Artemidorus of Daldia
Pausanias mentions several oracles and temples of Apollo in Greece and Asia Minor—one obscure local manifestation of the god he naturally enough omitted, but a fellow-citizen of the god preserves it. "It was in obedience to him, the god of my land, that I undertook this treatise. He often urged me to it, and in particular appeared visibly to me (enargôs epiotánti),[[63]] since I knew thee, and all but ordered me to write all this. No wonder that the Daldian Apollo, whom we call by the ancestral name of Mystes, urged me to this, in care for thy worth and wisdom, for there is an old friendship between Lydians and Phoenicians, as they tell us who set forth the legends of the land."[[64]] So writes Artemidorus to his friend Cassius Maximus of his treatise on the scientific interpretation of dreams—a work of which he is very proud. "Wonder not," he says, "at the title, that the name stands Artemidorus Daldianus, and not 'of Ephesus,' as on many of the books I have already written on other subjects. For Ephesus, it happens, is famous on her own account, and she has many men of note to proclaim her. But Daldia is a town of Lydia of no great renown, and, as she has had no such men, she has remained unknown till my day. So I dedicate this to her, my native-place on the mother's side, as a parent's due threptéria."[[65]]
Marcus Aurelius records his gratitude "that remedies have been shown to me by dreams, both others, and against blood-spitting and giddiness."[[66]] Plutarch, Pausanias, Aristides—dreams come into the scheme of things divine with all the devout of our period. Artemidorus is their humble brother—not the first to give a whole book to dreams, but proud to be a pioneer in the really scientific treatment of them—"the accuracy of the judgments, that is the thing for which, even by itself, I think highly of myself."[[67]] The critic may take it "that I too am quite capable of neologisms and persuasive rhetoric (ehuresilogein kaì pithaneùthai), but I have not undertaken all this for theatrical effect or to please the speech-mongers; I appeal throughout to experience, as canon and witness of my words," and he begs his readers neither to add to his books nor take anything away.[[68]] His writing is, as he says, quite free from "the stage and tragedy style."
Artemidorus takes himself very seriously. "For one thing, there is no book on the interpretation of dreams that I have not acquired, for I had great enthusiasm for this; and, in the next place, though the prophets (mánteôn) in the market-place are much slandered, and called beggars and quacks and humbugs by the gentlemen of solemn countenance and lifted eye-brows, I despised the slander and for many years I have associated with them—both in Greece, in cities and at festivals, and in Asia, and in Italy, and in the largest and most populous of the islands, consenting to hear ancient dreams and their results."[[69]] This patient research has resulted in principles of classification.[[70]] There are dreams that merely repeat what a man is doing (enúphnia); and others (óneipoi) which are prophetic. These last fall into two classes—theorematic dreams, as when a man dreams of a voyage, and wakes to go upon a voyage, and allegoric dreams. The latter adjective has a great history in regions more august, but the allegoric method is the same everywhere, as an illustration will show. A man dreamed he saw Charon playing at counters with another man, whom he called away on business; Charon grew angry and chased him, till he ran for refuge into an inn called "The Camel," and bolted the door, whereupon "the dæmon" went away, but one of the man's thighs sprouted with grass. Shortly after this dream he had his thigh broken—the one and sole event foretold. For Charon and the counters meant death, but Charon did not catch him, so it was shown that he would not die; but his foot was threatened, since he was pursued. The name of the inn hinted at the thigh, because of the anatomy of a camel's thigh; and the grass meant disuse of the limb, for grass only grows where the earth is left at rest.[[71]] The passage is worth remembering whenever we meet the word allegory and its derivatives in contemporary literature. Artemidorus has five books of this stuff—the last two dedicated to his son, and containing instances "that will make you a better interpreter of dreams than all, or at least inferior to none; but, if published, they will show you know no more than the rest."[[72]] The sentence suggests science declining into profession.
Apuleius
Far more brilliant, more amusing and more attractive than any of these men, whom we have considered since we left Lucian, is Apuleius of Madaura. Rhetorician, philosopher and man of science, a story-teller wavering between Boccaccio and Hans Andersen, he is above all a stylist, a pietist and a humorist. For his history we depend upon himself, and this involves us in difficulties; for, while autobiography runs through two of his works, one of these is an elaboration of a defence he made on a charge of magic and the other is a novel of no discoverable class but its own, and through both runs a vein of nonsense, which makes one chary of being too literal.
The novel is the Golden Ass—that at least is what St Augustine tells us the author called it.[[73]] Passages from this have been seriously used as sources of information as to the author. But there is another Ass, long attributed to Lucian though probably not Lucian's, and in each case the hero tells the tale in the first person, and the co-incidences between the Greek and the Latin make it obvious that there is some literary connexion between them, whatever it is. The scene is Greece and Thessaly, but not the Greece and Thessaly of geography, any more than the maritime Bohemia of Shakespeare. Yet in the last book Apuleius seems to have forgotten "Lucius of Patræ" and to be giving us experiences of his own which have nothing to do with the hero of the Ass, Greek or Latin.
The Apology of Apuleius
In the Apology he comes closer to his own career and he tells us about himself. Here he does not venture on the delightful assertion that he is the descendant of the great Plutarch, as the hero of the Ass does, but avows that, as his native place is on the frontiers of Numidia and Gætulia, he calls himself "half Numidian and half Gætulian"—just as Cyrus the Greater was "half Mede and half Persian." His city is "a most splendid colony," and his father held in turn all its magistracies, and he hopes not to be unworthy of him.[[74]] He and his brother inherited two million sesterces, though he has lessened his share "by distant travel and long studies and constant liberalities."[[75]] Elsewhere he tells us definitely that he was educated at Athens.[[76]] Everybody goes to the litterator for his rudiments, to the grammarian next and then to the rhetorician—"but I drank from other vessels at Athens," so "Empedocles frames songs, Plato dialogues, Socrates hymns, Epicharmus measures, Xenophon histories, Xenocrates satires; your Apuleius does all these and cultivates the nine Muses with equal zeal—with more will, that is, than skill."[[77]]
Like many brilliant men of his day he took to the strolling life of the rhetorician, going from city to city and giving displays of his powers of language, extemporizing wonderful combinations of words. Either he himself or some other admirer made a collection of elegant extracts from these exhibition-speeches, still extant under the title of Florida. His fame to-day rests on other works. In the course of his travels he came to Oea in his native-land, and there married the widowed mother of a fellow-student of his Athenian days. Her late husband's family resented the marriage; and affecting to believe that her affections had been gained by some sort of witchcraft, they prosecuted Apuleius on a charge of magic. The charge was in itself rather a serious one, though Apuleius made light of it. His defence is an interesting document for the glimpses it gives into North African society, with its Greek, Latin, and Punic elements. The younger stepson has fallen into bad hands; "he never speaks except in Punic,—a little Greek, perhaps, surviving from what he learnt of his mother; Latin he neither will nor can speak."[[78]] On family life, on marriage customs, on the registration of births (c. 89);—on the personal habits of the defendant, his toothpowder (and a verse he made in its praise) and his looking-glass, we gain curious information. Above all the speech sheds great light on the inter-relations of magic and religion in contemporary thought. A few points may be noticed.