The gates of ivory and horn: true and false dreams in Homer and Virgil
The two gates of dreams in the Odyssey and the Aeneid: the Greek pun on ivory and deceit, horn and fulfilment, and the riddle of Aeneas' departure.
One of the most evocative images of dreams that antiquity has left us is that of the two gates through which night visions pass: one of horn, for true dreams, and one of ivory, for deceptive ones. Born in Homer's Odyssey, the image was taken up by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aeneid and then travelled through the whole of European literature, from Macrobius to the poets of the Renaissance. Behind its apparent simplicity lies a riddle that still divides commentators.
Penelope's dream
In the nineteenth book of the Odyssey Penelope, who has not yet recognised her husband disguised as a beggar, tells him a dream. In the palace she kept twenty geese, and an eagle swooping down from the mountain killed them all; then the eagle spoke with a human voice and said that he was Odysseus, returned to punish the suitors. The meaning seems clear, and the false beggar confirms it.
Penelope, however, remains cautious and explains that dreams are hard to interpret and not all come true. There are in fact two gates of dreams: those that pass through ivory deceive, bringing words that are never fulfilled, while those that come out of polished horn come true for whoever sees them. Immediately afterwards the queen announces the contest of the bow, which will lead to the slaughter of the suitors.
An untranslatable pun
Ancient commentators already noted that the image rests on two puns in Greek. The word for ivory, elephas, recalls the verb elephairomai, «to deceive», while the word for horn, keras, echoes the verb krainō, «to accomplish, to fulfil». In Homer's language the gates themselves therefore spoke the nature of the dreams that passed through them.
Other ancient interpreters proposed symbolic explanations: horn, thin and translucent when worked, would let the truth be seen, while ivory, being opaque, would hide it. Macrobius, in his commentary on the Dream of Scipio, reports interpretations of this kind, linking horn to the eyes and ivory to the teeth, that is, to sight and to speech. These are late readings, but they show how much the image stirred the imagination of scholars.
The departure of Aeneas
Virgil takes up the image at the end of the sixth book of the Aeneid, after Aeneas' journey through the underworld. «Sunt geminae Somni portae», he writes: there are two gates of Sleep. Through the one of horn true shades pass easily, through the one of ivory the spirits of the dead send false dreams up to the world. Then, surprisingly, Anchises dismisses his son and the Sibyl through the ivory gate.
Why does Virgil make his hero leave by the gate of deceptive dreams, after showing him the glorious future of Rome? Many answers have been proposed: a reference to the hour of the night, since false dreams were said to be those that come before midnight; an Epicurean doubt about the reality of the afterlife; the idea that Aeneas, not being a shade, could not use the gate reserved for souls. No hypothesis has convinced everyone.
The image of the two gates lived on through the centuries. Medieval and modern authors took it up, and even today, in learned language, speaking of dreams «of ivory» means pointing to sweet illusions destined to vanish, while the gate of horn remains the symbol, fragile but tenacious, of the hope that at least some dreams tell the truth.