Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali,
e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande!
Tra li ladron trovai cinque cotali
tuoi cittadini onde mi ven vergogna,
e tu in grande orranza non ne sali.
Ma se presso al mattin del ver si sogna,
tu sentirai, di qua da picciol tempo,
di quel che Prato, non ch'altri, t'agogna.
E se già fosse, non saria per tempo.
Così foss' ei, da che pur esser dee!
ché più mi graverà, com' più m'attempo.
Noi ci partimmo, e su per le scalee
che n'avea fatto i borni a scender pria,
rimontò 'l duca mio e trasse mee;
e proseguendo la solinga via,
tra le schegge e tra ' rocchi de lo scoglio
lo piè sanza la man non si spedia.
Allor mi dolsi, e ora mi ridoglio
quando drizzo la mente a ciò ch'io vidi,
e più lo 'ngegno affreno ch'i' non soglio,
perché non corra che virtù nol guidi;
sì che, se stella bona o miglior cosa
m'ha dato 'l ben, ch'io stessi nol m'invidi.
Quante 'l villan ch'al poggio si riposa,
nel tempo che colui che 'l mondo schiara
la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,
come la mosca cede a la zanzara,
vede lucciole giù per la vallea,
forse colà dov' e' vendemmia e ara:
di tante fiamme tutta risplendea
l'ottava bolgia, sì com' io m'accorsi
tosto che fui là 've 'l fondo parea.
E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi
vide 'l carro d'Elia al dipartire,
quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi,
che nol potea sì con li occhi seguire,
ch'el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola,
sì come nuvoletta, in sù salire:
tal si move ciascuna per la gola
del fosso, ch nessuna mostra 'l furto,
e ogne fiamma un peccatore invola.
Io stava sovra 'l ponte a veder surto,
sì che s'io non avessi un ronchion preso,
caduto sarei giù sanz' esser urto.
E 'l duca, che mi vide tanto atteso,
disse: “Dentro dai fuochi son li spirti;
catun si fascia di quel ch'elli è inceso.”
“Maestro mio,” rispuos' io, “per udirti
son io più certo; ma già m'era avviso
che così fosse, e già voleva dirti:
chi è 'n quel foco che vien sì diviso
di sopra, che par surger de la pira
dov' Eteòcle col fratel fu miso?”
Rispuose a me: “Là dentro si martira
Ulisse e Dïomede, e così insieme
a la vendetta vanno come a l'ira;
e dentro da la lor fiamma si geme
l'agguato del caval che fé la porta
onde uscì de' Romani il gentil seme.
Piangevisi entro l'arte per che, morta,
Deïdamìa ancor si duol d'Achille,
e del Palladio pena vi si porta.”
“S'ei posson dentro da quelle faville
parlar,” diss' io, “maestro, assai ten priego
e ripriego, che 'l priego vaglia mille,
che non mi facci de l'attender niego
fin che la fiamma cornuta qua vegna;
vedi che del disio ver' lei mi piego!”
Ed elli a me: “La tua preghiera è degna
di molta loda, e io però l'accetto;
ma fa che la tua lingua si sostegna.
Lascia parlare a me, ch'i' ho concetto
ciò che tu vuoi; ch'ei sarebbero schivi,
perch' e' fuor greci, forse del tuo detto.”
Poi che la fiamma fu venuta quivi
dove parve al mio duca tempo e loco,
in questa forma lui parlare audivi:
“O voi che siete due dentro ad un foco,
s'io meritai di voi mentre ch'io vissi,
s'io meritai di voi assai o poco
quando nel mondo li alti versi scrissi,
non vi movete; ma l'un di voi dica
dove, per lui, perduto a morir gissi.”
Lo maggior corno de la fiamma antica
cominciò a crollarsi mormorando,
pur come quella cui vento affatica;
indi la cima qua e là menando,
come fosse la lingua che parlasse,
gittò voce di fuori e disse: “Quando
mi diparti' da Circe, che sottrasse
me più d'un anno là presso a Gaeta,
prima che sì Enëa la nomasse,
né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta
del vecchio padre, né 'l debito amore
lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,
vincer potero dentro a me l'ardore
ch'i' ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi umani e del valore;
ma misi me per l'alto mare aperto
sol con un legno e con quella compagna
picciola da la qual non fui diserto.
L'un lito e l'altro vidi infin la Spagna,
fin nel Morrocco, e l'isola d'i Sardi,
e l'altre che quel mare intorno bagna.
Io e' compagni eravam vecchi e tardi
quando venimmo a quella foce stretta
dov' Ercule segnò li suoi riguardi
acció che l'uom più oltre non si metta;
da la man destra mi lasciai Sibilia,
da l'altra già m'avea lasciata Setta.
'O frati,' dissi, 'che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l'occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente
non vogliate negar l'esperïenza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.'
Li miei compagni fec' io sì aguti,
con questa orazion picciola, al cammino,
che a pena poscia li avrei ritenuti;
e volta nostra poppa nel mattino,
de' remi facemmo ali al folle volo,
sempre acquistando dal lato mancino.
Tutte le stelle già de l'altro polo
vedea la notte, e 'l nostro tanto basso,
che non surgëa fuor del marin suolo.
Cinque volte racceso e tante casso
lo lume era di sotto da la luna,
poi che 'ntrati eravam ne l'alto passo,
quando n'apparve una montagna, bruna
per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto
quanto veduta non avëa alcuna.
Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;
ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque
e percosse del legno il primo canto.
Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l'acque;
a la quarta levar la poppa in suso
e la prora ire in giù, com' altrui piacque,
infin che 'l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.”
Rejoice, O Florence, since thou art so great,
That over sea and land thou beatest thy wings,
And throughout Hell thy name is spread abroad!
Among the thieves five citizens of thine
Like these I found, whence shame comes unto me,
And thou thereby to no great honour risest.
But if when morn is near our dreams are true,
Feel shalt thou in a little time from now
What Prato, if none other, craves for thee.
And if it now were, it were not too soon;
Would that it were, seeing it needs must be,
For 'twill aggrieve me more the more I age.
We went our way, and up along the stairs
The bourns had made us to descend before,
Remounted my Conductor and drew me.
And following the solitary path
Among the rocks and ridges of the crag,
The foot without the hand sped not at all.
Then sorrowed I, and sorrow now again,
When I direct my mind to what I saw,
And more my genius curb than I am wont,
That it may run not unless virtue guide it;
So that if some good star, or better thing,
Have given me good, I may myself not grudge it.
As many as the hind (who on the hill
Rests at the time when he who lights the world
His countenance keeps least concealed from us,
While as the fly gives place unto the gnat)
Seeth the glow-worms down along the valley,
Perchance there where he ploughs and makes his vintage;
With flames as manifold resplendent all
Was the eighth Bolgia, as I grew aware
As soon as I was where the depth appeared.
And such as he who with the bears avenged him
Beheld Elijah's chariot at departing,
What time the steeds to heaven erect uprose,
For with his eye he could not follow it
So as to see aught else than flame alone,
Even as a little cloud ascending upward,
Thus each along the gorge of the intrenchment
Was moving; for not one reveals the theft,
And every flame a sinner steals away.
I stood upon the bridge uprisen to see,
So that, if I had seized not on a rock,
Down had I fallen without being pushed.
And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,
Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;
Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
"My Master," I replied, "by hearing thee
I am more sure; but I surmised already
It might be so, and already wished to ask thee
Who is within that fire, which comes so cleft
At top, it seems uprising from the pyre
Where was Eteocles with his brother placed."
He answered me: "Within there are tormented
Ulysses and Diomed, and thus together
They unto vengeance run as unto wrath.
And there within their flame do they lament
The ambush of the horse, which made the door
Whence issued forth the Romans' gentle seed;
Therein is wept the craft, for which being dead
Deidamia still deplores Achilles,
And pain for the Palladium there is borne."
"If they within those sparks possess the power
To speak," I said, "thee, Master, much I pray,
And re-pray, that the prayer be worth a thousand,
That thou make no denial of awaiting
Until the horned flame shall hither come;
Thou seest that with desire I lean towards it."
And he to me: "Worthy is thy entreaty
Of much applause, and therefore I accept it;
But take heed that thy tongue restrain itself.
Leave me to speak, because I have conceived
That which thou wishest; for they might disdain
Perchance, since they were Greeks, discourse of thine."
When now the flame had come unto that point,
Where to my Leader it seemed time and place,
After this fashion did I hear him speak:
"O ye, who are twofold within one fire,
If I deserved of you, while I was living,
If I deserved of you or much or little
When in the world I wrote the lofty verses,
Do not move on, but one of you declare
Whither, being lost, he went away to die."
Then of the antique flame the greater horn,
Murmuring, began to wave itself about
Even as a flame doth which the wind fatigues.
Thereafterward, the summit to and fro
Moving as if it were the tongue that spake,
It uttered forth a voice, and said: "When I
From Circe had departed, who concealed me
More than a year there near unto Gaeta,
Or ever yet Aeneas named it so,
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind;
But I put forth on the high open sea
With one sole ship, and that small company
By which I never had deserted been.
Both of the shores I saw as far as Spain,
Far as Morocco, and the isle of Sardes,
And the others which that sea bathes round about.
I and my company were old and slow
When at that narrow passage we arrived
Where Hercules his landmarks set as signals,
That man no farther onward should adventure.
On the right hand behind me left I Seville,
And on the other already had left Ceuta.
'O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand
Perils,' I said, 'have come unto the West,
To this so inconsiderable vigil
Which is remaining of your senses still
Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.'
So eager did I render my companions,
With this brief exhortation, for the voyage,
That then I hardly could have held them back.
And having turned our stern unto the morning,
We of the oars made wings for our mad flight,
Evermore gaining on the larboard side.
Already all the stars of the other pole
The night beheld, and ours so very low
It did not rise above the ocean floor.
Five times rekindled and as many quenched
Had been the splendour underneath the moon,
Since we had entered into the deep pass,
When there appeared to us a mountain, dim
From distance, and it seemed to me so high
As I had never any one beheld.
Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping;
For out of the new land a whirlwind rose,
And smote upon the fore part of the ship.
Three times it made her whirl with all the waters,
At the fourth time it made the stern uplift,
And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,
Until the sea above us closed again."
Matching the ironic apostrophe of Pistoia that follows the departure of Vanni Fucci in the last canto (Inf. XXV.10-12), this one of Florence comes in the wake of the poem's departure from the five Florentine thieves. The image of Florence as winged has caused some puzzlement. While commentators, beginning perhaps with Scartazzini/Vandelli, point out that Dante's words most probably echo the Latin inscription, dating to 1255, on the façade of the Florentine Palazzo del Podestà, proclaiming that Florence is in possession of the sea, the land, indeed the entire world, we are still left to speculate on Dante's reasons for presenting her as winged. Whatever his reason, we might want to reflect that he thought of himself as the 'wingèd one' because of the easy pun available from his surname, Alighieri, in Latin 'aliger' (winged). See Hugh Shankland, “Dante 'Aliger,'” Modern Language Review 70 (1975), pp. 764-85; “Dante 'Aliger' and Ulysses,” Italian Studies 32 (1977), pp. 21-40. In this canto the apostrophised city and the seafaring Ulysses are both associated with 'wings' ('in our mad flight we turned our oars to wings' [v. 125 – Inf. XXVI.125]); at least intrinsically, the protagonist is also. He is on a better-purposed 'flight.' For these motifs and another related one see Maria Corti, “On the Metaphors of Sailing, Flight, and Tongues of Fire in the Episode of Ulysses (Inf. 26),” Stanford Italian Review 9 (1990), pp. 33-47.
The text alludes to the classical and medieval belief that morning dreams were more truthful in their content than any others. Guido da Pisa is the first (but hardly the last) to refer to a text in Ovid to this effect (Heroides XIX.195-196). On this subject see Charles Speroni's article, “Dante's Prophetic Morning-Dreams,” Studies in Philology 45 (1948), pp. 50-59. And see, for the same view of morning dreams, Purgatorio IX.16-18.
The passage about Prato has caused two interpretive problems: (1) Does it refer to the anger felt by Cardinal Niccolò da Prato when he failed to bring peace between the warring Florentine factions in 1304 or to the rebellion of the town of Prato in 1309, when Florence's small neighbor cast out its Black Guelphs? (2) Is Dante heartened or heart-sick as he contemplates this 'future' event?
It was only in the eighteenth century that a commentator, Pompeo Venturi, suggested a reference to the cardinal (comm. to XXVI.9). Further, since the second event was probably roughly contemporaneous to the writing of this canto, it seems likely that Dante would have enjoyed having so recent a piece of news as confirmation of his 'prophecy.' As to his emotions, it seems more reasonable to reflect that Dante is admitting that he will only be happy once the power of the Black Guelphs of Florence is destroyed; he is in pain as he awaits that liberation. In other words, this is not an expression of sadness for the city's coming tribulation, but a desire to see them come to pass – and that is the common view of the early commentators. As Poletto was perhaps the first commentator to note (in 1894), the passage is very like one found in one of Dante's 'political epistles' (Epistle VI.17), when he hopes that the invading forces of Emperor Henry VII will liberate the city. As Chiavacci Leonardi observes (Inferno, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1991], p. 794), according to the chronicle of Giovanni Villani, news of Henry's election in 1308 was causing excited imperialist hopes all through Italy in 1309.
While we do not believe that Dante says here what Petrocchi says he does, we have, as always, followed his text, which reads iborni (pallid, the color and coolness of ivory) and not, as the text had previously stood, i borni (the outcroppings of the rocks). In our opinion the 'old' reading is the superior one. Instead of 'on those stairs that turned us pale when we came down' we would say 'on the stairs the jutting rocks had made for our descent.'
The steepness of the rock causes Dante to find hand-holds on the wall as he mounts.
According to Lino Pertile (“Dante e l'ingegno di Ulisse,” Stanford Italian Review 1 [1979], pp. 35-65), those who propose a negative view of Ulysses fail to acknowledge the importance of these verses, which reveal the poet's sympathy for the Greek hero even now as he writes of him. He cites (p. 37) Ovid (Metam. XIII.135-139) in support of his argument. However, that text offers Ulysses' vaunt of his own worthiness to receive the arms of Achilles (denying the claims of Ajax), and the entire passage gives us the portrait of a figure full of pride and self-love. See Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 115-16, arguing that Dante, in this passage, is fully conscious of his previous 'Ulyssean' efforts, undertaken by his venturesome and prideful intellect, and now hopes to keep them under control. Castelvetro's reading of the passage is in this vein; according to him the poet grieves 'for having improperly put to use my genius' (comm. to vv. 19-22). Dante hopes, in other words, to be exactly unlike Ulysses.
In a lecture at Dartmouth College in the early 1980s Prof. Rachel Jacoff pointed out that Dante's verb for his necessary restraint, affreno ('rein in,' 'curb'), reflects precisely what Phaeton failed to do, rein in his steeds: 'Fetonte abbandonò li freni' (Inf. XVII.107).
The first of two elaborate similes in prologue to the appearance of Ulysses deals with the number of the false counsellors: they are numerous as fireflies. Dante, as peasant (il villano) resting on his hillside (poggio – Frankel [“The Context of Dante's Ulysses: the Similes in Inferno XXVI,” Dante Studies 104 (1986), pp. 102-5]) contrasts his 'humble' hillock with Ulysses' 'prideful' mountain [verse 133], looks out upon this valley full of fireflies. This peaceful scene lulls many readers into a sort of moral exemption for Ulysses; if he looks so pleasant, how can he be seen as sinful? In fact the distancing effect of the simile makes Ulysses seem small and relatively insignificant. We can imagine how he might feel, told that he had been compared to a firefly.
Many readers are rightly reminded of the previous simile involving a rustic (lo villanello) at Inferno XXIV.7-15.
For the flames as reminiscent of the Epistle of James (James 3:4-6) see Richard Bates and Thomas Rendall (“Dante's Ulysses and the Epistle of James,” Dante Studies 107 [1989], pp. 33-44) and Alison Cornish (“The Epistle of James in Inferno 26,” Traditio 45 [1989-90], pp. 367-79): 'Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven by fierce winds, yet are turned about with a very small helm, wherever the steersman pleases. Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasts many things. Behold how great a matter a little fire kindles! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell.' Pietro di Dante was the first to cite this passage in connection with Dante's description of the flames here (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 31-33), and also refers to it in both later redactions of his commentary.
The second Ulyssean simile describes the flame-wrapped appearance of Ulysses in terms of Elijah's fiery ascent to Heaven. Perhaps the first extended discussion of the biblical text behind the passage was offered by Margherita Frankel (“The Context of Dante's Ulysses: the Similes in Inferno XXVI,” Dante Studies 104 [1986]), pp. 110-16, who argues that, while Elijah is seen as antithetical to Ulysses (see Anthony K. Cassell, Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984], pp. 88-93), Dante is also seen as related to the negative aspect of Elisha (his pride in taking on the prophet's mantle) – see II Kings 2:9-12. She is answered by Luisa Ferretti Cuomo (“La polisemia delle similitudini nella Divina Commedia. Eliseo: un caso esemplare,” Strumenti critici 10 n.s. [1995], pp. 105-42) who regards Elisha as only a positive figure of Dante, similarly accepting his role as successor prophet. For the same view see Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 117. See also Kablitz (“Il canto di Ulisse [Inferno XXVI] agli occhi dei commentatori contemporanei e delle indagini moderne,” Letteratura italiana antica 2 [2001], pp. 74-84), who also argues against Frankel's interpretation, but seems unaware of Ferretti Cuomo's work.
Elisha was avenged by the bears in that the forty-two children who mocked his prophetic calling, addressing him as 'Baldy' (calve), were attacked and lacerated by two bears (II Kings 2:23-24). For the biblical resonance of this scene see Paola Rigo, Memoria classica e memoria biblica in Dante (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 51-54. Dante refers to this incident in one of his 'political epistles' (see the note to Inf. XXVI.8-12): Epistle VI.16.
The protagonist's excitement at the prospect of seeing Ulysses is evident (Ulysses has not been identified yet, but the poet seems to be taking a liberty in allowing his character to fathom who is about to appear). In his reckless abandon to gain experience of this great sinner, he resembles Ulysses himself.
Virgil's point seems to be that each of the flame-enclosed sinners is covered by the external sign of their inner ardor, their longing to captivate the minds of those upon whom they practiced their fraudulent work.
Almost all commentators point to the passage in Statius (Theb. XII.429-432) that describes the immolation of the corpses of the two warring brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, whose enmity was the root of the civil war in Thebes and is manifest now even in their death, as the smoke from their burning bodies will not join. Among the early commentators only Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 52-56) noticed that the same scene is reported in similar ways in Lucan as well (Phars. I.551-552). Some dozen or more modern commentators, from Venturi on, have also done so.
Ulysses and Diomedes are clearly indicated as suffering the punishment of God for their fraudulent acts; yet this indictment has not kept readers from admiring them – or at least Ulysses. Perhaps the central problem in the large debate that has surrounded Dante's version of the Greek hero in the last century and a half is how sympathetically we are meant to respond to him. To put that another way, what is the nature of Ulysses' sin, and how urgently is it meant to govern the reader's sense of his worth? And a further complication is of more recent vintage: what should we make of the at least apparent similarity between Ulysses and Dante himself? Chiavacci Leonardi has made a useful distinction between the two essential attitudes that distinguish divergent readings of the undoubtedly heroic figure (Inferno, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1991], p. 762): (1) Ulysses is marked by greatness; he is unfortunate but guiltless; (2) he is characterized by the sin of pride, like Adam. For an example of the first view see Francesco De Sanctis in 1870: Dante 'erects a statue to this precursor of Christopher Columbus, a pyramid set in the mud of hell' (Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, 4th ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1949 (1870)], pp. 201-2). For similar views see Benedetto Croce (La poesia di Dante, 2nd ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1921]), p. 98, and Mario Fubini (“Il peccato d'Ulisse” and “Il canto XXVI dell'Inferno,” in his Il peccato d'Ulisse e altri scritti danteschi [Milan: Ricciardi, 1966]), pp. 1-76. Attilio Momigliano (comm. to XXVI.64-69) throws all caution to the wind. He complains that the first 63 verses of the canto are too dry and erudite. Now that Ulysses is on the scene, we breathe the air of true and enthusiastic poetry. 'Appearances notwithstanding,' he says, 'Dante not only does not condemn the fraudulent acts of Ulysses and Diomedes, he exalts them.' Among contemporaries, Lino Pertile is essentially in this camp (“Dante e l'ingegno di Ulisse,” Stanford Italian Review 1 [1979], pp. 35-65). The negative view in modern discussions was enunciated clearly by Bruno Nardi (“La tragedia di Ulisse,” in his Dante e la cultura medievale [Bari: Laterza, 1942], pp. 89-99). See also Julius Wilhelm, “Die Gestalt des Odysseus in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie,” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 38 (1960), pp. 75-93; Giorgio Padoan (“Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 170-99); Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), pp. 114-23; Scott (“Inferno XXVI: Dante's Ulysses,” Lettere Italiane 23 (1971), pp. 145-86; Iannucci (“Ulysses' folle volo: the Burden of History,” Medioevo romanzo 3 [1976]. pp. 410-45). Recently a third 'school' has opened its doors, one that finds Ulysses less than totally admirable and yet associated with Dante, who presents himself, just beneath the lines of his text, as a trespassing voyager himself. See Mazzotta (“Poetics of History: Inferno XXVI,” Diacritics [summer 1975], p. 41); Stierle (“Odysseus und Aeneas: Eine typologische Konfiguration in Dantes Divina Commedia,” in Das fremde Wort: Studien zur Interdependenz von Texten, Festschrift für Karl Maurer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ilse Nolting-Hauff & Joachim Schulze [Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1988], pp. 111-54); Barolini (The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], passim); Bloom (“The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice,” in his The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994], pp. 85-89). For a rejoinder to the position of these critics see Stull and Hollander (“The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 1991 [1997]), pp. 43-52.
Virgil lists the sins of the two heroes: the stratagem of the troop-hiding Trojan horse (with which Ulysses, if not Diomedes, is associated in Virgil, Aen. II); Ulysses' trickery in getting Achilles to join the war against Troy, thus abandoning, on the isle of Scyros, his beloved Deidamia (as recounted in Statius's unfinished Achilleid), who subsequently died of grief at the news of his death in Troy; the joint adventure in which they stole the Palladium, image of Athena, a large wooden statue, in return for which the horse served as a fraudulent peace-offering (Aen. II.163-169). Those who, like Momigliano, believe that the fraudulent acts of Ulysses and Diomedes are exalted by Dante, should be reminded that Virgil, in the Aeneid, is pretty hard on them. Diomedes, for his part in the theft of the Palladium, is impious (impius – Aen. II.163), while Ulysses is called an 'inventor of crimes' (scelerum... inventor – Aen. II.164). It seems more than likely that Dante would have shared Virgil's views of these matters. For the recovery of the notion, widespread in the ancient commentators, that Ulysses is best described as 'astutus' (in the sense of possessing low cunning) see Richard Kay, “Two Pairs of Tricks: Ulysses and Guido in Dante's Inferno XXVI-XXVII,” Quaderni d'italianistica 1 (1980), pp. 107-24; John Ahern, “Dante's Slyness: The Unnamed Sin of the Eighth Bolgia,” Romanic Review 73 (1982), pp. 275-91. For further discussion of the importance of astutia to Dante's conception of Ulysses see Stull and Hollander, “The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 (1991 [1997]), pp. 49-50.
Sources for Dante's Ulysses are found nearly everywhere, so much so that one has a feeling that more are called than should be chosen: Virgil (Logan, “The Characterization of Ulysses in Homer, Virgil and Dante: A Study in Sources and Analogues,” Annual Report of the Dante Society 82 [1964], pp. 19-46; Padoan, “Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 170-99; Thompson, “Dante's Ulysses and the Allegorical Journey,” Dante Studies 85 [1967], pp. 44-46; Dante's Epic Journeys [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974], pp. 52-61); Ovid (Picone, “Dante, Ovidio e il mito di Ulisse,” Lettere Italiane 43 [1991], pp. 500-16); Persius (Chierichini, “La III Satira di Persio 'fra le righe' di Inferno XXVI,” L'Alighieri 11 [1998], pp. 95-103); Statius (Padoan, “Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 173-76; Hagedorn, “A Statian Model for Dante's Ulysses,” Dante Studies 115 [1997], pp. 19-43); Lucan (Stull and Hollander, “The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 [1991 (1997)], pp. 1-52); Tacitus (Von Richthofen, “¿Deriva de Tácito el episodio atlántico de Ulises (Dante, Inferno, XXVI, 83 y ss.)?” in Studia in honorem prof. M. De Riquer, Vol. I [Barcelona: Crema, 1986], pp.579-83); the Alexander cycle (Avalle, “L'ultimo viaggio di Ulisse,” Studi Danteschi 43 [1966], pp. 35-67; Von Richthofen, “La dimensión atlántica del Ulises y del Alejandro medievales en el contexto del mito herácleo gaditano,” in Philologica hispaniensia in honorem Manuel Alvar, Vol. III [Madrid: Gredos, 1986], pp. 423-34); as built on negative correspondences with Moses (Porcelli, “Peccatum linguae, modello mosaico, climax narrativa nel canto di Ulisse” [1991], in his Nuovi studi su Dante e Boccaccio con analisi della “Nencia” [Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1997], pp. 20-25); even as Pope Boniface VIII ( Schäffer, “Ulisse e Papa Bonifazio: un divertimento tipologico” [unpublished paper written for a graduate seminar at Princeton, spring 1968 (in English)]). There are of course many more. For three Latin passages (from Cicero, Horace, and Seneca) that may have helped shape Dante's conception of Ulysses see Singleton (comm. to XXVI.90-120). The last of these (from Seneca's Moral Epistles LXXXVI.7, which begins “Quaeris Ulixes ubi erraverit?” is translated as follows: 'Do you raise the question, “Through what regions did Ulysses stray?” instead of trying to prevent ourselves from going astray at all times? We have no leisure to hear lectures on the question whether he was sea-tost between Italy and Sicily, or outside our known world (indeed, so long a wandering could not possibly have taken place within its narrow bounds); we ourselves encounter storms of the spirit, which toss us daily, and our depravity drives us into all the ills which troubled Ulysses.' The first commentator to cite this passage, giving credit to Michele Scherillo for advancing it, was apparently Giuseppe Vandelli (to vv. 100-102). Emilio Pasquini, who also cites it (in Dante e le figure del vero [Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001, pp. 265-67]), goes on to make an interesting observation: Petrarch, in a letter to Boccaccio of 1359, fairly obviously appropriates Dante's presentation of Ulysses (vv. 94-99) in order to portray the poet himself, seen as lacking loyalty to the family he left behind in Florence.
For the vast bibliography of work devoted to Dante's Ulysses, see Anthony K. Cassell, “'Ulisseana': A Bibliography of Dante's Ulysses to 1981,” Italian Culture 3 (1981), pp. 23-45; Massimo Seriacopi, All'estremo della “Prudentia”: L'Ulisse di Dante (Rome: Zauli, 1994), pp. 155-91.
Now that Dante knows that the flame contains Ulysses his ardor to hear him speak is nearly overwhelming.
See Daniel J. Donno, “Dante's Ulysses and Virgil's Prohibition,” Italica 50 (1973), pp. 26-37, for the notion that here Virgil actually speaks Greek (if not assuming the role of Homer, as some have argued) because of a fable, which Dante might have known, that had it that Diomedes, forced back into wandering when his home-coming is ruined by news of his wife's infidelity, went off to Daunia (Apulia?) and eventually died thereabouts. Some of the birds that dwelled there became known as 'Diomedian birds.' Their main trait was to be hostile to all barbarians and friendly to all Greeks (pp. 30-31). On the basis of this fable, Donno argues, Virgil chooses to address Diomedes and Ulysses in Greek. The argument may be forced, but it is interesting. The passage is puzzling and its difficulty is compounded by what is found at Inferno XXVII.20, when Guido da Montefeltro says that he has heard Virgil speaking Lombard dialect to Ulysses.
Virgil identifies himself as Ulysses' (and Diomedes') 'author.' Now this is strictly true, since both of them appear (if rather unfavorably) in the Aeneid. Nonetheless, one can understand why some commentators, apparently spurred on by Torquato Tasso (see Campi's comm. to vv. 79-81]), have imagined that Virgil is pretending to be Homer as he addresses Ulysses and Diomedes. However, that he refers to his work as li alti versi ('my lofty verses') probably connects with his earlier description of his Aeneid, 'l'alta mia tragedìa' (my lofty tragedy), at Inferno XX.113. It seems most sensible to believe that Virgil is speaking whatever language he usually speaks.
Ulysses' speech begins, like classical epic, in medias res (in the midst of the action, i.e., not at its beginning). Dante would seem to be portraying him as the author of his own self-celebrating song, a 'mini-epic,' as it were. He makes it sound as though staying with Circe, the enchantress, were less culpable than it probably was, in Dante's eyes. His next gesture is to boast that he had come to Gaeta before Aenas did, which city Aeneas names after his dead nurse, who died and was buried there (Aen. VII.2). (Castelvetro, always one to find fault with Dante, complains that it is not verisimilar for Ulysses to know these things from the Aeneid – Inf. XXVI.91-93). Thus does Ulysses put himself forward as a rivalrous competitor of Virgil's hero.
Ulysses' aim, to discover the truth about the world and about mankind, sounds acceptable or even heroic to many contemporary readers. When we examine the prologue to this thought, in which he denies his family feeling for Telemachus, Laertes, and Penelope in order to make his voyage, we may begin to see the inverted parallelism to the hero whom he would emulate and best, Aeneas, loyal to Ascanius, Anchises, and Creusa. If Ulysses is venturesome, Aeneas is, as Virgil hardly tires of calling him, pius, a 'family man' if ever there were one.
He and his crew of aging, tired sailors head out across the Mediterranean from Italy and reach the gates of Hercules, the very sign, even as Ulysses reports it, of the end of the known world. While Dante does not refer to it (nor to the previous voyages of Marco Polo), a number of recent commentators speculate that he was aware of the voyage of the Vivaldi brothers in 1291. They, in search of India, sailed out through the Strait of Gibraltar, having passed Spain and Africa, and were never heard from again.
It is a commonplace in the commentaries to believe that the opening words of Ulysses' speech to his men reflect the first words of Aeneas to his men (Aen. I.198). Several, however, also refer to the similar passage in Lucan (Phars. I.299), but without making any further case for Lucan's greater appositeness here. Stull and Hollander (“The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 [1991 (1997)]), pp. 8-12, argue that Caesar's infamous words to his men, urging them to march on Rome, are cited far more precisely: the phrase 'che per cento milia / perigli' (through a hundred thousand perils) mirrors nearly exactly Lucan's 'qui mille pericula' (through a thousand perils) except for the added touch that Ulysses is even more grandiloquent than Lucan's florid Julius. The result is fairly devastating to all those who argue for a positive valence for Dante's Ulysses, which is close to impossible to assert if the essential model for the hero is Julius Caesar, portrayed in Lucan as the worst of rabble-rousing, self-admiring leaders, here at the moment that begins the civil war that will destroy the Republic. For Lucan, and for Dante, this is one of the most terrible moments in Roman history. Stull and Hollander explore a series of resonances of Lucan's text in this canto.
Ulysses' final flourish not only won over his flagging shipmates, it has become a rallying cry of Romantic readers of this scene, from Tennyson to Primo Levi. What can be wrong with such desires, so fully human? Alessandra Colangeli, a student at the University of Rome, suggested, after she heard a lecture on this canto on 10 March 1997, that Ulysses' words seemed to echo those of the serpent in the Garden to Adam and Eve, promising that, if they were to eat the forbidden fruit, they would become like gods, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5). For a similar if more general view of Ulysses as the tempter see Anthony Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), p. 86. Since Adam's later words to Dante (Par. XXVI.115-117) rehearse both the scene in the Garden and Ulysses' transgression, the eating from the tree and the trespass of an established limit, the association has some grounding in Dante's text. Ignazio Baldelli (“Dante e Ulisse,” Lettere Italiane 50 [1998], pp. 358-73) is the latest to argue that the speech is the locus of Ulysses's fraudulent counsel, since he, anticipating the reckless adventure of the Vivaldi brothers, urges his men to go beyond the known limits in search of experience.
Gustavo Vinay (“Dante e Ulisse,” Nova Historia 12 [1960], pp. 5-6), points out that these verses echo the opening of the Convivio: 'All men naturally desire knowledge' (Conv. I.i.1). His insight gives support to those who have argued that Ulysses is staged as a precursor, as it were, of the venturesome younger Dante, in whose more mature view a number of positions put forward in Convivio have become something of an embarrassment. For such opinions see Luigi Valli (“Ulisse e la tragedia intellettuale di Dante,” in his La struttura morale dell'universo dantesco [Rome: Ausonia, 1935], pp. 26-40); Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 114-18; “Purgatorio II: Cato's Rebuke and Dante's scoglio,” Italica 52 [1975], pp. 348-63; Freccero (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 188-90); Gagliardi (La tragedia intellettuale di Dante: Il “Convivio” [Catanzaro: Pullano, 1994], pp. 330-32), resuscitating Valli's views (his title derives from Valli's).
Ulysses' summary of the result of his speech is a masterpiece of false modesty. Once he has uttered his words, his exhausted companions are ready for anything. We now perhaps notice that one of his key words is 'little,' one mark of a speaker who masks his pride in false humility: his reduced company of shipmates is picciola (v. 102); so is the time left his men on earth (picciola, v. 114); and now his oration is also but a little thing (v. 122), picciola used one more time, a total of three times in 21 verses. Ulysses is, in modern parlance, a con artist, and a good one, too. He has surely fooled a lot of people. Rosalma Salina Borello (“Modelli di scissione e duplicazione nel canto XXVI dell'Inferno,” in Studi di letteratura, critica e linguistica offerti a Riccardo Scrivano [Rome: Bulzoni, 2000]), p. 17, shows a similar understanding of Ulysses' use of these apparently self-deprecating words.
His men, his 'brothers,' now show their real relationship to Ulysses: it is an instrumental one. They are his oars. As Carroll suggests in his commentary, 'Is it not possible that this wild adventure is narrated as the last piece of evil counsel of which Ulysses was guilty' (Carroll, comm. to XXVI.90-142).
The five-month voyage, the ship's stern to the east (the site of sunrise, perhaps the most familiar medieval image for Christ), occupies three tercets. Ulysses, abetted by his rowers, has stormed Olympus. They are the first mortals to see the mount of purgatory since Adam and Eve left it. God's punishment does not wait long to overcome them.
For an attempt to generate a new form of the adjective, arto (narrow), instead of the widely accepted alto (deep), see Guglielmo Gorni (“I riguardi di Ercole e l'arto passo di Ulisse,” Letteratura italiana antica 1 [2000]), pp. 54-58. The possibility that this the better reading is gainsaid by the fact that there is no instance of this form in the manuscripts nor in the commentary tradition.
For a possible source of this verse in the Bible (John 16:20) see Fredi Chiappelli (“Il colore della menzogna nell'Inferno dantesco,” Letture classensi 18 [1989]), p. 123: 'You shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be changed to joy.' For another, perhaps more apt, see the commentary of Durling and Martinez (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 414, citing James 4:9: 'Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, your joy to heaviness.'
The whirlwind is frequently associated with God's power used in punishment. See, among others, Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), pp. 90-92.
The final image of Ulysses' narrative is based, as a commentator as early as Guido da Pisa (comm. to XXVI.136-142) realized, on Aeneid I.116-117, where Virgil describes the only ship in Aeneas's flotilla to be destroyed in the storm at sea: '... 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.' The echo is probably not without consequence for our view of the would-be hero Ulysses: 'The ship in point is that which carried the Lycians and faithful Orontes and which goes down within sight of the land that would have saved its sailors, as does Ulysses' ship. It is a ship of the damned. Aeneas, in his piety, is the hero; Ulysses, in his heroicness, is the failure' (Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 121).
The final verse of the canto seems also to have a classical antecedent (one not previously noted), the final verses of the seventh book of Statius's Thebaid. There the seer Amphiaraus, the first of the 'seven against Thebes' to die in that civil war, plunges into a chasm in the earth only to have the land then close back in above him (Theb. VII.821-823): 'and as he sank he looked back at the heavens and groaned to see the plain meet above him, until a fainter shock joined once more the parted fields and shut out the daylight from Avernus' (trans. Mozley). Dante has referred to Amphiaraus's descent into hell at Inferno XX.31-36. If he is thinking of it here, it would call to mind still another pagan hero who may serve as a model for Ulysses' rash voyage and entombment. (Such a view, it is remarked belatedly, has a precursor in Giuseppe Velli's identical recovery of this source [“Dante e la memoria della poesia classica,” Annali della Facoltà di lettere e di filosofia della Università di Macerata 22-23 (1989-90), p. 43].)
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Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali,
e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande!
Tra li ladron trovai cinque cotali
tuoi cittadini onde mi ven vergogna,
e tu in grande orranza non ne sali.
Ma se presso al mattin del ver si sogna,
tu sentirai, di qua da picciol tempo,
di quel che Prato, non ch'altri, t'agogna.
E se già fosse, non saria per tempo.
Così foss' ei, da che pur esser dee!
ché più mi graverà, com' più m'attempo.
Noi ci partimmo, e su per le scalee
che n'avea fatto i borni a scender pria,
rimontò 'l duca mio e trasse mee;
e proseguendo la solinga via,
tra le schegge e tra ' rocchi de lo scoglio
lo piè sanza la man non si spedia.
Allor mi dolsi, e ora mi ridoglio
quando drizzo la mente a ciò ch'io vidi,
e più lo 'ngegno affreno ch'i' non soglio,
perché non corra che virtù nol guidi;
sì che, se stella bona o miglior cosa
m'ha dato 'l ben, ch'io stessi nol m'invidi.
Quante 'l villan ch'al poggio si riposa,
nel tempo che colui che 'l mondo schiara
la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,
come la mosca cede a la zanzara,
vede lucciole giù per la vallea,
forse colà dov' e' vendemmia e ara:
di tante fiamme tutta risplendea
l'ottava bolgia, sì com' io m'accorsi
tosto che fui là 've 'l fondo parea.
E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi
vide 'l carro d'Elia al dipartire,
quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi,
che nol potea sì con li occhi seguire,
ch'el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola,
sì come nuvoletta, in sù salire:
tal si move ciascuna per la gola
del fosso, ch nessuna mostra 'l furto,
e ogne fiamma un peccatore invola.
Io stava sovra 'l ponte a veder surto,
sì che s'io non avessi un ronchion preso,
caduto sarei giù sanz' esser urto.
E 'l duca, che mi vide tanto atteso,
disse: “Dentro dai fuochi son li spirti;
catun si fascia di quel ch'elli è inceso.”
“Maestro mio,” rispuos' io, “per udirti
son io più certo; ma già m'era avviso
che così fosse, e già voleva dirti:
chi è 'n quel foco che vien sì diviso
di sopra, che par surger de la pira
dov' Eteòcle col fratel fu miso?”
Rispuose a me: “Là dentro si martira
Ulisse e Dïomede, e così insieme
a la vendetta vanno come a l'ira;
e dentro da la lor fiamma si geme
l'agguato del caval che fé la porta
onde uscì de' Romani il gentil seme.
Piangevisi entro l'arte per che, morta,
Deïdamìa ancor si duol d'Achille,
e del Palladio pena vi si porta.”
“S'ei posson dentro da quelle faville
parlar,” diss' io, “maestro, assai ten priego
e ripriego, che 'l priego vaglia mille,
che non mi facci de l'attender niego
fin che la fiamma cornuta qua vegna;
vedi che del disio ver' lei mi piego!”
Ed elli a me: “La tua preghiera è degna
di molta loda, e io però l'accetto;
ma fa che la tua lingua si sostegna.
Lascia parlare a me, ch'i' ho concetto
ciò che tu vuoi; ch'ei sarebbero schivi,
perch' e' fuor greci, forse del tuo detto.”
Poi che la fiamma fu venuta quivi
dove parve al mio duca tempo e loco,
in questa forma lui parlare audivi:
“O voi che siete due dentro ad un foco,
s'io meritai di voi mentre ch'io vissi,
s'io meritai di voi assai o poco
quando nel mondo li alti versi scrissi,
non vi movete; ma l'un di voi dica
dove, per lui, perduto a morir gissi.”
Lo maggior corno de la fiamma antica
cominciò a crollarsi mormorando,
pur come quella cui vento affatica;
indi la cima qua e là menando,
come fosse la lingua che parlasse,
gittò voce di fuori e disse: “Quando
mi diparti' da Circe, che sottrasse
me più d'un anno là presso a Gaeta,
prima che sì Enëa la nomasse,
né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta
del vecchio padre, né 'l debito amore
lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,
vincer potero dentro a me l'ardore
ch'i' ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi umani e del valore;
ma misi me per l'alto mare aperto
sol con un legno e con quella compagna
picciola da la qual non fui diserto.
L'un lito e l'altro vidi infin la Spagna,
fin nel Morrocco, e l'isola d'i Sardi,
e l'altre che quel mare intorno bagna.
Io e' compagni eravam vecchi e tardi
quando venimmo a quella foce stretta
dov' Ercule segnò li suoi riguardi
acció che l'uom più oltre non si metta;
da la man destra mi lasciai Sibilia,
da l'altra già m'avea lasciata Setta.
'O frati,' dissi, 'che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l'occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente
non vogliate negar l'esperïenza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.'
Li miei compagni fec' io sì aguti,
con questa orazion picciola, al cammino,
che a pena poscia li avrei ritenuti;
e volta nostra poppa nel mattino,
de' remi facemmo ali al folle volo,
sempre acquistando dal lato mancino.
Tutte le stelle già de l'altro polo
vedea la notte, e 'l nostro tanto basso,
che non surgëa fuor del marin suolo.
Cinque volte racceso e tante casso
lo lume era di sotto da la luna,
poi che 'ntrati eravam ne l'alto passo,
quando n'apparve una montagna, bruna
per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto
quanto veduta non avëa alcuna.
Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;
ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque
e percosse del legno il primo canto.
Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l'acque;
a la quarta levar la poppa in suso
e la prora ire in giù, com' altrui piacque,
infin che 'l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.”
Rejoice, O Florence, since thou art so great,
That over sea and land thou beatest thy wings,
And throughout Hell thy name is spread abroad!
Among the thieves five citizens of thine
Like these I found, whence shame comes unto me,
And thou thereby to no great honour risest.
But if when morn is near our dreams are true,
Feel shalt thou in a little time from now
What Prato, if none other, craves for thee.
And if it now were, it were not too soon;
Would that it were, seeing it needs must be,
For 'twill aggrieve me more the more I age.
We went our way, and up along the stairs
The bourns had made us to descend before,
Remounted my Conductor and drew me.
And following the solitary path
Among the rocks and ridges of the crag,
The foot without the hand sped not at all.
Then sorrowed I, and sorrow now again,
When I direct my mind to what I saw,
And more my genius curb than I am wont,
That it may run not unless virtue guide it;
So that if some good star, or better thing,
Have given me good, I may myself not grudge it.
As many as the hind (who on the hill
Rests at the time when he who lights the world
His countenance keeps least concealed from us,
While as the fly gives place unto the gnat)
Seeth the glow-worms down along the valley,
Perchance there where he ploughs and makes his vintage;
With flames as manifold resplendent all
Was the eighth Bolgia, as I grew aware
As soon as I was where the depth appeared.
And such as he who with the bears avenged him
Beheld Elijah's chariot at departing,
What time the steeds to heaven erect uprose,
For with his eye he could not follow it
So as to see aught else than flame alone,
Even as a little cloud ascending upward,
Thus each along the gorge of the intrenchment
Was moving; for not one reveals the theft,
And every flame a sinner steals away.
I stood upon the bridge uprisen to see,
So that, if I had seized not on a rock,
Down had I fallen without being pushed.
And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,
Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;
Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
"My Master," I replied, "by hearing thee
I am more sure; but I surmised already
It might be so, and already wished to ask thee
Who is within that fire, which comes so cleft
At top, it seems uprising from the pyre
Where was Eteocles with his brother placed."
He answered me: "Within there are tormented
Ulysses and Diomed, and thus together
They unto vengeance run as unto wrath.
And there within their flame do they lament
The ambush of the horse, which made the door
Whence issued forth the Romans' gentle seed;
Therein is wept the craft, for which being dead
Deidamia still deplores Achilles,
And pain for the Palladium there is borne."
"If they within those sparks possess the power
To speak," I said, "thee, Master, much I pray,
And re-pray, that the prayer be worth a thousand,
That thou make no denial of awaiting
Until the horned flame shall hither come;
Thou seest that with desire I lean towards it."
And he to me: "Worthy is thy entreaty
Of much applause, and therefore I accept it;
But take heed that thy tongue restrain itself.
Leave me to speak, because I have conceived
That which thou wishest; for they might disdain
Perchance, since they were Greeks, discourse of thine."
When now the flame had come unto that point,
Where to my Leader it seemed time and place,
After this fashion did I hear him speak:
"O ye, who are twofold within one fire,
If I deserved of you, while I was living,
If I deserved of you or much or little
When in the world I wrote the lofty verses,
Do not move on, but one of you declare
Whither, being lost, he went away to die."
Then of the antique flame the greater horn,
Murmuring, began to wave itself about
Even as a flame doth which the wind fatigues.
Thereafterward, the summit to and fro
Moving as if it were the tongue that spake,
It uttered forth a voice, and said: "When I
From Circe had departed, who concealed me
More than a year there near unto Gaeta,
Or ever yet Aeneas named it so,
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind;
But I put forth on the high open sea
With one sole ship, and that small company
By which I never had deserted been.
Both of the shores I saw as far as Spain,
Far as Morocco, and the isle of Sardes,
And the others which that sea bathes round about.
I and my company were old and slow
When at that narrow passage we arrived
Where Hercules his landmarks set as signals,
That man no farther onward should adventure.
On the right hand behind me left I Seville,
And on the other already had left Ceuta.
'O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand
Perils,' I said, 'have come unto the West,
To this so inconsiderable vigil
Which is remaining of your senses still
Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.'
So eager did I render my companions,
With this brief exhortation, for the voyage,
That then I hardly could have held them back.
And having turned our stern unto the morning,
We of the oars made wings for our mad flight,
Evermore gaining on the larboard side.
Already all the stars of the other pole
The night beheld, and ours so very low
It did not rise above the ocean floor.
Five times rekindled and as many quenched
Had been the splendour underneath the moon,
Since we had entered into the deep pass,
When there appeared to us a mountain, dim
From distance, and it seemed to me so high
As I had never any one beheld.
Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping;
For out of the new land a whirlwind rose,
And smote upon the fore part of the ship.
Three times it made her whirl with all the waters,
At the fourth time it made the stern uplift,
And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,
Until the sea above us closed again."
Matching the ironic apostrophe of Pistoia that follows the departure of Vanni Fucci in the last canto (Inf. XXV.10-12), this one of Florence comes in the wake of the poem's departure from the five Florentine thieves. The image of Florence as winged has caused some puzzlement. While commentators, beginning perhaps with Scartazzini/Vandelli, point out that Dante's words most probably echo the Latin inscription, dating to 1255, on the façade of the Florentine Palazzo del Podestà, proclaiming that Florence is in possession of the sea, the land, indeed the entire world, we are still left to speculate on Dante's reasons for presenting her as winged. Whatever his reason, we might want to reflect that he thought of himself as the 'wingèd one' because of the easy pun available from his surname, Alighieri, in Latin 'aliger' (winged). See Hugh Shankland, “Dante 'Aliger,'” Modern Language Review 70 (1975), pp. 764-85; “Dante 'Aliger' and Ulysses,” Italian Studies 32 (1977), pp. 21-40. In this canto the apostrophised city and the seafaring Ulysses are both associated with 'wings' ('in our mad flight we turned our oars to wings' [v. 125 – Inf. XXVI.125]); at least intrinsically, the protagonist is also. He is on a better-purposed 'flight.' For these motifs and another related one see Maria Corti, “On the Metaphors of Sailing, Flight, and Tongues of Fire in the Episode of Ulysses (Inf. 26),” Stanford Italian Review 9 (1990), pp. 33-47.
The text alludes to the classical and medieval belief that morning dreams were more truthful in their content than any others. Guido da Pisa is the first (but hardly the last) to refer to a text in Ovid to this effect (Heroides XIX.195-196). On this subject see Charles Speroni's article, “Dante's Prophetic Morning-Dreams,” Studies in Philology 45 (1948), pp. 50-59. And see, for the same view of morning dreams, Purgatorio IX.16-18.
The passage about Prato has caused two interpretive problems: (1) Does it refer to the anger felt by Cardinal Niccolò da Prato when he failed to bring peace between the warring Florentine factions in 1304 or to the rebellion of the town of Prato in 1309, when Florence's small neighbor cast out its Black Guelphs? (2) Is Dante heartened or heart-sick as he contemplates this 'future' event?
It was only in the eighteenth century that a commentator, Pompeo Venturi, suggested a reference to the cardinal (comm. to XXVI.9). Further, since the second event was probably roughly contemporaneous to the writing of this canto, it seems likely that Dante would have enjoyed having so recent a piece of news as confirmation of his 'prophecy.' As to his emotions, it seems more reasonable to reflect that Dante is admitting that he will only be happy once the power of the Black Guelphs of Florence is destroyed; he is in pain as he awaits that liberation. In other words, this is not an expression of sadness for the city's coming tribulation, but a desire to see them come to pass – and that is the common view of the early commentators. As Poletto was perhaps the first commentator to note (in 1894), the passage is very like one found in one of Dante's 'political epistles' (Epistle VI.17), when he hopes that the invading forces of Emperor Henry VII will liberate the city. As Chiavacci Leonardi observes (Inferno, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1991], p. 794), according to the chronicle of Giovanni Villani, news of Henry's election in 1308 was causing excited imperialist hopes all through Italy in 1309.
While we do not believe that Dante says here what Petrocchi says he does, we have, as always, followed his text, which reads iborni (pallid, the color and coolness of ivory) and not, as the text had previously stood, i borni (the outcroppings of the rocks). In our opinion the 'old' reading is the superior one. Instead of 'on those stairs that turned us pale when we came down' we would say 'on the stairs the jutting rocks had made for our descent.'
The steepness of the rock causes Dante to find hand-holds on the wall as he mounts.
According to Lino Pertile (“Dante e l'ingegno di Ulisse,” Stanford Italian Review 1 [1979], pp. 35-65), those who propose a negative view of Ulysses fail to acknowledge the importance of these verses, which reveal the poet's sympathy for the Greek hero even now as he writes of him. He cites (p. 37) Ovid (Metam. XIII.135-139) in support of his argument. However, that text offers Ulysses' vaunt of his own worthiness to receive the arms of Achilles (denying the claims of Ajax), and the entire passage gives us the portrait of a figure full of pride and self-love. See Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 115-16, arguing that Dante, in this passage, is fully conscious of his previous 'Ulyssean' efforts, undertaken by his venturesome and prideful intellect, and now hopes to keep them under control. Castelvetro's reading of the passage is in this vein; according to him the poet grieves 'for having improperly put to use my genius' (comm. to vv. 19-22). Dante hopes, in other words, to be exactly unlike Ulysses.
In a lecture at Dartmouth College in the early 1980s Prof. Rachel Jacoff pointed out that Dante's verb for his necessary restraint, affreno ('rein in,' 'curb'), reflects precisely what Phaeton failed to do, rein in his steeds: 'Fetonte abbandonò li freni' (Inf. XVII.107).
The first of two elaborate similes in prologue to the appearance of Ulysses deals with the number of the false counsellors: they are numerous as fireflies. Dante, as peasant (il villano) resting on his hillside (poggio – Frankel [“The Context of Dante's Ulysses: the Similes in Inferno XXVI,” Dante Studies 104 (1986), pp. 102-5]) contrasts his 'humble' hillock with Ulysses' 'prideful' mountain [verse 133], looks out upon this valley full of fireflies. This peaceful scene lulls many readers into a sort of moral exemption for Ulysses; if he looks so pleasant, how can he be seen as sinful? In fact the distancing effect of the simile makes Ulysses seem small and relatively insignificant. We can imagine how he might feel, told that he had been compared to a firefly.
Many readers are rightly reminded of the previous simile involving a rustic (lo villanello) at Inferno XXIV.7-15.
For the flames as reminiscent of the Epistle of James (James 3:4-6) see Richard Bates and Thomas Rendall (“Dante's Ulysses and the Epistle of James,” Dante Studies 107 [1989], pp. 33-44) and Alison Cornish (“The Epistle of James in Inferno 26,” Traditio 45 [1989-90], pp. 367-79): 'Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven by fierce winds, yet are turned about with a very small helm, wherever the steersman pleases. Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasts many things. Behold how great a matter a little fire kindles! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell.' Pietro di Dante was the first to cite this passage in connection with Dante's description of the flames here (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 31-33), and also refers to it in both later redactions of his commentary.
The second Ulyssean simile describes the flame-wrapped appearance of Ulysses in terms of Elijah's fiery ascent to Heaven. Perhaps the first extended discussion of the biblical text behind the passage was offered by Margherita Frankel (“The Context of Dante's Ulysses: the Similes in Inferno XXVI,” Dante Studies 104 [1986]), pp. 110-16, who argues that, while Elijah is seen as antithetical to Ulysses (see Anthony K. Cassell, Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984], pp. 88-93), Dante is also seen as related to the negative aspect of Elisha (his pride in taking on the prophet's mantle) – see II Kings 2:9-12. She is answered by Luisa Ferretti Cuomo (“La polisemia delle similitudini nella Divina Commedia. Eliseo: un caso esemplare,” Strumenti critici 10 n.s. [1995], pp. 105-42) who regards Elisha as only a positive figure of Dante, similarly accepting his role as successor prophet. For the same view see Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 117. See also Kablitz (“Il canto di Ulisse [Inferno XXVI] agli occhi dei commentatori contemporanei e delle indagini moderne,” Letteratura italiana antica 2 [2001], pp. 74-84), who also argues against Frankel's interpretation, but seems unaware of Ferretti Cuomo's work.
Elisha was avenged by the bears in that the forty-two children who mocked his prophetic calling, addressing him as 'Baldy' (calve), were attacked and lacerated by two bears (II Kings 2:23-24). For the biblical resonance of this scene see Paola Rigo, Memoria classica e memoria biblica in Dante (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 51-54. Dante refers to this incident in one of his 'political epistles' (see the note to Inf. XXVI.8-12): Epistle VI.16.
The protagonist's excitement at the prospect of seeing Ulysses is evident (Ulysses has not been identified yet, but the poet seems to be taking a liberty in allowing his character to fathom who is about to appear). In his reckless abandon to gain experience of this great sinner, he resembles Ulysses himself.
Virgil's point seems to be that each of the flame-enclosed sinners is covered by the external sign of their inner ardor, their longing to captivate the minds of those upon whom they practiced their fraudulent work.
Almost all commentators point to the passage in Statius (Theb. XII.429-432) that describes the immolation of the corpses of the two warring brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, whose enmity was the root of the civil war in Thebes and is manifest now even in their death, as the smoke from their burning bodies will not join. Among the early commentators only Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 52-56) noticed that the same scene is reported in similar ways in Lucan as well (Phars. I.551-552). Some dozen or more modern commentators, from Venturi on, have also done so.
Ulysses and Diomedes are clearly indicated as suffering the punishment of God for their fraudulent acts; yet this indictment has not kept readers from admiring them – or at least Ulysses. Perhaps the central problem in the large debate that has surrounded Dante's version of the Greek hero in the last century and a half is how sympathetically we are meant to respond to him. To put that another way, what is the nature of Ulysses' sin, and how urgently is it meant to govern the reader's sense of his worth? And a further complication is of more recent vintage: what should we make of the at least apparent similarity between Ulysses and Dante himself? Chiavacci Leonardi has made a useful distinction between the two essential attitudes that distinguish divergent readings of the undoubtedly heroic figure (Inferno, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1991], p. 762): (1) Ulysses is marked by greatness; he is unfortunate but guiltless; (2) he is characterized by the sin of pride, like Adam. For an example of the first view see Francesco De Sanctis in 1870: Dante 'erects a statue to this precursor of Christopher Columbus, a pyramid set in the mud of hell' (Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, 4th ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1949 (1870)], pp. 201-2). For similar views see Benedetto Croce (La poesia di Dante, 2nd ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1921]), p. 98, and Mario Fubini (“Il peccato d'Ulisse” and “Il canto XXVI dell'Inferno,” in his Il peccato d'Ulisse e altri scritti danteschi [Milan: Ricciardi, 1966]), pp. 1-76. Attilio Momigliano (comm. to XXVI.64-69) throws all caution to the wind. He complains that the first 63 verses of the canto are too dry and erudite. Now that Ulysses is on the scene, we breathe the air of true and enthusiastic poetry. 'Appearances notwithstanding,' he says, 'Dante not only does not condemn the fraudulent acts of Ulysses and Diomedes, he exalts them.' Among contemporaries, Lino Pertile is essentially in this camp (“Dante e l'ingegno di Ulisse,” Stanford Italian Review 1 [1979], pp. 35-65). The negative view in modern discussions was enunciated clearly by Bruno Nardi (“La tragedia di Ulisse,” in his Dante e la cultura medievale [Bari: Laterza, 1942], pp. 89-99). See also Julius Wilhelm, “Die Gestalt des Odysseus in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie,” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 38 (1960), pp. 75-93; Giorgio Padoan (“Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 170-99); Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), pp. 114-23; Scott (“Inferno XXVI: Dante's Ulysses,” Lettere Italiane 23 (1971), pp. 145-86; Iannucci (“Ulysses' folle volo: the Burden of History,” Medioevo romanzo 3 [1976]. pp. 410-45). Recently a third 'school' has opened its doors, one that finds Ulysses less than totally admirable and yet associated with Dante, who presents himself, just beneath the lines of his text, as a trespassing voyager himself. See Mazzotta (“Poetics of History: Inferno XXVI,” Diacritics [summer 1975], p. 41); Stierle (“Odysseus und Aeneas: Eine typologische Konfiguration in Dantes Divina Commedia,” in Das fremde Wort: Studien zur Interdependenz von Texten, Festschrift für Karl Maurer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ilse Nolting-Hauff & Joachim Schulze [Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1988], pp. 111-54); Barolini (The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], passim); Bloom (“The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice,” in his The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994], pp. 85-89). For a rejoinder to the position of these critics see Stull and Hollander (“The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 1991 [1997]), pp. 43-52.
Virgil lists the sins of the two heroes: the stratagem of the troop-hiding Trojan horse (with which Ulysses, if not Diomedes, is associated in Virgil, Aen. II); Ulysses' trickery in getting Achilles to join the war against Troy, thus abandoning, on the isle of Scyros, his beloved Deidamia (as recounted in Statius's unfinished Achilleid), who subsequently died of grief at the news of his death in Troy; the joint adventure in which they stole the Palladium, image of Athena, a large wooden statue, in return for which the horse served as a fraudulent peace-offering (Aen. II.163-169). Those who, like Momigliano, believe that the fraudulent acts of Ulysses and Diomedes are exalted by Dante, should be reminded that Virgil, in the Aeneid, is pretty hard on them. Diomedes, for his part in the theft of the Palladium, is impious (impius – Aen. II.163), while Ulysses is called an 'inventor of crimes' (scelerum... inventor – Aen. II.164). It seems more than likely that Dante would have shared Virgil's views of these matters. For the recovery of the notion, widespread in the ancient commentators, that Ulysses is best described as 'astutus' (in the sense of possessing low cunning) see Richard Kay, “Two Pairs of Tricks: Ulysses and Guido in Dante's Inferno XXVI-XXVII,” Quaderni d'italianistica 1 (1980), pp. 107-24; John Ahern, “Dante's Slyness: The Unnamed Sin of the Eighth Bolgia,” Romanic Review 73 (1982), pp. 275-91. For further discussion of the importance of astutia to Dante's conception of Ulysses see Stull and Hollander, “The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 (1991 [1997]), pp. 49-50.
Sources for Dante's Ulysses are found nearly everywhere, so much so that one has a feeling that more are called than should be chosen: Virgil (Logan, “The Characterization of Ulysses in Homer, Virgil and Dante: A Study in Sources and Analogues,” Annual Report of the Dante Society 82 [1964], pp. 19-46; Padoan, “Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 170-99; Thompson, “Dante's Ulysses and the Allegorical Journey,” Dante Studies 85 [1967], pp. 44-46; Dante's Epic Journeys [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974], pp. 52-61); Ovid (Picone, “Dante, Ovidio e il mito di Ulisse,” Lettere Italiane 43 [1991], pp. 500-16); Persius (Chierichini, “La III Satira di Persio 'fra le righe' di Inferno XXVI,” L'Alighieri 11 [1998], pp. 95-103); Statius (Padoan, “Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 173-76; Hagedorn, “A Statian Model for Dante's Ulysses,” Dante Studies 115 [1997], pp. 19-43); Lucan (Stull and Hollander, “The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 [1991 (1997)], pp. 1-52); Tacitus (Von Richthofen, “¿Deriva de Tácito el episodio atlántico de Ulises (Dante, Inferno, XXVI, 83 y ss.)?” in Studia in honorem prof. M. De Riquer, Vol. I [Barcelona: Crema, 1986], pp.579-83); the Alexander cycle (Avalle, “L'ultimo viaggio di Ulisse,” Studi Danteschi 43 [1966], pp. 35-67; Von Richthofen, “La dimensión atlántica del Ulises y del Alejandro medievales en el contexto del mito herácleo gaditano,” in Philologica hispaniensia in honorem Manuel Alvar, Vol. III [Madrid: Gredos, 1986], pp. 423-34); as built on negative correspondences with Moses (Porcelli, “Peccatum linguae, modello mosaico, climax narrativa nel canto di Ulisse” [1991], in his Nuovi studi su Dante e Boccaccio con analisi della “Nencia” [Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1997], pp. 20-25); even as Pope Boniface VIII ( Schäffer, “Ulisse e Papa Bonifazio: un divertimento tipologico” [unpublished paper written for a graduate seminar at Princeton, spring 1968 (in English)]). There are of course many more. For three Latin passages (from Cicero, Horace, and Seneca) that may have helped shape Dante's conception of Ulysses see Singleton (comm. to XXVI.90-120). The last of these (from Seneca's Moral Epistles LXXXVI.7, which begins “Quaeris Ulixes ubi erraverit?” is translated as follows: 'Do you raise the question, “Through what regions did Ulysses stray?” instead of trying to prevent ourselves from going astray at all times? We have no leisure to hear lectures on the question whether he was sea-tost between Italy and Sicily, or outside our known world (indeed, so long a wandering could not possibly have taken place within its narrow bounds); we ourselves encounter storms of the spirit, which toss us daily, and our depravity drives us into all the ills which troubled Ulysses.' The first commentator to cite this passage, giving credit to Michele Scherillo for advancing it, was apparently Giuseppe Vandelli (to vv. 100-102). Emilio Pasquini, who also cites it (in Dante e le figure del vero [Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001, pp. 265-67]), goes on to make an interesting observation: Petrarch, in a letter to Boccaccio of 1359, fairly obviously appropriates Dante's presentation of Ulysses (vv. 94-99) in order to portray the poet himself, seen as lacking loyalty to the family he left behind in Florence.
For the vast bibliography of work devoted to Dante's Ulysses, see Anthony K. Cassell, “'Ulisseana': A Bibliography of Dante's Ulysses to 1981,” Italian Culture 3 (1981), pp. 23-45; Massimo Seriacopi, All'estremo della “Prudentia”: L'Ulisse di Dante (Rome: Zauli, 1994), pp. 155-91.
Now that Dante knows that the flame contains Ulysses his ardor to hear him speak is nearly overwhelming.
See Daniel J. Donno, “Dante's Ulysses and Virgil's Prohibition,” Italica 50 (1973), pp. 26-37, for the notion that here Virgil actually speaks Greek (if not assuming the role of Homer, as some have argued) because of a fable, which Dante might have known, that had it that Diomedes, forced back into wandering when his home-coming is ruined by news of his wife's infidelity, went off to Daunia (Apulia?) and eventually died thereabouts. Some of the birds that dwelled there became known as 'Diomedian birds.' Their main trait was to be hostile to all barbarians and friendly to all Greeks (pp. 30-31). On the basis of this fable, Donno argues, Virgil chooses to address Diomedes and Ulysses in Greek. The argument may be forced, but it is interesting. The passage is puzzling and its difficulty is compounded by what is found at Inferno XXVII.20, when Guido da Montefeltro says that he has heard Virgil speaking Lombard dialect to Ulysses.
Virgil identifies himself as Ulysses' (and Diomedes') 'author.' Now this is strictly true, since both of them appear (if rather unfavorably) in the Aeneid. Nonetheless, one can understand why some commentators, apparently spurred on by Torquato Tasso (see Campi's comm. to vv. 79-81]), have imagined that Virgil is pretending to be Homer as he addresses Ulysses and Diomedes. However, that he refers to his work as li alti versi ('my lofty verses') probably connects with his earlier description of his Aeneid, 'l'alta mia tragedìa' (my lofty tragedy), at Inferno XX.113. It seems most sensible to believe that Virgil is speaking whatever language he usually speaks.
Ulysses' speech begins, like classical epic, in medias res (in the midst of the action, i.e., not at its beginning). Dante would seem to be portraying him as the author of his own self-celebrating song, a 'mini-epic,' as it were. He makes it sound as though staying with Circe, the enchantress, were less culpable than it probably was, in Dante's eyes. His next gesture is to boast that he had come to Gaeta before Aenas did, which city Aeneas names after his dead nurse, who died and was buried there (Aen. VII.2). (Castelvetro, always one to find fault with Dante, complains that it is not verisimilar for Ulysses to know these things from the Aeneid – Inf. XXVI.91-93). Thus does Ulysses put himself forward as a rivalrous competitor of Virgil's hero.
Ulysses' aim, to discover the truth about the world and about mankind, sounds acceptable or even heroic to many contemporary readers. When we examine the prologue to this thought, in which he denies his family feeling for Telemachus, Laertes, and Penelope in order to make his voyage, we may begin to see the inverted parallelism to the hero whom he would emulate and best, Aeneas, loyal to Ascanius, Anchises, and Creusa. If Ulysses is venturesome, Aeneas is, as Virgil hardly tires of calling him, pius, a 'family man' if ever there were one.
He and his crew of aging, tired sailors head out across the Mediterranean from Italy and reach the gates of Hercules, the very sign, even as Ulysses reports it, of the end of the known world. While Dante does not refer to it (nor to the previous voyages of Marco Polo), a number of recent commentators speculate that he was aware of the voyage of the Vivaldi brothers in 1291. They, in search of India, sailed out through the Strait of Gibraltar, having passed Spain and Africa, and were never heard from again.
It is a commonplace in the commentaries to believe that the opening words of Ulysses' speech to his men reflect the first words of Aeneas to his men (Aen. I.198). Several, however, also refer to the similar passage in Lucan (Phars. I.299), but without making any further case for Lucan's greater appositeness here. Stull and Hollander (“The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 [1991 (1997)]), pp. 8-12, argue that Caesar's infamous words to his men, urging them to march on Rome, are cited far more precisely: the phrase 'che per cento milia / perigli' (through a hundred thousand perils) mirrors nearly exactly Lucan's 'qui mille pericula' (through a thousand perils) except for the added touch that Ulysses is even more grandiloquent than Lucan's florid Julius. The result is fairly devastating to all those who argue for a positive valence for Dante's Ulysses, which is close to impossible to assert if the essential model for the hero is Julius Caesar, portrayed in Lucan as the worst of rabble-rousing, self-admiring leaders, here at the moment that begins the civil war that will destroy the Republic. For Lucan, and for Dante, this is one of the most terrible moments in Roman history. Stull and Hollander explore a series of resonances of Lucan's text in this canto.
Ulysses' final flourish not only won over his flagging shipmates, it has become a rallying cry of Romantic readers of this scene, from Tennyson to Primo Levi. What can be wrong with such desires, so fully human? Alessandra Colangeli, a student at the University of Rome, suggested, after she heard a lecture on this canto on 10 March 1997, that Ulysses' words seemed to echo those of the serpent in the Garden to Adam and Eve, promising that, if they were to eat the forbidden fruit, they would become like gods, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5). For a similar if more general view of Ulysses as the tempter see Anthony Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), p. 86. Since Adam's later words to Dante (Par. XXVI.115-117) rehearse both the scene in the Garden and Ulysses' transgression, the eating from the tree and the trespass of an established limit, the association has some grounding in Dante's text. Ignazio Baldelli (“Dante e Ulisse,” Lettere Italiane 50 [1998], pp. 358-73) is the latest to argue that the speech is the locus of Ulysses's fraudulent counsel, since he, anticipating the reckless adventure of the Vivaldi brothers, urges his men to go beyond the known limits in search of experience.
Gustavo Vinay (“Dante e Ulisse,” Nova Historia 12 [1960], pp. 5-6), points out that these verses echo the opening of the Convivio: 'All men naturally desire knowledge' (Conv. I.i.1). His insight gives support to those who have argued that Ulysses is staged as a precursor, as it were, of the venturesome younger Dante, in whose more mature view a number of positions put forward in Convivio have become something of an embarrassment. For such opinions see Luigi Valli (“Ulisse e la tragedia intellettuale di Dante,” in his La struttura morale dell'universo dantesco [Rome: Ausonia, 1935], pp. 26-40); Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 114-18; “Purgatorio II: Cato's Rebuke and Dante's scoglio,” Italica 52 [1975], pp. 348-63; Freccero (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 188-90); Gagliardi (La tragedia intellettuale di Dante: Il “Convivio” [Catanzaro: Pullano, 1994], pp. 330-32), resuscitating Valli's views (his title derives from Valli's).
Ulysses' summary of the result of his speech is a masterpiece of false modesty. Once he has uttered his words, his exhausted companions are ready for anything. We now perhaps notice that one of his key words is 'little,' one mark of a speaker who masks his pride in false humility: his reduced company of shipmates is picciola (v. 102); so is the time left his men on earth (picciola, v. 114); and now his oration is also but a little thing (v. 122), picciola used one more time, a total of three times in 21 verses. Ulysses is, in modern parlance, a con artist, and a good one, too. He has surely fooled a lot of people. Rosalma Salina Borello (“Modelli di scissione e duplicazione nel canto XXVI dell'Inferno,” in Studi di letteratura, critica e linguistica offerti a Riccardo Scrivano [Rome: Bulzoni, 2000]), p. 17, shows a similar understanding of Ulysses' use of these apparently self-deprecating words.
His men, his 'brothers,' now show their real relationship to Ulysses: it is an instrumental one. They are his oars. As Carroll suggests in his commentary, 'Is it not possible that this wild adventure is narrated as the last piece of evil counsel of which Ulysses was guilty' (Carroll, comm. to XXVI.90-142).
The five-month voyage, the ship's stern to the east (the site of sunrise, perhaps the most familiar medieval image for Christ), occupies three tercets. Ulysses, abetted by his rowers, has stormed Olympus. They are the first mortals to see the mount of purgatory since Adam and Eve left it. God's punishment does not wait long to overcome them.
For an attempt to generate a new form of the adjective, arto (narrow), instead of the widely accepted alto (deep), see Guglielmo Gorni (“I riguardi di Ercole e l'arto passo di Ulisse,” Letteratura italiana antica 1 [2000]), pp. 54-58. The possibility that this the better reading is gainsaid by the fact that there is no instance of this form in the manuscripts nor in the commentary tradition.
For a possible source of this verse in the Bible (John 16:20) see Fredi Chiappelli (“Il colore della menzogna nell'Inferno dantesco,” Letture classensi 18 [1989]), p. 123: 'You shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be changed to joy.' For another, perhaps more apt, see the commentary of Durling and Martinez (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 414, citing James 4:9: 'Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, your joy to heaviness.'
The whirlwind is frequently associated with God's power used in punishment. See, among others, Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), pp. 90-92.
The final image of Ulysses' narrative is based, as a commentator as early as Guido da Pisa (comm. to XXVI.136-142) realized, on Aeneid I.116-117, where Virgil describes the only ship in Aeneas's flotilla to be destroyed in the storm at sea: '... 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.' The echo is probably not without consequence for our view of the would-be hero Ulysses: 'The ship in point is that which carried the Lycians and faithful Orontes and which goes down within sight of the land that would have saved its sailors, as does Ulysses' ship. It is a ship of the damned. Aeneas, in his piety, is the hero; Ulysses, in his heroicness, is the failure' (Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 121).
The final verse of the canto seems also to have a classical antecedent (one not previously noted), the final verses of the seventh book of Statius's Thebaid. There the seer Amphiaraus, the first of the 'seven against Thebes' to die in that civil war, plunges into a chasm in the earth only to have the land then close back in above him (Theb. VII.821-823): 'and as he sank he looked back at the heavens and groaned to see the plain meet above him, until a fainter shock joined once more the parted fields and shut out the daylight from Avernus' (trans. Mozley). Dante has referred to Amphiaraus's descent into hell at Inferno XX.31-36. If he is thinking of it here, it would call to mind still another pagan hero who may serve as a model for Ulysses' rash voyage and entombment. (Such a view, it is remarked belatedly, has a precursor in Giuseppe Velli's identical recovery of this source [“Dante e la memoria della poesia classica,” Annali della Facoltà di lettere e di filosofia della Università di Macerata 22-23 (1989-90), p. 43].)
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Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali,
e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande!
Tra li ladron trovai cinque cotali
tuoi cittadini onde mi ven vergogna,
e tu in grande orranza non ne sali.
Ma se presso al mattin del ver si sogna,
tu sentirai, di qua da picciol tempo,
di quel che Prato, non ch'altri, t'agogna.
E se già fosse, non saria per tempo.
Così foss' ei, da che pur esser dee!
ché più mi graverà, com' più m'attempo.
Noi ci partimmo, e su per le scalee
che n'avea fatto i borni a scender pria,
rimontò 'l duca mio e trasse mee;
e proseguendo la solinga via,
tra le schegge e tra ' rocchi de lo scoglio
lo piè sanza la man non si spedia.
Allor mi dolsi, e ora mi ridoglio
quando drizzo la mente a ciò ch'io vidi,
e più lo 'ngegno affreno ch'i' non soglio,
perché non corra che virtù nol guidi;
sì che, se stella bona o miglior cosa
m'ha dato 'l ben, ch'io stessi nol m'invidi.
Quante 'l villan ch'al poggio si riposa,
nel tempo che colui che 'l mondo schiara
la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,
come la mosca cede a la zanzara,
vede lucciole giù per la vallea,
forse colà dov' e' vendemmia e ara:
di tante fiamme tutta risplendea
l'ottava bolgia, sì com' io m'accorsi
tosto che fui là 've 'l fondo parea.
E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi
vide 'l carro d'Elia al dipartire,
quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi,
che nol potea sì con li occhi seguire,
ch'el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola,
sì come nuvoletta, in sù salire:
tal si move ciascuna per la gola
del fosso, ch nessuna mostra 'l furto,
e ogne fiamma un peccatore invola.
Io stava sovra 'l ponte a veder surto,
sì che s'io non avessi un ronchion preso,
caduto sarei giù sanz' esser urto.
E 'l duca, che mi vide tanto atteso,
disse: “Dentro dai fuochi son li spirti;
catun si fascia di quel ch'elli è inceso.”
“Maestro mio,” rispuos' io, “per udirti
son io più certo; ma già m'era avviso
che così fosse, e già voleva dirti:
chi è 'n quel foco che vien sì diviso
di sopra, che par surger de la pira
dov' Eteòcle col fratel fu miso?”
Rispuose a me: “Là dentro si martira
Ulisse e Dïomede, e così insieme
a la vendetta vanno come a l'ira;
e dentro da la lor fiamma si geme
l'agguato del caval che fé la porta
onde uscì de' Romani il gentil seme.
Piangevisi entro l'arte per che, morta,
Deïdamìa ancor si duol d'Achille,
e del Palladio pena vi si porta.”
“S'ei posson dentro da quelle faville
parlar,” diss' io, “maestro, assai ten priego
e ripriego, che 'l priego vaglia mille,
che non mi facci de l'attender niego
fin che la fiamma cornuta qua vegna;
vedi che del disio ver' lei mi piego!”
Ed elli a me: “La tua preghiera è degna
di molta loda, e io però l'accetto;
ma fa che la tua lingua si sostegna.
Lascia parlare a me, ch'i' ho concetto
ciò che tu vuoi; ch'ei sarebbero schivi,
perch' e' fuor greci, forse del tuo detto.”
Poi che la fiamma fu venuta quivi
dove parve al mio duca tempo e loco,
in questa forma lui parlare audivi:
“O voi che siete due dentro ad un foco,
s'io meritai di voi mentre ch'io vissi,
s'io meritai di voi assai o poco
quando nel mondo li alti versi scrissi,
non vi movete; ma l'un di voi dica
dove, per lui, perduto a morir gissi.”
Lo maggior corno de la fiamma antica
cominciò a crollarsi mormorando,
pur come quella cui vento affatica;
indi la cima qua e là menando,
come fosse la lingua che parlasse,
gittò voce di fuori e disse: “Quando
mi diparti' da Circe, che sottrasse
me più d'un anno là presso a Gaeta,
prima che sì Enëa la nomasse,
né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta
del vecchio padre, né 'l debito amore
lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,
vincer potero dentro a me l'ardore
ch'i' ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi umani e del valore;
ma misi me per l'alto mare aperto
sol con un legno e con quella compagna
picciola da la qual non fui diserto.
L'un lito e l'altro vidi infin la Spagna,
fin nel Morrocco, e l'isola d'i Sardi,
e l'altre che quel mare intorno bagna.
Io e' compagni eravam vecchi e tardi
quando venimmo a quella foce stretta
dov' Ercule segnò li suoi riguardi
acció che l'uom più oltre non si metta;
da la man destra mi lasciai Sibilia,
da l'altra già m'avea lasciata Setta.
'O frati,' dissi, 'che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l'occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente
non vogliate negar l'esperïenza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.'
Li miei compagni fec' io sì aguti,
con questa orazion picciola, al cammino,
che a pena poscia li avrei ritenuti;
e volta nostra poppa nel mattino,
de' remi facemmo ali al folle volo,
sempre acquistando dal lato mancino.
Tutte le stelle già de l'altro polo
vedea la notte, e 'l nostro tanto basso,
che non surgëa fuor del marin suolo.
Cinque volte racceso e tante casso
lo lume era di sotto da la luna,
poi che 'ntrati eravam ne l'alto passo,
quando n'apparve una montagna, bruna
per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto
quanto veduta non avëa alcuna.
Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;
ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque
e percosse del legno il primo canto.
Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l'acque;
a la quarta levar la poppa in suso
e la prora ire in giù, com' altrui piacque,
infin che 'l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.”
Rejoice, O Florence, since thou art so great,
That over sea and land thou beatest thy wings,
And throughout Hell thy name is spread abroad!
Among the thieves five citizens of thine
Like these I found, whence shame comes unto me,
And thou thereby to no great honour risest.
But if when morn is near our dreams are true,
Feel shalt thou in a little time from now
What Prato, if none other, craves for thee.
And if it now were, it were not too soon;
Would that it were, seeing it needs must be,
For 'twill aggrieve me more the more I age.
We went our way, and up along the stairs
The bourns had made us to descend before,
Remounted my Conductor and drew me.
And following the solitary path
Among the rocks and ridges of the crag,
The foot without the hand sped not at all.
Then sorrowed I, and sorrow now again,
When I direct my mind to what I saw,
And more my genius curb than I am wont,
That it may run not unless virtue guide it;
So that if some good star, or better thing,
Have given me good, I may myself not grudge it.
As many as the hind (who on the hill
Rests at the time when he who lights the world
His countenance keeps least concealed from us,
While as the fly gives place unto the gnat)
Seeth the glow-worms down along the valley,
Perchance there where he ploughs and makes his vintage;
With flames as manifold resplendent all
Was the eighth Bolgia, as I grew aware
As soon as I was where the depth appeared.
And such as he who with the bears avenged him
Beheld Elijah's chariot at departing,
What time the steeds to heaven erect uprose,
For with his eye he could not follow it
So as to see aught else than flame alone,
Even as a little cloud ascending upward,
Thus each along the gorge of the intrenchment
Was moving; for not one reveals the theft,
And every flame a sinner steals away.
I stood upon the bridge uprisen to see,
So that, if I had seized not on a rock,
Down had I fallen without being pushed.
And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,
Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;
Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
"My Master," I replied, "by hearing thee
I am more sure; but I surmised already
It might be so, and already wished to ask thee
Who is within that fire, which comes so cleft
At top, it seems uprising from the pyre
Where was Eteocles with his brother placed."
He answered me: "Within there are tormented
Ulysses and Diomed, and thus together
They unto vengeance run as unto wrath.
And there within their flame do they lament
The ambush of the horse, which made the door
Whence issued forth the Romans' gentle seed;
Therein is wept the craft, for which being dead
Deidamia still deplores Achilles,
And pain for the Palladium there is borne."
"If they within those sparks possess the power
To speak," I said, "thee, Master, much I pray,
And re-pray, that the prayer be worth a thousand,
That thou make no denial of awaiting
Until the horned flame shall hither come;
Thou seest that with desire I lean towards it."
And he to me: "Worthy is thy entreaty
Of much applause, and therefore I accept it;
But take heed that thy tongue restrain itself.
Leave me to speak, because I have conceived
That which thou wishest; for they might disdain
Perchance, since they were Greeks, discourse of thine."
When now the flame had come unto that point,
Where to my Leader it seemed time and place,
After this fashion did I hear him speak:
"O ye, who are twofold within one fire,
If I deserved of you, while I was living,
If I deserved of you or much or little
When in the world I wrote the lofty verses,
Do not move on, but one of you declare
Whither, being lost, he went away to die."
Then of the antique flame the greater horn,
Murmuring, began to wave itself about
Even as a flame doth which the wind fatigues.
Thereafterward, the summit to and fro
Moving as if it were the tongue that spake,
It uttered forth a voice, and said: "When I
From Circe had departed, who concealed me
More than a year there near unto Gaeta,
Or ever yet Aeneas named it so,
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind;
But I put forth on the high open sea
With one sole ship, and that small company
By which I never had deserted been.
Both of the shores I saw as far as Spain,
Far as Morocco, and the isle of Sardes,
And the others which that sea bathes round about.
I and my company were old and slow
When at that narrow passage we arrived
Where Hercules his landmarks set as signals,
That man no farther onward should adventure.
On the right hand behind me left I Seville,
And on the other already had left Ceuta.
'O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand
Perils,' I said, 'have come unto the West,
To this so inconsiderable vigil
Which is remaining of your senses still
Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.'
So eager did I render my companions,
With this brief exhortation, for the voyage,
That then I hardly could have held them back.
And having turned our stern unto the morning,
We of the oars made wings for our mad flight,
Evermore gaining on the larboard side.
Already all the stars of the other pole
The night beheld, and ours so very low
It did not rise above the ocean floor.
Five times rekindled and as many quenched
Had been the splendour underneath the moon,
Since we had entered into the deep pass,
When there appeared to us a mountain, dim
From distance, and it seemed to me so high
As I had never any one beheld.
Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping;
For out of the new land a whirlwind rose,
And smote upon the fore part of the ship.
Three times it made her whirl with all the waters,
At the fourth time it made the stern uplift,
And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,
Until the sea above us closed again."
Matching the ironic apostrophe of Pistoia that follows the departure of Vanni Fucci in the last canto (Inf. XXV.10-12), this one of Florence comes in the wake of the poem's departure from the five Florentine thieves. The image of Florence as winged has caused some puzzlement. While commentators, beginning perhaps with Scartazzini/Vandelli, point out that Dante's words most probably echo the Latin inscription, dating to 1255, on the façade of the Florentine Palazzo del Podestà, proclaiming that Florence is in possession of the sea, the land, indeed the entire world, we are still left to speculate on Dante's reasons for presenting her as winged. Whatever his reason, we might want to reflect that he thought of himself as the 'wingèd one' because of the easy pun available from his surname, Alighieri, in Latin 'aliger' (winged). See Hugh Shankland, “Dante 'Aliger,'” Modern Language Review 70 (1975), pp. 764-85; “Dante 'Aliger' and Ulysses,” Italian Studies 32 (1977), pp. 21-40. In this canto the apostrophised city and the seafaring Ulysses are both associated with 'wings' ('in our mad flight we turned our oars to wings' [v. 125 – Inf. XXVI.125]); at least intrinsically, the protagonist is also. He is on a better-purposed 'flight.' For these motifs and another related one see Maria Corti, “On the Metaphors of Sailing, Flight, and Tongues of Fire in the Episode of Ulysses (Inf. 26),” Stanford Italian Review 9 (1990), pp. 33-47.
The text alludes to the classical and medieval belief that morning dreams were more truthful in their content than any others. Guido da Pisa is the first (but hardly the last) to refer to a text in Ovid to this effect (Heroides XIX.195-196). On this subject see Charles Speroni's article, “Dante's Prophetic Morning-Dreams,” Studies in Philology 45 (1948), pp. 50-59. And see, for the same view of morning dreams, Purgatorio IX.16-18.
The passage about Prato has caused two interpretive problems: (1) Does it refer to the anger felt by Cardinal Niccolò da Prato when he failed to bring peace between the warring Florentine factions in 1304 or to the rebellion of the town of Prato in 1309, when Florence's small neighbor cast out its Black Guelphs? (2) Is Dante heartened or heart-sick as he contemplates this 'future' event?
It was only in the eighteenth century that a commentator, Pompeo Venturi, suggested a reference to the cardinal (comm. to XXVI.9). Further, since the second event was probably roughly contemporaneous to the writing of this canto, it seems likely that Dante would have enjoyed having so recent a piece of news as confirmation of his 'prophecy.' As to his emotions, it seems more reasonable to reflect that Dante is admitting that he will only be happy once the power of the Black Guelphs of Florence is destroyed; he is in pain as he awaits that liberation. In other words, this is not an expression of sadness for the city's coming tribulation, but a desire to see them come to pass – and that is the common view of the early commentators. As Poletto was perhaps the first commentator to note (in 1894), the passage is very like one found in one of Dante's 'political epistles' (Epistle VI.17), when he hopes that the invading forces of Emperor Henry VII will liberate the city. As Chiavacci Leonardi observes (Inferno, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1991], p. 794), according to the chronicle of Giovanni Villani, news of Henry's election in 1308 was causing excited imperialist hopes all through Italy in 1309.
While we do not believe that Dante says here what Petrocchi says he does, we have, as always, followed his text, which reads iborni (pallid, the color and coolness of ivory) and not, as the text had previously stood, i borni (the outcroppings of the rocks). In our opinion the 'old' reading is the superior one. Instead of 'on those stairs that turned us pale when we came down' we would say 'on the stairs the jutting rocks had made for our descent.'
The steepness of the rock causes Dante to find hand-holds on the wall as he mounts.
According to Lino Pertile (“Dante e l'ingegno di Ulisse,” Stanford Italian Review 1 [1979], pp. 35-65), those who propose a negative view of Ulysses fail to acknowledge the importance of these verses, which reveal the poet's sympathy for the Greek hero even now as he writes of him. He cites (p. 37) Ovid (Metam. XIII.135-139) in support of his argument. However, that text offers Ulysses' vaunt of his own worthiness to receive the arms of Achilles (denying the claims of Ajax), and the entire passage gives us the portrait of a figure full of pride and self-love. See Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 115-16, arguing that Dante, in this passage, is fully conscious of his previous 'Ulyssean' efforts, undertaken by his venturesome and prideful intellect, and now hopes to keep them under control. Castelvetro's reading of the passage is in this vein; according to him the poet grieves 'for having improperly put to use my genius' (comm. to vv. 19-22). Dante hopes, in other words, to be exactly unlike Ulysses.
In a lecture at Dartmouth College in the early 1980s Prof. Rachel Jacoff pointed out that Dante's verb for his necessary restraint, affreno ('rein in,' 'curb'), reflects precisely what Phaeton failed to do, rein in his steeds: 'Fetonte abbandonò li freni' (Inf. XVII.107).
The first of two elaborate similes in prologue to the appearance of Ulysses deals with the number of the false counsellors: they are numerous as fireflies. Dante, as peasant (il villano) resting on his hillside (poggio – Frankel [“The Context of Dante's Ulysses: the Similes in Inferno XXVI,” Dante Studies 104 (1986), pp. 102-5]) contrasts his 'humble' hillock with Ulysses' 'prideful' mountain [verse 133], looks out upon this valley full of fireflies. This peaceful scene lulls many readers into a sort of moral exemption for Ulysses; if he looks so pleasant, how can he be seen as sinful? In fact the distancing effect of the simile makes Ulysses seem small and relatively insignificant. We can imagine how he might feel, told that he had been compared to a firefly.
Many readers are rightly reminded of the previous simile involving a rustic (lo villanello) at Inferno XXIV.7-15.
For the flames as reminiscent of the Epistle of James (James 3:4-6) see Richard Bates and Thomas Rendall (“Dante's Ulysses and the Epistle of James,” Dante Studies 107 [1989], pp. 33-44) and Alison Cornish (“The Epistle of James in Inferno 26,” Traditio 45 [1989-90], pp. 367-79): 'Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven by fierce winds, yet are turned about with a very small helm, wherever the steersman pleases. Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasts many things. Behold how great a matter a little fire kindles! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell.' Pietro di Dante was the first to cite this passage in connection with Dante's description of the flames here (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 31-33), and also refers to it in both later redactions of his commentary.
The second Ulyssean simile describes the flame-wrapped appearance of Ulysses in terms of Elijah's fiery ascent to Heaven. Perhaps the first extended discussion of the biblical text behind the passage was offered by Margherita Frankel (“The Context of Dante's Ulysses: the Similes in Inferno XXVI,” Dante Studies 104 [1986]), pp. 110-16, who argues that, while Elijah is seen as antithetical to Ulysses (see Anthony K. Cassell, Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984], pp. 88-93), Dante is also seen as related to the negative aspect of Elisha (his pride in taking on the prophet's mantle) – see II Kings 2:9-12. She is answered by Luisa Ferretti Cuomo (“La polisemia delle similitudini nella Divina Commedia. Eliseo: un caso esemplare,” Strumenti critici 10 n.s. [1995], pp. 105-42) who regards Elisha as only a positive figure of Dante, similarly accepting his role as successor prophet. For the same view see Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 117. See also Kablitz (“Il canto di Ulisse [Inferno XXVI] agli occhi dei commentatori contemporanei e delle indagini moderne,” Letteratura italiana antica 2 [2001], pp. 74-84), who also argues against Frankel's interpretation, but seems unaware of Ferretti Cuomo's work.
Elisha was avenged by the bears in that the forty-two children who mocked his prophetic calling, addressing him as 'Baldy' (calve), were attacked and lacerated by two bears (II Kings 2:23-24). For the biblical resonance of this scene see Paola Rigo, Memoria classica e memoria biblica in Dante (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 51-54. Dante refers to this incident in one of his 'political epistles' (see the note to Inf. XXVI.8-12): Epistle VI.16.
The protagonist's excitement at the prospect of seeing Ulysses is evident (Ulysses has not been identified yet, but the poet seems to be taking a liberty in allowing his character to fathom who is about to appear). In his reckless abandon to gain experience of this great sinner, he resembles Ulysses himself.
Virgil's point seems to be that each of the flame-enclosed sinners is covered by the external sign of their inner ardor, their longing to captivate the minds of those upon whom they practiced their fraudulent work.
Almost all commentators point to the passage in Statius (Theb. XII.429-432) that describes the immolation of the corpses of the two warring brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, whose enmity was the root of the civil war in Thebes and is manifest now even in their death, as the smoke from their burning bodies will not join. Among the early commentators only Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 52-56) noticed that the same scene is reported in similar ways in Lucan as well (Phars. I.551-552). Some dozen or more modern commentators, from Venturi on, have also done so.
Ulysses and Diomedes are clearly indicated as suffering the punishment of God for their fraudulent acts; yet this indictment has not kept readers from admiring them – or at least Ulysses. Perhaps the central problem in the large debate that has surrounded Dante's version of the Greek hero in the last century and a half is how sympathetically we are meant to respond to him. To put that another way, what is the nature of Ulysses' sin, and how urgently is it meant to govern the reader's sense of his worth? And a further complication is of more recent vintage: what should we make of the at least apparent similarity between Ulysses and Dante himself? Chiavacci Leonardi has made a useful distinction between the two essential attitudes that distinguish divergent readings of the undoubtedly heroic figure (Inferno, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1991], p. 762): (1) Ulysses is marked by greatness; he is unfortunate but guiltless; (2) he is characterized by the sin of pride, like Adam. For an example of the first view see Francesco De Sanctis in 1870: Dante 'erects a statue to this precursor of Christopher Columbus, a pyramid set in the mud of hell' (Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, 4th ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1949 (1870)], pp. 201-2). For similar views see Benedetto Croce (La poesia di Dante, 2nd ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1921]), p. 98, and Mario Fubini (“Il peccato d'Ulisse” and “Il canto XXVI dell'Inferno,” in his Il peccato d'Ulisse e altri scritti danteschi [Milan: Ricciardi, 1966]), pp. 1-76. Attilio Momigliano (comm. to XXVI.64-69) throws all caution to the wind. He complains that the first 63 verses of the canto are too dry and erudite. Now that Ulysses is on the scene, we breathe the air of true and enthusiastic poetry. 'Appearances notwithstanding,' he says, 'Dante not only does not condemn the fraudulent acts of Ulysses and Diomedes, he exalts them.' Among contemporaries, Lino Pertile is essentially in this camp (“Dante e l'ingegno di Ulisse,” Stanford Italian Review 1 [1979], pp. 35-65). The negative view in modern discussions was enunciated clearly by Bruno Nardi (“La tragedia di Ulisse,” in his Dante e la cultura medievale [Bari: Laterza, 1942], pp. 89-99). See also Julius Wilhelm, “Die Gestalt des Odysseus in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie,” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 38 (1960), pp. 75-93; Giorgio Padoan (“Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 170-99); Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), pp. 114-23; Scott (“Inferno XXVI: Dante's Ulysses,” Lettere Italiane 23 (1971), pp. 145-86; Iannucci (“Ulysses' folle volo: the Burden of History,” Medioevo romanzo 3 [1976]. pp. 410-45). Recently a third 'school' has opened its doors, one that finds Ulysses less than totally admirable and yet associated with Dante, who presents himself, just beneath the lines of his text, as a trespassing voyager himself. See Mazzotta (“Poetics of History: Inferno XXVI,” Diacritics [summer 1975], p. 41); Stierle (“Odysseus und Aeneas: Eine typologische Konfiguration in Dantes Divina Commedia,” in Das fremde Wort: Studien zur Interdependenz von Texten, Festschrift für Karl Maurer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ilse Nolting-Hauff & Joachim Schulze [Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1988], pp. 111-54); Barolini (The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], passim); Bloom (“The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice,” in his The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994], pp. 85-89). For a rejoinder to the position of these critics see Stull and Hollander (“The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 1991 [1997]), pp. 43-52.
Virgil lists the sins of the two heroes: the stratagem of the troop-hiding Trojan horse (with which Ulysses, if not Diomedes, is associated in Virgil, Aen. II); Ulysses' trickery in getting Achilles to join the war against Troy, thus abandoning, on the isle of Scyros, his beloved Deidamia (as recounted in Statius's unfinished Achilleid), who subsequently died of grief at the news of his death in Troy; the joint adventure in which they stole the Palladium, image of Athena, a large wooden statue, in return for which the horse served as a fraudulent peace-offering (Aen. II.163-169). Those who, like Momigliano, believe that the fraudulent acts of Ulysses and Diomedes are exalted by Dante, should be reminded that Virgil, in the Aeneid, is pretty hard on them. Diomedes, for his part in the theft of the Palladium, is impious (impius – Aen. II.163), while Ulysses is called an 'inventor of crimes' (scelerum... inventor – Aen. II.164). It seems more than likely that Dante would have shared Virgil's views of these matters. For the recovery of the notion, widespread in the ancient commentators, that Ulysses is best described as 'astutus' (in the sense of possessing low cunning) see Richard Kay, “Two Pairs of Tricks: Ulysses and Guido in Dante's Inferno XXVI-XXVII,” Quaderni d'italianistica 1 (1980), pp. 107-24; John Ahern, “Dante's Slyness: The Unnamed Sin of the Eighth Bolgia,” Romanic Review 73 (1982), pp. 275-91. For further discussion of the importance of astutia to Dante's conception of Ulysses see Stull and Hollander, “The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 (1991 [1997]), pp. 49-50.
Sources for Dante's Ulysses are found nearly everywhere, so much so that one has a feeling that more are called than should be chosen: Virgil (Logan, “The Characterization of Ulysses in Homer, Virgil and Dante: A Study in Sources and Analogues,” Annual Report of the Dante Society 82 [1964], pp. 19-46; Padoan, “Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 170-99; Thompson, “Dante's Ulysses and the Allegorical Journey,” Dante Studies 85 [1967], pp. 44-46; Dante's Epic Journeys [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974], pp. 52-61); Ovid (Picone, “Dante, Ovidio e il mito di Ulisse,” Lettere Italiane 43 [1991], pp. 500-16); Persius (Chierichini, “La III Satira di Persio 'fra le righe' di Inferno XXVI,” L'Alighieri 11 [1998], pp. 95-103); Statius (Padoan, “Ulisse 'fandi fictor' e le vie della sapienza. Momenti di una tradizione [da Virgilio a Dante],” in his Il pio Enea e l'empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1977 (1960)], pp. 173-76; Hagedorn, “A Statian Model for Dante's Ulysses,” Dante Studies 115 [1997], pp. 19-43); Lucan (Stull and Hollander, “The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 [1991 (1997)], pp. 1-52); Tacitus (Von Richthofen, “¿Deriva de Tácito el episodio atlántico de Ulises (Dante, Inferno, XXVI, 83 y ss.)?” in Studia in honorem prof. M. De Riquer, Vol. I [Barcelona: Crema, 1986], pp.579-83); the Alexander cycle (Avalle, “L'ultimo viaggio di Ulisse,” Studi Danteschi 43 [1966], pp. 35-67; Von Richthofen, “La dimensión atlántica del Ulises y del Alejandro medievales en el contexto del mito herácleo gaditano,” in Philologica hispaniensia in honorem Manuel Alvar, Vol. III [Madrid: Gredos, 1986], pp. 423-34); as built on negative correspondences with Moses (Porcelli, “Peccatum linguae, modello mosaico, climax narrativa nel canto di Ulisse” [1991], in his Nuovi studi su Dante e Boccaccio con analisi della “Nencia” [Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1997], pp. 20-25); even as Pope Boniface VIII ( Schäffer, “Ulisse e Papa Bonifazio: un divertimento tipologico” [unpublished paper written for a graduate seminar at Princeton, spring 1968 (in English)]). There are of course many more. For three Latin passages (from Cicero, Horace, and Seneca) that may have helped shape Dante's conception of Ulysses see Singleton (comm. to XXVI.90-120). The last of these (from Seneca's Moral Epistles LXXXVI.7, which begins “Quaeris Ulixes ubi erraverit?” is translated as follows: 'Do you raise the question, “Through what regions did Ulysses stray?” instead of trying to prevent ourselves from going astray at all times? We have no leisure to hear lectures on the question whether he was sea-tost between Italy and Sicily, or outside our known world (indeed, so long a wandering could not possibly have taken place within its narrow bounds); we ourselves encounter storms of the spirit, which toss us daily, and our depravity drives us into all the ills which troubled Ulysses.' The first commentator to cite this passage, giving credit to Michele Scherillo for advancing it, was apparently Giuseppe Vandelli (to vv. 100-102). Emilio Pasquini, who also cites it (in Dante e le figure del vero [Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001, pp. 265-67]), goes on to make an interesting observation: Petrarch, in a letter to Boccaccio of 1359, fairly obviously appropriates Dante's presentation of Ulysses (vv. 94-99) in order to portray the poet himself, seen as lacking loyalty to the family he left behind in Florence.
For the vast bibliography of work devoted to Dante's Ulysses, see Anthony K. Cassell, “'Ulisseana': A Bibliography of Dante's Ulysses to 1981,” Italian Culture 3 (1981), pp. 23-45; Massimo Seriacopi, All'estremo della “Prudentia”: L'Ulisse di Dante (Rome: Zauli, 1994), pp. 155-91.
Now that Dante knows that the flame contains Ulysses his ardor to hear him speak is nearly overwhelming.
See Daniel J. Donno, “Dante's Ulysses and Virgil's Prohibition,” Italica 50 (1973), pp. 26-37, for the notion that here Virgil actually speaks Greek (if not assuming the role of Homer, as some have argued) because of a fable, which Dante might have known, that had it that Diomedes, forced back into wandering when his home-coming is ruined by news of his wife's infidelity, went off to Daunia (Apulia?) and eventually died thereabouts. Some of the birds that dwelled there became known as 'Diomedian birds.' Their main trait was to be hostile to all barbarians and friendly to all Greeks (pp. 30-31). On the basis of this fable, Donno argues, Virgil chooses to address Diomedes and Ulysses in Greek. The argument may be forced, but it is interesting. The passage is puzzling and its difficulty is compounded by what is found at Inferno XXVII.20, when Guido da Montefeltro says that he has heard Virgil speaking Lombard dialect to Ulysses.
Virgil identifies himself as Ulysses' (and Diomedes') 'author.' Now this is strictly true, since both of them appear (if rather unfavorably) in the Aeneid. Nonetheless, one can understand why some commentators, apparently spurred on by Torquato Tasso (see Campi's comm. to vv. 79-81]), have imagined that Virgil is pretending to be Homer as he addresses Ulysses and Diomedes. However, that he refers to his work as li alti versi ('my lofty verses') probably connects with his earlier description of his Aeneid, 'l'alta mia tragedìa' (my lofty tragedy), at Inferno XX.113. It seems most sensible to believe that Virgil is speaking whatever language he usually speaks.
Ulysses' speech begins, like classical epic, in medias res (in the midst of the action, i.e., not at its beginning). Dante would seem to be portraying him as the author of his own self-celebrating song, a 'mini-epic,' as it were. He makes it sound as though staying with Circe, the enchantress, were less culpable than it probably was, in Dante's eyes. His next gesture is to boast that he had come to Gaeta before Aenas did, which city Aeneas names after his dead nurse, who died and was buried there (Aen. VII.2). (Castelvetro, always one to find fault with Dante, complains that it is not verisimilar for Ulysses to know these things from the Aeneid – Inf. XXVI.91-93). Thus does Ulysses put himself forward as a rivalrous competitor of Virgil's hero.
Ulysses' aim, to discover the truth about the world and about mankind, sounds acceptable or even heroic to many contemporary readers. When we examine the prologue to this thought, in which he denies his family feeling for Telemachus, Laertes, and Penelope in order to make his voyage, we may begin to see the inverted parallelism to the hero whom he would emulate and best, Aeneas, loyal to Ascanius, Anchises, and Creusa. If Ulysses is venturesome, Aeneas is, as Virgil hardly tires of calling him, pius, a 'family man' if ever there were one.
He and his crew of aging, tired sailors head out across the Mediterranean from Italy and reach the gates of Hercules, the very sign, even as Ulysses reports it, of the end of the known world. While Dante does not refer to it (nor to the previous voyages of Marco Polo), a number of recent commentators speculate that he was aware of the voyage of the Vivaldi brothers in 1291. They, in search of India, sailed out through the Strait of Gibraltar, having passed Spain and Africa, and were never heard from again.
It is a commonplace in the commentaries to believe that the opening words of Ulysses' speech to his men reflect the first words of Aeneas to his men (Aen. I.198). Several, however, also refer to the similar passage in Lucan (Phars. I.299), but without making any further case for Lucan's greater appositeness here. Stull and Hollander (“The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 [1991 (1997)]), pp. 8-12, argue that Caesar's infamous words to his men, urging them to march on Rome, are cited far more precisely: the phrase 'che per cento milia / perigli' (through a hundred thousand perils) mirrors nearly exactly Lucan's 'qui mille pericula' (through a thousand perils) except for the added touch that Ulysses is even more grandiloquent than Lucan's florid Julius. The result is fairly devastating to all those who argue for a positive valence for Dante's Ulysses, which is close to impossible to assert if the essential model for the hero is Julius Caesar, portrayed in Lucan as the worst of rabble-rousing, self-admiring leaders, here at the moment that begins the civil war that will destroy the Republic. For Lucan, and for Dante, this is one of the most terrible moments in Roman history. Stull and Hollander explore a series of resonances of Lucan's text in this canto.
Ulysses' final flourish not only won over his flagging shipmates, it has become a rallying cry of Romantic readers of this scene, from Tennyson to Primo Levi. What can be wrong with such desires, so fully human? Alessandra Colangeli, a student at the University of Rome, suggested, after she heard a lecture on this canto on 10 March 1997, that Ulysses' words seemed to echo those of the serpent in the Garden to Adam and Eve, promising that, if they were to eat the forbidden fruit, they would become like gods, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5). For a similar if more general view of Ulysses as the tempter see Anthony Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), p. 86. Since Adam's later words to Dante (Par. XXVI.115-117) rehearse both the scene in the Garden and Ulysses' transgression, the eating from the tree and the trespass of an established limit, the association has some grounding in Dante's text. Ignazio Baldelli (“Dante e Ulisse,” Lettere Italiane 50 [1998], pp. 358-73) is the latest to argue that the speech is the locus of Ulysses's fraudulent counsel, since he, anticipating the reckless adventure of the Vivaldi brothers, urges his men to go beyond the known limits in search of experience.
Gustavo Vinay (“Dante e Ulisse,” Nova Historia 12 [1960], pp. 5-6), points out that these verses echo the opening of the Convivio: 'All men naturally desire knowledge' (Conv. I.i.1). His insight gives support to those who have argued that Ulysses is staged as a precursor, as it were, of the venturesome younger Dante, in whose more mature view a number of positions put forward in Convivio have become something of an embarrassment. For such opinions see Luigi Valli (“Ulisse e la tragedia intellettuale di Dante,” in his La struttura morale dell'universo dantesco [Rome: Ausonia, 1935], pp. 26-40); Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 114-18; “Purgatorio II: Cato's Rebuke and Dante's scoglio,” Italica 52 [1975], pp. 348-63; Freccero (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 188-90); Gagliardi (La tragedia intellettuale di Dante: Il “Convivio” [Catanzaro: Pullano, 1994], pp. 330-32), resuscitating Valli's views (his title derives from Valli's).
Ulysses' summary of the result of his speech is a masterpiece of false modesty. Once he has uttered his words, his exhausted companions are ready for anything. We now perhaps notice that one of his key words is 'little,' one mark of a speaker who masks his pride in false humility: his reduced company of shipmates is picciola (v. 102); so is the time left his men on earth (picciola, v. 114); and now his oration is also but a little thing (v. 122), picciola used one more time, a total of three times in 21 verses. Ulysses is, in modern parlance, a con artist, and a good one, too. He has surely fooled a lot of people. Rosalma Salina Borello (“Modelli di scissione e duplicazione nel canto XXVI dell'Inferno,” in Studi di letteratura, critica e linguistica offerti a Riccardo Scrivano [Rome: Bulzoni, 2000]), p. 17, shows a similar understanding of Ulysses' use of these apparently self-deprecating words.
His men, his 'brothers,' now show their real relationship to Ulysses: it is an instrumental one. They are his oars. As Carroll suggests in his commentary, 'Is it not possible that this wild adventure is narrated as the last piece of evil counsel of which Ulysses was guilty' (Carroll, comm. to XXVI.90-142).
The five-month voyage, the ship's stern to the east (the site of sunrise, perhaps the most familiar medieval image for Christ), occupies three tercets. Ulysses, abetted by his rowers, has stormed Olympus. They are the first mortals to see the mount of purgatory since Adam and Eve left it. God's punishment does not wait long to overcome them.
For an attempt to generate a new form of the adjective, arto (narrow), instead of the widely accepted alto (deep), see Guglielmo Gorni (“I riguardi di Ercole e l'arto passo di Ulisse,” Letteratura italiana antica 1 [2000]), pp. 54-58. The possibility that this the better reading is gainsaid by the fact that there is no instance of this form in the manuscripts nor in the commentary tradition.
For a possible source of this verse in the Bible (John 16:20) see Fredi Chiappelli (“Il colore della menzogna nell'Inferno dantesco,” Letture classensi 18 [1989]), p. 123: 'You shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be changed to joy.' For another, perhaps more apt, see the commentary of Durling and Martinez (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 414, citing James 4:9: 'Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, your joy to heaviness.'
The whirlwind is frequently associated with God's power used in punishment. See, among others, Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), pp. 90-92.
The final image of Ulysses' narrative is based, as a commentator as early as Guido da Pisa (comm. to XXVI.136-142) realized, on Aeneid I.116-117, where Virgil describes the only ship in Aeneas's flotilla to be destroyed in the storm at sea: '... 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.' The echo is probably not without consequence for our view of the would-be hero Ulysses: 'The ship in point is that which carried the Lycians and faithful Orontes and which goes down within sight of the land that would have saved its sailors, as does Ulysses' ship. It is a ship of the damned. Aeneas, in his piety, is the hero; Ulysses, in his heroicness, is the failure' (Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 121).
The final verse of the canto seems also to have a classical antecedent (one not previously noted), the final verses of the seventh book of Statius's Thebaid. There the seer Amphiaraus, the first of the 'seven against Thebes' to die in that civil war, plunges into a chasm in the earth only to have the land then close back in above him (Theb. VII.821-823): 'and as he sank he looked back at the heavens and groaned to see the plain meet above him, until a fainter shock joined once more the parted fields and shut out the daylight from Avernus' (trans. Mozley). Dante has referred to Amphiaraus's descent into hell at Inferno XX.31-36. If he is thinking of it here, it would call to mind still another pagan hero who may serve as a model for Ulysses' rash voyage and entombment. (Such a view, it is remarked belatedly, has a precursor in Giuseppe Velli's identical recovery of this source [“Dante e la memoria della poesia classica,” Annali della Facoltà di lettere e di filosofia della Università di Macerata 22-23 (1989-90), p. 43].)
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