James Joyce acknowledged his debt to Dante (The Divine Comedy) when crafting Ulysses. The two masterpieces and the Odyssey and Aeneid that preceded them, each include the device of a guide (or guides through the afterlife). In Inferno, that guide is Virgil; in Ulysses, Mr. Leopold Bloom mentors the underripe Stephen Dedalus. Over the coming months, we will explore the connections between Virgil and Bloom.