What does Virgil and Dante have to do with hell?

in book 6 of Virgils "The Anead" Aneas takes a journey, much like Odysseus did, to Hades to find his father who died in the Trojan war, and of course in Dante's "Inferno" the entirety of the book is a journey through 9 circles or layers of hell, it creates an allusion between the two books, and it is said that Dante looked at Virgil as an inspiration also for writing "The Inferno"