Ulysses personifies the fundamental moral issue of the use and abuse of human intelligence: What can we do with our intelligence? How far may we go with it? Are we allowed to pursue any intellectual quest regardless of its consequences? Should we resist the temptation to let our intelligence run freely without any moral restraint? In the Divine Comedy, Ulysses becomes a tragic hero. His example, more relevant today than ever, occurs and re-occurs as both a stimulus to search endlessly and a warning not to trespass the limit beyond which human intelligence brings its own downfall.
Lino Pertile is Carl A. Pescosolido Research Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana in Milan and the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome.
Presented on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, master poet and Father of the Italian language. In English
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, 1829, oil on canvas (National Gallery, London) Detail