Canto 28

Canto 28

This canto takes place in the 9^th zone of the 8^th circle of hell. As soon as Dante and Virgil enter into this ring, they see a ring of souls walking in a circle perpetually. Dante notices that the sinners have horrible wounds all over their body; he refers to the wounds as worse than those suffered by the battles of Troy and Ceparano, which is extreme because the wounds during those battles were malicious and unspeakable. At one end of the circle the sinners are walking in, a devil stands with a sword in hand. As the souls pass by, the devil splits them open with the point of the sharp sword. As they continue around the circle, their wounds heal up just in time to be struck again by the sword. Dante conveys the idea over and over again that no one could properly describe what they saw in this zone, and those who did would definitely fall short because the scenes are so graphic and horrible.  As Dante passes one of the damned, which just so happened to be Mohammed, the Muslim prophet, Mohammed told Dante that the sinners were the Sowers of Scandal and Schism, and their sin was division, and as a punishment for this sin, they themselves were literally split and divided. Many other sinners cried out to Dante and begged him to carry messages back to certain people on Earth and advised Dante of events they predicted but Dante paid no mind to their requests. The sinners want Dante to take their messages back to Earth so they could forge a sort of existence outside of hell and by being in contact with the mortal world, they could escape in a diminutive a way. But the main reason Dante disregards these pleas is because he has his own his own scheme, to use their stories as the main part of his poem.