Morpheus

Morpheus was the dream-spirit who appeared to sleepers in human form. He is first named in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid, who makes him the most skilled of the many sons of Sleep. His name is connected with the Greek word morphe, “shape”, and fits his gift of taking any human form.

Family

Ovid calls Morpheus a son of Somnus, the Roman Sleep (the Greek Hypnos). Somnus has a thousand sons in Ovid’s telling, and from them he picks three by name. The earlier Greek tradition does not name Morpheus: Hesiod gives Sleep and the tribe of Dreams (the Oneiroi) as children of Night (Theogony 211–212), and in the Odyssey Penelope speaks of the two gates of dreams, one of horn for those that come true and one of ivory for those that deceive (Odyssey 19.562–567).

The House of Sleep

In Book 11 (lines 592–615) Ovid describes the home of Sleep as a cave in a hollow mountain near the land of the Cimmerians, where the Sun never shines and mists rise from the ground. No cock crows there, no dog or goose breaks the silence, and no door creaks on its hinge; only the river Lethe murmurs past, and poppies and other herbs grow at the entrance. In the middle lies Sleep himself on a couch of ebony, surrounded by the empty dreams, his sons, as many as the ears of corn in a harvest or the leaves of a wood. Of the thousand sons Ovid names three (11.633–643):

• Morpheus, who imitates human beings, their faces, walk and speech;
• Icelos, as the gods call him, or Phobetor among mortals, who becomes a beast, a bird or a snake;
• Phantasos, who turns himself into things without life: earth, rock, water and trees.

Ceyx and Halcyone

Morpheus’ one appearance in Ovid comes in the story of Ceyx and Halcyone. Ceyx has died in a shipwreck. Juno sends Iris to the House of Sleep, telling Sleep to send a dream in the shape of the dead king to his wife Alcyone. Sleep chooses Morpheus, who flies through the dark on silent wings, comes to the city of Trachis, lays aside his wings, and takes on the face and body of Ceyx, pale and without clothes, with water dripping from his beard and hair. He stands at her bed and tells her the truth: that he is dead, drowned in the Aegean, and that she should mourn him rather than wait (11.650–673). Alcyone wakes, tries to embrace her husband and catches only air. Ovid ends the story with Alcyone finding the body on the shore and the two of them changed into kingfishers, the halcyons, which brood on a floating nest during seven calm days each winter (11.710–748).

In Homer the dreams are already messengers: Zeus sends a destructive Dream in the shape of Nestor to Agamemnon (Iliad 2.5–34), much as Sleep sends Morpheus in Ovid. Poets since Ovid have used Morpheus as a name for dreams and for sleep itself, but the older Greek sources do not give him a cult or a myth of his own.

See Also: Hypnos, Oneiroi, Nyx, Thanatos, Iris, Hera, Ceyx, Alcyone