DANTE’S ULYSSES BETWEEN TWO MILLENNIA (II)
DANTE’S ULYSSES BETWEEN TWO MILLENNIA (II)

Summary/Abstract: In the fourteenth century, Dante launched his elderly hero on a journey which, crossing beyond the Pillars which Hercules had planted at the Straight of Gibraltar acciò che l’uom più oltre non si metta (“so that men should not pass beyond”), would continue out into the Atlantic and south to the other side of the world. After five months at sea – what Dante’s hero himself dubbed his folle volo, his “mad flight” – guided chiefly by the light of the moon and stars, Ulysses and his men come within sight of a “new land,” dominated by a high mountain, dim in the distance, which later in the Commedia is revealed as the mountain of Purgatory. From it, however, there now comes a storm which whirls the ship into a triple vortex before sinking it, infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso (“until the sea closed again over us”). Ulysses had coaxed his companions beyond Hercules’ limit by appealing to their zest for knowledge: “choose not to deny experience,” he had told them, of the new, “uninhabited world” to the West, behind the sun, di retro al sol.

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