The Stuff of Dream: An Aesopic Critique of Dream Interpretation

Adam Rappold

doi:10.1515/arege-2013-0007

Abstract

This paper employs a little-discussed passage from the Life of Aesop, wherein the slave Aesop undercuts the dream-interpretation of his master, to comment on the broader status concerns of dream interpretation in antiquity. Specifically, extending Leslie Kurke’s (2011) framework in Aesopic Conversations, this paper identifies the depiction of Aesop as part of a more widespread ’demotic’ critique of high/elite wisdom culture, arguing that belief in the predictive power of dreams was a hallmark of elite culture. By doing so, it reveals that skepticism about the ability of dreams to predict the future was a trait stereotypically associated with ’low’ or non-elite culture, at least until the first century CE. Ultimately this allows us to defamiliarize our readings of ancient sources and to generate new interpretations, a fact which is tested on Socrates’ dream in Plato’s Phaedo. As a takeaway, this revised discourse about dreams undercuts modern scholarly assumptions about the relative status of believers versus skeptics in Greek religion. Perhaps most importantly though, through its framework for reconstructing and tracing the impact of literary stereotypes, this paper offers an attempt to glimpse true popular culture and a rebuttal to the claim that the ’inner thoughts’ of the non-literate cannot be understood.

The Stuff of Dream

Abstract

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