Macrobius and the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio: five kinds of dream

Throughout the Latin Middle Ages, whenever an author wanted to explain what a dream was, he almost always quoted the same book: the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius. This late antique work, written in the early decades of the fifth century AD, passed on to the West a classification of dreams that was clear and easy to remember, together with a store of Platonic teachings on the soul, on numbers and on the harmony of the cosmos that would otherwise have been largely lost.

The dream told by Cicero

The text on which Macrobius comments is the closing part of the sixth book of Cicero's De re publica, composed around 51 BC. It tells how Scipio Aemilianus, a young officer in Africa in 149 BC and a guest of the Numidian king Masinissa, dreamt of his adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal. The elder Scipio led him on high, among the stars, and showed him the smallness of the Earth and the destiny of the souls of the just.

The De re publica has been almost entirely lost, and only in the nineteenth century were large parts of it recovered from a palimpsest in the Vatican. The Dream of Scipio, by contrast, survived precisely because Macrobius copied it and commented on it, making it the starting point for a wide-ranging philosophical reflection. The discovery was made by Cardinal Angelo Mai in 1819.

Five kinds of dream

Before commenting on the text, Macrobius explains that not all dreams have the same value and distinguishes five kinds. The somnium is the enigmatic dream, which hides the truth beneath figures that must be interpreted. The visio is the prophetic vision, which comes true just as it was seen. The oraculum is the dream in which a parent, a priest or a god clearly announces what will happen or what must be done.

Then there are two kinds without value. The insomnium springs from the cares of the day, from hunger, love or fear, and vanishes on waking. The visum, which the Greeks called phantasma, appears in the drowsy state between sleep and waking, when one believes oneself still awake and sees strange figures moving about; it also includes the nightmare that weighs on the sleeper, called ephialtes. The classification probably draws on older Greek sources, close to those used by Artemidorus.

The Dream of Scipio, Macrobius concludes, belongs to all three truthful kinds: it is an oraculum, because a venerable ancestor speaks; it is a visio, because it shows real places in the cosmos; it is a somnium, because it contains deep truths that require interpretation. This threefold membership justifies, in his eyes, a long and detailed commentary, which moves from the dream to the nature of the soul, to numbers and to the music of the spheres.

A medieval fortune

The Commentary was copied in hundreds of manuscripts and read in the schools as a handbook of natural philosophy and astronomy. The Roman de la Rose, the great French poem of the thirteenth century, opens precisely by invoking the authority of Macrobius to argue that dreams can foretell the truth, and on that dream it builds its entire allegory of love.

In England Geoffrey Chaucer cites Macrobius several times, in the Parliament of Fowls and in the Nun's Priest's Tale, where a cock and a hen learnedly debate the value of dreams. Through these works Macrobius' classification became part of common culture, and for centuries it supplied the vocabulary in which Europe spoke of its dreams.