The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri The Inferno

The first section of Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy Inferno describes the endless torment that is meted out for sins including greed self-deception political deceit and betrayal. Robin Kirkpatrick translated edited and added annotations to this Penguin Classics version. Inferno which describes Dante's journey into Hell with Virgil as a guide in the middle of his life paints a brutal picture of an afterlife where desperate people are sentenced to perpetual torment for committing one or more of the seven deadly sins. Dante sees damned souls like the heathen Aeneas the liar Odysseus the suicidal Cleopatra and his own political foes damned for their treachery as he descends through nine concentric rings of increasingly agonising suffering.