Either Odysseus was the worst sailor in Greek history, or he took the scenic route home for a reason. Dante tended toward the second interpretation. His Odysseus is punished as the Ulysses of the Aeneid, a dirus (dreadful) type who is scelerum inventor, a “contriver of crimes.” In Canto XXVI of Inferno, Dante condemns the Homeric original to the Eighth Circle, among the false counselors, for misusing the gifts of reason and rhetoric, a ten-year streak of lying and trickery. When he gratifies his desire for knowledge and experience, it is at the expense of his family and duties in Ithaca.

This Ulysses is a secondhand scoundrel: out of Latin not Greek, and damned by medieval Christian morals. In Ulysses, James Joyce casts the modern shadow of this Ulysses onto Leopold Bloom by making Bloom an advertising salesman for the Freeman’s Journal. The adman is a false counselor, a trickster exploiting insights into psychology as Odysseus does—not unlike Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, who, if Dante is right about life after death, will be toasting right now in the Eighth Circle as “the father of public relations” and the author of Propaganda (1928), the first English-language how-to guide of its kind.

Oliver St. John Gogarty, the poet and nationalist who became the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses’ opening scene, called Joyce “the Dante of Dublin.” Dante was Joyce’s favorite writer, and Dante reconstructed the city of his birth in a metaphysical