Dante's Inferno Sins

412 Words2 Pages
Dante Alighieri's Inferno is the journey of a man called Dante who has wandered off the right path, and must journey through Hell to redeem himself. With the guidance of Virgil, Dante's idol, the two descend through the circles of Hell and observe the sinners within them. Each sin has its own punishment which reflects the sin. There are the gluttons, the wrathful, and the opportunists. All three of these sins' punishment is an appropriate reflection. The gluttons were those who ate more than their share of food and only produced waste during their life. Now, these gluttons are forced to lay naked in the garbage they produced, where a "great storm of putrefaction falls incessantly, a mixture of stinking snow and freezing rain, which forms into a vile slush underfoot"(Canto 6). What they produced in life is now coming back to torture them in death. Furthmore, to add to this punishment, they are being slashed and torn at by Cerberus, a three headed beast. With three mouths, Cerberus is always in a state of never ending hunger, which makes him a fitting guard of the circle that the gluttons lay in because they are so similar. Next, the wrathful were those who were violent and expressed excessive and uncontrolled anger during their life. In hell, they are placed in the river Styx together where they are constantly fighting and beating eachother in fits of rage. Here, they are re-enacting their violence that they had shown while alive. As violent as they were in life, they are in death. Lastly, there are the opportunists. These sinners were always neutral, only taking a side when they knew it would benefit them. For that reason, they are now chasing a changing banner while pursued by wasps which sting them, causing their blood to trickle down their bodies and onto the maggot covered ground. Because they "pursued the ever-changing illusion of their own

More about Dante's Inferno Sins

Open Document