Dante Alighieri's Inferno is a piece of classical literary horror, influenced primarily by the classical writers Ovid and Virgil. Alighieri, as a poet, refined the classic techniques of horror to an art.[01] A shrewd and imaginative poet, he used graphic images to appease the appetite of the common reader while not neglecting their need for imaginative cultivation. His unique blend of image and substance is demonstrated best in two cantos in the Inferno, Canto XIII (The Wood of the Suicides) and Canto XXV (The Den of the Snake-Thieves), and it is in these two cantos that we see Alighieri as the master of the art of horror.

In discussing Alighieri's technique of creating horror in these two cantos, one would also note that he was greatly influenced by the image-evoking techniques of Ovid, Virgil, and other classical poets.

Canto XXV is the second of two cantos in this part of hell, the den of thieves. It is important to realize Aliqhieri's poetic motives for creating a torture for petty thieves as painful and grotesque as this one. Fraud, as Virgil explained in canto XI, is a basic degeneracy of God's gift of intelligence for private gain. Theft, being a type of fraud, is, in Alighieri's

oalescing of both the nymph Salmacis and the son of Mercury, Hermaphroditus (hence the term "hermaphrodite") into one form. Here we can see the actual moment of transformation:

e writes: "And so I saw the seventh ballast change / and rechange [mutare and transmutare]; may the strangeness plead for me / if there's been some confusion in my pen" (XXV, 142-144). In this, Dante is apologizing to the reader for the possible after-effects of the horrible spectacle that Dante has just observed and chronicled. Again, this type of internal commentary within the story makes it all the more convincing, and all the more terrifying. After all is said and done, Dante says, "my eyes were somewhat blurred, my mind / bewildered" (XXV, 144-145) as if this encounter, whether or not it had a lasting effect on the reader, had a definite effect on Dante himself, one which causes him become disturbed and shaken by the horror that has just witnessed. In truly sympathizing with Dante, the reader feels the same aftershocks of fright that he feels, but the reader is safe: the terror is concluded....until the start of the next canto.

Dante Alighieri was one of the first great writers who understood the importance of horror in literature. His epic narrative journey, although consisting of three parts, is mostly remembered for the Inferno. The dark side of human nature, the beast within all of us, and the insanity of the soul interest us because they emancipate us, if only for a short time, from the humdrum of our succinct, bland lives into a world where the rules of the world break down at the sub-atomic level, and are built back up again, not in God's image, but our own, sometimes twisted, ones.

The similarities are many: the snake, the order of the transformation, the delicate sadness that surrounds both of the encounters, and most importantly, the final loss of speech, the one true method of human communication. Alighieri conveys the same message about speech in his description: that only through language can people truly be influenced, that the loss of communication between people is the cruellest loss of all. However, both poems are very different in their respective styles. Alighieri's account takes a much more terrifying and shocking approach. While Ovid's victim, Cadmus, sadly laments his fate, the thieves in Alighieri's poem spitefully launch themselv

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1588
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)