[681] _They were Greek_: Some find here an allusion to Dante's ignorance of the Greek language and literature. But Virgil addresses them in the Lombard dialect of Italian (_Inf._ xxvii. 21). He acts as spokesman because those ancient Greeks were all so haughty that to a common modern mortal they would have nothing to say. He, as the author of the _Æneid_, has a special claim on their good-nature. It is but seldom that the shades are told who Virgil is, and never directly. Here Ulysses may infer it from the mention of the 'lofty verse.' [682] _From Circe_: It is Ulysses that speaks. [683] _The open main_: The Mediterranean as distinguished from the Ægean. [684] _Which ne'er deserted me_: There seems no reason for supposing, with Philalethes, that Ulysses is here represented as sailing on his last voyage from the island of Circe and not from Ithaca. Ulysses, on the contrary, represents himself as breaking away afresh from all the ties of home. According to Homer, Ulysses had lost all his companions ere he returned to Ithaca; and in the _Odyssey_ Tiresias prophesies to him that his last wanderings are to be inland. But any acquaintance that Dante had with Homer can only have been vague and fragmentary. He may have founded his narrative of how Ulysses ended his days upon some floating legend; or, eager to fill up what he took to be a blank in the world of imagination, he may have drawn wholly on his own creative power. In any case it is his Ulysses who, through the version of him given by a living poet, is most familiar to the English reader. [685] _The mighty main_: The Atlantic Ocean. They bear to the left as they sail, till their course is due south, and crossing the Equator, they find themselves under the strange skies of the southern hemisphere. For months they have seen no land. [686] _A lofty mountain_: This is the Mountain of Purgatory, according to Dante's geography antipodal to Jerusalem, and the only land in the southern hemisphere. [687] _As pleased Another_: Ulysses is proudly resigned to the failure of his enterprise, 'for he was Greek.' CANTO XXVII.