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Dante’s Inferno Lust
Lust • Here Dante explores the relationship--as notoriously challenging in his time and place as in ours--between love and lust, between the ennobling power of attraction toward the beauty of a whole person and the destructive force of possessive sexual desire. The lustful in hell, whose actions often led them and their lovers to death, are "carnal sinners who subordinate reason to desire“. Dante's location of lust --one of the seven capital sins--in the first circle of hell in which an unrepented sin is punished (the second circle overall) is similarly ambiguous: on the one hand, lust's foremost location--farthest from Satan--marks it as the least serious sin in hell (and in life); on the other hand, Dante's choice of lust as the first sin presented recalls the common--if crude--association of sex with original sin, that is, with the fall of humankind (Adam and Eve) in the garden of Eden.
Minos • Typical of the monsters and guardians of hell, Dante's Minos is an mixture of figures from classical sources who is completed with a couple of the poet's personal touches. His Minos may in fact be a combination of two figures of this name--both rulers of Crete--one the grandfather of the other. The older Minos, son of Zeus and Europa, was known--because of his wisdom and the admired laws of his kingdom-- as the "favorite of the gods." This reputation earned him the office-- following his death--of supreme judge of the underworld. He was thus charged, as Virgil attests, with verifying that the personal accounting of each soul who came before him corresponded with what was written in the urn containing all human destinies.Minos' long tail, which he wraps around his body a number of times equal to the soul's assigned level (circle) of hell is Dante's invention. How do you think the judged souls travel to their destined location in hell for eternal punishment? Might Minos' tail be somehow involved in this unexplained event?
Famous Lovers • Famous Lovers (Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan)Physical beauty, romance, sex, and death--these are the pertinent elements in the stories of the lustful souls identified from among the "more than a thousand" such figures pointed out to Dante by Virgil • Cleopatra, the beautiful Queen of Egypt, took her own life to avoid capture by Octavian (the future emperor Augustus); Octavian had defeated Mark Antony, who was Cleopatra's lover (she had previously been the lover of Julius Caesar). • Helen, wife of Menalaus (King of Sparta) was said to be the cause of the Trojan war: acclaimed as the most beautiful mortal woman, she was abducted by Paris and brought to Troy as his mistress. The "great Achilles" was the most formidable Greek hero in the war against the Trojans. He was killed by Paris, according to medieval accounts (Dante did not know Homer's version), after being tricked into entering the temple of Apollo to meet the Trojan princess Polyxena.
Lovers • Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta are punished together in hell for their adultery: Francesca was married to Paolo's brother, Gianciotto ("Crippled John"). Francesca's shade tells Dante that her husband is destined for punishment in Caina--the infernal realm of familial betrayal named after Cain, who killed his brother Abel (Genesis 4:8)--for murdering her and Paolo. Francesca was the aunt of Guido Novello da Polenta, Dante's host in Ravenna during the last years of the poet's life (1318-21). She was married (c. 1275) for political reasons to Gianciotto of the powerful Malatesta family, rulers of Rimini. Dante may have actually met Paolo in Florence (where Paolo was capitano del popolo--a political role assigned to citizens of other cities--in 1282), not long before he and Francesca were killed by Gianciotto.
King Arthur? • Lancelot (Guinevere and Gallehaut)The story of Lancelot and Guinevere, which Francesca identifies as the catalyst for her affair with Paolo (Inf. 5.127-38), was a French romance popular both in poetry (by Chrétien de Troyes) and in a prose version known as Lancelot of the Lake. According to this prose text, it is Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur, who kisses Lancelot, the most valiant of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. Francesca, by giving the romantic initiative to Paolo, reverses the roles from the story. To her mind, the entire book recounting this famous love affair performs a role similar to that of the character Gallehaut, a friend of Lancelot who helps bring about the adulterous relationship between the queen and her husband's favorite knight.
Short answer essay • What is the logical relationship between the vice of lust and its punishment in Dante's hell?
