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Butler — Dante. 
Directly under Jerusalem lies Dante’s Inferno. So had that 
of Jews and Moslems always lain. Nor had this local habita¬ 
tion of spirits in prison been unknown to early Christians. 
Regarding Christ’s descent into hell the words of our poet are 
an echo of what, as a child, he must have read in the Golden 
Legend of Voraggio. 
Many a wanderer in the realm of disembodied souls had been 
known before Dante. Among these Alberico, a monk of Monte 
Cassino, had written out his extra-mundane experiences. Nine¬ 
teen passages where Dante imitated this book have been speci¬ 
fied by Cary. Both Alberico and Dante entered a compartment 
of sighs, not groans; both call Cerberus the great worm, both 
encounter stenches, flames and scorpions; both describe one 
river of boiling blood, or blood and fire, and another of hot 
pitch, swelling into billows, with victims struggling out and 
then tumbling into rivers here deep and there shallow. Both 
would have been clutched by demons but for angelic rescue, 
both rise to higher levels — one borne up by a dove — the other 
by an eagle. Both behold an angel and a devil in fight for a 
soul; both see six-winged cherubs and a similar paradise to 
which they both turn, like homesick exiles hastening home; 
both observe vacant seats prepared on high for some that were 
still alive, whose names Alberico was forbidden to mention, 
though some of them are told by Dante. 
Dante’s warp and woof are Biblical almost as thoroughly as 
Bunyan’s. His very first line has a scriptural allusion. In the 
Purgatorio you may count twenty-five texts from the Vulgate 
which he quotes in the ipsissima verba of the Latin original, as 
if he thought them untranslatable. Dantesque imagery con¬ 
stantly recalls the Apocalypse. The interview with Statius af¬ 
fords a representative specimen of Dante’s Biblical debts. It 
was fashioned, as he himself states, after the walk to Emmaus 
as chronicled by Luke. Virgil’s then overhearing what Statius 
said to our poet is of a piece with the unknown Jesus listening 
to the report about himself by Cleopas. Dante’s Biblical bor¬ 
rowings are noted by Cary one hundred and twenty-one times. 
Nor has he discovered them all. 
Dante is no less indebted to the classics than to Holy Writ. 
