The poetics of sleep: Representing dreams and sleep in Latin literature and Roman art (Propertius, Statius).

摘要

The Romans conceived of sleep as an outside force, sometimes personified as the deity Somnus, while dreams, whether visions of the dead, or symbolic messages that required decoding, were personal and characterized as internal mental experiences. There was often a tension between the exterior and interior forces of sleep and dreaming. This dissertation identifies several Roman attitudes towards sleep, dreams, and insomnia through the study of representations of the sleep experience in the poetry of Propertius and Statius as well as the depiction of sleeping figures in the visual arts. Not only are sleep and insomnia the dominant themes of two of these authors' best-known poems, but study of their works opens up important insights into formal and thematic issues raised by this topic. Thus, a comparison between the introspective, first person narration of elegy and the detached, third person viewpoint of epic illuminates the complex relationship between the interior and external aspects of the experience of sleep in Roman thought.; I argue in chapter I that the parallel between the experience of dreaming and that of looking at art is more complex than a simple analogy between the content of Propertius' dream images and the composition of certain wall paintings. Rather, the poet's construction of a dream image in visual terms reveals a sensibility shared by his artistic counterparts, one which exploits the tension between interior experience and exterior viewership. My analysis in chapter 2 compares Propertius' representation of sleep to related instances in the visual arts, chief among them the case of Rhea Silvia. The figure of Somnus in Statius' Thebaid (the subject of chapter 3) is an oppressive and powerful external force, whose ability to subdue a sleeper is corroborated by his personification on numerous Roman sarcophagi. But Somnus' absence, the insomnia which afflicts many of the epic's characters, is equally formidable, as it reflects the destructive circumstances of the Thebaid's fratricidal narrative. The dissertation's final chapter looks at how authors have used insomnia as a trope in their writing to reflect its desirable and abhorrent aspects, and to convey information about their own poetics.