Examines aspects of the dream in Homer and Greek tragedies as an originating cause or impetus of the action in a poem or play.

Excerpt from The Dream in Homer and Greek Tragedy This treatise is part of a broader investigation of the dream in all its aspects, literary and non-literary, to which I have devoted the spare hours of the last seven years. My primary interest in this investigation has been in the dream and its ways in Latin literature. A study published in Mnemosyne, 45, 78- 92, in which I suggested a possible source for one feature of a certain type of Roman dream, may be taken as defining to some extent my interest in the dream from the literary standpoint as well as presenting my conclusions with respect to the problems involved in the particular dream considered in that study. But to treat adequately the dream in Latin literature presupposes a knowledge of its ancestor and prototype in Greek literature, and so the present introductory monograph embodies one phase of my researches in the earlier field. It discusses some aspects of the dream in a portion of that field - Homer, Hesiod and Greek Tragedy. It concerns itself with the dream as an originating cause or directing principle of the action in poem or play, a moving force in the evolution of narrative or plot and in the introduction of smaller incidents and episodes. An American scholar has recently complained of the lack of a proper study of the matter of motivation in Greek and Latin tragedy and comedy. This essay touches upon a limited portion of that larger investigation. From another point of view it deals, within the limits of each dream picture, with the amplification of the dream, its increasing complexity, its growth and refinement, or its decay, as an artistic literary device. I hope at no far distant date to publish further studies in other aspects of the dream. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Dodson reads the dreams in the Gospel of Matthew (1:18b-25; 2:12, 13-15, 19-21, 22; 27:19) as the authorial audience. This approach requires an understanding of the social and literary character of dreams in the Greco-Roman world. Dodson describes the social function of dreams, noting that dreams constituted one form of divination in the ancient world, and looks at the theories and classification of dreams that developed in the ancient world. He then moves on to demonstrate the literary dimensions of dreams in Greco-Roman literature. This exploration of the literary representation of dreams is nuanced by considering the literary form of dreams, dreams in the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, the inventiveness of literary dreams, and the literary function of dreams. The dreams in the Gospel of Matthew are then analyzed in this social and literary context. It is demonstrated that Matthew's use of dreams as a literary convention corresponds to the script of dreams in other Greco-Roman narratives. This correspondence includes the form of the Matthean dreams, dreams as a motif of the birth topos (1:18b-25), the association of dreams and prophecy (1:22-23; 2:15, 23), the use of the double-dream report (2:12 and 2:13-15), and dreams as an ominous sign in relation to an individual's death (27:19). An appendix considers the Matthean transfiguration as a dream-vision report.

While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the ‘epiphany-mindedness’ of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer’s notorious anthropomorphism (in the Iliad and Odyssey but also in the Homeric Hymns). This anthropomorphism, which is keenly absorbed by Greek drama and figural art, has very little to do with the religious lifeworld experience of the ancient Greeks, as it appears in other genres. By contrast, throughout all textual genres investigated here, divinatory dreams are represented as an ordinary and real part of the ancient Greeks' lifeworld experience.

This volume evaluates the understanding of dreams and the form of dream reports in Josephus' writings, and it compares Josephan texts with ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and Hellenistic dream reports to discern Josephus' sources of literary inspiration and intellectual assumptions.