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DANTE'S INFERNO DEMANDS TO be understood as the culmination of a series of visits to the underworld in ancient epic tradition. Dante's most direct precedent is Aeneas's journey to meet his father in Hades, as told by Virgil in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas's voyage is modeled in turn on Odysseus's encounter with shades of Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey. The epic quest in each of these models pivots, in various ways, on a visit to the world of the dead, a discensus ad inferas, as a climactic episode at its center. However, Dante makes this episode the general framework of the whole poem: from beginning to end, Dante's poem represents a voyage through the world beyond the grave. In this respect, Dante's Inferno, and indeed the whole Divine Comedy, is conceived primarily as an expansion of the ancient epic motif of the katabasis or "going down" of the protagonist to the underworld for a revelation of his destiny from beyond the threshold of death. Like Virgil, Dante interprets history prophetically, finding in it the essential pattern of things to come. But this projection now reaches to an eschatological future beyond history altogether-to an uncannily dynamic realization of eternity.
The other world that is visited by Dante asserts itself unequivocally as ultimate reality. It is not just some shadowy world of bloodless phantasms like the shades that approach Odysseus, nor is it vacuous and inane, as are Virgil's "houses void and empty realms of Dis" ("domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna," Aeneid VI.269). This "other" world shows up as even more vivid than the world of ordinary sense-perception by virtue of a strikingly realistic, indeed surrealistic imagery. Dante heightens the mythological topos of the visit to the underworld that he inherited from Virgil and Homer to a level where it represents the true essence of life on this earth transposed into a transcendent dimension. The world of the dead is not just one in a series of episodes befalling the protagonist but rather the final and definitive experience that reveals the true meaning of all possible experiences and thereby the meaning of the world as a whole. This is perhaps implicit and incipient in Homer and Virgil, since the journey to...