Ditch

The dreamer is in the lead and jumps a ditch of water, just clearing it. The others fall into the ditch. The young man who told me this dream was a cautious, introverted type and rather afraid of adventure.

Jung uses the shared dream image of a ditch to demonstrate that the psychological significance of a symbol is entirely conditioned by the dreamer’s life-position — the same obstacle signifies opposite things for the cautious young man and the bold old invalid.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis

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The depth, and width, and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial.

Plato’s Critias presents the circular ditch of Atlantis as a boundary of near-supernatural dimensions, emphasizing the ditch’s function as a demarcation between the civilized centre and the outer world, with an implicit suggestion of hubris in its construction.

Plato, Critias, -360thesis

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on the outer side and against it they dug a deep ditch, making it great and wide, and fixed the sharp stakes inside it… driven about it a ditch, and not given to the gods any grand sacrifice.

The Iliad frames the Achaian ditch as a sacral-military boundary whose construction without divine sacrifice provokes Poseidon’s resentment, establishing the ditch as a liminal structure embedded in the sacred economy of the gods.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011thesis

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let the guards severally take their stations by the ditch we have dug outside the ramparts. This I would enjoin upon our young men.

Nestor’s tactical injunction assigns the ditch the role of a watched threshold, a zone of vigilance separating the defended interior from the dangerous nocturnal exterior.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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Guards must lie along the ditch we dug beside the wall. For the young warriors, these are my orders.

The Wilson translation reaffirms the ditch as the primary site of military boundary-keeping, a threshold that the young must guard and that defines the inner community against outer threat.

Homer, The Iliad, 2023supporting

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