Antiphon on How to Interpret Dreams

Antiphon (fifth century BCE) is reportedly the first to have written a book on dream interpretation, yet scholars have minimized the evidence and doubted that Antiphon could have had a serious interest in dream interpretation, an occupation deemed unbefitting to a sophist. I argue that Antiphon did take the interpretation of dreams seriously and adapted traditional dream hermeneutics to his own distinct method. I show (thanks to new papyrological evidence) that Antiphon, like other contemporaneous thinkers, offers a naturalistic explanation of dreams. For Antiphon, dreams are the work of our mind (γνώμη). This new view, however, does not preclude a real interest in a dream’s meaning and in the hermeneutic questions dreams pose. Based on an analysis of the indirect evidence for Antiphon’s book on dream interpretation, I reconstruct his method as modifying traditional dream hermeneutics in two respects: first, it relies on identifying nonobvious similarities between the dream image and the future event it predicts; second, it has a specific argumentative format. The later respect reveals how Antiphon’s dream hermeneutics connects with other parts of his oeuvre (and its fifth-century context), and the former points to Antiphon’s sophisticated reflection on the workings of figurative language. The evidence suggests that for Antiphon, the language of dreams can tell us something about the language we use when awake.

Reception to follow.