Dis (Divine Comedy)

In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, the City of Dis (in Italian, la città il cui nome è Dis, "the city whose name is Dis") encompasses the sixth through the ninth circles of Hell.

In ancient Roman mythology, Dis Pater ("Father Dis") is the ruler of the underworld and is named as such in the sixth book of Virgil's "Aeneid", one of the principal influences on Dante in his depiction of Hell (the god was also known as Pluto, a name not used by Virgil in the Aeneid). The hero Aeneas enters the "desolate halls and vacant realm of Dis" with his guide, the Sibyl, who correspond in The Divine Comedy to "Dante" as the speaker of the poem and his guide, Virgil.

The walls of Dis are guarded by fallen angels, the Furies, and Medusa. Dante emphasizes the character of the place as a city by describing its architectural features: towers, gates, walls, ramparts, bridges, and moats. It is thus an antithesis to the heavenly city, as for instance described by St. Augustine in his book City of God. Among these structures are mosques, "the worship places of the most dangerous enemies of medieval Christendom." In Dante's schematics of Hell, some Muslims and Jews are placed among the heretics. The presence of mosques probably also recalls the reality of Jerusalem in Dante's own time, where gilded domes dominated the skyline.

Punished within Dis are those whose lives were marked by active (rather than passive) sins are heretics, murderers, suicides, blasphemers, usurers, sodomites, panderers, seducers, flatterers, Simoniacs, false prophets, barrators, hypocrites, thieves, fradulent advisors, sowers of discord, falsifiers, and traitors. Sinners unable to control their passions offend God less than these, whose lives were driven by malizia ("malice, wicked intent"):

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