Blog Post One--Dante

One part of the reading that I found interesting was the first 35 lines of Canto XXIII. Dante is afraid of the demons trying to get retribution after Dante made them look foolish in front of a sinner. Dante tells Virgil of this fear and Virgil develops an escape plan in case the demons come after them (an “imagined chase” as Virgil calls it.) Immediately after Virgil makes this plan the demons are spotted charging for an attack, and Dante and Virgil narrowly escape into the next pouch of the eighth circle. The part that I find most interesting is the phrasing “imagined chase,” as it implies that Dante is just being paranoid and the demons are not going to come after them. But Dante’s imagination was more correct than Virgil’s intuition, and they are able to make the escape. I was expecting Virgil, as an expert guide on hell, to have a better prediction for the behavior of the demons. It turns out that Dante is the one who gets the prediction right this time. Does this signal more of Dante’s development, as he changes from a scared and sinful human towards a more enlightened and righteous man? I think it does. The objects of his fear have become more understandable (angry charging demons are way scarier than witnessing the punishments of the upper circles.) Additionally, fear acted as a paralytic in the upper circles; every time Dante was afraid Virgil had to remind him to not let the fear consume and defeat him. In this instance, Dante’s fear ends up saving both himself and Virgil. This could indicate that Dante is successfully progressing along the path of development that will save his soul.

Another interesting piece of the reading was Canto XXVI, lines 112-117. Ulysses talks about sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules out to where no man has ever sailed to and returned from alive. This had no parallels in the time of Dante, as many people still believed the world consisted of Asia, Africa, and Europe and was not round. Obviously in the 21^st century we now know that this is not the case. I do not think that Dante or Ulysses predicted the existence of the Americas (as the phrase “world that is unpeopled” could refer to.) Ulysses was probably just trying to inspire his men during their dangerous journey beyond the reaches of the known world. Nevertheless, when viewed from the 21^st century perspective, it is a little wondrous that Dante would write about this topic with these particular words nearly 200 years before the discovery of America.