The desire of discovering future events is natural to the human mind, which is hurried on by a kind of divine impulse to futurity; artifice is ever ready to avail itself of this curiosity, and was especially so inclined among the heathen nations, whose bewildered minds, turned with eagerness to every gleam of revelation.

The idea of divine dreams was traced up by them to the highest antiquity, and sometimes with indication of the vestiges of truth. Pliny represents Amphyction, the son of Deucalion, to have first displayed skill in the interpretation of them, while Trogus Pompeius ascribes the honour to Joseph, the son of Jacob, and Philo Judæus to Abraham.

The exposition of dreams was reduced to scientific principles, and practised by men who engaged in it as a profession. Some writers distinguish between "dreamers of dreams,"

and "expositors of dreams," one of the latter description appears to have been deified for his skill; and many of them flourished with high reputation in early days near the Boristhenes, the Gades, and in Sicily.

The eastern nations, who might have beheld the very stones which served as pillows to those who were blessed with divine visions, regarded dreams with punctilious veneration; and much of the reputed wisdom of their sages was shewn in the interpretation of them.

The Greeks and the Romans were also considerably influenced by dreams, and often acted in affairs of consequence on their sug gestion. We find in Homer the idea that

"Dreams descend from Jove §."

Ονειροκριτοί.

Dan. ii. 2, 3.

† Gen. xxviii, 11.

Pope's Homer, B. i, 1. 86, and note,

and see Nestor, the oracle of Wisdom, exhorting the Grecians in council to attend to the dream of Agamemnon, which had enjoined a battle*. In succeeding times almost every sect, excepting that of Epicurus, admitted their claim to reverence, and the vulgar regarded them with the most implicit credulity.

Plutarch informs us, that in consequence of a dream of Arimnestus (who was general of the Plateans, when the Grecians were confederated against the Persians), in which Jupiter Soter informed him, that the country round Platea was the district pointed out by the oracle at Delphi as the scene of victory, the Platæans altered the boundaries which separated their country from Greece, in order to enlarge the territories of Attica, that the Athenians might, according to the direction of the oracle, give the enemy battle within their own dominions +.

*Iliad. B. 2.

† Plutarch. in Aristidis.

The superstitious regard paid to dreams by the Grecians in general was carried to a great extent. When Pelopidas was encamped with his army on the plains of Leuctra, he dreamed, before his engagement with the Lacedæmonians, that he beheld the daughters of Scedasus, who were called the Leuctrides, weeping at their tombs, and loading the Spartans with execrations, because some of that nation, having despoiled them of their virgin honour, had driven them to suicide; and at the same time their father Scedasus commanded him to sacrifice a young red-haired virgin to his daughters, if he desired to obtain the victory. As many of the soothsayers and commanders recommended a literal compliance with the dream, it would probably have been productive of a sanguinary oblation, had not a diviner of the name of Theocritus happily proposed the sacrifice of a wild filly with a red mane, which casually broke into the camp, or was designedly introduced, and which he represented as the victim which. the gods had provided and required *.

Plutarch. in Pelopid.

Euripides represents Hecuba to have had a dream before the sacrifice of Polyxena had been required to appease the shade of Achilles. She thus describes it:

With bloody fangs I saw a wolf, who slew

A dappled hind, which forcibly he tore

From these reluctant arms; and what increased my fears
Was, that Achilles' spectre stalked

Upon the summit of his tomb, and claimed a gift,
Some miserable Trojan captive *.

Popular opinions varied much as to the origin and nature of dreams: the Peripatetics represented them to arise from a presaging faculty of the mind, which, as an oracular power excited by a divine fury, or released and liberated from the body in sleep, perceived future events. Other sects imagined, that dreams, as well as oracular suggestions in general, proceeded from demons, of which, upon the idea of Thales the Milesian, adopted by Plato, the world was full, and which, ac

Euripides' Hecuba, Woodhull's Translat.