Dreams in the Homeric poems: divine messengers and shades of the dead

In the Homeric poems the dream is not an image arising inside the sleeper's mind, but a presence that comes from outside. The gods send it, or it is a soul of the dead, and almost always it takes its place above the sleeper's head to speak to him. This conception, very far from our own, has attracted the attention of historians of Greek religion, who have seen in it one of the oldest forms of thinking about dreams in Europe and a key to the relationship between humans and gods in epic.

Agamemnon's baneful dream

At the beginning of the second book of the Iliad Zeus, determined to honour Achilles, wants to inflict a defeat on the Achaeans. He therefore summons Oneiros, the Dream, personified as a minor deity, and sends him to King Agamemnon. The messenger takes the form of old Nestor, the most respected counsellor, and assures the king that the time has come to capture Troy.

Agamemnon wakes full of confidence, but the dream is deceptive: Zeus wants precisely to drive him into battle so that he will be defeated. The episode shows that in the Homeric imagination a dream sent by the gods may be false, and that not even the most powerful king has sure means of telling the difference. Already in the first book, indeed, Achilles had suggested consulting an interpreter of dreams, recalling that the dream too comes from Zeus.

The shade of Patroclus

In the twenty-third book of the Iliad, after his friend's death, Achilles falls asleep on the seashore. The soul of Patroclus appears to him, identical in stature, eyes and voice, and asks to be buried as soon as possible so that he may pass through the gates of Hades. Achilles stretches out his arms to embrace him, but the shade vanishes beneath the earth like smoke.

The episode is among the most moving in the poem and bears witness to a belief widespread in the ancient world: the unburied dead could visit the living in dreams to demand their funeral rites. On waking, Achilles understands that something of the person truly exists in Hades, an image without substance. The solemn funeral of Patroclus, with the games in his honour, follows directly from this night vision.

Athena and the dreams of the Odyssey

In the Odyssey it is above all Athena who uses dreams to guide the protagonists. In the sixth book the goddess enters the room of young Nausicaa, princess of the Phaeacians, in the guise of a friend of hers, the daughter of Dymas. She scolds her for neglecting her clothes and urges her to go to the river to wash them: that is how the girl will meet the shipwrecked Odysseus on the beach.

In the fourth book, by contrast, Athena comforts Penelope, distressed at the departure of her son Telemachus, by sending her a phantom in the likeness of her sister Iphthime. In both cases the dream needs no interpretation: it conveys a direct message, adapted to the person who receives it, and fits naturally into the action of the poem. More complex is the dream of the geese that Penelope tells in the nineteenth book, linked to the image of the two gates.

Homer thus offers a repertory of dreams that the Greeks went on quoting for centuries. Philosophers, rhetoricians and interpreters such as Artemidorus returned to these episodes to discuss the truth of dreams, the role of the gods and the fate of souls, making the Homeric poems the first great reference text of Western dream culture.