After finishing Dante's Inferno, I was struck by the amount of classical mythology that was present in this Christian-themed work. Dante managed to incorporate numerous legendary Greek and Roman heroes and monsters into different places in his version of hell. While the purpose of the heroes is certainly to display specific sins using familiar characters, it is Dante's inclusion of the monsters that captured my attention. At the end of the book, I was left wondering why Dante included these monsters and what their symbolic purpose was.
To me, the most obviously symbolic creatures are the snakes that appear in Canto XXV. In this instance, Dante witnesses a soul being attacked by a snake who then becomes a part of the soul, melding into him so that Dante was able to see that "the soul... had become an animal" (Dante 233). In this instance, the mythology is Christian, the snake being the creature that tempted Eve to commit the original sin. In this circle of hell, the snakes symbolize the temptation of sin and how our sin becomes a part of us. Dante is saying here that sin changes a person and becomes a part of his soul, and only through the grace of God and repentance can that defect be removed.
The giants of Canto XXXI also represent a particular set of sins. These creatures, whose origins are in both Roman and Christian mythology, represent the consequences of pride. In each myth they are a part of, these prideful giants rebelled against the gods and attempted to overthrow their creators. These "defiant rebels" are punished by standing bound in chains with their feet in the ninth circle of hell, a fitting punishment for those whose pride in their abilities drove them to challenge their divine authorities (Raffa*).
The Minotaur, a creature symbolic of the souls he keeps, guards the entrance to the seventh circle, which has been reduced to a pile of boulders. This creature represents violence, the sin of those in his circle. In Greek mythology, this monster was the offspring of the violent union of queen of Crete and a bull, and grew so fearsome that he had to be locked away in the Labyrinth and given sacrifices to be controlled. Virgil manages to get them past this creature by mentioning Theseus, the monster's bane, at whose mention the monster flies into a self-harming, bestial rage (Raffa*). This creature is a clear personification of the violent souls of the seventh circle.
The creature Geryon is also representative of the souls in his circle, the final resting place of frauds. Geryon is described as a combination between a man and a serpent, the man having "gracious features", and his serpentine tail being "adorned with twining knots and circlets" so beautiful that "no Turks or Tartars ever fashioned fabrics more colorful" (Dante 151) . Though monstrous, Geryon is very beautiful at first glance. This is representative of fraud, which also looks beautiful and tempting at the start, but later is revealed to be a horrible, sinful action. By adding these monsters to his version of hell, Dante amplifies the fear his readers' fears of hell's horrors and also personifies certain sins in a poignant manner. Dante seems to say that these monsters live inside all of us in the forms of our sins, and that only by repentance can we be rid of them.
*Quoted from Guy P. Raffa's commentary on http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu
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