A page for major characters in The Divine Comedy, generally only those that speak or are referenced in multiple cantos.
open/close all folders
Big Goods
The Divine Love
The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars
God Himself. He is the architect of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and ordains each of the dead to their fate out of love. His goodness torments the damned, transforms the penitent, and beatifies the saints.
- All-Loving Hero: It's implied He even loves the people in Hell, but not for what they did with their wills, i.e., remain in a state of sin to the end.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Two of the central themes of Paradiso are that God is both endlessly unknowable and infinitely loving. Dante learns even the most powerful of the seraphim physically cannot understand all of the Divine Mind, but Dante grows to know that everyone in Heaven, from the oath-breakers to the Virgin Mother, all find happiness beyond expression in accepting the selfless love presented by God.
- Eternal Love: The relationship between Christ and his Bride, the Church, is described as an extended Romance Arc that has been plagued by 2000 years of adultery on the Bride's part.
- Everything's Better with Rainbows: The circle representing God the Father is described as an oscillating rainbow of light that reflects off the golden circle representing Jesus.
- God: In the thirty-third canto of the third part of the poem, the last 100 lines are dedicated to describing Him, a task the narrator admits is like accurately recalling something you saw 25 centuries ago or speaking wisely with an infant's intellect. Still, the Comedy tries and ultimately illustrates a figure that is made up of three circles which somehow look as if they are a single circle. One of the circles looks like it's coming from the first circle, and the third looks like fire being produced by both. That begotten circle strangely has the same color as the rest of the circles while also bearing the hue of humanity, a fact that encapsulates the poem's protagonist. Although he tries to take the whole of that great light into his mind, Dante admits he is too weak, but the light grants him what his mind had asked for."High phantasy lost power and here broke off;
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,
My will and my desire were turned by love,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars." - God in Human Form: One thousand two hundred and seventy-seven years before the poem began (by a demon's estimate), the Son of the Primal Power took on human nature so that man could be united to its Creator despite the evil of the First Man. This Man and God died as just vengeance against humanity for its sin, yet the injustice of the Divine Love being killed called wrath upon those wicked who did the deed. The evidence of this just and unjust vengeance dwells on Mars, where on a cross of martyrs lies the body of Christ with such splendor that memory and words cannot contain it.
- God Is Good: Inferno is such a terrible place because it is the furthest place in the universe from the Love, and when Dante jumps off the Devil's back to the surface, he begins an ascent through more beautiful and joyous areas of Purgatory and Paradise until he reaches what he calls "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars", what we call God. Dante blissfully laments that his memory could not capture more than a distant shadow of the pure goodness he knew in Love's presence, presenting a God always better than what we can conceive or convey.
- Greater-Scope Paragon: Every good in the Comedy, past, present, and future, comes from God and every action that Dante takes follows his purpose to rest in God. Ultimately, though, God's greatness is too much for Dante to describe.
- Heroic Dog: Virgil describes Jesus as a fierce greyhound who will chase off the lions and wolves (who represent sin) that stalk Dante and prevent him from finding true happiness.
- I Have Many Names: The infinity and transcendence of the Lord is evident in the Comedy because Dante refuses to only call Him God. To show how that phrase fails to capture Him, Dante calls him by unique titles like the Love that Moves the Sun and the Outer Stars, the First Equality, the Trinal Light, the Deep Mind, the Highest Joy, and more.
- My Skull Runneth Over: Even with Heaven's light and the Virgin Mary's intercession empowering him, Dante can't keep even a flawed memory of what God is like in his head, losing more memory of that event than memory had been lost of events from two thousand years before.
- The Omniscient: God knows every man and woman's thoughts, sins, and fates, having predestined all things from the time of creation. This is especially emphasized in Paradiso, where the saints mention things they learned from God that would be impossible to otherwise know.
- Person of Mass Destruction: Jesus entered Hell once in the backstory, but that one visit caused that entire dimension to nearly collapse in a massive earthquake. Even a thousand years later, parts of Hell are still destroyed from the visit and travel between circles is significantly harder because of all the bridges that were destroyed.
- Physical God: Discussed Trope; Beatrice explains that the reason The Bible describes God as if He had hands and the angels as if they had eyes is that humans can only understand things from the senses, so even non-physical existence must be described with sensory details.
- The Power of Love: The poem identifies God and His power with His divine love, going so far as to say that the existence of every single thing in existence is sustained by His love.
- Super-Empowering: Exaggerated Trope; God provides every power that exists to everything that has every had those powers, most fundamentally in providing the power to exist at all to beings. A more standard version of this trope applies when penitents climb Purgatory and ascend into the Empyrean, where they gain Flight, Super-Intelligence, Healing Hands, Super-Speed, Brown Note smiles, and much more.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Insofar as God is depicted at all, His depiction is in an extremely abstract fashion due to how far he is beyond human understanding. Dante has to literally go through Hell, climb up the opposite side of the world, fly outside the universe, bathe his eyes in a river of heavenly light, and pray for the intercession of the Mother of God. Even then, he admits his memory provides an infinitely inadequate account of what He actually is.
The Virgin Mary
The Virgin Mary
"A beauty smiling, which the gladness was within the eyes of all the other saints."
"Beatrice, the true praise of God, Why succourest thou not him, who loved thee so, For thee he issued from the vulgar herd? dost thou not hear the pity of his plaint? Dost thou not see the death that combats him Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt?"
The virgin mother of Jesus Christ, God made man. She reigns in Heaven as queen, commanding the saints and angels who help Dante on his journey and answering the prayers of those in Purgatory who see her as a model of holiness.
- Big Good: Mary, Queen of Heaven, sets the plot in motion by telling Saint Lucia and Beatrice to set Dante on the path to salvation, organizing his trip through Hell with Virgil, sending Beatrice to guide him from the top of Mount Purgatory, and directly giving Dante the grace he needs to achieve his ultimate goal of perceiving God.
- The High Queen: The last cantos of the Paradiso makes much of Mary's title as Queen of Heaven and describe the many subjects of her court in detail Her court includes Beatrice, all the heroes of the Bible, all the saints of the Church, and thousands of children saved by the grace of God. Her beauty, kindness, and grace are said to be even more than Beatrice and the closest of anyone's to that of Christ.
- Humble Hero: The Virgin Mary is announced to be the Mother of Christ, which leads the immortal Archangel Gabriel to hail the young girl.
- Oxymoronic Being: Saint Bernard opens up the final canto of the Comedy by referring to Mary as the "Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son." The theological strangeness of Mary has never been so concisely put as in this opening prayer by her greatest devotee.
- The Paragon: The Virgin Mary saves the souls on Earth not by forcing them to be good, but by showing them her paradisiacal happiness and her mastery of the Seven Heavenly Virtues. Mary herself allows Dante to travel through Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise so he understand the importance of accepting the Father's love.
- Seven Heavenly Virtues: Each depiction of virtue in Purgatory's seven terraces includes Mary as an exemplar.
- Her childbirth in the manger is used twice a model. First, the proud literally look up to a depiction of her being humble enough to settle for a manger, and later, the greedy are heard reciting the tale as a rebuke to their own grandeur.
- Mary's words convincing Jesus to turn water into wine at the wedding of Cana are heard echoing throughout the terrace for the envious as a reminder to be loving. The slothful then repeat the story in their own words as a reminder to actively do good like Mary did and a tree in the terrace of gluttony plays reminders to worry about getting other people wine before getting wine yourself.
- The wrathful have visions of Mary reuniting kindly with the young Christ after he disappeared for three days, reminding them to act with her mercy and meekness.
- Surprise, surprise, Mary acts as a model for chastity to penitents by virtue of her perpetual virginity.
- Super-Empowering: Due to her closeness to her son and Father, Mary can intercede in prayer more effectively than any other, making her more suited than any other to grant Dante to ability to see God.
Dante and Guides
Dante
Dante Alighieri
"I not Aeneas am, I am not Paul, nor I, nor others, think me worthy of it."
The main character, a 35-year-old Florentine poet who has lost his way in life spiritually and literally. By the intercession of the Virgin Mary, he is allowed to walk through the afterlife. As the poem goes on, it becomes clear that he is destined to become a poet of the same stature as Homer and to be exiled from his home forever. Based on the poem's author circa 1300.
- Audience Surrogate: The poem indicates that Dante's Author Avatar stands in for the audience in the first line, and thus, any reader can see himself in the personal journey."Midway through the journey of our life..."
- Author Avatar: Dante as the Pilgrim, the protagonist of the story, is a fictionalized version of Dante Alighieri the poet. Purgatory has seven levels corresponding to the Seven Deadly Sins. Dante experiences the penances for only three: Pride, Anger, and Lust. Translator Dorothy L. Sayers commented that these were the three faults people tend to accuse Dante of, so subjecting Dante to their penances was probably a deliberate confession on the poet's part.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: He has no problem flying from the Moon to Saturn and chatting up ghosts without so much as a whiff of air.
- Broken Pedestal: Downplayed on both counts.
- Dante never loses his admiration of Virgil, but when he first meets him, it is outright hero worship. Inferno Canto 9 tempers Dante's admiration, especially when he witnesses Virgil, despite his best yet naive efforts, fail to parley with the demonic garrison at the gates to the city of Dis.
- To a lesser degree, with Brunetto Latini, his old tutor who is in the circle of Violence for his sodomy. Dante thanks Latini for teaching him how to write poetry well, acknowledging the good that he did to him. That said, Latini's placement in the circle of Violence is ultimately Dante's concession to the justice of God, regardless of his personal connections to the damned.
- Casts No Shadow: Inverted; Dante is the only character in the story who explicitly has a shadow. Several ghosts he meets remark upon Dante's shadow before noticing anything else about him.
- Character Development: Previously, he has swooned upon seeing Paulo and Francesca in the circle of Lust, and he has expressed pity for the souls in the circles of Gluttony and Greed. However, upon meeting Filippo Argenti in the circle of Wrath, Dante for the first time sees sin as something truly vile. That said, though he might accept the vileness of sin on principle, his reactions to seeing those who are damned for worse sins vary on a case-by-case basis, like how he meets Latini, who is damned for the worse sin of sodomy, and addresses him with gratitude and affectionate regret.
- Faint in Shock: Dante faints twice near the beginning of Inferno because he's so shocked by how horrible the first tortures are. He faints again towards the end of Paradiso as he approaches the end of all desires.
- Invincible Hero: By the grace of God, nothing in Hell can kill or even injure Dante so long as they remain faithful. This spiritual invincibility applies to all loyal to God, which allows a saint like Beatrice to stroll into Hell without fear.
- The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Dante Alighieri, who will go on to walk through Hell and see God's face, can't contain his utter glee upon meeting his favorite author, Virgil.
- Red Is Heroic: Dante is almost always illustrated as wearing red robes and a hat, setting him apart from other characters who are generally either naked or wearing white.
- Refusal of the Call: In the second canto, Dante's cowardice gets the better of him at the prospect of ascending into the Underworld without the bravery of Aeneas or the divinity of Christ, and he questions why he should go on the journey with Virgil at all. Thanks to Virgil's assurance that he works on behalf of our hero's long-lost love, he dismisses his concerns and steps on the path to Hell.
- Temporary Blindness: Dante loses his sight for some time after his reunion with Beatrice. He was so eager to see her again he didn't avert his eyes from her radiant soul until the virtues made him.
- This Loser Is You: The first line of the poem identifies that the poem begins "midway through the journey of our lives" as the protagonist himself becomes exactly middle-aged, making it clear he stands in for the audience. To further show his humanity in the face of his fantastic travels, Dante faints, weeps, kicks the heads of incapacitated shades, and lambastes in the narration things his character self almost immediately does.
- Token Human: Dante is one of three embodied human characters in the story, with every other character either being a disembodied soul, an angel, or an infernal monster. The other incarnate humans, Jesus and his Blessed Mother, only appear in three cantos of the hundred, each time with no dialogue and little physical description outside of the narrator's laments at how indescribable their glory is.
- Super-Senses: Dante's ascension through Heaven gradually strengthens his senses, allowing him to look straight at the Sun without being blinded and eventually to see God.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Although Dante has nothing but contempt for Satan and his minions, he often shows empathy, pity, and even respect for several sinners he meets in Hell. He swoons after hearing Francesca bewail her state because of her inability to control her passions, and he exchanges bittersweet words with his master, Latini, upon seeing him in Hell for sodomy. That said, his sympathy wears thin for some other damned sinners, like Filippo Argenti, who tries to attack him. He and Virgil then watch in a fit of catharsis as the other Wrathful souls gang up on Argenti.
- The Watson: Dante writes himself into the story as an observer unfamiliar with the reality of the afterlife, putting him in the position to ask theological and moral questions that Virgil or Beatrice can answer. He also fits the trope by being the narrator of the story, who is largely secondary to the plot, since Dante can only get through Hell due to the holy protection of Beatrice.
- Weirdness Search and Rescue: The living poet Dante is taken through the fires of Hell and Purgatory to report on what he sees there. He is given the soul of the Roman poet Virgil (a man who was in Hell because he had the misfortune to live and die before the mission of Christ) as his tour guide.
- Wish-Fulfillment: He isn't always portrayed as the noblest hero, but Dante's insert also gets called an equal by Homer, gets to talk smack to his damned enemies, and gets guided by his dead crush to God Himself.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Several characters foretell that Dante is destined to be exiled from Florence and never return. He also learns that the already absurd corruption in the city will only get worse.
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro
"Took of the earth, and with his fists well filled, he threw it into those rapacious gullets."
"I by not doing, not by doing, lost the sight of that high sun which thou desirest, and which too late by me was recognized."
A pagan poet and philosopher damned to the First Circle of Hell for a lack of faith in God. Beatrice tasks him to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory, owing to his wisdom and experience traveling through Hell's circles on the command of a sorceress. Based on the historical poet who authored The Aeneid.
- Barefoot Sage: He becomes Dante's guide and mentor and is usually depicted barefoot in the illustrations. (Downplayed, since other afterlife inhabitants are usually drawn shoeless as well).
- Broken Pedestal: Downplayed. Dante never loses his admiration for Virgil, but he regards him as a walking legend early on. This idolization mellows into light respect come Canto 9, where Virgil walks straight into a dead end and implies their situation is hopeless.
- Can't Catch Up: While Dante purges himself of weakness throughout Purgatory and gains supernatural abilities in Paradise, his master Virgil lacks any capability to grow, making him wholly useless as a teacher by the time they reach the top of Purgatory. Virgil happily confesses his inferiority and leaves Dante to finish the journey with his well-forged will.
- Casts No Shadow: Virgil has no shadow since light passes through ghosts, just as everything else does. This causes some anguish when Dante sees only his shadow on the climb up Mount Purgatory and turns back, expecting Virgil to be gone.
- Guile Hero: Virgil gets through Hell in one piece by flattering most menaces he encounters while subtly threatening them with God's wrath. This helps him get the help of undead ferrymen, centaurs, flying scorpions, and giants on the journey, but once he ends up in Purgatory, the people have too much integrity for schmoozing to really help them out.
- Horrible Judge of Character: When dealing with non-humans, Virgil has no experience to go off of, so he ends up trusting demons to hold up their end of a bargain on at least two occasions. Fra Catalano mocks Virgil by alluding to John 8:44, prompting Virgil to storm off.
- Like a Son to Me: After he leaves the fourth circle, Virgil begins to address Dante as "my son" as he guides Dante through the harsh reality of Hell like a protective father. By Purgatorio, Dante returns the sentiment begins to address Virgil as "father," right up until their good-bye.
- Mama Bear: When demons begin to chase Dante, the narration compares his guide, Virgil, to a mother who is woken up by a fire and grabs her kid without pausing, putting his safety above her own. In that way, Virgil "snatched [Dante] up" and escaped the Circle with him.
- Mentor Archetype: Virgil guides Dante through Hell and Purgatory through his worldly wisdom. As a Roman poet, Virgil allegorically stands for wisdom obtainable by human reason, and he fittingly leaves the poem once Dante has to ascend to Heaven and face the world of theology.
- Mentor Occupational Hazard: Played With; Dante's mentor is the Hell-shadow of a pagan poet, so he can't die in the ordinary sense. Instead, the poet Virgil disappears without a word when Dante has scaled Purgatory and strengthened his will enough to be independent of his ghostly father figure. It is assumed Virgil returns to his eternal death in Hell, a fate that nearly moves Dante to tears.
- Politically Incorrect Hero: Virgil is constantly praised in the poem, and he is the one who directly leads Dante on the path to Heaven, but he also is a pagan from Hell who never accepted Christ... not that he could, because Virgil died before the birth of Christ. It can be easy to forget Virgil's paganism, but Dante notices it and is embarrassed when the mentor he loves talks about how he helped a pagan necromancer bring some souls out of Hell.
- Put on a Bus: Virgil leaves Dante just before the end of Purgatorio because, as one of the Damned, he cannot enter Heaven. He spends the rest of the Poem back in the first circle of Hell, although Dante thinks of him during later discussions of God's justice.
- Sherlock Scan: Virgil can read Dante's thoughts just by looking at his face. He once boasts that he receives Dante's inner being faster than a mirror could receive his appearance. These powers aren't supernatural like Beatrice's Telepathy (as Mark Musa
argues), but are just a sign of just how wise Virgil is. - Spirit Advisor: Virgil helps Dante through Hell through his guile, memory of the paths and monsters they face from his last trip down under, and his keen understanding of human psychology. He serves Dante decently well, but he really starts to fumble once they make it to Purgatory and start dealing with God stuff Virgil knows nothing about. Cause of that, Virgil bounces and gets replaced by Beatrice before Dante tours Heaven.
- Strong as They Need to Be: Virgil is supposed to be intangible, but sometimes he can interact with Dante just fine despite this:
- When the story needs to make a statement about how weird Virgil is, light passes through him, and he can't make a shadow. In Canto IX, though, we learn his hands are opaque enough to save Dante from seeing Medusa. Maybe he only his hands have shadows?
- When a horde of demons threatens to end the protagonist's journey in Hell, Virgil is able to use his illusion of a body to pick up our hero and leap into a ditch with him.
- Was Once a Man: He introduces himself as the shadow of a man and not a proper person.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Virgil disappears without a word at the end of the Purgatorio, presumably to return to the First Circle of Hell. The problem is that he has to climb out of the Ninth Circle of Hell to get there, and there's no giant or flying monster to help him out, so how is he supposed to make it back?
- The Worf Effect: Ghost-kicking, Hell-strutting Virgil fails horribly to protect Dante from the demons of Dis, creating real suspense that they'll make Dante stay in Hell forever. When all seems lost, the demons scramble way in fear at the sight of an angel who knocks down all their defenses with a light push, strictly establishing that the powers of Heaven are unrivaled by anything.
Beatrice
Beatrice Portinari
"Appeared a lady under a green mantle, vested in colour of the living flame."
"Beatrice am I, who do bid thee go; I come from there, where I would fain return; Love moved me, which compelleth me to speak. When I shall be in presence of my Lord, Full often will I praise thee unto him."
One of the most beautiful and virtuous women to ever live, who in death is enthroned by the side of the Virgin Mary in Heaven. She guides Dante through Paradise, though not after berating Dante for forgetting her. In real life, she was a woman who died in 1290 at age 25 and inspired many of Dante's poems in the La Vita Nuova.
- Beauty Equals Goodness: As Beatrice ascends closer to God throughout Paradiso, she becomes increasingly beautiful until her smile would crack a human's brain and her face defies all description.
- Brown Note Being: Generally, other saints only become dangerously beautiful in the higher spheres of Heavan, but even on Earth, Beatrice is so beautiful that she temporarily blinds Dante and nearly kills him just by being visible. He later compares her growing radiance in Heaven to what Jupiter must've looked like when Semele was killed by the sight of him.
- Colour-Coded Emotions: Beatrice is dressed in red, green, and white to represent her possession of the three theological virtues: love, hope, and faith.
- Dissonant Serenity: Even as low as the second planet of Paradise, Beatrice's smile is so brilliant that the narration says a man would feel serenity looking at it even if he were in a fire.
- First-Name Basis: She's the only character to refer to Dante by name.
- Foil: To Matilda, who represents the active life, while Beatrice represents the contemplative life. Matilda is feminine as Aphrodite, quietly peaceful, and concerned with tending her earthly garden; Beatrice is masculine as an admiral, loudly judgmental, and concerned with the contemplation of heavenly truths.
- Healing Hands: Emphasizing her relationship with Christ and the Apostles, Beatrice heals Dante's newfound blindness with a touch of her hand.
- Hero's Muse: Dante is sent on his quest for redemption through the afterlife by Beatrice, who enlists the help of the poet Virgil to guide him through Hell and Purgatory.
- Iron Lady: Beatrice is compared to a stern admiral when she reunites with her lover, Dante, since she scolds him to tears to get him to fully confess his many, many infidelities. This forceful first appearance is not without compassion since Beatrice has been charged with leading Dante's quest into Heaven, where no evil man can go.
- The Lost Lenore: The reader is first introduced to Beatrice as a dead woman who was friends with Dante, whose unrequited love for her motivates him to go through Hell to see her again.
- Mysterious Veil: Beatrice first appears with a white veil covering her face. It is only after Dante's sins are cleansed in the River Lethe that she unveils and he can survive seeing the splendor of his love.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: She absolutely cannot be harmed due to her sanctification by God. Not even the flames of Hell can scratch her, shocking Virgil as she appears to him.
- Spirit Advisor: Beatrice, the deceased love of Dante's life, takes the Poet through the spheres of Heaven, becoming increasingly more beautiful and jovial as they further approach God. As a Saint leading a fallen mortal, Beatrice guides and teaches Dante like a mother deals with a particularly distressed child. She often knows what Dante wants to ask before he does and she always has an answer that leaves him stunned and better for it.
- Telepathy: Since they live within God's omniscient mind, Beatrice and other saints can respond to the complex theological questions Dante has before he asks them aloud. In Dante's own (heavily translated and context-extracted) words, Beatrice "read me as I read myself."
- Tough Love: The audience is made to expect Lady Beatrice to be graceful and lovely as any pure damsel could be, only for her to express her love to Dante by drilling him on his sins until he bursts into tears. The angels pity the poet, but Beatrice remains stern as an admiral while maintaining only tears can allow Dante to survive the entry into Paradise.
St. Bernard
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
"And she, the Queen of Heaven, for whom I burn wholly with love, will grant us every grace, because that I her faithful Bernard am."
A Cistercian priest famous for his treatise on divine love and his devotion to the Virgin Mary. In the last three cantos, he takes over as Dante's guide to help him receive enough of God's grace from the Virgin Mary to be prepared to actually see God's face.
- Out of Focus: St. Bernard is only introduced as the third Spirit Advisor with three chapters left to go, leaving him with only a few dozen lines compared to Beatrice's hundreds and the thousand-something Virgil gets. Even that reduced page-time is spent focusing on the universal motherhood of the Virgin Mary and the beauty of the Highest Joy rather than Bernard's individual character. The degree to which the narrative and Bernard himself ignore him only tells us one thing about the man: that he has totally given his little life to God.
- Satellite Character: Almost all of Bernard's dialogue is about the Virgin Mary and his devotion to her.
- Spirit Advisor: Saint Bernard takes over as Dante's guide for the last two cantos so that he, on the advice of the Blessed Mother, can help Dante better perceive and experience the true presence of God.
The Damned
Francesca and Paolo
"Love has conducted us unto one death[.]"
Siblings-in-law who had an affair after reading love poetry together. They were killed by Francesca's husband and are now damned in the Second Circle of Hell for their lust.
- A Deadly Affair: Paolo and Francesca were reading a love poem about Sir Lancelot, seeing it as an innocent pastime, but the poem evidently stirred them into having an affair together. Eventually, Giovanni, Francesca's husband and Paolo's brother, found them in flagrante delicto and killed them both.
- Love Makes You Evil: Not so much "evil" in that they willed to do evil as "failed to make a resolute choice of the good and thus yielded easily to their desires". Still, the main thrust of Francesca's lament is that she had no control over her affair since she did so out of love.
- Lust: These two are the poster children for lust in the Comedy, with Francesca being the only soul damned for lust to speak. And speak she does, for she excuses her sins as an excess of love she had no control over. Fittingly, this "excess of love" is exactly how Dante describes lust, a refusal to control one's passion and romantic sense in keeping with reason and morality.
- Mal Mariée: Francesca's husband was far older than her and largely unattractive, making Paolo all the more enticing to her.
- New Media Are Evil: The impetus for Francesca and Paolo's lust was a love poem about Sir Lancelot. Such Courtly Love poems were growing in popularity at the time, and the subject of Arthurian Legend was just becoming known in Italy, so it sounds a bit like Moral Guardians blaming crimes on rock and roll.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Unlike many of the souls Dante meets, Francesca and Paolo are mainly well-known for their famous and shocking life stories rather than their socio-political significance or relationship with Dante. It seems the story was too juicy for Dante not to include in his masterpiece.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Francesca gives a powerful and romantic lament of her damnation that moves Dante to faint in sympathy. As the first of the damned to speak, this sets up the conflict Dante goes through about the justice of damnation. Essentially, Francesca and Paolo's portrayals as sympathetic adulterers, as tender and beautiful as it is, ultimately serve to make their sin half-excusable.
- Til Murder Do Us Part: Francesca's husband killed her after walking in on her romancing his brother, a sin for which he will be damned to the Ninth Circle for murdering his brother.
Filippo Argenti
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Filippo Argenti was a Florentine knight of a very foul temper. The moment he sees Dante, he tries to attack him, but Virgil wards him off. Dante and Virgil then watch the other wrathful souls gang up on him.
- No Sympathy: The first of the damned to receive this, as Dante and Virgil cathartically watch the other wrathful souls gang up on him.
Farinata
- The Heretic: Why he's in Hell to begin with. Specifically, he was an Epicurean, believing that the soul dies along with the body.
- Nay-Theist: It's implied that he (along with most of the heretics) knew that Christianity was the true religion but was was just too stubborn and prideful to admit it.
- Too Kinky to Torture: He's trapped in a coffin full of fire and basically shrugs it off, even saying that knowing about various bad stuff that's going to happen on Earth is more of a torment to him than what he's suffering in Hell.
Hellrakers
- Vulgar Humor: The Hellrakers are a very crass bunch. One of the ten demons acting as Dante and Virgil's escort salutes Belzecue by thrusting his tongue at him. Then, when he signals it is time to head out, he farts, or rather, "he promptly made a bugle of his breech".
Fra Catalano and Fra Loderingo
- As the Good Book Says...: Fra Catalano alludes to John 8:44note when ridiculing Virgil for trusting the Hellrakers to give him sound advice. This is the last straw for Virgil, who silently storms off.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Fra Catalano proves himself to be this. When the poets ask for a way to climb out of the bowge, he truthfully says they can climb up a rock, which used to be a bridge. When Virgil expresses that Belzecue has duped him, Fra Catalano takes this as an opportunity to mock him, quipping: "I heard the devil's iniquities much canvassed at Bologna; among the rest 'twas said, he was a liar and father of lies."
- Deliberately Painful Clothing: They wear regal-looking robes lined with heavy lead.
- Hypocrite: They were of the Order of the Militia of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a religious order that sought to promote reconciliation. However, the order also came to be known as the fratres gaudentes, or the ''Jovial Friars" (or rather "Frisky Friars"), as the observance of their rule was so lax, to the point where Pope Sixtus V suppressed the order. Fra Catalano demonstrates this by mocking Virgil with a quote from John 8:44, shortly after Virgil realizes that Belzecue has duped him, "he was a liar and father of lies".
Vanni Fucci
- Bastard Bastard: He was the illegitimate son of Fuccio de' Lazzari, and was a violent thug and thief, and is still a pretty big asshole in the afterlife.
- The Brute: He committed many violent crimes in life. As such, Dante is surprised to find him in the section of the Eighth Circle for thieves rather than the violent.
- Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: At the beginning of Canto 25, he makes "the fig" (an obscene gesture roughly equivalent to Flipping the Bird) at God. The demonic snakes in the bolgia immediately bite him after.
- Flipping the Bird: Fucci does a variation of this by making "the figs" with both his hands, thrusting his thumbs between his index and middle fingers, and directing them at God."The fico for Thee, God! take that, say I!"
- Kick the Dog: Like all the inhabitants of the afterlife, he has the ability to see into the future. At one point, he tells Dante all the bad things he foresees occurring in Italy, and then tells Dante he told him this just to make him grieve.
- Miscarriage of Justice: The sin he is damned for is robbing jewels from a church, for which an innocent person was executed, with Fucci never being punished in his earthly life.
Griffolino and Capocchio
- The Barnum: They are in Hell for practicing phony alchemy to rip people off. Griffolino also tricked someone into giving him a large sum of money by claiming he could teach him how to fly.
- Body Horror: Their punishment in Hell is to have leprosy which covers them in scabs that itch so badly they are constantly scratching so hard they are tearing them off.
Giants
- Adaptational Species Change: Nimrod (who comes from The Bible) is a giant here. There's nothing in the Bible to suggest he was anything but a normal-sized human.
- Anti-Villain: Anteus is by far the least evil of the giants. As a result, he's not chained up like the others, but he is still stuck in Hell. He's also the only one who can be reasoned with and keeps his promise to lower Dante and Virgil down to Cocytus without hurting them.
- Flat Character: Anteus and Nimrod are the only giants given any characterization. The rest just stand there and look scary.
- Our Giants Are Bigger: They are about 70 feet tall, and Dante even mistakes them for some kind of tower when he first sees them from a distance.
- Psychopathic Manchild: When Nimrod sees Dante and Virgil, he has a childish fit where he starts shouting at them in a Starfish Language and blows his trumpet at them.
- The Unintelligible: Nimrod can only speak some kind of Starfish Language that not even the other giants can understand, which makes sense given he suffered terrible punishment for building the Tower of Babel and had the languages of the world scattered; He's probably just stuck speaking whatever was spoken before God's punishment fell.
Satan
- The Devil Is a Loser: He's nearly mindless, and is trapped in Hell mainly due to his own stupidity.
- Didn't Think This Through: He thought trying to overthrow an omnipotent God was a good idea.
- Evil Is Petty: His whole reason for betraying God was basically just due to being jealous that God was more powerful. He also didn't even care that his actions would cause almost all the bad things in the entire setting, including Hell existing in the first place.
- Failed a Spot Check: He never sees Dante and Virgil, even though they are the only humans in Judecca not trapped under the ice. He also doesn't notice them climbing down his leg, although this is a bit more justified, as he's so gigantic that it's like a person not noticing fleas or mites crawling on them.
- Feral Villain: The Devil is portrayed as a horrid monster reduced to doing nothing but screaming, biting, and gnashing.
- I'm a Humanitarian: All three of his heads chew on the world's worst traitors. While Brutus and Cassius are "only" subject to his biting, Judas has it even worse, as he's also constantly being shredded by Satan's claws, which Dante claims make his bites look soft by comparison.
- Kaiju: He's so huge that the giants Dante encounters earlier (which are about 70 feet tall) are only about as big as one of his arms. this site calculates in the commentaries that he would have to be around 817 feet tall, although only half of his body is above the ice.
- Multiple Head Case: He has three heads, each chewing on one of the three worst people who ever lived.
- Self-Inflicted Hell: His flapping his wings in a futile attempt keeps Cocytus frozen. If he just stopped, it would eventually thaw, and he could escape.
The Penitent
Statius
Publius Papinius Statius
"And ere I led the Greeks unto the rivers of Thebes, in poetry, I was baptized, but out of fear was covertly a Christian, for a long time professing paganism; and this lukewarmness caused me the fourth circle to circuit round more than four centuries."
Statius was a 1st-century poet Dante knew from The Thebaid and The Achilleid. Here, he's depicted as a secret Christian, who joins Dante and Virgil on their ascent through Purgatory from canto 21 on.
- Author Appeal: Dante, of course, picks the most prominent soul in Purgatory to be a fellow poet and one who shared his passion for the works of Virgil.
- Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: Statius is shown completing his time in Purgatory, a shift so momentous that the whole mountain shakes to let everyone know Statius will now leave the physical universe to live in God.
- Back from the Dead: Metaphorically, at least. After having been freed from Purgatory and sent on the path to Paradise, Statius's visage is compared to the resurrected Jesus.
- Dirty Coward: Despite being a Christian for the last years of his life, he never publicly announced it for fear of persecution. For this, he spent years in the terrace of sloth.
- Historical Hero Upgrade: Statius historically loved The Aeneid, but Dante invents a story where Statius finds the message of The Aeneid and the message of the first generation of Christians so compatible that he converts to Christianity. From there, Statius repents of his ill-spending and begins his journey to join the Ultimate Good in Heaven.
- The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Even on the mountain up to Heaven, Statius is such a fan of The Aeneid that he literally bows to Virgil once he realizes who he is.
- Messianic Archetype: Statius is a Christ figure. Statius is a man destined to rise to God's throne, who has died and will live again, and appears after a crowd sings hallelujahs in the middle of a biblical earthquake. Dante even notes their first meeting is like when Jesus met two apostles on the road, and Statius' initial line of dialogue is modeled off one of Jesus's post-Resurrection greetings.
- Money Dumb: Statius has to spend 500 years in Purgatory's terrace for greed because he was terrible at spending his money. He wasted it all despite knowing better from Virgil's example, and he only repented of his habits late in life.
- Out of Focus: Statius joins the main cast from the 22nd canto of Purgatorio to the 33rd, but despite his assumed presence, there is not a single indication in the texts of the 29th, 30th, and 31st cantos that Statius exists. Apparently, Statius remained completely silent as Dante lost his mentor to Hell and reunited with his angry, dead ex-girlfriend.
- Turn to Religion: Reading the life-shaping works of Virgil not only gives Statius the inspiration for his great works but also inspires him to convert to Christianity.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Statius is released from Purgatory as Dante passes through, so he joins Dante on his ascent to Heaven. The problem is that the last place Statius appears is at the top of Purgatory, so the reader is left to assume that Statius makes it to Paradise and to speculate where in Paradise he eternally resides.
The Saints
Piccarda Donati
"Such saw I many faces prompt to speak, So that I ran in error opposite To that which kindled love 'twixt man and fountain."
"But thou shalt recognise I am Piccarda, who, stationed here among these other blessed, myself am blessed in the slowest sphere."
The sister of Forese Donati and a friend of Dante who became a nun, was forced to marry, and died shortly after. She is relegated to the First Sphere of Heaven, the Moon, for the sake of Dante's journey.
- Beauty Equals Goodness: Forese pretty much says as much when he references Piccarda as being as beautiful as she was good. Upon her ascension to Heaven, she has only gotten even more beautiful.
- Like Brother and Sister: She's one of a few people who Dante cares enough about to ask about her place in the afterlife. In return, she affectionately refers to him as brother when the two happily reunite in Heaven. Dante likes her so much that he debates with his love, Beatrice, for two cantos about whether she should be even higher in the Heavenly ranks.
- Lunarians: Piccarda is the spokesman for the saints who dwell on the Moon. Live silvery moonlight, these souls are nearly transparent and as the Moon's is inconstant, so did Piccarda hold to her vow inconstantly.
- Mirror Routine: Dante initially mistakes the misty, transparent visage of Piccarda for his own reflection.
- No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: The light of Heaven has so changed Piccarda that Dante can't recognize her by voice or sight until she explicitly tells him who she was: an old friend.
- The Oathbreaker: Piccarda was made to enter into a marriage of convenience by her family in violation of oath of celibacy, for which she is consigned to the lowest rank amongst the saints. The extent to which she consented to this violation troubles Dante and is the subject of much discussion by him and Beatrice.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: Piccarda is first introduced by an off-hand reference to her brother, a hideous glutton who is disfigured for his sin in Purgatory. In contrast, Piccarda is a nun who renounced worldly desires and was rewarded for that in Heaven with divine beauty.
- Taking the Veil: She became a nun in her life to escape from the world, but unfortunately, the world did not take kindly to that.
Justinian
"Caesar I was, and am Justinian, Who, by the will of primal Love I feel, Took from the laws the useless and redundant[.]"
A Byzantine emperor who Dante meets in Mercury among the saints who were too focused on worldly affairs in life.
- Character Filibuster: The entirety of Canto 6 is made up of a 142-line monologue by Justinian, the longest uninterrupted speech by any character in the epic.
- The Emperor: He is, of course, a historical Byzantine emperor, but the poem reflects this by making his monologue a grand history of the Roman Empire. It begins by invoking the imperial eagle, continues into a genealogy of the kings and emperors who preceded and succeeded Justinian, and winding down with a sweeping criticism of Italy's current politicians and how they have tarnished the empire's legacy.
- Faux Flame: He's among the first souls described as a "spirit-flame" due to the sheer amount of light they give off.
- The Good King: Justinian is positioned as a successor to Caesar who boasts about coming to the Christian faith and codifying the greatest code of law to yet exist. He lives forever in Heaven alongside the greatest heroes and saints of history.
- Holy Backlight: He's the first person in Heaven who gives off so much light that Dante can't see him. He is also the first soul Dante meets in Heaven who is low on the totem pole for being too concerned with some good, unlike the oath-breakers.
- Mission from God: He says his codification of Roman law came about by direct inspiration from God. He was deemed worthy of this task upon accepting that Jesus has a human and divine nature.
- Noble Bird of Prey: A lot of his dialogue is spent talking about the "bird of God," or rather the mighty eagle that represents Rome as it brings glory and goodness to the world.
- Writer on Board: His criticism of the Ghibellines and Guelphs is pretty clearly just Dante's own take on the politics of the time.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
"Of the lambs was I of the holy flock Which Dominic conducteth by a road Where well one fattens if he strayeth not."
Thomas Aquinas is a 13th-century Dominican theologian who appears to Dante on the Sun amongst the other wise saints. He is one of the most talkative souls Dante encounters, describing the life of St. Francis at length.
- Cosmic Motifs: St. Thomas' dialogue and descriptions of his appearance are replete with comparisons to constellations and the Sun. This is not unusual since light is associated with philosophy and, well, enlightenment.
- Good Shepherd: Aquinas introduces himself as a Dominican brother distinct from the corrupt sort that had overtaken the order. If his salvation was proof enough of his goodness, he at length praises the good in his rival order, the Franciscans, showing a sense of magnanimity and compassion the goes beyond the power-grabbing and politics amuck in the medieval priesthood.
- The Philosopher: St. Thomas' dialogue is primarily composed of arguments and syllogisms about the nature of wisdom and intelligence in response to some of Dante's doubts.
- Saved by the Church Bell: His singing and harmony with the other flames of the Sun in celebration of their salvation is compared to the ringing of the church bell at dawn.
- Telepathy: Fittingly for someone associated with knowledge, Aquinas is one of the saints who reads Dante's thoughts the most. He answers Dante's questions about Solomon before the man can ask them aloud.
