The Inferno
In the Inferno, the first part of Italian poet Dante's Divine Comedy epic, Geryon has become the Monster of Fraud, a winged beast with the face of an honest man, the paws of a lion, the body of a wyvern, and a poisonous sting at the tip of his tail. He dwells somewhere in the depths below the cliff between the seventh and eighth circles of Hell (the circles of violence and simple fraud, respectively); Geryon rises from the pit at Virgil's call and bears the Poets to the eighth circle. To Dante's horror, the Poets ride on Geryon's back, and he slowly glides around and around the waterfall of the Phlegethon down the great depths to the Circle of Fraud.
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Famous quotes containing the word inferno:
“New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)