Three women dreaming, part 1.

Isn't it interesting how dreaming seems to be the special prerogative of women in epic? I don't mean the prophetic, numinous kind—shaggy Hector scowling over Aeneas' bed, Julia appearing to Pompey—but ivory-gate dreams in all the fluidity and fragmentation we expect of them. This passage in book 3 of the Argonautica, for example: the arrow is smoldering deep in Medea's cor carbunculus, but when sleep finally overtakes her she dreams a remarkable dream—

κούρην δ’ ἐξ ἀχέων ἀδινὸς κατελώφεεν ὕπνος
λέκτρῳ ἀνακλινθεῖσαν. ἄφαρ δέ μιν ἠπεροπῆες,
οἷά τ’ ἀκηχεμένην, ὀλοοὶ ἐρέθεσκον ὄνειροι·
τὸν ξεῖνον δ’ ἐδόκησεν ὑφεστάμεναι τὸν ἄεθλον
οὔτι μάλ’ ὁρμαίνοντα δέρος κριοῖο κομίσσαι, (620)
οὐδέ τι τοῖο ἕκητι μετὰ πτόλιν Αἰήταο
ἐλθέμεν, ὄφρα δέ μιν σφέτερον δόμον εἰσαγάγοιτο
κουριδίην παράκοιτιν. ὀίετο δ’ ἀμφὶ βόεσσιν
αὐτὴ ἀεθλεύουσα μάλ’ εὐμαρέως πονέεσθαι·
σφωιτέρους δὲ τοκῆας ὑποσχεσίης ἀθερίζειν, (625)
οὕνεκεν οὐ κούρῃ ζεῦξαι βόας ἀλλά οἱ αὐτῷ
προύθεσαν· ἐκ δ’ ἄρα τοῦ νεῖκος πέλεν ἀμφήριστον
πατρί τε καὶ ξείνοις· αὐτῇ δ’ ἐπιέτρεπον ἄμφω
τὼς ἔμεν ὥς κεν ἑῇσι μετὰ φρεσὶν ἰθύσειεν·
ἡ δ’ ἄφνω τὸν ξεῖνον, ἀφειδήσασα τοκήων, (630)
εἵλετο· τοὺς δ’ ἀμέγαρτον ἄχος λάβεν, ἐκ δ’ ἐβόησαν
χωόμενοι. τὴν δ’ ὕπνος ἅμα κλαγγῇ μεθέηκεν.

But as she lay back on her couch, an overpowering sleep unburdened the girl of her love-pains—but straightaway dreams assailed her, lying, destructive, the same as do troubled women. She thought that the stranger had undertaken the labor, not in fact because he was so eager to carry away the ram's fleece—no, he hadn't come to Aeëtes' palace for that reason at all—but rather to take her home with him, his lawful wife. And she thought she was struggling with the bulls herself, that she wrought the deed—so easily—but that her own parents sneered at their promise because it wasn't up to the girl to yoke the bulls—they had tasked him with it. Oh yes, and there was a quarrel because of that, and it came to a draw between her father and the strangers; and both sides turned it over to her, how it should be, however she wished it in her heart of hearts—and she suddenly was heedless of her parents, chose the stranger: then an agony of grief siezed them, they were enraged, they let out a scream—and amid the shriek sleep released its hold on her.

I think Apollonius is chafing against the literary tradition here—the divine clarity of epic dreams gives us no real precedent for this; the really salient quality of Homer's dreams is their lapidary directness, a narrowing of focus down to the speech that drives all things out of mind—think of Agamemnon's dream in Iliad 2. It's a lying dream, and baneful too—βάσκ᾽ ἴθι, οὖλε ὄνειρε, says Zeus (Il. 2.8); make haste there, evil dream. Yet when it comes to the monarch's bed something amazing happens:

στῆ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς Νηληΐῳ υἷι ἐοικώς
Νέστορι, τόν ῥα μάλιστα γερόντων τῖ᾽ Ἀγαμέμνων,
τῷ μιν ἐεισάμενος προσεφώνεε θεῖος ὄνειρος:
εὕδεις Ἀτρέος υἱὲ δαΐφρονος ἱπποδάμοιο... (20-23)

Oh yes, it paused there above his head—the very likeness of Nestor, the son of Neleus, indeed the man Agamemnon honored above all his counsellors; in this semblance did the otherworld dream address him: you're sleeping, son of wisehearted horsetaming Atreus...

The dream is chastising him—he's sleeping on the job, it says. But it's a remarkable declaration, isn't it? Εὕδεις—what you're seeing isn't true, I'm only a semblance of Nestor, but what I say is true in the way these dreams are always true because you're sleeping and this is the unreal real of revelation. These clear-voiced dreams from the gate of horn always announce themselves, don't they? The dreamer knows he's dreaming the numinous because of that urgency, that focus: Priam wakes up in a state of perfect clarity, turning over Zeus' lie with an alert heart—τὸν δὲ λίπ᾽ αὐτοῦ | τὰ φρονέοντ᾽ ἀνὰ θυμὸν ἅ ῥ᾽ οὐ τελέεσθαι ἔμελλον (35f). Aeneas is the same way:

excutior somno et summi fastigia tecti
ascensu supero atque arrectis auribus asto: (Aen. 2.302f)

I shake myself out of the dream and bound across the rooftop pediments in my ascent; I stand there, ears pricked...

There's no shout here, no disorientation; Agamemnon's dream is a lie, Aeneas' is a warning, but the grammar of their dreams has filled them with conviction, and purpose. So Apollonius can imitate Homer, call Medea's delirium a predatory band of ὀλοοὶ ὄνειροι, but he knows this is disingenuous: epic dreams, men's dreams, are vehicles for the word; they cloak themselves in mortal shape, Zeus' alien messenger in Neleus' skin and the irrecoverable wisps of Hector dissimulating his body, but in each case the terrible clarity of the abstract only inhabits the obscurest and most exiguous body in order to wreak its godly works—the word, says Gorgias, ὃς σμικροτάτῳ σώματι καὶ ἀφανεστάτῳ θειότατα ἔργα ἀποτελεῖ.

But I think Apollonius is a step ahead of me—he's read Agamemnon's clarity and denied it: these are the kind of dreams that trouble women deranged with grief, οἷά τ’ ἀκηχεμένην ἐρέθεσκον. They lie—ἠπεροπῆες—but Medea doesn't know it; this isn't a dream that whispers you're asleep in an alien voice. Or rather, she doesn't know it while she's dreaming: she wakes up in a panic, thrashes in her bedclothes and immediately psychologizes—

παλλομένη δ᾽ ἀνόρουσε φόβῳ, περί τ᾽ ἀμφί τε τοίχους
πάπτηνεν θαλάμοιο· μόλις δ᾽ ἐσαγείρατο θυμὸν
ὡς πάρος ἐν στέρνοις, ἀδινὴν δ᾽ ἀνενείκατο φωνήν:
'δειλὴ ἐγών, οἷόν με βαρεῖς ἐφόβησαν ὄνειροι...' (633-36)

Shaking with terror, she bolted upright and stared wide-eyed at the walls of the chamber around her. She mustered her courage within her—as she had before—and spoke in a tortured voice: "wretch that I am! How these bad dreams have frightened me..."

It was no visitation—just a nightmare. Ghosts and gods could send her meaning about the world, past and passing or to come; but these dreams can only tell her about herself, what her mind was murmuring while she slept.

But why ὀλοοί, then? Why destructive, if Medea knows in her heart that her dreams were wordless, meaningless? She certainly hasn't been deceived, since her dream had nothing in it to compel confidence—no, the phantasmagoria shattered itself on its own dissonant scream. She's only left with fear, fear that the heroes' voyage will bring some terrible evil to her—δείδια, μὴ μέγα δή τι φέρῃ κακὸν ἥδε κέλευθος | ἡρώων, 637f; but there's nothing here to suggest that this comes to her with the force of revelation. No, it's introspection, basic and reasonable introspection into the heart that produced this kind of fantasy. Yet the dream is a turning point, and its effect is real, immediate and ruinous. Medea has made a decision:

'ἔμπα γε μὴν θεμένη κύνεον κέαρ, οὐκέτ᾽ ἄνευθεν
αὐτοκασιγνήτης πειρήσομαι, εἴ κέ μ᾽ ἀέθλῳ
χραισμεῖν ἀντιάσῃσιν, ἐπὶ σφετέροις ἀχέουσα
παισί: τό κέν μοι λυγρὸν ἐνὶ κραδίῃ σβέσαι ἄλγος.' (641-44)

"Even so, I'll muster myself a shameless heart and keep to myself no longer; I'll make trial of my sister, see if she asks me to give my aid to the labor, out of grief for her boys—that, at least, might calm the ruinous canker in my heart."

The dream was an unbearable point of culmination, a weight added to a will already strained to breaking. Her suffering was already barely tolerable; her dream has only compounded it and now Medea is maddened by need of relief. I think this is why Apollonius calls the dream ἠπεροπῆες—lying, yes, but cozening, a pandering dream with heart's desire on offer. The dream itself has nothing to do with hope, of course, but that terrible impetus, that overpowering pain that demands a solution—any solution—no matter what the cost? This, too, is a cozener: the flattery of the emergency measure, half-considered and reckless of persuasion.

In the process of trying to English Apollonius I had occasion to be humbled by Peter Green's edition of the same. The man has a native feeling for taut, stately lines of accentual verse—it was a pleasure to read, a pleasure to turn over against the original. At the same time it reminded me what a manifestly rotten translator I am, which is—let me tell you—something of a queasy feeling.

By the way, I made reference in passing to a favorite Plautine verse of mine, a snippet of Phaniscus in the Mostellaria—may I quote it?

edepol ne me eius patris misere miseret, qui cum istaec sciet
facta ita, amburet ei misero corculum carbunculus. (985f)

By Pollux if I don't feel awfully sorry for his father—when he learns about all these goings-on, the poor man's heart will burn up like a lump of coal.

The really remarkable word here is amburet—I think of a ruddy grill briquette, dark on the outside, red-orange within, now so thoroughly eaten through with its own fire that it collapses open in a gash of heat.