The Divine Comedy — who's who

Born in Florence in 1265. Exiled in 1302 under sentence of death. Dead in Ravenna in 1321. The protagonist and narrator of his own vision. Younger and more fragile during the journey than the poet writing about him from exile — he faints twice in Inferno alone. His personal sins are confronted directly: at the summit of Purgatory, Beatrice enumerates his failings. The poem is, among other things, his own confession.

Publius Vergilius Maro, author of the Aeneid, dead 19 BCE. He dwells in Limbo with the other virtuous pagans who could not be saved because they were born before Christ. Beatrice descends from Heaven to commission him. He guides Dante through all thirty-four cantos of Inferno and all thirty-three of Purgatorio. He does not accompany Dante into Paradise; he is not eligible. His departure in Purgatorio 30 is one of the most affecting exits in literature.

Beatrice Portinari, born 1265, died June 8, 1290. She commissions Virgil's rescue mission in Inferno 2, arrives to receive Dante at the summit of Purgatory in Canto 30, guides him through all of Paradiso explaining the cosmos, and takes her seat in the white rose in Canto 31. Her last act is to smile at Dante from her place among the blessed. She says nothing. The smile is enough.

A noblewoman of Ravenna condemned to Hell's second circle with her lover Paolo Malatesta, her brother-in-law. Her husband discovered them and killed them both. In Inferno 5 she tells her story so tenderly that Dante weeps and faints. Reading a romance of Lancelot and Guinevere together one afternoon, they reached the kiss: they read no further that day. She is the poem's most famous shade and its most honest admission that damnation and pity are not mutually exclusive.

A Florentine military leader, dead 1264, condemned for Epicurean heresy — the belief that the soul dies with the body. He rises from his burning tomb in Inferno 10 to argue Florentine politics with Dante. He stood alone in the council chamber after the Battle of Montaperti and prevented the destruction of Florence. He damns the Florence that has exiled him while defending the city that damned him. The encounter is one of the poem's most politically charged.

Dante's old teacher and mentor, dead 1294, condemned to the rain of fire among the sodomites. Dante recognizes him in the burning sand and walks beside him, straining to hear, for an entire canto (Inferno 15). Brunetto prophecies Dante's greatness and his exile with equal pride. The tenderness of the encounter is unbroken by the torment, and Brunetto's recognition of Dante's worth is one of the few unambiguously loving moments in the Inferno.

The Greek hero, burning in a forked flame with Diomedes in the eighth ditch of the eighth circle (Inferno 26). Dante damns him not for the wooden horse but for the last voyage: having returned to Ithaca, Ulysses grew restless, gathered his old crew, and sailed past the Pillars of Hercules into the forbidden ocean. He urged them toward "virtue and knowledge." A storm sent by God drowned them within sight of Mount Purgatory. The speech he gives his crew is the poem's most dangerous passage: Dante clearly admires what he condemns.

A Pisan nobleman condemned to the ninth circle, frozen in the ice of Cocytus, gnawing eternally on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri — the man who imprisoned him and his children in a tower and starved them. In Inferno 33 he tells the story: the door was nailed shut; the children died around him one by one; on the fourth day, grief — or hunger — did what grief could do. The episode is among the most harrowing in the poem.

Three-faced, six-winged, frozen from the chest down in the lake of Cocytus. Each face chews on a great traitor: Judas Iscariot in the center (the betrayer of Christ), Brutus and Cassius on the sides (the betrayers of Caesar). His six wings generate the wind that freezes the lake. He cannot speak. He weeps. He is the endpoint of the entire descent and the pivot-point through which Dante and Virgil must pass to reach Purgatory. Evil, in the Comedy, is not energy but paralysis.

A Florentine musician, friend of Dante's, newly arrived on the shore of Purgatory in Canto 2. Dante tries to embrace him and his arms pass through air — Casella is a shade. Dante asks him to sing; Casella sings one of Dante's own love poems, "Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona." The souls gathered on the shore stand still, enchanted. Cato arrives and drives them all to the mountain. The moment is tender and the correction sharp: beauty is not an excuse for delay.

A Lombard courtier, penitent on the third terrace of the mountain (the wrathful), who appears in Purgatorio 16. He delivers the poem's most explicit political sermon: the corruption of the world comes not from the stars but from human free will; the papacy's temporal power is the root of the Church's corruption; Italy has no emperor and so has no guide. The speech is one of the clearest statements of Dante's Ghibelline politics.

The Provençal troubadour, master of the sestina, encountered on the seventh terrace of Purgatory (Purgatorio 26). He is the only character in the Comedy who speaks in a language other than Italian: his eight lines are in Provençal. Dante considered him the greatest vernacular poet before himself — "the better craftsman," as Eliot remembered the phrase. He weeps and points forward.

Dante's great-great-grandfather, a crusader who died in the Second Crusade. He appears in the Heaven of Mars (Paradiso 15-17), speaks to Dante in the pure Latin of the twelfth century, tells the history of Florence before its corruption, and explicitly prophecies Dante's exile: "You will leave behind everything most dearly loved." He instructs Dante to make the Comedy public regardless of the bitter taste. He is Dante's Anchises — the ancestor who justifies the mission.

The great Dominican theologian, dead 1274, who appears in the Heaven of the Sun (Paradiso 10-14) and delivers, in Cantos 11-12, eulogies of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic so generous that a Dominican praising Francis and a Franciscan (Bonaventure, who replies) praising Dominic is one of the Comedy's most perfectly balanced formal gestures. Aquinas is the theologian whose thought structures the entire moral architecture of the poem.

The apostle, appearing in the Fixed Stars (Paradiso 24-27) to examine Dante on faith. He passes the examination, then turns red with fury and delivers the poem's most furious condemnation of the contemporary papacy: his throne on earth has been usurped by a man who turned it into a sewer of blood and filth. All of Paradise grows dark with his anger. In the Comedy, the Saint condemns the Pope.