FREE ESSAY ON DANTE'S INFERNO

DANTE'S INFERNO

According to his guide, Virgil (in the 
Aeneid)Ulysses and the Greek army stormed Troy 
and destroyed everything. A few survivors, 
led by Aeneus, sailed away and finally landed 
in Italy (that was their fate). And with that 
fate they took over Italy, founded the Roman 
Empire which in turn becames into the states of 
Italy. Dante and Virgil were upset at the attack 
on Troy and considered the warfare brutal, so 
placing Ulysses in Hell in an eternal fire is 
a fitting punishment for his Trojan Horse design 
which collapsed their ancestors home of Troy. 
It is an ethnocentric way to demean the Greeks
Ulysses discusses his son, father, and wife, and that the longing he had to gain the
experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men. So he left those he loved
and deserted them to sail away with those he knew would never desert him. After gaining
this experience of the world (he lists off spain, morocco, both shores, sardinia, and
"the other islands the sea bathes", thus he visited everything worldly. He came to the
end of the world, was "old and slow," at Hercules' boundary stones. Everyone heeds these
stones and never goes past. He had travelled everywhere, and this was the only conquest
left. He wanted to best evryone.
With a slick speech, a fiery speech he makes to his comrades, he convinces them all not
to desert him, but to imagine they are better than other men (118) and that they don't
deserve to live their lives as brutes (119) but to be followers of "worth and knowledge."
His speech was so compelling, that when he was finished, they would have gone even if he
had not. 
Bibliography
Dante's Inferno, CAnto 26