How Did The Aeneid Influence Dante's Inferno

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As an epic journey to Hell and back, The Inferno clearly traces its ancestry, in part, to The Aeneid. As an "autobiographical: record of a spiritual struggle, it also has equally obvious roots in Augustine's Confessions. We come to this book, then, uniquely well-versed in its literary antecedents. Where do you see the influence of The Aeneid in Dante's poem? Of Confessions? The influence’s initially seen from both Virgil’s The Aeneid and Augustine’s Confessions are that The Divine Comedy’s Inferno is about one man’s spiritual journey to find the divine “modus operandi” behind God’s sense of judgment and the perils he must face along the way. It is also a journey of rediscovery. “Midway through the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered from the straight path” (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy- Inferno, 1600) and one rich with many visual cues similar to the fantastical voyage and adventurous experiences that Aeneas himself embarked upon to found Rome. In doing so, he “found” himself” and so too does Dante. Many aspects of that…show more content…
With Confessions, "The overall effect- is to turn the reader inward, away from the individual journey of Augustine and toward the collective journey of humanity toward the divine." (Puchner, 1178). In Inferno, Dante Alighieri “…compels his reader to inhabit the point of view of a narrator who, halfway through not “my” but “our” lifetime, suddenly realizes that he is lost. His life is thus our life, and the ethical or righteous “straight path” that the narrator hopes to rediscover also comes to be the reader’s own goal.” (Puchner,

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