Dante loses his way both literally and metaphorically. The darkened forest is the space of error and sin; the backlit hill is the tortuous path one must follow to seek out the Good. The three beasts recall the vices that pull humans away from the path of virtue: the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf each represent, respectively, lust, pride, and greed. Like other authors who precede and succeed him, Dante tells a layered tale that must be read simultaneously in several ways: his poem is an allegory, a prophecy, a pilgrimage. The story unfolds somewhere between the world of dreams and that of reality, and the poet, himself caught between sleeping and waking, is hard-pressed to tell the reader just how he ended up in the dark wood in the first place.

As a poet, Dante was intimately familiar with the works of Publius Vergilius Maro, who lived between 70 and 19 BCE, under the reign of Roman Emperor Octavian Augustus. Dante learned the Aeneid, his predecessor’s most celebrated poem, by heart, an epic in which Virgil recounts the mythic founding of Rome by Aeneas of Troy. Like Dante, Aeneas descends into Hell -- a Roman, pagan Hell, mind you -- to speak to his deceased father. The Aeneid is in fact the most explicit substrate text in the Comedy, informing many of the poem’s core motifs and constituting the most frequently referenced non-religious text in Dante’s divine poem. Virgil, a poet of Hell in his Aeneid, becomes Dante’s perfect guide for the journey ahead.