Chapter Four
The Reality of Dreams

The reader of ancient fiction enters a world in which dreams appear significantly in the exposition of plot and character. The relevance of these episodes to life in the imperial age is hard to assess, because dreams are inherently mysterious and elusive. Dreams, both real and imagined, can often strain credulity, and yet they are bound to tell us something about the world that generates them. There can be no doubt of their importance even among the highly educated. The great doctor Galen in the second century of the Christian era wrote that, although some people paid no attention to dreams, he held them in high regard. "I know," he said, "that I have often made a diagnosis from dreams; and, guided by two very dear dreams, I once made an incision into the artery between the thumb and index finger of the right hand." Nor, it seems, was this a unique success: "I have saved many people," Galen goes on to say, "by applying a cure prescribed in a dream."^[1]

Coming from one of the founders of scientific medicine and one of the most broadly cultured physicians that ever lived, these observations have a special importance. They prove that taking dreams seriously was hardly a characteristic of the ignorant or poor. Dreams had an immediate, practical relevance for daily

life, even among the very highly educated. Galen does not tell us exactly how the successful cures were revealed to him in his dreams, or who, if anyone, prescribed them. His contemporary the great sophist Aelius Aristides often saw the god Asclepius in dreams in Pergamum, and it was from that divine source that he undertook many bizarre treatments for his illness over more than a decade.^[2] Also in Pergamum Aristides' rival sophist Polemo set up a statue of Demosthenes, his great predecessor, together with an inscription to commemorate a dream that he had there.^[3] The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius expressed gratitude in his Meditations for help furnished in dreams.^[4] Galen's younger contemporaries the emperor Septimius Severus and the historian Cassius Dio were drawn to one another through their shared confidence in the importance of dreams. Dio tells us that he had narrated the dreams that foretold Severus's rise to power in a small work that antedated his own great history, which was itself set in motion by a dream.^[5] It is reported that in his autobiography the emperor himself gave an account of the marvelous dreaming that anticipated his accession.^[6]

Significant dreaming was nothing new in the second century. It went back in the classical tradition as far as Homer. It figured

prominently in the historical narratives of Herodotus and the classical Greek theater. As Galen said, some disparaged it, but dearly most did not. From time immemorial dreams tended to uncover the anxieties or ambitions of the dreamer, as well as to provide advice for the future. Sometimes the appearance of a god imparted a divine authority to the dream, and sometimes a dream seemed actually to foretell the future. But generally predictions took the form of prescriptions. In other words the dreamer was told what to do, and the dream thus had its predictive force when the prescription was carried out. The predictive interpretation of dreams that were not in any way prescriptive was another matter altogether. This was a form of occultism, a pseudoscience like the reading of palms or the interpretation of animals' entrails. It involved seeing one thing—or rather hearing reports of seeing one thing—and determining, on the basis of it, some other thing that would happen in the future.

In the first book of his work on divination Cicero made this point unambiguously. He distinguished two forms of prophetic activity that human beings turn to sine ratione et scientia — "without reason or knowledge."^[7] These are oracular utterances by a possessed intermediary and individual dreams. Cicero discussed both at length, and in his treatment of dreams (somnia ) accorded ample attention to the inescapable fact that many dreams depict or predict what is simply false. At multa falsa ;^[8] yet, we are told, many are not so much false as obscure and have to be interpreted. Even so, some are really false. Clearly guidance is called for, and the ancient world was not lacking in people to provide it. Most of them, like Artemidorus of Daldis, would have

blushed to admit that their work was accomplished, in Cicero's words, without reason or science.

The predictive interpretation of dreams is best known to us in the extensive dream analysis provided in the ' by Artemidorus, who was yet another contemporary of Galen in the second century.^[9] Sigmund Freud thought, by his own admission, that he had found in Artemidorus's book a worthy antecedent in the study of the interpretation of dreams.^[10] To the extent that Artemidorus collected accounts of interesting dreams, Freud was right. But Freud, as we all know, was interested in dreams as a reflection of the unconscious and as a revelation of suppressed anxieties. Artemidorus, by contrast, had little interest in that aspect of dream interpretation. His own theory carefully segregated what he called , those dreams that are no more and no less than a reflection of the fears and desires of the dreamer while awake, from the , which he distinguished as those dreams that either directly or allegorically indicate what the future will be for the dreamer. These latter dreams, the were the principal concern of Artemidorus, and it is obvious why they were. In an age long before the existence of the psychoanalyst's couch, a dream interpreter who did nothing but uncover the hidden complexes of the dreamer would not be likely to have

had many clients. What everybody wanted to know was what was going to happen in the future. Hence a canny interpreter of dreams would inevitably devote himself to the science of prediction. This means that Artemidorus is at least as different from Freud as a fortune teller is from a psychoanalyst.

Artemidorus intended to be just as scientific in his research and deductions as Freud. He compiled extensive records of dreams of all imaginable kinds (and, it must be said, many that are quite unimaginable), and to this end he traveled the known world attending public gatherings, fairs, festivals, and any thronged occasion where he could confer with dreamers or (one suspects) also imaginative poseurs.^[11] For Artemidorus the social level of the dreamer and the social context within which the dreams were experienced mattered enormously.^[12] One has the impression that Artemidorus was not only assiduous in his work, but something of a snob. A well-adjusted dreamer, who lived a good life, could never, according to Artemidorus, have such uninteresting dreams as because he would not be subject to the kinds of fears or anxieties that would be reflected in nonpredictive dreams of that sort. Such breathtaking naiveté must have astonished Freud, but it probably reflects the clientele that Artemidorus proposed

to serve. The better sort of people had only , or predictive dreams. Those were the only kinds of dreams he was interested in discussing.^[13] From his lofty position Artemidorus was able to castigate his rivals as no better than tricksters and magicians. Gaining a good reputation as a dream interpreter was probably not all that easy. It required the aggressive salesmanship that Artemidorus obviously had in abundance. The reader of Petronius's Satyricon will recall Ascyltos's tart question about fancy speakers: "Would I have to listen to well-turned phrases that are like scraps of broken glass and the interpretation of dreams?"^[14] He is talking about trash.

Artemidorus aspired not to write trash. He chose as his targets an essentially elite audience. These were people who never had dreams reflecting troublesome fears and desires, because, in his view, their superior style of life freed them from such emotions. It can hardly be possible, therefore, that Artemidorus is a reliable witness to the ordinary world of conventions and presuppositions in the second century. Yet enthusiasm for Artemidorus's book of dream analysis in recent years has paradoxically cast him in this remarkable role. One thoughtful writer, Jack Winkler in his Constraints of Desire , describes Artemidorus as "a dream analyst who spent years investigating the social meanings which average people saw in their dreams." He goes on to say, "His theory and practice of interpretation uniquely qualify him as a witness to common conceptions because he sees his role as one of letting the social meanings held by his clients speak for themselves."^[15] The same writer asserts with confidence, "Artemidorus's categorization of sexual acts corresponds to widespread

and long-enduring social norms—that is, to the public perception of the meaning of sexual behavior."^[16]

The architect of this representation of Artemidorus's work would appear to be Michel Foucault, who declared, in his History of Sexuality , that the dream analyses of Artemidorus let us "see certain generally accepted schemas of evaluation." He generalized this point immediately by saying, "One can affirm these are very near to the general principles which already in the classical period organized the moral experience of aphrodisia . Artemidorus's book is therefore a landmark. It testifies to a scheme of thinking that was long enduring and current in his day."^[17] Foucault stated explicitly that the type of dreamer to whom Artemidorus addressed himself was an ordinary person—un individu ordinaire , concerned with health, life, death, and material prosperity. His clientele was middle-level (moyenne ). He is alleged to discuss the preoccupations of ordinary people (des gens ordinaires ).^[18]

A reader of Artemidorus may well wonder how what appears there can conceivably represent "generally accepted schemas of evaluation" or constitute "a scheme of thinking that was long enduring and current in his day." We look in vain for any basis for such an assessment of Artemidorus's work. Nowhere else in the whole of classical antiquity can one find, for example, a man who "dreamed that he was feeding bread and cheese to his penis as if it were an animal,"^[19] nor is there anything to compare with Artemidorus's detailed account of dreams of sexual intercourse

with one's mother. Incest, to be sure, played an important role in Greek culture and Greek tragedy before it was taken over as a particular preserve by Freud. But Artemidorus's approach to sex with one's mother is something altogether unexampled. His treatment of this unappetizing subject is central to Winkler's argument and is reprinted in full as an appendix to his book.^[20] (This part of Artemidorus's work, incidentally, was omitted from Krauss's nineteenth-century German translation, which Freud used.)

In his clinical way Artemidorus states, "The analysis of the mother is intricate, elaborate, and susceptible of many discriminations. It has eluded many dream analysts. It goes as follows— intercourse in itself is not sufficient to show the intended significance of the dream, but the postures and positions of the bodies, being different, make the outcome different." From this point Artemidorus goes on to discuss in remarkable detail the various positions that a son might take in having intercourse with his mother.

Frontal penetration, which Artemidorus declares some people consider perfectly natural, will predict a falling out with one's father, if he is still alive (because, we are hardly surprised to learn, of the jealousy involved). If the father is ill, the dream predicts that he will then die. On the other hand, a frontal approach constitutes a good dream for all craftsmen and laborers, "for it is usual to refer to one's craft as 'mother,' and what else could sexual intimacy with one's craft signify except having no leisure and being productive from it." Artemidorus then moves on to less natural forms of congress with one's mother. Anal penetration, he says, is very bad for the future; and, if the mother is on top and riding the son, this is very difficult to interpret. Sick men

who have this dream always die, but healthy ones live out the remainder of their lives in great ease and just as they choose.

These are only a few of the possible forms of incestuous congress that interest Artemidorus, but there is absolutely nothing in the literature and art of classical antiquity to suggest that what we find here represents, in Foucault's words, "a scheme of thinking that was long enduring and current in [Artemidorus's] day." It is more than likely that the dreams reported by Artemidorus were really dreamed by someone. Psychoanalysts with whom I have spoken can see here, as Freud did in the case of other Artemidorean dreams, the signs of authentic dream experiences. But like the dreams recorded and analyzed by Freud himself, these experiences by their very nature as dreams lie outside the conventions and protocols of ordinary life. If we were to describe current thinking at the end of the nineteenth century on the basis of the dreams in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams , we should certainly produce an unrecognizable and unhistorical world.

In short, there is every reason to believe that Artemidorus's book is exceptional precisely because it includes so many dreams that would have otherwise been known only to the dreamer. Those dreams may take their origin in the substrate of common conventions and protocols that some have sought to find there, but they hardly provide a simple index of the patterns of waking life. Even granting, as we should, that the dreams of Foucault's ordinary people can be extraordinary—that dream fantasies can indeed often astonish the dreamer after waking up (as well as others who may hear of them)—we can find nothing in the manual that Artemidorus put together that allows the sexual acts he describes there to be said to correspond "with widespread and long-enduring social norms." Parallels are utterly lacking, and without them the wish-fulfilling fantasies of scholars can have little probative value. The attempt to enlist Artemidorus as a hitherto-unnoticed sexual libertarian and to deduce from his

work that the whole Graeco-Roman world took everything he talked about as perfectly consonant with daily life is one of the most serious, if well-intentioned, misrepresentations of antiquity that the modern world has yet beheld.

Since dreams are so important in the fictional literature of Artemidorus's own day, most conspicuously in the novels, it would be worth looking at a selection of the dreams that appear in those works to see whether or not they provide any support for understanding the dream book of Artemidorus as a precious repository of common views. One of this century's leading interpreters of the ancient novel, Bryan Reardon, has recently written quite correctly, "Dreams and their interpretation much interested antiquity, certainly late antiquity, and are a standard feature of novels."^[21] That is certainly correct. But do their dreams parallel the researches of Artemidorus? Dreams in fiction, as well as those that eminent public figures like Marcus Aurelius may feel comfortable in telling to the whole world, are the product of the mind when it is fully awake. These are the dreams that ought to tell us something about current thought and morality, as well as attitudes toward dreaming itself. Can they possibly look like what we read in Artemidorus?

In a recent paper on this very question one scholar was moved to answer in the affirmative. She summarized her conclusions as follows: "Dreams in the novels relate to personal goals, anxieties, or fears. These oneiric aspirations reflect the contemporary waking world where the predominant feeling is for 'self.' The same observation can be made in the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, the novels' approximate contemporary. In addition, the novelists' treatment of and attitude toward ways of identifying and inter-

preting dreams also conforms to Artemidorus's system. The novels contain examples from all the diverse dream categories that he envisaged."^[22] Apart from the writer's observation about personal goals, anxieties, and fears in the novels, virtually everything here is wrong. Artemidorus's ' are not principally concerned with personal goals, anxieties, and fears. The way in which the novelists identify and interpret dreams does not conform to Artemidorus's system. And, after what we have already looked at, it must be obvious that it is absurd to suggest that the novels contain examples from all the diverse dream categories that Artemidorus envisaged.

What follows now is a sample of dreams from the major novelists in Greek, who ought to provide the best points of comparison with Artemidorus's Greek constituency. In what is probably the earliest of the novels, Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe , the pirate Theron, who has abducted the heroine from her tomb (where she had unfortunately been placed when unconscious), contemplates throwing her into the sea at the break of day because she would be a difficult cargo. But he falls asleep and has a dream in which he sees a dosed door. This he believes to be an admonition to wait for at least a day.^[23] So he does wait for a day, and the story is able to continue in its meandering way without the sacrifice of the heroine at an early stage. In a later dream the heroine, Callirhoe, herself sees her lover, Chaereas, in chains.^[24] The dream is clairvoyant, because Chaereas actually is in chains, but Callirhoe misinterprets it. She says explicitly that this must signify death, yet clearly it does not, because the story

goes on. Callirhoe's interpretation is simply a reflection of her anxiety, just as her dream had itself been a reflection of her love for Chaereas. Still farther along in the same novel Callirhoe dreams that she is in Syracuse, her homeland, entering the shrine of Aphrodite.^[25] There she beholds her beloved Chaereas. Unfortunately she wakes up just before she embraces him. This is obviously another reflection of her love for Chaereas and her desire to be united with him.

From the romance of Xenophon of Ephesus we may excerpt the dream of Anthia, the heroine, in which a beautiful woman draws away her beloved, Habrocomes.^[26] This is transparently a sign of her anxiety that some other woman will win the affections of her true love. In Achilles Tatius, near the beginning of the novel, the hero, Cleitophon, has a dream of his beloved,^[27] in much the same way as Callirhoe dreams several times in Chariton of her beloved. In the second book of Achilles Tatius's romance Pantheia has a grisly dream in which her daughter is sliced in two by a bandit.^[28] This may perhaps anticipate, in an artistic way, the false sacrifice of her daughter at the hands of the Boukoloi a book later; but, since the daughter survives, the dream could hardly be called predictive. It is, rather, another dream of anxiety and fear. In the fourth book of the same romance the heroine, Leucippe, dreams that she is going to be butchered, but the goddess Artemis appears.^[29] The dream reflects the dangers and anxieties of Leucippe. She is, after all, a lady who seems to die repeatedly in Achilles Tatius's romance, although she never really does. Her beloved, Cleitophon, had had a dream rather like that of the

pirate Theron in Chariton, in which he sees closed doors at a temple of Aphrodite, and he construes this as an admonition to him to wait before proceeding.^[30]

This sampling of dreams from three Greek novels, of roughly the same century as the work of Artemidorus, points unmistakably to a lack of interest in predicting the future from dreams. Like Freud, the Greek novelists are far more concerned with reflections of the fears and desires of the dreamers, particularly fears of death and desires for the lover's embrace. The only dreams that are not of this form are admonitions, in which the dreamer infers what he should do on the basis of what he has seen in a dream. We have noted in two cases a closed door interpreted as an admonition to wait. None of these dreams can be paralleled by anything in Artemidorus.

But perhaps we should not expect to find parallels there. Artemidorus is, after all, interested only in , not in . Nonetheless it is worth noting that the chains that Callirhoe believed to be a sign of death are indeed registered in Artemidorus, but as nothing more sinister than a sign of obstruction to one's activities. A chain can also make reference to a spouse, declares Artemidorus on suspect etymological grounds, but again there is no suggestion of death.^[31] As for the kind of bodily mutilation that threatened Leucippe in the novel by Achilles Tatius, Artemidorus has much to say, with his interpretations varying according to the part of the body that is mutilated. Yet, with all his detail, his observations on injuries to the midsection bear very little resemblance to Leucippe's plight. If you dream of being cut open when you are poor or childless, you may expect to acquire chil-

dren and property. But, if you are rich, shame or deprivation will be in store. It is very bad for anyone to have his or her entrails seen by another.^[32] Pantheia would hardly have had any solace if she had been aware of such interpretations when she dreamed that her daughter was cut in two.

Admonitions interest Artemidorus scarcely at all, and yet they are very important for the novelists. Sometimes a sign conveys the advice, as in the case of the closed door, or more often a god appears in a dream, as so often happened to Aelius Aristides, to communicate the advice directly. This happens, for example, in the novel by Achilles Tatius when the goddess Artemis appears in a dream to Leucippe's father, Sostratus, to reveal that he should go to find his daughter in Ephesus and his brother's son as well.^[33] In the latest of the romances, Heliodorus's novel about Ethiopia, Calasiris records that Apollo and Artemis appeared together to him in a dream and entrusted both Theagenes and Charicleia, the lovers, to his care. Apollo made the commitment of Theagenes and Artemis of Charicleia. They addressed Calasiris by name in the dream and gave him an explicit injunction: "It is time now for you to return to the land of your birth, for thus the ordinance of destiny demands. Go then, and take those whom we deliver to you; make them the companions of your journey; consider them as your own children."^[34] Dreams of this kind are essentially like those in Aristides and probably also those in Galen, in which admonition, with the direct or perhaps indirect intercession of a divinity, is the principal ingredient and purpose of the dream. Although Artemidorus devotes consider-

able attention to the appearance of deities in dreams,^[35] he has no interest at all in the advice that they may give. His concern is entirely with the symbolic value of the deities for making predictions of the future.

Heliodorus's account of dreams is generally far more subtle and sophisticated than what we find in the other novelists. He exploits with consummate artistry the tendency of people to misinterpret their dreams, and in doing so he allows the reader as well as the characters to be misled. Shadi Bartsch, in her study of description (ekphrasis ) in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, has lucidly analyzed the ambivalence of dream interpretation.^[36] At the end of Book 2 Heliodorus makes Calasiris compare dreams with oracles as revelations that can only be interpreted properly once the outcome is known. Skepticism of this kind had already turned up early in the work when the robber Thyamis forced the interpretation of a dream he had about Charicleia and Isis "to conform," as Heliodorus says, "with his own desires." Later on he is obliged to reinterpret the same dream all over again.^[37]

The uncertainty of dream interpretation predominates even in a scene in which one of the characters hits upon a solution that reflects rather more experience in the art. Charicleia dreamed that an evil man cut out her right eye with a sword. She promptly but erroneously interpreted this to mean that her beloved Theagenes would be killed—"my eye, my soul, my all." Not so,

says Cnemon, awakened from a sleep of his own. The loss of the right eye means the loss of her father.^[38] As Bartsch and J. R. Morgan have both independently observed, this interpretation actually coincides with the professional judgment of Artemidorus on such a dream,^[39] and in a sense it even turns out to have a specious element of truth in it—if one accepts Calasiris as a kind of father to Charicleia, although he, in fact, is not her father. But even Cnemon brushes aside his own interpretation by saying, "Here we are analyzing dreams and figments of the imagination and not pausing for a moment to think how to solve our own problems."^[40] He, who obviously knows something of the trade, dismisses it as unproductive.

As Charicleia's dream shows, prophetic dreams are not altogether absent from the novels, nor should any reader of Cicero's De Divinatione expect them to be. But they are relatively infrequent. Perhaps the most startling occurs near the opening of Achilles Tatius's story of Leucippe and Cleitophon, when the narrator, Cleitophon himself, records a dream of Artemidorean strangeness, in which his half-sister's body and his own are seen to have grown together from the navel down. (Details are not provided.) A terrible woman with bloodshot eyes and snakes for hair hacks the two bodies apart where they were joined at the groin. This dream is introduced as prophetic: "Often the celestial powers delight to whisper to us at night about what the future holds—not that we may contrive a defense to forestall it (for no one can rise above fate), but that we may bear it more lightly

when it comes."^[41] The dreadful dream portended that Cleitophon would not be marrying his half-sister, as his father had wished.

Later in the same novel one of the characters, Sostratus, complains to Artemis that what he had taken to be a prediction in a dream actually was not. The passage is less interesting for its allusion to dreams of the predictive kind than for the Greek word used there for dreams. It violates completely the definition laid down by Artemidorus. The allegedly predictive dream is called . In upbraiding Artemis Sostratus can even speak of ("the prophecies of "). And that he sees no difference whatever between an and an is conclusively shown in his very next utterance, in which he says to the goddess, "I trusted your dreams." This time the word is .^[42]

It is fair to say that the fiction of the Roman imperial period reinforces completely the impression that nonfictional texts, such as those of Aristides, Cassius Dio, and Galen, provide in the matter of taking dreams seriously. That is to say, they were indeed taken seriously, but principally as reflections of the fears or desires of the dreamer or else as sources of instruction or advice for future conduct. In other words, these texts illustrate the same kinds of dreams as interested Freud. They do not represent a view of dreams chiefly as predictive materials. Artemidorus's position is that of a professional dream interpreter, a kind of superior fortune teller, a man who aspires to an affluent clientele that, in his view, does not have anything to do with anxiety and wish fulfillment. Artemidorus is a snob. It is no surprise that of the people he mentions by name several are famous characters of the time—the

philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea, the orator and teacher of emperors Cornelius Fronto from North Africa, and the affluent Ruso of Laodicea.^[43] The person called Cassius Maximus to whom Artemidorus dedicated the first three books of his was evidently someone of consequence too, and quite probably none other than the great rhetorician Maximus of Tyre.^[44]

The highly exceptional character of Artemidorus's work shows up in another of his dogmatic pronouncements. For centuries the Greeks and the Romans believed that dreams and visions that occurred after midnight were true, whereas those that came to the sleeper before midnight were false. The literature on this popular belief is substantial, and most readers of Virgil will be reminded of the gates of true and false dreams in the sixth book of the Aeneid .^[45] Artemidorus is perfectly well aware that

this was the received opinion, but he, presenting himself as a truly scientific interpreter of dreams, takes a different view—a view that could hardly be more out of line with contemporary sentiment. It makes no difference when the dreams occur, according to Artemidorus, whether at night or even in the daytime; nor does it matter whether they occur in the twilight of the evening or the twilight of the dawn. The only thing that Artemidorus worries about is whether or not the sleeper has had a sufficiently light meal before dreaming. He is adamant that overindulgence at the dinner table eliminates the possibility of having true dreams, even when the dreams occur the next morning at dawn.^[46]

That such pseudoscientific precision is utterly at variance with contemporary opinion can be seen arrestingly in the tract of the polytheist Celsus against the Christians. It will be recalled that he found so much implausibility in the Gospels that he saw in the tale of Jesus a fiction that looked very little different from the novelists we have been examining earlier. The epiphany of Jesus after his death seemed to Celsus nothing more than a routine dream or hallucination. Celsus attributed the whole story of the risen Jesus essentially to a report of a hysterical female, Mary Magdalene. The appearance of a presumably dead man was, for Celsus, no more than a dream "in a certain state of mind or through wishful thinking ... due to some mistaken notion—an experience that has happened to thousands."^[47] Visions of the dead in dreams, if not exactly an ordinary occurrence, certainly are mentioned frequently enough in the literature of antiquity to give some plausibility to Celsus's hostile interpretation.

In making his rebuttal, the Christian apologist Origen accused Celsus of suggesting that certain people were actually

dreaming in the daytime, something he implies neither of them would have thought at all plausible. Although Celsus was a younger contemporary of Artemidorus, he was unlikely to have had the advantage of reading his Oneirocritica . And, if he had, Origen could still attack him by referring to the conventional opinion. Origen admitted that Celsus's opinion "would not be unreasonable if the visions had occurred by night; but his idea of a vision in the daytime is not convincing, when the people were in no way mentally unbalanced and were not suffering from delirium or melancholy."^[48] Needless to say, Origen was not prepared to acknowledge that Mary Magdalene was "a hysterical female."

From a non-Christian perspective, visions of the dead in sleep were far easier to credit than resurrection in the flesh. In the generation after Celsus's interpretation of the life of Jesus, the sophist Philostratus composed a life of the pagan sage and wise man Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius was reported to have wrought miracles so remarkably similar to those of Jesus Christ that, in the days of the Tetrarchs in the early fourth century, another polytheist writer was able to take up the cause of Celsus by advancing Apollonius as the Antichrist.^[49] Nonetheless, when Apollonius finally died, toward the end of the first century of the Christian era, he may perhaps have left the tomb in which he was placed. Philostratus, at any rate, allows for this possibility.^[50] Yet no one dared to report that he saw Apollonius resurrected in the flesh. But a little after nine months had passed, a boy fell

asleep while engaged in a discussion of wisdom with his friends. In the midst of his sleep Apollonius came to him and declaimed in his dream on the nature of the soul.^[51] If we are not told whether this took place in the daytime or at night, it is undoubtedly because the discussion took place at night. The boy's companions were drawing geometrical figures in the sand, but this detail neither tells us whether the group was indoors or outside, nor does it tell the hour. Dreaming in the daytime would have been as implausible for Philostratus as for Origen.

Dreaming was undoubtedly an important part of the spiritual and intellectual life of Greeks and Romans in the time of the Roman empire. It was as important to the highly educated as to the illiterate. But a professional dream interpreter should no more condition our understanding of this important aspect of Graeco-Roman society than a soothsayer should instruct us on the ancient view of birds or animals. Artemidorus was a diligent researcher and, without any doubt, exceptionally thorough in compiling the most varied and outlandish assortment of dreams ever examined by a single person. Certainly Freud cannot compete with Artemidorus in the promulgation of remarkable dreams. Just as art dealers are very rarely disinterested, though often exceptionally learned and intelligent, so too was Artemidorus never disinterested: he had a product to sell, and he was proud of his product. It was the predictive interpretation of dreams. Prediction was something that was of far more importance to the upper strata of society than the lower. Those who possessed property or power had more to lose—or gain. It was the rich, the ruling class, the emperors who had the most at stake in ascertaining what the future held, and who could afford to

summon to their aid the professional astrologers and soothsayers, and the likes of Artemidorus.

The Graeco-Roman world had just as much interest in the projection of fears and desires in dreams as we would expect any human society to have. They had, perhaps fortunately, no Freud to interpret their dreams of this kind, but they did have their gods to give explicit instructions when dreams could be ambiguous. It would be wrong to assume that the obsession with the purely predictive interpretation of dreams, as we find it in Artemidorus, represents anything commonplace or fundamental at all in the ancient world. It is a grossly illegitimate move to appropriate Artemidorus as a representative of the masses of Greeks and Romans and to impute to them protocols of sexuality or morality on the basis of his dream book. Artemidorus does indeed deserve a place in the history of the period, but his place remains as a scholar of the occult, a chronicler of the unconscious mind, and a professional profiteer in the business of making forecasts. He is an archaeologist of sleep, whose research may remind us of Freud but whose objectives clearly do not. He belongs in the company of the best astrologers and soothsayers. For the historian, it is paradoxically the fiction of the age that eloquently confirms the outlook of the many historical figures who spoke for it, like Galen, Marcus Aurelius, Cassius Dio, and Origen. It is the fiction that delivers dreams of real historical significance in antiquity, for these were dreams that were created by a wakeful author in conscious submission to the moral and emotional expectations of his age.