/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6341694]

Why were there so many references to Greek mythology in Dante's Inferno? Did Dante just really like the Greeks?

[Anonymous No.6341701]

[Anonymous No.6341710]

>>6341694
The greeks were perhaps even more of a reference at the time that they are now. Also Dante references pretty much everything that was important in his time, and that includes primarily the Greeks, Aristotle-inspired scholastic science, and Christian teachings.

[Anonymous No.6341711]

>>6341694
Dante was one of those weird medieval people who thought that good writers and philosophers who came before Christianity were trying to prophesize the coming of Jesus unconsciously, so they get a free "we were Secret Magic Christians all the time pass".

[Anonymous No.6341712]

Think about it, there wasn't much else to read other than the Greeks and Christian theology back in those days.

[Anonymous No.6341720]

>>6341711
But weren't the majority of those writers and philosophers in Limbo?

[Anonymous No.6341721]

Many of the Greeks were actually completely inaccessible to him. There were no Latin translations of Homer except for quotations in Cicero and others, and of Plato's works only a bowdlerized version of the Timaeus was available. I believe Aristotle's works were mostly intact thanks to Muslim commentators.

Also, you should probably keep in mind that everyone in the Inferno is damned (by Dante as poet if not as the pilgrim), even and especially Virgil. There are fewer mythic characters as the poem progresses heavenward. As Dante explains to Statius in Purgatory, most of them are kept in Limbo for being born before Christ's crucifixion. The ones that are in deeper Hell, e.g. Ulysses, usually serve to enlighten some key points in Dante's thought.

[Anonymous No.6341722]

That is something I wonder. Why can Greek deities appear in works about antiquity from Christian writers? Is the justification "oh, the characters don't know any better so God (perhaps by another name, perhaps Saturn or Uranus but clearly Yahweh) answers prayers addressed to Venus" or was it "it's just fiction, no big deal if Venus is a goddess"?

[Anonymous No.6341739]

>>6341722
Those deities were often reworked into something else (for instance in Dante's Inferno, Charon and Pluto are demons). Also read >>6341721. Dante incorporates Greek thinkers into his vision of the afterworld, but mainly he explains how their great talent wasn't enough without Christianity.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6341750]

Dante's vision of hell is modeled on the underworld in the Aeneid. Plus it was written at the beginning of the Renaissance, everyone liked the Greeks and Romans, they were all the rage.

[Anonymous No.6341764]

He knew his shit and started with the greeks.

Also pact in the day the greeks were taught as the most noble of the heathens.
Lots of theologians liked to say that Aristotle would have been a christian.

Thats why so many philosophers are seen in purgatory during the inferno

[Anonymous No.6341776]

>>6341722
Study your European history, especially scholasticism. When the Roman Catholic church began to form, it incorporated many classical elements and merged them into a new doctrine.
They understood that the Ancients had wisdom, but they picked and chose what to take in.
Plenty of statues in the renaissance are almost directly styled from Greco-roman works as well.

[Anonymous No.6341780]

>>6341750
Dante died a good century before the beginning of what we call the Renaissance by any measure. But people already liked the Greeks at the time, they just weren't dickrided as hard as in the Renaissance (and nowhere near as hard as we sometimes believe people in the Renaissance dickrided them).

[Anonymous No.6341790]

It goes away in purgatorio and paradiso and turns into straight Catholicism. The Greeks he knew (especially Virgil) were his aidorus and they all belonged in hell (or at least limbo) because they were pagans (?)
Also yea as others have said, it was modelled on the Aneid.