[In the following essay, Musurillo examines Petronius's use of dream symbolism in his poetry and describes how it works on more than one level.]

Petronius Arbiter is chiefly known as the author of that curious and sometimes scatological novel, the Satyricon. That he is to be identified with the Master of the Revels of Nero's court who enjoyed a rather theatrical suicide in A.D. 66 is most likely, there being very little serious evidence to challenge the traditional point of view.¹ But he has also left us a very striking collection of lyrics and short elegies which will repay serious study, since they are quite modern in their poetic technique.

We get a brief glimpse of Petronius' talent for symbolic composition in the brief and unfortunately corrupt fragment 84 which begins O litus vita mihi dulcius. Following the most commonly accepted text, we may translate:

O shore sweeter than life! Ah sea!
How happy I am that I can come straightway
To the land I love.
Ah, lovely day!
This is the country spot where once I used
To rouse the water-nymphs with swimming-
 stroke.
Here is the spring's pool. There the weeds
 that the sea
Washed up. Here the sure haven of my silent
 hopes.
I have lived. And no meaner fate can ever
  destroy for us
The blessings of time past.

The setting is somewhat ambiguous, but it would seem to be as follows. An old man returns—at least in reverie—to the scenes of his childhood, to the country lake of Italy where he used to swim as a boy. As he thinks of the joys he had, the quiet pool suddenly becomes a kind of symbol of the peace and security he has finally achieved in old age. He is happy in the remembrance of Time Past. Almost as in The Lake of Lamartine, the spring and its cool basin stand as a permanent token of happiness that cannot be destroyed. Despite the obscurities of the poem, it is masterly in its brevity.

But perhaps Petronius' greatest power may be seen in his use of dream-symbolism. In that beautiful elegiac poem, Lecto compositus (frag. 99 Baehrens), a young man in his first sleep is awakened by Amor tugging him by the hair. "How can you, my servant," says Cupid, "lie alone?" He leaps up and dashes out into the night with bare feet and tunic ungirt; then, bewildered by the various streets, he stands stock still like a wandering madman; he can move neither forward nor backward. Suddenly he is aware that

Silent are men's voices and all street sounds;
Silent the song of the birds and the noise of
  faithful watchdogs.

I of all men stand alone,
And I am afraid of sleep.
Great lord of Desire, I am at your service
(11-14).

It is like an anxiety dream or a dream of wish-fulfilment. But all at once in the silence of the night, passion yields to a philosophic awareness of man's fundamental loneliness. The conclusion is ambiguous: sequor imperium, magne Cupido, tuum (14); but the stark picture of the pathetic, bewildered sleepwalker is unforgettable.

Petronius' most interesting dream poem is frag. 30 (Buecheler; frag. 121 Baehrens), Somnia quae mentes ludunt. It is easy to hazard the guess that it occurred in one of the lost sections of the Satyricon; a similar poem, in fact, may be found in 128. The ostensible theme of fragment 30 is that dreams are merely a continuation of the day's activities—in Freudian terminology, the "day's residues." In translation:

Dreams that trick the mind with flitting
 shadows,
Come not from the shrines of the gods or
 powers of heaven.
Each man makes his own. For when sleep
 presses
On the body crushed with weariness, then the
 mind
Can play without burden, pursuing at night
 whatever
Occurred by day. The man who makes towns
 tremble
In war, and destroys unhappy cities by fire,
Sees spears and routed hosts and dying kings
And plains flowing with shed blood. Lawyers
See statutes and law-courts, and gaze in terror
On a judge's bench that is merely within the
 heart.
The miser buries his wealth, discovers
 treasure.
The hunter shakes the woodland with his
 pack.
The sailor saves his ship or, drowning, grips
 it.
The courtesan writes her lover; the adulteress
 yields.
The drowsing dog barks at the spoor of the
 hare.
The wounds of the unhappy perdure through
 the hours of night.

On a superficial reading of the poem, the theme seems almost a commonplace of the sort found frequently in literature with an Epicurean tinge. For the Epicureans attempted to combat the view held by the superstitious masses and encouraged by the Stoics, that dreams could be communications from the gods. Indeed, the second century dream writer, Artemidorus of Daldis, incorporating what seems to have been Stoic material, taught that in addition to dreams prompted by bodily needs there was a true class of prognostic dreams due to divine influence: the "theorematic" or vision-dreams, which embodied a clear indication of the future, and the allegorical or obscure dreams, which required expert interpretation.³ Stoic dream theory, as reflected particularly by Posidonius, seems to have had an important influence on Christian allegorism chiefly through the writings of Philo Judaeus. For Philo utilized Stoic theory in his attempt to explain the three types of dreams which occurred night. in the Old Testament, the divine, the angelic and the non-divine.⁴

It is logical to suppose, then, that our poet is attempting to refute this prophetic theory of dreams, and, for this reason, he takes only such examples which would readily fit his case. The instances are obviously tailored to picture continuations, or possible continuations, of the day's activity. He does not treat, as do other theoreticians, the body-need dream, the fantastic allegorical dream or the theophany type of dream, which poets like Sappho, Tibullus and Propertius could describe so well. But, it is precisely this selectivity, among other things, which arouses suspicion that the poem may have a level of meaning which is not completely on the surface, though not irrelevant to the Epicurean view of life.

As we begin reading the first line, it is not immediately clear that the somnia which trick the mind are night dreams in the literal sense. Before the meaning becomes specified the associations of "vague fancies" and "pretenses," which can be attached to the word somnia, seem very present. Again, they deceive the mind "at the time of hovering shadows," or "by means of flickering shadows," perhaps like the "images of things," rerum simulacra, that flutter through the air in Lucretius 4. 32. Further, can the "shadows," umbrae, mean "ghosts"? Indeed, it is not completely clear what it is that each man makes for himself until we come to the "sleep" and "weariness" of the succeeding lines, and then it becomes obvious that the poet is dealing with the prophetic theory of dreams and, perhaps, the practice of incubation.

Thereafter, the sequence of the various dream narratives is clear: the soldier, the orator, the miser (at least as a type from the mime), the hunter, the sailor, the women of ill repute. The dreams are of the sort that one would today call wish-fulfillment dreams and, at least in the case of the terrified orator and drowning sailor, anxiety dreams. A modern Freudian analyst might perhaps tend to see more, especially in the sacking of cities, the plain flowing with blood, the hunter and his hounds, the sinking sailor and the unfaithful women. But these images are familiar enough from ancient accounts of dreams, as we find them, for example, in the Hellenistic papyri and especially in the Dream Book of Artemidorus. The pathetic little line on the barking dog—in Lucretius, incidentally, the dog wakes itself up—should not, I feel, be deleted, nor should latrat ("barks") be changed to lustrat ("follows" the tracks of). The detail would seem to have been a regular Epicurean topic, to show the affinity between animals and men, and is similarly developed by Lucretius.⁵

But it is the ambiguity of the final line, In noctis spatium, ("The wounds of the unhappy," etc.) that suggests an entirely different reading of the poem. What is meant by the "wounds" and who are the unhappy? One possibility that occurs is that the lines refer to those who are in sorrow, or otherwise ill. Or, again, because of the previous reference to lovers and their ladies, we may legitimately think of the "wounds of love"; the image is frequent enough in the elegiac poets. Hence physical pain, moral affliction, the pangs of love—all seem possible. But still we are not sure whether the line is intended to refer to a type of dreamer not previously mentioned, or is meant to be a summary of all the types of dreams that have gone before. After the mention of the dog, we should have expected the list to be complete. It is this final possibility, that the last line sums up the entire poem, which presents an entirely new dimension in imagery. For all of the dreamers that the poem describes are all in search of happiness in one form or another, aptly symbolized by the hunter and the courtesan; and thus all might be described as "unhappy" and suffering from "wounds." In this way, the final line of the poem, "The wounds of the unhappy perdure through the hours of night," would resume the meaning of the entire fragment. Dreams merely continue the unhappy quest of our conscious lives; in the Epicurean view, they are symbolic of man's pursuit of happiness without benefit of providence. Like hounds we too merely bark at the hare's scent.

Thus a further nuance suggests itself. If dreams are merely a prolongation of what we do by day—and, indeed, the poet speaks of the dream activity almost as though he were describing men's daily lives—Petronius may be hinting, though not expressly stating, that all these absorbing interests are, in a sense, mere dreams, somnia. This would bring us back to the ambiguity we noted in the first line, where somnia, "dreams," could have the suggestion of "idle fancies." Hence what the sailor, the courtesan, the warrior do in their dreams is hardly less substantial than what they do in the light. If this suggestion is correct, the poem would have two levels of meaning. On the first level, it would represent a fairly straightforward case against the prophetic theory of dreams as supported by the Stoic school. This would confirm the impression we get from the poem quoted in Ch. 128 of the Satyricon as well as the slighting reference in Ch. 10 to "dream-interpretations," somniorum interpretamenta. But I cannot escape the impression that on a second and more poetic level the fragment would seem to be saying something about the dream quality of life: that the most absorbing interests of men, their passions and ambitions, are little more than dreams.

Notes

¹ See the discussion in G. Bagnani, Arbiter of Elegance: A Study of the Life and Works of C. Petronius (The Phoenix, suppl. vol. 2, Toronto, 1954) 3 ff., with the bibliography cited.

² For the text I have departed somewhat from A. Riese, Anth. lat., pars prior, fasc. 2 (Leipzig 1870)651, in order to reflect the MS tradition more closely. See also F. Buecheler, Petronii Saturae et liber Priapeorum⁶ (cur. W. Heraeus, Berlin 1922) frag. 30, 121.

³ For the literature in general, see H. Kenner, Pauly-Wissowa 18 (1939) 448-459, s.v. 'Oneiros.' For the Epicurean view, see Lucretius 4.962-1036, with the commentary of C. Bailey (Oxford 1947)3.1295ff. On Artemidorus of Daldis, who flourished about A.D. 170, see Nilsson, Gesch. griech. Rel. 1 (Munich 1950)499. Cf. also R. Pack, "Lexical and Textual Notes on Artemidorus," Trans. of the Amer. Philol. Assoc. 90 (1959) 180-84, with bibliography. It is interesting to note that Sigmund Freud in his Traumdeutung, ch. ii, pointed out that his own theory ultimately went back to the principles of Artemidorus, based on the association of ideas. If one may be allowed to oversimplify, however, the difference in Freudian dream-analysis primarily consists in the fact that (a) the analyst is to draw the associations from the dreamer himself, and (b) Freudian dream-symbolism is almost wholly sexual.

⁴ For a discussion of the influence of Stoic dream theory on Philo, see H. A. Wolfson, Philo (Cambridge, 1948) 2.55ff.

⁵ See Lucr. 4.987ff., with Bailey's commentary ad loc, 1297ff.