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Roman Opinions about the Truthfulness of Dreams*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2012

W. V. Harris
W. V. Harris*
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Columbia University
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Extract

Let us start by considering a remarkable text. At the very beginning of the second half of his account of the reign of Nero, Tacitus tells at some length a tale about the emperor and a dream (Ann. 16.1-3): one Caesellius Bassus, ‘origine Poenus, mente turbida’, dreamt that there was a cavern full of treasure on his estates. He was so confident about the dream that (without identifying the cavern) he sailed from Africa to Rome, where he convinced the emperor; Nero accordingly expected new revenue and spent still more extravagantly. Later, before the disappointed and desperate Caesellius committed suicide, ‘posita vaecordia’, he expressed surprise, claiming that his dreams had never before been false (‘non falsa antea somnia sua … admirans’). An alternative version said that he did not commit suicide but merely had his property confiscated. Tacitus is in any case most disapproving, and tells the story at unusual length with the obvious intention of suggesting that Nero was as insane as Caesellius.

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Articles
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The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 93 , November 2003 , pp. 18 - 34
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Copyright ©W. V. Harris 2003. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

*

Much of this paper was presented in outline to the Roman Society on 8 June 2002, and I thank Alan Bowman and Helen Cockle for the parts they played so effectively on that occasion. I also wish to thank the many kind colleagues who made material comments that day or afterwards, and above all Suzanne Said for sharing her wide knowledge of ancient dreaming.

References

1 A long-established dream subject: Hdt. 5.92; Cic, De div. 2.134, etc.

2 The most recent contributions, which can lead one back into most of the others, are Weber, G., Kaiser, Träume und Visionen in Prinzipat und Spätantike (2000)Google Scholar; Kragelund, P., ‘Dreams, religion and politics in Republican Rome’, Historia 50 (2001), 53–95Google Scholar; C. Walde, Die Traumdarstellungen in der griechischrömischen Dichtung (2001).

3 Another one is dealt with in a paper entitled ‘Insomnia: the content of Roman dreams’, which will appear in a volume in memory of Martin Frederiksen (ed. W. V. Harris and E. Lo Cascio).

4 Aserinksy, E. and Kleitman, N., ‘Regularly occurring periods of eye motility, and concomitant phenomena, during sleep’, Science 118 (1953), 273–4Google Scholar.

5 The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), 102–3Google Scholar. Dodds' own credulity about ‘paranormal’ phenomena is partly documented in Missing Persons: an Autobiography (1977). But Dodds' views should not be simplified: he also wrote that ‘the civilized rationalism of de divinatione book 2 … has hardly been sufficiently appreciated’ (134 n. 118).

6 ‘S'il était donné à nos yeux de chair de voir dans la conscience d'autrui, on jugerait bien plus sûrement un homme d'aprés ce qu'il rêve que d'apres ce qu'il pense’. The quotation comes from Les Misérables. Not one in a hundred of us agrees, I suspect.

7 See for example Thomas, J., ‘Der Traum: Wege der Erkenntnis im klassischen Altertum’, in Benedetti, G. and Hornung, E. (eds), Die Wahrheit der Träume (1997), 145–85Google Scholar. Miller, P. C., Dreams in Late Antiquity (1994)Google Scholar, goes some way along this path when she writes, for example, that Roman divination had the ‘ability to provide techniques for meditating on human problems’ (9); there is no foundation for this, though there is a lively controversy as to whether scientists who have been close to solving problems have ever found the right answer in a dream (an entirely different matter). Of course it was often said in antiquity, from Pindar onwards, that human life was only a dream, or a nightmare; see the references gathered by Dodds, , Pagan and Christian in the Age of Anxiety (1968), 9 n. 4Google Scholar.

8 cf. Caillois, R., ‘Logical and philosophical problems of the dream’, in von Grunebaum, G. E. and Caillois, R. (eds), The Dream and Human Societies (1966), 23–52Google Scholar, at 29–33 (this is the von Grunebaum so vividly evaluated by Said, E. W., Orientalism (1978), 296–9)Google Scholar. For anthropologists who have held that their study populations have thought of dreams as being as true as real events see Kessels, A. H. M., ‘Ancient systems of dream classification’, Mnemosyne 22 (1969), 389–424, at 389CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 2.

9 Michenaud, G. and Dierkens, J., Les rêves dans les “Discours Sacrés” d'Aelius Aristide (1972), 29Google Scholar. The evidence cited is that Artemidorus thought that gods and ancestors sometimes truly appeared in dreams. Readers will understand that in treating Aelius, Artemidorus, and other Greeks who lived under Roman power as ‘Romans’ I am employing shorthand, and not eliminating cultural differences.

10 Bowersock, G. W., Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (1994), 97Google Scholar.

11 Bouché-Leclercq, A., Histoire de la divination dans l'antiquité I (1879), 278Google Scholar; E. J., and Edelstein, L., Asclepius: a Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (1945), II, 157Google Scholar, where what astonishes most is that no distinction is made between different kinds of dreams. In my view, hardly anyone in antiquity thought that all dreams were revealing (Tertullian, De anima 46.3, alleges that this was an eccentricity of the people of Telmessus).

12 N. Lewis, The Interpretation of Dreams and Portents (1976), 99.

13 Price, S., ‘The future of dreams: from Freud to Artemidorus’, Past and Present 113 (1986), 3–37, at 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Pack, R. A., ‘Artemidorus and his waking world’, TAPhA 86 (1955), 280–90, at 280Google Scholar: ‘In the age of the Antonines … most men considered their dream-experiences … prophetic’. According to Miller, op. cit. (n. 7), 9, ‘the question of divination's rationality did not seem to most late antique [but she means ‘Roman-period’] thinkers to be a question worthy of debate. Cicero was the major exception …’ (dreams were her subject here). Cf. van Straten, F. T., ‘Daikrates' dream. A votive relief from Kos, and some other kat'onar dedications’, BABesch 51 (1976), 1–27, at 14Google Scholar. R. G. A. van Lieshout, Greeks on Dreams (1980), 6, took a less orthodox line: ‘only in exceptional cases was serious attention paid to dreams by normal people in normal daily life’. P. Veyne, ‘De Halai en Dalmatie: un voeu de voyageur et les rêves chez Virgile’, in Poikilia. Etudes offertes a Jean-Pierre Vernant (1987), 381–95, at 384, also swam against the current: see below, p. 33.

14 Any attempt to write a chapter of the cultural history of the Roman Empire faces the difficulty that very many of its inhabitants were Romans only in some attenuated sense. I have no solution for this problem except to stay alert for cultural differences.

15 The best study of these texts so far is Veyne, op. cit. (n. 13). Dr Renberg defended his dissertation in the Classics Department at Duke University in April 2003. LiDonnici, L. R., The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions (1995)Google Scholar, is also a useful treatment of some of this material.

16 Oral. 47.63; 62 and 67. It is not clear what was wrong with him (see C. A. Behr's n. 89 in his translation of this work (1981)).

17 See Behr, C. A., Aelius Aristides and The Sacred Tales (1968), 22Google Scholar, and cf. Festugière, A.-J., Personal Religion among the Greeks (1954), 99–100Google Scholar. Compare what is said about the role of Imhotep/Imouthes/Asclepius in P.Oxy. xi.1381, 11. 53–6 (second century).

18 Artemidorus ‘consorted for many years with the deeply despised diviners (manteis) of the marketplace’ (1.prooem.). Pomeroy, A. J., ‘Status and status-concern in the Greco-Roman dream-books’, Ancient Society 22 (1991), 51–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, maintains that Artemidorus' approach was the popular one, a view to which we shall return. R. A. Pack, The Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt (2nd edn, 1967), lists no dream-books among the Greek literary papyri (palmomancy is better represented), which does not of course mean that dream-predictions and dreamepiphanies were anything like absent from that world (note once again P.Oxy. xi.1381, the Imouthes papyrus). It is true that many Greeks and Romans wrote specialized books about the interpretation of dreams (Bouché-Leclercq, op. cit. (n. 11), I, 277 n.*, lists some thirty-four names), but we are more interested here in what was read than in what was written.

19 Plaut., Curculio 246–50; Miles 693 (female); Cic, De div. 1.132. It has sometimes been argued that the latter passage is part of a quotation from Ennius.

20 De div. 1.132(cf. 2.145); Artem. 1.prooem.

21 In Il. 2.79–83 wise Nestor says that if Agamemnon's dream had been recounted by anyone else, ‘we would have said that it was a falsehood and we would have turned our backs on it’, and he noticeably avoids saying that it is true even coming from Agamemnon.

22 Od. 19.562–7; Aen. 6.893–9. There is no need to list the numerous allusions elsewhere.

23 5.prooem.: ‘it was difficult and laborious to attempt to gather together only those dreams that were worth recording — for it is very easy and takes no time at all to record a large number of random dreams’. This was a very long-standing opinion: Pindar believed in veridical dreams (fr. 131), but also thought that they were (typically) meaningless (Pyth. 8.95–6). As to how one might argue away the fact that many dreams were ‘false’, see Cic, , De div. 1.60Google Scholar.

24 1.78 p. 88 11. 12–15 Pack.

25 ‘Are you raving mad, I'd like to know, or are you dreaming on your feet?’ Cf. Plaut., Amph. 696–8; Men. 393–7, and see OLD; it is true that this usage is rare after the Republic.

26 Dreams as illusions: cf. Pl, Ly. 218c; Pit. 209b; Tht. 208b; Philo, Legum Alleg. 3.226; Plu., Mar. 46; Dio Chrys. 11.129. Yet in Pl., Rep. 4.443b enhupnion refers to a splendid ideal. See van Lieshout, op. cit. (n. 13), 104–5, on the importance of casual expressions such as the simile in Pl, Smp. 175e for indicating the author's underlying attitudes.

27 See, for instance, Bouché-Leclercq, op. cit. (n. 11), I, 317–21, on fantastic ways of interpreting numbers in dreams.

28 Van Lieshout, op. cit. (n. 13), at 10–12. Cf. also Bouche-Leclercq, op. cit. (n. 11), I, 7–13; J. Bayet, ‘La croyance romaine aux présages déterminants: aspects littéraires et chronologie’, in Hommages à J.Bidez et F. Cumont (1949), 13–30.

29 For an instance see Cic, De div. 1.57, with Pease's commentary.

30 Plin., Ep. 3.5.4, with interesting details. For receiving instructions as the typical form of the dream that had some claim to validity see Cic, De div. 2.122 beginning.

31 1.2, p. 5 11. 17–18 Pack. What in general was regarded as a propitious kind of dream in his circles Artemidorus explains in 1.3.

32 The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), viiiGoogle Scholar. The second volume of M. P. Nilsson's Geschichte der griechischen Religion, which had appeared the year before, still laid great stress on belief, incidentally classifying trust in dreams among the ‘lower’ beliefs.

33 From a review published in 1886, quoted in Pickering, W. S. F. (ed.), Durkheim on Religion. A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies (1975), 21Google Scholar (but my translation diverges from his at one point).

34 cf. C. G. Perkell, The Poet's Truth: a Study of the Poet in Virgil's Georgtcs (1989).

35 See n. 23.

36 31 B 108. In truth this interpretation of Empedocles depends exclusively on Philoponus' commentary on Aristot., De anima, and may not be correct (see, among others, J. Kany-Turpin, and P. Pellegrin, ‘Cicero and the Aristotelian theory of divination by dreams’, in W. W. Fortenbaugh and P. Steinmetz (eds), Cicero's Knowledge of the Peripatos (1989), 220–45, at 242 n. 3). A view like the one attributed to Empedocles appears in Hdt. 7.16, and in many Hellenistic and Roman writers (see O. Skutsch, The Annals of Q. Ennius (1985), 376).

37 Hippocrates, Sacred Disease 17; cf. Ancient Medicine 10 (Oberhelman, S. M., ‘Galen, On Diagnosis from Dreams’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 38 (1983), 36–47CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 36 n. 1, should not have cited this passage or Humours 4 as evidence that Hippocrates (that famous construct) believed in divination through dreams; there is in fact no evidence that he did so); Ps.-Hipp. Regimen IV (cf. G. Cambiano, ‘Une interprétation “matérialiste’ des rêves: Du Régime IV’, in M. Grmek (ed.), Hippocratica (1980), 87–96), which, however, admits the existence of some ‘divine’ dreams (4.87) and is in effect a description of dream-lore, a distant ancestor of the work of Artemidorus.

38 She indicates that there is at least some communication between the gods and sleeping humans. Cf. Pl., Rep. 9.572b; Tim. 71de.

39 Rep. 9.571ed; Tim. 45d-46a. For some later parallels see H. von Staden, Herophilus: the Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (1989), 306 n. 236. For a full discussion see S. Rotondaro, Il sogno in Platone (1998).

40 Aristotle thought that most supposedly ‘fulfilled’ dreams are only fulfilled by coincidence; and many dreams are not fulfilled at all. In About Divination in Sleep 2.463b 12–4&4b6 he attempts to explain why some dreams come true, his most emphatic point being that such dreams are not sent by gods. ‘Nevertheless they are daemonic; for nature is daemonic not divine.’ Their daemonic origin is proved by the fact that quite commonplace people [whom the gods would not bother with] have veridical dreams. Clearly he is writing against a backdrop of widespread credulity (see once again About Divination in Sleep 1.462b14–15). ‘Even the best doctors say that one should pay extremely close attention to dreams' (About Divination in Sleep 1.463a5–6) — potentially at least, they have diagnostic value, he seems to think. See D. Gallop, Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams (1996), for a reading of Aristotle as a dream-sceptic. There are complexities here which have to be passed over; one of them is what to do about Aristotle's acceptance of the prophetic dream of Eudemus (Cic, De div. 1.53); see Kany-Turpin and Pellegrin, op. cit. (n. 36), at 231–2).

41 Characters 16.11. This passage should not be belittled, as by van Straten, op. cit. (n. 13), 14, but it only criticizes extreme behaviour, not all belief in the predictive power of dreams. Presumably Theophrastus' monograph On Sleep and Dreams (Diog. Laert. 5.45) explained dreams naturalistically.

42 Diog.Laert. 6.43. (but he was not ‘cynical’, pace van Straten, op. cit. (n. 13), 14, which would suggest that his opinions were marginal — and that is not quite true).

43 See van Straten, op. cit. (n. 13). For a general account of incubation see most recently Wacht, M., ‘Inkubation’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum XVIII (1998), cols 179–265Google Scholar.

44 Here we can turn on its head a remark sometimes attributed to Diogenes, who supposedly pointed out, with respect to the numerous dedications on Samothrace, that the many disappointed pilgrims were not represented (Diog. Laert. 6.59); what matters for us is that they had hoped (and to be disappointed was not necessarily to be disillusioned).

45 Lucr. 3.316; 4.962–1036. Which is notto suppose that the Epicureans were always in agreement with one another (cf. W. V. Harris, Restraining Rage: the Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (2002), 102). For the view that Lucretius should be judged an eclectic on this topic see Schrijvers, P. H., ‘Die Traumtheorie des Lukrez’, Mnemosyne 33 (1980), 128–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 As we know from Philodemus' De pietate: see D. Obbink, Philodemus On Piety, Part I (1996), 6.

47 In De div. 1.6 Cicero lists the Stoics, from Zeno on, who had written about divination.

48 For Herophilus' classification see Schrijvers, P. H., ‘La classification des rêves selon Hérophile’, Mnemosyne 30 (1977), 13–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; von Staden, op. cit. (n. 39). 306–10 (he gathers the evidence, 386–7). For its adaption by the Stoics: von Staden, 308–9 (see Poseidonius fr.108 E–K, from Cic, De div. 1.64). Oberhelman, op. cit. (n. 37), 36, makes Herophilus out to be far more favourable towards dream prediction than we have any reason to believe that he was.

49 There is in fact considerable evidence that Panaetius was sceptical on this subject: see Pease's commentary.

50 e.g. I, 110, 113, 150.

51 Here I am compelled to disagree with Kragelund, op. cit. (n. 2), 53. Not that his view is altogether clear, for while he says that ‘the models for this [dreams in early Roman poetry] were patently Greek’, he only implies that this renders them relatively unimportant. Kragelund (though he knows virtually all the evidence) goes much too far: there were sceptics about predictive dreams in pre-Sullan Rome, as we shall see, but there were others who sometimes believed; if indeed it had not been so, Sulla's political use of dreams would be unintelligible.

52 Ann. 5–15 Vahlen, but better read in the Skutsch edition.

53 Cic, De div. 2.127 = Feb. 429 Vahlen. The exact form of this line need not concern us.

54 ‘Nee vero somnia graviora, si quae ad rem publicam pertinere visa sunt, a summo consilio neglecta sunt’ (De div. 1.4). Kragelund, op. cit. (n. 2), 54 — unlike M. Cicero in De div. 2 — attempts to undermine this evidence.

55 Cic, De div. 1.4, etc. For another recent incident see Granius Licinianus 3322 (p. 11 Criniti).

56 Kragelund, op. cit. (n. 2), 79–86. Another possibly antique story: Val.Max. 2.4.5.

57 Kragelund, op. cit. (n. 2), 86. Cancik, H., ‘Idolum and imago: Roman dreams and dream theories’, in D. Shulman and G. G. Stroumsa (eds), Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming (1999), 169–88Google Scholar, at 170, claims that ordinary Romans often used dream interpretations, ‘to the great annoyance of the official cult functionaries’. I know of no basis for this.

58 Brutus frr. 1–2 (pp. 237–8 Dangel).

59 Lines 487–8 Marx2: ‘sic isti somnia ficta/ vera putant’, with Lachmann's emendation of the impossible omnia ficta (for the reading see O'Hara, J. J., ‘Somnia ficta in Lucretius and Lucilius’, Classical Quarterly 37 (1987), 517–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Here and in Lucr. 1.104 somnia fingere seems to mean ‘to interpret dreams misleadingly’.

60 Vollenweider, M.-L., ‘Der Traum des Sulla Felix’, Schweizerische Numismatische Rundschau 39 (1958–1959), 22–34Google Scholar. Whether the gems which reflect this occurrence really go back to the 80s B.C. must remain in some doubt; cf. Kragelund, op. cit. (n. 2), 92–3. Other Sullan dreams: App., BC 1.97.455, Plu., Sull. 28 (in both cases before battles). See further H. Behr, Die Selbstdarstellung Sullas (1993), 74–5.

61 For another dream of his from this period see App., BC 1.105.492; Plin., NH 7.138 is obscure.

62 Sulla became known as one of those who had manipulated religion, Val.Max. 1.2.3, Frontin., Strat. 1.11.11. A coin-type of 44 B.C. (Crawford 480/1), on the other hand, seems to presuppose that his dreams were still treated with some respect.

63 For scholars who believe(d) that the first-century élite was sceptical about divination see Beard, M., ‘Cicero and divination: the formation of a Latin discourse’, JRS 76 (1986), 33–46Google Scholar, at 33 (setting up an opponent). The scepticism of the historian Sisenna about dream predictions: Cic, De div. 1.99.

64 Where, Bailey notwithstanding, I take somnia to mean dreams in a literal sense. Other important passages: 4.455–61, 5.1169–82.

65 As claimed by Brillante, C., Studi sulla rappresentazione del sogno nella Grecia antica (1991)Google Scholar, 31, on the basis of De pietate 92 11. 12–15 (as edited by T. Gomperz, Philodem: Uber die Frömmigkeit (1866), p. 43), where even if Gomperz's text is right it is a matter of Homer's (supposed) opinion, not Philodemus’; Philodemus' sceptical view seems to be indicated by line 1450 Obbink.

66 He could hardly deny this, since it was known that in earlier years he had taken at least one predictive dream seriously — a dream about Marius he experienced as he was going into exile in 58 B.C. (De div. 1.59; his later explanation: 2.140). Evidently he did not have to defend the fact that he had used the somnium Scipionis in De republica. That Quintus is represented as retreating from most kinds of divination (De div. 2.100) confirms, if confirmation is necessary, that Marcus really did favour the sceptical view.

67 Beard, op. cit. (n. 63), Schofield, M., ‘Cicero for and against divination’, JRS 76 (1986), 47–65Google Scholar. De natura deorum 1.10, where Cicero says that his own opinions are off the agenda, is largely irrelevant (pace Beard, 35), since in that work Cicero does not in fact put much argumentation in his own mouth. According to Beard, 43, the character of Marcus in De div. ‘highlights the underlying problems in reconciling traditional Roman practice and the Greek philosophical theory’, but in the first place there was no great contradiction with respect to dreams (as I hope to have shown), and if there is anything in De div. 2 which is merely formal, it is the nod towards the believers (see the text). The source of all this trouble is perhaps that Cicero really was ambivalent about some other types of divination (cf. Schofield, 56–7). For a critique of Beard and Schofield see Timpanaro, S., Nuovi contributi di filologia e storia della lingua latina (1994), 257–64Google Scholar. In his view, Cicero did not write the first book to defend divination, ‘ma per mostrarne la mancanza di fondamenti razionali, per preparare il terreno alia sua confutazione’ (260); that, however, seems too simple. We must also reject the theory of Cancik, op. cit. (n. 57), 173, that Cicero was only sceptical about dreams because that was the tradition of official Roman religion. For another misstatement of Cicero's views see Le Goff, J., ‘Le christianisme et les rêves (IIe–VIIe siècles)’, in Gregory, T. (ed.), I sogni nel medioevo (1985), 171–215Google Scholar, at 200.

68 ‘Let us therefore get rid of divination by dreams along with other kinds … For we would consider it a great gain both for ourselves and for our fellow countrymen if we entirely eliminated it’. A little later: ‘Cum autem proprium sit Academiae iudicium suum nullum interponere, ea probare quae simillima veri videantur, conferre causas, et quid in quamque sententiam dici possit expromere, nulla adhibita sua auctoritate iudicium audientium relinquere integrum ac liberum …’, ‘but since it is characteristic of the Academy not to issue any judgement of its own, to approve what seems nearest to the truth, to bring claims together, to set forth what can be said on each side, and to leave the judgement of the audience independent and free with no use of its own authority …’. This does not balance the lengthy denunciation which has gone before.

69 Lydus, De ost. 45 = fr. 82 Swoboda.

70 PIR 2 A 1183. The earliest sources: De vita sua fr. 10 Peter (from Plu., Brut. 41); Vell.Pat. 2.70; Val. Max. 1.7.1.

71 He was in bed — ‘nee sopor illud erat, sed coram adgnoscere voltus/ velatasque comas praesentiaque ora videbar’, 3.173–4: ‘I was not asleep, but I seemed to recognize their faces there beside me, their veiled locks and living presence’. In 3.151 one might read ‘insomnis’. Cf. Veyne, op. cit. (n. 13), 389.

72 4–351-3; 5722–45; 8.26–67.

73 See Steiner, H., Der Traum in der Aeneis (1952)Google Scholar, also Bouquet, J., Le songe dans l'épopée latine d'Ennius à Claudien (2001), 19–53Google Scholar, ar d Walde, op. cit. (n. 2), 261–311.

74 ‘[At the edge of the underworld] there are twin gates of sleep, one of them said to be of horn — and by this an easy exit is give to true shades, the other made of shining white ivory — but the spirits of the dead send false dreams this way to the upper world’. Cf. Steiner, op. cit. (n. 73), 90–1.

75 Another reference to empty dreams: 6.283–4. Cf. Eel. 8.108 (‘credimus? an qui amant ipsi sibi somnia fingunt?’).

76 cf. the list in Tert., De anima 46.11. For the western evidence see Wacht, op. cit. (n. 43), 194–5.

77 See further Sat. 128. Cf. Bowersock, op. cit. (n. 10), 82.

78 The story in 1.7.3 was treated sceptically in De div. 2.136, and subjected to the word dicitur in Liv. 8.6.9. The stories in Val.Max. 1.7.4 and 6 had also been dismissed in Cic. loc. cit. The dream in 1.7.5 is the one about Marius dealt with in n. 66 above.

79 DJ 7, DA 94, Tib. 74, Cal. 50 (nothing predictive here) and 57, Claud. 37, Nero 46, Galba 4, Otho 7, Vesp. 5, Dom. 23.

80 Suetonius says that Augustus himself ‘somnia neque sua neque aliena de se neglegebat’. Every spring he dreamt many terrifying false dreams (anxiety dreams); the rest of the year, he dreamt less, and less mistakenly (minus vana). A dream also led him to play at being a beggar for one day a year (DA 91). Cassius Dio (54.35.3–4) found this last story hard to credit (see further Weber, op. cit. (n. 2), 325–7).

81 Suet., Claud. 37 retails two stories of this kind, one about anonymous litigants, the other about the plot of Messallina and Narcissus which led to the killing of the consular Ap. Iunius Silanus in A.D. 42 (another version in Dio 60.14). Syme said of the Annals that ‘not until the later books do the prodigia become a regular entry. It would be fanciful to discover a sceptical historian's relapse into antiquated credulities’ (Tacitus (1958), 523). An obvious explanation is that the central figures, Claudius and Nero, and their entourages, were indeed more credulous than their predecessors.

82 NH 25.16–18. The story is parallel to the one about Alexander rejected by Strabo. And we recall Pliny's willingness to write the history of the German Wars because of a dream.

83 Medical Questions 5 (pp. 7–8 in the Teubner edn by H. Gärtner), after he has recounted three dreams which had nothing whatsoever to do with divine epiphanies. The view that Rufus believed in dream divination was put forward by Oberhelman, op. cit. (n. 37), 36, and probably derives from a rash remark in Edelstein and Edelstein, op. cit. (n. 11), II, 139. It is true that in a long passage of Rufus about the determination of humours which is quoted in Oribasius' Medical Collections there is a single account of a patient who received advice from Asclepius in an incubation-dream he experienced at Pergamum (45.30.11–13 = III p. 192 Raeder (CMG VI, 2, 1); the passage is quoted, out of context, and translated in Edelstein and Edelstein I, 238–9). The god's reply was unhelpful, and Rufus' interest is in what happened after the epileptic patient subsequently experienced a quartan fever.

84 CIL VI.301 = 30731 is Flavian or very slightly later. VI.21521 is in verse and was judged to be Flavian by Buecheler in Carmina Latina Epigraphica p. 509 (no. 1109). Gil Renberg (cf. above, n. 15) pointed out to me that there are classical and hellenistic examples, but agrees with the view expressed above. He also confirms the impression that the deity who most often gave instructions to Romans in dreams was Silvanus (on whom see Dorcey, P. F., The Cult of Silvanus: a Study of Roman Folk Religion (1992)Google Scholar).

85 cf. Geffcken, J., The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism (trans. MacCormack, S., 1978Google Scholar; original edn: Der Ausgang des griechisch-römischen Heidentums, 1920), ch. 1; Drachmann, A. B., Atheism in Pagan Antiquity (1922), 120–2Google Scholar, and, more recently, Veyne, P., ‘Une évolution du paganisme gréco-romain: injustice et piété des dieux, leurs ordres ou “oracles”’, Latomus 45 (1986), 259–83Google Scholar. Yet it is not certain that the volume of interest in Epicureanism declined (cf. below, n. 99).

86 cf. Dulaey, M., Le rêve dans la vie et la pensée de Saint Augustin (1973), 30–1Google Scholar.

87 cf. Brenk, F. E., ‘The dreams of Plutarch's Lives’, Latomus 34 (1975), 336–49, at 347Google Scholar; Pelling, C., ‘Tragical dreamer: some dreams in the Roman historians’, Greece and Rome 44 (1997), 197–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 199. Most suggestive of all is the passage in De Iside et Osiride 80 (Mor. 3836–3843) in which he describes how the kuphi of the Isiacs, a complex aromatic, had the (evidently desired) effect of ‘brightening and making clearer the faculty of the imagination that is receptive of oneiroi’.

88 De superstitione 3 = Mor. 165e–166c. This seems to me to be more important evidence about Plutarch himself than are the anecdotes recounted in the Lives. For a pitiful dream-interpreter see Arist. 27.

89 See above, n. 31; and see further Ep. 3.5.4, 5.5.5–6, 7.27.12–14, though there are complications in each case.

90 Fragment 9 Smith (The Epicurean Inscription, ed. M. F. Smith (1993)) = fr. 10 Casanova, col. vi, 11. 6–11. The date is hardly likely to be later than the middle of the second century: cf. Smith, pp. 39–48.

91 The logic of Roman literacy and book-distribution, combined with the (non-) evidence of the papyri, points in that direction. Artemidorus says that he wrote so as not to ‘waste’ his wisdom (4.prooem.), and 1–3 evidently circulated among experts (ibid., p. 237.18 Pack); 4–5, on the other hand, were written for his homonymous son, with explicit instructions to keep them to himself (ibid., p. 238.2–6), which he apparently did not mean literally (see 5.prooem. p. 301.15).

92 No doubt Pomeroy (above, n. 18) was right to suppose that Artemidoran interpretation had some popular appeal. Bowersock's notion, op. cit. (n. 10), 97–8, that ‘prediction was… of far more importance to the upper strata of society than the lower’ will probably persuade few. You could meet petty fortunetellers in any agora (cf. Artem. 1.prooem. p. 2.14 Pack). See Weber, G., ‘Artemidor von Daldis und sein “Publikum”’, Gymnasium 106 (1999), 209–29, at 224–5Google Scholar, who, however, struggles relentlessly to overstate the size of Artemidorus' likely readership.

93 cf. On the Method of Healing by Section of the Vein 23 (= XI.314–315K), On the Natural Faculties 1.12.29. Oberhelman, op. cit. (n. 37), portrays Galen as having been much like his predecessors in this respect, but as I have indicated that seems to be incorrect. For Galen's other references to valid dreams see Oberhelman.

94 But the short essay About Diagnosis from Dreams (VI.832–835K) that appears in the Galenic corpus seems too mechanistic and simple-minded to be Galen's genuine work. Its editor G. Demuth (1972) concluded (71) that it was a Byzantine compilation made up of Galenic material. The emperor Marcus, incidentally, credited the gods with informing him of cures by means of dreams (To Himself 1.17.20).

95 Herodian claims to have this from Septimius' autobiography. He also says (9.3) that ‘these things are believed to be honest and true when they turn out well’.

96 cf. Chariton 2.5.7; 3.1.4.

97 e.g. Chariton 3.7.4–5; Heliodorus 1.18.5; 1.16.3–4. Cf. Heliod. 2.36.2.

98 Bartsch, S., Decoding the Ancient Novel (1989), 84–94Google Scholar. Cf. Longus 1.7–8; 3.27–9; 4.34.

99 Tertullian, De an. 46, still saw Epicurus as a major opponent on the subject of dreams. Le Goff, op. cit. (n. 67), 178–82, gives an account, somewhat different from this one, of how he thinks pagan thinking about dreams developed in the period A.D. 100–250, and then continues with an investigation of what non-Christian intellectuals thought in later times (182–5), a subject which will not be pursued in this article. On the latter topic see also Athanassiadi, P., ‘Dreams, therapy and freelance divination: the testimony of Iamblichus’, JRS 83 (1993), 115–30, at 124–7Google Scholar; C. Moreschini, ‘Sogni e filosofia nella tarda antichità’, in Paideia Cristiana. Studi in onore di Mario Naldini (1994), 511–22.

100 For straightforward romantic and sexual wish-fulfilments see Chariton 5.5.5; Longus 2.10.

101 Origen, Contra Celsum 3.24; cf. Minucius Felix, Oct. 7.6 (‘per quietem deos vidimus, audimus, agnoscimus’).

102 Ammianus 21.1.12: ‘somniorum autem rata fides et indubitabilis foret, ni ratiocinantes coniectura fallerentur …’; Synesius, De insomniis 13: Penelope was quite wrong about the Gates of Horn and Ivory — if she had been an expert, ‘she would have made all dreams pass through the gates of horn’.

103 Veyne has written (op. cit. (n. 13), 384) that in general the Romans thought much as we do about predictive dreams, while considering that certain types of dreams were significant. But this judgement may under-estimate the likelihood that an ordinary Roman would take a reported dream to be auspicious or inauspicious; it also misses among other things variations from period to period.

104 Gods also appeared to artists working on divine statues: van Straten, op. cit. (n. 13), 15.

105 e.g. PGM V.488, VI.47.