Dreams and the Orient in the Work of Herodotus

Abstract

In the first part of this article, dreams are shown to be an element of the Herodotean «rhetoric of otherness». For the receivers of the eighteen dreams in the Histories were not citizens of a Greek city, in the sense that none of them participated in a collective decision-making body. While dream and oracle are both means of receiving divine messages, they are also different; the former, being a passive means of communication with the gods, is considered as suitable to the political structure of Oriental monarchies and the latter to that of the Greek city. In the second part, a close relation between the Herodotean dreams and the Eastern tradition is brought out through an investigation of the types of dreams and of their symbols. In the third part, this relation is used to explain why the dream is chosen by the historian as an indicator of the inherent difficulties of mixed dynastic marriages. Further, emphasis is put on the relation between the waking world and that of dreams. In addition to the rational opinion, according to which the content of the dreams depends on the waking world, an important dimension of reality is also attributed both to the waking world and to the world of dreams in the Herodotean work.