Tragical Dreamer: Some Dreams in the Roman Historians

There are many ways of classifying dreams. This paper is concerned with only one, perhapsthe most fundamental: one which also – we are told – captures the most important difference between modern and ancient dream-interpretation. Ancient audiences were primed to expect dreams to be prophetic, to come from outside and give knowledge, however ambiguously, of the future, or at least of the otherwise unknowable present. This sort of dream is hard to distinguish from the ‘night-time vision’, and indeed it is sometimes hard with dreams in ancient literature to tell whether the recipient is asleep or not. For moderns, especially but not only Freudians, dreams come from within, and are interesting for what they tell us about the current psychology of the dreamer: for Freudians, the aspects of the repressed unconscious which fight to the surface; for most or all of us, the way in which dreams re-sort our daytime preoccupations, hopes, and fears. This distinction between ancient and modern was set out and elaborated a few years ago by Simon Price; it was also drawn by Freud himself. At the risk of oversimplification, we could say the first approach assimilates dreams to divination, the second to fantasy - with all the illumination that, as we increasingly realize, fantasy affords into the everyday world, as it juggles the normal patterns of waking reality at the same time as challenging them by their difference.