Today we continue our journey into Hell, discussing cantos 4-6 of Dante’s Inferno. Canto 5 contains one of the most famous monologues in the Inferno, where the Italian countess Francesca da Rimini relates the tale of lust, woe, Romance literature, and murder that ends with her eternal punishment. Her story raises a host of interesting questions about love, free will, passion, reason, and rhetorical persuasion. We spend a good bit of time discussing these thorny problems. However, we begin with Dante’s encounter with the great poets in Limbo, a grey field that is not quite Hell, but is nonetheless a very bland and unpleasant place to spend eternity. What sense of history and time is suggested by the existence of Limbo, both for Dante and his age? How and why is Dante linking himself to the great tradition of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid? Can epic poems be religious and didactic, or do they inevitably surpass such aims? How is the poem Dante will write different from the romantic stories that led Francesca into adultery and damnation?