Dreams in Late Antiquity

W.J.T. MITCHELL has pointed to the “recursive problem” that arises when one gives one’s attention “to the way in which images (and ideas) double themselves: the way we depict the act of picturing, imagine the activity of imagination, figure the practice of figuration.”¹ Problematic though it may be, a consideration of how dreams, as an activity of imagination, were imaged is an important step toward demonstrating the semiotic character of the literature of dreams as well as the practices of dream interpretation. Because many of the images that were used in late antiquity to picture the imaginal world of dreams were borrowings or refinements of yet more ancient depictions, the discussion will begin with classical and preclassical texts.

In Homer’s Odyssey, dreams were located spatially in an imaginal landscape that was in close proximity to the dwelling place of the dead. Book 24 of this Homeric text opens with a description of the journey taken by Penelope’s slain suitors, a journey that takes them from the concrete space of empirical reality through a fantastic geography.

Also translated as “village of dreams” and “people of dreams,” the demos oneirōn is located beyond Okeanos, the mythological river that encircled the “real” world.³ Described as “the land where reality ends and everything is fabulous,” the regions of Okeanos inscribe a boundary in cosmic space.⁴ Beyond that boundary is a realm of images and ghosts, a space that one interpreter has characterized as an “anticosmos,” “the reverse side of the cosmic order” that mirrors its other in fantastic, phantasmal ways.⁵ This, then, is the spatial location of dreams in the Homeric cosmos.

The fact that the word demos has been translated as “village,” an architectural construct, and as “people,” a race of living beings, provides an interesting (if unintentional) clue to two further features of the Homeric view of dreams that were to persist in late-antique characterizations of dreams.

Architecturally speaking, the dream-village of Homer had gates. In Odyssey 4.809, Penelope is pictured as “slumbering sweetly in the gates of dream.”⁶ Later on, again in connection with one of Penelope’s dreams, these gates are further specified.

Truly dreams are by nature perplexing and full of messages which are hard to interpret; nor by any means will everything [in them] come true for mortals. For there are two gates of insubstantial dreams; one [pair] is wrought of horn and one of ivory. Of these, [the dreams] which come through [the gate of] sawn ivory are dangerous to believe, for they bring messages which will not issue in deeds; but [the dreams] which come forth through [the gate of] polished horn, these have power in reality, whenever any mortal sees them.⁷

This passage has occasioned a good deal of scholarly debate, particularly regarding the meaning of Homer’s choice of ivory and horn to characterize the materials out of which the two gates are constructed.⁸ As a general statement about the quality of dreams, the meaning is clear: all dreams are amēchanoi, things that are “intractable” or “hard to cope with either physically or emotionally.”⁹ Dreams are further specified as akritomūthos, a kind of speech that is akritos, “indiscriminate” or “numberless” and so hard to interpret.¹⁰

As for the two gates, Amory has pointed out that the dreams that issue through them “are not described adjectivally as ‘true’ and ‘false.’ Instead the dreams are distinguished by verbal phrases, pertaining to what they do after they have come through their contrasted gates.”¹¹ All dreams are equivocal, but some, associated with ivory, are “dangerous,” while others, associated with horn, “have power in reality.” Why horn and ivory? I follow Amory’s argument that the three most probable explanations for Homer’s choice of these materials were already being discussed in antiquity. As presented in the vast compilation of commentaries on Homer written by Eustathius in the twelfth century, they are as follows:¹²

(1) The reason that the poet makes a horn gate the source of dreams which are true and accomplish true things is that there is a certain resemblance in sound between the words krainein [to accomplish] and kerasi [horns], as if from the word keras were derived kerainō, that is, krainō. [Similarly the poet makes] an ivory gate the source of dreams which are false and deceptive, that is, which mislead, cheat, and only arouse expectations [the verb elephairō, “deceive” or, in Amory’s translation, “dangerous to believe,” being hypothetically derived from elephas, ivory].

(2) Some, understanding the speech differently, more symbolically, interpret the horn gate as the eyes, taking the part for the whole, in that the outermost covering of the eye is horny. And they say that the mouth is the ivory [gate] because of the ivory-colored teeth, so that the wise Penelope is saying symbolically that the things which are seen as actual events are more trustworthy than things which are simply said to be so. Therefore, obviously [she means that] she will believe the things that are said about Odysseus as dream interpretations [only] when she sees them.

(3) Some say that the true [gate] is of horn, that is, transparent, whereas the false [gate] is of ivory, that is, blurred or opaque, because it is possible to see through horn . . . but not through ivory.

Amory petitions these passages from Eustathius as part of her argument that the association of dreams with the substances of ivory and horn was a popular tradition that Homer appropriated rather than merely a poetic fiction of his.¹³ She shows further that, while the passages from Eustathius are important in that they preserve an ancient connection of speech with the ivory gate and sight with the gate of horn, nonetheless Eustathius has made a distinction between true and false dreams which Homer did not make.¹⁴ The issue of the transparency of the two materials, as in Eustathius’ third explanation, is the one that Amory finds to be the likeliest basis for the contrast between them and the dreams that they usher forth—but not, as Eustathius has it, because ivory is opaque and horn transparent. Rather, it is a case of contrasting kinds of transparency: “xestos, applied to the smooth polished substance of horn, and pristos, used of the intricately carved and decorated substance of ivory, both reinforce the contrast in transparency between the two materials.”¹⁵ She concludes with an affirmation of the Homeric view of the ambiguity of dreams: “For the fact that neither substance is completely transparent corresponds to the fact that all dreams are by nature obscure, as Penelope says at the beginning of her speech.”¹⁶

Whereas Amory prefers the third of Eustathius’ explanations of the two gates, I find his second explanation equally suggestive because it brings forward the association of dreams with ivory, teeth, and language on the one and, and horn, eyes, and vision on the other. For Homer, dreams were both linguistic and visual events, and they were linked spatially with village gates whose elaborately overdetermined meaning, growing out of etymological puns and imagistic associations, certainly makes them fitting architectural monuments of the dēmos oneirōn.

When the dēmos oneirōn is understood not as a village of dreams but rather as the people of dreams, another important feature of Homer’s way of figuring the figurative phenomenon of dreams comes to the fore. The word that is usually used in Homeric texts to denote a dream is oneiros, which designates a dream-figure (and not the more generalized idea of dream-experience).¹⁷ As Dodds notes, “this dream-figure can be a god, or a ghost, or a pre-existing dream-messenger, or an ‘image’ (eidōlon) created specially for the occasion; but whichever it is, it exists objectively in space and is independent of the dreamer.”¹⁸ As “people,” then, dreams were autonomous; they were not conceptualized as products of a personal subor unconscious but rather as visual images that present themselves to the dreamer. Thus Homeric dreamers spoke of seeing a dream, not of having one as modern dreamers do.¹⁹

One of the most striking instances of a dream presenting itself to a dreamer in Homer involves Penelope. In the Odyssey 4, Penelope is sick with worry over the fate of her son Telemachus, who has left Ithaca to seek out news of his father Odysseus. “Sweet sleep” overtakes her, and the following scene ensues:

As this scene continues, the dream is described as a “dim phantom,” a “wavering form” that “withdrew along the doorbolt into a draft of wind.” Penelope awakes “in better heart for that clear dream in the twilight of the night.”²¹

Several features of this scene can be used to typify the Homeric “people of dreams.” First, they are connected with divine beings, who either send an image or appear as the dream-figure themselves, though always in disguised form.²² Certainly the connection with the gods serves to underscore the dream’s autonomy and the authoritative quality of its message. Yet this is a strange kind of authority, embodied by a dim and wavering phantom that glides in and out of keyholes on drafts of wind. For Homer, the dream appears to be a kind of technique for overcoming epistemological uncertainty that nevertheless participates in that very dynamic. Thus the second feature to note about the people of dreams is the equivocal status of their airy substance.²³ This quality of dreams has already been alluded to in Penelope’s statement in Odyssey 19.562, where she says that there are two gates of insubstantial (amenēnōn) dreams. As an adjective, the term amenēnos is generally taken to mean either a lack of strength, hence “feeble” or “insubstantial,” or a lack of staying power, hence “fleeting.” Amory shows, however, that “all the other usages in Homer make it certain that the first meaning, lacking physical strength’ and therefore “incorporeal’ is the correct one.”²⁴ Although these figures lack physical strength, they do not lack imaginal power. Penelope, indeed, awakes from her dream “in better heart”; however dim, the eidōlon of her twilight experience has given her a perceptual clarity.

The Homeric people of dreams lack bodies; but they give a sense of body and substance to experience. As images, they give emotion a tangible clarity.²⁵ A final Homeric dream portrays this dynamic, this “order” of ambiguity, in a striking way, and it will also take us back to the beginning of our discussion of Homer by the way in which it situates the people of dreams spatially in the land of dreams. In Book 23 of the Iliad, the Greek warrior Achilles refuses to be cleansed of the bloodstains of war until his friend Patroclus is properly buried. Having made preparations for the burial the next day, Achilles, deep in grief, falls asleep.

As with Penelope, so here with Achilles, the dream galvanizes emotion and makes it palpable by giving it articulate, imagistic expression. This is an unusual Homeric dream in that the dream-figure is neither a god in disguise nor an image fabricated by a god. Instead it is the soul of a dead man whose likeness to life is “wonderful.” However, it is like Penelope’s dream in its airy substantiality, and it too is described as an eidolon, which in this case “ghosts” the life of the dreamer and crystallizes his experience of grief.

As Kessels has pointed out, this dream may be evidence of an ancient Greek belief that the unburied dead haunted the living in (or as) dreams.²⁷ My interest, however, is in the placement of Patroclus’ eidolon as a dream. The dream-figure is not in Hades but by Hades’ house, in the fabulous land beyond the frontier of the real with which this description of Homeric texts began. The village of dreams and the people of dreams have been united in this text. The further specification of the location of this dreamfigure, that it is not only by Hades’ house but also kata, chthonos, “underground,” makes contact with a genealogical view of dreams as found in other ancient Greek texts, and to those I now turn.

When ancient Greek literature presents a figuration of dreams from a genealogical standpoint, they assume a more fearful, baneful aspect than they do in Homeric texts. A striking example of the genealogy of dreams is presented in Euripides’ play Hecuba, which derives the lineage of dreams from earth. Early in this drama, the fallen Trojan queen Hecuba has seen a dream that portends the deaths of two of her children. Frantic with terror, she says,

Here dreams are pictured as children of earth. This is not the nourishing earth of agricultural productivity but a darker, more primordial earth, the majestic goddess Chthon.²⁹ As black-winged apparitions issuing from the womb of Chthōn, these dreams do not have the almost playful aspect of the many Homeric dreams that bend over the head of the dreamer to engage in conversation.

Elsewhere Euripides describes dreams as “truth’s shadows upfloating from Earth’s dark womb” and specifies the reason for their birth.³⁰ Originally, the oracle at Delphi had belonged to Chthon.³¹ When Apollo killed her sacred serpent and took the site of the oracle for himself, Chthōn retaliated.

A reason for the frightful aspect of dreams when imaged genealogically is their birth in anger, and it was this angry, doom-saying speech of dreams that predominated in classical drama.³³

The terrible vengefulness of dreams as powers of earthy darkness is carried in the alternative genealogy of dreams reported by Hesiod. In the Theogony, dreams are figured as children not of earth but of night: “Night gave birth to hateful Destruction and the Black Specter and Death; she also bore Sleep and the race of Dreams.”³⁴ As Brelich has remarked, this passage does not turn on a banal association of sleep, dreams, and ordinary nighttime: “the Nyx [Night] in the Theogony is not the night of our daily rest.” Rather, she is “one of the most serious and formidable powers the Hellenic imagination was capable of creating.”³⁵ A daughter of chaos, Nyx gives birth, in Brelich’s translation, to “Moros (odious destiny), to ominous Ker (archaic demon associated with inexorable doom), to Thanatos (death), to Hypnos (sleep), and to the people of dreams.”³⁶ Linked through their mother Night with chaos, the people of dreams are part of that vast gulf of possibility that is the condition and foundation of all life in Hesiod’s cosmogonic vision.³⁷ And that they are a necessary condition of life is what is implied by the company of siblings in which they find themselves, the inexorable, inescapable forces of the imaginal darkness of night.

As the foregoing figurations show, dreams belonged, in Brelich’s words, “to the spatial and temporal peripheries of the cosmos, to the antiworld that surrounds the world, to the antireality that is found outside real time and real space.”³⁸ These configurations functioned like a mirror held up to the ancient Greek imagination as it gave image to its own dynamic. Picturing the act of picturing was an art that required an imaginal vocabulary “outside the real” so that the real could be presented to itself in meaningful terms. This strategy of using dreams to present the world in articulate and nuanced ways had a lasting impact. The spatial and temporal metaphors that ancient Greeks used to picture this world of pictures helped to shape late-antique imaginings in significant, and sometimes surprising, ways.

FIGURATIONS OF A FIGURATIVE WORLD:
LATE ANTIQUITY

Two Latin poets at the beginning of the Graeco-Roman era continued the Homeric idea that dreams were a world situated in a cosmic space that was closely connected with the realm of the dead. However, both Ovid and Virgil painted their pictures of this dream-world with an intensity of description that surpassed that of their precursor.

Like Homer, Ovid located dreams spatially in close proximity to the land of the dead, in a cavern under a Cimmerian mountain.³⁹ This is a place of “dusky twilight shadows” where the ground is dark with mist and fog.⁴⁰ Total silence reigns, save for the whispering of a branch of the river Lethe, “murmuring over mumbling stones inviting sleep.”⁴¹ Inside the cave’s doorway, which is festooned with poppies and other narcotic plants, lies the god Somnus, Sleep, in langorous repose. Around him lie his children, “as numerous as the wheat-ears of the harvest,” and so dense that anyone entering has to brush them aside as though clearing a path through thick cobwebs.⁴² These children are “the empty dream-shapes, mimicking many forms” (varias imitantia formas somnia vana).⁴³

There is something undecidable about the choice of the adjective vanus as a modifier for dreams. Are they merely “empty,” “unsubstantial,” and “vain”? The unsubstantiality of dreams is certainly underscored by their placement in a fabled geography, but Ovid’s construction of this landscape as a lavish setting, lush even in its gloom, suggests that there is something substantial, full, and significant about these airy beings. It may be that the word vanus, if taken only at face value, is misleading.

As Frederick Ahl has argued, Ovid was a master of the “multiple entendre”; the Ovidian world is one of “radical multiple realities” in which “the strife of opposites and everchanging shapes” rules—and bewilders— one’s perceptual sense.⁴⁴ This is particularly true of the world of dreams— so much so, in fact, that one interpreter has argued that the dream may be a cipher for the process of metamorphosis itself. According to Charles Boer, “while metamorphosis is the one almost constant feature of the poem that we observe, it is like the observance of a dream, where images keep shifting, the tone keeps changing, and where we are never sure of motives or morals.”⁴⁵

In his discussion of the way in which Ovid based the structure of his long poem on wordplays and soundplays, Ahl reinforces Boer’s view of the constant inconstancy of the Ovidian world, again in reference to dreams. The context for Ahl’s observations is the story of Alcyone and her dream of her dead husband Ceyx, which is itself the pretext for Ovid’s spatial description of the dreamworld. When asked to send a dream to Alcyone to convey the truth about her husband, Somnus chooses his son Morpheus who is “an artist and simulator of appearance” (artificem similatoremque figurae).⁴⁶ As Ahl points out, the Latin word MORPHEus contains a cross-linguistic play on the Greek word MORPHĒ, “shape,” and hence on the title of Ovid’s work, MetaMORPHoses.⁴⁷ In the same passage, the play on the ideas of shape, change, and dream is continued in the statement that “dreams, in imitation, equal true forms” (somnia, quae veras aequant imitamine FORMas), where FORMas is a cross-language anagram of MORPHē.⁴⁸ The shifting shapes of language itself match the qualities of the Ovidian oneiric landscape.

Thus dreams are empty and full, vain and significant, insubstantial and substantial. They are part of what Ahl has called the savage reality of the Ovidian world, where one dimension of the savagery is an acceptance of the “notion of simultaneous and contradictory realities.”⁴⁹ A striking example of this Ovidian paradox—and an example as well of how the geographical landscape of the dreamworld is simultaneously a psychological landscape— is the story of the dreamer Byblis, a young woman delirious with love for her brother. In the beginning of her story she did not recognize her passion: “she was long deceived by the semblance [umbra] of sisterly affection.”⁵⁰ However, repressed desire found its outlet—in dreams of sexual love. Caught between the dictates of sexual mores, on the one hand, and passionate desire, on the other, Byblis longs for the dream of physical union to return again and again: “A dream lacks a witness, but does not lack a substitute joy [imitata voluptas],’” she says.⁵¹

Ovid is playing here with the notion of the shifting status of what might be considered real. The umbra—shade, shadow, uninvited guest—is invited in; as a dream, the guest becomes host to a sensuous pleasure that is all the more real for being an imitation, and all the more an artifice for being imaginal, “only” a dream. Byblis asks herself, “‘But what weight have dreams? or have dreams weight?’”⁵² In the Ovidian world, dreams do have “weight” by virtue of their ability to shift the grounds of perception and to give shape to emotion. Indeed, they are the shifting of the ground, mimicking the many forms of a pluralized reality.

Ovid maintained the Homeric connection between dreams and death not only in his placement of the dreamworld in an under- or otherworldly cavern but also by means of a further wordplay carried in the name of the god Morpheus. The Latin word for death, Mors, sounds in the name of the dream as master artificer, Morpheus. Further, as Ahl says, “Sleep, in Latin, is proverbially the brother of death, MORs,” and as one of Ovid’s characters suggests, “metaMORphosis lies somewhere between life and death.”⁵³ Ovid thus does not place the deathly dimension of dreams in a world apart but rather places it squarely in the context of life’s turmoil. Because they carry change, they are deadly, yet they embody the ongoing rhythms of living.

If, for Ovid, dreams were one aspect of “the unbearable lightness of being,” to borrow a recent phrase, this was not the case for his older contemporary Virgil.⁵⁴ Virgil’s presentation of Homer’s spatial metaphor was unrelievedly dark and more rigid than that of the younger poet. It would appear that Virgil’s reworking of the Homeric trope has been colored by the horrific face of dreams as presented in tragic drama.

Early in Book Six of the Aeneid, the hero Aeneas is being led by the Sibyl to visit the imago, the phantom or imaginal residue, of his dead father. The way to the world of the dead lies through the mouth of a deep cave; before entering, Aeneas says a prayer to Earth, terra, a sign that Virgil has, like the dramatists, adopted a chthonic view of this underworldly region rather than the Homeric view of a fabled land.⁵⁵ Nonetheless, like Homer and especially like Hesiod, Virgil peoples with fearful presences the territory just outside the entry way to the land of the dead.

The terror of the place, which is implicit in Homer, is specified by Virgil in painful detail. First one encounters personified emotions and afflictions: grief, anxiety, fear, hunger, agony, and death.⁵⁶ This is the company in which Sleep finds its place, and Virgil, following the tradition noted by Ahl, describes Sleep as death’s blood relative (consanguineus Leti Sopor).⁵⁷ Life’s emotional afflictions are accompanied by monsters:

Besides, many varieties of monsters can be found

Stabled here at the doors—Centaurs and freakish Scyllas,

Briareus with his hundred hands, the Lernaean Hydra

That hisses terribly and the flame-throwing Chimaera,

Gorgons and harpies, and the ghost of three-bodied Geryon.⁵⁸

In the midst of all this monstrousness there is a tree, a huge, shadowy elm that “spreads wide its branches like arms.” Here “the unsolid dreams [somnia, vana] roost, clinging everywhere under its foliage.”⁵⁹ Like Ovid, Virgil characterized dreams as insubstantial, but he has changed the metaphorical shape of these vain beings: instead of the cobwebby, langorous creatures of Ovid’s imagination, now dreams roost like bats beneath the leaves of a tree, an organic metaphor in keeping, perhaps, with Virgil’s chthonic, earthy placement of this realm. Aeneas, terrified at the sight of all this, takes out his sword, but the Sibyl assures him that the lives of these beings are “thin and bodiless; they flutter about in an empty semblance of form” [volitare cava sub imagine formae] .⁶⁰

Like Ovid, Virgil has amplified the imaginal significance of Homer’s spatial metaphor for the place of dreams, though in a more ponderous way. He has, however, made explicit the psychological contours of this realm by placing personified emotions there. The monsters of the underworld are creatures of the human imagination, unsolid yet fearfully alive. Again, it is the semblance of form that makes the perception of form possible.

Virgil continued the play on the idea of semblance in his appropriation of the Homeric gates of dream.

There are two gates of Sleep, one of which is said to be

of horn, and through it true shades [veris umbris] are

given a ready outlet; the other shines with the gleam of

polished ivory, but false are the dreams [falsa insomnia]

which the shades send upward by it.⁶¹

Although he continues the notion that there is truth in shadows, Virgil gives a twist to the Homeric passage on the gates that was to have a lasting impact on Graeco-Roman dream theory. Homer had maintained the equivocality of all dreams; the two gates do not preside over separate realms of truth and falsity. Virgil has rigidified or systematized what in Homer remains finally undecidable, namely, the quicksilver intractability of oneiric phenomena as a whole. Virgil’s appropriation of the Homeric metaphor of the gates as a way of characterizing dreams is thus really a misappropriation, but the distinction he made between true and false dreams became the basis of an oneiric hermeneutic that touched the imaginal lives of Graeco-Roman people from Artemidorus to Synesius. The Virgilian mistake fathered oneirokritica, the judgment of dreams.

The final twist that Virgil gives to the Homeric trope of the gates will take us to the remaining, extended exploration of Homer’s visual presentation of the land of dreams. Immediately following the passage about the two gates, Aeneas and his father Anchises part, their conversation concluded. “Anchises escorted his son and the Sibyl as far as the ivory gate, and sent them through it.”⁶² This passage has occasioned debate: why did Anchises send his son back to the “real” world through the gate of false dreams? Is Virgil suggesting that Aeneas is a legendary figure, not “true”? Is he implying that the world that is usually thought to be real is a figment, while the realm of shades and shadows is the substantive world?⁶³ There is no determinable answer to these questions—a tribute, perhaps, to the shadowy landscape of the dreamworld.

Answerable or not, the idea that people, as well as dreams, might travel through the gates appealed to Lucian of Samosata; his comic use of a trip through the ivory gate forms part of his picture of the land of dreams, the final Graeco-Roman trope on Homer’s land of dreams that will be considered here. Lucian’s A True Story, a “tall-tale travelogue” modeled on the adventures of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, contains an extended description of Homer’s spatial metaphor for dreams.⁶⁴ The passage is an amusing parody—a testimony to the fact that, by the mid-second century C.E., Homer’s picture of the dreamworld had become a convention so well known that it could be subjected to the spoofing that it receives in Lucian’s hands. Caricatures, after all, depend on familiarity for their satiric punch.

Lucian’s narrator passes into the land of dreams through the ivory gate, reversing the direction of Aeneas and perhaps emphasizing the statement in the preface of the work, that “the one and only truth you’ll hear from me is that I am lying.”⁶⁵ Lying or not, Lucian begins his parody of the heroic dream-figures of Homer with a down-to-earth observation: the Isle of Dreams, “dim and hard to make out,” behaves “very much the way dreams do; as we approached, it receded, moving further away and eluding us.”⁶⁶ Her then gives the following description of the “city” of dreams:

It’s completely surrounded by a forest of lofty poppy and mandrake trees where hordes of bats, the only species of bird on the island, roost. Alongside flows Nightway River, as it’s named, and by the gates are two springs called Sleepy-time and Allnight. The city wall is high and gaily painted the colors of the rainbow. There are four gates, not two as Homer says. One of iron and one of ceramic lead to Drowsy Meadow; we were told that nightmares and dreams of murder and violence leave by these. Then two others lead to the water front and the sea, one of horn and the one we came through, of ivory.⁶⁷

Lucian continues on in this way, as though he were writing a tourist’s guide, pointing out such notable local monuments as “the twin temples of trick and truth” and so on.⁶⁸

Into this comic cityscape Lucian introduces his version of the demos oneirōn, the people of dreams. His evocation of this Homeric trope will provide a good transition into late-antique figurations of dreams as “people.” Lucian’s narrator says:

As for the dreams, no two are alike in either character or appearance. Some are tall, with good features and good looks, others short and ugly; some are golden, others plain and cheap. There were dreams with wings, freakish dreams, and dreams which, dressed up like kings, queens, gods, and the like, looked as if they were going to a carnival. Many we recognized because we had seen them long ago. These actually came up and greeted us like old friends, then invited us to their homes and, putting us to sleep, extended us the warmest and most generous hospitality. . . .⁶⁹

The dreams of Lucian’s imagination look as though they were going to a carnival, just as his discourse is itself “carnivalesque” insofar as its irreverent humor pokes fun at epic tradition.⁷⁰ Yet Lucian’s topsy-turvy version of Homer’s people of dreams instantiates that view even as it parodies it—but with a twist. His description of the physical appearance of dreams in this passage is reminiscent of a section of his satire entitled Zeus the Opera Star, in which the gods are described in terms of their statues. Some are made of gold, others of cheap materials, bronze and stone; some are comely and beautifully sculpted, others crudely made and ugly.⁷¹ The dream-figures are described in similar terms—golden and cheap, handsome and unattractive. Although Lucian has not made explicit the statuary quality of his dream-people, the implicit connection is a telling one, because one of the ways in which the ancient idea that dreams are autonomous figures lived on in the late-antique imagination was as statues of the gods.⁷²

Like painting, dreams were a form of iconization. This is particularly clear in the many instances in which the gods appear in dreams in the form of their statues. In these cases the exactitude of the oneiric imagination is especially evident, as is the dependence of this kind of thinking on visual articulation for its construction of meaning.⁷³ While Plato may have worried about the epistemological status of copies of copies, dreamers knew that appearances were a source of knowledge.

These late-antique appearances differed from their Homeric predecessors in an essential respect, related to the quality and precision of their mimetic effect. In Homer, when the gods appear as dreams, they do so in disguise, fabricated so as to look like people familiar to the dreamer. As Lane Fox has pointed out, “It is particularly significant that the dreams and visions in Homer show none of art’s effects, for Homer had composed the epics before portrait statues had been widely available. . . . As Greek sculpture developed, it fixed mortals’ ideas of their gods as individuals; the distinct ‘personality’ of the Greek gods has been questioned, but art was an enduring mould which helped to form it.”⁷⁴ Implicit in Lane Fox’s observation is the thesis of E. R. Dodds about culture-patterns of dreaming, namely, that social milieu and cultural expectation have an influence on the forms in which dreams present themselves and are remembered.⁷⁵ It would indeed seem to be the case that the ubiquity of artistic representations of the gods had an influence on the late-antique appropriation of the people of dreams.

A deep familiarity with the dream-images of his fellow Mediterraneans assured Artemidorus of the iconistic verity of these gods-as-dreams. A large section of the second book of his hefty compendium of dream-images and their significations, the Oneirocritica, reports on the appearances of gods in dreams. His rule of thumb for the interpretation of these dreams is that “statues of the gods have the same meaning as the gods themselves.”⁷⁶ Furthermore, each of the gods and goddesses has characteristic signs, so that it is important to notice the age, attributes, activities, material of composition, and clothing of these oneiric statues to determine the identity and meaning of the dream.⁷⁷ That these images can be identified with exactitude Artemidorus has no doubt; they are inclusive visual images whose depth of meaning lies on their aesthetic surface.

It is noteworthy that when Artemidorus says that the gods, as statues (and the statues, as gods) have “characteristic signs,” he uses the word parasēma.⁷⁸ Parasēmon is a word that denotes a mark that can either be distinguishing or marginal; as a sign, it can either be indicative or it can be counterfeit; it is an emblem or password that can be misleading, as in one of the verbal forms from which it stems, “to betray by one’s expression.”⁷⁹ J. Hillis Miller has observed about what he calls “words in para” that they call up their apparent opposites and have no meaning without those counterparts. He goes on to say that para- is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance,similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, . . . something simultaneously this side of a boundary line . . . and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary. . . .” He continues:

A thing in ‘para,’ moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and out. It is also the boundary line itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside. It confuses them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them and joining them. It also forms an ambiguous transition between one and the other. Though a given word in ‘para’ may seem to choose univocally one of these possibilities, the other meanings are always there as a shimmering in the word which makes it refuse to stay still in a sentence.⁸⁰

In the light of this perspective, Artemidorus has, by his choice of word, pointed to the equivocal richness of these aesthetic appearances of the gods as people of dreams.

The oneiric imagination confounds the conventional distinction between (real) thing and (false) copy. Emphasis is placed instead on aesthetic scrutiny of the image: appearance is all.⁸¹ Yet in the mimetic world of dreaming, images are uncanny, as Artemidorus knew. Immediately following his statement that equates statues of the gods with the gods themselves, he moves into a discussion of the materials out of which these imaginal statues are composed.

Statues that are fashioned from a substance that is hard and incorruptible as, for example, those that are made of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, stone, amber, or ebony, are auspicious. Statues fashioned from any other material as, for example, those that are made from terra cotta, clay, plaster, or wax, those that are painted, and the like, are less auspicious and often even inauspicious. We must also bear in mind that it is auspicious to see the statues of gods who signify something good in themselves or through their statues, if the statues are not smashed to bits or broken. But if the gods themselves or their statues indicate something bad, it is auspicious to see their statues disappear.⁸²

Clearly, it is not enough simply to dream of a statue of a god. Attention must also be given to the substance, the material out of which the statue is formed, because imaginal substances “matter” more, carry more signifying weight, than do the objects themselves. Furthermore, these imaginal substances carry what Gaston Bachelard called the “individualizing power” of matter: they are finely wrought, and every detail counts.⁸³ Again, Artemidorus:

Whenever the gods are not wearing their customary attire, whenever they are not in their proper place, and whenever they are not conducting themselves as they should, everything that they say is nothing but a lie and a deception. Therefore one must take everything into consideration at the same time: the speaker, what is being said, the place, the conduct, and the clothing of the speaker.⁸⁴

This statement makes clear the difference between Homer and the tradition that followed him concerning the people of dreams. These Graeco-Roman figures are not in disguise; rather they are truly parasēma, capable of signifying both similarity and difference at once. The deciphering of meaning lies with the aesthetic astuteness of the observer.

Artemidorus says that these dream-statues speak, move, wear clothing, and so on. This kind of mobile iconization draws on a widespread understanding among Graeco-Roman polytheists about the relationship between statues and deities. Ramsay MacMullen has written that these people “thought first to touch the gods through images, because that was where the gods lived, or at least to images they could be brought by entreaty, there to listen and to act.”⁸⁵ Indeed, the many reports from this era of statues moving, trembling, winking, and so on suggest that these objects had been conceptualized in such a way as to endow the aesthetic with life.⁸⁶ In his third century C.E. work on statues, Callistratus wrote of a statue of Asclepius that “the god infused his own powers” into it; within the statue “the power of the indwelling god is clearly manifest... in a marvelous way, it fathers proof that it has a soul; the face, as you look at it, entrances the senses.”⁸⁷ Similarly, the character Lucius in Apuleius’ novel Metamorphoses characterizes statues of the gods as “breathing images” (simulacra spirantia), as did the author of the Hermetic treatise Asclepius, who thought them to be “ pleines de souffle vital,” to quote the French translator’s pungent phrase.⁸⁸

Theorists of the role of images in religion knew that what was involved in this view of statues was not mere magic. The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, writing like Callistratus in the third century C.E., had this to say about statues:

I think that the wise men of old, who made temples and statues in the wish that the gods should be present to them, looking to the nature of the All, had in mind that the nature of soul is everywhere easy to attract, but that if someone were to construct something sympathetic to it and able to receive part of it, it would of all things receive soul most easily. That which is sympathetic to it is what imitates it in some way, like a mirror able to catch [the reflection of] a form.⁸⁹

In this view, the statue as mimetic object provides a sympathetic space for the presenting of the gods. The animate world of soul can be reflected in the inanimate world of matter when the latter is formed aesthetically.

As Françoise Meltzer has aptly observed, in an imaged religious sensibility such as this, “the representational, or highly mimetic simulacra will . . . cause the sensory to mirror meaning, and celebrate the technē and lifelike quality of sacred art.”⁹⁰ The blunt statement of the author of the Corpus Hermeticum underscores this view: “Statues are adored because they contain in them the forms [ideas] of the intelligible world [tou noētou kosmou] .”⁹¹ The sensuous image can “contain” such forms because that which is bodiless (asōmata) is reflected in bodies (sōmata) and the reverse is also true: the world of the senses (tōn aisthētōn) is reflected in the noetic world (ton noēton kosmon).⁹² The reflecting process between what is intangible and what is tangible is a two-way dynamic; as the nexus or connecting point between the two, the image is the message.

I argued earlier that divination at large was a poetizing process. So too was this way of conceptualizing the role of statues in that it involved an imaginal appropriation of the natural and the supernatural worlds. Furthermore, as a semiotic construction, this “language” of statues had a decided tendency toward enabling people to situate themselves more comfortably and securely in the everyday world around them. By “entrancing the senses,” as Callistratus said, statues could provide emotional comfort. An Epicurean of the second century C.E. wrote, “Some gods are angry with fortunate men, as the goddess Nemesis seems to be to most people. But the statues of gods should be made cheerful and smiling so that we may smile back at them rather than fear them.”⁹³ When the statue smiles, we smile back; this is a poetry of the invisible that lifts the weight of the world with an aesthetic touch. Italo Calvino has called this dynamic “a lightness of thoughtfulness,” a perspective echoed by Porphyry’s sense that making an image of a friend or a statue of a god has as its aim to honor, respect, and remember.⁹⁴ Thus these “breathing images” could also work to instill life with a sense of virtuous filiation and a sense of thoughtfulness toward one’s relationships.

In this world of statues, then, it was the sensuous image that carried meaning. When these simulacra appeared in dreams, they were not derided as mere copies of copies; on the contrary, their emotional and epistemological charge was heightened by virtue of their doubly imaginal character. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the cult of Asclepius, where the influence of statues on dreams was perhaps most pronounced among the dream-traditions of late antiquity. Asclepius was the god of health, and suppliants at his many shrines and temples regularly saw dreams of this healer in the form of his statues. The cult of this god was a kind of oneiric therapy, and the healing was aesthetically induced.⁹⁵ It would appear that most, if not all, of the sites sacred to Asclepius had a statue of the god as their central point of attraction. Pausanias, inveterate traveler and recorder of tourist attractions, wrote in his second-century C.E. Guide to Greece about the Asclepian shrines that he visited. All of them had statues of Asclepius. Sometimes made of stone, sometimes of gold and ivory, sometimes accompanied by his animal companions the dog and the serpent, sometimes holding the medicinal pinecone, this god was thoroughly iconized, and he was a remarkably “live” artistic presence in the dreams of his constituents.⁹⁶

It is tempting to call this dream-Asclepius “statuesque,” for as Lane Fox notes, many of his statues were “colossal” and “combined awe with a friendly quality,” certainly a desirable trait in a doctor.⁹⁷ To those in need of medical help, Asclepius as statue would appear as a dream, either giving prescriptive advice or performing surgery. The following dream reported by Artemidorus was typical:

A man with a stomach disorder implored Asclepius for a medical prescription. He dreamed that he went into the temple of the god and that the god stretched out his right hand and offered the man his fingers to eat. The man ate five dates and was cured. For the fruits of the date palm, whenever they are in excellent condition, are called “fingers.”⁹⁸

As one of the people of dreams, this statue is not only mobile but edible, at least in terms of the substitutionary code that brings the imagery of the dream into the sensuous world of the everyday, where dates can cure a stomach ache. This dream is a good example of the way in which Graeco-Roman dream-figures can function as parasēma, as equivocal signs. A statue’s fingers are not dates; yet in the imaginally charged constructions of the dream, stone takes on sensory qualities that have real consequences for the health of the dreamer.

The best-known instances of the appearance of Asclepius as a dream-statue were recorded by his most famous devotee, Aelius Aristides. Rhetorician and dreamer extraordinaire, Aristides was an aristocrat from Smyrna who studied in Athens and won fame in Rome for his ability to declaim. Yet despite his fame and wealth, Aristides was not a happy man. Plagued by a string of illnesses, he sought relief, in the mid-second century C.E., in the temple of Asclepius at Pergamum. By submitting himself to the process of dream incubation, he hoped to receive curative prescriptions from the divine doctor.⁹⁹

His hopes were richly fulfilled; not only did he receive prescriptions, Asclepius became his nighttime familiar. In The Sacred Tales that record his dream-visits, Aristides described the god. Here is one of the most striking of these descriptions of an oneiric appearance of Asclepius:

[In the temple] first the statue was seen, which had three heads, and shone about with fire, except for the heads. Next we worshippers stood by it, just as when the paean is sung, I almost among the first. At this point, the God, now in the posture in which he is represented in statues, signaled our departure. Therefore all the others went out, and I turned to go out, and the God, with his hand, indicated for me to stay. And I was delighted by the honor and the extent to which I was preferred to the others, and I shouted out, “The One,” meaning the God. But he said, “It is you.”¹⁰⁰

Aristides commented about this dream, “For me this remark, Lord Asclepius, was greater than human life, and every disease was less than this, every grace was less than this. This made me able and willing to live.”¹⁰¹

Unlike the statues of Asclepius described by Pausanias, this one has three heads and shines with a fiery light. As an image, the dream-statue is not merely mimetic to “real” statues but takes on a life of its own. This dream is a good example of the way in which the oneiric imagination infuses its matter with an emotional intensity that both reflects and shapes the sensibility of the dreamer. The surreal statue of the dream singles out Aristides in a gesture of honor; echoing that gesture, Aristides says, “The One,” in an effort to praise the divinity of the god. But the statue says, “It is you.” An identification of dreamer and dream-god has occurred. The oneiric Aristides has merged with the dream-statue of the god Asclepius and so has assumed the form of an aesthetic ideal of himself. The dream “translates” Aristides into another idiom, reformulating his identity in terms of the imaginal figure of his dream. Further, the reformulation takes him not out of the world but more deeply into it, as he himself said, “This made me able and willing to live.” Curiously, when the extraordinary happens, when stone speaks, ordinary life seems more livable.

Lane Fox has observed that Aristides’ dreams “reinforced his sense of a special relationship” with the god—and I would add, with himself.¹⁰² The forging of bonds through the aesthetic medium of an oneiric image was an important characteristic of these late-antique people of dreams—not only when dreams took the artistic form of statues, but also when they appeared along the lines of the older Homeric model. Perpetua, a young woman from Carthage who died in defense of her Christian belief in the early third century, was visited twice by a dream in the figure of her dead brother. Appearing first with the facial cancer that killed him, and then cured, happily at play, this image appears to have enabled Perpetua to establish a therapeutic relationship with a haunting memory.¹⁰³ As in the literary portrayal of Achilles encountering the ghostly dream of his dead friend Patroclus, the oneiric image sharpens and clarifies relationships by giving them visual articulation. A similar case is that of a late-first or early-second-century Roman, the author of a book entitled the Shepherd of Hermas. This dreamer, Hermas, was visited repeatedly by a dream in the form of an old woman, who presented him with allegorical visions of proper Christian ethical behavior. Having once been tormented by adulterous longings, Hermas is instructed by his oneiric visitor and forges new relationships with his religious identity. His dream-woman is, like the older Homeric gods, a figure in disguise; she is an allegory of the church, and her visits reorient the dreamer’s moral sensibility.¹⁰⁴

The reconciling function of these Graeco-Roman “people of dreams” is testimony to the representative power of these figurations of a figurative world. The psychic liveliness of these mobile icons is by now clear, but what of their psychic liveliness? Among some of the Platonists of late antiquity there was an appropriation of the Homeric people of dreams that connected them specifically with constructions of the soul. Insofar as it touches on discussions of the theoretical underpinnings of the practices of dream interpretation, this Platonic convention will provide a transition to an exploration of the oneiric theory of late antiquity in which views of the imaginative functions of the psyche were fundamental to understanding the discourses of dreams.

The writings of a second-century Pythagorean, Numenius of Apamea, are the probable source of a leitmotif that occurs in Neoplatonic discussions of the cosmic travels of the soul, whereby Homer’s image of the demos oneirōn was placed in the context of Plato’s construction of cosmic space in the tale that ends the Republic, the myth of Er. Numenius’ speculations were adopted by Neoplatonists who were attempting to explicate their view of the cosmos in terms of Platonic and Homeric imagery.¹⁰⁵ In his essay on the Homeric image of the cave of the nymphs (Od. 13.110-12), Porphyry made the following observations.

He [Homer] somewhere talks of “gates of the sun” [Od. 24.12] by which he means Cancer and Capricorn, for these are the limits of its [the sun’s] travel as it descends from the home of the North Wind into the South and then returns back up to the North. Capricorn and Cancer mark the extremities of the Milky Way and lie near it, Cancer in the North and Capricorn in the South. According to Pythagoras, the souls are the “people of dreams” [Od. 24.12] who, as he says, are assembled in the Milky Way [galaxia] which derives its name from “milk” [gala] because they are nourished with milk when they first fall into genesis.¹⁰⁶

Working with a much more complicated, astronomical view of the cosmos than Homer had, Porphyry here directs his attention to the spatial position of disembodied souls, that is, souls as they exist before they enter the earthy plane of life in a body. Such souls are the people of dreams, living a purely imaginal existence.

This intricate astronomical fantasy concerning the soul’s oneiric identity was still alive a century after Porphyry wrote, and in an even more complicated form. Proclus, the last of the major Neoplatonic thinkers of late antiquity, presented a more extensive version of Numenius’ thoughts than Porphyry had. The portions relevant to this discussion are related by Proclus as he attempts to decide how to locate the place of the judgment of souls as it is described in the myth of Er (Rep. 10.614c-d).

Numenius says that this place is the center of the entire cosmos, and likewise of earth, because it is at once in the middle of heaven and in the middle of the earth. . . . By “heaven” he means the sphere of the fixed stars, and he says there are two holes in this, Capricorn and Cancer, the one a path down into genesis, the other a path of ascent. . . . He invokes the poem of Homer as a witness to the two chasms . . . when it sings of “the gates of the sun and the people of dreams” [Od. 24.12], calling the two tropical signs the “gates of the sun” and the Milky Way the “people of dreams,” as he claims. For he also says that Pythagoras in his obscure language called the Milky Way “Hades” and “a place of souls,” for souls are crowded together there. . . . Furthermore, he claims that Plato, as mentioned, is describing the gates in speaking of the two “chasms” and that in describing the light that he calls the “bond of heaven” he is really referring to the Milky Way. . . . He claims the signs of the Tropics, the double chasms and the two gates are different only in name, and again that the Milky Way, the “light like a rainbow” and the “people of dreams” are all one— for the poet elsewhere compares disembodied souls to dreams. . . .¹⁰⁷

In his wonderfully lucid discussion of this passage, Robert Lamberton has pointed out the two sets of identifications that have been assembled here. One set identifies the Homeric “gates of the sun” with the Platonic image of two cosmic chasms through which souls travel; these have been further identified with the astrological signs of Capricorn, the passage taken by souls traveling out of this world, and of Cancer, the passage taken by souls as they enter this world. The other set identifies the Homeric “people of dreams” with the Platonic image of the rainbow, “the light that binds heaven” (Rep. 10.616c); the people of dreams are then further identified with the Milky Way and with disembodied souls.¹⁰⁸

The idea that the soul is a dream was not developed further in Neoplatonic writings. It sits enigmatically in a corpus of Homeric exegesis that was more interested in establishing than in exploring the teasingly suggestive metaphoric connections that it spun out. Yet there is in this same exegetical tradition a hint that might help toward understanding how a transfer of meaning between soul and dream might have been possible. At one point in his treatise on the river Styx, Porphyry is commenting on the passage in the Odyssey that describes Odysseus’ meeting with the ghost of his mother Anticleia. In this passage, ghost, dream, and soul appear to be metaphors for each other.

I [Odysseus] bit my lip,

rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her [Anticleia],

and tried three times, putting my arms around her,

but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable

as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.¹⁰⁹

Anticleia answers:

All mortals meet this judgment when they die.

No flesh and bone are here, none bound by sinew,

since the bright-hearted pyre consumed them down—

the white bones long exanimate—to ash;

dreamlike the soul flies, insubstantial.¹¹⁰

Porphyry had this to say about these “images of dead men” (brotōn eidōla kamōntōn; Od. 11.476).

The idea is that souls are like the images [tois eidōlois] appearing in mirrors and on the surface of water that resemble us in every detail and mimic [mimeitai] our movements but have no solid substance that can be grasped or touched. This is why he calls them “images of dead men.”¹¹¹

In this passage, Porphyry has described the soul with many of the same terms and ideas that were used to describe dreams. The soul is a ghostly image, insubstantial yet nonetheless in movement, and it works by means of mimesis, reflecting us to ourselves “in every detail.” Apparently it was these shared characteristics that made possible a metaphoric resonance between the soul and the image of the “people of dreams.”

Although the exegetical context of this Neoplatonic juxtaposition of soul with Homer’s “people of dreams” did not allow for an exploration of the connection between the two, the fact of the coming together of these two phenomena is telling. In the dream theory of late antiquity, soul and dream were intimately connected. The next chapter explores the ways in which dreams were conceptualized as one of the major imaginative languages of the soul.

¹ W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology, p. 5.

² Homer, Odyssey 24.10-14 (ed. Stanford, p. 177; trans. Fitzgerald, p. 445). Fitzgerald’s translation of dēmos oneirōn as “shores of dream” seems odd, given the usual connotations of demos as a term denoting a human, rather than a geographical, phenomenon. I prefer the translation of demos as either “village” or “people.”

³ Respectively, these are the translations of Angelo Brelich, “The Place of Dreams in the Religious World Concept of the Greeks,” p. 298, and Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, p. 70.

⁴ Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. Oceanus, p. 744.

⁵ Brelich, “The Place of Dreams in the Religious World Concept of the Greeks,” p. 298.

⁶ Od. 4.809 (ed. Stanford, p. 71; trans. Fitzgerald, p. 77). For a discussion of this image, see A.H.M. Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, p. 108.

⁷ Od. 19.560-67 (ed. Stanford, p. 119; trans. Anne Amory, ‘The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” p. 31).

⁸ The best recent discussions are Amory, ‘The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” pp. 3–57, and Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, pp. 100–103. The book by E. L. Highbarger, The Gates of Dreams, argues that “the gate of ‘ivory’ was probably a pure Greek concept. . . originally picturing the gate of clouds which Homer describes as the way of entrance to Mount Olympus,” while “the gate of ‘horn(s)’ was traced to ancient Egyptian and Babylonian religious beliefs” (quotation from Highbarger’s summary of his book in Proceedings of the American Philological Association 76 [1945]:xxxiii). While Highbarger’s ideas are interesting, they have been convincingly refuted by both Amory and Kessels in the literature cited above.

⁹ Amory, ‘The Gates of Horn and Ivory, pp. 16–17; Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, p. 103.

¹⁰ Amory, ‘The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” pp. 17–18; Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, p. 104.

¹¹ Amory, “The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” p. 22; see also Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, p. 104.

¹² The following passages from Eustathius, Commentaria, ad “Iliadem” et “Odysseam” 1877.26-39, are quoted from the translation of Amory in ‘The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” pp. 4–6.

¹³ Amory, ‘The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” pp. 32–33. Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, argues on the contrary that the image of the gates of dreams was one of Homer’s poetic inventions and bases his argument on the fact that this image “did not find further application in Homer’s dream episodes” (107).

¹⁴ Amory, “The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” p. 22n.26.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 34.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 104; Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, pp. 178–79.

¹⁸ Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 104.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 105; Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, pp. 156–57, 194.

²⁰ Od. 4.795-807 (ed. Stanford, p. 71; trans. Fitzgerald, pp. 76–77).

²¹ Ibid. 4.824, 838–41 (ed. Stanford, p. 72; trans. Fitzgerald, p. 78).

²² Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, pp. 86–87, 115n.10.

²³ On the issue of “airy substance,” see Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, pp. 155–56.

²⁴ Amory, “The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” pp. 19–20.

²⁵ See the essay by David L. Miller, “Theologia Imaginalis,” pp. 1–18, for an in-depth discussion of the importance of image and metaphor as ways to “sense” experience. As he writes, the issue of insubstantial images “has to do with the mystery of a sense of ‘body’ coming precisely with the letting-go of notions of literalness with regard to body” (4-5).

²⁶ Il. 23.65-107 (ed. Allen, pp. 295–98; trans. Lattimore, pp. 452–53).

²⁷ Kessels, Studies on the Dream in Greek Literature, pp. 53, 155.

²⁸ Euripides, Hecuba 69–76 (text in Way, p. 252; trans. Arrowsmith, p. 497).

²⁹ For a discussion of Chthōn, see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 199–200.

³⁰ Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris 1278 (text and trans. in Way, pp. 392–93).

³¹ See the discussion of Euripides, Iph. Tour. 1244–51, in Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 110.

³² Euripides, Iph. Taur. 1259–65 (text in Way, pp. 390, 392; trans. Bynner, p. 400).

³³ See especially Aeschylus, The Persians 215–25 (trans. Benardete, p. 227) and The Libation-Bearers 523–50 (trans. Lattimore, p. 112).

³⁴ Hesiod, Theogony 212 (trans. Brown, p. 59).

³⁵ Brelich, “The Place of Dreams in the Religious World Concept of the Greeks,” p. 299.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Hesiod, Theog. 116 (trans. Brown, p. 56).

³⁸ Brelich, “The Place of Dreams in the Religious World Concept of the Greeks,” p. 300.

³⁹ Ovid, Meta. 11.592 (text and trans. in Miller, pp. 162–63).

⁴⁰ Ibid. 11.594-95 (text and trans. in Miller, pp. 162–63). Humphries’ mistranslation of dubiaeque crepuscula lucis (“dusky twilight shadows”) as “a dubious twilight” (277) is a telling if unintentional commentary on the character of the dreamworld.

⁴¹ Ovid, Meta. 11.602-4 (text in Miller, p. 162; trans. Boer, p. 243).

⁴² Ibid., 11.605-17 (text in Miller, pp. 162, 164; trans. Humphries, p. 278).

⁴³ Ibid., 11.613-14 (text and trans. in Miller, pp. 162–63).

⁴⁴ Frederick Ahl, Metaformations, pp. 58, 101, 273.

⁴⁵ Charles Boer, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, xix.

⁴⁶ Ahl, Metaformations, p. 60, quoting Meta. 11.634.

⁴⁷ Ibid., pp. 59–60.

⁴⁸ Ibid., quoting Meta. 11.626.

⁴⁹ Ahl, Metaformations, p. 101.

⁵⁰ Ovid, Meta. 9.459-60 (text and trans. in Miller, pp. 34–37).

⁵¹ Ibid., 9.480-81 (text and trans. in Miller, pp. 36–37).

⁵² Ibid., 9.496 (text and trans. in Miller, pp. 38–39).

⁵³ Ahl, Metaformations, p. 60.

⁵⁴ This phrase is the tide of a recent novel by Milan Kundera.

⁵⁵ Virgil, Aeneid 6.264-67 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 487).

⁵⁶ Aen. 6,274-77 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 488).

⁵⁷ Ibid. 6.278 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 488).

⁵⁸ Ibid. 6.285-89 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 489; trans. Lewis, p. 138).

⁵⁹ Ibid. 6.282-84 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 489; trans. Lewis, p. 138).

⁶⁰ Ibid. 6.292-93 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 489).

⁶¹ Ibid. 6.893-96 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 529; trans. Grant, p. 214).

⁶² Ibid. 6.897-98 (ed. Ribbeck, p. 529; trans. Lewis, p. 155).

⁶³ See the discussions by Robert J. Getty, “Insomnia in the Lexica,” pp. 13–14, and W. F. Jackson Knight, Elysion, p. 135.

⁶⁴ The description of Lucian’s travelogue as a tall tale is by Lionel Casson, trans., Selected Satires of Lucian, p. 13.

⁶⁵ Lucian, A True Story [Verae historiae], 1.4 (trans. Casson, p. 15).

⁶⁶ Ibid., 2.32 (trans. Casson, p. 47).

⁶⁷ Ibid., 2.33-34 (trans. Casson, p. 47).

⁶⁸ Ibid., 2.34 (trans. Casson, p. 47).

⁶⁹ Ibid., 2.34-35 (trans. Casson, pp. 47–48).

⁷⁰ For a discussion of the term carnivalesque as it is used in some forms of contemporary literary criticism, see Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” pp. 78–80.

⁷¹ Lucian, Zeus the Opera Star [Iuppiter Tragoedus], 7–11 (trans. Casson, pp. 140–42).

⁷² See the discussion by Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 153–63.

⁷³ Commenting on Apuleius’ use of the word signum to denote a statue of Diana (Metamorphoses 2.4), Françoise Meltzer makes the following observation that is pertinent to my point here:

Signum is a marvelous word-play for what we have been discussing here, for the word signum has as its first meaning “a sign, mark, token.” It is only secondarily “a figure, image, statue.” A statue, then, in a culture of an imaged religion, is also a sign: a mark or token of divine presence. . . . We might formulate all of this thus: in an imaged religion, mimetic art or representation is the mark of presence, the inscription (or trace) of divinity. (Salome and the Dance of Writing, p. 102)

⁷⁴ Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 153.

⁷⁵ Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, ch. 4: “Dream-Pattern and Culture-Pattern,” esp. pp. 102–4.

⁷⁶ Artemidorus, Onir. 2.39 (ed. Pack, p. 176; trans. White, p. 123).

⁷⁷ Ibid. 2.35, 2.44, 4.72 (ed. Pack, pp. 159–60, 178–79, 293–94).

⁷⁸ Ibid. 2.44 (ed. Pack, p. 179): hoi theoi echousi parasēma.

⁷⁹ Liddell, Scott, Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. parasēmon.

⁸⁰ Miller, “The Critic as Host,” p. 219.

⁸¹ The following comments of Lane Fox are pertinent: “Were the gods also seen openly without a formal invocation? Here, too, we touch on patterns of psychology which our own modern case histories may not do much to illuminate: in antiquity, unlike our own age, ‘appearances’ were part of an accepted culture pattern which was passed down in myth and the experiences of the past, in art, ritual and the bewitching poetry of Homer” (Pagans and Christians, p. 117).

⁸² Onir. 2.39 (ed. Pack, p. 176; trans. White, pp. 123–24).

⁸³ Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les Rêves, p. 3.

⁸⁴ Onir. 4.72 (ed. Pack, p. 293; trans. White, p. 214).

⁸⁵ MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, pp. 59–60.

⁸⁶ Ibid. p. 175n.42 for examples.

⁸⁷ Callistratus, Ekphraseis 10 (text in Fairbanks, p. 411; trans. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 160). In the same passage, Callistratus goes on to describe the statue as not merely a replica or outline (tūpos) but as a “figure of truth” (tēs alētheias plasma).

⁸⁸ Apuleius, Meta. 11.17 (ed. Griffiths, p. 90); Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius 24.11 (ed. Nock, trans. Festugière, 2:326).

⁸⁹ Plotinus, Enn. 4.3.11.1-8 (text and trans. in Armstrong, 4:71).

⁹⁰ Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing, p. 101.

⁹¹ Corpus Hermeticum 17.11-12 (ed. Nock, trans. Festugière, 2:244).

⁹² Ibid. 17.8-11 (ed. Nock, trans. Festugière, 2:244).

⁹³ M. F. Smith, “Diogenes of Oenoanda: New Fragments 115–121,” p. 193; text trans. by Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 159.

⁹⁴ Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium. p. 10; Porphyry, Contra Christianos, fr. 76 (ed. Harnack); for a discussion of the authenticity of this and other fragments, see T. D. Barnes, “Porphyry Against the Christians: Date and the Attribution of the Fragments,” pp. 424–42; on the issue of the relation between statues and gods, see Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity pp. 107–10.

⁹⁵ For discussion of the cult of Asclepius, see Howard C. Kee, “Self-Definition in the Asclepius Cult,” pp. 118–36; C. A. Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 23–40; the collection of ancient testimonies in Emma J. and Ludwig Edelstein, Asclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies; and Ch. 4 infra.

⁹⁶ Pausanias, Guide to Greece 2.4.6; 2.10.2-3; 2.11.6; 2.27.1; 7.20.5; 7.23.5; 10.32.8 (trans. Levi, 1:141, 153–54; 157; 193–94; 280; 289; 492).

⁹⁷ Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 160.

⁹⁸ Onir. 5.89 (ed. Pack, p. 323; trans. White, p. 242).

⁹⁹ For discussions of Aelius Aristides, see Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales; Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, pp. 41–45; E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 39–45; Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 159–63; and Ch. 7 infra.

¹⁰⁰ Aristides, Sacred Tales 4.50 (trans. Behr, Complete Works 2:328).

¹⁰¹ Ibid. 4.51 (trans. Behr, Complete Works 2:328).

¹⁰² Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 162.

¹⁰³ Pass. Perp. 7–8 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 18–23).

¹⁰⁴ For a detailed discussion, see Ch. 5 infra.

¹⁰⁵ Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, pp. 66–77.

¹⁰⁶ Porphyry, De antro nympharum 28 (trans. Lamberton, p. 36).

¹⁰⁷ Proclus, In rem publicam 2.128.26-130.14; 2.130.15-16; 2.131.8-14 (text and trans. in Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, pp. 66–67).

¹⁰⁸ Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, p. 70.

¹⁰⁹ Od. 11.204-8 (ed. Stanford, p. 174; trans. Fitzgerald, p. 191).

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 11.218-22 (ed. Stanford, p. 175; trans. Fitzgerald, p. 192).

¹¹¹ Porphyry, Peri Stygos [The Styx], in Stobaeus, Eclogae 1.41.50 (text and trans. in Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, p. 114 and n.100).

FIGURATIONS OF A FIGURATIVE WORLD: LATE ANTIQUITY

FIGURATIONS OF A FIGURATIVE WORLD:
LATE ANTIQUITY