Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Medusa by Anthrax

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Anthrax’s “Medusa” is featured on their album ‘Among the Living.’

The song includes the lyrics “Endless curse, blood runs cold / Evil stare, will turn your flesh to stone / Land of doom, world of sin / All subside, don’t venture near / The island where she lives / Oh, she’ll suck you in,”

These lyrics reference the fallen angels, including Medusa, who deny Dante and Virgil entry into the city of Dis in Canto VIII.

Read more about the song in the Loudwire article by Katy Irizarry, 11 Metal Songs Inspired by Dante’s Inferno.

The Dantes

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The Dantes were a British style garage band in 1960s Columbus, Ohio.

“If you were a mid Ohio teen in the 60s, the Dantes were your house band. They were top draws at all the teen clubs and opened for many national touring acts. This Columbus combo started as a British styled garage band, picking up strong shots of the Byrds and Rolling Stones. A Dantes gig would include a whole set of all Stones, done as well as five Ohio boys could deliver. They recorded three 45s. The first, “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love” was written by rhythm guitarist Lynn Wehr and exploded over the mid-Ohio airwaves in the spring of 1966. The B-side, the bluesy instrumental “80-96”, was originally titled “8-69” but this suggestive title was changed by the record company. The Dantes scored again with their second release “Under My Thumb” to accentuate their Stones devotions. Lead guitarist Dave Workman left the band to pursue blues (harbingered on “80-96”), and has lead the Dave Workman Blues Band since (he now resides in San Francisco). The band released one more 45 in 1967 (a cover of the Stones “Connection”) and continued until 1968.”    –buckeyebeat.com

Seinfeld Season 3, Episode 10 – “The Stranded” (1991)

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“Seinfeld is an American sitcom television series created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. It aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, over nine seasons and 180 episodes. It stars Seinfeld as a fictionalized version of himself and focuses on his personal life with three of his friends: George Costanza (Jason Alexander), former girlfriend Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and his neighbor from across the hall, Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards). It is set mostly in an apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in New York City. It has been described as ‘a show about nothing’, often focusing on the minutiae of daily life.”     —Wikipedia

In Season 3, Episode 10, entitled “The Stranded”, George remarks that his current office relationship makes it feel as though every day is a date to which Jerry replies, “That’s one of Dante’s nine stages of Hell, isn’t it?”

See our other post involving comedian Jerry Seinfeld here.

Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm (2021)

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“In the opening scene of Episode 5 of Season 11 of the television show Curb Your Enthusiasm, titled “IRASSHAIMASE!”, Larry David and his friend Freddy Funkhouser argue about whether Freddy talked through Larry’s putt in their game of golf earlier in the day. Larry asks his friend Jeff Greene to weigh in, but he refuses to take a side. In response, Larry says, ‘Jeff, you know what Dante said: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of crisis retain their neutrality.’ He then jokes with Jeff, saying, ‘You’re goin’ straight to hell’ in reference to Jeff’s neutrality in Larry and Freddy’s argument about golf.

“Larry is referring to Canto III of Dante’s Inferno, in which Dante encounters cowardly and neutral souls who ‘lived without infamy and / without praise. / They are mixed with that cowardly chorus of / angels who were not rebels yet were not faithful to / God, but were for themselves. / The heavens reject them so as not to be less / beautiful, nor does deep Hell receive them, for the / wicked would have some glory from them’ (Canto III, lines 35–42, Englishtranslation by Robert Durling, 1996).
“Larry’s citing of Dante is actually a common misattribution of his placement in Hell of neutral souls. Dante does indeed encounter souls who retained their neutrality in times of crisis in Canto III of Inferno, but places them not actually in Hell, but rather outside of its gates, doomed to never enter Hell nor Heaven. The contrapasso of these neutral souls’ punishment is that they are neutral in the afterlife, being neither damned nor saved, as they were neutral in their Earthly life; they are forced to nakedly follow a blank banner, representative of their neutrality, while being stung by insects. Dante asserts that they were never even really alive because of their neutrality, and thus are not worthy of being named. His misattribution of Dante’s placement of those who remain neutral in the ‘hottest places in hell’ further alludes to a speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 15, 1967, in which he stated ‘I am here because I agree with Dante, that: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.’    –Cesca Craig

Contributed by Cesca Craig (University of Arkansas, ’23)

Inferno, Romeo Castellucci (2008)

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[. . .] “Romeo Castellucci attempts to ‘hurl down The Divine Comedy on the earth of a stage’. He offers the spectator, in three stages and at three venues of the Festival, a crossing, the experience of a Divine Comedy.

“Inferno is a monument of pain. The artist must pay. In a dark wood in which he is immediately plunged, he doubts, he fears, he suffers. But what sin is the artist guilty of? If he is thus lost, it is because he does not know the answer to this question. Alone on the large stage, or on the contrary, walled in by the crowd and confronted with the world’s hubbub, the man that Romeo Castellucci puts on stage fully suffers, bewildered from this experience of loss of self. Everything here aggresses him, the violence of the images, the fall of his own body into matter, the animals and spectres. The visual dynamic of this show possesses the consistency of this stupor, sometimes this dread, that seizes the man when he is reduced to his paltriness, defenceless faced with the elements that overwhelm him. But this fragility is a resource, however, because it is the condition of a paradoxical gentleness. Romeo Castellucci shows each spectator that at the bottom of his own fears there is a secret space, marked by melancholy, in which he hangs on to life, to ‘the incredible nostalgia of his own life.'” [. . .]    —Festival D’Avignon, 2008

Watch segments of the show here.

Relatedly, see our post on Romeo Castellucci’s earlier 2002 commendation here.

This theatrical piece will be discussed by scholar Sara Fontana in her contribution to the forthcoming volume Dante Alive.

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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