Dante designed his Inferno so that sinners were assigned progressively worse levels based on their sins and punishment not for but by their sins. Cite specific examples of his sinners, their placements, and their punishments. Then suggest a punishment

Question

for a sin not mentioned by Dante, explaining your rationale.

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. Dante’s Inferno is composed of nine descending rings of sinners undergoing punishment, each more gruesome than the one before it.
2. In Hell, the poet and his guide, Virgil, first encounter sinners whose passion has condemned them—Paolo and Francesca, whose illicit love was motivated, they tell Dante, by reading Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot. The lovers are forever condemned to unreconciled love, to touch each other but never consummate their feelings.
3. In the next ring are the gluttonous, condemned to wallow like pigs in their own excrement.
4. Dante finds intellectual dishonesty more sinful than any sin of passion, and thus flatterers, hypocrites, and liars occupy the next lower rings of Hell.
5. The violent are farther down, immersed for eternity in boiling blood.
6. At the very bottom of the pit, imprisoned in ice “like straws in glass,” are the traitors. Among the lowest of the low are Guelphs and Ghibellines from all over Tuscany who betrayed their cities’ well-being.
7. Finally, in Canto 34, Dante once again integrates the pagan and Christian worlds as Satan himself chews on the worst of all traitors—Judas (thought to have betrayed Jesus) and Brutus and Cassius (assassins of Julius Caesar).
8. Students’ ideas for sins not covered by Dante, and their just punishments, will vary.