Dante's Inferno and Vergil's Aeneid: Underworld Comparisons

In Latin class this year, we have been continuing reading Vergil’s Aeneid, and I thought it was fun that we happened to reach the part about Aeneas descending into the underworld as we started reading Dante’s Inferno in English class. I noticed many parallels and connections between the two versions of hell. One of the more obvious connections is Dante’s direct references to Aeneas’s journey to hell. The two poets did organize their versions of hell differently; Dante has drawn out circles and more clear directions than Vergil’s mapping of hell, and Vergil has an area in his underworld that is peaceful and pleasant. They both, however, have sections for different types of sinners, and Dido is in both of their underworlds. Dido is in Vergil’s section of people who have been consumed by love, and is in Dante’s area for lust. Vergil showed that Dido was not lustful; she was actually very surprised to fall in love again after her husband was murdered. Vergil’s boundaries and sections are a bit more fluid than Dante’s, I think, but he does mention 9 circles, which surprised me. The rivers and boatmen are common to both because of their presence in mythology. In both stories, there is a guide as well as some divine intervention. Dante has Vergil, and Aeneas has the Sybil. Both have a sort of “fate” or reason for being guided down there. Aeneas’s whole journey has been dictated by the gods; it is even divine permission that allows him to get the golden bough and go to the underworld. Dante has help from three divine women. They each have to calm Cerberus by throwing something into his mouths; Aeneas and the Sybil give him honey cake, which he probably preferred over Dante and Vergil’s slime. The boatmen of the underworld are hesitant to bring each group across, but eventually do. This was actually a small point of humor in the Aeneid, just as Dante tried to include some humor with the salutes and signals of the demons to one another. Furies attack sinners in both; in the Aeneid, they attack the gluttons who try to eat at the feast eternally laid out before them. Aeneas and Dante talk to spirits in the underworld, and are both shaken by their experiences, but Aeneas is more caring than Dante and isn’t mean to spirits he meets or recognizes. Aeneas’s father is in the underworld and he seems unaware of how Aeneas got there or what trials he had to go through on his journey, but he shows Aeneas the future and fate of Rome. This reminded me how people in Dante’s hell can’t see the present, but can see and predict the future. Betrayal against those who trust you, particularly family and clients, is something that Romans despised, and theses sins were shown in both underworlds. The authors also both set their work’s timeline behind their own and were able to make references and predictions of the future that had already in fact happened. There are many more similarities, but these were a few that stood out to me while reading the two works.