Three Ways Down

Carolyn Sinsky · October 29, 2026

This month, The Art of Reading goes down three times. On Wednesdays we read Odysseus’s visit to the dead in the Odyssey. On Thursdays Dante walks through Hell in the Inferno. On Tuesdays we watch Macbeth wade further into blood than he ever meant to. The books are centuries apart, and the same shape runs under all three: someone goes down, and what matters is what he brings back, or whether he comes back at all.

You can read all three, any two, or just one. This essay is a map of where the paths cross, so that whichever you choose, you know what the other two are saying to it.

Odysseus goes down for directions

Odysseus goes down because he is told to. After a year with Circe he asks for the way home, and she says there is one more journey first: “Go to the house of Hades and the dreadful / Persephone, and ask the Theban prophet, / the blind Tiresias, for his advice.” He is shaken. “Circe, who can guide us on this journey? / No one before has ever sailed to Hades / by ship.” She tells him he needs no pilot. The North Wind will carry the ship to the limits of Ocean, where the dead gather round the pit he digs: “Teenagers, girls and boys, the old who suffered / for many years, and fresh young brides whom labor / destroyed in youth.”

What Tiresias gives him is a forecast and a task. “Odysseus, you think of going home / as honey-sweet, but gods will make it bitter.” He tells Odysseus to be careful with the Sun God’s cattle, that he will kill the suitors in his own halls, and that afterward he must carry an oar inland, “to people with no knowledge of the sea, / who do not salt their food.” The descent is practical. Odysseus goes down to learn how to get home, and he comes back with it.

Years later, alone on a raft, he has no prophet beside him, only the sky: “he watched the stars, / the Pleiades, late-setting Boötes, / and Bear” (Odyssey 5.270–272).

Dante goes down and out

Dante has a guide, and the guide has been here before. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Virgil sends Aeneas down to the dead to speak with his father, and that scene was written with Odysseus’s visit in Odyssey 11 in mind. So when Virgil leads Dante into Hell, they walk a road Homer laid out and Virgil rebuilt.

Dante goes down to get out, as much as to find out. The poem begins with him lost in a dark wood, and the only way through is down, past every kind of harm people do to one another, to the bottom, where Satan sits in the ice. Dante and Virgil climb down his body, turn at the center of the earth, and climb out the other side. The Inferno ends with the line every reader of the poem remembers: e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle, “and from there we came out to see the stars again.” Each of the poem’s three parts ends on the same word, stelle, stars.

Macbeth goes down and keeps going

Macbeth has no Circe and no Virgil. No one sends him and no one guides him; he chooses. When Duncan names his son as heir, Macbeth turns to the stars and asks them to look away: “Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires” (1.4). These are the stars Odysseus steers by and Dante climbs out to see. Macbeth wants them put out.

He knows exactly what he is breaking. Before the murder he counts the reasons not to do it: “as I am his kinsman and his subject, / Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, / Who should against his murderer shut the door, / Not bear the knife myself” (1.7). By the third act he is far past turning back: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4). The other two descents have a bottom and a way up. Macbeth’s has only the next step.

Where the three meet

In the underworld of the Odyssey, the ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus how he died. He was invited to dinner, and Aegisthus “killed me, as one slaughters / an ox at manger.” A guest was murdered at his host’s table. Duncan dies the same way, in Macbeth’s own house, and Macbeth says the rule aloud before he breaks it: the host’s job is to shut the door against the murderer. The Odyssey is full of that rule, the hospitality owed to strangers, and the suitors who eat another man’s house are condemned by it.

Dante ranks the same betrayals. In Canto 11 Virgil explains that fraud against someone who trusts you is the worst kind, and that it is punished in the smallest circle, “where the point is / Of the Universe, upon which Dis is seated.” That circle is the frozen lake of Cocytus, and it has four divisions: traitors to their kindred, to their country, to their friends, and to their lords and benefactors. It is the ice Dante and Virgil must pass through to reach the stars. Dante never wrote about Macbeth, but Duncan is Macbeth’s kinsman, his king, and his guest, and Macbeth kills him in a single night. By Dante’s scheme, that belongs at the bottom.

Even Achilles, the hero the Iliad measures everything against, has a verdict from below: “I would prefer to be a workman, / hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, / than rule as king of all the dead.” Seen from down there, glory looks different. Each of these books asks what a person is willing to go through to get what he wants, and what the getting leaves of him.

Ways through

• Just the Odyssey (Wednesdays: Nov 4, 11, 18, and Dec 2). Hold on to Book 11, which we reach on Nov 11. It is the one place Odysseus goes down, and much of this essay is an answer to it.
• Just the Inferno (Thursdays: Nov 5, 12, 19). Read it as a descent with a way out. Watch for Virgil, and watch for the stars.
• Just Macbeth (Tuesdays: Nov 3, 10, 17). Read it as a descent with no guide and no way up, and listen for every time stars, light, or night come up.
• The Odyssey and the Inferno. You will see one scene handed from Homer to Virgil to Dante, and what each does with it.
• The Odyssey and Macbeth. Read them for the host and the guest: what is owed at the table, and what happens when the host picks up the knife.
• The Inferno and Macbeth. Ask where Dante would put Macbeth, and why it is the place Dante has to climb through to get out.
• All three. You get one question from three depths: a descent that gets you home, one that gets you out, and one that does not come back.

Sappho comes in December, and Joyce’s Ulysses in January takes the same descent to a funeral in Dublin.