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Literary device

Antithesis

Setting opposing ideas or words side by side, so that one illuminates the other through contrast.

In Inferno

Of all malice that draws hatred in heaven the end is injustice, and every such end afflicts another either by force or by fraud. But because fraud is the evil proper to man, it displeases God more; and therefore the fraudulent remain below, and more pain assails them.

The sentence sets two poles face to face, the evil done "by force" and the evil done "by fraud", and immediately opposes one to the other: fraud is proper to man and displeases God more. The contrast organizes the rest of Hell.

Cantos IX to XII: The City of Dis, Virgil, explaining to Dante the order of the circles still to come

O blind greed and mad wrath, that so goad us in the short life and then soak us so badly in the eternal one!
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Cantos IX to XII: The City of Dis, The poet, who interrupts the description of the river of blood to speak to the passions that fill it

we were men, and now we have become stumps: your hand should indeed be more merciful, even if we had been souls of serpents.
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Cantos XIII to XVII: The Violent, The thorn trunk that Dante wounded in the wood of the suicides, which tradition identifies with Pier delle Vigne

the face of his was the face of a just man, so benign was the skin outside, and the rest of the body that of a serpent.
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Cantos XIII to XVII: The Violent, Dante, describing Geryon, the image of fraud, when he reaches the edge

look how he made a chest of his back; because he wanted to see too far ahead, he looks behind and walks backward.
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Cantos XVIII to XXII: The First Five Ditches, Virgil, showing Dante the diviner Amphiaraus and explaining the punishment of the fourth ditch

outside they are gilded, so much so that they dazzle; but inside all of lead, and so heavy that those of Frederick, beside them, were of straw.
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Cantos XXIII to XXVI: Hypocrites, Thieves, and Ulysses, Dante, describing the capes of the hypocrites in the sixth ditch

as long as I was the form of bones and flesh that my mother gave me, my works were not those of the lion, but of the fox.
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Cantos XXVII to XXX: Guido, Mahomet, the Forgers, Guido da Montefeltro, from within the flame, as he says who he was

for one cannot absolve whoever does not repent, nor repent and will at the same time, because the contradiction does not allow it.
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Cantos XXVII to XXX: Guido, Mahomet, the Forgers, A devil, according to Guido da Montefeltro, when preventing Saint Francis from carrying him off

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