-Factual: Why did Virgil feel deceived by Malacoda?
-Interpretive: Why are the Jovial Friars’ attire flashy and attractive on the outside but on the inside are lined by and crafted from lead which is the heaviest and most worthless metal?
-Evaluative: Why does Dante badly want to hear the sins and stories of sinners that he meets through his journey in Hell in exchange of him making them famous in the mortal world if he does not even know if he has the power to do that? If he does not follow through would he not be condemned to Hell as well?
3. “For though he in his poet-craft transmutes one to a serpent, and makes the other spill transformed into a fountain, I envy him not: he never transformed two individual front-to-front natures so both forms as they met were ready to exchange their substance.” (XXV, 96-101)
Thieves fail to recognize the boundaries between their property and what is theirs and that of others. To Dante, this shows a basic flaw in their humanity which is the inability to distinguish what belongs to them and what belongs to others and is off their limits. This misuse of their intellect gives them the characteristics more of an animal than a person. So in the eighth circle they mutate into pseudo-serpentine creatures because they did not honor the boundaries of property while they were alive and now they are exchanging their matters with each other. The thieves are then merging and morphing into the bodies of other thieves. Through this the thieves cannot