Nisus

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Nisus is mentioned by Dante in Inferno I, v. 108, in the passage where the poet recalls figures from the Virgilian tradition: «Euryalus and Turnus and Nisus of their wounds». The authorized note to Canto I identifies him as a young Virgilian hero, together with Camilla, Euryalus, and Turnus, united in the same pity and the same glory beyond the alternation of victors and vanquished. Nisus and Euryalus, in particular, are indicated as two young Trojan friends who fell in the conflict between Trojans and Latins for supremacy in Latium, as a parallel reference to the providential enterprise of Aeneas. Dante evokes them here not as protagonists of a scene in the Inferno, but as a historical-epic term of comparison inserted into the exhortation addressed to Virgil.