More than an Eye for an Eye: Dante’s Sovereign Justice

The manner in which the souls are punished in the Commedia seems to indicate a symbolic relationship between transgression and punishment.¹ More often than not, the punishment assumes the form of a brutal literalisation of the respective sin, so that the damned are tormented by manifestations of their own externalised psychological states. In life, the adulterous Paolo and Francesca were figuratively blown to and fro by the ‘storm’ of their uncontrolled passions; in Hell, a literal storm now blows them round without end. It has become a commonplace in the field of Dante Studies to describe this ‘alignment’ of punishment