“There presides Minos, grisly sight to face, snarling; inspects the faults as they come in, dooms and, by how he girds them, allots their place”
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The second circle (beginning of punishment of hell) - the circle of carnal lust Dante beholds a place completely dark, in which there is noise worse than that of a storm at sea. Lamenting, moaning, and shrieking, the spirits are whirled and swept by an unceasing storm. Dante learns that these are the spirits doomed by carnal lust - helpless in the tempests of passion, sinners who subject reason to desire. Smaller than the first circle Dante witnesses the beast Minos (mythological king of Crete) examines each soul as it stands in judgement. The souls confess their sins, and Minos wraps his tail around them to determine which circle of hell the sinner belongs. This canto also begins descriptions of the circles devoted to the sins of incontinence: the sins of the appetite, the sins of self-indulgence, and the sins of passion. Among those whom Dante sees in Circle II are people such as Cleopatra, Dido, and Helen. Some of these women, besides being adulteresses, have also committed suicide. But in Dante's Hell, a person is judged by his own standards, that is, by the standards of the society in which he lived. For example, in classical times, suicide wasn't considered a sin, but adultery was. Therefore, the spirit is judged by the ethics by which he or she lived and is condemned for adultery, not suicide. The sin in Circle II is a sin of incontinence, weakness of will, and falling from grace through inaction of conscience. Francesca tells their story; Paolo can only weep. Francesca da Rimini was the wife of Cianciotto, the deformed older brother of Paolo, who was a beautiful youth. Theirs was a marriage of alliance, and it continued for some ten years before Paolo and Francesca were caught in the compromising situation described in the poem. Cianciotto promptly murdered them both, for which he is confined in the lowest circle of Hell. For modern readers, understanding why Dante considered adultery, or lustfulness, to be the least hateful of the sins of incontinence is sometimes difficult. As the intellectual basis of Hell, Dante thought of Hell as a place where the sinner deliberately chose his or her sin and failed to repent. This is particularly true of the lower circles, which include malice and fraud. In the example of Francesca and Paolo, however, Francesca did not deliberately choose adultery; hers was a gentle lapsing into love for Paolo, a matter of incontinence, and a weakness of will. Only the fact that her husband killed her in the moment of adultery allowed her no opportunity to repent, and for this reason, she is condemned to Hell. Francesca is passionate, certainly capable of sin, and certainly guilty of sin, but she represents the woman whose only concern is for the man she loves, not her immortal soul. She found her only happiness, and now her misery, in Paolo's love. Her love was her heaven; it is now her hell.