Canto XIII - XX:

The art of Mars will always make her grieve.
And if his semblance did not in part remain
Still at the Arno, she would survive-

And later, when they pitched the city again
Over the ashes left by Attila, those
Striving to refound it would have worked in vain.

And I-I made my own house be my gallows."

For some reason being turned into a tree seems a very fitting punishment for those inclined to suicide. You can't very well give them a new body because they're likely to just kill it again. Its evident that Dante thought out the punishment for this sin so that it fit the crime especially that part about judgment day whereupon the bodies of the suicides would be brought down and hung from the trees, that's an intense image. Virgil seems to act strangely out of character in this scene though, he purposefully tricks Dante into causing harm to a soul then kind of feels bad about it and tries to make up for it. That contrasts strongly with the super-powerful way Virgil has been portrayed previously.
Something that comes up every so often in Dante's work is the idea that people try to escape hell. This is a weird idea to me. Hell doesn't seem like a place you can break out of but the Centaurs are there to shoot you if you get out of the blood water and the harpies attack you if you try to run through the forest. Does Dante believe that people can run away from their sins? Or maybe the whole idea is that they can't, no matter how hard they try and the harder they try the more gruesome the punishment.

The next sin Dante visits is that of sodomy. I honestly did no catch that the first time around and Dante seems to be reasonably nonchalant about this one. I thought it was blasphemy or something the first time I read it (that one big guy said something about defying Jove)but I reread it and they are called the sodomites. I ended up googling it to see what sodomy entailed back then and its pretty much any sex outside of missionary. I can't blame Dante for not thinking this sin is a big deal when he visited but he must of thought something of it seeing as how its so deep in hell. Maybe its not so much a sin against man as a sin against god, Dante has been reasonably uncaring about the wrathful and the violent but sodomy, on the whole, is between a person and god.

I did not get that part about the purse people at all. Did. Not. Understand. I did look it up though and evidently those crests on their purses stand for various Florentine houses and the fact that they are purses means they were bankers. Evil greedy bankers? It seems like a little side note that slaps the Florentine bankers in the face and is there only to serve that thinly veiled political purpose. As a matter of fact some of the evil-bankers he wrote about in that scene weren't even dead. People were still alive and he threw them in hell. So much for a forgiving christian.

Strangely enough the part about the flying/furry/snake/man/scorpion/thing was by far the most realistic part of the book so far. Dante feels the need to tell us in detail about the feeling of flying and the way the thing looks and all the thoughts that were going through his head. I could really picture it 'swimming through the air.' Its odd that he would focus on that, I wonder what good ol' Geryon symbolizes.

Lastly, Jason. Dante, really? Gonna throw Jason in hell? It seems a little harsh is all, especially throwing him way down here. And all because of tricking women, I agree that that's no good but this is a good three levels after murder and mass genocide. It's very strange the way he prioritizes things.