Thunder wakes Dante. He is at the edge of the first circle, and its sound is sighing — the sighs of those who suffer no pain but live in a longing that never resolves. Virgil's own face has gone pale. He explains: he himself lives here. These are the souls who did not sin, who lived honorably and justly, but who were not baptized — they had no faith, or lived before faith was possible to have. They are missing not righteousness but the doorway. The distinction is exact and anguishing: it is entirely possible to be good, to be wise, to be just, and still be separated from God — not as punishment for what you chose but as consequence of what you never had the opportunity to receive.
A great light blazes in the darkness: Christ's Harrowing of Hell, long past. Virgil tells Dante of it — the great souls taken out: Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, Israel and Rachel. The rest remain. Dante and Virgil enter a great castle with seven walls and seven gates, surrounded by a stream — the image of human wisdom at its highest, walled within itself — and inside, on a green meadow, the greatest figures of the ancient world sit in their dignity. Homer, the poet sovereign, leads them. Then Horace, Ovid, Lucan. They welcome Virgil back; they admit Dante to their company as sixth. Together they walk and speak of things Dante cannot report.
Then the great philosophers: Aristotle, the master, surrounded by his philosophical family — Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Thales, Heraclitus, Zeno, Empedocles, Dioscorides. Orpheus, Cicero, Linus, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Avicenna, Galen, Averroes. Saladin the great Muslim sultan sits alone, dignified. All of them here — the best the world has ever produced — in permanent, unresolved longing for a light they were never given the means to reach.