The inscription above the gate of Hell is the most quoted passage in the Inferno, and the third line in particular has had a longer afterlife than the rest of the poem. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Abandon every hope, you who enter. Read in isolation the line is grim. Read in context it is harder. The gate is welcoming the souls of the indifferent, the souls of those who in life took no side, who refused the obligation to commit, and the line is naming what such a life has already cost them: a future that contained hope is no longer the future they inherit.

Dante's first set of damned, in Canto III, are not heretics, sodomites, traitors, or simoniacs. They are the indifferent. They are placed not in Hell proper but in the vestibule before it, in the corridor between the gate and the river Acheron. They run forever after a wavering banner, stung by hornets and wasps, their tears and blood feeding the worms beneath their feet. Heaven will not have them. Hell will not have them. They are in transit, and remain there.

The placement is the argument. By naming the indifferent as the first inhabitants of his cosmos's worst space, before any active sinner, Dante is asserting a moral order in which neutrality is the deepest betrayal. The position is consistent with the rest of the Comedy and consistent with what we know of Dante's life (he had been exiled from Florence in 1302 for refusing neutrality in a factional war he had taken the losing side of). The Inferno is a poem of political vengeance as well as religious cosmology, and Canto III lays down the principle that organises both.

Cover illustration: Plate 9 from Gustave Doré's 1857 engravings for the Divine Comedy, depicting Charon ferrying the souls of the damned across the Acheron.