figure
Artemidorus
Travelled the Roman world collecting dreams and what happened next, and worked out that the same dream means different things to different people — a point modern dream books have lost.
Who they were
Artemidorus, active in the second century CE, was a professional dream interpreter from Daldis in Lydia — he calls himself Daldianus, apparently to honour his mother's home town — who lived and worked in Ephesus.
He wrote the Oneirocritica, the only complete dream manual to survive from antiquity, and one of the more unexpectedly modern-sounding books of the ancient world.
Where they came from
Almost everything known about him comes from his own asides. He travelled — Greece, Italy, the islands of the Aegean and Asia Minor — deliberately, to collect material. He attended festivals, sought out working diviners whom respectable people despised, and, most importantly, followed up outcomes: he recorded dreams and then what happened to the dreamers afterwards.
He was defensive about the reputation of his trade and insistent that he had read everything written on the subject, which suggests both a substantial prior literature and a professional under pressure to justify himself.
He addressed the last two of his five books to his son, also an interpreter, and told him to keep them private — the trade secrets, as against the public-facing first three.
What they taught
Context determines meaning. This is his central methodological principle and the reason he still repays reading. A dream cannot be interpreted from the image alone. The interpreter must know the dreamer's occupation, wealth, health, age, status — crucially whether free or enslaved — their habits, and their present circumstances.
His examples are concrete. A dream of being crucified means something quite different for a poor man than for a rich one; for a sailor it may relate to the mast and the voyage. A dream of losing teeth signifies differently for a man in debt and a man expecting a child. The same image, read against different lives, yields different meanings.
Two kinds of dream. He distinguishes the enhypnion — an ordinary dream that simply reflects the dreamer's current bodily or emotional state, and predicts nothing — from the oneiros, the significant dream that indicates the future. A hungry man dreaming of food, a lover dreaming of the beloved: these are not omens, they are appetite. This filtering step is unusually disciplined for the genre.
Interpretation by analogy and wordplay. His method works through resemblance, custom and pun. Much of it is untranslatable, because the connections run through Greek words rather than through the things themselves.
What we can and cannot say
We can say his empirical instinct was real and unusual. Collecting cases, recording outcomes, comparing across a large sample and refusing images that predict nothing is closer to method than anything else in ancient divination.
We can say his central principle survives, and that the popular practice has regressed from it. Every dream dictionary that tells you what water or falling means is doing precisely what Artemidorus warned against eighteen hundred years ago. That the ancient professional was more careful than the modern paperback is worth noting.
We can say the predictive claim fails for the same reasons as the rest of this section, and that his outcome-tracking cannot rescue it: he recorded the cases he learned about, which are overwhelmingly the ones where something notable followed.
We can say the book has become an important source for historians for reasons Artemidorus never intended. Michel Foucault devoted a substantial part of The Care of the Self (1984) to it, because Book I's extensive treatment of sexual dreams reveals how a second-century Greek understood sexual acts — organised by social hierarchy, by who is active and who passive, by status and household relation, rather than by the categories a modern reader brings. As evidence of ordinary Roman-era anxieties and assumptions, the book is close to unique.
We cannot say how good an interpreter he was. What can be said is that he took the problem seriously, thought hard about method, and identified the flaw that still ruins the practice.
Further reading
- Oneirocritica, in Martin Hammond's translation (Oxford, 2020) or Robert White's (1975).
- Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (1984), Part One — on what the book reveals about ancient sexual ethics.