Writing sucks. I have paper due tomorrow, Thursday, and then on Friday 
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I have a 5 page character research paper on Dante from The Inferno due tomorrow too!
That'll be interesting, Dante was quite the character. Apparently, a good part of his trilogy was politically motivated, putting his friends in Heaven and his enemies in Hell. Gotta love somebody like that! 
It was pretty interesting. Basically, nobody really ever talked about HIM, just his enemies and what they were there for.
So, I wrote about how Dante wrote The Inferno with a political agenda, and how it was just to slander or make everyone evil, and to cover it up he wrote two more works so that it didn't look like he was just attacking people.
Something like that.
I'd say that's fairly far from the truth. He may have used it for political purposes, but there was also more to it than that; The Divine Comedy is largely recognized as among the greatest religious texts ever written. His work largely represents much of the religious belief of the time.
Compare the number of Christian, Greek, Jewish, Islamic references to the number of Italian political references. It's overwhelmingly evident that this work is much more a reflection of classical mythology and religion than a political attack.
The poem was not supposed to be about Dante, just what he experienced. When they describe certain circles of hell, and the reasons why people might be there, he is able to allude to certain Italian figures that have a very large following, which allows his readers to understand who he is talking to, and why they are there. I mean... if you're talking about a place where people deemed as gluttons are forced to lay in black snow, ice, and hail (i.e. 3rd circle), why not allude to a very popular Italian widely regarded as a glutton, Ciacco? Even when he did converse with him in the poem, he made him out to be a rather respectable person, despite being a glutton.
Dante did live in Caesar's Italy, until the time when he was assassinated, so there was obviously a large amount of sentiment against those who assassinated Caesar (and hence caused the destruction of a unified Italy). As such, Dante includes them, in amongst the most supremely harsh of all places of hell, Satan's mouth. I do believe it was largely politically motivated to place the assassins in a place nearest to Judas Iscariot, who faces the most notorious of all punishments, as I wouldn't consider a mere assassin to be on the same level as a betrayer of the largest religious figure of the time. Well, I wouldn't if I belived in all that, anyway. Hah.
