Page images
PDF
EPUB

cureans what was to be thought of such spectres*.

Cassius is reported to have seen in the same battle the figure of Julius Cæsar on horseback preparing to strike him, which terrified him to flight and suicide: but these and other accounts of apparitions, though they relate to the belief in preternatural interpositions, do not strictly come within the subject of our discussion, and we shall therefore wave the consi. deration of them.

The dream of Xenophon, in which he ima gined that the fetters with which he was bound spontaneously broke, and which encouraged the troops of Cyrus when about to pass a river on the borders of Armenia, in defiance of the enemies, who harassed their retreat and obstructed their progress, might have been the

* Plutarch. in Brut. Lips. Mon. L. i. C. 5, p. 75.

result of solicitude, or the contrivance of policy. Xenophon, however, appears to have been impressed with a greater reverence for the existing superstitions than might have been expected from a disciple of Socrates.

Sylla, before his successful engagement with Marius, pretended to dream that he received from Pallas a thunder-bolt, the emblem of victory; and afterwards, in the same spirit, professed to have dreamed the night before he defeated the son of Marius, that he had seen him in a dream admonished by his father to avoid an action.

A dream of like nature is attributed to Judas Maccabæus, who, when about to engage with inferior forces the army of Demetrius, king of Syria, under the command of Nicanor, is related in the second book of Maccabees, a work of doubtful authority, to have beholden the high priest Onias, who was then dead, praying to God for the Jewish nation, and af

terwards Jeremiah the prophet presenting him with a golden sword of conquest. In the confidence of the dream he is stated to have defeated the Syrians, with a slaughter of thirty and five thousand men *.

Pompey and Cæsar each dreamed before their final conflict, that he dedicated a temple to Venus, the victorious. The blind and lame men who applied to Vespasian at Alexandria, and are reported to have been miraculously cured by him, pretended to have been admonished in a dream by the god Serapis to address themselves to the emperor. The cure and the dreams were probably equally contrived to do honour to Vespasian †, whose elevation Josephus also professes to have predicted.

*Fulgosius. 2 Maccab. xv. 12.

De Bell. Jud. L. iii. viii. et de Vit. §. 42. et Sueton, Vespas. C. 5.

Onomarchus, who excited the Phocæans to persevere in maintaining the possession of the treasury of Delphi, was encouraged in his design by a dream, in which the brazen Colossus, dedicated by the Amphyctions to Apollo, had by his hands been made higher and larger, which he considered as figurative of his exploits; but Diodorus Siculus, judging by the event, informs us, that it signified, that the mulct imposed by the Amphyctions upon the Phocæans for their sacrilege would be much advanced through Onomarchus ; which, indeed, was as probable as the other*.

[blocks in formation]

ON

OTHER

CHAPTER V.

ANCIENT DREAMS OF A MIS

CELLANEOUS CHARACTER.

But it is an abuse of time to commit such dreams to paper.-Vit. Tit. Livii. a Jac. Phil. Tomas. conscript. Verum enim vero, &c.

THAT the pretensions of antiquity to the claim of inspired dreams may be fairly examined, another chapter or two should be assigned to some other accounts, which have been transmitted to us, with a show of authority, and which may equally be explained on very simple considerations.

The dream in which the apprehensions of Antigonus, king of Macedonia, foresaw the flight of Mithridates, the illustrious captive, whom after the conquest of Persia he detained

« PreviousContinue »