Odyssey 4.808 · Book 4, lines 808–810
Penelope answers from the gates of dreams
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τὴν δʼ ἠμείβετʼ ἔπειτα περίφρων Πηνελόπεια, ἡδὺ μάλα κνώσσουσʼ ἐν ὀνειρείῃσι πύλῃσιν·
Penelope — τίπτε, κασιγνήτη, δεῦρʼ ἤλυθες; οὔ τι πάρος γε
Then circumspect Penelope answered her, slumbering very sweetly at the gates of dreams: Why, sister, have you come here? You never before—
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The setting
Still asleep, Penelope replies to the apparition inside her dream. Her question breaks off at the end of the block, mid-sentence, as she wonders why a sister who lives far away should suddenly appear.
A note on this passage
Penelope answers the dream without waking. Homer marks that she speaks from deep inside sleep — slumbering 'very sweetly at the gates of dreams,' the threshold where true and false visions pass. Her reply begins as a plain, startled question to a sister she has not seen: why have you come, when you never came before?
The undercurrent is that image of the dream-gates. It looks ahead to the famous later passage in Book 19, where Penelope herself names the two gates of dreams — of horn for the true, of ivory for the false — and doubts which kind hers are. Even asleep and comforted, her first instinct is the sceptic's: not to accept the vision but to interrogate it. The most guarded woman in the poem cross-examines her own dream.
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