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- [00:00]
A
Dreaming of intercourse with your mother has a multifaceted complexity, allowing a degree of analysis which has escaped many interpreters of dreams.
- [00:12]
B
Those are not the words of Sigmund Freud. 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.
- [00:40]
A
And they are, I think we have to warn you, sometimes quite fruity when you get down to the details of this, but still, sure are. Dreams are everywhere in ancient literature. There's some perpetuous dreams in the nights before her martyrdom and 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.
- [01:15]
B
The Emperor Nero was supposed to be a really big dreamer at 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 end of one of his favorite horses was turned into a monkey's bum. Too good to be true, perhaps. Certainly very peculiar, Mary.
- [01:40]
A
Yeah, very peculiar. So we go to Artemidorus, because Artemidorus book, which fills more than 200 pages in a modern text, is the only systematic ancient study which brings together and tries to explain hundreds of real dreams. They're not all about sex, although quite a few are, as we'll discover. Some are a lot more domestic, others surprising, and others, frankly, weird. Pretty obvious. What does it mean if you dream you've lost a finger ring? What does it mean if you've grown an extra foot or a head or you found dead fish in the sea, or. What does it mean if you dream that you can't sweat?
- [02:30]
B
Well, all of this tells us a lot about ancient dreams and dream theory, obviously. This tells us a lot about ancient dreams and dream theory, obviously. But Artemidorus also tells us a lot about the dreamers, and he's a really fantastic backdoor route into ancient social life of the free and the enslaved, into ordinary people's hopes and fears, their bodies, their clothes, their hairdos, and even where they went to the loo.
- [02:59]
A
This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
- [03:07]
B
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we Dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this week, dream on with the Greeks and Romans.
- [03:33]
C
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- [04:02]
A
Okay, We've promised that in the course of the podcast, we're going to be putting into the spotlight some wonderful but awfully neglected ancient authors. And this time we're looking at the very, very neglected author, Artemidorus. He's the author of the single surviving book of Dream Theory, or Dream Interpretation, totally devoted to that from the ancient world. It's written in Greek, but written 2nd century CE in the Roman Empire. And I just think, amazingly, into the world of ancient dreaming and the extraordinary varieties of dreams. I mean, I think it there is happily, we'll put this in the show notes, a very, very good, easily obtainable new paperback translation of Artemidorus. And it's one worth getting your hands on because it is extraordinary.
- [05:09]
B
It's a lot of fun. I mean, the whole book actually, you know, as often when we go into one of these sort of like you'd say non canonical texts that doesn't come up. If you did like an Oxford classics degree in the 1990s like I did, this was new to me and it's been such fun. Just to be fair, you could have a copy of Artemidorus next to your laugh and it would be a lot. It'd be great fun, I think.
- [05:36]
A
Next to your lab, did you say Charlotte? Yes, next to your lab, not your lab.
- [05:40]
B
It's like a low book. You need to flick through it. There are so many weird and wonderful dreams, you know, dreaming of different kinds of birds, dreaming of what it's like to, you know, dreaming of bedbugs and lice, dreaming of, you know, becoming a gladiator.
- [05:57]
A
This is one for me, though. I do this in real life. Dreaming of losing your house keys to kind of the ancient. Oh my goodness me, where did I put my keys? But sometimes very, very odd. I mean, there's one that I was looking at the other day, I just thought, what is it really saying? I think it's saying you dream that you're having your child skinned or flayed and then you turn him into a wineskin.
- [06:26]
B
That's just durable.
- [06:27]
A
Yeah. And that's side by side with, you know, getting stuff stuck in your teeth. You're dreaming you can't kind of eat properly because you've got things in your teeth. If you've given birth to a snake,
- [06:39]
B
there's quite a lot on, you know, having a really satisfying crap. Yes, there is the meaning, the various meanings and significances of this, which is, you know, good fun.
- [06:49]
A
So it's a kind of, from the point of view of the relatively ordinary person because we're not here at the, you know, the top of Roman society with the doings of emperors, et cetera. They come in a little bit, but it's really the street life. It's kind of all of ordinary ancient Roman life is here, but in sometimes very surprising ways.
- [07:13]
B
It's just amazing to me that we have a book that tells you what people actually dreamed in the ancient world. I mean, obviously he's not reporting as, yeah, it's a guide, it's a manual to the interpretation of dreams. But you can kind of essentially assume that since it was useful, this must be the sort of things that people were dreaming. And so like to imagine that you could know what people were dreaming in second CE Turkey is absolutely amazing to me.
- [07:42]
A
But, you know, that does raise the question of who this guy we know only as Artemidorus. You know, what's he doing this for? What's the point? What's the project? You know, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write a book about the interpretation of dreams. Well, why? And as so often with these kind of curious, slightly out of the way texts, we know nothing about him apart from what he tells us in the book. And from that we can, we can infer that he basically was based. He lived most of his life in entry, one of the big famous cities on the seaboard of what's now Turkey, the city of Ephesus. He's often called Artemidorus of Daldis. Now Daldis is a one horse town, you know, some way from Ephesus, but apparently his mum came from Daldis. And yeah, he's using I'm from Dull Dis to give Dull Dis a bit of kind of street cred. We kind of guess from internal references that we're in what, the last quarter of the second century ce, which is not a bad time to be around that part of the world in the Roman Empire, because It is. Well, you know, I don't like these kind of phrases, but it is, quote, a golden age of culture there. The emperor's after Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius. And there is a great flowering so far as we can see, of literary culture, particularly in those cities in modern Turkey. And I think we have to reckon that that's our Themidorus background.
- [09:43]
B
And it feels, Mary, doesn't it, like it's not, it's not some kind of low grade equivalent of looking up your star sign. And the. This is quite a serious. It's a seriously meant treatise. And he refers to previous things that we don't have anymore. He refers to other books on dream interpretation in, in a very serious way. It made me giggle that apparently there was an entire book that we no longer have purely on the interpretation of dreams about teeth, which, you know, so it's kind of got this scholarly. It's a scholarly thing, it's hard science, it's theoretical. Although, as I say, it is kind of, for all the reasons that we're describing is also kind of good fun and enjoyable for us to read. And it has this systematic aspect, doesn't it?
- [10:36]
A
Yeah, I mean it's one of the most kind of organized, systematic accounts of anything that we get from the ancient world. I mean if you go to. It comes in five books or five chapters we call them really, when you go to book one of this and he's trying to talk about dreams about the human body and he, he goes through that kind of nerdishly ordered, right. So you know, starting from head, hair and nails. Oh, then he goes to ears. You know, what happens if you dream that you've got more than two ears? Eyes. What happens if you dream you've got blurred vision? Oh, lack of money. That's what it means. Then you've got teeth, you've got tongues, you've got vomiting, and on and on and on until you come to what happens if. Dream about feet. What happens if you dream your feet are on fire? Right. So he's really trying to kind of get a grip on how you might classify and put together dreams for. I'm pretty sure you're right, a scientific audience. I mean it's very tempting if you say, oh, here's a nice little book of dream interpretation to sort of imagine. It's a kind of self help fairground stuff. You know, I've just had a dream about this. Let me look it up in my, in my cheap little book. I don't think this is a cheap little book at all. This is a real attempt to get a grip on how you might begin to understand what it means to dream about something.
- [12:20]
B
So I have a question. So it feels like it's a professional. It has a professional. Or does it. Like, is it purely a sort of theoretical thing, or is there a sense in which this is being offered as something to help a professional dream interpreter who might. Who might charge money or there might be some transaction. You go to Artemidorus, or do you have a sense of that?
- [12:49]
A
Have to start this off by saying we don't actually. We have no clue who read Artemidorus. Nobody, I think no other writer in the ancient world quotes Artemidorus. So we don't get. We don't get a glimpse into his readership. I think that I see sort of two potential readers. One, the lot that you're talking about. If you are the practical dream interpreter and you want a bit of a kind of handbook, encyclopedia, not for your, quote, patience to have, but for you to read up on, then it doesn't seem implausible that Artemidorus is your man here and that his book would be found on your shelves. And I think that's certainly possible. I think there is a kind of sort of higher theoretical level too, because although we don't have other books from antiquity solely devoted to dreams, not those that survive anyway, we can see that there are big, you know, close to philosophical debates about what a dream is about and how you would. What the main. What's the template for beginning to understand a dream? And it's certainly the case that some people say, look, dreams aren't important and they certainly don't predict the future. For example, I mean, the person we know is the Roman orator Cicero, but he was also a, you know, a philosophical scientist. He. He has no truck with the idea that. That dreams tell you the future. One of the things that Artemidorus does seem to be trying to do, and I think contributing to that bigger debate, honestly, is he's saying many dreams predict the future and that's why they're interesting. Now, he admits that some don't. You know, he admits that some dreams have almost no significance at all. And if you dream you're hungry, well, that's probably because you're hungry. You know, that isn't greatly predictive. And he kind of writes those off with the Greek word enhypenioi, what happens when you're sleeping. But he. Then the dreams he's interested in, he gives a different word Greek word to oneiroi. And they, he says, predict the future. And that really is his big theoretical point. So in the kind of history of ancient science, I think this is a contribution to a particular version of what the scientist does with dreams. So I think it, you know, there is a practical application and, you know, I'm sure, you know, you're right. If you were a dream interpreter, you know, an on the ground dream interpreter, you might, you know, you might well refer to Altamidorus, but there's also, there's a higher level and Altamidorus question then is if you say dreams are things that predict the future, then the question is, so how, right, how do you go from the dream to the prediction?
- [16:16]
B
I found this very interesting because a lot of it does seem to depend on kind of wordplay and sort of etymological connection. So one word might, a word of the thing in the dream might give a clue as to the thing that's being predicted or the outcome in real life, which is kind of not a million miles from Freud. Except, of course, the point about, the entire point about Freud doesn't really think that your dreams are going to predict the future. He thinks that dreams are uncovering your or giving you clues as to your unconscious. And, you know, one uses them in order to make, make oneself know oneself better and, you know, grow in a personal way. Not to say what's gonna happen happen next week, but I suppose I was kind of surprised how that chimed these little words, sort of slippage of word meaning is absolutely in Artemidorus. And that's definitely a facet of Freud's dream interpretation.
- [17:28]
A
And of course to us, a lot of those in Altemaduras, and I have to say, even in Freud, sometimes a lot of those kind of the interpretation of the dream rests on some kind of wordplay in the dream. They look a bit difficult to take seriously. I mean, there's one in Altamidurus where he explains that dreaming about an eagle could mean that something is going to happen within the year. And you think, pardon, what? And he does that by looking hard at the Greek word for eagle, which
- [18:07]
B
is
- [18:09]
A
now letter A to us is number one in Greek and etos is year, right? So we've got the important thing about seeing the eagle, the A etos, is that something's going to happen within the year, right? Now, as you say, the linguistic basis of dreaming is something that you find very, very clearly with Freud. And Freud is big on Artemidorus. I mean, we said he was a fan he is repeatedly referred to in Freud's book on dreaming. But the only real overlap is in this kind of sense of language. You have to look at the language very carefully.
- [19:04]
B
And even then it feels like when Artemidorus is talking about something like our ETOs and the relationship with ETOs, that's something that's external and intrinsic to the thing being dreamed. Whereas if that was something in one of Freud's essays about dreams, it would be something internal to the dreamer. It would be some slip inside themselves that revealed the sort of inner truth of their own desires or characteristics. So it's a slightly different end of the telescope, but it's really interesting that Freud, who really loved the classical world, and if you. If you are in the UK and you ever get to visit Freud's, the Freud Museum in London and go into his study, it's completely full of really extraordinary ancient antiquities, beautiful Greek vases and things. He really. And he wrote, of course, a lot about the ancient world in one way or another. So his desire to attach himself to an ancient precursor is really quite interesting. I don't know whether it's sort of legitimate. It adds a certain layer of legitimacy, possibly, or, you know, everyone wants to
- [20:22]
A
have forefathers and Freud gets Altembodorus, but pretty selectively, because I think the things that stick in my mind when I'm reading Artemidorus is not so much these linguistic tricks, but the kind of interpreting the dream by some kind of illusion or analogy. So that you dream, for example, you're a woman and you dream that you're giving birth to a snake. Well, what might that mean? It might mean that you are going to have a son who is a great orator. Why does it mean that? Well, snakes have forked tongues. Orators speak with forked tongues. Snake equals orator.
- [21:16]
B
Yeah. Or there's loads like that, aren't there? If you dream of a loom, may meaning that you're going to go on your travels, because the loom travels this way and that. Repeats itself over and over again. If you dream of a weasel, yeah, there's quite a lot of misogyny. You'll be amazed to hear that there is quite a lot of misogyny in this, but.
- [21:40]
A
Oh, surprise, surprise.
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B
Yeah, it's a huge shock. If you dream of a weasel, it may portend a wicked or unreliable woman, because weasels are. Well, weasels are weasels. Weasels have been landed with a bad rap from antiquity to now.
- [21:55]
A
It seems, I think, though, that Freud's quite interesting because it Also points us in the direction of the later history of this text because we've been hedging our bets a bit about who it was written for, who it was not written for. And as we said, it's in several chapters or books and there's five of them. And the first three are dedicated to an orator from, from Tyre. Right.
- [22:28]
B
And modern Lebanon.
- [22:29]
A
Yes. And the last two too, his Artemidorus son. And there's, there's a nice bit where he kind of warns the son not to let anyone else copy out the text because, you know, this, this is something that we've got, this is our, this is our trade secrets, trade secrets. But clearly the text did get copied out because that's the only way it survives. And it survives in Greek and through the Byzantine period. And that's where our basic text comes from, that process of copying. Interestingly, it's one of those texts of Greek science that get very close and get very studied within the Islamic tradition. And there's a 9th century Arabic translation of it. And again, one of the forgotten bits of the history of Greek culture is its close relationship with Islamic culture.
- [23:40]
B
And to be clear, I'm always a little bit confused about this, is that because texts were copied by Islamic people in, you know, in later Byzantium, how did these Greek texts reach the Islamic world and get translated into Arabic?
- [23:59]
A
That's where you have to say. I think it's because within the field and there's particularly scientific texts, philosophical and scientific texts. You know, there are not hundreds of translations of Greek tragedy out there. It's Aristotle. I mean, some, some works of Aristotle and of the, the Greek medical writer Galen are really best known in Arabic translation. And what that's telling, I mean, I think we don't fully know the answer to, to your question, but the only one that's possible is that there is a much closer relationship, cultural relationship in terms of personal contact at some level, personal and literary contact between inquiry in the Islamic world and in the Greek world. It's easy to think of this as being Greek science, but there is an ancient and medieval scientific community which, you know, which is sharing, which is sharing texts. And you know, Islamic science is very interested in dreams too. I mean, you know, why wouldn't you be? And Artemidorus is one of the, is one of the places that they go to. But it doesn't stop there because by the time you get the early modern period, you get loads of translations of Artemidorus into the vernacular. I mean, there was, I was Reading that, it was that in the middle of the 18th century, one English translation of Artemidorus was by then in its 24th edition.
- [25:36]
B
I mean, that's amazing, particularly given that it's so little known now comparatively. But it was all the rage in Georgian Britain. Turns out, among. Among the educated classes, it is probably
- [25:52]
A
why Freud, who's that much closer to that period of real popularity of Artemidorus, can kind of refer to it as frequently and as casually as he does now. You go to a group of, you know, clever undergraduates studying the ancient world and you say, artemidorus, what did he write? And my bet would be, I may be misjudging them, that most of them wouldn't have a clue, which is why it's great. We've just got a reliable new translation, not of 1740 vintage, but modern, which we'll, as I say, we'll put on the show notes.
- [26:36]
B
But there's so much more to think about, isn't there, Mary? Because we discussed in the introduction that this is this amazing. It's an amazing back door into the social life, the ordinary life, the hidden life of the Romans. And let's talk a bit about that in the second part.
- [27:02]
A
Okay, class, let's begin. Psst.
- [27:05]
C
Love your boots. I just sold a pair like that on ebay. Oh, really? I actually, yeah, it took like two seconds to list and they sold almost immediately. I've been selling everything lately. Some chunky boots, a faux fur coat I never wore, and a vintage chair that was more of an expensive clothing rack. You know, I actually bought these on ebay. Wait, are you Kitty? Sell stuff from Brooklyn.
- [27:26]
A
Okay, quiet please.
- [27:27]
C
Find what you love, sell what you don't. EBay. Things people love.
- [27:32]
A
Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book Club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [27:51]
B
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
- [28:11]
A
All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com. i am interested in dreams and, you know, I find tomodoras fascinating from that point of view. But I have to say that I'm more interested in the people who did the dreaming and in the life of the ancient world that those dreams open up to Us. And for me, that's what makes Artemidorus even more exciting, because casually, he's not setting out to write an everyday life in second century CE Ephesus. But the context that he's writing in, the context of the dreams, the kinds of interpretation he's giving, really take us absolutely straight into a world of antiquity that it's harder to see than others. I mean, the Roman hierarchy, the role of the emperor, does hover a bit over Artemidorus and his dreams, and people dream about the Emperor, actually, but really it's the ordinary life of a flourishing town in 2nd century CE Roman Turkey that he's taking us into. And it's absolutely amazing. I mean, it's the street corner, it's the home, it's what the enslaved are doing, it's what the poor are doing, it's what people on the way up are doing. And it's really about, you know, I think this is the bits of the ancient world that usually Hidden from history.
- [30:01]
B
Absolutely. I mean, there are just some. Just lovely moments where, for instance, there's a whole section on dreaming about mice. And, you know, you just have this sort of sudden moment where you'll think, well, there are mice in people's houses. In fact, there's a reference to. There's a reference to the idea that it's not only that you dream and might dream about mice, but the mice themselves might be used in real life in the waking world. If you see mice in your house doing different things, that is a useful tool for some kind of divination. I mean, all of this is quite abstruse. But the nice thing is you suddenly have this vision of people's very ordinary houses. Obviously, there are mice. You know, this is just ordinary stuff. There are mice. Yeah. I mentioned bedbugs earlier. There's. There's dreams about bedbugs, dreams about lice, dreams about mosquitoes.
- [30:58]
A
And I think it's amazing that those are bits of antiquity that we just don't. We don't see, we don't think about. And though, you know, mice must have been, and all the other nasty little bits of vermin that you've been talking about, they are, for the average inhabitant of the ancient world, they're center stage. It reminds me of something that always amazes people when they hear that. If you go to the famous temple in Athens, the temple of Athena on the Acropolis, the Parthenon, it has a huge golden ivory statue of Athena, and she's covered, she's not solid, she's Kind of a frame covered with golden ivory. And we suddenly, quite casually learn from someone describing it that it was a wonderful home for mice. You know, they. Mice. Mice nested in the statue of Athena on the Acropolis. Right, well, fine. And I can promise you that they must have nested in millions of ancient homes and we don't even bother to look for them. Whereas Artemidorus, you know, you're not going to escape mice if you read Artemidorus.
- [32:21]
B
It's just so earthy, isn't it? I mean, the paragraph's devoted to sitting on the loo or whether you might be taking a crap in a field. And, you know, these have subtly different meanings. You are really down, you're really there with the Romans, these, the.
- [32:40]
A
The.
- [32:40]
B
Well, the Greeks who were living in the Roman Empire. It's. It's incredibly intimate. Let's say almost too intimate. Thank you very much.
- [32:51]
A
Yeah, I mean, some bits are quite. Are just quite, you know, funny. I mean, we discover that people, when they went to the baths, you know, the public baths. Well, what do they do? Well, just like you and I do sometimes in the bathroom, they sang. So you'd go to the baths and there'd be people having, you know, you know, a jolly chant. Right. Whereas we kind of think of them as, you know, discussing, you know, matters of local gossip or local politics. And some of them, they're being rubbed down and they're having a good sing,
- [33:22]
B
having a sing song.
- [33:24]
A
But I mean, I have to say, I mean, we. We started out, you know, this is a bit of a trigger warning here. We started out talking about. Alluding to Altamidorus, talking about sex and a lot of his dreams. It has a whole section on, in a slightly nerdy, scientific way, to what particular version of the sex act might mean if you dream about it. And I think that if you want. Do you want to see the range of what Greeks and Romans thought about when they thought about what they might do in bed with each other? There is nowhere better than Artemidorus. There's nothing lurid. He just goes through the different varieties of sex in the ancient world. So sex with your wife, sex with prostitutes, sex with strangers. And that's divided into pretty strangers and not pretty strangers, sex with slaves, sex with a God or goddess, sex with your family members, sex with yourself, masturbation. And then once you've done all the people it might be. It's a pretty male kind of perspective here. You haven't escaped because here you've got, you know, this is Alex Comfort, Joy of sex stuff in a way, because we've got all the different positions you might have. Is it going to be face to face? Is it going to be from behind? Is it on your knees? And each of these, of course, has a significantly different meaning if you dream about it. Well, I don't really care what the meaning is, but just seeing somebody in the second century CE sitting down and saying, so what are the possible varieties of this? This is unbelievable. You know, you find it nowhere else.
- [35:31]
B
No, this is true. And you know, there's plenty of stuff on what we might loosely call self pleasuring also.
- [35:39]
A
Yes, there is indeed. No, they're just. And you think nobody knows that all this is buried in Altamiras. And you know, I don't think, I mean, it's only a few pages and I don't want to kind of recommend it on any kind of false pretenses, but there it is. But there it is also alongside. And you see this in the predictions of whether this is going to be a good outcome or a bad outcome. You start to see also the kind of hopes and fears of ordinary people, right? Repeatedly, one of the bad outcomes is that this might bring you up in front of the law. The idea that for the ordinary people of, let's say, Ephesus, the law isn't a friend. The law is something that if you get brought to court, that's scary, right? Well, you also think and you see that the good outcome for slaves is that that dream might mean you're going to get your freedom.
- [36:52]
B
The stuff about what various dreams might mean for slaves, enslaved people is so fascinating. Will you be at the top or the bottom of your internal hierarchy in the household? Will you be sold? Will you run away? All of these are possible interpretations. Actually. There's a whole section of dreams on flying and there's a set of interpretations aimed at slaves. I mean, I mean, it's a really obvious, a really super obvious thing to say is that a lot of the dreams are interpreted as about to bring on death. And you know, in a way that's incredibly bland. Of course dreams are going to be interpreted as bringing on death, but on the other hand, there was a lot of death about it is this really
- [37:46]
A
unexpected kind of window into the, into not just the thought world. That sounds a bit boring, but it's what you might hope for, what you might fear if you are, you know, an ordinary person, if you're an enslaved person in the Roman Empire, you know, and as you say, the kind of, the idea that one of your aspirations might not to be freedom if you're a slave, but it might be to be at the top of the domestic pecking order.
- [38:16]
B
Yeah, if you're a slave dreaming that you're flying up to heaven. Altemadura says it always signifies a transfer to a more important household, for example, and often enough admission to the actual imperial court, he claims. But it means something different for Freeman, you know, so, you know, I mean, here's the thing. To fly with the birds for criminals, it says, if you're a criminal and you dream of flying along with birds, it means punishment, often crucifixion. So you're getting this, you know, that gives you a little window into, you know, what's the worst thing that the worst kind of judicial punishment you could encounter? Well, it's crucifixion, all this.
- [39:00]
A
I mean, it's. I mean, it's intriguing. It's quite cute. It's wonderful. Little vignettes of ancient life. But I think that also. And what you're saying is kind of pointing to this. Artemidorus is absolutely convinced that dreams don't have single meanings that you might. It's not, for example, to say that if you dream of a mouse in your bathroom, it always means the same thing. One of the things he's saying as practical advice is that you have to know who the dreamer is. And that comes in two ways, I think. One is you have to know their particular circumstances, but you also have to know what their formal legal status is. So these interpretations are
- [40:02]
B
very.
- [40:03]
A
To start with, they're very individualized. And the brilliant example of that is the one we mentioned a bit ago of a woman dreaming she gave birth to a snake. And actually, it was only one interpretation of that which said that she was going to give birth to an orator, because that is what it would mean if she was a wealthy woman and therefore had a child who was likely to be the kind of person who would get rhetorical training. But there's.
- [40:41]
B
And there are another. There is seven in total. He offers seven interpretations of this dream. You know, a woman dreaming that she's going to give birth to a snake. But the seven different interpretations depend on who the woman is and essentially what position she occupies in society. So if you're the wife of a priest dreaming about giving birth of a snake, it means that your son will become a high priest because the snake is sacred. If the dreamer is the wife of a soothsayer, of a kind of prophet, someone who tells the future, and you dream, you're giving birth to a snake, you will have a son who will become a wonderful soothsayer because the snake is sacred to Apollo. And so it goes on. I mean, if the mother was sick while she was having this dream and she was pregnant, she would, the child that she would have, says Artemidorus, would become, you know, unable to walk, would become lame because snakes use their whole body. They, you know, snakes don't have legs, I suppose is the crucial thing. They move across the ground and you've got these ones.
- [41:55]
A
What if the mother is not respectable? One interpretation of the dream, if it's by a non respectable mother, is that the son is going to be a real seducer all around town. Why? Because the snake sneaks around, right? Or he is going to be mugged and beheaded. But why's that? Because if you catch a snake, you behead the snake. Well, you kill it by beheading it.
- [42:26]
B
That is a very, very unpleasant dream, you know, that your child is going to end up being beheaded. If you're a slave having this dream, you know, you're a pregnant woman having this dream, your son is going to turn out to be a runaway slave. Because the snakes move in this circuitous. I mean, in one sense, Mary, I think we can say that this is absolutely bonkers. You know, the idea that you would predict the outcome of your child's life based on this is ridiculous. But it is such an interesting insight into the hopes, the fears, and also Artemidorus preoccupations and sense of social order.
- [43:22]
A
The seven interpretations of giving birth to a snake, they're partly about hierarchy, they're partly about wealth and status, but they're also about individual circumstances. Sometimes you find those differences pared down to very simple status distinctions. So there's one where you might dream of an olive tree being harvested. Now this will be, if you're a free person, that will be auspicious, you know, harvesting good, etc. If you're a slave and you dream that it's going to mean that you're going to get beaten. You know, again, the fear of a slave is being beaten. What does it mean that you're going to be beaten? Well, because olive trees get beaten in order to make them drop their fruit. Now again, the interpretation strains credulity, but what really strikes me about it is it's one way where you start to see how embedded the status of free or not free slave or free man or free citizen, that is utterly embedded in antiquity. It's not just that this happens to be what you'd have on your modern equivalent of a passport. It's not just a kind of mark of legal status, though it is that it also is absolutely bound up with the meaning of everything you do. So that if you're a slave, what you do or what you dream is so essential to you that it means something different if you dream this dream or that dream from if you were a free person. And that's. It's often, I think, very hard to. To kind of understand how far those differences of status were sort of absolutely at the center of how you saw the world in antiquity. And I think Artemidorus is quite good at giving that sense that this is not just, oh, legal status, pass on, we're all human beings. That the status of the slave means that everything they do is interpreted differently. And for me, that's my. I think, my big takeaway from Artemidorus, actually.
- [46:06]
B
Well, I hoped that my big takeaway, Mary, would be that this would be a useful guide to my dreams, right? And I dream a lot, so. Or rather I remember my dreams a lot. So I almost set myself the task of trying to dream stuff that would come up in art Amidorus, that I could, you know, I could figure out what my future was going to be. What was weird is that it was strangely hard to do that. Now, it's true that in art, Amadorus, there are loads and loads of dreams about teeth, and there are loads and loads of dreams about flying. And I think those are both fairly common dreamscapes for people now as well as in the second century. So if you're dreaming about teeth or flying, Artemidorus is your man. You're going to be able to find out some quite interesting stuff. If you dream about ivory teeth, it's very auspicious. But if you dream of having golden teeth, it's only auspicious for public speakers. For other people, it signifies that there will be funeral pyres in the house. You know, that's the kind of. That's the kind of thing. But I found myself dreaming of some. Okay, I'm just going to give you perhaps too much information here. I dreamt about having sex with a stranger, okay? So I thought, this is going to be an Artemidorus because he has so many different sex dreams, and that's just. That's bound to be one of them. But of course, there is no category for a woman having sex with a stranger in Altamidorus. So that was completely useless. Then I had another dream which was Again, I'm sorry, this is so weird, and I'm not going to go into detail, but it was about oats, as in porridge oats, you know, breakfast oats. I thought, okay, this is a crop, like, maybe this is going to be an Altamatorus, because, you know, there are various foodstuffs. But do you think they were growing oats in 2nd century CE, Turkey? And even if they were, were they dreaming about them? No, I dreamt about cats. There were no cats. So this was in itself. Although this. I mean, it sounds kind of a mindless thing to try and remember your dreams in order to see whether Artemidorus has anything to say about them. I think I did have a takeaway from this, which is a pretty straightforward one, which is the stuff. The stuff of our lives. The sort of. The bits and bobs of our waking lives that get filtered through. Through our dreamscapes are just very, very different. We live in a very. Aside from these sort of these basic ones, which I do, I think there are dreams. I think there are dreams about being naked. They're dreams about going to the loo, dreams about losing your teeth, dreams about flight. Those seem to me to be shared territory. But I'm not dreaming about, you know, looms.
- [49:04]
A
I have two reactions to that. I mean, one is that when we were looking at some perpetua in an earlier episode and talking about her dreams, there are. There. There are. And there were overlaps there because she was dreaming about running and not ever quite being able to get there. And that's very familiar. And you can pick up some things in this. But okay, so I've got two. Two explanations, and there's millions more. But for me, my two reactions. One is, like you say, dreams are very culturally specific, that we don't dream about the same things as the ancients. There might be little bits of overlap, but just as the ancient world is very different from ours, so the world of ancient dreams is very different. And what we're seeing is people dreaming about quite different things. I think that's interesting, and I think that might be true, or I think it's probably partly true anyway. I suppose the. You're not going to be surprised at this, are you? The skeptic here wonders. I don't think that Artemidorus is making these up. Right. I'm not saying these are a whole load of invented dreams. Don't believe a word of it. But I think that, as we know, the process of writing down dreams always alters them. You know, that. You know, how you tell the story, even if it's you and you've just woken up in the morning and you try to write it down straight away, you always alter it. And I think that there is a sense in Artemidorus that, yeah, real dreams are there somewhere at the background. But he's so systematic, he's so determined to systematize that actually the system starts to take over really beyond the messy reality of the dream. Right. You know, so it's got to be, you know, so did you dream about ears? Well, how many ears did you have in this dream? And he's so concerned to organize the material that in the organization, I suspect we move gradually further and further away from whatever Mrs. Audenry in Ephesus actually dreamed on that night in 186 CE. That's my slightly gloomier reflection.
- [51:39]
B
No, I think that's got to be absolutely right. I mean, it doesn't purport to be a piece of anthropology that collects in a very detailed way people's dreams. It's a manual or treated written by a very nerdy man. And that's sort of part of my anxiety about the way he divides up sex dreams. I can't shake the feeling that it tells us a bit more about Artemidorus own assumptions about sexual positions and who's giving oral sex to whom, which we will leave you to discover for yourself. But you know, I think it's quite bespeaks certain set of prejudices which are quite interesting. But when I was reading that kind of list of how you might have sex, I just thought, God, what a nerd.
- [52:29]
A
Yes.
- [52:30]
B
This is not very. This is not a man who sees much joy in the act. He just wants to classify it.
- [52:38]
A
Yes. And as soon as you've done that, you know, you've taken one step away from real life. And I think we are one, two or three steps away from real life. Even though in the gaps it remains fantastically visible in this book, which is well worth. I mean, you're right, I wouldn't sit down and read it start to finish. But it's well worth, you know, having in the loo and reading a little bit at a time. Because it's eye opening.
- [53:11]
B
It is. And there are just things that will stay with me, little snippets like children playing with dice or knuckle bones. Just tiny, tiny little things where you get this little snapshot of what's happening on the streets in Ephesus, end of the second century ce. And it's gorgeous.
- [53:34]
A
So I hope We've given our Temedora some a bit of a leg up by talking about him in this episode.
- [53:41]
B
See you next time. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media @instantclassicspod.
- [54:00]
A
Bye bye.
- [54:07]
D
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [54:13]
E
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
- [54:20]
D
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
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E
A rebel son who hated his father, survived a sixth 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.
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D
From Empire, the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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E
And I'm William Duranpool.
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D
In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
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E
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
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D
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