Lark ascending: Paradiso 20

The simile of the lark that comes in the middle of Paradiso 21 reminded me of a lovely piece by Bernard de Ventadorn:

 

When I see the lark beat his wings

for joy against the sun’s ray,

until he forgets to fly and plummets down,

for the sheer delight which goes to his heart,

alas, great envy comes to me

of those whom I see filled with happiness,

and I marvel that my heart

does not instantly melt from desire.

Alas, I thought I knew so much about love,

and really I know so little,

for I cannot keep myself from loving her

from whom I shall have no favor.

She has stolen from me my heart, myself,

herself, and all the world.

When she took herself from me, she left me nothing

but desire and a longing heart.

Never have I been in control of myself

or even belonged to myself from the hour

that she let me gaze into her eyes-

that mirror that pleases me so greatly.

Mirror, since I saw myself reflected in you,

deep sighs have been killing me.

I have lost myself, just as

handsome Narcissus lost himself in the fountain.

I despair of women,

no more will I trust them,

and just as I used to defend them,

now I shall denounce them.

Since I see that none aids me

against her who destroys and confounds me,

I fear and distrust them all

for I know well they are all alike.

In this my lady certainly shows herself

to be a woman, and for it I reproach her,

for she wants not that which one ought to want,

and what is forbidden, she does.

I have fallen out of favor

and have behaved like the fool on the bridge;

and I don’t know why it happened

except because I tried to climb too high.

Mercy is lost, in truth,

though I never received it,

for she who should possess it most

has none, so where shall I seek it?

Ah, one who sees her would scarcely guess

that she just leaves this passionate wretch

(who will have no good without her)

to die, and gives no aid.

Since with my lady neither prayers nor mercy

nor my rights avail me,

and since she is not pleased

that I love her, I will never speak of it to her again.

Thus I part from her, and leave;

she has killed me, and by death I respond,

since she does not retain me, I depart,

wretched, into exile, I don’t know where.

Tristan, you will have nothing from me,

for I depart, wretched, I don’t know where.

I quit and leave off singing

and withdraw from joy and love.

===

Can vei la lauzeta mover

de joi sas alas contra.l rai,

que s’oblid’ e.s laissa chazer

per la doussor c’al cor li vai,

ai! tan grans enveya m’en ve

de cui qu’eu veya jauzion,

meravilhas ai, car desse

lo cor de desirer no.m fon.

more 

Vision's end: Cacciaguida and the Eagle (Par. 15/19)

Much time and space here was given to Paradiso 18 for two reasons - first, it traces a clear change in the poet's power to speak (and speak truth to power); next, it begins the second half of the Paradiso, and one argument I'll be making is that Dante deliberately wishes us to see Paradiso 17 as a center and a threshold between two different aspects of Paradise.

To see what's happening before and after the center more clearly, it's helpful to note that the cantos on either side of 17 balance each other. For example, 15 and 19, 14 and 20, etc. each have parallel elements, creating a kind of nested ring structure around the center. However, Dante's "rings" have torque -- the differences between cantos 15 and 19 (or 14 and 20) are deeply germane to an expansion or transformation occurring through the canticle. An architectonic whose rings turn to something more.

An example or two might help. 

We can see this "symmetry with a difference" in cantos 15 and 19 as an example. Each stands two cantos removed from 17. In 15, Cacciaguida appears before Dante and tells him "I am your root." Between the two is established an organic connection -- the ties of family, of Firenze, of culture and history connect them like root and branch of a single tree. In canto 18, Cacciaguida's closing speech will note that all of Paradise is a series of sills, or thresholds (soglia) of a tree that "lives from the top":

dell'albero che vive della cima
e frutta sempre e mai no perde foglia

 of the tree which lives from the top
and is always in fruit and never sheds its leaves. (18:29-30)

The organic tree of life rooted in earth, time, and history is replaced by this tree, that clearly stands outside of nature. One finds upside down trees, or trees fed from above, in esoteric lore and in the Kabbalah (e.g., the sephirot) and other wisdom traditions.

The encounter with Cacciaguida is rich in warmth, human connection, memory and history, neighborhood gossip and love of city, patria, and God. Canto 15 ends with Cacciaguida detailing the virtues and great citizens of their city:

Saria tenuta allor tal maraviglia
una Cianghella, un Lapo Salterello
qual or saria Cincinnato e Corniglia. 

As great a marvel then would have been held
A Lapo Salterello, a Cianghella,
As Cincinnatus or Cornelia now. (15:127-29)

In Canto 19, Dante is facing a giant composite of just souls who are subsumed within the image of the head and wings of an eagle. The image stuns the poet when it speaks -- indeed, its speech is unlike any ever recorded, because instead of saying "we," all the voices in unison say "I."

This is the eagle that came from the "M" in canto 18 -- an eagle born of letters. The souls that form it are described as conserte, that is, interwoven. The poet introduces that astonishing description of the plural speaking as "I" -- a grammatical violation of number -- with an echo of Paul's echo of Isaiah:

But as it is written:
“What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard,
and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him,” (1 Cor. 2.9)

Paul, who was also taken up to Paradise, is saying that nothing our senses have ever offered can prepare us for what awaits us. But it's worth noting that Paul is not saying this, he's citing Isaiah 64.4. Dante is introducing this giant segno, this eagle that has nothing to do with natural birds, via a text citing a text citing a text.

The eagle speaks with authority about the limitations of human vision and intellect. The entire canto is steeped in words for seeing, the eye, the ocean floor that the eye cannot penetrate. What the eagle does say is that the limit to our vision is what enables us to discern that its origin is far beyond all that it can see. Thanks to this very limit, or failure, human vision (veduta) "sees" that its origin must derive from something unseen and unseeable.

Dunque vostra veduta, che convene
 essere alcun de' raggi de la mente
 di che tutte le cose son ripiene,

non pò da sua natura esser possente
 tanto, che suo principio non discerna
 molto di là da quel che l'è parvente.

In consequence our vision, which perforce
  Must be some ray of that intelligence
  With which all things whatever are replete, 

Cannot in its own nature be so potent,
  That it shall not its origin discern
  Far beyond that which is apparent to it.  (19:52-57)

The double negative form of the statement suggests that the very thing that the poet and many of his fellow humans view as a frustrating obstacle to our wish to see and know is not so powerful as to blind us to this truth of our origin. If our vision were greater, we might fail to see how far we are from our actual root. The evidence of our senses, in its paucity, proves that we begin beyond the senses. (One hears intimations of immortality here found in other writers -- Descartes and Wordsworth, for example.)

The turning around of the canticle began in Paradiso 17 with the appearance of writing, which is itself re-presenting Scripture. The Eagle is a profoundly rich image that, yes, is linked with the symbol of Rome and empire, but, like Homer's "winged words," it is also the sign of signification itself, rooted precisely not in sensory mimesis.

That the figure of a natural creature known for having the sharpest sight demonstrates the limits of our vision makes for the comic irony here. First we learn that our powers of seeing are limited, and we are shown that this tells us something important about us. The eagle-eyed speaker then goes on, not unlike Cacciaguida did with Florentines, to look at a series of kings.

We can see the parallels here - the figure Dante is speaking with is reviewing actual personages of history. But the differences are equally telling:

• Cacciaguida described the modest citizens of Florence past, the virtuous city. The Eagle speaks at a higher level of power, and about larger aggregates of people - it speaks of kings, the heads of nation states.

• Cacciaguida speaks of fellow citizens - people of his own background, some from his own experience. The Eagle speaks of rulers of far flung nations, which it has the eyes to see, but we do not. In fact, though, the eagle is not seeing them at all. It's reading about them in a volume filled with the infamies of these kings. As commentators note, this is scripture depicted in the Apocalypse (20:12) that records the foul deeds of the damned. Hence the irony - the Eagle is not "seeing" these figures, but reading about them in a book that, though it appears at the end of days, in fact already contains all the deeds and horrors of human history. 

• Cacciaguida is recounting people of the past; the Eagle is reading of events which had not yet occurred in 1300.

Indeed, two entirely different kinds of seeing and memory are at work here. Cacciaguida speaks from his life, his memories. Though a series of tercets begins with the word for seeing, the Eagle speaks from its reading, and the tercets that list the kings are replete with references to writing:

Che poran dir li Perse a' vostri regi,
 come vedranno quel volume aperto
 nel qual si scrivon tutti suoi dispregi? 

Lì si vedrà, tra l'opere d'Alberto,
 quella che tosto moverà la penna, 

What to your kings may not the Persians say,
When they that volume opened shall behold
In which are written down all their dispraises?

There shall be seen, among the deeds of Albert,
That which ere long shall set the pen in motion, (19:112-116)

If Cacciaguida praised and criticized his fellow citizens and then went forth on Crusade to the Holy Land, the Eagle is looking out at a time when the kings of Europe will shame their lands before the non-Christian peoples. The perspective has radically shifted with the substitution of written records for lived experience.

Note the repeated use of segnare:

Vedrassi al Ciotto di Ierusalemme
segnata con un i la sua bontate,
quando 'l contrario segnerà un emme.

Be seen the Cripple of Jerusalem,
  His goodness represented by an I,
  While the reverse an M shall represent; (19:127-129)

Frederick's contribution to the hall of shame qualifies him for lettere mozze -- mutilated letters (134), abbreviations.

Writing of course is a vast abbreviation, based on signs we learn in order to record what is no longer visible or in any other way available to the senses. When the plenitude of the sensory realm is subsumed into a sign; when a word or missive can fly from hither to yon, and speak of what no longer is, or of what is not yet, one is in a different modality from mimesis, from representation.

We can look at more implications of this point in Paradiso where vision and knowledge end, and nations have heads without sense or vision. Whatever else, what comes to the fore must be the irrepressible modalities of faith and hope.

Venomous letters: The end of Paradiso 18

Già si solea con le spade far guerra;
 ma or si fa togliendo or qui or quivi
 lo pan che 'l pïo Padre a nessun serra.

Ma tu che sol per cancellare scrivi,
 pensa che Pietro e Paulo, che moriro
 per la vigna che guasti, ancor son vivi.

Ben puoi tu dire: “I' ho fermo 'l disiro
 sì a colui che volle viver solo
 e che per salti fu tratto al martiro,
ch'io non conosco il pescator né Polo.”

Once 'twas the custom to make war with swords;
  But now 'tis made by taking here and there
  The bread the pitying Father shuts from none.

Yet thou, who writest but to cancel, think
  That Peter and that Paul, who for this vineyard
  Which thou art spoiling died, are still alive 

 Well canst thou say: "So steadfast my desire
  Is unto him who willed to live alone,
  And for a dance was led to martyrdom,
That I know not the Fisherman nor Paul (Polo)."  (18:127-136)

Paradiso 18 ends with a sting in its tail. The hesitant poet of the opening of the canto now addresses the reigning Pope, John XXII, and the attack goes deep.

This is the canto in which we along with the poet have witnessed the writing of the godhead, spelled out. Given the direct citation is the book of Wisdom, it might not be amiss to note the astrological sign for Virgo -- the goddess of wisdom, she who visited the source struck by Pegasus's hoofs:

Virgo

The "emme" the poet encounters appears overdetermined. The emphasis upon writing, upon the letter, comes to be used in the canto's conclusion with force.

Pope John XXII, the vicar of Christ on Earth, takes the pan, the sacramental body of Christ, that the Father "shuts from none," away from those he's shaking down. He does this by means of writing. In his struggle against the Fraticelli, John XXII issued the bull "Gloriosam ecclesiam" in which he excommunicated those followers of Francis who took the vow of Poverty literally.

Papal Bulls had constitutive power - they could create, or erase, the entitlement of orders, the possession and administration of property:

The majority of the "great bulls" now in existence are in the nature of confirmations of property or charters of protection accorded to monasteries and religious institutions. At an epoch when there was much fabrication of such documents, those who procured bulls from Rome wished to secure that the authenticity of their bulls should be above suspicion. A papal confirmation, under certain conditions, could be pleaded as itself constituting sufficient evidence of title in cases where the original deed had been lost or destroyed. (Papal Bull)

In a real sense, the Pope was the most powerful writer on Earth, with authority over earthly and heavenly real estate. Here in Paradiso 18 at the moment of Wisdom writing itself, the poet chooses to focus precisely upon one "who writest but to cancel." 

And Dante goes further. 

Because the Bull was so powerful an instrument, the practice of affixing to it a unique lead seal -- the bulla -- had become standard practice in the 13th century. The seal had the living pope's name on one side, and would be attached to the original document:

The most distinctive characteristic of a bull was the metal seal (bulla), which was usually made of lead, but on very solemn occasions was made of gold (as those on Byzantine imperial instruments often were: see Golden Bull). On the obverse it depicted (originally somewhat crudely) the early fathers of the Church of Rome, the apostles Peter and Paul, identified by the letters Sanctus PAulus and Sanctus PEtrus (thus, SPA •SPE or SPASPE).. . . On the reverse was the name of the issuing pope in the nominative Latin form. This disc was then attached to the document either by cords of hemp (in the case of letters of justice, and executory) or by red and yellow silk (in the case of letters of grace) that was looped through slits in the vellum of the document.

Bulla with heads of Peter and Paul

The seal authenticated the identity of the pope as author - the power of the writing, exercised through his office, was guaranteed by the bulla. For Pope John, whose existence in Avignon required a huge amount of income, the bulla was equivalent to the power to print money. With his pen, he could withhold earthly property or salvation until the desired bundle of extorted coins were delivered.

When the pope says that he's so obsessed with John the Baptist -- i.e., the inscribed head of the precursor of Christ on the florin -- that 

io non conosco il pescator né Polo 

I know not the Fisherman nor Polo, 

he meets Wisdom's definition of the fool by adoring the graven image. Boasting of not recognizing the seal of his own authority, he even fails to pronounce "Paolo" properly (flattening the dipthong as Dante may have heard Frenchmen doing). 

John is trapped in the linguistic act of abusing, confounding, and disowning the signs and meanings of his office. He has debased the very thing the poet earlier prayed the Pegasea to scrupulously respect -- the literal reality of language. 

In Avignon, John used his bastard pen to expropriate wealth and power, disowning those who professed to love Lady Poverty. Where Peter had been a fisher of men, Pope John was more a filcher, minting coinage bearing the lily of Florence and his own name on one side, the precursor of Christ on the other. The bowdlerized lily was thenceforth seamlessly linked to this pope's voice crying in the exilic desert of Avignon, prophesying salvation in gold.

Pope John XXII's Florin

Given the canto's profound concern with the duplicity of the word (verbo), it's fitting that the tail of Paradiso 18 with its venomous sting evokes yet one more "emme" with its venomous sting: the astrological symbol of Scorpio:

Scorpio

The bloody bishop of Feltro and "cotanto affetto": Paradiso 9

[Update: The last few paragraphs have been revised in faint hopes of producing a bit more clarity.]

Let's look at Paradiso 9 with regard to a pattern of surprise that is still only lightly discernible. Part of the problem is of course that if something "falls" into a pattern, it will have difficulty remaining a surprise. Nonetheless, after our encounters with Piccarda, Justinian and Charles Martel, we should expect the unexpected, and Paradiso 9 delivers.

Still in the realm of Venus, Dante and Beatrice meet three figures: a woman of the world, a crusader-bishop, and Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho. Cunizza and Bishop Folco of Marseilles couldn't be more different, but they share two elements: they were lively young people -- Cunizza ran off with Sordello, a troubadour, while Folco, before his locks turned grey, penned troubadour lyrics to great ladies -- and both lovers are possessed of an ardent disgust with both the secular and religious powers of Italy.

Cunizza and Folco make it clear that they experienced many agonies found in the characters of Ovid's Heroides. Folco says as much of himself, citing the tales of Dido, Phyllis, and Heracles -- all lovers, and all royal beings whose lives ended tragically thanks to all-consuming love. (Heracles's case is more complex, but let's leave it for another time.)

When Dante alludes to a classical text, it invariably pays to go and read that text. Here, for example, is Phyllis, left behind by Theseus' son, Demophoon, who richly promised to return for her:

You swore to me by the sea, all stirred by winds and waves,
over which you surely travel, over which you were to go,
you swore by Neptune, your grandfather, unless that too is a lie,
who calms the waters roused by the winds,
by Venus, and those weapons, made so much so to me,
one weapon the bow, the other the torch,
and by Juno, whose kindness presides over the marriage bed,
and by the mystic rites of the torch-bearing goddess:
if each of these many injured gods took vengeance with their powers,
your life alone would not be enough, in punishment! (Heroides II)

A lovelorn heroine if there ever was one -- it might not be too rash to say that Ovid's Heroides are likely to be at the root of nearly every melodramatic portrayal of scorned lovers.

Folco mentions Dido to evoke her devastating love tale. But the reference reminds us that, in Paradiso 8, as soon as Dante and Beatrice arrive to Venus, Dante the poet takes pains to note that the old tales of Eros and Cupid and Dido were misguided beliefs about Venus and mad love -- antico errore. Paradiso's third sphere doesn't contain a hoard of suicides -- it contains vivid lovers like Cunizza and Folco whose hearts found a way beyond erotic possession to a larger relationship with the life of their times.

Cunizza and Folco sharply differ in their sense of space -- their perspective on their respective worlds. Cunizza speaks of being born of one root with the murderous Ezzolino on a low hill north of Venice. Her purview is local, horizontal -- Padua, Treviso, Feltro. She gives Dante three prophecies about her contemporaries -- three tales dripping with blood and betrayal.

Folco's scope of vision is more elevated - it takes him a while to pinpoint that he's from Marseilles - he first has to give us the latitudinal breath of the entire (in fact, larger than entire) Mediterranean, then brings in the longitudinal axis that puts his city on the same north/south line as the Algerian town of Buggea (source of the French word bougie, candle). As a famous lover and poet, he's cosmopolitan in culture as well as geography. He alludes to three ancient tales of mad love, but reserves his critical venom for the highest officials of the Church.

Neither famous lover speaks of his or her own amours, seductions, betrayals, or whatever. Instead of personal telenovelas or sad country music songs, we get the clarity and ardor of their engaged attention to the betrayals they witness, or foresee -- betrayals of civic and sacred trust -- because, quite simply, they care. 

This turning of their hearts from carnal love outward to the body politic and the body of Christ is underscored, virtually literally, when the glow enveloping Cunizza first approaches Dante:

      e 'l suo voler piacermi
significava nel chiarir di fori.

            its will to pleasure me
It signified by brightening outwardly.

Cunizza's three prophecies might almost be scenes from a 14th-century prequel to The Godfather. In one, a mob of Paduan Guelfs is massacred by Cangrande della Scala's Ghibbelines, turning Vicenza's swamp, il Bacchiglione, red; in the next,

a ruler who held his head a little too high loses it to an assassin's pruning hook while at home, playing chess; in the third tale, a bishop betrays a group of young men who came to him in Feltro from Ferrara, seeking the church's sanctuary from a gang of Guelfs. 

Cunizza predicts the kind of "sanctuary" that treacherous clergyman will provide:

Piangerà Feltro ancora la difalta
de l'empio suo pastor, che sarà sconcia
sì, che per simil non s'entrò in malta.

Troppo sarebbe larga la bigoncia
che ricevesse il sangue ferrarese,
e stanco chi 'l pesasse a oncia a oncia, 

che donerà questo prete cortese
per mostrarsi di parte; e cotai doni
conformi fieno al viver del paese.

Feltro moreover of her impious pastor
Shall weep the crime, which shall so monstrous be
That for the like none ever entered Malta. 

Ample exceedingly would be the vat
That of the Ferrarese could hold the blood,
And weary who should weigh it ounce by ounce, 

Of which this courteous priest shall make a gift
To show himself a partisan; and such gifts
Will to the living of the land conform. (Par. 9. 52-60)

It seems that in 1314, three Ferrarese youths -- Antoniolo, Lancillotto e Claruccio da Fontana -- fled from Ferrara to Feltro, believing the longtime Bishop of that town, Alessandro Novello, would give them protection from Guelf vengeance (they had conspired to kill the ruler of Ferrara). Instead of giving sanctuary, Novello handed them over to the Guelfs, who decapitated the three, plus 27 others. Thus the need for the vat to be "ample exceedingly." 

The word for vat - bigoncia - is interesting. As commentator Nicola Fosca notes, the word describes a large tub made of wooden planks that was used to collect, then press, grapes. The eventual wine would be ladled out and sold "ounce by ounce." The tale of the wedding feast of Cana might come to mind here. The bigoncia for this harvest would have had to be giant, and ladling the "wine" would certainly have wearied the ladler. Additional grim irony arises from the fact that bigoncie were also used by butchers, according to Fosca. 

I'm not sure any commentator has noted that Cunizza has the bishop of Feltro gifting the Guelf faction he wishes to impress with wine turned to blood -- a ghastly consecration.

Possibly an additional layer of irony is present, if bigoncia was also used, as the etymological dictionary suggests, to mean a cathedral's pulpit:

If so, then Cunizza is evoking the place where a cathedral's pastor feeds his flock with the words of the gospel, as well as indicating the generosity of this prete cortese:

Of which this courteous priest shall make a gift
To show himself a partisan; and such gifts
Will to the living of the land conform. (Par. 9. 52-60)

Fosca takes "living of the land" to be the customs, or way of life, of this part of Italy, and this seems right. Cunizza's tale of "such gifts" in the form of a human harvest is grim enough. Dante does not include an additional item offered by the commentator Benvenuto da Imola, who claims Bishop Alessandro Novello was so loathed for his betrayal that he was beaten to death with sandbags. Perhaps the poet wanted to make sure we had no reason to feel a wisp of sympathy for Novello or his novel sacrament.

====

What comes through in Cunizza's telling is not merely the high justice of the Troni, from whom nothing is hidden and nothing remains unadjudicated. It's also the sense of insult, the blood boiling at such acts of betrayal -- the acts of a traitor hurled back at him, much the way Phyllis and Dido had done with their faithless lovers.

Yet this passion, while undeniable, is not the whole tenor of Cunizza or Folco's tales. As Folco says (in a passage that has several textual uncertainties), they see their own follies, and those of others, from a higher, smiling recognition of "so much affection (cotanto affetto) in the art that adorns."

Non però qui si pente, ma si ride,
non de la colpa, ch'a mente non torna,
ma del valor ch'ordinò e provide. 

Qui si rimira ne l'arte ch'addorna
cotanto affetto, e discernesi 'l bene
per che 'l mondo di sù quel di giù torna.

Yet here is no repenting, but we smile,
Not at the fault, which comes not back to mind,
But at the power which ordered and foresaw.

Here we behold in the art that adorns
So much affection, and discern the good for which
The world above wheels about the one below.*  (Par. 9.103-108)
 . . . 

The echo here of Francesca's words describing the moment she and Paolo succumbed to passion (while reading of Lancelot and Guinevere), could not be more pointed, or more astonishing.

For it was at this moment that the earthly lovers were surprised by eros, a more than human force. But this power or mad force of passion is precisely what the cantos of Venus are written to transform.

When Folco uses these words, it's not his own passion he speaks of. This cotanto affetto is divine love itself, making beautiful the world already ordered by its power.** There might be no more diametrical opposition than what happens here with these two instances of these words. Folco's cotanto affetto echoes the fall into erotic enslavement of the first lovers we meet in the Commedia, but here and now, he's speaking of how he rose from "telenovela love" to a love that smiles at seeing, in the ordered art of the Creator, cotanto affetto.

Here on Venus, Francesca's words echoed by Folco now convey the joyful surprise of beholding an affection legible in the order, beauty, and purpose shaped by the artist. Not just any artist, but one who, as Providence, displays such care and absolute mastery.

The repetition / revision of the phrase fits the pattern we've been finding in Paradiso: Something enigmatic throws us off, we work at putting some seemingly ill-fitting pieces together. If we're fortunate, there's a kind of poetic lift-off, or levity, an unexpected turn that expands what we think of as comedy.

There may be a subtle joke here as well: the effect of God's affetto is about as unlike Paolo and Francesca's as can be imagined. But they were reading a book, in which the artistry of the author was not merely visible, but effective -- it turned them from detached readers into lost lovers. When the author of Paradiso 9 adorned his book with this bold leap of figuration, perhaps he smiled.

*Going with Sinclair's translation rather than Longfellow's in the latter part of this tercet, in line with Fosca and others' reading.

**This reading is greatly indebted to the comments of Nicola Fosca on this challenging passage.

Addressing Ulysses: The perfect contrapasso

Virgil in Inferno 26 tells Dante not to speak to Ulysses - he'll speak for him, because, he says, "They were Greeks, perhaps they'd disdain your words."

Words, language, are the substance of rhetoric -- the very sound of words plays a part in whether the one addressed deigns to respond. So too with spelling. Consider how differently you regard a message seeking your input, or your money, when the message itself lacks orthography, syntax, the basics of civilized discourse.

Virgil fears Dante's address would "lack address," in the secondary sense of adroitness of delivery, the manner of coming at someone:

1 dutiful and courteous attention especially in courtship —usually used in plural 

2 a: readiness and capability for dealing (as with a person or problem) skillfully and smoothly : adroitness 

b obsolete: a making ready; also : a state of preparedness

3 a: manner of bearing oneself  

b: manner of speaking or singing: delivery

Turning to the Greeks, the Roman poet employs a full-bore captatio benevolentiae -- working on his audience by alluding to his own alti versi, the lofty lines of his epic (lines that in fact do nothing to enhance Ulysses' reputation):

"If I deserved of you while I lived . . . if I deserved of you much or little when in the world I wrote the lofty lines, do not move on, but let the one of you tell where, being lost, he went to die."

The ploy works; Ulysses begins a speech that manages to contain a full life's quest within a few lines.

I want to look at the first thing he says, simply because in the large commentary devoted to this canto, these lines might receive short shrift. Ulysses begins:

When I parted from Circe, who held me more than a year near Gaeta before Aeneas so named it . . .

The parallel is clear: Ulysses was "held" -- the verb sottrarre can carry the suggestion of something taken fraudulently -- by Circe, the witch who turned his men into animals. Aeneas, coming to the same place, chooses to name it for his beloved wetnurse, and it bears that name today: Gaeta.

The contrast is between the wily Greek who, though escaping bestial enchantment, nonetheless is caught in the charms of Circe for "more than a year," and the Roman leader who, seeking a new land, names a beautiful portion of it for the nurse who nurtured him (and his son, some say), and who died at that point in their journey.

Throughout the Aeneid the Romans show themselves often nobler, more generous, and more rooted in the realm of the heart than the Greeks. In bestowing the humble nurse's name upon the isle of Circe, Aeneas moves toward the obliteration of the memory of Ulysses' experience there. Ulysses is being written out of epic memory on the Roman peninsula.

For Dante and his world, many of the names they use derive from the exploits, stories, the emperors and poets of Rome. The world was a palimpsest; one could dig down and find Greek predecessors, but they have been overwritten -- put into Italic form, or completely replaced by names that bring in indigenous Roman stories and achievements. Romans accepted the fact that they came after the brilliant world of Greece, but they push back, asserting different values and priorities. Allusively the point is made: Ulysses and the Greeks might have mapped out the world, explored it, given us knowledge, but the romance of the Roman people, their quest and glory, has remapped it with its own aura and meanings.

If Ulysses's language is usurped in this way, it points to another, larger eclipse further on in his journey. To know things is to name them, and Ulysses is rather meticulous in giving his auditors the names of places he and his men took in on their last voyage:

                            Spagna,  

fin nel Morrocco, e l'isola de' Sardi . . . 

. . . Sibilla . . .

 . . . Setta.

Passing the pillars of Heracles they sail five months into the blank oceanic void beyond. A mountain appears, and with it the storm that takes them under. Ulysses has no name for the mountain, of course (see previous post). He has no idea what it is, that it's made of earth that fled the body of Satan as he plummeted down and reamed out the core of the planet.* Ulysses lacks all sense of this, and, of course, he had no one to whom to tell his tale. So neither a name, nor a memory of the exploit, lives on -- other than in the Commedia. 

The world's most accomplished traveler, this former hero of the nostos, not only doesn't return, but also leaves no tale of his final destination, no trace. This silence, this aphasia, is the antithesis of kleos for the Greeks. Only a judicial imagination of genius could have produced what happens here: a contrapasso loaded with irony potent enough to punish Ulysses.

For the Greek teller of tales knows that this, his greatest exploit, was swallowed up with his drowning, and this will help us understand why Ulysses is Dante's uncannily nightmarish doppelganger. To have seen what he saw but cannot name or chart, and then to drown, puts his staggering final tale out of reach of knowledge, fame, earshot, of language itself. For this Homeric hero, no greater punishment is conceivable than to have been graced with achieving one incomparable feat, only to lie beneath the sea in eternal silence in the absolute certitude (he will never know otherwise) that no one will ever hear the greatest story he or his odyssey ever could have told. In this certitude, the hero encounters a judge who knew precisely how he deserved to be addressed.

*Lucifer, in falling, excavated the earth that creates the empty cone of hell, carved into the northern hemisphere; the displaced earth fled from Lucifer and then became Mount Purgatory, a cone of earth that rises up in the middle of the southern hemisphere.

Columbia University, Digital Dante.