In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgil guides Dante through Hell and much of Purgatory.
Virgil was the ancient Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid. Dante chose him as a guide because he admired Virgil’s poetry and viewed him as a symbol of human reason and classical wisdom. In the poem, Virgil appears in the opening of Inferno and leads Dante through the circles of Hell.
Virgil cannot enter Paradise because he lived before Christianity and died outside the Christian faith as Dante presents it. Beatrice then becomes Dante’s guide through Paradise, representing divine revelation and grace.
The historical Virgil lived from 70 to 19 BCE. Dante’s poem was written in the early fourteenth century, so the two poets were separated by more than a millennium. Virgil’s role is therefore both literary and symbolic: he is a character, a revered predecessor, and the embodiment of reason’s limits.