Dante begins this canto with bitterly ironic praise of his native Florence: Congratulations, fellow citizens—we’re the best-represented city in Hell! Dante predicts disaster for the city and wishes that it would quickly come; it is unbearable to wait for it and only more unbearable as time progresses.

Virgil carries Dante away from the bolgia of the thieves, and they climb up to the next ridge. Looking down, Dante sees something that makes him choose, in the retelling, to “rein in my wit more than is my custom, that it may not run without virtue guiding it, so that, if a good star of something better has given me what is good, I may not deprive myself of it” (21-24). He goes on to describe the sight with a long, beautiful pastoral analogy, imagining a peasant resting on a hill in summer and watching fireflies lighting up the fields below him. Dante can see as many flames in the bottom of the eighth bolgia as that imaginary peasant could see fireflies. Within each flame is a damned soul. Virgil explains: “each is swathed in that which burns him inwardly” (47-48).

In one such flame, two souls burn together: Ulysses—the hero of the Odyssey—and Diomedes—one of his co-conspirators at the fall of Troy.