Remember that Dante is a continuation of the conversation started by The Iliad and The Odyssey (8th or 7th century BC), then continued by Virgil's Aeneid (19 BC).
Virgil was considered a prophet during medieval times, since his poem about a boy's birth ushering in a golden age was seen as a prediction of the birth of Jesus. Thus as both a poet and a symbol from Christianity, Dante used him as his guide.
Can you expand on this, or provide a link? Sounds interesting. I've obviously heard The Iliad and The Odyssey taken together, but not lumped in with Inferno.
I guess anyone who took Classics is writhing in frustration now. Help a friend out ? :)
I don't know what you meant, but I am forced to point out there are at least two adaptation of Dante's inferno in Disney comics: one with Mickey Mouse and one with Donald Duck :)
Dante, one of the harshest imaginations to ever write itself into a poem believed that, for instance, depression was a sin meriting eternal punishment by drowning over and over in a pool of filth and kept from rising to the surface by the pressure of cannibals possessed with rage devouring each other just above them, forever, and at best they could bubble or gurgle up, because they cannot speak as their mouths are filled with slime, the sigh that ‘Tristi fummo ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra’. In the linked essay the author makes out Dante to be an advocate of new age positivity, something more commensurate with Snow White than Satan.
I don't see the contradiction in what you are pointing out, but more importantly I don't see a widely accepted view that the part you are referring to is about people with depression: it seems about people with rage problem (iracondi) and "accidiosi", which most scholars seem to identify with "those who kept their rage inside at all time, instead of expressing it".
Interestingly, "those who kept their rage inside at all time, instead of expressing it" would come very close to Freud's general sense of repression, inhibition, and Melancholia. Thus depression. And it wouldn't chime badly with Blake's sense of angelic morality either. The symmetric contrast of outward and inward rage is theological in character, rather than poetic, which would more likely consider individual spirit before imposing moral abstractions like ideal rage. Current academic consensus on Dante is heavily influenced by Theology, notably Aquinas, it overlooks the heretical aspects of Dante's poetry. As for Scholars who view the interpretation as depression, Ernst Curtius is one.
Virgil was considered a prophet during medieval times, since his poem about a boy's birth ushering in a golden age was seen as a prediction of the birth of Jesus. Thus as both a poet and a symbol from Christianity, Dante used him as his guide.