Ulysses

Who He Is

Ulysses is the Greek hero whom Dante meets in the eighth ditch of the eighth circle, that of the fraudulent counselors, inside a flame with a split tip that he shares with Diomedes. Each condemned soul in that ditch burns inside a flame that hides him, and Ulysses speaks only because Virgil, who sang the fall of Troy in the Aeneid, takes the floor on Dante's behalf and asks him to say where, lost through his own doing, he went to die. The Ulysses of the poem is the one of the horse, of Achilles and the Palladium, whom Virgil names when he points to him, and he is also the one who, after leaving Circe, does not return to Penelope: he sets out onto the open sea with a single ship and a small company, passes the pillars that Hercules set as a limit, and dies before a dark mountain, when the sea closes over the boat. What defines him is his speech, the most admired in the Inferno, and the question it leaves: is the voyage the punishment, or its pretext?

Trajectory

Everything happens in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, and the canto prepares the scene before Ulysses. The poet reins in his wit, so that it does not run without the virtue to guide it. When Dante asks who is in the flame with the split tip, Virgil answers that Ulysses and Diomedes are tormented there, together in vengeance as in wrath, and that inside the flame they groan over the trick of the horse, the art through which Deidamia, even dead, still grieves for Achilles, and over the Palladium. Dante begs that they wait for the horned flame, and Virgil praises the request, but bids Dante's tongue be still: two Greeks might disdain the speech of a Tuscan. He then speaks as a poet who sang of the hero in the Aeneid, and asks that one of the two tell where he went to die. The largest horn of the flame moves like one that the wind wearies, and its tip, moving like a tongue, sends the voice out. Ulysses tells that, when he parted from Circe, who held him more than a year near Gaeta, nothing that was owed him in affection made him return:

He names the son, the old father, and the wife only to set them aside, one by one, before the ardor of knowing the world, the vices of men, and their worth. He sets out with a single ship and the small company that did not abandon him. He sees one shore and the other as far as Spain, Morocco, and the island of Sardinia, and arrives old and slow, with his companions, at the narrow mouth where Hercules placed his markers so that man would go no farther. There he speaks to his companions: he reminds them that they reached the west through a hundred thousand perils, that little vigil remains to the senses, and that they should not deny themselves the experience of the uninhabited world that lies behind the sun. And he adds the exhortation that makes them set out: to remember the seed from which they came, made not to live like brutes but to pursue virtue and knowledge. The speech is so brief that it leaves them so eager for the voyage that he could hardly have held them back. They turn the stern toward the morning, make oars into wings for a mad flight, always gaining on the left, and see the stars of the other pole, and ours so low that they do not rise above the surface of the sea. Five times the moon had lit and extinguished itself since they entered the high passage, when a mountain, dark in the distance and higher than any Ulysses had seen, appears. The joy lasts little:

The voice of the flame falls silent with the sea closed over the boat. Ulysses does not return in the poem, but Canto XXVII of the Inferno begins with his flame quieted and moved away, with Virgil's leave, who dismisses it in Lombard.

Themes Embodied

Ulysses is the case of Knowledge and Wisdom put to the test at its highest point: what moves him is neither glory nor riches, but the ardor of knowing the world and men, and the poem places him in the ditch of the fraudulent counselors. Desire, here, is a passion like the others that Hell punishes, only with a lofty object. The Sin that puts him there, according to Virgil, is the fraud of the horse, of Achilles and the Palladium, and the voyage that Ulysses tells when asked where he died is named as sin by no one: whoever judges it is the reader.

The canto leaves the tension standing. The speech to his companions is the most noble discourse of the canticle and, in the context of the ditch, is also the counsel that leads them to death, in a way consistent with the place where he burns. Dante, who reins in his wit before hearing him, hears the hero of wit with the measure he has just given himself, and the phrase with which he closes the shipwreck, as pleased Another, names power without being able to say its name, because the pagan hero does not pronounce the name of God.

Divergent Readings

The text sustains two readings of why Ulysses is there. One judges him by the horse, by Achilles and the Palladium, as Virgil says, and the voyage is only the account of the death that he grants when asked. The other reads the voyage as the transgression that gives the canto its meaning, the daring to pass the pillars, and the punishment as the response to it. The canto does not resolve this: it gives the condemned man the most admired speech in the Inferno and takes his life in the closed sea.

On the source Dante uses to invent the character's end: Dante did not read Homer, and the image of the hero reaches him through Virgil and Ovid.

Dante's Ulysses is, therefore, a creation of the poet from two Latin materials, and not the continuation of the Odyssey, in which the hero returns to Ithaca. The fate of Odysseus in the myth and that of Ulysses in the poem are, from the beginning, two fates.

Relationships

• Dante: the poet who reins in his wit before hearing him, and who, by Virgil's order, does not speak to Ulysses (Canto XXVI of the Inferno).
• Virgil: the one who speaks to the hero in the name of the lofty verses he wrote, and to whom Ulysses answers.
• Guido da Montefeltro: the other fraudulent counselor who speaks from inside a flame, in Canto XXVII of the Inferno, just after that of Ulysses moves away.