In the Shadow of Vesuvius. Daisy Dunn
about to proclaim against ‘very powerful citizens and even friends of the emperor’ when he dreamed that his mother-in-law got down on her knees and begged him not to go through with the trial. The Romans believed that dreams merited deep consideration on the basis that they might have some bearing upon waking life. Like the Greeks before them, they realised that, while some dreams come to pass, others presage a less obvious result.
Any dream involving a mother figure was always ripe for discussion. On the Interpretation of Dreams, a definitive guide in five volumes, was published a generation after Pliny died and laid out what could come of nightly visits by matriarchs. The book was an important influence on Sigmund Freud, who read it before writing his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, and described a number of possible scenarios. A senator like Pliny who might dream of having sex with his mother had reason to rejoice, provided he had adopted the missionary position; the mother symbolised the state, and one who governed his partner sexually could be sure to govern well politically.58 But a man of fragile health who dreamed of having sex with his mother on top, might predict his own death – for earth, Mother Earth, does not lie above the living. Such earthy thoughts could not have been further from Pliny’s conscious, but at their root lay the old idea that, for all the many things a dream can symbolise, Sleep is little more than a shadow of Death.
Since adjournments were not permitted in the Court of One Hundred, Pliny had had no choice but to ignore the warning of his dream and go through with his trial. The words he had used to reassure himself then were the words he used now to reassure Suetonius: ‘The best thing is to fight for one’s country.’59 With this hearty expression of patriotism, a quote from Homer’s IIiad, the young Pliny had stormed into the basilica, confronted the opposition, and promptly won his case. He recommended that Suetonius did the same. If his dream rendered the prospect of doing so too frightening, then Suetonius was well advised to interpret it to a better outcome. As Homer had illustrated, dreams were meaningful or meaningless depending on which of two gates they issued from. There was a gate made of horn and another of ivory. Dreams which poured through the ivory gate, according to Odysseus’ wife Penelope, were empty. But those which passed through the horn gate ‘bring the truth to pass whenever a mortal sees them’.60 It was to the gate of ivory, through which ‘the spirits of the dead send false dreams towards the sky’, that Aeneas and the Sibyl were led as they prepared to leave Hades in Virgil’s Aeneid.61 By departing through the gate of false dreams it was as if their journey to the land of the dead had never happened.
Pliny anticipated that Suetonius might still struggle and told him that he would attempt to delay his case. ‘It’s difficult, but I’ll try,’ he promised, for as Homer said, ‘a dream is from Zeus.’62 The line was a wry comment on the difficulty of interpreting one’s own dreams, for as he knew only too well, even dreams from Zeus could be deceptive. In the Iliad, Agamemnon, commander of the Greek army, was famously deceived into thinking that he could take Troy at once after the King of Pylos appeared to speak to him in a dream.63 On waking he decided first to test his men’s resolve by encouraging them to abandon the war and return home, since they had no hope of sacking Troy. Far from rejecting his plan and rallying to fight all the more defiantly, his soldiers shamefully got up to leave. It was up to Odysseus to talk them into staying. There was no chance of concluding the war after nine years in a single day. The dream was false. Vita vigilia est.
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