Greed
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Dante's 14th century epic poem Inferno assigns those committed to the deadly sin of greed to punishment in the fourth of the nine circles of Hell. The inhabitants are misers, hoarders, and spendthrifts; they must constantly battle one another. The guiding spirit, Virgil, tells the poet these souls have lost their personality in their disorder, and are no longer recognizable: "That ignoble life, Which made them vile before, now makes them dark, And to all knowledge indiscernible." In Dante's Purgatory, avaricious penitents were bound and laid face down on the ground for having concentrated too much on earthly thoughts. Dante's near-contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote of greed in his Prologue to The Pardoner's Tale these words: "Radix malorum est Cupiditas"(or “the root of all evil is greed”); however the Pardoner himself serves us as a charicature of churchly greed.
Greed-10