Dante’s Inferno
Commentary by Jessica Henry

What is the underlying logic of the structure of Inferno?
The degradation and disintegration of personality and community.
One indicative example is in Canto 26 where the falsifiers
of coins are placed in the inner circles of hell because they abused
the means of communal exchange. Another good example described
in Canto 34 is the tenth circle of hell, the fundament
of the world, which has four regions of increasing betrayal and
treason moving from family to country to guests to oaths and
vows. All of the symbolic characters - from Cain to Brutus and
Cassius - represent the destruction of personality and community.
Dante’s choice of a poet as his guide implicitly salutes Plato’s
Republic. Plato criticizes the potentially illusive character of
poetic imagery. But the concluding Myth of Ur validates allegorical
poetry that is based on philosophy. Dante therefore
establishes Virgil and himself as the kind of philosophical poets
that Plato sanctioned.