Canto 34...is actually canto 33

"That soul," my master said, "who suffers most,\Is Judas Iscariot; head locked inside,\He flails his legs. Of the other two, who twist\With their heads down, the black mouth holds the shade\ of Brutus: writhing, but not a word will he scream; Cassius is the sinewy one on the other side." (XXIV. 61-66)

I find, once again, Dante's choice of who is punished to be odd. Certainly the assassination of Caesar is one of the most well known, but to say that is was as bad as the treachery against Jesus is a stretch to me. I suppose it is not Dante's intention to pick these particular people, but rather the acts they perpetrated. When one thinks of famous betrayals, one will eventually come to Caesar's assassination. It is more the "sin" that I disagree with in this case. Betrayal seems, to me, to be a lesser affront to God than does false worship or other, more direct, defiance towards the Almighty. For this reason, I think Dante chose to place betrayers in the final pit because of his own experience. Perhaps Dante felt betrayed when his political party members' exiles were rescinded, but his was not. He wrote Inferno around the time when his people were allowed back into Florence, but having written some especially violent letters to Henry VII (who reconquered much of Italy for the Holy Roman Empire), he was not allowed to come back to Florence, for fear that he would be politically unstabilizing. Having finished this volume of Dante's Divine Comedy, I am more convinced that much of what he wrote was a commentary on his time and personal situation. I may be reading too much into Dante's work, but I think writer bias is an important thing to consider in any piece of literature.