Ok so Dante has now included just about every major mythological story or monster that he can besides the Scylla monster and Charybdis. Multiple people have pointed out how the story includes references and callbacks to various other works that Dante no doubt was a fan of. Speaking of fandom, Dante’s love of Greek mythological stories is quite obvious from Cerberus, Charon, and many other characters being included thus far. One specific creature that Dante describes in Canto XVII intrigued me extensively, mainly because of the fact that the Spanish King that this creature is based on took a much different form in Greek stories. Geryon was depicted by the old stories as a three-headed, three-bodied giant who would lure weary travelers to his realm and then kill/rob them. Dante uses Geryon as an embodiment of fraud here, and it works well, but he takes on a more peculiar form in The Inferno that I wanted to point out in specifics. Dante’s description of the beast is quite appalling:
“His face was innocent of every guile, benign and just in feature and expression; and under it his body was half reptile. His two great paws were hairy to the armpits; all his back and breast and both his flanks were figured with bright knots and subtle circlets… His tail twitched in the void beyond that lip, thrashing, and twisting up the envenomed form which, like a scorpion’s stinger, armed the tip.” (Canto XVII, lines 10-27).
In order to give a more fiendish feel to the monsters of hell, the draconic body is a fitting change, and a scorpion tail to go along with a pair of wings is not unlike a creature that fantasy setting fans may remember the name of: the Manticore. In order to have a horrifying underworld, one needs horrifying monsters inhabiting said underworld, and Dante continually puts on a clinic with how he builds his setting. I think the main question looking toward the end of the story will be the fate of lower circles of hell, and I personally can’t wait to see what other characters he will stumble across next.
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I have never been one for Greek mythology, but it is amazing to see how much Dante incorporates it into his work. It's almost exciting because we read the Inferno assuming what hell is going to be like and then we get all these surprises that give us nostalgia of the Greeks. I am not sure if hell would be more or less terrifying with or without the Greek monsters. I suppose I won't have to find out.
ReplyDeleteI think its fascinating that he makes his creature kind of take on pieces of the leopard and lion. The gaudily-spotted suggest the leopard and the hairy paws the Lion. I love the use of the human face because it symbolizes the human nature of Fraud. I love his use of Greek monsters.
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