In answer to the Pilgrim?s questions about the distribution of wealth on earth, Virgil?s digresses to answer the Dante. Fortune is a major theme of medieval and Renaissance writers such as Boethius, Petrarch , Boccaccio, Chaucer and Machiavelli. Usually it was visualized as a female figure with a wheel, the revolutions of which symbolized the rise and fall of fortune in a man?s life, but Dante deviates somewhat from the standard concept of Fortune by assigning to her the role of an angel. In Dante?s world she is a minister of God who carries out the divine purpose among men; i.e. Dante has Christianized a pagan goddess.
The river Styx is the second of the rivers of Hell; Dante, following the Aeneid, refers to it here as a marsh or quagmire. Since we know from Canto XIV that all the river in Hell are joined, the spring mentioned in this canto must be the point where the Acheron issues from an underground source.