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| Zeus sends deceptive dream to Agamemnon (Flaxman illustration to 1905 Riverside Press edition of The Iliad) |
Literary dreams have shaped cultural understanding of what
happens in dreaming and may actually have influenced the way people dreamed in
certain societies.
For the early Greeks, Homer was the closest thing to the Bible.
One of the things they learned from him was that the gods speak through dreams, but can also use dreams to transmit deceptive messages. Another lesson was that we want to check what is behind the mask of a dream messenger. A familiar face may be a disguise, and we want to grasp the motives and agenda of the guiser.
In a scene in Book II of the Iliad, Zeus decides to avenge the honor of his protege Achilles, who is
sulking in his tent, by making it clear to the Greeks that he is the
indispensable hero. Zeus lays a trap for Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek
host, who has dishonored Achilles.
Zeus summons Oneiros and orders him to deliver a misleading message to Agamemnon. The name Oneiros means Dream. Here a dream is actually a dream messenger, an independent entity.
To carry out Zeus' command, Oneiros puts on the semblance of Nestor, a trusted comrade of Agamemnon, and visits the
sleeping king in this form. Standing over Agamemnon's head, the dream visitor tells him - quoting Zeus himself -that the gods are no longer taking sides in the war.
Therefore the Greeks should make haste to attack Troy
Trusting the dream,
Agamemnon recounts it to his battle captains, and they launch their attack -
only to find that the walls of Troy
We understand from this tale the sources of the Greek suspicion of oneiropompoi, or "dream senders". We see that in dreams, as in other situation, we want to check the reliability of our sources.
Cicero observed, in his treatise on divination, “although these stories were made up by a poet, they are not far
from the usual matter of dreams.”
2 comments:
Let's notice that when the gods put on masks in Greek literature it is most often to deliver a true message through a messenger that will be familiar - in semblance - to the dreamer. See, for example, how (in the Odyssey) Athena reaches to princess Nausicaa in the guise of a girlfriend to induce her to get her father to give her horses and wagons to go down to the water to do the royal laundry first thing in the morning - at the place where she will find and rescue the shipwrecked Odysseus.
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