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?
> While that
> other exit might be used by false dreams, Aeneas is real in this poem, not
> a dream or a shade. And under what circumstances could we conceive of Manes
> (which ones? all of them?) converting Aeneas from human to dream and then
> sending him out not as a true dream but as a false one?
>
I agree with part of the sentiment here: Aeneas is not literally changed into a
false dream before using the gate ("Captain, we have to reconfigure your human
DNA
using the transporter's pattern buffer before we can send you through this
Eikonian portal"), because there is no statement made that only false dreams can
use this gate. I repeat my claim that the only secure thing we can say is that
Aeneas is somehow associated with false dreams. This modest claim, that he is
associated with false dreams, is one I think that cannot be denied.
Those who say that Aeneas "is" a false dream in some sense are both drawing a
conclusion from a hint of Vergil's, and also speaking metaphorically. Others
think the "false dreams" with which Aeneas is associated are the visions of
Rome's
future he has scene, a not unreasonable reading, one also involving a litte
leap,
since the viewer of that future and not the future scenes themselves are sent
through the gates (Zetzel in TAPA for 1989 actually discusses this reading as
working like a type of enallage--like a tranferred epithet)
--
Jim O'Hara
Paddison Professor of Latin
206B Howell Hall
phone: (919) 962-7649
fax: (919) 962-4036
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
www: http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj
surface mail:
James J. O'Hara
Department of Classics
CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall
The University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145
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