The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) by Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) is a masterpiece of Western literature and unrivaled in its depiction of the horrors of Hell. Written during the last decade of Dante’s life, this long Italian poem told the story of the author’s journey to the three domains of the dead, beginning with his descent to the place of eternal torment (the Inferno). Escorted through Hell by the shade of the Roman poet Virgil, whose depiction of Hades in The Aeneid did much to inspire the first part of The Divine Comedy (see pp. 22–32), Dante painted a vivid tableau of the hideous fates awaiting the wicked in a vast subterranean realm where divine justice doled out punishment to sinners according to the nature of their transgressions. In the poem, Hell has the organization and efficiency of a bureaucratic state: every impious soul has its appropriate place and every place apportioned a particular punishment keyed to a specific sin. More so than any previous author, Dante had a clear and logical understanding of the geography of the afterlife. He depicted Hell as a deep funnel with circular tiers. He and Virgil descended tier by tier from the gates of Hell, past the limbo of the virtuous pagans, and down through each circle, where those guilty of lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery suffered for all eternity. At the bottom of Hell was Cocytus, a vast, frozen lake. Trapped in the ice of this lake was the gigantic, three-faced Satan, who beat his six massive, batlike wings in vain to escape his imprisonment. Satan’s face was stained with tears and his chin dripped with the gore of history’s three worst traitors, whose souls he chewed endlessly and without pity in his monstrous mouths: Brutus and Cassius, who assassinated Julius Caesar in 44 BCE; and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ himself.