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Rome was not built in a day, and it was not destroyed in a day either. All that the Roman Empire was and stood for did not go away when the city was destroyed. Pieces of Rome survived throughout the centuries, and lived on in people’s thoughts, works, and deeds. During Dante’s lifetime people were still being influenced by the culture of the Roman Empire. The fact that Virgil is one of the main characters in The Inferno shows how remnants of the Roman Empire were still a part of people’s lives in the 14th century. Virgil was more than just a random character in the story. He was Dante’s first guide and in real life Dante’s role model. Dante had a huge fascination with the Roman poet. Throughout The Inferno Dante gives Virgil the highest respect and praise. He even calls him his master. Dante’s fixation with a famous Roman hints towards the way that Dante’s society treated historical figures from the Roman Empire. A lot of people in fourteenth century Europe tried to imitate the Romans.…show more content… Dante’s writing style reflected that of Greco-Roman poetry. The Inferno is written in poetic verse that is similar to Virgil’s Aeneid. Not only was the work’s structure patterned after of a roman poem, but its plot comes from a concept that is popular in Greco-Roman literature. In both Homer’s The Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, debatably the two greatest pieces of Greco-Roman literature, the main character travels to the underworld to talk to the dead in order to gain wisdom and advice. This is exactly what Dante does for the duration of his journey thru hell. He talks to people in each circle and asks them questions so that that he can better understand good and evil. The Inferno is an example of the influence that Greco-Roman literature had on authors in the 14th century. Literature in the fourteenth century was a mixture of Greco-Roman influence and the popular topics of the