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Originally Posted by essendoubleop
I think you're incorrect about Virgil and Aristotle. Virgil certainly did write about an afterworld in the Aenid and it is referenced several times in the footnotes of the edition of The Inferno that I'm reading. Aristotle may not have come up with a Hell per se, but the Greeks had a concept of Hades and the underworld hundreds of years before Christianity was even an idea. Aristotle's images are also referenced in the book.
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The Greeks had a concept of an underworld and Virgil did describe it in book 6 of the Aenid, when Aenas journeys there to speak with his faather. Note, however, that the underworld in the Greek sense and Hell in the Christian sense are two quite different things. I stated that Virgil did not describe Hell, which is true; Hell as a Christian concept did not exist for Virgil, who pre-dates Christianity. Dante does borrow ideas from Virgil (specifically the rivers Acheron and Styx and their respective ferryman, Charon and Phlegyas), but the underworld described by Dante and the one described by Virgil are more dissimilar than they are similar. I haven't personally read any of Aristotle's work yet so I can't comment directly on it, but I should imagine the comparison is largely the same.
As a footnote, if you're looking for significant historical works, the Aenid is a good one if you haven't gotten that far yet. I'd actually suggest reading the Iliad first though, since some of the events in the Aenid occur directly after events in the Iliad.