Dante's Inferno Quotes

In addition to his setup of hell, Dante also uses beasts to explore the relationship between free will and morality. One of the first beasts that are encountered in the inferno is Minos. He is the judge of the damned: the beast that condemns sinners to their respective levels of hell. His method of judging is unique:

There Minos sits, grinning grotesque and hale. he examines each lost soul as it arrives and delivers his verdict with his coiling tail.

That is to say, when the ill-fated soul appears before him it confesses all… (Canto V, lines 4-8)

This quote explains how each of the souls comes before Minos of its own free will and Minos judges each one by wrapping his tail around himself once for each level that the sinner has to descend. Minos wrapping his tail around

Dante describes him by saying: "His face was innocent of every guile, / benign and just in feature and expression; / and under it his body was half reptile" (Canto XVII, lines 10-12). This quote describes Geryon as having the face of an honest man and the body of a serpent. In Christian mythology, the serpent is often used as the symbol of fraud because of the role of the snake in the story of Adam and Eve. Ciardi says in his footnotes on Geryon that the aforementioned, "...embodies corruption of the Appetite, of the Will, and of the Intellect." this corruption of the Will (or free will) suggests that the sinners below Geryon will have used their free will to do something morally unacceptable. After passing Geryon, there are very few beasts, and these do not hinder the progress of the poets. Since fraud is the vice of which man alone is capable, very few beasts could fit into this realm and hinder the progress of Dante and Virgil. Before entering the ninth level of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil encounter a wall of giants. All of the giants except for Anteus are chained for rising up against God. Anteus did not commit any such crimes and it is not clear why Dante placed him