An important theme in Dante’s Commedia is the theme of love. Although it is not often mentioned in the story, love is what drives Dante to go through the stages of Hell. One of the reasons Dante is traveling through Hell is to look for his lover, Beatrice, hoping to find her in one of the stages. The movie we watched in class “What Dreams May Come”, helped me actually picture Dante desperately looking for Beatrice. Love is also what drives Dante to not sin because he wants to receive the love of God so he doesn’t get placed in Hell. Love is sort of like a motivation for Dante; even though he kept fainting during the stages in hell, he still managed to keep going and get through all of them.

Why does the Qur’an place such great emphasis on gardens and/or feasts?

The Quran is like the bible to people who are Muslim, it is like a belief and value system. People that truly believe in The Quran and follow what it says will then be accepted into the “Gardens”. The gardens is a sort of paradise that Muslims get to go to in their afterlife. It’s known to be this blissful place, where everything is beautiful and men and women can exist eternally. The Quran talks about feasts because after Muslims are done fasting, they feast as a form of celebration and gathering. The Quran places emphasis on this because people need to feel like they are abiding The Quran for a reason. Believers want to be accepted by God so that He may then accept them into the gardens after death. Everyone wants to get into heaven and the Quran says that in order to be accepted, they must be holy and if they sin, they must do penance.

Compare The Odyssey and The Ramayana.

The stories The Odyssey and The Ramayana are similar in many ways but the characters themselves are a bit different. In both of the stories, characters are able to do some sort of magic. In The Odyssey, Athena was able to disguise herself as another person. In The Ramayana, Viswamitra taught Rama some chants so he could be able to summon powerful weapons whenever he wanted to. Also, in The Odyssey and The Ramayana, both of the women stayed faithful to their husbands. Penelope did not give in to the suitors when they were trying to woo her and all Sita spoke about when she was captured by Ravana was her husband. Rama even tested Sita when he rescued her from Ravana to make sure that she was truly loyal. Even though their stories were similar, they had very different characteristics. When Rama left the kingdom after he was banished, he decided to let Sita go along with him. When Odysseys went away to war for many years, he left behind his wife and family. Also, Odysseys used his cunning and a deceitful ways to get out of trouble, the story mostly focused on how much he lied rather than his violence. Rama, on the other hand, was an honest man that used his holiness and knowledge to come out winning in the end.

Describe how Plato, Sappho, and/or Catullus conceive of love (and/or friendship). You can also choose to compare their views on love with The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, or Lysistrata.

Catullus is a very passionate writer, he loves and hates hard. He writes of a woman named Lesbia, it is obvious that the love he has for her is strong just by the way he writes about her. In Poem 5 Catullus says, “You’d like to know how many of your kisses would be enough and over, Lesbia, for me? Match them to every grain of Libyan sand in silphium-rich Cyrene, from the shrine of torrid oracular Jupiter to the sacred sepulchre of old Battus; reckon their total equal to all those stars that in the silent night look down on the stolen loves of mortals.” Here, he describes that he would want endless kisses from Lesbia, he wouldn’t get tired of them. He expresses his love by using metaphors in his poem. Catullus’ poems and Lysistrata are a bit different when it comes to the topic of love because the love is actually genuine in Catullus’ poems. In Lysistrata, it was more about the men just wanting sex out of the women, they didn’t really appreciate them. But they are also a bit similar because sex was brought up many times in the poems of Catullus.