In the nineteenth book of the Odyssey Penelope tells her disguised husband her dream of the eagle who killed her geese, and he gives this dream the obvions interpretation: it is a portent of Odysseus’s imminent retum and slaughter of the suitors. Penelope seems very reluctant to accept the obvions, and denies the dream’s validity by resorting to a description of two gates, one made of homs and one of ivory, through which pass true and false dreams. What she says is the following (Od. 19. 560-569):

‘Stranger, dreams are indeed hard to deal with, confused

in meaning; and not everything comes true for mortals.

For double are the gates of strengthless dreams:

one set is made of homs, and one of ivory.

Whichever of dreams corne through the sawn ivory,

these deceive, carrying words that are not to corne true.

But those that corne out from between the polished homs,

these accomplish true things, when some mortal sees them.

But I do not think my own dread dream came from that place.

It would have been welcome to me and my son if it had.

I note specifically that the text does not say «hom,» as most translators and commentators have it, but the pl. «homs,» κεράεσσι and κεράων at 563 and 566 (I shall retum to this important point below). We have already leamed earlier in the poem that mortals may encounter dreams in a passageway marked by gates: at Od.4. 809, the dream sent by Athena found Penelope «slumbering in the Gates of Dreams,» κνώσσουσ’ ἐν όνειρείησι πύλησιν. But in this earlier passage there is no contrast between two kinds of gates for two different kinds of dreams; no oppositional categories are implied. And so we are not prepared for the antithetical distinction Penelope makes with such clarity and emphasis in Book 19.

Penelope’s description raises questions still to be satisfactorily answered by Homerists, conceming both the identity of the two gates she describes and her reason for characterizing them as she does¹. Foremost among these are:

(1) From what source does Penelope get this piece of lore about gates of horn(s) and ivory? She cites it matter-of-factly, as if such knowledge is traditional and beyond question. Is it in fact so?

(2) Why are homs related to truth and ivory to falsity?

(3) Does Penelope really believe, as absolutely as her rhetoric suggests, that the dream she narrated to the stranger is false, of the kind sent to deceive mortals? This vivid dream, which the stranger interpreted so positively and which in fact carried within itself its own unambiguous interpretation – this dream whose meaning is so very welcome to the queen, as she herself says at 19.569 (with an optative of wish)

ἦ κʼ ἀσπαστὸν ἐμοί καί παιδί γένοιτο

– why does she insist it is false, when what she most yeams for is the exact opposite, that this dream be true, a reliable forecast of events to corne?

Let me begin with 1), where does this belief in two gates of dreams come from?

Greek eschatological tradition offers many examples of a passageway between this world and a world which is invisible and adjacent; a passageway characterized by two paths, to allow for two antithetical kinds of «travellers.» Plato’s Myth of Er (Rep. 614c) describes «two openings alongside one another on earth, and another two opposite them above in heaven.» The just soûls go through the right and upwards, the unjust to the left and downwards². Similar descriptions appear in Plato’s Gorgias (523a-524a) and Phaedo (108c), which offer essentially the same eschatological mythic vision. In Gorgias 523a-524a Socrates gives an account which he has heard from an unnamed informant, which he calls a logos while acknowledging that Kallikles will consider it merely a mythos. He speaks of a certain meadow where Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aiakos pass judgement on the souls of the dead. There is a point here from which two roads lead, one to the Isles of the Blessed and one to Tartaros, for the just and the unjust souls. A similar tradition may be discemed in Pindar, Ol. 2.57-80, describing the contrasting afterlife existence of just and the unjust. The former travel a specifie «road of Zeus to the tower of Kronos» (70). An alternative road (for the unjust) is not mentioned, but the pattern familiar from Plato is clearly implied.

We may see the same pattern of thought – this paradigm of the two roads complementary but antithetical – preserved in the philosophical tradition used by Parmenides. In his fr.1 he frames his philosophical journey symbolically in terms of a journey through «gates of the passageways of Day and Night, πύλαι Νυκτός τε καί ‘Ήματός εἰσι κελεύθων. This passage apparently gives access to two paths of enquiry described in fr. 2 as two antithetical roads, one of Seeming and one of Being³. These will be the paths followed by the philosophical as contrasted with the unphilosophical, in essence the same distinction as religious thought makes between the just or «saved» and the unjust or «damned.» An originally religious conception has here been transferred to the realm of philosophical thought, so that Parmenides’ vision carries the suggestion that philosophy is a kind of spiritual salvation.

We seem to have here an ancient eschatological conception concerning special Gates that divide this world from the next; and there is good reason to believe that the most ancient conception of such gates imagined them as marked by or consisting of a pair of homs⁴. The well-known importance of sacral homs in Minoan iconography and cult suggest at least a pre-Hellenic source for this image; but it may be still older, even Palaeolithic. In her classic study The Gate of Horn, Gertrude Levy notes the frequency, beginning in Old Stone Age cave carvings and continuing into Near Eastern and pre-Hellenic Minoan culture, of the image of the homs of a ram, bull, or bison – either a pair of horns or a single horn – which she and other scholars believe symbolize sources of creative energy. She connects these horns with the concept of the Horned Gate that links and separates Day and Night, Life and Death, Human and Divine⁵. It seems that an ancient conception, originally created to describe the passage from this life to the afterlife, was adaptable, by analogy, to other points of boundary or transition between the world of ordinary life and appearances and the world that lies beyond, a world invisible to ordinary vision and normally inaccessible, but offering either greater reality or the ultimate reality. Such analogical thinking allows a philosopher to apply this paradigm to describe the separation of the realm of tme Being from that of mere Seeming. It also explains why Homer could picture the boundary point between the waking world and that of sleep in terms similar to that between the realms of the Living and the Dead. Homer’s analogical thinking is based on the oft-stated kinship between Sleep and Death. In Iliad 14.231 and 16.682 they are called, respectively, brothers and twins, kasignetoi and didumoi. Hesiod in Theog. 212 States that Night, in immediate sequence, begets Death, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams, and in 756 calls Sleep the brother of Death, Ὓπνον… κασίγνητον Θανάτοιο. In Works and Days 116 he gives a rationale explaining the resemblance that suggests this kinship: when the first race of mortals, the Golden Race, dies, «they died as if subdued by sleep», θνῇσκον δ’ ὥς τ’ ὕπνῳ δεδμημένοι.

Thus Penelope, describing a passageway consisting of a homed gate between this world and that of dreams, is indeed alluding to traditional patterns of thought conceming what we might call «spiritual gateways» between the world in which we wake and live, and the world of the «beyond.» And she is also using traditional belief when she makes this passageway double. What is significant and in fact highly original in her formulation, is that she is combining two familiar paradigms into one: the Homed Gate and the Twofold Road become the Twofold Gates. What still needs to be explained is why it is essential for Penelope to have two gates; and why she describes the second gate as made of ivory.

Penelope needs a second, contrasting gate, because here she is giving the ancient paradigm a very particular inflection, bending it to suit her immediate psychological and strategic needs. These needs have to do with her position at this moment in the long-developing drama in which she has continually been balancing three desires: to stall the suitors, to wait for her husband’s retum, and to protect her son. Penelope’s situation in book 19 and her personal psychology combine to require that she not immediately accept the beggar’s validation of the dream’s prophetic message, but do the opposite, that she warily back away and protect herself from the risk of disappointment. Thus, to answer question 3) asked above – Does Penelope really believe that her dream was false? – we might say «yes and no,» that Penelope’s response to the dream is double, it exists simultaneously on two levels. The intuitive, more submerged part of her mind instantly recognizes the truth of the dream’s prediction. Yet the self-conscious, self-protective part of her mind wants to «play it safe» and not accept it. For if she accepted the stranger’s prediction of Odysseus’ imminent retum, that would require the kind of thoroughgoing transformation of her emotional State – what a psychologist would call «abandonment of her defenses» – for which she is not yet prepared. And so she (or rather, the poet who is fashioning the persona of «thoughtful Penelope») creatively adapts the traditional beliefs in the Two Passageways and the Homed Gate, combining them into a single new construct, the Two Gates of Dreams. Thus she can cleverly deny the convincing interpretation that the stranger has just offered of her dream, and allow herself to maintain her emotional defenses until a time when it will be safe to discard them⁶.

But we still need to know why she chooses ivory as the material of the second gate, and why horn is associated with truth and ivory with falseness or deception.

The American Homerist Anne Amory – much lamented for her early demise – devoted an essay to these questions, but did not arrive, in my judgement, at a plausible solution⁷. She associated horn with Odysseus and ivory with Penelope as very explicit symbols for each character’s way of looking at reality: he steadily and directly and she obliquely and intermittently. There may be some truth in such a contrast, but it may have less to do with intrinsic character as with plot necessity (Odysseus deliberately keeping Penelope in the dark about this identity and plans) and the inevitable social restrictions placed upon women in the maledominated heroic world⁸. There is no good reason for connecting the substances horn and ivory with this way of seeing or dealing with the world (moreover, such an association is less likely with the pl. «horns» than the sg. «horn.»). Homer’s punning connection of keraa, «horns» with kraino, «accomplish,» and elephas, «ivory,» with elephairomai, «deceive,» is clever, and reinforces the antithesis between validity and deception; but it is likely to be a by-product of the already chosen terms keraa and elephas, and sheds no light on the reason for selecting these two substances in the first place. While there is no mention in the Hellenic «two passageways» tradition of any material substance of which the pathways are made, we have seen that horn or a pair of horns was already an ancient symbol associated with spiritual gates. Since the «two passages» tradition requires an antithetical element, and hom is already present, it is a small step for the Greek poetic imagination (possibly Homer’s or one of his predecessors’) to come up with ivory as a substance close enough to the material hom to serve as a «false twin» – a similar hard material that also grows from the head of an animal – but different enough in essentials to serve as an opposite. What gives the combination hom/ivory its power as an imaginative compounded symbol, I suggest, is precisely this unusual tension between pseudo-identity and significant opposition.

There is a complex basis for the mixture of similarity and opposition in the pairing of ivory and hom. Both are commonly used to make handles for knives, swords and other basic implements; but hom is practical while ivory is omamental. Horn is common, hard, and inexpensive, while ivory is rare, soft, and costly. One may speculate further that horns came from animals whose existence was a reality to the early Greeks, whereas ivory represented an analogous «horn» from a beast in the realm of the fantastic, the elephant. This cluster of attributes and associations lends itself easily to a symbolic opposition where horn represents practicality, durability and reliability whereas ivory represents vanity, (mere) appearance, and transience.

Having dealt with questions 1) and 2) conceming the sources and significance of horn(s) and ivory, I would like to retum to question 3): does Penelope really believe her own dismissal of the dream’s obvious message? I believe that the interpretation suggested above – in essence, «yes and no» – offers one major advantage. It allows us to answer the perennially difficult question, Why does Penelope propose the bow-contest now; why is she willing to risk the loss of her independence and a «hated marriage» to one of the suitors at the very moment when she has been given increasing signs and promises that Odysseus’ retum is truly imminent? Note that her proposai of the bow contest follows immediately upon her denial of the dream’s validity. It appears in the text almost as a non-sequitur: it is a sudden change to a new topic, introduced by the formula for acknowledging an abrupt transition, ἄλλο δέ τοι ἐρέω, σὺ δ’ ἐνί φρεσί βάλλεο σῇσι. Yet this proposai of a bow-contest must be closely connected to the discussion of the dream and the effect of that discussion upon Penelope. If we can divide Penelope’s mind (like all human minds) into a calculating part and an intuitive part, we understand how her response to the stranger’s affirmation of the dream-message can be both «no» and «yes.» It is the intuitive part that has understood the dream’s obvious truth, and her sudden decision to set up the contest tomorrow shows that the initial «no» of the cautious, calculating mind is now yielding to the underlying «yes» of her deeper, more intuitive understanding.

To sum up: I believe that Penelope immediately understands intuitively that the stranger is right and her dream was clearly prophetic; but the more calculating and cautious part of her mind, the rational part in control of the deliberate, strategie decisions that have continually characterized⁹ her embattled position vis-à-vis the suitors, says «no,» the risk of acceptance is too high, it would make her vulnerable to painful disappointment still one more time. (Note that in 14.124ff. Eumaios refers to the queen having been deceived several times by visitors who raised false hopes; and Penelope’s own fears about deception by a god disguised as a mortal expressed vividly at 23.215-7). Thus to explain her rejection of the obvious, Penelope fabricates a hybrid image of twin gates of dreams made of contrasting substances, which allows her to place this dream in the category of the illusory. Yet her deeper belief in the prophecy’s likely truth prompts her to propose the bow contest for tomorrow. In so doing, she permits intuition to prevail over reasoned caution, and this is Penelope’s true wisdom.