In spite of Dante’s reservations about the “new people” who were busily making Florence into the most exciting place in the Western world, Florence soon became a cultural and commercial center that would rival Athens and Rome in its brilliance during the period between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries.

Once the merchant class determined that internal conflict was bad for business, the city government found a novel way to limit the strife. In 1293 a fundamental constitutional change, the Ordinamenti di Giustizia (Ordinances of Justice), took place in Florence, supported by the Guelph faction. Essentially, it limited political participation in the republican government of the city to members of the major guilds or corporations—basically merchants, bankers, magistrates, notaries, and the moneyed classes. It is important to remember that medieval guilds were not modern labor unions: Membership usually excluded common workers and included only people with property or money. In 1295 Dante joined the Arte dei Medici e Speziali (Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries)—the same guild to which most artists in Renaissance Florence subsequently belonged, because apothecaries provided the materials for paintings. He was elected to serve a two-month term as one of the seven city priors, but fulfilling his civic duty proved to be disastrous for Dante. The elevation to this office identified him as an important White Guelph and made him a target when the more radical Black Guelphs seized power from the White Guelphs. While serving as one of three Florentine ambassadors to Pope Boniface VIII in Rome in 1302, Dante was sentenced first to exile and then to death if he should ever again set foot in his beloved native city of Florence.

Dante’s exile lasted until his death, in 1321, from malaria at Ravenna, where he enjoyed the protection and patronage of Guido Novello of Polenta, after receiving the same type of hospitality from Cangrande della Scala in Verona. He wrote The Divine Comedy during his long years in exile, and his body was laid to rest in Ravenna, not in Florence, where it remains to this day. In spite of Dante’s life in exile and the composition of the poem outside his native city, The Divine Comedy has a distinctive Florentine and Tuscan character. The poem often reflects the partisan struggles that swept over Italy during Dante’s day, and in so doing allowed the poet ample opportunity to pay back his political foes. Many of the most memorable figures in the Inferno are essentially minor historical characters who played a role in the internecine factional struggles of fourteenth-century Florence and who had a personal effect on Dante’s life. Many minor historical figures—although condemned to a Hell of Dante’s invention, their depictions inspired by Dante’s rancor and righteous indignation or, occasionally, by his admiration—have been transformed by Dante’s poetry into major literary characters.

An Overview of The Divine Comedy

Several times in the poem, Dante refers simply to his creation as The Comedy. A subsequent sixteenth-century edition of a manuscript published in Venice during the Renaissance added the adjective “divine” to the title, where it has remained ever since. The poem is an epic, owing a good deal of its structure and content to the epic tradition that began in Western literature with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—works Dante could not have read, since he knew no Greek. Few readers of Virgil’s Aeneid, however, would ever know the Latin epic better than Dante, who absorbed many of the lessons he might have learned from a direct reading of Homer through an indirect encounter with Homer in Virgil’s poem. In celebrating the birth of the city of Rome, destined to rule the classical world by Virgil’s lifetime, the Latin poet could not have predicted that his imperial capital would eventually become the capital of Christianity, or that the Latin race would be fully Christianized. The link of Rome to both the Roman Republic and Empire, on the one hand, and to the rise of Christianity, on the other, was never far from Dante’s mind when he considered what Rome meant to his own times. Virgil’s Latin epic became the single most important work in the formation of the ideas that would eventually produce The Divine Comedy. Dante also read carefully other Latin epics that are less popular today. One such book was Lucan’s Pharsalia, a Latin work that described the Roman civil wars and was also full of horrible monsters and marvelous sights. He admired two Latin epics by Statius: the unfinished Achilleid, a treatment of Achilles in the Trojan War, and the more important Thebeid, a poem treating the fratricidal struggles of the sons of Oedipus in the city of Thebes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses provided Dante with the most influential repository of poetry about classical mythology.

However, there is really no classical precedent for the overall structure of The Divine Comedy, in which the author is also the epic protagonist, an Everyman who is not a warrior or a city founder. Homer or Virgil would never have dreamed of making themselves the heroes of their epic works. Dante the Pilgrim in Dante the Poet’s epic takes a journey that the poet believes must be taken by every human being. No matter how many trappings of the classical epic The Divine Comedy may contain—invocations to the muses, masterful epic similes, divine messengers sent from the deities, lofty verse, and monsters and other figures cited from the literature or mythology of ancient Greece and Rome—the underpinning of the entire poem is fundamentally religious. It is a Christian epic and, more specifically, a Catholic epic. For the first time in Western literature, the values and ideals of an epic poem derive from the fundamental tenets of Christianity as they were understood during the Middle Ages. This means Catholicism as mediated by the dominant theology of the time—the Scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas—as well as the writings, teachings, and examples of such figures as Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Saint Benedict, Saint Dominic, Saint Bernard, and Saint Bonaventure. Ancient philosophy, in particular the works of Cicero, Boethius, and Aristotle, filtered through these Christian lenses, as did the traditional Ptolemaic picture of the universe as Earth-centered and the classical rhetoric and erudition often based on either Scholastic commentaries in Latin or Latin translations of Arabic commentaries on Greek texts.

The most important philosopher of the Middle Ages in Italy as in Europe was Aristotle, the sage Dante calls the Master of “those who know” (Inferno IV: 131). By the time Dante was born, more than fifty of Aristotle’s works had been translated into Latin, although these works were often read alongside Scholastic or Arabic commentaries. Plato was virtually unknown during Dante’s time, except for an incomplete Latin translation of the Timaeus. The emergence of Plato as a rival for Aristotle would not occur until the Medici family of fifteenth-century Florence sponsored the publication of Latin translations of the entire body of Plato’s works.

In addition to his profound knowledge of Christian philosophy and theology, Dante had a familiarity with the Bible that was extensive for his time, an era when most Catholics may have only heard scripture cited in sermons, or read to them out loud during the celebration of the Mass, or even depicted in narrative fresco painting and tempera altar pieces in the churches.