Plato's levels of falling vs. Dante's Inferno

At first, I had a really hard time thinking up something to relate Phaedrus to, so I thought about focusing instead on the section of the dialogue about the different levels that souls can fall from enlightenment. I realized that it sounded a lot like Dante's Inferno, so I've decided to look into that aspect.

Even though Plato's dialogue isn't about death, and Socrates is talking about chariots and horses, both Dante and Plato are mapping out the journey of a soul, and what happens to those souls if they fall too far. Dante uses nine levels of Hell, and Plato uses nine levels of a fall from the heavens: "But when, lacking the power to follow, [the soul] does not see and, having experienced some mischance, filled with forgetfulness and badness, it is weighed down, and having been weighed down it loses its wings and falls toward earth" (52-53).

If I understood Socrates speech correctly, however, I believe that souls have a chance to make their way up through the levels, back toward what is considered the closest to the gods, a philosopher (of course). Socrates tells us "whoever passes his life justly receives a better allotment afterwards, and whoever unjustly, a worse" (53). Here is where he would differ from Dante's picture. In a way, this makes Socrates's model more hopeful; we are not all doomed to live in one place forever, but could possibly become as enlightened as a philosopher one day. If we do not mend the errors of our ways, we will continue to live at our current level, or worse, fall to the lowest level, as a tyrant.

Dante and Plato as writers are also alike in how they both wrote people into their work that they hate. Socrates does mention several sophists by name, but the blow he strikes to them is most evident in his levels: "to the sixth, a poetic life or some other one of those concerned with imitation will be fitted...to the eighth, a sophistic or demagogic" (53). I guess he should be commended for not being completely rude and banishing all his enemies to the ninth level away from enlightenment, though it seems rash to put sophists so close to tyrants. Dante does the same in his Inferno when he places people who have wronged him in his poem and has them suffering in Hell for the crimes he believed the committed against him on earth.

Some of Plato's levels also don't seem to make sense. With Dante, his levels were listed as sins, showing which sin would put someone closer to Satan's circle; with Socrates's speech, it just seems he is making up people to put in between philosopher and tyrant because he's trying to make a point that philosophers are the best. For example, I don't think that a craftsman or farmer deserves to be on the seventh level away from enlightenment, just two steps away from a tyrant. Maybe I'm reading into that too much, but I think that's a bit harsh, mainly because it seems unlikely to me that a farmer would want or have the resources to become a philosopher, so in Socrates's model, they would forever be reliving a state of being below what Socrates considers "enlightened".