ABSTRACT
To understand quite what shores of existence Ulysses is travelling towards, we should follow up the narrative’s metaphorical movement into darkness with some biographical facts. Dante’s Ulysses, then, departs from Circe and sails towards darkness, the extreme limit of old age, the Ocean, and the Antipodes. J. M. Lotman’s description of Ulysses as ‘Dante’s original double’ is indeed feasible of the Dante who in the Commedia embarks on a voyage to the world of the dead. Ulysses’ story is dictated by an inexorable narrative telos which is thanatos: losing one’s way means departing, and departing means death. Dante begins the episode by asking Virgil who is inside the ‘foco diviso’, the cloven fire, and remains silent at the end. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Ulysses stands on a triple threshold, that on which, in Dante’s conscience, the death of the classical world, the end of Christian philosophy, and the advent of a new world finally clash.
