Dante's Invention
In Dante's Divine Comedy, in the eighth bolgia of the Inferno, Dante and his guide meet Ulisse among the false counsellors, and receive a variant accounting of his death "from the sea" in a five-month journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules that has ended in a whirlpool drowning as the mariners approach the mountain of Purgatory. No Greek source was available to Dante, only the Latin recensions of Dictys and Dares.
Among the plethora of operas based on the myths of Odysseus and those around him, there is but one based on Telegonus, Carlo Luigi Grua's Telegone (premiered in Düsseldorf, 1697) of which an aria "Dia le mosse a miei contenti" may be noted. Divine intervention, a death and multiple weddings at the end all assorted easily with the conventions of opera seria.
Read more about this topic: Telegony
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“Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
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