Other pages, linked below, offer specific details on Greeks and Trojans in Dante's work. If we want to think more broadly, we can note that both Virgil and Homer end in the same place: Limbo. Virgil is a damned soul, however mild his punishment may be. In many cases, he is faulty in his knowledge, and Dante needs to grow beyond his master in order to enter Paradise.
One way he can grow is by abandoning his own partisanship (Guelph vs Ghibelline) and to reject simple partisanship from the Iliad. We can see Virgil being celebrated not so much for the Aeneid but for creating the poem of the Roman Empire, a form of government Dante admired. Dante, in turn, becomes a poet of the Christian Empire, while Homer is a poet of individual heroes. The Greeks who are most scorned in Dante's poem are those who sought fame or glory for themselves, or who—like Odysseus—used his intellectual talents to deceive others through false rhetoric.
As a poet, Virgil was long celebrated as a writer of eloquent Latin verse. He is still studied in Latin courses as a model of clean and graceful style. As mentioned, Virgil as Dante's character contains some lapses in knowledge, and a study of his relationship to Dante on this journey offers some insight to the type of growth as a poet Dante seeks to enshrine. Virgil is never repudiated entirely, but he is also not a very delightful character in Dante's poem. His self-sacrifice and duty to country are important in context, but less valued in later eras.
Dante's Ulysses, while punished in the canto of False Prophets, is a more inspiring voice. Even while displaying the rhetoric that lands him in Hell, Ulysses is compelling:
Consider well your seed.
You were not born to live as a mere brute does
But for the pursuit of knowledge and the good. (Pinsky translation)
This is the voice of the anti-hero, a figure that is developed in the Renaissance by Marlowe and Milton but also in the Romantic era. Tennyson's "Ulysses," for instance, offers a similarly ambivalent portrait of an aged king longing for exotic travel:
We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
In both the Renaissance and the Romantic periods, the Greeks become more admired for their independence, daring, and aesthetic appeal. In the Neo-Classical period, Virgil's rationalism would have seemed more fitting.
Once we enter the Modern era, Odysseus again becomes the hero of Joyce's Ulysses. And, again, the figure of ambition, of creativity, and of adventure was more celebrated in art than the person of prudence and self-discipline. This divide—however appropriate with the Classical texts—is part of Dante's legacy.
Homer, being Greek, wrote the The Iliad from a viewpoint mainly favoring the Greeks. Yes, he created some admirable Trojans, such as King Priam and Prince Hector, but it was Greek culture to admire their enemies. Dante, however, being Italian and more familiar with the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid, seems to be more pro-Trojan, reflecting the views of his Italian readers. He does, however, present a variety of classical characters as immoral, since he peoples his version of Hell with both Trojans and Greeks (albeit heavier on the Greek count).
For example, Dante places both Helen and Paris in circle two, to be punished by battering winds for their lustful affair. Yet Dante writes that his guide, Virgil, merely comments that the Trojan prince, Paris, is there, while he takes the time to comment on Greek-born Helen’s sin: “See Helen for whom / so many bad years revolved.” Technically, they were equally guilty in their shared lust, yet the Greek takes the brunt of Dante’s criticism. The mighty Achilles is also punished in the circle of the lustful. Dante is somewhat mocking of this Greek, suggested in Virgil’s remark that Achilles’s “last battle was with love,” referring to the legend that Achilles abandoned the Greek army to marry a Trojan princess.
Another Greek, Ulysses, is punished in Canto 26, the eighth bolgia of the eighth circle, reserved for fraudulent evil counselors. Ulysses is trapped in torturous flames with his Greek cohort, Diomed, for their deceitful trickery against the Trojans, including the famed Trojan horse, which led to the destruction of Troy. But the legends of Ulysses’s immoral behavior are not enough for Dante. He creates an additional story of Ulysses convincing some of his men to take yet another journey after they finally are allowed to return to Ithaca. In Dante’s story, Ulysses uses his gift of intelligent speaking to trick his men into sailing past the forbidden boundary set by the gods, where they are punished with death as their ship is pulled into the sea. It is interesting to note, however, that Ulysses is one of the few characters whom Dante gives a sense of remorse for his sinfulness, rather than the self-righteous attitude of the many other souls in Inferno.
Dante’s Inferno is a vivid, haunting reflection of our human fears concerning the afterlife. As we read, are we not secretly glad that it is these “fictitious” characters suffering, and not ourselves? Or rather, do we see ourselves in the characters? We view Virgil as Dante described him, a virtuous, unbaptized poet “of much worth,” whose poetry so improved the world that he would be given special privileges in Hell. And while the Greeks might have admired the cunning Ulysses and the mighty warrior Achilles, Dante has forever pointed out their failings to the world, immortalized one last time in an epic poem, not celebrated for their greatness, but suffering eternally for their immorality.
https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-26/
