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The Aeneid: Dreams
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Patricio
Jan 31, 2016, 2:24:47 AM1/31/16
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The Aeneid seems to me a book of visions and prophesies, monsters and portents. It's striking that both the main characters, Aeneas and Turnus, are first introduced in dreams, in Aeneas' case not in the main narrative, but in the tale he himself tells Dido about the fall of Troy and the start of his journey. Aeneas enters this story asleep, when Hector appears to him in a dream and tells him that Troy is lost and he must flee (2.268-297). And this, significantly, is the same dream that Dido has had, mutatis mutandis, in which her husband Sychaeus appears to her all bloody and murdered, and warns her to flee Tyre (1.357-363).
Turnus is first mentioned in 7.56, but he only shows up in person in the middle of his own violent nightmare, when the Fury Allecto appears to him in the guise of a priestess of Juno and urges him to war (7.413-458). Turnus resists the apparition--it's already been revealed (7.85-86) that the people of Italy have special practice confronting dream images--but Allecto morphs back into her demonic shape and terrifies him into submission.
Most of the dreams in the Aeneid are like these, prophetic or admonitory, in which a ghost or divine being reveals the future or incites someone to action. In book three (3.147-171) his penates come to Aeneas in a dream and tell him to abandon Crete, that Anchises was mistaken in his interpretation of the oracle of Delos, and that the Trojans must seek Italy. This vision is so vivid that Aeneas tries to deny it was a dream at all (nec sopor illud erat).
This confusion of waking and dreaming is not uncommon, either in literature or in life. It appears again in the Aeneid in the episode of the loss of the ship's master Palinurus, who when he falls overboard is shown in an obvious hypnagogic state, straddling the boundary between wakefulness and sleep. It's not clear how much of what is described is a dream and how much a waking illusion (5.835-863).
But men know that dreams can be false as well as true (6.894-897), so the business of delivering messages through them can be risky. At the beginning of book eight Aeneas falls asleep on the bank of the Tiber, and the river speaks to him in a dream, telling him to travel to Pallanteum and ally himself with Evander. This message is so important to Aeneas' fortunes that the dream itself feels the need to provide assurance of its own authenticity (ne vana putes haec fingere somnum), and Tiber predicts that Aeneas will find a white sow and her piglets on the riverbank, which he duly does (8.26-65).
Aeneas might be plagued by dreams--he tells Dido he dreams of his father every night (4.350-353)--but it is Latinus and his entire lineage who are revealed as dream warriors. After receiving a prophecy and viewing an omen, the old king seeks answers by embarking on a vision quest (7.81-106). Vergil describes the ritual. The king acting as priest enters the sacred grove and sacrifices a hundred sheep (black ones presumably, since this is an offering to the dead). He then lies down to sleep on their skins while inhaling the mephitic vapors of a sulfurous stream. Visions appear, he hears voices, and he is able to speak with the gods and address his ancestors in Acheron.
Huc dona sacerdos
cum tulit et caesarum ovium sub nocte silenti
pellibus incubuit stratis somnosque petivit,
multa modis simulacra videt volitantia miris
et varias audit voces fruiturque deorum
conloquio, atque imis Acheronta adfatur Avernis.
Dreams come from below, even Dr. Freud knew that. One of the first things Aeneas sees when he enters the underworld with the Sybil is the tree of false dreams, with one hidden under every leaf (6.282-284). These might recall the Sybil's own prophecies that she writes on leaves and lets blow around her cave unattended (3.443-451), or even the mob of unquiet spirits that rush down to the shore of the river and crowd around Charon's boat, "as many as the leaves that fall in the forest at the first chill of autumn (6.305-310)." Ghosts and dreams and prophecies are all fluttery, untrustworthy things. Even more ominously, when Aeneas leaves the underworld to return to the light, Anchises sends him through sleep's ivory gate, the one through which the spirits of the dead send false dreams, deceptive visions (6.894-899).
But sometimes in the Aeneid a dream is just a dream. In book four Vergil describes Dido having a perfectly ordinary anxiety dream, similar to those people have all the time--no ghosts, no prophesies, not even any words; just disquieting images of herself lost and abandoned (4.465-468). And at the very end of the poem Vergil uses the common nightmare experience of frozen panic as an expressive metaphor for the hopeless state Turnus finds himself in (12.908-914).
Ac velut in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit
nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
velle videmur et in mediis conatibus aegri
succidimus; non lingua valet, non corpore notae
sufficient vires nec vox aut verba sequuntur:
sic Turno, quacumque viam virtute petivit,
successum dea dira negat.
--Patricio
Turnus is first mentioned in 7.56, but he only shows up in person in the middle of his own violent nightmare, when the Fury Allecto appears to him in the guise of a priestess of Juno and urges him to war (7.413-458). Turnus resists the apparition--it's already been revealed (7.85-86) that the people of Italy have special practice confronting dream images--but Allecto morphs back into her demonic shape and terrifies him into submission.
Most of the dreams in the Aeneid are like these, prophetic or admonitory, in which a ghost or divine being reveals the future or incites someone to action. In book three (3.147-171) his penates come to Aeneas in a dream and tell him to abandon Crete, that Anchises was mistaken in his interpretation of the oracle of Delos, and that the Trojans must seek Italy. This vision is so vivid that Aeneas tries to deny it was a dream at all (nec sopor illud erat).
This confusion of waking and dreaming is not uncommon, either in literature or in life. It appears again in the Aeneid in the episode of the loss of the ship's master Palinurus, who when he falls overboard is shown in an obvious hypnagogic state, straddling the boundary between wakefulness and sleep. It's not clear how much of what is described is a dream and how much a waking illusion (5.835-863).
But men know that dreams can be false as well as true (6.894-897), so the business of delivering messages through them can be risky. At the beginning of book eight Aeneas falls asleep on the bank of the Tiber, and the river speaks to him in a dream, telling him to travel to Pallanteum and ally himself with Evander. This message is so important to Aeneas' fortunes that the dream itself feels the need to provide assurance of its own authenticity (ne vana putes haec fingere somnum), and Tiber predicts that Aeneas will find a white sow and her piglets on the riverbank, which he duly does (8.26-65).
Aeneas might be plagued by dreams--he tells Dido he dreams of his father every night (4.350-353)--but it is Latinus and his entire lineage who are revealed as dream warriors. After receiving a prophecy and viewing an omen, the old king seeks answers by embarking on a vision quest (7.81-106). Vergil describes the ritual. The king acting as priest enters the sacred grove and sacrifices a hundred sheep (black ones presumably, since this is an offering to the dead). He then lies down to sleep on their skins while inhaling the mephitic vapors of a sulfurous stream. Visions appear, he hears voices, and he is able to speak with the gods and address his ancestors in Acheron.
Huc dona sacerdos
cum tulit et caesarum ovium sub nocte silenti
pellibus incubuit stratis somnosque petivit,
multa modis simulacra videt volitantia miris
et varias audit voces fruiturque deorum
conloquio, atque imis Acheronta adfatur Avernis.
Dreams come from below, even Dr. Freud knew that. One of the first things Aeneas sees when he enters the underworld with the Sybil is the tree of false dreams, with one hidden under every leaf (6.282-284). These might recall the Sybil's own prophecies that she writes on leaves and lets blow around her cave unattended (3.443-451), or even the mob of unquiet spirits that rush down to the shore of the river and crowd around Charon's boat, "as many as the leaves that fall in the forest at the first chill of autumn (6.305-310)." Ghosts and dreams and prophecies are all fluttery, untrustworthy things. Even more ominously, when Aeneas leaves the underworld to return to the light, Anchises sends him through sleep's ivory gate, the one through which the spirits of the dead send false dreams, deceptive visions (6.894-899).
But sometimes in the Aeneid a dream is just a dream. In book four Vergil describes Dido having a perfectly ordinary anxiety dream, similar to those people have all the time--no ghosts, no prophesies, not even any words; just disquieting images of herself lost and abandoned (4.465-468). And at the very end of the poem Vergil uses the common nightmare experience of frozen panic as an expressive metaphor for the hopeless state Turnus finds himself in (12.908-914).
Ac velut in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit
nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
velle videmur et in mediis conatibus aegri
succidimus; non lingua valet, non corpore notae
sufficient vires nec vox aut verba sequuntur:
sic Turno, quacumque viam virtute petivit,
successum dea dira negat.
--Patricio
Ed Cryer
Jan 31, 2016, 8:32:38 AM1/31/16
to
It's similar to the night sky. Today it's usually dimmed by all the
street lighting we have. But when I'm out in the country on a clear
night, and look up, I sometimes find the immensity of it quite
awe-inspiring.
Ed
Patricio
Feb 1, 2016, 12:17:19 AM2/1/16
to
--Patricio
By the way, is impleret correct here, or better just impleat?
Ed Cryer
Feb 1, 2016, 5:49:29 AM2/1/16
to
I think it's elliptical for a construction like this; id volumina
impleret si scriberetur.
Ed
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