On his book Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
Cover Interview of October 13, 2009
In a nutshell
From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds, Plato, Aristotle and Galen among others, paid careful attention to what dreams might mean. Yet no work in English (and only one in any other language) attempts to establish how the Greeks and Romans understood their dreams. In Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity, I make cultural history out of this material, with the help of contemporary post-Freudian science.
I contrast Greek and Roman ways of understanding dreams with those that prevail in the modern west, while contradicting the opinion that the Greeks and Romans in general treated their dreams superstitiously and credulously (sometimes they did, just as people do now).
I start with “epiphany” dreams, a type of dream still sometimes described in unmodernized societies: these are dreams consisting of “appearances” by authority figures who give orders or impart information. I explore the psychological, religious and literary reasons why this form of dream-description was so popular, trace its continuance through the Middle Ages and attempt to explain why it has virtually died out.
Did ancient people really dream like that? This question leads to another: can we ever know what any ancient person really dreamt? A number of extraordinary individuals feature in this discussion, including Saint Perpetua and the emperor Constantine. But the person who comes out of the investigation best is the hypochondriac second-century AD rhetorician Aelius Aristides, author of what is in effect antiquity’s only surviving dream diary.
Did the Greeks and Romans then believe in their dreams? What that might mean, and how Greeks and Romans of different classes and periods differed on this subject, are questions that require a careful analysis. In the book, this ranges from the relative credulity of Artemidorus of Daldis, the author of Graeco-Roman antiquity’s only surviving dream-book, to the lucid scepticism of Cicero. This is mainly an investigation of ordinary people; my last chapter by contrast assesses Greek and Roman attempts to understand dreams naturalistically. In other words the chapter is about the efforts of philosophers and physicians, some of whom – most notably Aristotle – made a large number of perceptive statements about a phenomenon, which as far as dream-content is concerned, still remains mysterious.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds, Plato, Aristotle and Galen among others, paid careful attention to what dreams might mean. Yet no work in English (and only one in any other language) attempts to establish how the Greeks and Romans understood their dreams. In Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity, I make cultural history out of this material, with the help of contemporary post-Freudian science.
I contrast Greek and Roman ways of understanding dreams with those that prevail in the modern west, while contradicting the opinion that the Greeks and Romans in general treated their dreams superstitiously and credulously (sometimes they did, just as people do now).
I start with “epiphany” dreams, a type of dream still sometimes described in unmodernized societies: these are dreams consisting of “appearances” by authority figures who give orders or impart information. I explore the psychological, religious and literary reasons why this form of dream-description was so popular, trace its continuance through the Middle Ages and attempt to explain why it has virtually died out.
Did ancient people really dream like that? This question leads to another: can we ever know what any ancient person really dreamt? A number of extraordinary individuals feature in this discussion, including Saint Perpetua and the emperor Constantine. But the person who comes out of the investigation best is the hypochondriac second-century AD rhetorician Aelius Aristides, author of what is in effect antiquity’s only surviving dream diary.
Did the Greeks and Romans then believe in their dreams? What that might mean, and how Greeks and Romans of different classes and periods differed on this subject, are questions that require a careful analysis. In the book, this ranges from the relative credulity of Artemidorus of Daldis, the author of Graeco-Roman antiquity’s only surviving dream-book, to the lucid scepticism of Cicero. This is mainly an investigation of ordinary people; my last chapter by contrast assesses Greek and Roman attempts to understand dreams naturalistically. In other words the chapter is about the efforts of philosophers and physicians, some of whom – most notably Aristotle – made a large number of perceptive statements about a phenomenon, which as far as dream-content is concerned, still remains mysterious.