Blog Post -Nate Strum
In Canto 1, after waking up, Dante starts up a hill and encounters "a leopard...a lion" and "a she-wolf, whose scrawniness seemed stuffed with all men's cravings, sluggish with desires, who had made many live in wretchedness." Since the wolf is female, I'd wager that the she symbolizes prostitution, but I can't say what the other two mean.
The long lists of people that Dante sees in hell seems just like an updated version of Book 11 of the Odyssey where Odysseus and his crew enter the kingdom of the dead.
Cerberus reminds me of Scylla who is also from the Odyssey. Just how much inspiration is Dante taking from Homer?
"When Cerberus that great worm caught site of us he bared his fangs and opened his maws wide, his muscles taught and not one holding still. My guide spread out his palms and shoveled up two big fistfulls of mud and chucked them down the monster's ravenous funnels." The fact that Virgil throws handfuls of mud into the cerberus's mouths so that he and dante can pass without being eaten is pretty funny, but doesn't that kind of undermine the monster's danger? I mean, can't just about any passerby throw some mud? Checkmate, Cerberus. Also, if Cerberus has got three heads, then shouldn't he also have three "funnels," and, therefore, Virgil would need not two but three fistfulls of mud? What am I missing here?
P.S. Zelda and Colbert
Cerberus reminds me of Scylla who is also from the Odyssey. Just how much inspiration is Dante taking from Homer?
"When Cerberus that great worm caught site of us he bared his fangs and opened his maws wide, his muscles taught and not one holding still. My guide spread out his palms and shoveled up two big fistfulls of mud and chucked them down the monster's ravenous funnels." The fact that Virgil throws handfuls of mud into the cerberus's mouths so that he and dante can pass without being eaten is pretty funny, but doesn't that kind of undermine the monster's danger? I mean, can't just about any passerby throw some mud? Checkmate, Cerberus. Also, if Cerberus has got three heads, then shouldn't he also have three "funnels," and, therefore, Virgil would need not two but three fistfulls of mud? What am I missing here?
P.S. Zelda and Colbert
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