User:Aubreyroberts/sandbox

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 * Dante's Inferno (Bloom's Notes)

In Limbo reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, although not sinful, did not accept Christ. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Asphodel Meadows; thus, the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. Without baptism ("the portal of the faith that you embrace")[7] they lacked the hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo includes green fields and a castle with seven gates to represent the seven virtues. The castle is the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Persian polymath Avicenna. In the castle, Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Averroes. He also meets the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the mathematician Euclid, the scientist Pedanius Dioscorides, the statesman Cicero, the first doctor Hippocrates, the historical figures Lucretia, Lucius Junius Brutus, and Julius Caesar in his role as Roman general ("in his armor, falcon-eyed"),[8] mythological characters Hector, Electra, Camilla, Latinus, and Orpheus, and many others. Interestingly, he also sees Saladin in Limbo (Canto IV). Dante implies that all virtuous non-Christians find themselves here, although he later encounters two, Cato of Utica and Statius, in Purgatory and two, Trajan and Ripheus, in Heaven.