A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald Read Free

enemies most directly responsible for the fall of Troy, a defeat they now made their own, and his character epitomizing the perfidious Greek at his worst.
    The perfidy of the horse and the origin of the Roman people are specifically linked and heightened in
The Divine Comedy
when Vergil answers the pilgrim Dante’s query about the twin flames they see in the eighth circle of hell. These are Ulysses and Diomedes, Ulysses’ companion on many missions, who together, as Vergil says, “bemoan / the snare of the horse which made the gate / whence issued the noble seed of the Romans” (
Inferno
XXVI.58–60). What Dante knows of Odysseus he knows through the Latin tradition, primarily Vergil’s
Aeneid
, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, and Statius’
Achilleis
(widely read notwithstanding its unfinished state) along with their commentaries,which were the staples of medieval schooling in the Classics or, as they were then called, “The Authors” (
auctores
). Dante conveys his recognition that his knowledge of these figures of Greek epic is entirely mediated by Latin, along with his profound sense of the historical belatedness of his Italian tongue, by staging a Vergilian intervention when it comes time for Dante to question Ulysses and Diomedes. “Leave the speaking to me,” Vergil advises, “who have understood / that which you wish: for perhaps they would be disdainful, / since they were Greeks, of your speech” (XXVI.73–75).
    Vergil adjures them by his own celebration of both characters in verse and asks one of them to tell how he came to die (XXVI. 79–84). Dante makes Ulysses respond, and now it is the Italian poet’s turn to make the next move in the literary game of interpolation. The subsequent narrative of Ulysses’ last journey is often read, anachronistically, as a remarkable anticipation of romantic, even Faustian, striving. But Dante, like Augustine before him, need only have looked within himself to find the great temptation for an intellectual that the desire for unbounded knowledge represents. Indeed, that temptation, and all the woe born of it, runs back in the Judeo-Christian tradition to the first temptation in Eden. The shipboard address of Dante’s Ulysses to yet another set of comrades he will lead to destruction continues the tradition of Odyssean eloquence, and, while it wins over Ulysses’ shipmates, Dante expects the reader of the
The Divine Comedy
to be wary of its appeals to the senses and experience (XXVI. 115–16). He gives Ulysses these concluding words: “Consider your stock: / you were not made to live like brute animals, / but to pursue manly valor and knowledge” (XXVI. 118–20).
    But for Dante there is a third way, between brutish existence and undisciplined striving for glory and wisdom: submission to authority and the willingness to brook the limits placed on human knowledge by God. Dante goes far beyond Vergil’s presentation of Ulysses as a negative example of irresponsible leadership, against which Vergil highlights Aeneas’ self-effacing responsibility. Dante’s Ulysses destroysboth his companions and himself not merely in striving to satisfy idle curiosity and to see other lands and peoples but in searching for knowledge, on which he, erring, places no limits. It is out of his own understanding of the temptation of the desire for knowledge that Dante could describe in such heroic terms Ulysses’ five-month-long sea journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules (i.e., the Strait of Gibraltar), which for Greco-Roman and medieval navigators marked the bounds of the known world. But, as even Dante’s Ulysses makes clear when he describes his ultimate shipwreck—“and our prow sank, as it pleased another, / until the sea closed back over us” (XXVI. 141–42)—this is a heroism which attracts us at our peril. The “other” mentioned in the canto’s penultimate line is, Dante’s Ulysses now understands, Dante’s God.
      While the double-sided nature of Odysseus, explicit