BOOKS Classical dreaming

Barry Baldwin explores a new translation of a famous Greek work and a companion commentary on it

The Interpretation of Dreams

Artemidorus, ed. Peter Thonemann & Martin Hammond

Oxford Universirty Press 2020

Pb, 416pp, £10.99, ISBN 9780198797951

An Ancient Dream Manual

Artemidorus’ The Interpretation of Dreams

Peter Thonemann

Oxford Universirty Press 2020

Hb, 256pp, £20, ISBN 9780198843825

Artemidorus’s work from the second century AD is the only survivor of many such “Dreams for Dummies” compilations, which go back to the fifth century

BC. He naturally considers his the best.

Thonemann and Hammond provide a richly annotated translation of Artemidorus, with Thonemann’s separate book backgrounding this Graeco-Roman dream merchant, his clients, and their world.

Stressing the practical, with several hundred case histories, Artemidorus was aiming at punters rather than professors – “People who go to fortune-tellers are functioning conservatives” (Fort, Books, p668).

Given the number of athletes’ dreams, Thonemann suggests Artemidorus might have set up a stall at Olympia to flog his book. Granting this, Dream Books may have been sold at other focused locations. Dentists, perhaps; Thonemann remarks on the plethora of orthodontic dreams – Moments of Tooth...?

Also notable is the number of bird dreams, perhaps connected with Artemidorus’s lost book on ornithoscopy.

Derided by older-generation classicists, Artemidorus made a 20th-century comeback, thanks to Jung (“The peak of scientific dream exegesis”) and especially Freud. The Viennese trick-cyclist hails him as true founder, shares his pre-occupation with puns and word play, and agrees that dreams are products of “daytime residue”: ancient explanations ranged from heaven-sent (Homer; but Aristotle thought this “ridiculous”) to Epicurean notions of random atoms assaulting minds made vulnerable by sleep). One vital distinction. Freud concentrated on explaining the past; Artemidorus interpreted for the future.

Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, subject of Thonemann’s chapter 5) applauds Artemidorus’s view that sex is largely a class-based phallic issue: who penetrates whom? There’s lashings of what Hammond and Thonemann dub “mind-boggling sex” – some call it an ancient Kinsey Report. His erotic panoply runs to such distinctive feats as auto-fellatio (surely only for acrobats and gymnasts) and more sedate oral activities.

Another dream is of being naked in public. Fort (p686) regards this as “disagreeable”. His frequent oneiric remarks may be influenced by his dreamobsessed friend, Theodore Dreiser.

Hammond and Thonemann contrast Brian Masters’ Dreams about HM the Queen (1972) with the Roman emperor’s absence from Artemidorus. They rightly emphasise his focus on everyday life, such as children playing in streets alongside ranting madmen, dung-heaps, brothels and street conjurers doing the three-ball and cup trick.

Slave dreams predominate. They may well have been eager Dream Book buyers. The universal favourite is the one who saw himself grow three cocks. Explanation: he would be freed and so earn the right to triple Roman nomenclature.

This is not the first English translation of Artemidorus – Thonemann traces that story from 1559; others run from Arabic to Welsh. There was RJ White (1975) and Daniel Harris-McCoy (2012), praised by Thonneman (TLS 2013) who here changes tack and condemns its “unreliable translations”.

This complementary pair of books naturally overlap on Artemidorus’s life and background and Dream Book history. Both provide very select bibliographies and Brobdingnagian indexes (61 pages, compared to White’s eight). A useful appendix on Greek numerals/numerology is appended. The translations naturally often vary little from previous ones, except when they depart from Roger Pack’s canonical Teubner Greek text; there’s a list of variant readings. The richly-annotated translations are balanced and enriched by Thonemann’s 11 chapters lucidly, sometimes wittily, exploring all aspects of Artemidorus and his twin worlds of dreams and reality.

A caveat: William Harris in Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity (2009) dismissed Artemidorus as “a man of monumental gullibility” who made up these dreams, rendering them useless as a sociological treasure-house. If true, all bets are off. However, Harris has lost the ensuing academic dog-fight.

“An undistorted interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer could not continue to exist in a dreaming mind because that touch of relative realness would be of awakening and not of dreaming” (Fort p22). Interpretation ★★★★★ Dream Manual