Three women dreaming, part 2.

Let's look at the Apollonius passage again. It's a devil to translate because it's so hypotactic, so many fragmented phrases plastered together with breathless conjunctions, δέ δέ δέ. If there's clarity in Agamemnon's dream, all elements pared down to the apparition head of Nestor and its speech, Medea is dreaming in smeared images only—it's a confused sequence. Is the first passage, the perverse revision of Jason's motives, an imaginary scene in itself or just a kind of background conviction, an underpinning for what follows? I think it's more likely the latter: the dream proper is a mashup of scenes and visions, explicitly experiential, and lines 619-623 stand apart from what follows, only introducing it, coloring and explaining the strange pantomime beginning in 623 with ὀίετο δ’, and she thought she was struggling with the bulls herself, that she wrought the deed—so easily. Apollonius has given us a kind of epistemological mimesis of dreaming when he pictured the rootless convictions that sometimes invade our dreams and drone behind their action like a cantus firmus, but with μάλ’ εὐμαρέως he moves into the peculiar experience of dreaming itself: Medea wrestles with the bulls with timeless rapidity, with the liquid effortlessness of dreamt action conforming to the will; it's not just a literary forward-reference to how her arts will save Jason at the end of the book but something more mimetic, a realism new to the literary dream.

But the scene changes suddenly, her parents are there, a decision has been made: σφωιτέρους δὲ τοκῆας ὑποσχεσίης ἀθερίζειν (625), but her parents scorned their promise. It's not just the fluidity of scene and action at issue here but really the wordlessness of Medea's dream: everything that follows is in indirect discourse, reported from the same remove as was her fantasy on Jason's intentions. I think this has much to do with the relationship to tradition I had mentioned earlier, that Apollonius is reacting to the speech-centered clarity of the Homeric dream. Those divine dreams drove everything but the central word from the dreamer's mind, and it's the word that they wake up pondering; here, though, it's the scene, the strange action, its consequences. That οὕνεκεν of line 626 only emerges from the background of the dream, only intrudes onto the experiential now of the νεῖκος ἀμφήριστον (627) because it explains the scene that actually occupied Medea's dreaming mind—it's only the revision of a waking and recollecting mind that can order the text the way Apollonius gives it to us, with the explanation before the scene, rationalization before experience. That we read this dream as if Medea were narrating it to us is another point of departure from that old Homeric clarity: we should have a text that runs in linear fashion, that a quarrel came to a draw ... because her parents scorned their promise, since it wasn't up to the girl to yoke the bulls, etc., experience before explanation. It's an insoluble narrative problem, though: if 625-627 are only a concomitant understanding or mood that underpins the νεῖκος and judgment, there's nowhere the explanatory passage can go without straining the mimetic organization of the text—Apollonius' ambition is remarkable.

That ἄφνω in line 630 has much to do with the passage as a whole, though, doesn't it? The separate parts—bull-labor, judgment and scream—all blur into one another, changes in circumstance and action piled together with the same hypotactic rapidity as Apollonius' phrases: you see the same thing in receptions of this passage by Ennius (fr. 34ff, Warmington) and Vergil (Aen. 465-69). But what about the end, that syntactically ambiguous scream?