Character of Ulysses and Dante’s Inferno

During the Middle Age, the character of Ulysses is charged with new meanings, which trigger a process of multiplication of identities and symbols that have its fulcrum in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno where, for the first time, the Homeric hero merges with the Christian and Western values systems. With Dante's rewriting, the story of Ulysses is enriched with shades that, while not contemplated by the original context, give an account of the immense capacity of the myth to adapt to the civilizations that use it and to its individual in different places and times.

Canto XXVI shows how, on several occasions, the poet revives mythical characters from the classical world and rewrites them in a medieval key: this is certainly a sign of the lack of historical sense that characterizes the world in which Dante operates. In fact, with Christianity, all the events of the previous eras are considered as a providential vision: all ages have come in preparation for the advent of Christ.

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Thus, typical mythical characters such as Charon or Cerberus are used by Dante as administrators of divine justice, and other classical heroes are destined for eternal damnation, since, despite their great deeds, they have sinned against God.

Ulysses is, first among all, an example of this Dante's attitude: in his Inferno, the extraordinary traveller, symbol of human reason, which has in the poem a function equal to Dante himself, is relegated to hell as his actions and his ingenuity, which they represents the ones of all men, are not supported by the divine will.

This is how 'Dante created the most original version of Ulysses ever received, a Ulysses who does not look for a house and a wife in Ithaca, but leaves Circe to violate all the limits and venture into the unknown”.

Being Ulysses the prototype of the man hungry for knowledge, and, according to Boitani 'the figuration of what we are', Dante as character of the Commedia can only be attracted to him in a peculiar way: “I pray / that you don’t deny me my desire to stay“ he tells Virgil. He knows well that the nature of man intend to overcome humanity itself (so much that he will open his Convivio saying that “ all men by nature desire to know”) and the meeting between the two will be a symbol of the tenacity by which the desire of knowledge challenges all the limits imposed by Fate.

Accompanied by Virgil, his guide and mentor on the journey through hell, in which the author places every example of fallen humanity without divine grace, Dante arrives in the eighth circle, where the fraudulent counsellors are condemned. Their doom is to be wrapped in tongues of fire that burn endlessly, as he wanted to create the adequate contrappasso to the complexity of the guilt attributed to those who deceive their victims with the art of speaking, hiding their purpose.

However, among the condemned of the Eighth Bolgia, there are not only figures related to the Florentine environment of which the poet is a part of, but also the legendary Ulysses. The hero, urged by Vergil to tell his story in without ever being interrupted for 52 verses, makes Dante 'slave of the melodramatic story' making clear the admiration for the poet towards the Homeric character. To support of this admiration, there is the fact that Dante, unlike Homer, presents an aged version of Ulysses, synonymous of intrinsic wisdom, which suggests a strong emotional involvement but put aside to make space for the right divine condemnation.

During the time that separates the Odyssey from the Inferno, countless other authors have reinterpreted the figure of Odysseus as 'a deceiver, an inventor of false stories, an illusionist orator', including Virgil in the Aeneid and Ovid in the Metamorphoses, so as to make it a literary tradition of great authority, from which Dante can only have drawn. Ulysses is in fact condamned because of various actions: for tricking Achilles into warring against the Trojans, for the deception of the horse and for stealing the statue of Athena from the defeated city, showing contempt for sacred things.

It is important to underline the fact that Dante could not know the Homeric poems and Ulysses is for him a character arrived only through the Latin works of Statio, Ovid and Virgil. This clarification on Dante’s sources is relevant as it is also of this mediation that the sentence against Ulysses suffers: for Dante what was narrated in the Aeneid by Virgil (the siege of Troy and Aeneas’ journey) were historically happened facts. And the evident sympathy for the Trojans, ancestors of the Romans and the enemies for the Greeks, is constant motif in Virgil and in the Latin tradition.

According to Boitani 'there is no doubt that Dante condemns (Ulysses) for his frauds”, but Dante himself seems to have some interest in Ulysses' role as an evil adviser. In fact, the poet draws attention to another sin that is far more serious: the “ardor to posses / experience of the world and humanity”. In fact Ulysses tempts his companions in the task of skirting Africa to the extreme point, being on the verge of the accusation of impiety (hybris), as the hero tried to voluntarily exceed the limit of the Pillars of Hercules, 'placed by God for a supremely important reason' and 'marker of the pietas': the Christian-like characteristic of devotion to God and to the family that distinguishes Aeneas, Virgilian hero founder of Rome. All features that do not belong to Ulysses, as he will be defined by David Thompson ”the antitype of Aeneas”.

This is why Ulysses' “few words” to his companions, even if originated from the desire to improve human nature (Living like a brute / is not the destiny of men like you, / but knowledge and virtue ever our pursuit.), are for Dante 'a selfish (…) incitement (...) to undertake a journey that leads to death” so, a fraudulent advice, since virtue can be exercised only in the observance of the divine laws and in the recognition of the limits set to human knowledge. So, Lina Insana notes that the sin of Ulysses involves “both a misguided use of rhetoric and an inappropriate crossing of the boundaries that govern human learning’.

This Dante conviction on Ulysses' journey is certainly fueled also by Dante's cosmological vision, which imposes an image of the ocean strongly rooted in the reality of the era in which he lived in: unlike modern men, who hardly find negative elements in Ulisse's quest for knowledge, for Dante the Sea is not the unknown to be discovered, but beyond the Pillars of Hercules there is the “uninhabited region”, the part of world denied to the living, where the only earth is the mountain of Purgatory described in the verses 134-135. The Dantesque character chooses as the purpose of his journey the deep knowledge of the world, beyond which the medieval man, profoundly Christian, sees perdition and death. It is the refusal of that typically Christian model of knowledge to determine, for Dante, the failure of Ulysses.

The latter is therefore an exemplum with the aim of providing a code of conduct for the Christian man who must submit to the divine will. It is for this reason that Ulysses’ enterprise ('flight') is defined “mad”: because he, a man, believed he could reach the infinite without God's help. The 'mad flight' is almost a prophecy: it anticipates and summarizes the whole range of experiences that is between Dante and us. Thus Ulysses is, at the same time, a prefiguration of the Renaissance man (as Colombus), of the Enlightened man lover of reason and, finally, of modern man, a soul wrecked in the knowledge of nothingness.

But Dante's decision to write about a character remembered as well as condemned for his curiositas could be a sign of a certain affinity between the thought of Ulysses and the poet himself: the analogy between Dante's and Odysseus's journey is in fact implicit, the first one aimed to the knowledge of human nature and the second one to the knowledge of the world. If Ulysses considers human reason the key to deciphering the world, so does Dante in the first verse of the Inferno, when, in the middle of his political life, he becomes fascinated by philosophy (as he tells in Vita Nova). And as Ulysses will then be punished and sent to hell, Dante will loose himself into the dark wood.

This is why Dante is unable to fully condemn Ulysses' natural desire to anticipate him in that great step and get rid of the sensation of transcending a sacred limit, a fear which is reflected in the continual doubts that the author expresses during the poem, for example in Canto II when he defines his own journey as 'foolish'. This consideration is shared by Jorge L. Borges who states that Ulysses has undertaken an impossible task, but the evident participation of Dante is almost too deep and intimate. Dante, therefore, is not the anti-Ulysses, since he makes a journey no less “foolish” than the one of the Greek hero, but the difference between the two lies in the fact that Dante's enterprise is approved by the divinity: 'For this reason Ulysses' has this strength, (…) Ulysses is a mirror of Dante, (…) Dante felt that (…) he too deserved such a punishment.

He had written the poem, but he had also broken the mysterious laws of (…) God.“ For Borges, the mad flight of the poet is the writing of the book itself, because he arrogated to himself the right to decide about good and evil. In this sense Ulysses, being pre-Christian, cannot be condemned for his own atheism, but only for his universal moral faults. Boitani defines Dante 'a more fortunate hero because he is better guided (...) and protected by a more powerful God'than Ulysses, who instead 'disgraces the Christian fate to legitimize (Dante)“. The author, therefore, feels Ulysses close to his own experience but he believed he could save himself returning to faith. In Boitani’s words: 'if there is no Christianity, every idea of ​​return appears impossible to Dante; and the unexpected ending he adds to Homer's poem draws the circle of human destiny. Life is complete only when death comes: but death, for a believer, is only a beginning; and if we do not go to Heaven we fall into an infernal labyrinth.'

The verses of Inferno have therefore multiplied the echo of the adventure of the Homeric hero by providing the greatest number of subsequent literary ideas, entrusting the new implications to modern and contemporary literature. Even for Italian poets, for example, what counts is not the beginning but the end, the last journey of the Greek hero, ideally accomplished in Dante's work.