ABSTRACT
The dreams of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians were motivated by their longing for a better world beyond the shadows of their everyday lives. In between Old World biblical accounts of a lost Eden and Christopher Columbus’s voyages to find Eden in the New World, Western history is filled with Greek and Roman images of a golden age and Christian visions of salvation. By 1300, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy had deftly entwined these two narratives. In this classic allegory, Virgil guides Dante out of a forested wilderness, through the Fall into the Inferno, and then upward to the earthly Eden of purgatory whence he enters the heavenly Eden of salvation.
