Dante’s Inferno – Canto 26

            As the Poet moves toward his prophetic vision that comes with “early morning dreams,” perhaps he had the words of Jeremiah in mind: “Is Israel a laughing-stock to you?  Was she caught among thieves, that you shake your head whenever you speak of her? (48:27)” Remembering that Dante wrote the Inferno in 1307 but sets it in 1300, he can speak for the dark hopes Florence’s neighbors (e.g., Prato) harbored for her. Not only this, but another event Dante may have had in mind took place in 1304 (around the time Dante was exiled). In that year, Pope Benedict XI sent his legate, Cardinal Niccolò da Prato, to Florence to try to settle its incessant political feuding. Unable to do so, he cursed the city, saying:

“Since you want to be at war and under a curse, and will neither hear nor obey the messenger of the Vicar of God, or have peace and quiet among yourselves, you will be left with the curse of God and of the Holy Church.”

And thereupon he excommunicated the city and placed it under interdict, which meant that the celebration of the Catholic Liturgy and other sacraments of the Church were suspended. Later, a series of calamities came upon Florence and many linked them with the Cardinal’s curse. One of these calamities is particularly ironic and is recorded both by the historian Villani and the early commentator Benvenuto. Here, Vernon, in his commentary, cites Benvenuto:

“About that time the ward of San Frediano determined to offer the Cardinal a fête, in which should be given a representation of Hell and the torments of the damned. They proclaimed publicly that all who wished to know wondrous things about another world were invited to assemble upon the Ponte alla Carraja upon the first of May. Stages were prepared upon boats on the river, and by artificial fires of different colors a picture of Hell was supposed to be displayed; men disguised as demons were represented casting sinners into the flames, and inflicting upon them other torments.  The bridge was thronged with a vast concourse of spectators.  Screams and yells of simulated agony made a horrible din to hear. Just when the excitement was at its highest, the bridge, which was built of wood, from the unusual and excessive load upon it, suddenly gave way, and fell into the Arno with all the people that were on it. The destruction of life was enormous; and ‘many who were looking down upon a simulated Hell went to a real Hell, and were brought within the terms of the proclamation which had been made, for they soon did know wondrous things of another world, and all the acted cries of suffering were converted into cries of stern reality.’”

            It should also be noted that in 1306, Pope Clement V sent Cardinal Orsini to attempt a settlement. This attempt also ended without peace and another edict of interdict!

            This bucolic image changes to a famous incident recorded in the Second Book of Kings (2:11) where the prophet Elisha witnessed his mentor, Elijah, being taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Elisha watched the heavens until he could only see the flames that concealed the chariot. Dante’s reference to “the bears” in identifying Elisha is a gratuitous touch. After Elijah had been taken up into the heavens, Elisha went to another place. On the way he was met by a group of boys who jeered at him (2 Kings 2:23). “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” they shouted at him, referring to Elijah’s ascension. At that, Elisha cursed them and two bears came out of the forest and ate them!

            Only now, with so many references to flames and in the soft glow of the canyon below him, does Dante become more specific – and more mysterious. In what appears to be a kind of procession, tongues of flame are seen moving slowly along the bottom of this bolgia, each one silently concealing within it an unidentified sinner – the contrapasso. In the Italian, Dante calls the concealment of these sinners’ identity “a theft” (l’furto), suggesting something “furtive” about them; and following that he uses the word invola, suggesting something “stolen.”

            Finally, the reader will do well to keep the following words that Dante uses in mind as this canto moves forward: flame, throat, tongue, theft, stealing.

            The three “sins,” by the way, are famous in both Homer and Virgil: the first was the clever ambush on Troy by means of the iconic Trojan Horse. The second involved the “trick” of bringing Achilles into the war. His mother had disguised him as a girl and brought him to the court of King Lycomedes to live with his daughters so that he wouldn’t have to fight. Pretending to bring gifts to the king’s daughters, Ulysses hid among the gifts a shield and a lance which the disguised Achilles payed too much attention to and gave himself away – but not before he had seduced one of the king’s daughters, Deïdamia, and then abandoned her and her newborn child. The third involved the theft of the sacred Palladium, a gold statue of Pallas Athena that guaranteed the safety of Troy as long as it remained in the city.

“The affinity between Dante and Ulysses is again brought to mind by the Pilgrim’s claim that he is ‘bending’ [Dante’s word] with desire toward the flame. He previously had to grab onto a rock in order to avoid falling into the ditch. ”

Langdon’s comment on this adds an insight contemporary with Dante’s age:

“Dante’s great desire to see Ulysses’ shade was due to the chance it offered of solving one of the greatest medieval literary questions: what became of Ulysses after his return to Ithaca? He felt somewhat as a lover of Shakespeare might on seeing the spirit of Hamlet in ‘another world.’” And we must wait until the end of the canto to find out.

            As Dante was writing this scene, he may have had in mind some imagery from Chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. Note the various correspondences. There we read that when the Apostles were gathered together the sound of a great wind was heard and the power of God’s Spirit descended upon them in the form of tongues of flame. Filled with this Spirit, they were able to speak in tongues and the throngs of pilgrims in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost all heard them speaking in their own languages. Thousands were converted. What Dante will present in the rest of this canto is Ulysses being in-spirited and using the power of his speech to sway others.

            Ulysses begins his speech by recollecting the episode in the Odyssey when he and his crew were held captive by Circe, the sorceress/Siren who turned his men into pigs. This locates us momentarily within the epic story he (Dante) is about to change; and he adds to this a geographical location,  Gaeta, an ancient coastal city about 50 miles north of Naples. In ancient times, the city had been called Caieta after Aeneas’ nurse whom he buried there (see Aeneid VII, 1-4). But the seemingly casual mention of Circe, Gaeta, and Aeneas here is not without importance. Circe lived on a mythical island off the coast of Gaeta called Aeaea. Dante wants to set up a contrast between Homer’s Ulysses, who was drawn to Circe’s island and Virgil’s Aeneas, who passed it safely on his way north. And more than this, when Ulysses speaks of his fondness for his son, Telemachus, and honor for his father, Laertes, Dante uses the phrase “la pieta del vecchio padre.” But by pieta he doesn’t mean “pity” in this case, but the more classical meaning of “duty” toward his father, something that Ulysses (sinfully?) neglected. This kind of neglect was frowned on among the classical ancients.  On the other hand, in the Aeneid Virgil refers to Aeneas as “pious” Aeneas because he was a dutiful son toward his father and dutiful in his honor of the gods.

            Thus, while Ulysses mentions his family only in passing, he says nothing more about them or his return to Ithaca. Rather, he seems purposely to ignore the bonds they naturally had on him and follows, instead, the siren’s call of ambition for knowledge, which he sets higher than family obligation. And here now he delivers what are perhaps the boldest lines in the entire Inferno. No other character has or will express such high aspirations. With the pun intended, what he tells us is breathtakingly bold, adventurous beyond belief, inflated, prideful, utterly dangerous, and something only an epic hero of his stature might hope to get away with! His desire is absolutely epic, and he speaks as though he were a deity! And he’s only beginning. One can humorously imagine the excited Dante standing there with his mouth open in awe.

            At the same time, it’s fascinating to ponder what was going through the mind of the Poet as he set these words down on paper. Unknowingly, he creates a character like Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost. And how many of Shakespeare’s characters might have harbored such thoughts, and what dramas might have ensued? Or Goethe and others? Selling his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge would be beneath him. For Ulysses, it was his right – ALL of it! Though Dante did not know Greek, did he nevertheless have access to the great plays of antiquity in translation? Ulysses’ words need a Greek theater and an audience of thousands such as they could hold.

            What Ulysses is proposing is sheer madness, but perhaps only a character of his stature might be able to carry this off. In a sense, the sheer immensity of his proposal only makes sense when we consider the primordial story of the Garden scene in Chapter 3 of the Book of Genesis. If Adam and Eve (and we by being their children), by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, became like God (as the serpent said they would), with the ability to tell right from wrong, Ulysses, masquerading as one of their greatest heirs, proposes to become even greater than God by cataloging every human experience that his and our mythical ancestors set in motion by their “original” sin. We might be able to excuse the primordial couple from the sin of pride because they were tricked by the serpent. But Ulysses has no such excuse because he is, in a sense, the primordial trickster writ large on the pages of Homer’s epics. And what Virgil does here is to re-kindle his flame and let him step out of his epics in order to tell us with unvarnished pride the untold story of his last adventure, which Dante the Poet records word for word.

            Once they had eaten the “forbidden fruit” from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve realized that they were naked and, for the first time, they experienced shame. Their “sin” was their first experience of a kind of knowledge that cost them the loss of their innocence, because until then they had no knowledge or experience of evil. Not only did they gain this experience, but even greater than this, they gained the ability to discern, which was unnecessary in their previous state. Though Ulysses knows and can clearly discern the difference between good and evil, he wants complete knowledge of both: an epic sin! And while he may have forced Circe to turn his men back from pigs into their human form, here he’s become a virtual pig himself! He wants everything and he’ll eat anything. At this point, one might imagine him in the Garden defiling the Tree!

            Soon enough, he will tell his crew, “You cannot deny yourself the experience of what lies beyond.” Here he becomes the serpent in the Garden assuring Adam and Eve with epically false words: “Surely, you will not die.” And with these, and a lifetime of false words, he’s here in Hell. Back in Canto 5, Francesca ended her sad take by telling Dante that by the power of one line in the story they were reading she and her lover, Paolo, lost their souls. At that, Dante fainted, perhaps realizing the power he possessed and the responsibility he bore to use words truthfully.

Finally, in his De finibus (On the ends of good and evil), which Dante had access to, Cicero offers a very different perspective on Ulysses by suggesting that it wasn’t the Sirens’ songs that lured passing mariners. Rather, it was knowledge. One wonders whether Ulysses here is so bold in his quest for knowledge at all costs because Dante had Cicero’s text in mind when he wrote this Canto. This is Cicero in Book 5:18 in De finibus:

“Let us consider the parts of the mind, which are of nobler aspect. The loftier these are, the more unmistakable indications of nature do they afford. So great is our innate love of learning and of knowledge, that no one can doubt that man’s nature is strongly attracted to these things even without the lure of any profit. Do we notice how children cannot be deterred even by punishment from studying and inquiry into the world around them? Drive them away, and back they come. They delight in knowing things; they are eager to impart their knowledge to others; pageants, games and shows of that sort hold them spell-bound, and they will even endure hunger and thirst so as to be able to see them. Again, take persons who delight in the liberal arts and studies; do we not see them careless of health or business, patiently enduring any inconvenience when under the spell of learning and of science, and repaid for endless toil and trouble by the pleasure they derive from acquiring knowledge? For my part I believe Homer had something of this sort in view in his imaginary account of the songs of the Sirens. Apparently it was not the sweetness of their voices or the novelty and diversity of their songs, but their professions of knowledge that used to attract the passing voyagers; it was the passion for learning that kept men rooted to the Sirens’ rocky shores. This is their invitation to Ulysses (for I have translated this among other passages of Homer): ‘Ulysses, pride of Argos, turn thy bark / And listen to our music. Never yet / Did voyager sail these waters blue, but stayed / His course, enchanted by our voices sweet, / And having filled his soul with harmony, / Went on his homeward way a wiser man. / We know the direful strife and clash of war / That Greece by Heaven’s mandate bore to Troy, / And whatsoe’er on the wide earth befalls.’ Homer was aware that his story would not sound plausible if the magic that held his hero enmeshed was merely an idle song! It is knowledge that the Sirens offer, and it was no marvel if a lover of wisdom held this dearer than his home. A passion for miscellaneous omniscience no doubt stamps a man as a mere dilettante; but it must be deemed the mark of a superior mind to be led on by the contemplation of high matters to a passionate love of knowledge.”

            It should be noted that Dante’s Ulysses isn’t the only one in classical literature to give such a speech, though his is matchless. Dante would have found speeches given on significant occasions in Virgil, Lucan, and Horace. He may also have been familiar with Châtillon’s Alexandreid, a Medieval French epic about Alexander the Great, where this great adventurer, quoted by Charles Singleton in his commentary, says what Dante’s Ulysses might have said:

“Now since there is nothing more left of the world to be traversed, lest weapons so used to war should grow rusty, come, let us seek those who dwell under another sun, on the other side of the world, lest our glory should fade and our courage miss a chance to shine; this way, an immortal song will be our reward” (X,5307-5312,col.569).

               In Dante’s text, however, Ulysses doesn’t “suggest” to his crew – he tells them bluntly, “you cannot deny yourself” the experience that lies before you. He’s not only the captain of the ship, but of their lives. And then his pride and ego simply pour out all over them! “You are Greeks, not savages!” As though to say that being Greek, one has a right to, inherits, and owns knowledge and experience. Any other kind of life is worthless. It’s strange to consider that Ulysses, with his huge ego, fails to realize how small he makes the world and human existence if it only belongs to Greeks, as though everyone else is a savage, unable to think and reason. Isn’t this the case with sin? We miss the mark, and we choose to make ourselves less than what we’re destined to be.

               Finally, there is a fascinating irony at work here. In Canto 3, Virgil told Dante, upon their entrance through the Gate, that everyone in Hell had lost the good of their intellect. Here, Ulysses appeals to the noble intellectual heritage of his Greek companions and in the process closes all other doors of possibility except the one that lies before them. Doing this, however, we will see what happens.

            In his Personal Narrative of Travels, written exactly 500 years after Dante’s death, Alexander von Humboldt, gives us a sense of what Ulysses and his crew might have experienced once they crossed the equator.

“Nothing awakens in the traveler a livelier remembrance of the immense distance by which he is separated from his country, than the aspect of an unknown firmament. The grouping of the stars of the first magnitude, some scattered nebulae, rivaling in splendor the milky way, and tracks of space remarkable for their extreme blackness, give a particular physiognomy to the Southern sky.”

Dante the Pilgrim will note many of these stars at the beginning of the Purgatorio.

            While this story of Ulysses’ end is Dante’s, he continues to borrow from Virgil’s Aeneid – in this case, the final image of the ship going down. Virgil writes: “… but a wave whirls the ship, driving it three times around in the same place, and then a sudden eddy swallows it up in the sea” (I:116f).

            In the end, Courtney Langdon summarizes wonderfully: “The story of Ulysses’ last journey and death in quest of adventure, which closes this Canto, is more than an illustration of its hero’s baneful powers of persuasion, if it be that. Transcending this, it becomes in his hand one of Dante’s most classically conceived passages, presenting a picture of the Hellenic race’s genius for fearless pursuit of knowledge and truth for its own sake, couched in words so simple, direct, and self-restrained that one, who did not know Dante, would think that the whole Canto was written by a different hand from that which penned the last two. Never have the essentials of a shipwreck been narrated with such awfully convincing brevity.”