William V. Harris
Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
In truth, the best place to start is the beginning. The book is carefully structured and non-repetitive, so it is best to read the Introduction first, and keep going. Whether the dream-sending spell on page 1 works, I leave to readers to discover.
The next-best place to begin a non-fiction book is often the index. In this case the index starts with Abraham and ends with Zulus. On the way the index-reader will meet plenty of expectable items – anxiety dreams, Freud, Homer – and some possibly less expected ones – Chartres, demons, Scipio Africanus.
You will find in this book hardly any descriptions of my dreams, mainly because other people’s dream descriptions easily become tedious. But I have sometimes kept a dream diary – a narcissistic habit, and also in my opinion a waste of time, unless you are writing a book about dreaming.
As for where to dip into the book, it depends who you are: if you know psychology, I guess that I probably want you to read the chapter about naturalistic explanations of dreaming offered by the Greeks and Romans. And let me know what you think.
If you know the classics, it might be good to start with the most “scientific” chapter, which (aside from the Introduction) is Chapter 2. If you are simply interested in dreaming, you might start with the epiphany dreams (Chapter 1). If you want to read some bizarre dream-descriptions, try for example page 50 or page 97 or 111 – in fact there are a few more.
I am looking forward to some debate, since some readers will certainly not agree with my conclusions.
It would also be wonderful if this book somehow managed to get people to cross the divide that separates psychologists from historians and social scientists. I am not optimistic about that, even now when it is so easy for a reader to explore in fields adjacent to the ones that s/he knows about. But, as I have implied already, I hope Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity is a symptom of a spreading willingness on the part of historians to study human psychology in a systematic fashion.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
William V. Harris Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity Harvard University Press 352 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN: 978 0674032972
Available here →October 14, 2009
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William V. Harris
William Harris got his dream job, teaching Greek and Roman history at Columbia, at age twenty-six, and has been there ever since, apart from more or less prolonged absences in Oxford and in Italy. He is Shepherd Professor of History and also Director of the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2008-2011). His next book is provisionally entitled Rome’s Imperial Economy.
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The Greeks and Romans were more skeptical of their dreams than credulous.
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