> Eliot was 'quoting' Dante: I had not known death had undone so may.
> The line is in the Canto which deals with the ante-room of hell,
> where all those who were unwilling to act, hence were neither good or
> bad, but weren't worth damning. The line is rather curious: there
> are more people in this anteroom (it seems to Dante) than there were
> in Hell proper, Purgatory, and Heaven combined.
This reading surprises me a bit. At the point where Dante makes this observation, he hasn't yet seen the rest of Hell, much less Purgatory and Paradise. This is in fact the first large group of the dead he has seen, apart from the Staten Island Ferry queue for Charon's services. I always read this passage --
... sì lunga tratta di gente, ch'i' non averei creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta
-- as an expression of his surprise at the topos-koinos -- which was always true, until perhaps quite recently -- that the dead are much more numerous than the living: the maiores in both senses of the word. (That's one of the reasons why Nixon's, or rather Safire's phrase, "silent majority", always struck me as funny; it sounded like he was referring to the dead).