Dante’s Inferno: Questions 2

 1. Why is Vergil so worried about winning this battle in opening of Canto 9. What is this battle? And why is so confident he knows the way? Why the visitor from heaven. And why the burning sarcophagi?

 2. What is Farinata's character and why is he prone to heresy? Why is he obsessed with ancestors and public identity? Why combine him with Calvacanti who is interested only in the private 

matter of his son? Why might that attitude have led to his son having no faith in god? Why the stress on how the dead cannot know the present? And what upsets Dante so much in this encounter?

Can reason unaided grapple successfully with heresy?

 3. Why in Canto 12 do the violent not get to speak? And why does Vergil command one centaur to be a guide?

 4. Why is the pilgrim bewildered by the appearance of the suicides? Why here does he cooperate in actively giving pain? What are the characteristic traits of Pier della Vigne, the suicide? Why 

did these traits lead to suicide?

 5. Why might Canto 15 not be about outing Brunetto Latini but about a lack or need that characterizes homosexual existence and makes it both noble and for Dante unnatural? Why can he still 

appear a winner?

 6. Why have a second canto on sodomites? What does D want that he cannot do with Brunetto? Why stress the sinners relation to Florentine public life? What does the cord have to do with this sin?

 7. This is the central canto of the 33 in the Inferno. Why put Geryon and the journey here? Why make it a point to have the usurers here and have Dante see them on his own? What is the relevance of 

their punishment?