Inferno · Canto XXVI ·
Inferno XXVI — The Bolgia of Flames
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 26 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XXVI
Before reading
This is the Ulysses canto. It is one of the cantos of the Inferno most often read alone, and one of the most contested. The reader who does not know who is hidden inside the great two-pointed flame will meet, in this canto, the boldest and most beautiful self-defence delivered by any soul in Hell.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim has climbed out of the bolgia of the thieves and onto the next ridge of Malebolge. He now looks down into the eighth bolgia, the bolgia of the counsellors of fraud — the men who used their intelligence to mislead others into ruin. The punishment is collective and unusual: each soul is wrapped in its own flame, and from the rim above the pilgrim sees the floor of the bolgia like a summer hillside scattered with fireflies. The greatest crimes get the greatest flames; the very largest flame, the only one with two horns, holds two souls together.
What it helps to know
The canto opens with a savage apostrophe to Florence. Dante has just seen five of his own city's leading citizens damned among the thieves; the irony is bitter — over sea and land thou beatest thy wings — and the curse he calls down on his birth city is one of the Inferno's most personal moments. He has been an exile for six or seven years as he writes, and the wound is fresh enough to bleed through the verse.
The two-horned flame at the centre of the canto holds Ulysses and Diomedes — the heroes of the Odyssey and the Iliad whom the medieval Latin tradition (which had not read Homer directly) remembered chiefly for three frauds: the wooden horse that took Troy, the theft of the Palladium (the sacred statue that protected Troy), and the trick by which Achilles was lured out of his hiding place at Skyros. They are damned in this bolgia for being the great inventors of strategic deception in the western tradition.
What Dante does with Ulysses is more interesting than the catalogue of his classical crimes. The medieval West, reading Homer through fragments and through the Latin Trojan-cycle compilations, had no Homeric Odyssey to draw on; the death of Ulysses was an open page. Dante fills it. He invents — and the invention is one of the most consequential acts of literary creation in the Middle Ages — a story in which the aged Ulysses, after returning to Ithaca, cannot settle. He gathers his old crew, sails west past the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar, the limit of the known world for medieval cosmography), strikes out across the unmapped southern ocean, and, after five months, sights a great mountain in the distance before a whirlwind out of the new land sinks him. The mountain, Dante is telling his initiated reader, is Mount Purgatory — the antipodal island the pilgrim will himself reach by very different means in the next cantica. Ulysses tried to come to salvation by his own wits and was drowned for it within sight of the shore.
The speech Ulysses gives to his crew before the final voyage is one of the most quoted in the poem. 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. It is the noblest call to action in the Inferno. It is delivered by a damned soul. The whole interpretive puzzle of the canto is in that conjunction.
What to read for
Notice that Virgil insists on speaking to Ulysses himself, because, he says, the Greek heroes might disdain the pilgrim's Italian-dialect speech. The detail is courteous and also revealing — Virgil knows how to address Homeric warriors as a fellow citizen of the classical world. The pilgrim is the outsider here.
Notice how the speech is built. It begins as travel narrative, ends in catastrophe, and never once names sin. Ulysses tells his story as a tragedy of curiosity, not as a crime. That is precisely the problem the canto leaves the reader to sit with.
The canto's final image is a sea closing over a ship. The last word is Another — altrui. Pay attention to who, in the poem's grammar, gets a capital letter.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto opened with one of the Inferno's most bitter civic apostrophes — 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 — and then climbed onto the next ridge of Malebolge to look down into a valley scattered with hundreds of separate flames, like fireflies on a summer hillside. Inside the largest flame, the only one with two horns, the pilgrim met Ulysses. The whole second half of the canto is a single monologue: the dead Greek hero invents his own death and tells it. He tells it well enough that no reader has ever quite settled into the conclusion that the speech is also damning. That is precisely the problem the canto is built to leave open.
Florence and the firefly simile
The opening apostrophe is unique in the Inferno in its conjunction of pride and disgust. Florence is great enough to spread its name through Hell — and that is the proof of its damnation. Dante has just seen five of his neighbours among the thieves; he will, in the bolgia ahead, find the great voices of fraud. The simile that opens the second movement of the canto turns from civic anger to pastoral memory: the bolgia's hundreds of separate flames are likened (around lines 25–33, paraphrased) to the fireflies a peasant sees scattered down a valley on a summer evening when he rests on a hill above his vineyard. The contrast is deliberate. The same eye that just cursed Florence remembers a summer evening on a Tuscan hill watching the fireflies come out. Dante does not let his rage at his city erase his love for the countryside that surrounds it. The two simultaneous attitudes coexist in the verse without resolution.
Why Ulysses is here at all
The bolgia is the bolgia of the counsellors of fraud — souls who used eloquence and strategy to deceive others into ruin. Ulysses is here, the canto's earlier lines specify, for the wooden horse (which made the door whence issued forth the Romans' gentle seed), for the trick that drew Achilles out of his hiding place at Skyros (which broke the heart of the abandoned Deidamia), and for the theft of the Palladium (the sacred statue that protected Troy). These are the three frauds the Latin-Trojan tradition remembered him for. He is not in this bolgia for the Odyssey. The medieval West had no Odyssey. The story Ulysses tells inside the flame is not the story Homer told; it is a story Dante wrote.
The invented voyage
Everything from line 90 of this canto onward is Dante's invention. After the return to Ithaca, the recovery of Penelope, the embrace of Telemachus and the duty owed to the aged Laertes, this Ulysses cannot rest. He gathers the small remnant of his old crew, sails west, runs the Pillars of Hercules — the western limit set by Jove himself for human exploration — and turns south into the open ocean. Five months later, after long passage in the new hemisphere, he sights a dark mountain, taller than any he has ever seen. The crew rejoice; the joy turns to weeping; a whirlwind out of the new land strikes the bow; the ship is whirled three times; the prow goes down; the sea closes above them. As pleased Another — com'altrui piacque — the capitalised pronoun a quiet, lethal piece of Dantean grammar. The mountain is Mount Purgatory, the antipodal island the pilgrim will reach by very different means in the next cantica. Ulysses tried to come to salvation by his own oars. He died within sight of the shore.
The speech and its paradox
The thirty lines of Ulysses's exhortation to his crew before the final voyage are the noblest sustained piece of moral rhetoric anywhere in the Inferno:
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. (Inf. XXVI.112–120)
Considerate la vostra semenza: / fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza. It is one of the most quoted tercets in Italian literature. Boccaccio cited it; the Renaissance built humanism on its echo; modern readers have heard in it a manifesto of the secular pursuit of knowledge. And it is delivered by a damned soul, inside the flame that contains him for the fraud he is being punished for. The conjunction is the canto's whole problem.
Two readings have stood up against each other for seven centuries. The first reads the canto as the Commedia's judgment on autonomous human reason: Ulysses sins by trying to reach the antipodal shore — the shore of Purgatory — by intellect and seamanship rather than by the grace that brought Dante there. His curiosity is folle, mad, because it exceeds the limit Jove (the canto's name for divine providence) set. The second reads the canto as something stranger: Dante's most ambivalent self-portrait. The poet too is sailing where no one has gone, l'acqua… che mai non si corse. The poet too is writing in pursuit of virtute e canoscenza. Dante is the only living man who has been to the mountain Ulysses sighted. The canto could be read as the poem's nightmare image of itself: the voyage Ulysses failed at is the voyage the Commedia claims to have succeeded at, and the only thing that separates them is which authority has authorised the sailing.
The canto leaves both readings open. Virgil's curious detail — that he will speak to Ulysses, because the Greek heroes might disdain Dante's modern speech — places the pilgrim outside the conversation he most needs to be inside. Whatever else Ulysses is, he is the figure of an ambition the Commedia cannot quite disown.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening apostrophe to Florence.
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 honor risest. (Inf. XXVI.1–6)
The first six lines of the canto are a direct address to the exiled poet's birthplace. Whence shame comes unto me — ond' io vergogna porto — is one of the Inferno's most quietly painful confessions. The civic identity persists even where the city is repudiated.
The flame begins to speak.
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 (Inf. XXVI.85–90)
The fire becomes a tongue. The image is one of the Commedia's most precise small inventions: the soul wrapped in flame must speak through the flame, so the flame itself takes the shape of the voice — as if it were the tongue that spake.
The great speech.
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. (Inf. XXVI.112–120)
The most-quoted lines in the canto, and one of the most-quoted in the poem. Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang is the noblest sentence ever spoken by a damned soul. Whether it is also the most damning is the question the Commedia puts and does not answer.
The closing wreck.
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 it 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. (Inf. XXVI.133–142)
The closing two words of the speech — Until the sea above us closed again — are the verbal equivalent of a held breath. As pleased Another — com'altrui piacque — the capitalised altrui is the Commedia's grammatical signature for the unnamed will of God, and it closes the canto with the smallest possible acknowledgment of the authority Ulysses was sailing past.
What to watch for
Watch the mountain. The reader will reach it in Purgatorio I, and the first soul the pilgrim meets there — Cato — guards the same shore Ulysses died trying to make. The arrival the Greek failed at is the arrival the Commedia will quietly claim for itself.
Watch Virgil's social radar. The detail that he does not let Dante speak to Ulysses because of the heroes' possible disdain for Italian dialect is a small joke about the linguistic prestige of antiquity. It is also a quiet acknowledgment that the great pagans, even in Hell, remain a closed circle to which Virgil belongs and the pilgrim does not.
Watch the next canto's opening. A second flame is already approaching, asking to hear news of its own region — and the conversation it will hold with the pilgrim is the structural mirror of this one. Counsellors of fraud come in pairs.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.