linguistic:translation, structural:expansion, stylistic:style_transfer, linguistic:voice_change, structural:summarization
Classical

Without access to the works of Homer, Dante used Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, and Statius as the models for the style, history, and mythology of the Comedy. This is most obvious in the case of Virgil, who appears as a mentor character throughout the first two canticles and who has his epic The Aeneid praised with language Dante reserves elsewhere for Scripture. Ovid is given less explicit praise in the poem, but besides Virgil, Dante uses Ovid as a source more than any other poet, mostly through metaphors and fantastical episodes based on those in The Metamorphoses. Less influential than either of the two are Statius and Lucan, the latter of whom has only been given proper recognition as a source in the Divine Comedy in the twentieth century.

Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the Comedy with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly quotations in the works of Albertus Magnus. Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the Nicomachean Ethics. In the same canto, Virgil draws on Cicero 's De Officiis to explain why sins of the intellect are worse than sins of violence, a key point that would be explored from canto XVIII to the end of the Inferno.