1 Earliest Rome

7- D I V I N A T I O N A N D D I V I N E R S
to pass through rugged, broken country. With difficulty and out of breath, we filially
made our way to the amphitheatre and he led me into the middle of the arena. 'Do not
fear,' he said, 'I am with you and share in the struggle.' Then he went away. I looked at
the great crowd of people, who were astonished. I knew that I had been condemned to
death by the beasts, so I was surprised that they did not loose the beasts on me. Then
there came out against me an Egyptian of foul appearance along with his seconds, so as to
fight against me. There also came out some good-looking young men, to be my seconds
and supporters.
(7) My clothes were stripped off and I became a male. My seconds began to rub me
down with oil, as they do before a contest. Then I saw the Egyptian on the other side,
rolling in the dust. At this point there came forth a man of gigantic height, so big that he
rose above the top of the amphitheatre. He was wearing a heirless tunic with purple
running down the middle of his chest, between two stripes. He wore elaborate sandals
made of gold and silver. He carried a rod like a trainer and a green branch with golden
apples on it. He asked for silence and said: 'If the Egyptian wins, he will slay her by the
sword; if she wins, she will receive this branch.' Then he departed.
1. That is, to he martyred in the amphitheatre.
7.9c Professional dream-interpretation
Artemidorus, Dream Book 1.79
Artcmidorus' Dream Book - an encyclopaedic handbook on different kinds of
dream - was written in the middle to late second century A.D. in the Roman
province of Asia. Artemidorus claims that he learned the craft of dream interpretation
by experience: 'I rubbed shoulders for many years with the despised
market-place diviners' and often notes that he has reached his own conclusions
on the basis of observation. Many, but not all, of the dreams discussed by
Artemidorus have a predictive element. But whether predictive or not, the
significance of the dream (as in this passage concerning dreams of incest)
changes according to the status and circumstances of the dreamer.
See further: R. J. White (1975); Price (1986)*; Foucault (1988) 3-36;
Bowersock(1994) 80-98.
The discourse about the mother has many different aspects, sections and subsections not
noticed by many interpreters so far. It goes like this. Sexual intercourse as such is not
enough to indicate the meaning, but the different forms of embrace and positions of the
bodies refer to different outcomes. First of all we ought to speak of intercourse in the
'body to body' position if the mother is still alive, for if she has died then the dream
means something different. If someone dreams of having intercourse with his mother
'body to body', in the position called by some natural, when she is still alive and the
fathet healthy, that means he will have hatted against his father, as a result of the normal
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