How The Divine Comedy drew on 2 Maccabees
A documented line of influence: Dante Alighieri demonstrably engaged Unknown’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
2 Maccabees
Unknown · c. 124 BCE
BibleThe influenced
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1320
MedievalRelevance
7/10
On The Divine Comedy’s page
- Purgatory itself stands on 2 Maccabees — Dante's entire mechanism of the living praying for the dead traces to 2 Macc 12:43-46
- Heliodorus, beaten by a horseman for robbing the temple, surfaces in Purgatorio XX as an exemplum of avarice; reading the source scene first makes Dante's shorthand land
- One of the lesser-read books behind the Comedy — but the one that justified Dante's middle realm existing at all
On 2 Maccabees’s page
- The doctrinal bedrock of Dante's Purgatorio — its whole engine of prayer for the dead rests on 2 Maccabees 12:43-46
- Dante also mines it for exempla: Heliodorus, the temple-robber beaten by a horseman (2 Macc 3), is cried out by the avaricious penitents in Purgatorio XX
- A short, fierce book of martyrdom and plunder that quietly supplied the Comedy with a theology and a cast of cautionary figures