Dreams in Roman epic: The hermeneutics of a narrative technique

The power of dreams to command action and signify the future was a matter of widespread belief in antiquity. Frequently regarded as ambiguous, dreams issued a hermeneutic call that came to be associated with the interpretation of poetry. Epic narrative manifests an awareness of this association, the impetus for which resides with the Homeric poems wherein dreams not only foreshadow and forward action but also call attention to the poet's narrative strategies. This study examines the inheritance of this tradition at Rome and elucidates the novel ways in which Roman poets exploit the cultural bias toward seeing meaning in dreams and the inclination to align such meaning with poetic meaning.;Close readings of the dreams of Dido in Vergil's Aeneid, Alcyone in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Pompey in Lucan's Bellum Civile center on interaction between the dream event and modes of figuration. Conflating Homeric models for supernatural visitation, Ovid crosses a ghostly apparition with the personified figure of a dream divinity to produce a textured sequence of messages which are, for their verbal plays, as much about the poet's craft as they are effective for events in the story. Personification gives the dream a figured role in the narrative. Vergil and Lucan capitalize on the symbolic nature of the dream to transform it from an event into a poetic image that comments on the story's action. Enhanced by a simile, the dream becomes a subject for and a tool of interpretation. Figuration of the dream in these poems further reveals the diversification of an active tradition for the subject matter and narrative form of Roman epic. Vergil foregrounds the tragic ethos and structure of Aeneid 4; Ovid blurs the line between epic and amatory story; Lucan subverts historical narrative to epic.;This study also exposes two patterns of signification in the use of dream metaphors and similes. First, by distending rhetorical constructs poets render the reader's difficulty in apprehending meaning a productive vehicle for illustration. Second, poets draw on a dream's capacity to distort reality as a means for heightening poetic meaning and illustrating their own fictions.