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Dante's Eighth Circle
Ulysses in Dante's Eighth Circle of the Inferno
In the Eighth Circle of the Inferno, Dante places all those souls whose vice was falsehood. It is a sensible dwelling place for them since it is the last Circle before the final Ninth Circle wherein dwells the Father of Lies, Satan or Dis. In the Eighth Circle, one finds flatterers, panderers, fortune tellers, hypocrites, thieves, evil counselors and more. What all of them have in common is their practice of distorting the true nature of things. For that reason does Dante find Ulysses in the ditch of the evil counselors in Canto XXVI. This paper will examine a passage from this Canto and examine its context, significance, and my reaction to it.
In the eighth ditch of the Eighth Circle, Dante meets the evil counselors whose sin was to abuse their position and gift from God (which was to lead by example), choosing instead to lead by way of deception and trickery. Their punishment is to forever burn in a single flame, their persons hidden from view just as their true intentions...
In one such flame resides the soul of Ulysses, also known by his Greek name Odysseus. Dante asks about a particular two-headed flame and is told by Virgil that it is actually two flames united in one -- belonging, of course, to Ulysses (his Roman name) and Diomede: "Forever round this path / Ulysses and Diomede move in such dress, / united in pain as once they were in wrath; / there they lament the ambush of the Horse / which was the door through which the noble seed of the Romans issued from its holy source; / there they mourn that for Achilles slain / sweet Deidamia weeps even in death; / there they recall the Palladium in their pain" (Inferno 26.55-63). Dante asks to tarry a moment so that the flame might draw near and he may hear the words of Ulysses. Virgil grants the request and the two hear a portrait of Ulysses that other poets have not described.
Indeed, Dante's portrayal of Ulysses is quite different from Homer's, who depicts Odysseus as the hero of the epic poem The Odyssey. It is quite different from classical…
Works Cited
Dante. The Divine Comedy. [trans. John Ciardi]. NY: Penguin, 2003. Print.
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