The Significance Of The Underworld In Dante's Inferno

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante incorporates Virgil’s depiction of the Underworld from The Aeneid into his poem, and borrows much of Virgil’s language, style, and content. Although the Hell depicted in Dante’s Inferno is essentially grounded in the literary construction of the netherworld found in Virgil’s The Aeneid, in their features, the two realms are quite different. Virgil’s underworld stands largely undifferentiated, and Aeneas walks through it without taking any specific notice of the landscape or the suffering that takes place among the souls. Aeneas’ first concern is with the fate of his friends, then with meeting his recently deceased father: the ethical and religious implications of sin and death means nothing to him, and there is no moral judgment implied in the fate of the departed. Inferno, on the other hand, there is a systematic differentiation of the landscape, each progressively lower circle of hell implies a deadlier sin.
For Virgil, Limbo was the first stop for souls on their way to the Underworld. To continue forward from Limbo, your body needed to be laid to rest, or you paced the coastlines of Cocytus for a hundred years. Dante instead situates honorable pre-Christian-era souls in Limbo, stating that those who “[…] did not worship God in fitting ways” (Cantos IV. 38.) or did not receive baptism, were eternally stuck, and consequently, constraining those of the Christian era into either Heaven or Hell. The authority of the church is evidently present in Dante’s telling. If a person doesn’t have faith in God as portrayed by the Church, he is deemed a sinner and his soul is compelled to go to Hell. Conversely, Virgil had no holy discriminations, and, as a result, the placement of shades in his Underworld stood blind to all belief systems. Additionally, Virgil told of punishments being impermanent in the