The Odyssey’s Gates of Horn and Ivory, Original Stakes and Re-Readings

In the Odyssey, Penelope distinguishes between the dreams that pass through the gate of horn and those of the gate of ivory : to understand these verses of book 19, one must first compare them with the dream narrative previously given by Penelope, the “dream of the geese”, and then note that the territory of the people of Dreams evoked in book 24 completes them in a coherent way. Homer thus introduces a new conception of the dream into the epic : a dream in images, with prophetic value, which must henceforth be interpreted. Some centuries later, Latin and Greek poets and narrators took up the challenge of a text that had remained enigmatic to put forward their own reading of the gates of dreams.