Entitled Opinions, coming to you from the underworld of KZSU on the Stanford campus.

Speaking of Underworlds, today's show marks the first installment of a mini-series devoted to the great wayfarer of the nether regions.

I mean our medieval comrade Dante, author of the Divine Comedy.

I mean in loco of any luke, moot, loco eternal, where udiray the disparate strida,

vedrai the antiches spiritiques spirit dolenty that at the second-morte chas-cun grida.

At a time when English departments are struggling

to get students into courses on Shakespeare,

the Romantics and the Victorian novel, Dante continues to max out.

He may be the only dead white male in the literary canon whose stock keeps going up in our

post-Christian age. Go figure. I've been teaching the Divine Comedy for decades, and many of the poem's characters have become like family members to me by now.

So I thought I would offer the brigade a handful of scattered episodes about the most fascinating, original, and complex sinners in Dante's Inferno.

One thing you can say about hell is that its denizens are more interesting and seductive,

and certainly more perverse than the paragon's of moral virtue in Dante's other canticles.

So stay tuned, our first episode on Francesca da Rimini.

Who else?

Coming right up.

Thank you. What makes the characters in Dante's Inferno so compelling are above all their monologues.

Almost all of the major monologues contain ruses of one sort or another, ruses by which the sinners offer misleading, manipulative, or meretricious accounts of the motives and actions that landed them in hell.

Since they know that Dante, the journeyman, will eventually return to the world

and report what he has seen and heard in the underworld, and since their worldly reputation still

matters a great deal to them, these sinners find themselves in the incongruous position of trying to curate their self-serving narratives

from within a framework of damnation. In other words, their confessions are permeated by an

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