Scylla

Scylla appears only by comparison, but the comparison sharply enlarges the imaginative scale of the infernal world. As Satan and the Rebel Angels cross a landscape of death, monstrous life, and poisoned nature, Scylla is presented as less abhorrent than the unnamed female guardian at the Gates of Hell. Her reference therefore functions not as a separate episode but as a benchmark of monstrosity: even the legendary creature associated with the waters between Calabria and Trinacria is surpassed by Hell's embodiments of terror.

Identity and Classical Allusion

Scylla is identified through her traditional location, the sea separating Calabria from the “hoarce TRINACRIAN shore.” The allusion places her within a recognizable Mediterranean geography while simultaneously drawing that geography into the poem's infernal catalogue. Her horror is not described independently; instead, it is used as a known measure against which the Gates of Hell's female-shaped monster can be judged.

Appearance in the Infernal Landscape

The reference occurs after the traveling bands have passed through frozen and fiery mountains, rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and “shades of death.” The surrounding region is characterized as a universe in which all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds monstrous forms. Within this sequence, Scylla belongs to a chain of classical horrors that includes Gorgons, Hydra, and Chimera. The poem's method is cumulative: each mythic name adds a further traditional association of danger, while the surrounding infernal setting claims to exceed what earlier fables or human fear have imagined.

Comparison with Hell's Guardian

Scylla's decisive narrative function is comparative. The female guardian before the Gates of Hell has a fair human appearance above the waist but ends in a vast, folded, scaly serpent body armed with a mortal sting. Hell hounds circle her middle, barking through Cerberus-like mouths and retreating into her womb when disturbed. Against this spectacle, Scylla is declared “Farr less abhorrd.” The comparison makes the Gate guardian's deformity and violence more extreme than a classical sea monster already established as an emblem of peril.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Scylla helps define the poem's strategy of converting classical mythology into a hierarchy of infernal terror. She is not an active participant in Satan's journey, does not speak, and does not alter the action. Her importance lies in the contrast between an inherited mythic terror and a newly imagined Christian cosmology of evil. By subordinating Scylla to the monster guarding Hell, the passage presents the infernal realm as a “Universe of death” whose creations are “worse / Then Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd.” The allusion thus turns cultural memory into a scale: what once seemed monstrous becomes comparatively lesser when set beside the consequences of cosmic rebellion and the architecture of Hell.