Who Is Ugolino Dehumanize Dante's Inferno

Ugolino’s treatment of his children defies Aristotle’s view of friendship between children and parent; friendship is more about loving than being loved. Ugolino shows just how much he cares for his children when he refuses to console them when they are locked in the tower (Montemaggi et. al). Instead, when his children see Ugolino biting his hand out of grief, they think that it is because he is hungry and they offer themselves to him to be eaten: “‘Father, for us it would be much less pain / if you ate us instead! You clothed us with / this wretched flesh, now strip it off again’” (Inferno, 33:61-62). Yet, Ugolino turned to stone and said nothing, even as his children wept in their sleep out of hunger (Boitani, 1989). Ugolino even says that
Ugolino is placed in the ninth circle, close to Satan. It can be seen throughout the Inferno that the lower down Dante and Virgil go, the more dehumanized the sinners are. This is because the souls that are damned to Hell participated in sins and vices that were considered unvirtuous, and by Aristotle’s thinking, being unvirtuous reduces the human to an animal-like state (Aristotle, 2002). Ruggieri appears animal-like in that he does not speak or even acknowledge Dante’s presence. He also does not seem to realize that he is constantly being cannibalized. His punishment is to be the food that feeds the man he starved in life. For Ugolino, his reversion to a beast-like state is his very act of eternal cannibalism. This could stem from the cannibalism he committed in life, in the rumors are true, or from his death by starvation. Even Dante recognizes Ugolino’s animal-like state; in Canto 32, before he knew who Ugolino was, he calls out “‘O you who show by such a beastlike sign / your hatred of the one you feed upon…” (Inferno, 32: 133-34). When Ugolino introduces himself, he refers to who he was rather than who he is, separating his person from his current state and no longer identifying with his human self (Vernon, 1894). Ugolino also tells Dante of a dream he had while imprisoned in which he was a wolf, perhaps the male equivalent to the she-wolf that Dante meets in Canto 1, the symbol of greed (Barolini, 2015). The tower itself -the “Eagle Cage” (Inferno, 33: 22) is compared to a cage where birds of prey- beasts- were placed (Di Pietro, 1987). The last image that Dante is left with in Antenora is Ugolino falling silent only to return to gnawing on the head of Ruggieri, returning to his bestial