What an extraordinary beginning to Dante’s epic. Imagine, just for a moment, that you are a medieval reader in an age without the visual and intellectual distractions of mass and social media. It must have been incredible. You have in front of you Dante’s Divine Comedy. You’ve just read the first canto, often referred to as the prologue, in which Dante has conjoined the particular—his own journey, that of Dante-character, and the universal—the implication that his journey, our journey, is that of the everyman.

He has encountered the three allegorical beasts. He has met Virgil, who will be his guide through Inferno and Purgatory. At the end of the first canto, Dante pleads with his duca, his leader, to take him to the realms Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise that he has just described.

We also get a foretaste of Dante’s own confidence in that first subtle slight of Virgil. Dante makes his plea to, and I quote, “the God Virgil did not know.” For all his knowledge, the pagan Virgil cannot know, as Dante knows, that God’s grace has perfected nature. “Aha, Virgil,” Dante is saying, and not for the last time: “You’re a pagan. You don’t know this stuff.”

Dante’s beloved Beatrice, on the other hand, suffers not from the spiritual maladies of sin and Hell that dog Virgil and the other, albeit virtuous, pagans. “I am made such,” says she to Virgil, “by God’s grace, that your affliction does not touch nor can these fires assail me.” Dante-character recalls his dreamlike journey with artifice, yes, but I think we can agree with the critic Charles Singleton, who wrote that “The fiction of the Comedy is that it is not fiction.” All the more so for the medieval reader, as it may be for us.

If the first canto sets the scene for the entire poem, in the second canto, we have a sort of second prologue. For it is only in the third canto of the Inferno that Dante and his guide will come, finally, to the anti-Inferno—and the very first sinners, the neutrals, who were not rebellious and not faithful to God, who held themselves apart.

Inferno 2 begins with more interweaving, more conjoining. Dante assimilates the two traditions to which he will make recourse most often in his poem: Virgil’s Latin epic, the Aeneid, and of course, the Christian Bible. Among other things, Dante is a great synthesizer. Like all great artists, he fuses multiple traditions in creating something novel. Think Steve Jobs and Apple. Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer, nor much of the associated technology. He just did it better than anyone else. Dante doesn’t invent the epic, not even in the vernacular. He just does it better than the others.

To the particular and the universal from the opening canto, here in Inferno 2, Dante joins the secular and the sacred. He evokes two standard bearers of other worldly journeys, one from each of the two traditions: Aeneas’s descent into the netherworld in Virgil’s poem, and the ascent of St. Paul into heaven, recounted, of course, in his second letter to the Corinthians.

We mustn’t forget that Dante alternates masterfully between the high and the low, like heaven and hell, between an ascending, elegant rhetoric and a descending, popular speech more fit for the tavern. His speech mirrors the depths of Hell and the unsurpassing sublimity of Heaven. In Paradise 17, for example, his ancestor Cacciaguida will prophesy to him that his poem will have to, and I quote, “lascia pur grattar dovè la rogna,” will have to “scratch where it itches.” And so here, in one of the most pregnant verses of the Comedy, one given even greater weight by the unusual and solemn word order in the Italian, Dante expresses hesitation. He claims to be neither Aeneas nor Paul—“Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono,” he says. “I’m not Aeneas nor am I Paul.”

Is he up to the task? Is Dante worthy? Will he be able to lay eyes on both St. Peter’s gate and on those so sorrowful? To descend to Hell and to ascend to Paradise? Despite his protestations to the contrary, Dante does desire to be the new Aeneas and a latter-day Paul. After all, the Comedy does not end after 168 verses. Suffice it to say, Dante is self-assured. In Canto 5 of the Inferno, he classes himself—rather immodestly, I might add—as the sixth worthy poet in the company of Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.

Our poet here references classical and the scriptural, and he imbues Dante-character with the glory of the secular and the holiness of the sacred. It is not that he is neither Aeneas nor Paul. He is Aeneas and Paul in one person. The coming together of the secular and the sacred in one person makes immanent in Dante-character a political component. The secular Rome founded by Aeneas begat, and I quote, “holy Rome and her dominion.” The journey of Virgil’s protagonist prepared the papal mantle, verse 27. Dante thus draws a straight line from the founding of Rome to the founding of the Church in Rome. He Christianizes the epic genre, and he Christianizes the legendary founding of Rome. This line will be sharpened subsequently, especially in the sixth canto of Paradise, the final canticle.

Dante’s claim to be perhaps inferior to the task at hand leads to the second theme of Inferno 2, Dante’s lack of courage. Virgil reproaches Dante for his apparent peaceful animity. “If,” says Virgil to Dante, “I’ve rightly understood your words, your spirit is assailed by cowardice.” The Latin poet attempts to allay Dante’s fears. He recounts how he was called by Beatrice. She, in turn, relays that it was Saint Lucy, through the intercession of Virgin Mary, who requested that she (Beatrice) “help the one (Dante) who loved you so / that for your sake he left the vulgar herd.” The reference to the vulgar herd alludes to Dante’s abandonment of the more profane, amorous poetry of his youth for the higher poetic ideal of the donna angelo, the female figure as angel.

Dante, in other words, ain’t like the other fellas—or maybe is. The bad boy of lyric poetry has reformed himself for the girl. Dante’s Comedy will have its comedic moments, though that is not what comedy means in this instance, and in any case, Inferno 2 is decidedly not one of them.

After Virgil explains why he has come to Dante, he reproaches him again. He pokes him, this time with a series of piercing questions that would have not have been out of place in a modern day rom-com. Think about the male protagonist who is encouraged to throw caution to the wind and told to just go get the girl. “What are you waiting for?” asks Virgil. “Why? Why do you delay? Why do you let such cowardice rule your heart? Why are you not more spirited and sure when these three such blessed ladies care for you in Heaven’s court?”

Appropriately, chagrined, Dante-character demonstrates a changed attitude with one of the most beautiful similes in the entire poem. Yes, beauty and truth exist even in the Inferno. And it is fitting that he should do so via simile, for he first expressed his doubts to Virgil with yet another: “And as one who unwills what he has willed, / changing his intent on second thought / so that he quite gives over what he has begun, / such a man was I on that dark slope.” From his initial doubts and cowardice, Dante is reinvigorated, buoyed by Virgil’s account of Beatrice’s comforting words. His second thoughts are countered by the radiant sun that is Beatrice’s speech: “As little flowers, bent and closed / with chill of night, when the sun / lights them, stand all open on their stems, / such, in my failing strength, did I become.”

Dante, newly resolute, concludes the second canto with an allusion to the very first verses of the Comedy: “intrai per lo cammino alto e silvestro.” “I entered,” he writes in the final verse of Inferno 2, “on the deep and savage way.” He uses the Italian adjective silvestro from the noun selva, wood, with which he had begun his epic. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.” “Midway in the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood.”

And we too enter with him as we prepare to cross to the gates of Hell and of eternal pain, and as we prepare to experience the Infernal topography, a terrain muto d’ogne luce—mute of all light. Dante’s fictional epic stands as one of the great teachers of our nonfictional world. The fiction of the Comedy is that it isn’t fiction.