DREAMS OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR. 55 fectly natural, being suggested by the fortunes and the occupations of the dreamers, although they were informed with a soul of divine meaning. Of the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar especially, it may be said that if events did not instruct us to recognize the prophetical import of the first, we should regard it as perfectly natural that he should dream of an image (Dan. iii.) at a time when his waking thoughts were busy about that projected statue of gold before which the Three Hebrew Children refused to prostrate themselves. Of the second dream (Dan. iv.), a pathologist might with much show of reason, assert that it was an incipient manifestation of the mental disease which soon after forced the king of Babylon to company with the beasts of the field, and the symptoms of which, according to sound nosological experience, first emerged into notice during sleep. In this dream, as in the former, we recognize the element of melancholy, either constitutional or contracted, working together with that arrogance of the royal dreamer which made him look on his capital and say, "Is not this great Babylon which I have built ?" In examining this dream, we see that the interpreter has to decide first upon the significance of each unit thereof; and then to fit it into its proper place without being staggered at partial incongruity. The pieces for the mosaic are given him; he must elaborate the design. The mode of interpretation is precisely the same as that which Homer makes Ulysses to adopt, in reference to Penelope's dream about her geese. We subjoin it from Cowper's translation of the "Odyssey;" we need scarcely remind the reader how faithfully Ulysses took care to verify the interpretation with which he sought to comfort the disquiet of his wife. But I have dreamed. Hear and expound my dream! 56 CRADLE OF ONEIROCRITICISM. They lay, and he soared swift into the skies. "Take courage, daughter of the glorious chief But, in thy sleep, a truth. The slaughtered geese He said; then, waking at the voice, I cast Her then Ulysses answered, ever-wise— O Queen, interpretations cannot err So plainly spake the event. Since death impends Amphictyon, son of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who succeeded Cranaus on the throne of Athens, which city he called by that name, and dedicated to Minerva, is said by Pliny to have been the first to practise the art of dream interpretation. This is a tolerable degree of antiquity to invest the art with; and it tends to show that in the days of Pliny, it was about as hopeless to assign a date to the origin of dream-interpretation as it is now. It would seem that the art, of course in a very rudimentary form, was as universal and only a very few days more modern than the act of dreaming. But Amphictyon does not wear his laurels without challenge. The honour of the introduction of oneirocriticism is given by Tatian and Clement of Alexandria, to the people of Telmessus in Caria; of whom Herodotus, who was a native of the neighbouring city of Halicarnassus, reports that they were consulted by Croesus, DESULTORY LEGISLATION. 57 when-Cyrus being already on his march against Sardisthat much be-moralized monarch saw the whole suburbs of his capital "filled with serpents, and as soon as they appeared, the horses, forsaking their pastures, came and devoured them. When Croesus beheld this, he considered it to be, as it really was, a prodigy, and sent immediately to consult the interpreters at Telmessus; but the messengers having arrived there, and heard from the Telmessians what the prodigy portended, were unable to repeat it to Croesus, for before they sailed back to Sardis, Croesus had been taken prisoner. The Telmessians had pronounced as follows:-"That Croesus must expect a foreign army to invade his country, which on its arrival would subdue the natives; because, they said, the serpent was a son of the earth, but the horse is an enemy and a stranger.' This answer the Telmessians gave to Croesus when he had already been taken; yet without knowing what had happened with respect to Sardis or Croesus himself."* There is little doubt that if this prodigy had occurred as a dream to Croesus, instead of a portentous fact to Sardis, the explanation would have been just the same. Nomine mutato, therefore, it shows the style of work in vogue in the middle of the sixth century before Christ, amongst a people who, by some, were reputed to have been the first experts in dreaminterpretation. If we wished to arrive at a knowledge of the rules according to which the significance of dreams was investigated, we should have to do it by a generalization from a crowd of examples similar to the preceding. Of principles laid down as such, of law as a code, we have little trace; we must pick up what we want from a multiplicity of statutes and instances. Indeed, what rules still exist, exist in the form of facts or assumed facts, the results of a laborious and misdirected induction, and are not by any means unanimous as coming from the mouths of different authorities; for both the Magi of Persia and the soothsayers of Greece were continually making blunders. And *Herodotus: Clio, 78. whether those of Rome were safer guides to the solution of a knotty point, we shall by and by call in the aid of Cicero to discover. Dreams of evil purport are represented by the Greek tragedians as containing a conditional threatening, rather than a changeless and fateful denunciation. There was, therefore, room to hope that by a timely repentance of the crime which had outraged the gods or awakened the Furies their wrath might be appeased, and the doom turned aside from the quailing offender. This door of hope from destruction or disaster naturally gave rise to some rubrical forms and services, of which propitiation was the object. In another place (page 30) we had occasion to see how scornfully Queen Clytemnestra had treated the idea suggested to her interrogatively by the Chorus of Old Men of Argos in the "Agamemnon" of Eschylus, that possibly it was by means of dreams that she had attained her supernaturally speedy knowledge of the fall of Troy, and of the consequent return of her husband, whose place, in his absence, had been dishonourably supplied by her favourite, Ægisthus. But then the Queen was sceptical, because she was innocent; at any rate the Furies had not yet had occasion to fasten upon her soul on account of a murderous intention consummated by a murderous deed. In the "Choephora," the guilty Clytemnestra, whose hands are by this time actually stained with the blood of her husband, is seen hoping by a vicarious and hollow ceremonial appease the Furies that have assaulted and plagued her soul in the shape of avenging dreams. In order to avert the evil presignified by these nocturnal tormentors, she sends to her husband's tomb a deputation of captive Trojan women, who under the name of "Choephora," or 66 libation bearers," are at once the chorus and the titulars of the drama. Their proceedings at the tomb of Agamemnon, to which they have been commissioned, in "sable vestments" and gloomy procession to repair, are sufficiently described in the following to extracts from Professor Blackie's translation of Eschylus. It will be observed that they have no great heart in their work; and but little hope, perhaps because but little wish, that any good will come of it to their detested mistress. SCENE.-The Tomb of Agamemnon. Chorus dressed in sable vestments, bearing vessels with libations. STROPHE I. Missioned from these halls I come In the sable pomp of woe, Here to wail and pour libations With the bosom-beating blow. And my cheeks, that herald sorrow, See! my rent and ragged stole My vexed heart on grief is feeding, ANTISTROPHE I. Breathing wrath through nightly slumbers, Prophet of the house of Pelops, Terror stands with bristling hair. Did the sleeper scare. On the woman-governed halls! "The dead, the earth-hid dead, are fretful, From their graves they call." |