Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/462

 412 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE have an important political treatise, the Be Monarchia, on the proper relations between the pope and the emperor. But by far his greatest work and the one that gave fullest play to his wide learning and experience and varied talents The Divine was the Commedia, or Divine Comedy, as his ad- Comedy mirers called it, a long poem in a hundred can- tos and three chief parts, namely, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Dante, in short, visits the other world, and his guide at first is Vergil, whose account of the realm of Hades in the fifth book of the Mneid was familiar throughout the Middle Ages, and who was then regarded not only as the greatest Latin poet, but as an allegorical philosopher, and even by some as a magician. We must realize that there was hardly any subject of such universal interest to medie- val men as the other world. Other- worldliness had been a leading trait of early Christianity and of monasticism. The medieval chroniclers who wrote world-histories customarily closed their narrative with a very circumstantial account of the last judgment and future life both of the blest and the damned. Indeed, they often seem to have fuller and more authentic information upon such points than concern- ing the events of past centuries which were often shrouded for them in obscurity and legend. Over the doors of many a medieval cathedral, too, the last judgment was repre- sented vividly carved in stone, sometimes with the dead rising from their coffins and pushing up the covers or being dragged off in chains by demons armed with pincers to a seething caldron. We can understand, then, that Dante's vivid description of the hereafter would be well received, especially since it went into specific personalities and defi- nitely located many recent celebrities in hell or elsewhere. Hell is depicted by Dante as a large hole in the earth, circular in shape and gradually narrowing to a point at the Dante's earth's center. Around the slopes of this huge cosmogony conical cavity run nine successive circles or zones in which famous sinners both of the remote and recent past pay the penalty for their misdeeds. Those guilty of the worst crimes are in the circles nearest the earth's center and