Essay --

In Limbo reside the unbaptized and the everlasting(a) pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Asphodel Meadows hence the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. Without baptism (the portal of the faith that you embrace)6 they lacked the intrust for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo includes green fields and a castle with seven gates to represent the seven virtues. The castle is the base place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Persian polymath Avicenna. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan the Amazon queen Penthesilea the mathematician Euclid the scientist Pedanius Dioscorides the statesman Cicero the first doctor Hippocrates the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and ibn-Roshd the historical figures Lucretia, Lucius Junius Brutus, and Julius Caesar in his role as Roman general (in his armor, fal con-eyed)7 mythological characters Hector, Electra, Camilla, Latinus, and Orpheus and many othe...