Dante had no access to the original Odyssey, though he knew the story of Odysseus. In his Inferno, he places Ulysses (the Romanized name for Odysseus) low down in Hell (the eighth circle out of nine, the circle of Fraud), because he leads his people by deceit into destruction. Dante’s silver-tongued, self-serving, and falsely inspiring Ulysses gives his men a rousing, deceitful speech urging them to continue their adventures for “virtue and knowledge”; he is urging them on, yet again, to shipwreck, on the Mountain of Purgatory. This rhetorically gifted version of Odysseus is not entirely alien
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