The Dream of the Charioteer in the Rhesus ascribed to Euripides (728–803)

Abstract

When Rhesus' charioteer sees two suspicious shadows around the horses of Rhesus just before the slaughter of his prince, he concludes that they must be friendly soldiers with thievish intentions (777). The two men were actually Odysseus and Diomedes, but the charioteer could not have suspected that Greeks had infiltrated the core of the Trojan camp. The waking vision of the two Greek commandos is followed by a dream in which the charioteer sees wolves attacking Rhesus' horses – in the meantime the horses are actually being robbed and Rhesus is being killed by Odysseus and Diomedes. The dream is concluded with the charioteer's reaffirmation that this action must have been accomplished by “friends” (802f.). The dramatic action requires that this assumption of the charioteer was or seemed particularly sound (at least to him), because it is the only argument upon which he relies in his later formal accusation of Hector (833–889). In fact, the presentation of the dream emphasizes its quasi-perceptional nature, which is in tune with the widespread idea that dreaming is mainly the work of perception or of δόξα. The motif of the premonitory dream, which is customary in tragedy, seems to be split into concrete eyesight where the charioteer physically sees Odysseus and Diomedes (although they are not yet in action and he does not correctly identify them) and a dream which builds upon what he sees and explains it (in fact, it perfectly parallels the concrete actions taken by Odysseus and Diomedes). The result is that the charioteer's dream becomes almost as probative as his eyesight, and both the perceptual and oneiric experiences contribute to strengthening his interpretation of the facts and establishing his apparent reliability. Rhesus' idea of paralleling the concrete aggression of Odysseus and Diomedes with a concurrent dream may have followed the model of Iliad 10.494–497. This intertextual relationship enables us to speculate that the author of the tragedy read line 10.497 in his Iliad, which was questioned by Hellenistic philologists.