To be specific, the poem begins with Dante lost in a famous allegorical landscape. In the brief space of 60 lines, terror piles on terror: the wilderness, the near drowning in "the lake of my heart," the "pass that none had ever left alive," and then, just as the danger seems ended, the beasts--the prowling leopard, the ragin

As one might expect, therefore, in canto XI, when Virgil explains the structure of Inferno by classification of sins, he follows pre-Christian traditions, an amalgam of Aristotle and Cicero. Pagans are perfectly capable of discerning the effects of original sin, the darkening of moral vision and weakening of will that afflicts all the offspring of Adam and Eve. What they cannot do without God's grace is remedy the all-too-visible difficulties.

Limbo was a place postulated by early Christians as a haven for the souls of unbaptized children. These Christians felt trapped by what seemed an inherent contradiction in their system of belief. If no one could enter heaven without baptism and if God were perfectly just and merciful, how could He consign to everlasting pain the souls of babies unbaptized through circumstances obviously beyond their control? The solution was to surmise that there must have been a Limbo, literally a borderland, a place free both from the suffering of hell and from the bliss of heaven, in which the souls of these children would remain eternally. Thus were preserved intact the doctrines of God's mercy, of the discrete immortality of each human soul, of eternal rewards and punishment, and of the dependence of salvation upon the church and her sacraments.

Finally the lowest area of all in hell is located at the bottom of a deep circular well. Stationed around the perimeter of the well, their torsos sticking up over the edge are a half dozen giants, one of whom, Antaeus, gently deposits the poets down upon the frozen floor of hell. Here, at the center of evil, all the infernal waters, and all the tears and blood of suffering humanity gather and freeze in the total absence of love. Here those souls are trapped in the ice who have been treacherous, that is, fraudulent to those who especially deserved loyalty. At the center of this frozen lake, his torso coming up above the surface, Satan himself, with his three faces, perpetually gnaws on Brutus and Cassius and Judas Iscariot.

Two motifs dominate and help unify the realm of violence: bestiality and infertility. If we humans are halfway between angels and animals in the chain of being, violence is one of our connections to beasts, and so we find here an assortment of beast-men, from the Minotaur who stands as guardian to the whole region to the Centaurs and Harpies, and finally to the Usurers who, though fully human, are grotesquely bestial in their actions and whose money bags bear their family coats of arms with their lions, geese, and the like. The second notion is infertility; violent action would seem to be an attempt to accomplish something, but in fact such attempts do not bear fruit. Thus the violent against neighbors are in the boiling bloody River Acheron, the suicides are transformed into gnarled trees that bear thorns instead of fruit, and the violent against God, nature, and art are lying, running, and squatting on a burning desert. Nothing in this circle is capable of sustaining life.

After the 11th canto, in which Virgil tells of the structure of hell, Dante proceeds to the circle of the violent. We should not forget, however, that in the way the poem presents itself to a first-time reader, without notes or critical apparatus, not until canto 11 does one understand the significance of the terrain thus far traversed. For Dante the pilgrim, the succession of shocking images only now begins to make sense, only now begins to fall into the pattern that modern readers have laid bare for them from the beginning by obliging editors.

Dante places these unbaptized infants elsewhere and adds in his Limbo to the souls of those righteous Jews who have since gone to heaven the souls of virtuous pagans, of the just who lived moral lives as far as people could without the grace of Christianity. Dante puts Virgil there in the company of other poets, and he adds a catalogue of military heroes from the Aeneid and a catalogue of scholars. These souls sp

Some common words found in the essay are:
River Acheron, Boniface VIII, Dante Virgil, Marsh Styx, Ciacco Glutton, Middle Ages, God God's, Homer Virgil, Violence Fraud, Beatrice Dante's, dante virgil, mt purgatory, earthly paradise, spend eternity, violence fraud, river acheron, god's justice, marsh styx, descent hell, middle ages, fraud ten categories,
Approximate Word count = 4827
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page double spaced)