In the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Inferno, the pilgrim and his guide come across two figures encased in flame. Virgil reveals to Dante that within this single fire dwells Diomedes and Ulysses, grieving over the horse that penetrated Troy. They approach the flame and converse with Ulysses, who reveals that his sins, characterized by guile and betrayal, involved abandoning his home in Ithaca almost immediately after having reached it:
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