Eteocles

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Eteocles appears in Ulysses' speech in Inferno XXVI, where the Greek recalls to his companions the example of the pyre of Eteocles and Polynices to spur them on to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules. According to the mythological account reported in the notes to the canto, the two brothers, sons of Oedipus, killed each other beneath Thebes and, when their bodies were placed on the same pyre, the flame divided into two tongues to signify the hatred that had divided them in life and that endured beyond death. The phenomenon is presented as a unique event in the bolgia of the fraudulent and prompts Dante to ask Virgil who it is who seems to rise from the pyre, dividing the tip of the fire. Dante uses in this regard the Sicilianism 'miso' for 'messo'.