Riddling Prolepses: Dreams and Oracles in Herodotus’ Histories

Herodotus’ Histories abounds in dreams and oracles that are almost without exception fulfilled, and thus can be qualified as certain prolepses. But their opaque and even decidedly ambiguous nature entails that characters understand them incorrectly and/or undertake mistaken actions and eventually come to harm. For them the dreams and oracles are uncertain prolepses, which do not bring the results they had hoped for or expected. Herodotus’ narratees will know that dreams and oracles are bound to be fulfilled in the Histories. But since the narrator usually does not reveal their true meaning right away, narratees do not understand them fully nor know exactly how they are going to be fulfilled. For them, too, most dreams and oracles therefore are riddling prolepses, which trigger cognitive activities such as puzzlement and intellectual stimulation.

In presenting oracles and dreams this way, Herodotus shows that, just as stories about the past are not per se reliable and therefore in need of careful research, signals about the future likewise ask for patient decoding; the future is just as much a historiographic category as the past.