The different punishments inflicted to the sinners in Dante's
Inferno always fit their crimes. The structure of hell follows the "law of symbolic retribution"
as the sinners are piunished in the same way they have
sinned.
Farinata Degli Uberti is put in Circle Six among the
Heretics and Epicureans. Farinata was the leader of the Ghibellines, a political faction that
favored the authority of the empire against that of the Pope and the Church. Because the sin of
the heretics was to consider their knowledge superior to that of religion and the Church, their
souls cannot rest in peace: their open graves are constantly
burning.
Tiresias is in the Fourth Bowge of Malebolge (the Eighth
Circle) among the sorcerers. As they tried to predict the future, they are forced to walk with
their heads turned backwards.
Ulysses is in the Eighth Bowge of
Malebolge among the counselors of fraud. These people persuaded others to act fraudulently.
Ulysses first persuaded the Greeks to build the Trojan Horse with which they entered Troy and
then convinced his sailors to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules. He is condemned to burn in a
dual flame with Diomede. As Ulysses constantly hid his true intentions in life, now he is
condemned to be hidden by a flame. The fire is as consuming and devastating as Ulysses's speeches
were for others.
Ugolino della Gherardesca, an aristocrat from Pisa,
is in the second region of Cirlce Nine which includes traitors against their own country. The
sinners in this region are immersed in the frozen Cocytus River up to their heads. Ugolino had
conspired against the government of his own city by helping to establish a Guelph regime. He was
imprisoned and put in the Tower of Famine where he was left to die of starvation together with
his sons and grandsons. According to several critics, Ugolino also ate the flesh of his own
relatives and that's why his punishment is the condemnation to perpetual hunger. He tries to
quell this hunger by eating the head of his political enemy, Archibishop
Ruggeri.
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