Artemidorus of Daldis and the Oneirocritica, the great ancient dream book
Who Artemidorus of Daldis was, how the Oneirocritica arose in the second century AD and why his dream manual has survived for almost two millennia.
Of all the ancient books devoted to dreams, only one has reached us complete and arranged like a true manual: the Oneirocritica, meaning «the art of judging dreams», written in Greek by Artemidorus in the second century AD. It is neither a philosophical text nor a collection of marvels, but the work of a professional who wanted to give technical dignity to an often despised trade, that of the interpreters who offered their services in the squares and fairs of the Graeco-Roman world.
An author between Ephesus and Lydia
Artemidorus came from Ephesus, but he preferred to call himself «of Daldis», after the small Lydian town his mother came from, in order to honour her. He says so himself in the work, which remains almost the only source for his life. He probably lived under the Antonines, in the second half of the second century, and dedicated the first books to a certain Cassius Maximus, a figure scholars have not identified with certainty.
To gather his material he travelled widely in Greece, Asia Minor, Italy and the larger islands, attending the great religious festivals where soothsayers worked. He claims to have listened patiently even to the street interpreters whom other scholars avoided, and to have noted down dreams and their outcomes for years. This fieldwork is what makes his book different from abstract speculation.
The structure of the work
The Oneirocritica is divided into five books. The first three follow an order that begins with the human body, from birth to death, and then moves on to daily activities, work, animals, gods and natural phenomena. The fourth and fifth books are dedicated to his son, also called Artemidorus, who was preparing for the same profession: they contain advice on method and a collection of concrete cases.
The fifth book is especially precious to the historian, because it lists almost a hundred dreams followed by the event which, according to the author, had confirmed them. The result is a vivid portrait of the society of the time: slaves hoping for freedom, athletes anxious about their contests, merchants, debtors, the sick, wives and husbands. Dreams thus become a document of social history as well as of religious belief.
A fortune lasting almost two millennia
The treatise was translated into Arabic in the ninth century by Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the great translator of Baghdad, and influenced the interpretation manuals of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. In the West it re-emerged with the first printed edition of the Greek text, published in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1518, and later appeared in Latin and vernacular translations. Sigmund Freud cited it in The Interpretation of Dreams of 1900, granting it a place in the history of the discipline.
Reading Artemidorus today means entering the mindset of a world in which the future could be glimpsed in night-time images, but also discovering an attentive, methodical author, curious about people and their hopes. The sources, after all, mention other dream interpreters alongside him whose books have been lost. His work remains the essential starting point for anyone who wants to understand how the ancients thought about dreams.