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Storytime: Reading Cicero’s Dream of Scipio
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Note: acute listeners will notice that the episode on Poseidonius and Weird Stoicism referred to in this Storytime episode doesn’t actually exist yet. Coming next Wednesday, if such is the will of the celestial Ennead.
[Corrigendum: In this episode I overwork the so-called Chaldæan Planetary ordering: while this is the ordering used by Cicero, and does indeed come to dominate astrology eventually, I was very anachronistic when I implied it was the astrological order par excellence in antiquity. No! As Neugebuer and van Hoesen point out, the normal ordering for most papyrus horoscopes and all literary horoscopes before 150 CE goes, starting from the Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Sun, Moon (O. Neugebauer and H. B. van Hoesen. Greek Horoscopes. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA, 1959, p. 164).]
Marcus Tullius Cicero was not an esoteric author in any normal sense of the term, but he did write one piece which is a gem of rather weird ideas, incorporating aspects of Pythagorean, Platonist, and Stoic lore into a strange and beautiful take on ‘cosmic religion’. This piece, known as the Dream of Scipio, comes at the end of Cicero’s now-fragmentary dialogue on the state, the De re publica, and has as its model plato’s Myth of Er in Book X of his Republic. But this guided tour of the otherworld is different from Er’s in many important ways.
We discuss the textual matrix of the Dream, some of the sources Cicero was drawing on, and the political background in the Punic Wars, just so we know who these Scipios were. We then read through the text, and finally throw in a few comments on the elite Roman astral religion which the Dream lays out.
Works Cited in this Episode:
Primary:
Aristotle: the Aristotelian pneuma (πνεῦμα), which is the place of the nutritive, sensitive and imaginative soul, is generated from something analogous to the fifth element, aithēr, from which the stars are made (De gen. anim. 736b29-38. See esp. 29: ἀνάλογον τῷ τῶν ἄστρων στοιχείῳ).
Cicero reads Plato as teaching an astral afterlife: Tusc. Disp. 1.11.24; 1.17.40.
Plato:
- Each soul has a ‘home-star’ from which it descends and to which it returns between incarnations: Tim. 41d-e.
- Against suicide: Phæd. 62a2-6 (a mystic teaching); cf. Leg. 873c-d: suicides to be buried in unmarked graves at the borders of the polis.
- On the body (sōma) as a tomb (sēma) for the soul: Crat. 400c; Phædr. 250c; Gorg. 493a; cf. Phæd. 81, 82, 83, the body as ‘prison’ or ‘watchtower of the soul’.
Porphyry: The rainbow-coloured pillar in the Myth of Er (Pl. R. X 616b-c) is the ochēma of the Soul-of-All or World-Soul: 185aF Smith = Simplicius In Phys. (corell. de loco) 615,32-35.
Secondary:
Capelle 1917 [see below].
Festugière’s comments on ‘religion cosmique’ paraphrase Festugière 1944-1954 [see below], II pp. xii-xvi.
André Piganiol. Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 101-1:88-94, 1957.
Powell 2006 [see below].
Stahl 1952 [see below].
Recommended Reading:
Editions
Here are a few critical editions of the text of Cicero’s De re publica, at the end of which you’ll find the Dream of Scipio. There are more editions than we have listed here, but these are hopefully enough to be getting on with.
C.F.W. Müller, editor. M. Tullius Cicero. Librorum de re publica sex. Teubner, Leipzig, 1889.
K. Ziegler, editor. M. Tullii Ciceronis De re publica. Teubner, Leipzig, 1964.
J.G.F. Powell, editor. M. Tulli Ciceronis De re publica, De legibus, Cato Mairo de senectute, Lælius de amicitia. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.
Studies
Pierre Boyancé. Études sur le Songe de Scipion. de Boccard, Paris, 1936 [includes Ziegler’s Latin with a useful French translation].
Richard Harder. Über Ciceros Somnium Scipionis. Schriften der Konigsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft, VI(3):11551, 1929.
Gernot Michael Müller. Seelenlehre und Therapie. Das Fortleben der Seele nach dem Tod als Gegenstand von De re publica und ciceros Spätwerk und seine Funktion. In Irmgard Männlein-Robert, editor, Seelenreise und Katabasis: Einblicke ins Jenseits in antiker philosophischer Literatur. Akten der 21. Tagung der Karl und Gertrud Abel-Stiftung vom 30. Juli bis 1. August 2018 in Tübingen, number 40 in Philosophie der Antike, pages 227-76. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, MA, 2021.
William Harris Stahl, editor. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius. Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1952.
Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Astral Religion
Paul Capelle. De luna stellis lacteo orbe animarum sedibus. PhD thesis, Halle, 1917 [the original and still the best!].
André-Jean Festugière. La révélation d’Hermes Trismegiste. J. Gabalda, Paris, 1944-1954. 4 vols, III pp. 27, 33.
Martin Nilsson. Greek Piety. Clarendon, Oxford, 1948, pp. 96-103, 109, 135; pp. 121-22 on solar cult in the Græco-Roman world.
Stephen Rego
December 14, 2023
Thanks for another great storytime, Earl! I am very-much looking forward to the episode on Macrobius.
However, I was surprised there was no mention in this episode of Plato’s student Heraclides of Pontus as a possible source for some of Cicero’s ‘astral afterlife’ content, as he was said to have relayed a story about an epiphany/vision had by a certain Empedotimus of “three gates”, as mentioned by Varro:
‘Varro nevertheless said that he had read that the mortal vision had been wiped away from a certain Syracusan Empedotimus by the agency of a certain divine power, and that he had seen among other things three doors and three paths, one at the sign of the scorpion , by which Heracles is said to have gone to the gods, the second along the boundary that is between the lion and the crab , and that the third is between the water bearer and the fishes .’
~ Heraclides of Pontus, fr. 57 ( = Varro, Fragments of Menippean Satires, fr. 560, 3.1126-27 Krenkel), trans. Schütrumpf (ed.), 2008, p.133.
On these ‘three gates’ – see the interesting exposition by H. Reiche, ‘Heraclides’ Three Soul-Gates: Plato Revised’, in the Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 123, (1993), pp. 161-180.
*Note: Heraclides/Empedotimus are also referenced later by Proclus, in his commentary on Plato’s ‘Republic’, where there is reference to the ‘heavenly Hades’:
‘Nor is it impossible that a human soul gained the divine truth of the situation in the Underworld and reported it to humans. This is also shown by the account according to Empedotimus, which Heraclides Ponticus narrated. Heraclides says that while Empedotimus was hunting in some place with other people at high noon, he himself was left alone, and after encountering the epiphany of Pluto and of Persephone the light that runs in a circle around the gods shone down upon him, and through it he saw in visions that he personally experienced the whole truth about souls.’
~ Proclus, ‘Commentary on Plato’s 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤’ [𝘐𝘯 𝘙𝘦𝘮𝘱.] II.119.18–27 Kroll ( = Heraclides of Pontus, fr. 54A), trans. Schütrumpf (ed.), 2008, pp. 127.
Also we also find it referenced by Damascius, apud John Philoponus in his commentary on first book of Aristotle’s ‘Metereology’:
‘Damascius well appropriates Empedotimus’ hypothesis about the Milky Way, calling it a fact not a myth. For, Empedotimus says that the Milky Way is the path of souls which pass through the heavenly Hades. And it is not astonishing, says Damascius, if also souls are purified in this circle of heavenly becoming. And it must be conceded, [he says] that the heavenly circle itself is a divine arrangement, either formed by Hera’s milk, as the myth says (and this is why it is fit to relate it to the ascent of the souls, and its meaning is that a soul does not ascend from the world unless it has sucked in from Hera’s milk, i.e. unless it lighted on the Goddess’ providence which is spread in that milk), or arranged in a different way known to the gods.’
~ John Philoponus, ‘Commentary on the First Book of Aristotle’s 𝘔𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺’, 𝘊𝘈𝘎 XIV 1, 177.9-19 Hayduck, trans. Kupreeva, 2012, p.103.
Stephen Rego
December 14, 2023
On ‘the harmony of the spheres’ and its connection to Pythagoras, there’s this nice little excerpt from Simplicius:
‘And if anyone had this mortal body attached to its luminous and heavenly vehicle and the senses within it purified – whether by good fate or a good life or, in addition to these, because of ritual perfection – he would see what is invisible to see and hear what is inaudible to hear [sc. ‘the harmony of the spheres’], just as is recounted of Pythagoras.’
~ Simplicius, ‘Commentary on Aristotle’s 𝘖𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘴’ [𝘐𝘯 𝘊𝘢𝘦𝘭.] 469.7-11, trans. Mueller, 2004, p.126.
Earl Fontainelle
December 14, 2023
Yessir! Thanks for the references! We can add Iamblichus, On the Soul 26 378 (p.54.1, 4–11 Finamore-Dillon). Heraclides and a host of others were perforce left out of the super-short, condensed survey, but you are definitely right that Heraclides is a glaring error, vis à vis the Milky Way in particular.
Heraclides is also especially interesting in this context also because he is part of a proud heritage: Plato invented a iatromantis figure, Er. Heraclides invented a iatromantis figure, Empedotimus. Cicero reinvents the iatromantis as a Roman statesman/warrior, Scipio.
Stephen Rego
December 14, 2023
Indeed. Heraclides’ fictional Empedotimus being a conflation of Empedocles and Hermotimus.