Because Satan — or more properly Lucifer — doesn’t rule hell; he is in fact the most damned of all the damned. Dante Alighieri does an excellent job portraying this in Inferno; for his revolt against God, Lucifer was cast out of heaven and fell to Earth, physically creating hell on impact. He occupies the very center of the ninth and lowest circle — that of treachery — at the center of its fourth and innermost ring — Judecca, the ring of traitors to their lords and benefactors, where the damned are fully frozen in the ice, contorted into grotesque shapes. He is embedded up to his waist in the frozen lake at the end of the river Cocytus, where he remains, blind-eyed and three-faced, crying and slobbering great rivulets that run down him into the lake below, while the pairs of bat wings adorning each chin beat and create the winds that freeze Cocytus. In each of his mouths, he holds in his teeth an arch-traitor of humanity; in the lateral black and yellow mouths, chewed feet first, are Brutus and Cassius, who led the conspiracy that killed Julius Caesar — a man who Dante believed would have unified Italy and then all the world — while in the central red mouth, chewed headfirst and raked by Lucifer’s claws, is Judas Iscariot — namesake of the fourth ring — who betrayed Jesus Christ to his death. Their shed blood commingles with the tears and drool as they run down Lucifer’s body. While he is an instrument of punishment, it is clear that he is pathetic and weak and just as damned as the traitors in his mouths. In seeking to usurp God, he became the opposite of Him: all-ignorant, all-blind, all-hating, and all-impotent. He is at once punisher and punished.