What did the Romans dream about?

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)

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