Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Behold, we are pressed once again to spell out, from a review of dreams themselves, how the soul is tossed about by them. And when shall we arrive at death? Here too I would say: when God gives it; there is no long delay for what is to come. [2] Epicurus judged dreams wholly vain, freeing divinity from business and dissolving the order of things, scattering everything into passivity, as though exposed to chance and accident. But if that is so, there must also be some outcome of truth, since it cannot be that truth alone is exempted from the outcome owed to everything. Homer divided two gates for dreams, one of horn for truth, one of ivory for deceit; for, they say, to see through horn is to see clearly, while ivory is blind. [3] Aristotle, while reckoning the greater part a lie, still acknowledges the true. The Telmessians void no dreams at all, blaming instead the weakness of interpretation. But who is so alien to humanity as never to have felt some vision come true? Touching briefly on the more notable cases, I will put Epicurus to shame. [4] Astyages, king of the Medes, dreamed — Herodotus reports — that a flood poured from the bladder of his daughter Mandane, still a virgin, over all Asia; and again, a year after her marriage, that a vine sprang from the same place and overshadowed all Asia. Charon of Lampsacus, earlier than Herodotus, hands down the same story. Those who interpreted it of her son did not err, since Cyrus did indeed both flood and crush Asia. [5] Philip of Macedon, not yet father of Olympias's child, had dreamed that he sealed his wife's womb with a ring: the seal was a lion. He believed her fertility thereby closed off — I suppose because a lion fathers only once. Aristodemus, or Aristophon, reckoned instead that nothing is sealed in vain, and that a son of the greatest force was portended. Those who know Alexander recognize the lion of the seal. Ephorus records it. [6] But also a certain woman of Himera dreamed of the tyranny of Dionysius of Sicily — Heraclides has handed this down. And Laodice, mother of Seleucus, foresaw the kingdom of Asia before she had even borne him — Euphorion published this. I also learn from Strabo that Mithridates gained Pontus through a dream, and from Callisthenes that Bardylis ruled Illyricum from the Molossians all the way to Macedonia through a dream. [7] The Romans too have known dreams of this kind of truth. Marcus Tullius already knew, from a dream, the reformer of the empire — still a boy then, and a private citizen, merely "Julius Octavius" and unknown even to himself — both as Augustus and as the one who would bury the whirlwinds of civil war. This is recorded in the memoirs of Vitellius. [8] Nor will this kind of vision be the herald only of supreme powers, but of dangers and destructions too: as when Caesar, sick in the battle against the rebels Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, was about to face a greater crisis from the enemy still, and yet escaped his abandoned tent because of a vision seen by Artorius; as when Samos's Polycrates had a daughter who foresaw his crucifixion, drawn from the sun's smearing of him and Jove's rinsing him with rain. [9] Honors and talents too are revealed through sleep, cures are granted, thefts are exposed, treasures are disclosed. Cicero's own greatness, indeed, his nurse had already glimpsed while he was still a small child. The swan slipping from the bosom of Socrates, caressing men, is Plato the disciple. Leonymus the boxer is healed by Achilles in dreams. When the Athenians had lost the golden crown from their citadel, Sophocles the tragedian found it again by dreaming. Neoptolemus the tragic actor, warned in a dream by Ajax himself at the tomb near Rhoeteum in the Troad, freed him from the rubble and, when he lifted the burden of stones off the old man, came back rich in gold. [10] And how many commentators and witnesses stand behind this matter? Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus, Dionysius of Rhodes, Hermippus — the whole literature of the age. I will laugh only, if at all, at the man who thought he could persuade us that Saturn dreamed before anyone else — unless, that is, he also lived before anyone else. Aristotle, forgive my laughter. [11] For the rest, Epicharmus, along with Philochorus of Athens, raised dreams to the very summit among the modes of divination. For this whole world too is thronged with oracles of the same kind: Amphiaraus's at Oropus, Amphilochus's at Mallus, Sarpedon's in the Troad, Trophonius's in Boeotia, Mopsus's in Cilicia, Hermione's in Macedonia, Pasiphae's in Laconia. The rest, with their origins and rites and reporters, along with the entire history of dreams besides, Hermippus of Berytus will exhibit to satiety in his five volumes. The Stoics, too, prefer to hold that God, most provident of human welfare, has among the other safeguards of the divining arts and disciplines instilled dreams as well — a peculiar comfort of natural oracle. [12] So much, then, on the credit due to dreams — which we too must acknowledge, though interpret differently. As for the other oracles, where no one even sleeps, what else shall we pronounce them but the demonic working of those spirits who already then dwelt in the men themselves, or courted their memories, for the whole stage-play of their malice — feigning divinity under that same guise, and by the same industry deceiving even through benefits, through cures and warnings and predictions, so as to injure all the more by helping, drawing men away, through the very things that help them, from the search for the true divinity by insinuating the false? [13] And certainly this power is not confined, nor is it bounded within the limits of shrines; it is roaming and flitting and, for the time, free. Hence no one should doubt that houses too lie open to demons, and that men are surrounded by their apparitions not only in inner sanctuaries but in their own bedrooms.