Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Inferno: The Hero's Quest

Introduction: Two Quests, One Journey

In Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Inferno, we see the universal quest of the hero — yet the two works pursue it in markedly different ways. The Odyssey is an epic adventure that is heroic in its very nature. The Inferno, on the other hand, is less overtly so; it is more of a personal journey, told in the first person by the writer himself, Dante Alighieri. Yet in this difference we find a synthesis of universal truths, and we come to see that both are heroes' quests nonetheless.

The shared theme is the hero's journey of first deconstruction — the journey out — and then reconstruction — the journey back. It is the deconstruction of old ways and habits of everyday thinking, cast aside to make room for something new. The reconstruction that follows is of the personality itself, reborn in light of a new awareness of the depth and breadth of the universe. The hero emerges changed, carrying a new understanding of life and of what reality is and can be. As Joseph Campbell outlined in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, this pattern recurs across cultures and centuries, testifying to its deeply human origins.

Both tales begin rather oddly: their openings are not quite beginnings, but middles. In the Inferno, Dante announces that he is "In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray / Gone from the path direct..." (Alighieri 1). He is saying that he is in midlife — he was, in fact, thirty-five years old at the time of the journey — and that he is lost. One hesitates to use the term "midlife crisis," but perhaps it is not so far-fetched. After all, it is usually a crisis of some kind that necessitates the journey in the first place.

Beginnings in the Middle: Starting In Medias Res

In the Odyssey, we discover that the hero, Odysseus, has already been on his quest for ten years and is lost as well: "Of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again" (Homer 1). He does not even appear in the narrative until the fifth book. What does this tell us about the hero's journey? It suggests that young warriors are not yet equipped to handle the mythical nature of such a quest — they may lack the necessary patience or depth of experience. It is only after considerable time spent in the world that one has strong enough footing to travel into the realm of myth, or, in psychological terms, the subconscious. The hero's journey is, in this sense, a later-life rite of passage.

The hero's journey, by and large, is composed of certain universal steps. The master mythologist Joseph Campbell expertly laid out these steps in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. All heroic adventures naturally begin in what we call the phenomenal world — the real world that surrounds us. Through the course of the tale, our perceptions of that real world are brought into question. The second required step is a call to action or a quest, and that is precisely where both of these tales begin.

One of the striking differences between the two quests is that one is populated by a pantheon of gods and goddesses, while the other is populated by people. Homer gives us a lesson in Greek mythology, introducing us to many of its gods, yet those gods are somehow familiar. They possess all-too-human attributes: love, greed, jealousy, pride, and so on. They are, in essence, human — except that they are immortal and hold power over nature. This calls to mind Jungian archetypes, the large-scale emotional and psychological figures that represent the subconscious in human beings (Jung), except that these gods have the power to make their desires reality, while human beings may only dream of it. Yet this dreaming — this mythology — reveals a panorama of psychological depth that is otherwise unattainable.

In Dante's Inferno, the more personal aspect of these archetypal figures is embodied in the population of hell. This seems at first to stand in opposition to the lofty symbols of the Greek gods as presented in the Odyssey. Nevertheless, the archetypes here are equally recognizable and familiar.

Gods, Archetypes, and the Mythology of the Subconscious

But what is hell? Cardinal Dulles offers the generally accepted Christian view:

"As we know from the Gospels, Jesus spoke many times about hell. Throughout his preaching, he holds forth two and only two final possibilities for human existence: the one being everlasting happiness in the presence of God, the other everlasting torment in the absence of God." (Dulles)

The Hades of Homer is the original representation of the underworld before Christianity recast it as hell. There it is called the underworld, and it genuinely recalls the subconscious in many ways. For the Greeks, it is just one aspect of life after death, and in some sense it seems more closely associated with the Christian concept of limbo. Heaven finds its counterpart in the Elysian Fields. In the Inferno, hell again represents the subconscious, but in a more visceral, active, and judgmental aspect. The inherent human tendencies toward violence and deceit are found there in varying degrees, yet one feels pity for many of its inhabitants, much as one does in the Odyssey.

But why do these authors produce visions of gods and hell at all? Jung points out that the introversion necessary to look inward is the common factor: