Circle Nine: Treacherous

Treacherous to Kin and Country

The people betrayed random bonds of genes or nationality are stuck in ice, with their heads stuck up above the ice. 

Treacherous to Guests and Hosts
Next we come to those who betrayed their guests and hosts, and they're stuck in ice as well, only they're more fully encased in the ice, with only part of their heads sticking out.

And here we are, at the very center of Hell, where the worst offenders of all are interred: those who betrayed their masters. They're incased in ice.

Circle Eight: Fraud

All fall under the genre of fraud, a form of malice, unique to human beings and therefore more displeasing to God. While all versions of fraud involve the malicious use of reason, circles 8 and 9 are distinguished from one another according to the offender's relationship to his or her victim: those who victimize someone with whom they share a special bond of trust are punished in the lowest circle, if no bond, the guilty soul suffers in one of the ten concentric ditches that constitute circle 8.

 

Circle Seven

Now this is what I call violent. People who, you know, hit people. These malcontents are doomed to wallow in a boiling river of blood, and if they stop wallowing in blood they get shot by centaurs. But hey, at least they get a choice. If the boiling blood gets dull, they can give the centaur pincushion thing a try for a while. Suicides get their souls trapped in trees which bleed when harpies eat them. The suicides can only speak while bleeding, which is much different than being dead. Burning sands and rains of fire are the punishments Blasphemers get or people who offend God. Sodomy is understood here as sexual relations between males and the punishment is Sodomites have to run around the same burning plane on which the blasphemers are lying down. Ursary was similarly condemned, particularly after it was equated with heresy. This is an often-overlooked sin: the sin of charging interest, they have to crouch on the burning plane.

Circle Six: Heretics

Dante opts for the most generic conception of heresy--the denial of the soul's immortality. People in tombs writhe in flames, pretty standard. It's nice to finally see some flames in Hell, I'd hate to think that all those Far Side cartoons had no basis in reality. The odd bit here is that these souls are a sub-genus of "The Violent," because they did violence to God by denying immortality. I'm not sure how that's, technically speaking, violent.

Circle Five: The Wrathful and Sullen

Wrath and sullenness are basically two forms of a single sin: anger that is expressed (wrath) and anger that is repressed (sullenness). The punishment for the wrathful is to attack each other. Is it just me or is this a briar-patch sort of "punishment"? If you're really wrathful, you're probably going to dig on a chance to work out that anger by gouging others. It's like punishing gluttons with ice cream sandwiches.

Circle Four: The Greedy

Hoarders and wasters get the same punishment: they have to slam weights against each other, then do it again forever. Of course, this is Hell, so "do it again forever" is implied. This is kind of a lame punishment, but excessive hoarding or wasting is kind of a lame sin. Medieval Christians thought and viewed the sin as most offensive to the spirit of love; Dante goes even further in blaming avarice for ethical and political corruption in his society. Dante accordingly shows no mercy unlike his attitude toward Francesca and Ciacco.

Circle Three: Gluttons

Now we're getting into gruesome punishments. Gluttons can't eat or drink in Hell because they ate and drank so much in life. They are trapped in putrid soil because they produced nothing but garbage in life. And they are being torn apart constantly by Cerberus's three sets of bloody teeth. Virgil describes Cerberus as loud, huge, and terrifying.

Circle Two: The Lustful

Lustful people spend eternity in a dark damp whirlwind. The second circle is the real beginning of hell. Here we see the principle of retribution: sinners tossed and whirled by winds as in life they were helpless in sexual things. This is poetic justice. I still think that this still seems better than following a flag while being stung by wasps. There are a lot of famous people here: Cleopatra, Helen, Tristan.

Circle One: Limbo

1st circle: Limbo. Reserved for the souls of the just people who never knew Christ, and those (especially infants) who died without baptism and never committed a sin. Here Dante encounters the ancient philosophers and poets. Another group that fell between the ecclesiastical cracks are those who died before Christ made the scene. Never having experienced God's word in the form of door-to-door missionaries, they just kind of hang around and sigh about the fact that while not being tortured for all time is nice and all, it's not as nice as heaven. The poets in Limbo include the Classical Poets Homer, Ovid, Lucan, and Horace.