7 Inferno 17–26
CHAPTER 7
Inferno 17–26
Just as Dante jumps onto the back of Geryon in Canto 16, so too must we make some leaps as we proceed farther into the depths of Dante’s Hell. I’ll make brief mention of Canto 17, which is an extraordinary canto. It’s the only time that Virgil leaves Dante alone, and Dante has to meet the usurers without any guidance. It is as if he had to discover by himself and by his own powers what those temptations are and what the implications of usury would be for him. Let me offer a biographical resonance, in the sense that not only is the poet edging toward the condition of the usurer by engaging in illusory re-creations, but his own father was also engaged in that sort of activity.
Because of time constraints we go to Canto 19. Here we have an experience of the shifts in Dante’s voice. In Canto 19 Dante assumes what I do not hesitate to call a prophetic voice. He sees himself as playing a public role. The departure from the political rhetorical tone used in the encounter with Brunetto could not be sharper or more radical. What does it mean to be a prophet for Dante? How can one take on this sort of voice? How does a prophet talk? One thing that you may want to keep in mind as I go on, to understand this canto, is that the pattern for all of this is the voice of the biblical prophets. But do not make the mistake of thinking for a moment that prophets are those who foretell the future, as that’s not really their role. In fact, Dante later goes out of his way in Canto 20 to highlight the differences between prophets and diviners. The diviners are those who predict the future, while the prophets are literally readers of the present. For Dante, the biblical prophets are those who read the present history in its unfolding from the perspective of what they perceive to have been God’s promise to Israel and to them. The prophets are, in a way, commentators. To be a commentator requires an exercise of memory, a way of bringing ancient memories to bear on the present. That’s the way Dante understands the prophetic voice.
Another background detail that will prove useful as we proceed is that Dante was a writer of many epistles; he was a letter writer. We do not know the letters he wrote on behalf of his patrons, but we do know the letters that he wrote in his own name. One of his most noteworthy letters was written to the Italian cardinals who were in conclave, meaning that they were shut under lock and key and kept in a place where they could make decisions about electing, from within themselves or from the outside, a pope. In this case they could not agree about whom to choose. Dante begins the letter by addressing them, saying that perhaps they will wonder who this man is, who gives him the authority to speak to them and to spur us on to action. Doesn’t he remember the possible objection to the intervention of a layman’s voice in sacred things? Doesn’t he remember the lesson of the biblical prophet who, on seeing the Ark of the Covenant tottering as it was being carried into the city of Jerusalem, stretches out his hand to try to protect it? God intervened with lightning and killed him. The point of these statements is to make clear that Dante is aware of the danger of taking on the prophetic voice.
He’s aware of the possible profanation in which he is engaged, in addressing the so-called simonists in Canto 19. Who are the simonists? The simonists are the followers of Simon, who was called a magus, a sorcerer, or a magician. We call this phenomenon, when you have a name that creates a trend or a way of thinking, an eponym. So, Dante begins this story with reference to a founding event in the constitution of the Church. It goes back to the Acts of the Apostles, where there is a story of a sorcerer, a man engaged in witchcraft and illusions, Simon, who wants to buy the gift of prophecy and the power of making miracles from Peter. And therefore he challenges him to see who can fly, and they go up on a tower and try to fly. Simon, of course, will plummet and die. What Dante is doing here is lambasting the popes of his own time: Nicholas III, Boniface VIII, and Clement V. These three popes during Dante’s life are all engaged in simony, a sacrilege, the act, exactly like that of Simon in the Acts of the Apostles, who wanted to buy the gift of prophecy. It is the sin of making commerce of sacred things and thereby engaging in blasphemy.
The question, then, is what does Dante think the sacred is? It’s a constant theme in his reflections. What is the sacred? How do we determine it? What does it mean to violate the sacred? Simon violates the sacred. The popes now, who are of his own time, are engaged in the same kind of blasphemy and profanation. To further complicate matters, let me give you a little detail that might help you to appreciate this ambiguity. The other name of Peter is Simon, so in fact he’s known as Simon Peter. It is as if by having both a magician called Simon and the first pope called Simon Peter, we arrive at metonymic proximity, the nearness between the prophetic mode and the profanation of that same prophetic mode. How precarious is the boundary line that divides the two? Regardless, Dante will straddle this precarious border as he explores the sacred.
Now, let’s see how he dramatizes all of these concerns. The first question is: how do prophets talk? “O Simon Magus” right at the start, is an apostrophe, and the technique is one of several apostrophes in this canto. It is followed in the opening line by another address: “O you his wretched followers that, rapacious, prostitute for gold and silver the things of God which ought to be the brides of righteousness.”1 That’s the definition of simony, which is viewed as adultery, a corruption of the chastity of the marriage between God and the soul. We will see other invocations here, and I’m not so sure that we can quite differentiate between an invocation, which is obviously a prayer, and an apostrophe, a calling on, an address. Apostrophes are also forms of lament. “O Simon”—as you can hear, it expresses a kind of mourning. It’s the language of grief, primarily, but there is also, from a linguistic point of view, a crucial indeterminacy to this rhetorical device. It’s not really language. It says nothing on its own. It’s a shout, a need to break the silence. In other words, you use apostrophe because you cannot be quiet, and that’s exactly what makes this aspect of prophetic language so critical. It lies between silence, when one is overcome by the enormity of what one sees, and the refusal to acquiesce. The whole canto is punctuated by this rhetorical form that wants to break the silence and cannot quite find the words.
After the initial invocations, Dante begins to describe his surroundings: “Upon the sides and upon the bottom I saw the livid stone full of holes, all of one size and each was round. They seemed to me not less wide or larger than those that are made for the baptizings in my beautiful San Giovanni,” the Baptistery in Florence. He is referring to the wells where baptisms take place, which are usually octagonal in shape. Dante reports, “Not many years ago, I broke [a baptismal font] to save one who was drowning in it—and let this be the seal to undeceive all men.”2 What Dante is doing here is acknowledging what could have been seen as an act of profanation. It is really figurative, though, because these fonts are huge, and you would need ten people to break them apart, so it’s a figurative idea that he stretched his hand into holy things and violated them. He did it, and that’s the excuse he’s giving, that he did it in order to save someone’s life. There is nothing gratuitous in Dante’s own intervention, which is called an interventio in sacris, stretching profane hands into holy things. One could dismiss it as a gratuitous act, but it is not, so he must provide us with a description of it in order to establish its validity.
From here Dante begins to note the sinners in this part of Hell: “From the mouth of each projected the feet of a sinner and his legs as far as the calf, and the rest was within.”3 He’s representing the popes, who were placed upside down, which is the way Simon fell, and also the position that, according to legend, St. Peter wanted for himself. Peter asked that he be buried upside down because he wanted to demonstrate the true direction needed for souls to arrive at the perfection of being. We live in an inverted world, and therefore when you have your head down, you are actually right side up. You’re going toward your proper destination. Dante is playing with this iconographic motif of Peter, who asks to be crucified upside down, and the story of Simon who, very much like this soul, suffers a punishment with his head upside down.
How else are these particular souls punished? In an overt parody of the Pentecost, with flames. There is a rain of fire that comes down upon them, and they have flames running along their feet. This is a horrible inversion and perversion of prophecy and of the gift of languages, for we are all capable of speaking everybody else’s language. I’m sure that there are polyglots among you, but we all speak the language of charity, and therefore we can all understand each other that way. These souls, instead, have no gift of language at all.
Dante asks Virgil to identify a specific sinner who “writhes himself, twitching more than all his fellows, . . . and who is sucked by a ruddier flame,” and in the process of discovering the soul’s identity, a series of inversions is introduced. “I,” Dante says, “was standing there like the friar,” but he is a layman, so we are witnessing a role reversal, and the pope is going to unveil his own identity in a moment; he is revealed to be like an assassin. They’ve traded places. This inverted pope is Nicholas III, and he soon admits a highly suggestive misunderstanding. He tells Dante that the reigning pope at the time of Dante’s writing, Boniface VIII, of the Orsini family, one of the great Roman families, has already arrived. He asks Dante, “Are you already standing there, Bonifazio? By several years the writ has lied to me. Are you so quickly sated with those gains for which you did not fear to take by guile the beautiful Lady, and then to do her outrage?”4 This is the kind of accusation that Dante can launch at powerful figures now, via his text, by acting as a prophet who takes on power and unveils its abusers.
Dante is unsure at first how to respond to his confused interlocutor, but Virgil urges him to correct Boniface’s misconception about Dante’s identity, which leads to the former pope’s haughty reply, “Then what is it you ask of me? If to know who I am concerns you so much that you have for that come down the bank, know that I was vested with the great mantle.” Dante will respond to this pompous self-importance with a general attack, which is really the prophetic moment: “I do not know if here I was overbold, in answering him in just this strain, ‘Pray now tell me how much treasure did our Lord require of Saint Peter before he put the keys into his keeping? Surely he asked nothing save: “Follow me.” Nor did Peter or the others take gold or silver of Matthias when he was chosen for the office which the guilty soul had lost.’”5 Dante feels that he ought to speak in this manner because he finds himself in the presence of an eclipse of authority. He thinks that it is incumbent upon him to take on that authority that is lacking in Boniface, in order to make up for what he thinks is missing.
This whole problem of the confusion of orders, the confusion between the secular and the sacred, can be traced to one great event, the so-called Donation of Constantine. The Donation of Constantine was a fourth-century document that stated that Emperor Constantine gave control of the land of the Roman Empire to the pope, Sylvester I. In other words, it made the pope the ruler of a secular domain. To Dante, this was a confusion of registers and of responsibilities, for the pope should be engaged only in spiritual pursuits and spiritual matters. So, the sin of simony is certainly a problem that has to do with the Donation of Constantine.
The problem is complicated by the fact that the document was a forgery. But this issue won’t be clarified until the fifteenth century, when two people begin to uncover the truth. One was Nicholas of Cusa, who repeatedly emphasized the moral arguments against the Donation of Constantine, as much as Dante does here. But the one who really proved the falseness of the documents with which Constantine supposedly made the donation to the pope was Lorenzo Valla, a philologist who thoroughly examined the language of that text, and thereby found out that the document could not possibly have been written in the fourth century because it bore the traces of eleventh-century Latin. With extraordinary linguistic precision, Valla specified all the signs that the Donation had been a forgery and that the forgery had been committed in a convent in the south of France.
But these discoveries are all after Dante’s time, so why is this Donation so important to Dante? Dante makes it such a central concern precisely because it represents the confusion of the spiritual and the secular that simony embodies, and simony crystallizes the crucial crisis of his own time. Dante also wrote a political text called Monarchia, which is really an argument in favor of the separation between these two orders, the church and the state. It had to be neatly divided, both to protect the state from the intrusions of the church and to protect the church from the likely intrusions of the state. So, it’s really an argument that goes in two directions, and it’s the most critical argument of Canto 19.
A different question of registers is on display in Canto 21, which merits a brief comment. Dante goes out of his way in Canto 21 to speak of the humble style of his Comedy. It is as if he wants to free himself from the shackles and the complications of using a lofty language or of taking on the extraordinary position of being the prophet of his own times. This use of comedy is also linked to a peculiar experience in this canto: the fear of falling. The devils are chasing him, and he calls them Ghibellines. These demons are like his enemies who are trying to throw him down, and the point is that comedy is always flanked with the idea of the fall. Laughter, as it were, begins at the moment when someone slips and falls.
But the chase concludes, and the fear of falling is dissipated in the latter part of this section of the Inferno. In Cantos 24 and 25 Dante passes through the realm of the thieves, and he is overwhelmed by the metamorphoses he witnesses: the form of punishment of these thieves, who are forced to change form over and over again. They are human beings bitten by snakes, then they become snakes, then they turn into ashes, and then they recom-pose themselves, in an endless cycle: “As the lizard under the great scourge of the dog days, darting from hedge to hedge, seems a lightning-flash, if it cross the way, so appeared, making for the bellies of the other two, a small fiery serpent, livid and black as a peppercorn; and it transfixed in one of them that part by which we first receive our nourishment, then fell down before him, stretched out. The transfixed one gazed at it, but said nothing, only standing there yawning as if sleep or fever had come upon him. He eyed the reptile, the reptile him; the one from his wound, the other from its mouth, smoked violently, and their smoke met.”6
Following this description, though, Dante breaks the chronicle of what he has seen, the witnessing. Instead he speaks of other poets, saying, “Let Lucan now be silent, where he tells of the wretched Sabellus and of Nasidius, and let him wait to hear what now comes forth. Concerning Cadmus and Arethusa let Ovid be silent, for if he, poetizing, converts the one into a serpent and the other into a fountain, I envy him not; for two natures front to front he never so transmuted that both forms were prompt to exchange their substance.”7 On the face of it Dante is saying that the kind of metamorphosis he’s describing is more horrifying than anything that Ovid or Lucan could create. Ovid, the author of The Metamorphoses, always guided his metamorphoses by a belief in the bond between human beings and the natural world. There is a kind of serene transformation happening in Ovid. Dante also says that he’s different from Lucan, another author of scenes of metamorphosis in his story about the Roman civil war. What is really crucial here is that Dante’s vision of metamorphosis is a different one from those of his predecessors.
Dante is repeating and reenacting exactly the kind of aesthetic temptation that we already witnessed in Canto 4 of Inferno, in Limbo. Dante met the poets, and he was taken with the great temptation of sitting with Homer, Virgil, Horace, Lucan, and Ovid, exactly the people that he mentions here. And yet, the scene of harmony that Canto 4 seemed to convey is now being utterly overthrown. Here what Dante is really saying is that he is their rival, he is even better, he is seeing things that they didn’t even imagine. If you had the illusion of an idyllic relationship among these poets before, Dante disabuses you at this point. Once again Dante is descending, performing a descent of spiritual humility, and yet his voice seems to be going in an opposite direction, one of hubris. This is exactly the same kind of temptation that he had in Canto 4. The structure repeats itself.
In another parallel, in Canto 4 Dante claimed that he built fellowship with the great poets, and then he came into Canto 5 and had to confront the responsibilities of being a writer through his encounter with Francesca, a reader of his own sort of writing. Similarly, when Dante leaves Canto 25 and enters Canto 26, he meets none other than Ulysses, the master rhetorician, whose experience and whose journey will lead Ulysses and his companions to a tragic end. For Dante this is an extraordinary moment, for a number of reasons. Ulysses is a steady point of reference for his own adventure. He will keep thinking of him in Canto 19 of Purgatorio and in Canto 28 of Paradise, when Dante is about to move beyond the entire physical universe. He looks back to see the distance he has traveled, and the only thing that he sees is really that passageway where Ulysses violated all boundaries. Ulysses is a mode of being, a possibility of being, for Dante himself.
Every school child in antiquity and in Dante’s own time knew that Ulysses was a famous Greek hero, polytropic as Homer calls him: a man of many turns, a man who had been seasoned in all experiences, a man who knew it all. They knew that he had gone to the war at Troy, that he was the one to suggest the building of the Trojan Horse and the stealing of the Palladium, which was a simulacrum of Minerva. And everybody knew that it took him ten years to return to Ithaca. This is the story of The Odyssey. Ulysses returns, completing the nostos as the Greeks call it, the journey of return. He becomes the hero of nostalgia.
In antiquity, in particular, they knew it very well because then the story of Ulysses had become a philosophical allegory of the fate of the soul. The idea of Ulysses, who goes from Ithaca to Troy and then, after a war of ten years, undergoes another ten years of vicissitudes, cleansing and testing himself in order to reach his hometown, was really the story of the soul. The soul incarnates itself, it travels past the various planets and gets tainted by their attributes (some of us are lunatics, others are mercurial, others are saturnine), but then, by cleansing ourselves, the soul can go back to its place of origin. That’s the circle of the return, and that’s the way the Alexandrian Neoplatonists understood the allegory of The Odyssey. An overarching theme in this canto will be Dante’s divergent reading of this story and of the Greek world in general.
Dante almost immediately violates the standard version of Ulysses’ tale. Dante begins, instead, with a Ulysses who has already returned to Ithaca and who is about to start his journeys of exploration all over again. The idea of the eternal return, the idea of closure at home, is not part of Dante’s imaginative sensibility. He is a truly restless poet, always placing himself and his heroes on some kind of quest, on the road toward a place, or toward an idea, like those philosophers who are always thinking about some way of reaching wisdom and truth. That’s what happens with the story of Ulysses in Dante’s hands. In the Comedy Ulysses starts all over again. He’s involved in a journey that is absolutely gratuitous, a quest for wisdom in the unpeopled world. And he dies as a result. That’s it.
The first thing you will notice is that it’s not Dante who conducts the interview with Ulysses. It is Virgil, the poet of Latin antiquity; they speak Greek. It is the poet of The Aeneid who thinks of himself as the fitting interlocutor of the great Greek hero. Dante’s excluded; he just watches their exchange. But there’s more to this idea of stylistic decorum. This reinterpretation of Ulysses’ story is, in fact, as tragic as a text could ever get, arriving even at the tragic sublime, and Virgil was the author of a tragedy, rather than a comedy. The sublime style is also present in the words of Ulysses, who speaks in the loftiest way possible. In a certain sense, Ulysses tells the story of his life as if he were Aeneas. If you ask readers of Virgil and Homer, some of them will probably will tell you that while Virgil is a good poet, the first six books of The Aeneid are just The Odyssey, and the second set of books are just The Iliad. Not at all. The difference between the two heroes is clear: Ulysses has a place to which he can return. He goes from Ithaca to Troy and then back to Ithaca. Aeneas has no place to go. His is the open-ended road, the open-ended journey, and this is the way Ulysses will think of himself in the Inferno. This beguiling self-depiction is just one example of the extraordinary ambiguity with which Dante represents Ulysses. From the very beginning, Ulysses is a philosopher and a rhetorician. He is someone who can manipulate all knowledge for his own ends, and it is this alluring ambiguity that Dante emphasizes in his characterization of Ulysses in Canto 26.
The canto starts with a topical allusion. Dante is drawing our attention to a specific place, to the city of Florence. It is as if he wants to moor himself, to anchor himself to something as concrete as his own native place. And it’s an apostrophe to Florence: “Rejoice, O Florence, since you are so great.” The antithetical use of “great” or of “tall and small” at the same time is a common feature of this canto, a rhetorical move intended to make us wonder what the relationship is between that which claims to be so large and that which claims to be so small. Ulysses obviously thinks of himself in terms of loftiness, and Dante now rhetorically starts with Florence as “so great.” The satire is obvious as he continues, “Over land and sea you beat your wings, and your name is spread through Hell!”8 The whole point is that he has seen some Florentine thieves, even named them, so Florence’s “greatness” is questionable, at best.
In one of the next few lines, Dante makes a telling shift of verb tenses: “I sorrowed then and sorrow now again.” He sorrowed then, in the past tense, when he was a pilgrim, watching and witnessing the stories that he is going to tell, and he sorrows now, in the present tense, as a writer. There’s a double focus that Dante’s using: the focus of the pilgrim and the focus of the narrator. “I sorrowed then and I sorrow now again,” he continues, “when I turn my mind to what I saw; and I curb my genius more than I am wont, lest it run where virtue does not guide it.”9 At least Dante attempts to curb his powers as he pays witness to a story of the immoderate hunger for knowledge that comes from a flight of the mind.
The flight of the mind is like the flight of Icarus. It seems to know no boundaries. Ulysses is he who transgresses all boundaries, but doesn’t Dante also transgress boundaries? He won’t say so here, for he wants it to seem that he is taking Ulysses as an exemplary figure who could lead him to curtail his abilities. Similarly, the language of running here is that of horses, specifically the horses of the soul, and virtue is the ability to rein in both the black horse and the white horse of the chariot, to hold them together. That’s the allusion that Dante is making with his Neopla-tonic language.
Then we get the first description of the landscape, a somber landscape indeed: “As many as the fireflies which the peasant, resting on the hill—in the season when he that lights the world least hides his face from us, and at the hour when the fly yields to the mosquito—sees down along the valley, there perhaps where he gathers the grapes and tills: with so many flames the eighth ditch was all agleam, as I perceived as soon as I came where the bottom could be seen. And as he who was avenged by the bears saw Elijah’s chariot at its departure, when the horses rose erect to heaven—for he could not so follow it with his eyes so as to see aught save the flame alone, like a little cloud ascending: so each flame moves along the gullet of the ditch, for not one shows its theft, and each steals away a sinner.”10 Dante’s not comparing himself to Elijah here; he’s comparing himself to someone who watches Elijah. Elijah is also engaged in a flight of the soul, exactly like Ulysses, though Elijah is going to be represented as the antithesis to Ulysses. But Dante is claiming to be unlike either of them. Rather, he is like Eliseus, the one who inherits the mantle of prophecy from Elijah, and the one who witnesses, who watches. Dante is trying to avoid the extremes of both the prophet and the rhetorician.
Virgil goes on to tell Dante that within the flames are spirits. Inside a forked flame there are two souls: Ulysses and Diomedes. Except in the case of the suicides, Dante always sees pairs of sinners. Here’s Diomedes, who doesn’t talk, and here’s Ulysses, as well, and I suppose that the reason is that Dante really wants us to know about the social quality of a moral violation. A moral violation always implies the presence of somebody else. Except for the suicide, which has a peculiar form because you have witness, homicide, and victim all in one, you always have a witness, somebody else who has been touched by the sin, or an accomplice of the sinner.
Dante describes the flame as “so divided at its top that it seems to rise from the pyre where Eteocles was laid with his brother,” and in so doing already makes a connection to ancient Greece.11 The story is The Thebaid, and the two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, were enemies. In Greek mythology the story of Thebes, which Dante knows through Statius, reveals the idea of the tragic city. Thebes becomes the term for a tragic city because in effect it presents birth, specifically the birth of Eteocles and Polynices, the children of Oedipus and Jocasta, as a tragic event. In this sense, the Greek idea of cities and birth is radically distinguished from Virgil’s idea of birth as something to be celebrated all the time. Already, then, these flames have an aura of tragedy about them.
Dante asks to speak with the fiery souls—“Master, I earnestly pray you, and pray again, that my prayer avail a thousand, that you deny me not to wait until the horned flame comes hither: you see how with desire I bend towards it”—and Virgil responds, “Your prayer deserves much praise and therefore I accept it; but do you restrain your tongue.” Earlier Virgil wanted to curb Dante’s powers, now he asks him to curb his speech: “Leave speech to me, for I have understood what you wish—and perhaps, since they were Greeks, they would be disdainful of your words.”12 We have a sense of the hierarchy of styles beginning to take shape: Virgil and Ulysses, and then in Canto 27 it will be Guido da Montefeltro and Dante.
Virgil requests to hear the tale of one of these sinners, and Ulysses speaks with a tongue of flame, whipping in the wind. He says, “I departed from Circe, who had detained me more than a year there near Gaeta, before Aeneas had so named it.” Clearly, Ulysses tells his story through the myth of Aeneas, claiming priority over Aeneas. But Ulysses lacks Aeneas’s human connections, for Aeneas is a founder of cities, and he names the city of Gaeta after his nurse, whereas for Ulysses, “neither fondness for my son, nor reverence for my aged father, nor the due love which would have made Penelope glad, could conquer in me the longing that I had to gain experience of the world, and of human vice and worth.”13 The heavily ethical language here suggests an ethical quest, and nothing can stand in the way of this virtuous action.
Ulysses sets sail aboard a single ship, and he begins to mention places he sees on his travels. He always mentions cities—in Spain, Morocco, Sardinia, Ceuta—on the other side of the Mediterranean. It is as if he is a man who lives in space; as if he never really knew his own place in the world. He’s always looking for something and doesn’t know where he belongs.
These aimless wanderings continue for a long time, and then, “my companions were old and slow when we came to that narrow outlet where Hercules set up his markers, that men should not pass beyond.” And now we are treated to the speech that he makes to these companions. Look at the rhetorical wisdom with which he moves. He addresses them as brothers, which is the biggest possible captatio benevolentiae: we are all together, there is no hierarchy here, I’m not your leader, I’m not your king. His next rhetorical move is hyperbole. If you want to seduce people to come with you, you have to tell them that theirs are mighty actions and then magnify all the possible perils. He says, “O brothers . . . who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the west”—not a definite place, the west, it is a vague place and yet lofty—“to this so brief vigil of our senses that remains to us, choose not to deny experience.”14 He enacts modesty, the oscillation between hyperbole and litotes, as it were, the recoiling into the sense of ordinariness and smallness. And then he uses this extraordinary word, “experience,” which, etymologically speaking, refers to a journey, a going-through. Knowledge is tied to displacement and travel; potential wisdom is used as a lure. His rhetoric is a snare.
And then Ulysses appeals to his companions’ sense of self-worth in order to seal the deal. He advises them to “consider [their] origin.” If you want to know the end of things, you have to know the beginnings, the seeds. This is Ulysses’ perception, and because he is of a noble seed, there is a natural determination in his own mind that he will reach, indeed, a noble end. And the same for his men: “You were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”15 That’s a remarkable line. In what is perhaps an allusion to the metamorphosis of Circe, who had changed these same companions into the hogs of Epicurus wallowing in voluptuary experiences, Ulysses promises not only to restore in them the fullness of their human image but also to bring them to virtue and knowledge. It’s almost an impossible promise; it may not even be a correct promise, because he’s stating that virtue is knowledge. I say I will lead you to virtue and knowledge, but they may not be the same thing. I may have knowledge, but it doesn’t mean that I have the virtue that I claim to have knowledge about. I can know what prudence is, but that doesn’t really make me prudent. It is with these false promises, then, that Ulysses leads his men to their doom.
Ulysses’ sin is to have counseled his companions to go beyond the boundaries of knowledge. Let me say that for Dante there’s no figure more interesting, more important, for whom he has so many questions, than the figure of the counselor. One counselor was, of course, Pier delle Vigne. How does he take the pressure of the court? What does he offer as advice to Frederick the Great, his emperor? And then we’re going to see other counselors. We’re going to find, in Inferno 28, a Provençal poet who literally advises war between father and son. He breaches the unity of the body politic. Here, though, Ulysses is the counselor who gives the wrong advice to his followers. He makes rhetorical promises that he knows he cannot quite keep. They are grand questions, but what do they amount to? Furthermore, Dante places Ulysses and his companions on the point of going beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It is as if Dante implies, if one were to read the full trajectory of the Divine Comedy, that there is no knowledge worthy of its name unless it is connected to some degree of transgression, that somehow transgression is part of an original and new knowing.
Ulysses has to go beyond the limits of the known world in order to discover something new that nobody else knew. That makes him, as they say, a Renaissance figure avant la lettre. Dante doesn’t seem to be terribly bothered by the transgression, however, since he himself, in different circumstances, is engaged in exactly the same kind of transgression of the perimeter. Dante surpasses even the cosmic perimeter as he goes beyond the sun, goes farther than Daedalus and certainly farther than Icarus. But the promise Ulysses makes to his compatriots remains a faulty one. Dante will refer to it, with a famous metaphor, as a “mad flight.”
Dante makes us aware of Ulysses’ madness by underscoring the political consequences of the promises that he makes. The whole of Canto 26 is littered with fallen cities. It begins with Florence. Dante apostrophizes against the city, which he describes as spreading its wings as if cities were like heroes, engaged in great flights. That is a clear desire on Dante’s part to have us connect the story of Ulysses’ self-degradation and turpitude with the story of Florence. Ulysses’ own fall is linked to that of Dante’s native city. Then there is a reference to the city of Troy. There is a reference to Thebes through Eteocles and Polynices. There is also a reference to Rome. The canto is full of references to cities from this perspective. Canto 26 is a brief version of the epic because the impulse of the epic is always political. There is no epic that exists that doesn’t attempt to represent falling cities and the edification of new cities or the placement of a city in a great metaphysical drama. It could be Heavenly Jerusalem, Rome, Carthage, or Thebes, but it’s always about falling and rising cities, and so, too, is the strategy of Dante. In particular, he aims to show how the grand philosophical claims of Ulysses have effects that make them appear to be empty rhetoric.
Dante places Ulysses nowhere, somewhere in the ocean without a particular place. He goes from one city to another, and at the same time, because of this, he doesn’t seem to be able to deliver on what he has promised. It’s a reflection on one particular aspect of the tragic story of Ulysses. It’s the tragedy of language, a language that contains all the most incredible mirages and yet falls short of reality. Ulysses is placed in the empty ocean away from all responsibilities and locations, and it is this gratuitousness of his quest that results in his being in Hell among the evil counselors. He has led his men to nothing after having promised them everything.
But Ulysses will appear again in the Comedy. He plays a pivotal role in Dante’s imagination. He has a paradigmatic role. Dante can’t quite get over the phantasm of Ulysses. Ulysses shows up in his dreams in Canto 19 of Purgatorio, and then he will also make an appearance when Dante has to measure the great imaginative distance that he traveled when he’s at the border of the physical and the metaphysical worlds in Paradiso. He looks back, and he will see Ulysses, or he will see the place that has been the place of Ulysses’ transgression. The figure of Ulysses haunts Dante, and as a result, he also haunts the Divine Comedy.