[123]
What would be the sense in the sick
seeking relief from an interpreter of dreams rather
than from a physician? Or do you think that
Aesculapius and Serapis 1 have the power to prescribe a cure for our bodily ills through the medium
of a dream and that Neptune cannot aid pilots
through the same means? or think you that though
Minerva2 will prescribe physic in a dream without
the aid of a physician, yet that the Muses will not
employ dreams to impart a knowledge of reading,
writing, and of other arts? If knowledge of a
remedy for disease were conveyed by means of
dreams, knowledge of the arts just mentioned would
also be given by dreams. But since knowledge of
these arts is not so conveyed neither is the knowledge
[p. 511]
of medicine. The theory that the medical art was
imparted by means of dreams having been disproved,
the basis of a belief in dreams is utterly destroyed.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.