What did the Romans dream about?
6/4/202655 min
Nearly 2000 years before Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, a sage in Ephesus (now in Turkey) wrote a book whose title translates as… The Interpretation of Dreams. Armed with Artemidorus’ book, Mary and Charlotte dive into the surreal and revealing dreamscape of the Ancients. If you’ve ever had a dream about flying or losing teeth or sex with a stranger, well… Artemidorus has a view about what this really means. Today, we might find his interpretations a little too neat and prescriptive, but they provide a fascinating insight into life on the edge of the Roman empire, including what people chatted (or sang) about at the public baths, the prevalence of mice in the home, and the hopes, aspirations and fears of household slaves. As with our episodes on Roman joke and cook books, we discover that the Ancients were simultaneously more like us and more dissimilar than we might expect. Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading: The best translation of Artemidorus is by Martin Hammond in the Oxford World’s Classics series (OUP,pb, 2020) with an introduction by Peter Thonemann. Thonemann discusses the text and its context in his An Ancient Dream Manual: Artemidorus’ The Interpretation of Dreams (OUP, 2020) A classic article is by Simon Price, “The future of dreams: from Freud to Artemidorus”, originally published in Past and Present for 1986, reprinted in R Osborne (ed), Studies in Greek and Roman Society (Cambridge UP, pb, 2012) @instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube @insta_classics for X email: instantclassicspod@gmail.com Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci Producer: Jonty Claypole Video Editor: Jak Ford Theme music: Casey Gibson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMary Beard· Host0:00
"Dreaming of intercourse with your mother has a multifaceted complexity, allowing a degree of analysis which has escaped many interpreters of dreams."
Charlotte Higgins· Host0:11
Those are not the words of Sigmund Freud. [laughs] They were written in the 2nd century CE by a man called Artemidorus from what is now Turkey. He was the author of The Interpretation of Dreams, the only guide that has survived from antiquity to what your dreams might mean. And almost 2,000 years later, Freud was really quite a fan.
Mary Beard· Host0:39
And they are, I think we have to warn you, sometimes quite fruity when you get down to the details of this.
Charlotte Higgins· Host0:46
[laughs] [laughs] Sure are.
Mary Beard· Host0:47
But still, dreams are everywhere in ancient literature. Um, there's some Perpetua's dreams in the nights before her martyrdom that we looked at in an earlier episode. There's Penelope's dream in Homer's Odyssey of an eagle killing a flock of geese, supposedly a sign that her husband Odysseus was about to appear and kill those unwelcome visitors who were gobbling up his house and home.
Charlotte Higgins· Host1:14
The Emperor Nero was supposed to be a really big dreamer at, uh, tricky moments. So according to his biographer, Suetonius, after he'd had his mother murdered, he dreamt that he was covered with ants and that the back