The Art of Resilience: How to Choose Your Destiny?
(Inferno, Canto XXVI): Ulysses, Aeneas and the Art of Resilience
‘some things you will think of yourself,
...some things God will put into your mind.’
~ From Robert Fagle’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey
Welcome to Dante Read-Along! 🌒
(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )
Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide is the great Roman poet Virgil and in this Twenty-Sixth Canto we look into the eighth bolgia of the Eighth Circle and encounter the Deceivers. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, the list of characters here (coming soon), and the list of chat threads here.
In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.
All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.
This Week’s Circle ⭕️
An invective against Florence - Eighth Circle, eighth bolgia - the Deceivers, or Councilors of Fraud - Souls trapped within flickering flames - Double flame of Ulysses and Diomedes - Ulysses final voyage.
Dante opens Canto XXVI with an ironic invective, a proclamation, against Florence, the city of both Dante and the five thieves whose serpentine transformations he had just witnessed. The irony stems from the source of Florence’s fame in Hell; it is not the fame of virtue but of disgrace. Dante mentions the significance of early morning dreams; they held weighty truths, as referenced in the poetry of Horace and Ovid:
I, too, though born this side of the sea, once took to writing little verses in Greek, but Quirinus appeared to me after midnight, when dreams are true, and in such words ordered me to refrain.
Horace, Satires I.x.30-34
Dante and Virgil make their way to the ridge between the seventh and eighth bolgia, the rocky pathway growing ever more treacherous:
It grieved me then and now grieves me again
when I direct my mind to what I saw;
and more than usual, I curb my talent,
that it not run where virtue does not guide;
so that if my kind star or something better
has given me that gift, I not abuse it.
XXVI.19-24
Dante recognizes that he has been blessed with great intellect - his talent - and prays that he does not abuse it for any temptation that is less than virtuous, that he exercise it in alignment with the divine order that we will see unfold once we move through Purgatorio and into Paradiso.
The Thieves in the bolgia above stole material goods; these are spiritual thieves, who rob other men of their integrity.1
Just as the dusky gloaming on a summer evening brings out the fireflies as peasants watch the landscape fill with their light, so the trench below them is glowing, shining brilliantly with flames.
And just as Elisha watched Elijah’s fiery chariot and horses sail through the air and away into the heavens, that flame receding before his eyes and becoming the only visible remnant of his departure, so did Dante and Virgil see the moving flames below them. Elisha and Elijah are two Old Testament prophets:
Behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more.
II Kings 2:11-12
After the episode of the chariot, as Elisha was traveling and prophesying, there came the affair of the bears, so quickly referenced in line 34, and a most unusual story:
And as [Elisha] was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. II Kings 2:23-24
Dante held onto the rocks as he leaned over to look down at the flames, as Virgil explained that within each flame is contained the soul of a sinner; it is as much as Dante had guessed, and he asks about a certain flame that is cleft at the top, split in two.
Dante compares the split flame to the brothers Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Oedipus the King. The two had agreed to share the throne of Thebes after forcing their father to abdicate the throne, and Oedipus prayed that they might be forever in enmity with each other as a result. Eteocles refused to cede the throne when the time came, leading to the war of the Seven Against Thebes, where the brothers slew each other. When placed on a funeral pyre, their animosity was so great that even the flames of the pyre split in two. Statius says of this event in the Thebaid:
When the devouring fire
first touched the corpse, the whole pyre shook and cast
the newcomer aside. A flame shot up
two-headed and each severed point shone bright.
as though the Furies' torches had been set
to battle by the death-pale lord of Hell,
each fiery column threatened, each essayed
to outsoar the other.
Statius Thebaid xxi.435-442
The two who live within the double flame before them are Ulysses and Diomedes of the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. As they worked together in life to deceive, so are they bound together in this twin flame of punishment.
Together Ulysses and Diomedes played three deceits which have brought them to their current place: the first was at the end of the Trojan War as recounted in Virgil’s Aeneid; the Greeks gifted a giant wooden horse to the Trojans, who brought it into the city walls as an acceptance of reconciliation. It was filled with Greek warriors who spilled out at night and sacked the city, the definitive battle of the war.
The second deceit was the grief that led to the death of Deidamia. Achilles, the Greek warrior, was hidden by his mother Thetis on the island of Scyros to avoid the war between the Greeks and Trojans. He was hidden, dressed as a woman, in the king's harem, but while there seduced his daughter, Deidamia, who had Achilles’ child. Ulysses and Diomede were the ones who brought him out of hiding to fight in the war, leading to Deidamia’s grief.
The last of their sins was the theft of the statue of Pallas Athena - the Palladium - from Troy, which was the guarantor of the city’s safety, leading to its downfall.
Dante is eager to hear them talk if they are able, and Virgil calls on them with an invocation, that if he was worthy to write of them in his lifetime, may they now halt and share their stories.
The tongue of flame that was Ulysses recounted the story of their adventures and downfall after the events of their deceit; the details of the story itself is of Dante’s own making and are not found in any original accounts.
After being detained on Circe’s island on his way home from the war to his kingdom of Ithaca and his family - his wife Penelope, his son Telemachus, and his father Laertes - he was overwhelmed with the desire to know; in this account he does not return home, as he did in the Odyssey, to fight the suitors and regain mastery of his home after being away for twenty years:
Neither my fondness for my son nor pity
for my old father nor the love I owed
Penelope, which would have gladdened her,
was able to defeat in me the longing
I had to gain experience of the world
and of the vices and the worth of men.
XXVI.94-99
This is the very state of mind that Dante refers to earlier in the Canto when he curbs his talent “that it not run where virtue does not guide” (21-22).
So Odysseus and his men set out for yet another adventure. They sailed west through the Mediterranean toward the straits of Gibraltar, crossing the point at which “Hercules set up his boundary stones,” (108) marking the end of where it was permitted to travel. With Spain to the north and Morocco to the south, they passed through the Pillars of Hercules:
O you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that is still left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled
XXVI.112-117
He encouraged his men to follow “worth and knowledge” (120), making the voyage symbolic of the highest attainment for those who are seeking the ultimate virtue and knowledge:
Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. Job 38:11
They headed southward; they travelled so far and long that they crossed the equator and saw the stars of the southern hemisphere. After five full moons, a mountain arose in the distance over the water; this is the Mountain of Purgatory. Yet they did not arrive by divine decree, but through their own power.
Their joy at the sight was short lived, for upon sight of it they were caught up in a mighty wind from the mountain which sent their ship spinning and diving into the whirlpool, capturing them, closing upon them, ending their journey. And so the Canto closes.
💭 Philosophical Exercises:
“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
~ Homer, The Odyssey
I sailed away from Circe, who’d beguiled me
to stay more than a year there, near Gaeta—
before Aeneas gave that place a name—neither my fondness for my son nor pity
for my old father nor the love I owed
Penelope, which would have gladdened her,was able to defeat in me the longing
I had to gain experience of the world
and of the vices and the worth of men.~ (lines 91-99)
“Aeneas’ destiny is to build with integrity, not to destroy by deception as Ulysses does”, writes Andrea Marcolongo in her brilliant book The Art of Resilience, where she explores how Virgil’s Aeneid can teach us to endure hardships and why it often feels so difficult to read this masterpiece in times of peace.
Aeneas is not a story for a peaceful times. It’s a story which gives hope in the difficult times. Aeneas teaches us the importance of going on, when there’s no hope, just fulfilling our duty. Answering destruction with reconstruction.
~ The Art of Resilience, Andrea Marcolongo
If we look closely at the engraving I included in this section by Agostino Carracci — a reproduction of which, by the way, hangs in my library — we see a horrifying scene: Aeneas and his family realise that their native city of Troy has fallen. Aeneas carries his aged father Anchises2, who in turn tries to save the last remnants of their legacy from the burning city of Troy in his hands.
No parent can look calmly at Aeneas gently holding his son’s hand, making sure Ascanius is following him so he does not meet the fate of his mother. Creusa, Aeneas wife, fell only few steps behind her family and was massacred in the madness that was unleashed by Ulysses guile, since it was Ulysses who came up with an idea of the Trojan horse.
This, of course, is nowhere near the end of the journey, neither for Aeneas nor for Ulysses. The fall of Troy marks a new beginning. At this moment, as Aeneas flees the burning city and Ulysses enters it in triumph, two very different adventures begin.
Two different kinds of adventures that many of us must choose in-between, are we going to follow the footsteps of Aeneas or be Ulysses?
The crucial different between them I will explain to my reader in a brief moment.
Our choice will determine our destiny.
Dante’s Ulysses
“Next to Homer’s conception of Ulysses, Dante’s, despite its brevity, is the most influential in the whole evolution of the wandering hero” 3 claims Dante scholar W.B. Stanford in his The Ulysses Theme, not a small achievement by Dante considering he did not know about Homer’s Odyssey.
About two hundred years after Dante, in 1453, the great city of learning, Constantinople, fell to Muslim invaders, forcing many Greek-speaking scholars to flee to the western parts of what was once called Christendom. With them, they brought works previously unknown to Latin-speaking intellectuals — among them, Homer’s Odyssey.
Dante’s main source for Ulysses (the Latin name of Odysseus) was Virgil.4 Our pilgrim’s mentor portrayed Ulysses in a negative light, as the cunning and ruthless mastermind behind the fall of Troy — it was Ulysses who devised the scheme of the wooden horse, a deceptive gift that breached Troy’s walls and led to Aeneas’s ruin. Interestingly, it was Ulysses’ guile that, in a way, set Aeneas’s journey in motion. This is doubly fascinating, because in Inferno, Ulysses’ nature closely resembles that of the infernal serpent from the Garden of Eden.
The other source of Ulysses was Cicero’s De Finibus. In it Cicero praises Ulysses thirst for knowledge, desire for more wisdom, “Cicero interprets Homer’s Sirens as givers of knowledge and Ulysses’ response to their invitation as praiseworthy. He endorses Ulysses’ quest, writing: “It is knowledge that the Sirens offer, and it was no marvel if a lover of wisdom held this dearer than his home”5
Have you ever asked yourself, what does Fate actually mean?
While Aeneas embarks on his fated journey carrying his father in one hand and holding his son in another, Dante’s Ulysses declares:
neither my fondness for my son nor pity
for my old father nor the love I owed
Penelope, which would have gladdened her,was able to defeat in me the longing
I had to gain experience of the world
and of the vices and the worth of men.
If Homer’s Ulysses must find his way back home to his wife and son after the fall of Troy, Dante’s Ulysses has no precise destination, just a lust for adventure. Like the infernal serpent in the garden of Eden, who promises limitless knowledge of good and evil, Ulysses wants to “experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men.” (Even if it costs him abandonment of his loved ones)
Aeneas, in contrast, is the anti-thesis of Ulysses. His character and destiny are the opposite of the cunning Greek. Aeneas’s journey was fated—but have you ever asked yourself: what is fate? And, can we choose it?
The best translation of fatum - the most lucid - is ‘obligation’.6 Aeneas is fulfilling his obligation, his duty. His home, which resembled the Garden of Eden, was destroyed by the infernal serpent Ulysses, and now it is his fate—his sacred duty—to found another city and regain Paradise.
Dante places seers and diviners in the lower depths of Hell because they seek to convince us that our fate lies beyond our free will and choices. But fate is not something predetermined — it is something we shape by our own decisions. Aeneas was obliged (fatum) to found Latium, and yet it was a duty he chose to embrace.
Ultimately, what makes Ulysses and Aeneas so starkly different is not how much they care about their loved ones, or whether they follow their fate, but that they live different questions, Ulysses wants to know “what”, while Aeneas craves to discover “how".
We spend all our lives trying to figure out “what”. Restless, we barely give a thought to “how”. Because the only thing we have abundant influence over is the meaning of our actions. Our fortunes entirely depend on how we act and on the way in which we carry out our actions.7
While Ulysses is consumed by the question: What new light might I find at the edge of the world?
Aeneas, instead, asks: How do I carry the weight of my people toward that light?
Are you Ulysses or Aeneas?
Aeneas’ actions are modelled on mos, which refers to mores — traditions, customs, or, in other words, the accumulated wisdom of experience that teaches us how to live.
~ Andrea Marcolongo, The Art of Resilience
Just as with Brunetto Latini, whom we met in Canto XV, he seeks fame for fame’s sake — a barren fame, aimed not at the stars but at earthly glory. Ulysses, likewise, pursues sterile adventures that bear no fruit, driven only by a thirst for knowledge. In the northern lands of Europe, among the German-speaking peoples, this same hunger for knowledge will later be personified by Faust.
‘If you pursue your star, you cannot fail to reach a splendid harbour’ Latini tells to Dante. This marks another difference between Ulysses and Aeneas, both of them embark on a journey, filled with trials and failures, but the former has no guiding star, while the latter does.
The choice between construction and destruction, between the patient duty of Aeneas and the restless hunger of Ulysses, between love anchored in responsibility and the feverish pursuit of desire, between the question of how we act and the blind impulse toward what we pursue — this is the quiet choice each of us must make, unless we prefer to find ourselves among the neutrals in the darkest places of the Inferno.
So, are you Aeneas or Ulysses?
This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭
(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)
The Empire State of Mind
This canto marks yet another, the third, transition in Dante’s growing wisdom and the strengthening of his moral compass. He began his journey in Canto I walking on solid ground (a cammino), then proceeded with the beautiful simile of a man escaping to the shore after nearly drowning (per mare e per terra — by sea and by land), and this canto begins with:
Be joyous, Florence, you are great indeed,
for over sea and land you beat your wings;
through every part of Hell your name extends!
Later, Ulysses will declare:
and having turned our stern toward morning, we
made wings out of our oars in a wild flight
and always gained upon our left—hand side.
Dante draws a connection between Florence’s relentless imperial ambitions — to rule over land, sea, and even air — and, as we discover later in the canto, the figure of Ulysses, who, like Florence, pursued power and knowledge without any noble purpose.
Tennyson’s Ulysses
I must emphasise here that I sympathise with Ulysses, as did the great poet Tennyson. His poem, inspired by Dante’s portrayal, never fails to bring tears to my eyes. I cannot quote it in full here, but please do follow the link and read it — I promise you, you will not regret it.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
It is astonishing how the greatest fictional characters in history are never truly fictional —they are more alive than ever, more alive than many of us will ever be, and their imprint on our civilisation is often deeper than that of even the greatest figures in history.
Ulysses’ Virtue ❤️
Ulysses’ character is so relatable, charming, and seducing because he lived a life of adventure that many of us crave so much. I would love to quote a passage from Prue Shaw’s brilliant Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity:
Ulysses has almost reached purgatory by relying on unaided human efforts: his own courage, his eloquence, his companions' loyalty and trust in his leadership, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge.
He has done so bypassing divine grace, and his mission is therefore doomed to failure. In a medieval Christian world, this is the crux of the issue. But for us as readers, it is only as we look back from purgatory that these things will fall into place, when we encounter our first group of saved souls who disembark on the shore at the foot of the mountain after a sea voyage which exactly follows in its course the path taken by Ulysses on his final journey.
The connection is underlined by the deliberate repetition of the final rhyme sequence of the canto. The nacque—acque—piacque of the last lines of Inferno xxvi becomes the acque—piacque—rinacque of the last lines of Purgatorio i: a fine example of the functional use of rhyme.
Final Words
It’s been a long post, but that’s only because this is one of my favourite cantos in the Inferno. In fact, let me be bold and say it outright: it is my favourite Canto. That’s not to say that the ones we’ve crossed before lacked wisdom or beauty—you’ve been with me on this journey, you know there has been plenty of both. But there is something about Canto XXVI that touches my heart more deeply than the rest. I’m certain I’ll return to it and write more when the time is right.
Quotes 🖋️
(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):
‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘o you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking—time that still is leftunto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.’ ❤️
Sayers, Hell 237
Who, surprisingly fit for an old man, just look at his muscles — I only wish I were as healthy at my age of 35 as Anchises (Aeneas’s father), who must be around 60!
(The Ulysses Theme, p. 178)
There were plenty of Latin sources about Ulysses - Ovid, Lucan, Horace, Alexander.
Barolini, Teodolinda. “Inferno 26: The Epic Hero.” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-26/20
Andrea Marcolongo, The Art of Resilience
Andrea Marcolongo, The Art of Resilience
Joel Christensen argues that Homer's genius is in getting us to root for Odysseus, who is (much) more anti-hero than hero (which would support that he is getting his just desserts in the Inferno)
https://youtu.be/jOECu1uvkrw?t=3