>James Butrica wrote: > >> >> The other gate is explicitly the exit for uerae umbrae: Aeneas is not a >> uera umbra or any kind of umbra at all, and presumably therefore cannot >> take this route and must therefore take the only alternative. > >I've never understood this argument. What is it about the gate of true dreams >that means that ONLY true dreams can go through it, while the gate of >false dreams >is such that non-dreams can go through it? Didn't Aeneas cross the river in a >boat made only for shades?
>Jim O'Hara >Paddison Professor of Latin > Department of Classics > CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall > The University of North Carolina > Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 What it is is that Virgil *says* that this gate is the one by which true shades find easy exit; if we want, we can read this to imply that true shades perhaps find difficult exit through other portals, but I think that interpretation starts to become seriously imperilled when we assume things that Virgil does *not* say, such as that anything we want other than a true shade can exit this way. Living mortals do not return from the undiscovered country; Aeneas must return, however, and must return somehow. If this exit is for "true shades" only, and there are only two exits, he must use the other one, whatever its primary purpose. In addition, I wonder what the justification is for treating the "umbrae" here as dreams rather than shades of the dead -- other than the desire to create a perfect parallelism with the later *insomnia* (of course under the influence of the true/false contrast). An *umbra* of someone in the sense of *simulacrum* can certainly appear *in* a dream, but neither I nor the OLD knows examples where "umbra" = dream. By the way, in other traditions of catabasis, how do living mortals return from the Underworld? To the best of my knowledge, no-one else is given this sort of exit, not Orpheus, not Hercules, not Odysseus, so it might be a case of Virgil trying to adapt the lines from the *Odyssey* into a new and somewhat inapposite context, and not succeeding to everyone's satisfaction. In addition, it is possible to read these lines as implying that both Aeneas and the Sibyl exit through this portal (natum ... unaque Sibyllam is the object of both prosequitur and emittit, with Anchises as subject), though Virgil does not tell us exactly where the Sibyl went (one assumes Cumae). How does passage through the gate of false dreams affect our view of her? How does it affect our interpretation that it is Anchises personally who sends both of them through? It is at a point like this that I usually begin to draw back from the madness-inducing difficulty of trying to figure out exactly what Virgil means and try to comfort myself with the lack of final polishing as the legitimate cause of my aporia ... James Lawrence Peter Butrica Department of Classics The Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, Newfoundland A1C 5S7 (709) 737-7914 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
