![]() Helen’s prophetic episode in Book 15 is helpful in several ways for understanding Penelope’s prophetic performance in Book 19.For 20 long years, Penelope has waited for her husband, Odysseus, to sail home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. This sight then prompts a question from Peisistratos to Menelaos: As is typical for oracular poetry, the starting point is visual, the portent, the sight of the eagle and the goose. As in Penelope’s dream, the wild eagle ‘from the mountain’ (15.175) is contrasted with birds of entirely different nature, pampered domestic geese (15.176). Here Telemachus, still in Lacedaimon, prays to find his father at home, and as he prays an omen appears on the right, an eagle carrying off a domestic goose. ![]() The geese are the suitors, and I was an eagle before,īut now I have come back and I am your husband,Īnd I will bring an ugly death upon all of the suitors.” As Nagy has shown, this verb hupokrinesthai refers to “responding by way of performing,” the way a seer would perform oracular poetry “in responding to questions about omens.” There is a related and parallel example of mantic poetry in Book 15 of the Odyssey, where Helen interprets an actual portent similar to Penelope’s dream. ![]() This is not a dream, but a true waking vision, and it will come to fulfillment. “Take heart, daughter of far-famed Ikarios. In the house, while the eagle rose up high into the shining ether.īut I cried and wailed, though in a dream,Īnd Achaean women with beautiful hair gathered around meĪs I was bitterly lamenting that the eagle killed my geese.īut the eagle came back and settled on a projecting roof-beam,Īnd in a human voice consoled me and spoke to me: Out of the water, and I delight in looking at them.īut a great eagle with a curved beak came from the mountainĪnd broke each one’s neck and killed all of them. I have twenty geese at home, they eat wheat If Penelope does also question the beggar, it is only in an indirect way, by observing his reaction to the dream.īut come, respond to a dream for me and listen to it. Towards the end of the conversation, far from asking his opinion, Penelope is emphatic that he should pay attention to what she says: ἄλλο δέ τοι ἐρέω, σὺ δ᾿ ἐνὶ φρεσὶ βάλλεο σῇσιν, ‘I will tell you another thing, and you put it away in your mind’ (19.570). ![]() Although at the resumption of their conversation Penelope says that she will question her guest (εἰρήσομαι, 19.509), she asks no direct questions and only requests that he interpret the dream, which already contains its own interpretation. Far from waiting for Odysseus to propose a solution, Penelope presents her guest with her own vision of how her predicament will end: if he is indeed Odysseus and wants to avoid her remarriage, he will kill the suitors. By plunging into the dream, Penelope lets the beggar know that she is not asking for advice: something entirely different is going on. Rather, the dream narrative builds on the simile and presents Penelope’s conclusions derived from it while giving Odysseus no chance to comment on his wife’s dilemma, as he might be expected to do. The transition is abrupt, and Anhalt comments that Penelope seems to “deflect interest away from the simile.” The abruptness certainly seems deliberate, but in my opinion it is not because the simile is meant to recede quickly from the audience’s mind. ![]() Action by Odysseus is just what Penelope envisages next, immediately after the Aedon comparison, in her dream about the eagle and the geese – or rather her message in the form of the dream. ![]()
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