Eagle and Geese
Dreamed c.1240 BCE by Penelope of Ithaca.
The Trojan War is long over. Ulysses has come home to find he's presumed dead. His palace crawls with suitors for his wife Penelope's hand, running riot. She's stalling but losing hope. Here Penelope tells Ulysses (disguised; she doesn't know him) a dream about... Ulysses!
'But I have dreamed. Hear and expound my dream!
My geese are twenty; which within my walls I feed with sodden wheat;--they serve to amuse Sometimes my sorrow. From the mountains came An eagle, hook-beaked---brake all their necks And slew them: scattered on the palace floor They lay, and he soared swift into the skies. 'Dream only as it was, I wept aloud;
'"Take courage, daughter of the glorious chief
'He said: then, waking at the voice, I cast
'Her then Ulysses answered, ever-wise--
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From Homer's Odyssey as translated by William Cowper.
EDITOR'S NOTES
A wonderfully nuanced dream! Here's a woman being held captive in her own house, being quarreled over, with only the thinnest of pretences that she's a host not a prisoner. Yet she dreams of them as a gaggle of geese! Loud, quarrelsome, but in the end tame and silly. She even feels a maternal affection for them. They're that ineffectual, compared to her memory of her brilliant husband. He's no tame bird. Not at all--her dream-portrait of him is quite unsparing too--a dreamer with her eyes open. That hooked beak isn't just a physical description, but hints at his cruel predatory streak. His words only confirm it.
Penelope tells the dream to her "servant", who she hasn't yet recognized is Ulysses. So the dream becomes a way to tell her husband that she knows him (and what he plans) even though she doesn't yet--not consciously.
So is this real? Did Penelope dream this? Was there even a Penelope, or is she pure fiction? Two points:
Penelope's house, and her dream, lack stone foundations--so far. But I'm betting she, and her impossible predicament, and fierce cunning husband, and inept squawking suitors, and even her dream of them all... were real.
--Chris Wayan
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