Canto 26 doesn’t really begin until verse 19. The opening tercets continue the admonishment to cities, which is, of course, important, especially considering that this time it’s Florence that Dante criticises for being full of thieves. As always, when it comes to his hometown there’s a greater level of urgency to Dante’s writing, but even so, the intro pales in comparison to the central event of the canto - the encounter with Ulysses (or Odysseus).
There are two stylistic choices that anticipate the great episode about to be narrated. First, the brief aside that starts in verse 19, where Dante tells the reader that he must pace his mind before recounting what happened, lest his virtue should fail to do justice to the subject matter. We’ve seen Dante express how difficult it is to describe what he’s seen in hell, but it was always because the things seen were too monstrous to be described. This time, instead of the events and characters being too vulgar for language to describe, Dante suggests that his own talent might be inadequate.
The second choice, which I am a big fan of, is the use of simile. We’ve grown accustomed by now to reading descriptions of hell delivered via similes, usually to savage landscapes/seascapes. In this canto, we have three similes: a secular one, a biblical one, and a mythological one.
The first conjures up the idyllic image of a farmer who, looking out across a valley at night sees thousands of fireflies flicker in the darkness. So, looking down into the 8th pocket of the 8th circle, Dante sees a sea of little flames flickering in the infernal abyss.
The second simile is of biblical origin. It describes the sinners as completely enshrouded by flames and entirely hidden to the eye of the observer. Looking at them, Dante feels like Elisha, the disciple of the prophet Elijah, who watched his master be surrounded by a whirlwind of flames and carried up to heaven.
Each flame conceals the soul of a person who has been a “false” or deceitful adviser.
My English text translates the name of these sinners as “intellectually dishonest”, but I’m not sure the term fully renders the meaning of the Italian “falsi consiglieri”. A consigliere is an adviser, someone people go to for counsel. The sin committed by the people in this pocket is that these people have used their authority and the fact that their advice is highly regarded to make those around them do what they - the adviser - wanted.
Among the flames, Dante sees one that looks like it’s splitting into two separate “tongues”, described by means of the third simile. The flame is likened to the one that burned the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices. The legend goes that after Oedipus was expelled from Thebes, the rule passed to his sons. But as they were affected by their father’s curse, the two men fought extensively before killing one another in battle. When their corpses were burned, as was the custom, the flames separated to symbolise the hate that separated the brothers.
The flame that Dante looks at contains Ulysses and Diomedes, on the contrary, are inseparable in death as they were in life. Thought of as the mind (Ulysses) and the hand (Diomedes) between the Trojan horse, the two did *everything* together, and it’s always annoyed me a bit that Diomedes doesn’t get as much recognition.
Dante begs (literally) Virgil to speak to the two sinners and Virgil agrees but advises Dante to let him speak to the men on his behalf. Those are Ulysses and Diomed, Virgil reveals, and they would not take kindly to being spoken to by Dante.
There are two possible reasons for this. One, Dante didn’t speak Greek, and therefore would have been unable to communicate with them. Two - which I personally enjoy more - Ulysses and Diomedes, being Greeks and therefore thinking of themselves as the fathers of Western civilisation, wouldn’t deign to speak to some third-rate Italian.
Either way, Virgil asks Ulysses to share his story, and he obliges. What follows is not the story of Ulysses as we know it from the Homeric poems. The reason for this is, as mentioned above, that Dante did not speak Greek, so, unable to read the original texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, all he knows about Ulysses he’s learnt from references to him in Latin poems, including Virgil’s Aeneid. So the story that Ulysses recounts here is Dante’s own invention of what happened after the Greek hero left Circe.
Ulysses says that he was so overwhelmed by a thirst for knowledge and adventure that instead of going back home to his family, he persuaded his crew to go on one last journey, beyond the limits of the known world. Dante imagines the following speech:
‘Brothers, a hundred thousand
perils you have passed and reached the Occident.
For us, so little time remains to keep
the vigil of our living sense. Do not
deny your will to win experience,
behind the sun, of worlds where no man dwells.
Hold clear in thought your seed and origin.
You were not made to live as mindless brutes,
but go in search of virtue and true knowledge.’
The men agreed, and the crew sailed across the Mediterranean and through the strait of Gibraltar, which was believed to have been created by Hercules as a signpost between the inhabited world and the rest (the Greeks believed that the southern hemisphere was completely covered by the ocean). For five months they sailed until one day the biggest mountain ever known to man came into view. The crew rejoiced, but before they could reach it, the waters opened and swallowed them whole.
So Ulysses is punished for having given advice that let his men to their deaths - as his intellect has “burned” those who trusted him, so he will burn in eternity. But there is a nobility to his punishment that we haven’t seen before and which reverberates throughout the canto, reflected in the careful use of simile and the high register of the language.
Ulysses is undoubtedly on the receiving end of “preferential treatment” and the reason for it is made explicit in the two verses in bold. The tone here is too solemn to think that Dante didn’t admire the ambition that pushed Ulysses beyond the limits of the known world. For this reason, critics have long discussed whether Ulysses has committed the sin of hubris or he was actually a virtuous man whose only fault was living before the arrival of Christ. Ultimately, it is widely accepted that if Ulysses hadn’t committed some sin related to pride, we would have been in Limbo with the other great figures of antiquity.
But there’s an arrogance tied to Ulysses’s thirst for knowledge and he comes to represent the struggle of the man who seeks to unveil the mystery of human existence without divine assistance, which is why he ultimately fails. As he is aware that he is trespassing a limit imposed by the gods (Hecules would have written “non plus ultra” on the pillars of the strait) his sin is a less directly offensive iteration of the original sin, committed by Adam in his desire for knowledge.
Most critics agree that there are echoes of Dante’s own voice in Ulysses - he is after all on a journey to the end of creation. This identification, however, doesn’t function as a defense of Ulysses. On the contrary, all of the characters that Dante feels pity for in his journey through hell represent sins that he recognises in himself. He projects his flaws onto these characters, detaching himself from them and criticising them. Every time he physically moves on from the sinner, he spiritually moves on from the part of himself guilty of that sin, in a purifying process that prepares him for the upcoming entrance to heaven.
In the case of Ulysses, Dante leaves behind his appetite for secular knowledge supported solely by human intellect, to embrace the truth that can only crystalize to the human mind through divine grace.