Homer’s
Odysseus and Dante's Ulysses: The Survival of a
Classical Myth
Before I begin to
discuss my theme, I would like to make two remarks.
The first concerns the title of the symposium,
Antiquity and Christianity: A Conflict or a Conciliation.
In English as well as in Slovene, we hear two words
“conflict—conciliation” as a sound figure, an
alliteration. Let me repeat: “conflict—conciliation,”
or in Slovene, “spor—sprava”. As you have
heard (or at least I hope you have), the first two
consonants are in accord with one another. In this
accordance of sound, where “conflict” alliterates with
“conciliation,” I do catch the hint that one is in
accord with the other, and that one cannot exist without
the other. There can be no conciliation without a
conflict—or the other way around: first comes the
conflict and then the conciliation, exactly in this
order. In the title of the symposium I have thus
discerned a sequence, a scenario in which the
complicated relationship between antiquity and
Christianity is supposedly coming into existence in the
course of history, a relationship that is, as we all
know, absolutely crucial to the origin and structure of
modern Europe in all realms, so to speak, touched by the
human spirit. This scenario, however, is the scenario of
a tragedy, indeed of a classical Greek tragedy: a
conflict that leads to conciliation through the victim.
But does the scenario implied in the
title of the symposium hold out? Let us say that it
does—who, then, is the tragic victim? Whom would death
have to befall in order to bring about conciliation?
Would that be Hellenism in the Christianity of the
Middle Ages, or Christianity in the Greek legacy of
modern Europe? And further: the question is, where there
is conflict, must there necessarily be conciliation?
This is a question that does not only concern my
contribution, but the whole of our explorations and
discussions at this symposium.
I would like to say beforehand that,
in discussing my theme—the myth of Odysseus as told by
Homer and Dante or, in a broader sense, in Hellenism and
Christianity, I will speak rather about survival
than of the (tragic) victim and conciliation. This will
undoubtedly be less spectacular than if I attempted to
tell the fate of the myth of Odysseus according to the
tragic scenario and thereby translate it into a tragedy.
But, nevertheless, Überleben is not the same as
Fortleben, as Walter Benjamin stressed in his
famous essay on the task of the translator.[1]
Survival is more than ordinary living on, a life without
grandeur and sense, a vegetation, a life-in-death.
My second remark refers to Sergei
Averintsev’s book, Poetics of Early Byzantine
Literature, which served as an initiative for our
symposium. No need to waste words on its greatness. The
attention that Averintsev pays in this book to the
encounters of Greek literature, philosophy and other
spiritual activities, or Greek culture in general, with
Christianity is all-encompassing, so to speak. What
surfaces in this book is a broad knowledge of Hellenism
and Christianity, reaching from literature on one side,
to the law, the military, and even daily life on the
other side of the cultural sphere, as well as a deep
insight into the intertwining of elements from all
possible realms, and especially a sharp sense for the
attachments and ruptures within Christianity in its
relationship towards Hellenism, through which
Christianity established itself in the world almost from
its very beginnings. Yet despite his far-reaching
breadth, Averintsev does not make the encounter of
Hellenism with Christianity the subject of his
discussion, and touches upon myth only in passing.
But why does the encounter of
Hellenism and Christianity call for discussion precisely
in connection with the myth?
In the sixth chapter of his
Poetics, Aristotle says that myth is arché
and psyché, the “principle” and “soul” of
tragedy.[2]
To him, myth is the most important constitutive part of
tragedy, the highest of all poetical genres—a plot or a
“plot-structure,” as the word mýthos in this
special use employed by Aristotle has been translated by
Stephen Halliwell, one of the most respectable scholars
of Poetics.[3]
I myself would say something similar about myth and, at
the same time, even more than that: it is the heart
of all Greek literature, not only of drama with tragedy
at the head, but also—and even sooner—of epic poetry,
and an essential component of lyric poetry. Myth is the
heart of Greek literature both in the sense of a living
spring as well as a vital core. It springs from a
multi-source oral tradition before antiquity, which
denotes the historical existence of the Greeks and
Romans, and is, in antiquity itself, always an already
written myth, a myth in literary form, a formed story.
It is an original speech of singers from prehistoric
times, and at the same time a story told in this
speech—a story about immortal gods and mortal men.
My contribution will therefore
expand the field of research outlined by Averintsev in
his book. An expansion in this direction seems to me
important because Greek literature is, in fact, the
speech of ancient singers transformed in the written
word. In my opinion, myth cannot be avoided in observing
the encounter of antiquity and Christianity in
literature.
As already mentioned, I shall expend
the field of research using a single myth. Yet this is
not just any myth. First of all, the myth of Odysseus
surfaces at the beginning of European literature, where
Homer’s poems Iliad and Odyssey stand, and
second, it is the myth of perhaps the most complicated
of all figures in classical mythology. Odysseus is not a
complicated figure only, as one might think, because of
his cunningness, but in particular because of his
many-sidedness. In the opinion of James Joyce, who, in
his novel Ulysses, has made Odysseus a modern
hero, Homer’s Odysseus surpasses all the other great
figures of European literature as far as many-sidedness
is concerned: Hamlet, for example, is just a son, as
Joyce wittily remarks in Frank Budgen’s book of
conversations with him, while Odysseus is a son, a
father and a husband—and, on the other hand, a lover; a
master and king—and, on the other hand, a warrior and a
traveler. To use Joyce’s word, he is “all-round:” just
as the figure made by a sculptor is visible in space
from all sides in its voluminous plasticity, so Homer’s
Odysseus appears as a full figure through all the
relations into which he enters with others.[4]
I will now proceed to my
theme, first to Homer’s Odysseus. But, in so doing, let
me refer to my introductory deliberation about conflict
and conciliation. Although this reference will lead to a
digression, that is, a step away from my theme, I am
convinced it will pave the way for an easier approach to
the theme itself.
A certain conflict and a
certain conciliation, both concerning the myth in
general and the myth of Odysseus in particular, was
already encountered in Hellenism. It is a common place
of Geistesgeschichte that a conflict was roused
in Hellenism between poetical mýthos and
philosophical lógos, between the two different
speech modes or their “narratives.” This conflict was
triggered in the 6th century B. C. by
Xenophanes, who reproached Homer and Hesiod for
presenting the gods too anthropomorphically, and it
reached its culmination with Plato, who rejected the
poetical presentation of gods and also of heroes as
entirely false, thus making questionable the leading
role of poetry, with Homer at the head, in paideía,
the “education” or “cultivation” of Greek generations.
From the philosophical point of view, poetry became
contestable because philosophy understood itself first
of all as a way of life,[5]
that is, as lógos being lived, or to be lived,
and not as a speculation, theory, doctrine, or similar.
The solution to this conflict—let us
call it conciliation—came in Hellenistic
philosophy through the allegorical interpretation of a
poetical myth, which Plato himself did not approve of.
Philosophical allegoresis of a poetical myth stemmed
from two interweaving motives. The first was to save the
venerable poetical tradition, with Homer at the head,
from remaining, after the conflict with philosophy, a
mere tale without any value; and the second motive was
to ground philosophy itself, as a relatively young
invention, in ancient wisdom, because, in face of the
contacts of Hellenism with the ancient cultures of the
East grounded in sacred writings that the Greeks had not
had, the need for such grounding was becoming more and
more urgent in late antiquity. Hellenistic philosophy
thus saved poetry through allegoresis by grounding
itself in poetry, as if poetry were a holy scripture. In
philosophy, which took a conciliatory leaning towards
poetry, the myth became an allegory, i.e. another or a
different speech (from the Greek állon, “other,”
and agoréo, “I speak in public, at Agora”). It
became a speech that was not to be taken literally, but
as a speech about something else, as another story. As a
differently told story about philosophy itself. Not only
any naïve, but also any serious literal reading of the
myth was sacrificed.
Christianity, on the
other hand, took over the philosophical allegoresis of a
poetical myth by virtue of its affinity to Greek
philosophy understood precisely as a way of life. In the
first centuries after Christ, Christianity presented
itself in the Hellenistical world as both a
philosophical and, at the same time, a
more-than-philosophical way of life—as life in Christ
Logos.[6] The
early Christian writers thus became susceptible to the
poetical myth in which Hellenistic philosophy was
grounding itself.
If I may now pass from myth in
general to the myth of Odysseus, a double image of
Odysseus, a negative and a positive one, was formed in
the Christian reception. The negative image originated
particularly in the reception of Western Christianity.
It was influenced by the tradition of the Romans, who
deduced their descent from Troy—the poetical monument to
the Roman searching for roots was raised by Virgil in
his Aeneid—because it was precisely Odysseus who
caused the fall of this famous city with the stratagem
of the wooden horse. And the novels about Troy
originating in the vernacular during the Middle Ages
contributed to the negative image of Odysseus as well.
The positive image of Odysseus,
however, was the result of early Christian writers’
referring to Greek philosophy. For example, Odysseus
polýtlas, “much suffering” Odysseus, who endured so
much on his journeys after the end of the Trojan War,
was raised by Stoics to the ideal of a wise man, going,
in spite of all suffering, his way to the end; but it
was in Christian allegoresis that the mast to which, in
the episode with the Sirens, Odysseus lets himself
fasten began to symbolize the cross to which a Christian
had bound himself past the seduction of sensual
pleasure.[7]
And even more than this: the whole story of Odysseus,
the whole odyssey, was re-interpreted by the principal
Neoplatonist, Plotinus, into a story of a philosopher
who, through his way of life, has turned away from the
world and started to ascend to his divine homeland. In
the first of The Enneads (6, 8), Plotinus exhorts
to such an ascension, or flight, as follows: “Let us
flee, now, to the beloved fatherland (Il. 2,
140), one might advise us more truly. But what kind of
flight [phygé] should this be and how should we
flee? Homer said—in a riddle, as it seems to me—that we
should turn away from Circe the magician and from
Calypso, as Odysseus has done, for he did not like to
stay, though he shared in the pleasures through his eyes
and cohabited with great sensuous beauty.”[8]
In short, the odyssey became an inner journey, a journey
of the soul—in Neoplatonic allegoresis, a return of the
soul to its fatherland, to the One, and, in Platonizing
Christian allegoresis which in the Christian West can be
found in Ambrose and Augustine, to God the Father.
However, the allegoresis of
Odysseus’ story was challenged in its very foundations
already by Clement of Alexandria, who took part in the
nascence of Christian philosophy in Alexandria before
Christian allegoresis came into full swing. As he says
in his Exhortation to the Gentiles (25), Odysseus
“did not yearn for his real heavenly fatherland and the
light of the Being [toû óntos], but for a smoke,”[9]
his yearning did not stretch itself to the radiance of
the Arché above the existing things, but to the
kapnós apothróskon, the “smoke ascending” (Od.
1, 58)—but only from the domestic hearth over his native
Ithaca. The message of Clement’s words is that Odysseus’
yearning for home cannot be an exhortation to the
Christian outworldly yearning on account of its low,
earthly boundedness, at the same time drawing our
attention to the sacrifice of literal reading of
Odysseus’ story in later Christian allegoresis.
What, then, is to say
about Homer’s Odysseus, if we try to take back this
sacrifice and seriously read the Odyssey
literally?
Homer’s Odysseus is a
returner—and Odyssey a poem of nóstos, of
Odysseus’ “return”—but to his earthly home, to Ithaca.
The moving power of this return, however, which, as
indicated in the first and then again in the fifth book
of Odyssey, certainly would not have occurred
without the conclusion of gods, is, on the other side,
as regards Odysseus himself, nothing other than
yearning. This is an axis of Odysseus’ figure as formed
by Homer.
In the first verse of Odyssey,
Homer begins to speak of Odysseus in the following way:
Ándra moi énnepe, Moûsa, polýtropon,[10]
“Tell me, Muse, of the man who is polýtropos.”
The epithet polýtropos, which in some way denotes
Odysseus with “many turns” (the Greek polý means
»many«, and trópos means “way” or “turn”),
summarizes all of Odysseus’ other fixed epithets,
notably those with the prefix poly- (for example,
polýtlas, polyméchanos, which refers to a
man capable of many mechanaí, “means” or “ruses,”
and so on). Simultaneously, it is a seminal epithet, one
that carries in itself the whole story of Odysseus.
Already in the 5th
century B.C. there appeared in ancient Greece an
explanation under which Odysseus polýtropos meant
“the one often changing his character,” the “unstable,”
“unprincipled one.” And it was Antisthenes, the
precursor of the philosophical school of Cynics, who
defended Odysseus with the opinion that this epithet
denotes Odysseus’ skill in using figures of speech, his
capability of turning words, of troping.[11]
Contemporary scholars, however, do not agree with any of
these explanations. They reached the consensus that,
considering the immediate context in which this word
occurs in Homer, Odysseus as polýtropos is one
who has traveled much or experienced much. Odysseus is,
then, a man who was led this way or that, to this or
that experience, by many turns—or, as a well-suited
English translation reads, a “man of many turns.”
But of which turns? First of all,
the turns of fate. Odysseus polýtropos is a man
who is much turned by fate, who is tossed by fate
from one danger to another, yet at the same time a man
who is capable of many turns by himself—and this
not only in words, but also in actions. In short, he is
a man, who has the agility to save himself from these
dangers. In the difficult situation brought by fate, he
is always capable of turning, turning round and finding
a way out, for example, from Cyclops’ cave. As
polýtropos he is thus turnable in the passive as
well as active sense: time and time again he is being
turned by fate, and time and time again he is also
capable of turning in a difficult situation to find a
way out. Odysseus suffers the turns of fate, but in his
suffering he is not paralyzed by its blows and does not
become a passive figure, but, paradoxically, he acts. It
is in such a passive-active doubleness of polytropy that
the whole dynamics of Homer’s story about him is
conceived.
But what helps Odysseus to keep his
direction in face of all those turns encountered during
his wanderings after the end of the Trojan War is his
yearning for return—and precisely with respect to
yearning, this axis of Odysseus’ figure, the composition
of Odyssey has been made. Homer does not follow
all that happened to Odysseus during his wanderings in
straight succession, but begins his poem when Odysseus
has the majority of these wanderings behind him—and this
is when his return is also most threatened: on the
island of Ogygia by the nymph Calypso. It is on this
island, which is the “navel of the sea” (Od. 1,
50), far from oikuméne, i.e. from the populated
world, and far even for the gods, that Odysseus’
yearning for return is strongest. His yearning is so
very strong that Calypso can overcome it neither with
her divine love, in which she enfolds him, nor with the
promise of divine immortality if he stays with her. The
composition of Odyssey, then, exposes in the
odyssey of the main character his yearning—and, inasmuch
as this yearning is the moving force of return, also his
return as a theme of the poem. Odysseus’ stay at Ogygia,
which is not the first in the chronological order of
events, becomes the first in the order of narration. For
if the course of narration matched the chronology of
events, the stress would be transferred to what Odysseus
experienced during his sea wanderings, and the theme of
the poem would lean towards adventure.
This is, however, precisely what
happens in Dante’s poem, in canto 26 of Inferno.
Not only does Dante substitute the name Odysseus with
its Latin form, Ulysses, which writers in the West were
doing up to the 20th century, but primarily
makes Odysseus change from a returner into an
adventurer. Dante’s transfiguration of the figure of
Odysseus is the greatest turn in its literary polytropy.
His dealing with the figure of Odysseus is by far
incomparable with Homer’s in terms of scope, but it is
comparable to it in terms of the influence it had on
European literature (and even on reality, as I shall try
to demonstrate).
W. B. Stanford, who was the first to
study the reception of Odysseus in European literature
from antiquity up to the present, describes Dante’s
turning away from Homer’s returner as follows: “In place
of this centripetal, homeward-bound figure Dante
substituted a personification of centrifugal force.”[12]
How does Dante carry out his basic transfiguring turn of
Odysseus’ figure?
In such a manner that he connects
Odysseus’ wish for knowledge with his death and thereby
moves away from Homer, who mentions this wish, for
example, in the episodes with Cyclops or the Sirens, but
leaves out Odysseus’ death (and Odysseus in Odyssey
remains the perfect survivor). Namely, Dante does not
allow his Ulysses to sail homewards from Circe the
witch, but to Heracles’ pillars, which, standing in the
Strait of Gibraltar, marked the border of the known
world in antiquity. From there Ulysses sets out retro
al sol, “behind the sun” (Inf. 26, 117),[13]
where, after a few days, when only the moon and the
stars were raising in the darkness, death befalls him
together with his crew in front of the mountain of
Purgatory on the south hemisphere of the earth.
If Homer’s Odysseus is a centripetal
figure, if his yearning is homeward-bound and his voyage
is a voyage of return, Dante’s Ulysses is, on the
contrary, a centrifugal figure, his wish tends away from
home and his voyage is a voyage into the unknown: an
adventure. This is something totally different from the
turn of fate that comes upon Homer’s Odysseus and, as
such, is not in his power. Adventure is what Dante’s
Ulysses, in his ardent desire for the unknown, searches
for, lets himself into, what he himself causes to come—a
certain ad-venire, which he himself triggers. It
is his turn. Odysseus’ act, his sailing out of the known
world, is thus not a re-action to the turn of fate, it
is not a re-turn to this turn in his yearning for
return. It is rather an act which precedes fate and by
which fate is coined. The adventure of Dante’s Ulysses
goes absolutely the opposite way of that of the return
of Homer’s Odysseus, thus turning the figure of Odysseus
by a hundred and eighty degrees.
However, Dante does not conceive the
reversal of this figure from returner to adventurer in
accordance with traditional Christian allegoresis. Like
other figures in Dante’s Divine Comedy,
Ulysses also speaks sub specie mortis after the
gran mar del' essere, the “big sea of existence”
(Par. 1, 113), is behind him, and from the
perspective of death, where outlived earthly life
appears as a whole, he names his sailing a “mad flight:”
dei remi facemmo ali al folle volo, “out of oars
we made wings for the mad flight” (Inf. 26, 125).
In these words of Ulysses, Dante
metaphorically interweave the poetical and philosophical
traditions. He refers to the metaphor remigium alarum,
“rowing of wings,” used by Virgil in Aeneid 6, 19
for the flight of Dedalus, and at the same time to the
flight of the soul in Neoplatonic and Platonizing
Christian allegorisis, which interpreted the odyssey as
well as the flight of Dedalus as an ascension or flight
of the soul out of the world to the divine homeland. In
his allegoresis of the myth of Dedalus, Ambrose uses
precisely this metaphor, as so does Augustine on several
occasions, says John Freccero, one of the most prominent
contemporary scholars of Dante.[14]
Yet the sailing of Ulysses is not the wise flight of a
soul into hereafter, but a “mad flight:” the oars
swinging through the air like wings do carry him out of
the world, but not beyond, merely into another world
beyond the borders of the known, populated world. The
mad flight is a flight into the-unknown-on-this-side.
And when, at the sight of the mountain of Purgatory,
Ulysses with his crew already rejoices at the thought
that another world has appeared in his horizon,
the other world opens up before him and
swallows him up.
Such an Odysseus, Odysseus the
adventurer, is an invention of Dante. And although Dante
put him to death, he has survived in European
literature in the works of Alfred Tennyson, Giovanni
Pascoli, and many others. Even more: transfigured by
Dante, Odysseus has survived in Christian culture of
Europe without being Christianized, that is, without
being conceived as a figure in accordance with the
Christian allegoresis. And finally, he has survived not
only in literature, but also in reality.
It was Dante’s Ulysses that
Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci kept before
their eyes, when they sailed where the sun was going
down: according to the typological interpretation they
knew from the Bible, they saw in him the týpos
that fulfills itself in reality: the image of
themselves.[15]
Sailing from the known world into the sunset, Dante’s
Ulysses thus became a proto-type of the discoverer, the
seafarer, who happened at last to discover the new world
behind the old one, the unknown-world-on this-side. With
Ulysses, as Bruno Nardi puts it, Dante “discovered the
Discoverer.”[16]
Ulysses has survived as a discoverer of the brave new
world.
Let me conclude now. And let me
conclude in contemporaneousness.
In October 1990, NASA launched a
spacecraft towards the sun. In November of last year,
this spacecraft set out on its third voyage around the
Sun’s poles,[17]
navigating in space weather and transmitting to Earth
various data, in which it transforms unknown reality,
reality outside the horizons of our world, of our
manifold worlds—this spacecraft carries the name
Ulysses.
SUMMARY
The text discusses the encounter of
Hellenism with Christianity in connection with a myth
from the beginning of European literature—the myth of
Odysseus. The discussion of this encounter is framed by
the report of a conflict between poetical mýthos
and philosophical lógos, which, surfacing
in 6th century B. C., reached its peak with
Plato and came to an end, in Hellenistic philosophy,
with a conciliation through the allegorical
interpretation of a poetical myth that was also accepted
by Christianity. It was thus a double, negative and
positive, image of Odysseus that established itself in
the Christian reception. The negative image was formed
in accordance with the tradition of the Romans, who
deduced their descent from Troy, which was conquered
through Odysseus’s stratagem, while the positive image
sprang from the referring of early Christian writers to
Greek philosophy, particularly Neoplatonism, in which
Odysseus becomes a returner to his heavenly homeland.
Here, the text sketches a serious literal reading of
Odyssey: Homer's Odysseus is polýtropos, a
“man of many turns,” one who is much turned by fate, and
at the same time one who is capable of many turns by
himself, that is, who always finds the way out of a
difficult situation and remains steady on his way home.
This is followed by the exposition of the greatest
transfiguration, the most formidable turn of the figure
of Odysseus in his literary polytropy, which was
accomplished by Dante in his Divine Comedy.
Namely, Dante transforms a returner to his earthly
homeland, who was then allegorically reinterpreted as a
man returning to his heavenly homeland, into an
adventurer. Dante’s Ulysses does not react, as Homer’s
Odysseus does, to the turns of fate while yearning to
return, but, in his wish for the unknown, takes the
initiative to act and sails across the border of the
known world. And though his sailing ends with his death,
he survives beyond the Christianizing interpretation: he
becomes a týpos of the discoverer in Europe of
the Renaissance, which in reality discovered the new
world.
POVZETEK
Tekst obravnava srečanje grštva s
krščanstvom ob mitu z začetka evropske literature, mitu
o Odiseju. Obravnavo tega srečanja okvirja s poročilom
o sporu med pesniškim mýthosom in filozofskim
lógosom, ki je izbruhnil v 6. st. pr. Kr., dosegel
vrh pri Platonu in se v helenistični filozofiji iztekel
v spravo prek alegorične razlage pesniškega mita, ki jo
je prevzelo tudi krščanstvo. Tako se je v krščanski
recepciji uveljavila dvojna, negativna in pozitivna
podoba Odiseja. Negativna podoba se je oblikovala v
skladu z izročilom Rimljanov, ki so svoje poreklo
izpeljevali iz Troje, premagane z Odisejevo zvijačo,
pozitivna pa je izšla iz navezovanja zgodnjih krščanskih
piscev na grško filozofijo, predvsem na novoplatonizem,
v katerem je Odisej postal povratnik v nebeško domovino.
Tu tekst skicira resno dobesedno branje Odiseje:
Homerjev Odisej je polýtropos, »mož mnogih
obratov«, ta, ki ga mnogo obrača usoda, in hkrati ta, ki
sam zmore mnoge obrate, se pravi, ki zmeraj najde izhod
iz težkega položaja ter ostane neomajen na poti proti
domu. Sledi še izpostavitev največje transfiguracije,
najbolj neznanskega obrata Odisejevega lika v njegovi
literarni politropiji, ki ga je izvršil Dante v
Božanski komediji. Dante namreč povratnika v
zemeljsko domovino, ki je bil potem alegorično
prerazložen v povratnika v nebeško domovino, preobrazi v
pustolovca. Dantejev Ulikses ne reagira, tako kot
Homerjev Odisej, na obrate usode v hrepenenju po
vrnitvi, ampak v želji po neznanem sam prevzame pobudo
za dejanje in odpluje čez mejo znanega sveta. In čeprav
se njegova plovba konča s smrtjo, preživi onstran
kristijanizirajoče prerazlage: postane týpos
odkritelja v renesančni Evropi, ki je dejansko odkrila
novi svet.
[1] Walter
Benjamin, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, in Walter
Benjamin, Schriften, t. 1, eds Thedor W. Adorno
and Gretel Adorno, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1955, pp. 40–54.
[2]
Aristoteles, De arte poetica liber, ed. Rudolf
Kassel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 12.
[3] See
Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, London:
Duckworth, 1998 (2nd edition).
[4] See Frank
Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses,
New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1934, pp. 15–17.
[5] See, for
example, Pierre Hadot, Excercises spirituels et la
philosophie antique, Paris: Études augustiniennes,
1981, and Qu'est-que la philosophie antique?,
Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
[6] See
Gorazd Kocijančič, Splošni uvod, in Gorazd
Kocijančič (ed.), Logos v obrambo resnice. Izbrani
spisi zgodnjih krščanskih apologetov, Celje:
Mohorjeva družba, 1998, p. 20ff.
[7] See
Bernhard Zimmermann, Odysseus – ein Held mit vielen
Gesichtern, in Bernhard Zimmermann (ed.), Mythos
Odyssesus. Texte von Homer bis Günter Kunert,
Leipzig: Reclam, 2004, p. 179; see also the chapter
„Odysseus am Mastbaum“ in Hugo Rahner’s book
Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung, Zürich:
Rhein-Verlag, 1957, pp. 414–486.
[8] Plotinus,
Opera, t. 1: Porphyrii vita Plotin / Enneades
I–III, ed. by Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 102.
[9] Clemens
Alexandrinus, Cohortatio ad gentes, in
Clementis Alexandrini opera quae exstant omnia,
Patrologia Graeco-Latina 8, ed. by J.-P. Migne, Paris:
Garnier fratres, editores, et J.-P. Migne succesores,
1891, coll. 197.
[10] Homer,
Odyssee. Griechisch und deutsch, München and
Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1990, p. 6.
[11] See W.
B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme. A Study in the
Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, Dallas, Texas:
Spring Publications, 1992 (1st edition 1954),
p. 99.
[12] W. B.
Stanford, The Ulysses Theme, p. 181.
[13] For
the original I use Dante’s Tutte le opera, ed. by
Luigi Blasucci, Firenze: Sansoni editore, 1965.
[14] John
Freccero, The Prologue Scene, in John Freccero,
Dante. The Poetics of Conversion, ed. by Rachel
Jacoff, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England:
Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 16–17.
[15] See
Pietro Boitani, The Shadow of Ulysses. Figures of a
Myth, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 44ff.
[16] Bruno
Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale, Bari:
Laterza, 1942, p. 99.
[17] See
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/audioclips/ulysses-20061117/
(1st May 2007).
