Sicilian Bull

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In the simile that opens the second part of Canto XXVII of the Inferno, Dante compares the flame in which Ulysses and Diomed move to the Sicilian bull that bellowed first. The comparison is tied to the classical myth, taken up from the Virgilian and Ovidian tradition, in which the fiery giant of the Cyclopes, struck down by Apollo with a thunderbolt, emits a first bellow in place of a human voice. This mythological reference, according to the commentary on the canto, refers to the episode of the fall of Polyphemus narrated by Homer in the Odyssey and reworked by the Latin poets, and serves Dante to evoke the idea of an enormous and inarticulate voice that issues from a mouth of flame.