User:Lildoginacoat/Inferno (Dante)

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Canto XXVI


 * Bolgia 8 – Counsellors of Fraud: Dante addresses a passionate lament to Florence before turning to the next bolgia. Here, fraudulent advisers or evil counsellors move about, hidden from view inside individual flames. These are not people who gave false advice, but people who used their position to advise others to engage in fraud. Ulysses and Diomedes are punished together within a great double-headed flame; they are condemned for the stratagem of the Trojan Horse (resulting in the Fall of Troy), persuading Achilles to sail for Troy (causing Deidamia to die of grief), and for the theft of the sacred statue of Pallas, the Palladium (upon which, it was believed, the fate of Troy depended). Ulysses, the figure in the larger horn of the flame, narrates the tale of his last voyage and death, a creation of Dante's that illustrates the extent of his own pride despite his condemnation of this principle vice throughout the Divine Comedy. Ulysses tells how, after his detainment by Circe, his love for neither his son, his father, nor his wife could overpower his desire to set out on the open sea to "gain experience of the world / and of the vices and the worth of men". As they approach the Pillars of Hercules, Ulysses urges his crew:

'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.'


 * This passage exemplifies the danger of utilizing rhetoric without proper wisdom, a failing condemned by several of Dante's most prominent philosophical influences. Although Ulysses successful convinces his crew to venture into the unknown he lacks the wisdom to understand the danger this entails, as exemplified by their death in a shipwreck after sighting Mount Purgatory in the Southern Hemisphere.