Ancient Roman Dreams

Ancient Roman dreams weren’t just unlike our own because of the differences in physical environment, although that of course mattered. We probably don’t dream about breakfast foods made with fish oil, walking around in tunics, or bathing publicly in enormous baths (not usually, anyway). And cell phones, indoor lighting, and skyscrapers could never have been envisioned by Ancient Romans. But Romans even thought about the function of dreams differently from us. Absent Freud’s ideas about the subconcious, Romans thought that dreams could be a source of otherwise hidden truths and reveal meanings about life that might normally be unclear.

Cicero’s _Dream of Scipio_ (Somnium Scipionis) is a case in point. The first-century BCE orator Cicero wrote a fictional story of a dream he had in which the famed Scipio Africanus appears to his grandson in a vision to tell him all about the nature of reality. Scipio relates how human souls descend from the stars, forgetting all knowledge of the heavens as they descend to earth and become embodied in flesh. He discusses the makeup of the celestial spheres — you can see the dreamer in the image, and the spheres making up the stars and outer planets Jupiter, Mars, the sun (solis), and Venus appearing above. (#notactuallyrealastronomy).

Oraclular visitations were only one type of dream Romans recognized. The writer Macrobius (f. 398-422 CE) actually categorized five different classes of dreams in a commentary he wrote about Cicero’s _Dream_: the enigmatic dream, prophetic vision, oraclular dream, nightmare, and apparition. Although he considered the latter two types reflective of anxieties and not worth taking too seriously, the first three types he thought were external messages bringing insight and truth to the sleeper.

The second image is a 12th-century illustration of Macrobius giving his writings to his son, to whom he dedicated his works.