Dreams and dynasty: Septimius Severus dreams his way to the purple

“I had written and published a memoir about the dreams and portents which led Severus to hope for the imperial power, and after he had read the copy I sent him he wrote me a handsome acknowledgement. Receiving the letter in the evening, I soon went to sleep, and as I slept the divine power commanded me to write history. Thus I came to compose the present account." 

- Cassius Dio, The Roman History]translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Classics, 1987).

Septimius Severus made himself master of Rome in 193, after fighting and defeating several rivals in the power struggle that followed the murder of a previous emperor, Pertinax, by his own Praetorian Guard. Septimius came from the province of Africa. His father was Phoenician, his mother Italian. His first language was Punic, the language of Hannibal; under the tutelage of the great rhetorician Quintilian in Italy, he may have lost his "African" accent.
     He was a lawyer, a poet, a senator and a general, who valued dreams at all stages of his rise to the imperial purple. He used dreams as sources of tactical and strategic information as well as a useful language in public discourse and propaganda, in an era when dreams were widely believed to be a nightly field of interaction between gods and humans, and between the living and the dead.
     Newly installed as emperor, Septimius accepted homage from Lucas Cassius Dio, a young senator on the make, in the form of a little book describing dreams and portents. The dreams were attributed to Septimius himself, and were cited as evidence that the general was destined to become emperor. On the evening of the same summer day when he received the book, the emperor wrote Dio “many complimentary things” in a letter of appreciation.
    Dio’s book contains six dreams that must have come from Septimius himself, or members of his close entourage. In one of them, the emperor-to-be is suckled by a she-wolf, like Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. In another dream, Faustina, the wife of the revered philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius, prepares a wedding chamber for Septimius in the Temple of Venus, near the imperial palace.
    The dreams become more and more grandiose. Water streams from his hand, giving limitless refreshment to the people and nourishment to the earth. The whole Roman Empire salutes him. Someone takes him up on a high mountain. From the summit, he can see Rome and all the world. "As he gazed down on all the land and see, he lid his hands on them as one might on an instrument capable of playing all modes, and they all sang together." [Dio 74.3.1, 2.3]
    The dream that most specifically announces Septimius’ rise to power is one in which a horse throws Pertinax, his murdered predecessor, in the forum. Septimius mounts the riderless horse, which acknowledges its new master. Septimius ordered the creation of an equestrian statue of himself, and had this set up in the Forum Romanum at the spot where, in the dream, he mounted the horse that threw Pertinax.
    Some of these dreams may have been concocted or “improved” as propaganda in support of the new emperor. If that is the case, it speaks volumes about respect for dreams as sources of epiphany – revelation – prophecy, and divine favor. The contemporary historian Herodian, who claimed to have details from Septimius’ autobiography, said that “these things are believed to be honest and true when they turn out well.”
    However, we have evidence that as emperor Septimius valued dreams as sources of intelligence. Septimius reportedly dreamed that his very powerful Praetorian Prefect, Plautianus was plotting against him, and had Plautianus put to death. He required the Senate to discuss a dream report by the nurse of one of its own members, which was also held to contain evidence of treason.
    Septimius’ son Caracalla was a dedicated believer in the therapeutic power of dreams. He visited the great Temple of Asklepios at Pergamon in the winter of 214-215. Herodian reports that in the sanctuary of the god of dream healing, the emperor “had his fill of dreams” and made personal use of “the treatments of Asklepios.”
    The Severan dynasty, founded by Septimius, continued to take dreams very seriously.  As in other societies where dreams are valued highly, the Severans moved towards creating a  “dream police” in the effort to limit the circulation of dream reports that could be used by rebels and dissenters. Those who invent dreams and portents on the pretext that they are doing so “on the instructions of the gods” must “by no means go unpunished”, ruled imperial jurist Domitius Ulpian.
    Cassius Dio, who wrote up the dreams of Septimius, was instructed by his daimon in a dream of his own to write the history of "the wars and very great disturbances" that followed the death of Commodus and led to the emergence of the Severan dynasty.He eventually folded this into a vast history of Rome, in eighty books, written in Greek. Though much of this work has vanished, the surviving text contains a valuable account of the revolt led by the British warrior queen, Boudica. Dio's Roman History is full of dreams and portents, suggesting that these had great currency among the educated elite in his time, as well as in the centuries he covers.

Sources: The Loeb Classical Library has published a nine-volume bilingual (Greek-English) text of the surviving books of Dio's Roman History. Fergus Millar's A Study of Cassius Dio is a valiant attempt to penetrate the mind of this dream-oriented historian. The other almost-contemporaneous ancient sources are a colorful and unreliable history of the Roman Empire by Herodian of Antioch, writing in the 250s, and the no more reliable collection of imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta, or Augustan History. The best biography of Septimius Severus is Anthony R. Birley, Septimius Severus: The African Emperor. William V. Harris provides useful leads in his full and skeptical study of Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity.

Graphics (top): Solid gold bust of Septimius Severus discovered in Plotinopolis, Greece. Exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Komotini, Greece.
(bottom) statue of Septimius found at Alexandria, now in the British Museum, which some think gives him an "African" look.

Lick the sky and rule China: dreams and shamans in imperial Chinese history

The imperial future of a dowager empress of ancient China was foreshadowed by a dream in which she rose to the sky and drank from it. The crucial role of dreams and shamanic experience in imperial China is another chapter in the history we weren't taught in school, the.Secret History of Dreaming. 
   Deng Sui(81-121) who ruled China as dowager empress in the Later Han Dynasty. As a young girl, she dreams that she rises up to the sky. It is beautiful, flawlessly blue. She touches it, moving her hand lightly across the smooth, rounded surface. Her exploring fingers find something shaped like “the nipple on a bronze bell”. She puts this in her mouth and sucks on it like a baby, feeling herself fed and nourished. 

    When she tells the dream to her parents, her father, a high official and royal tutor, calls in a dream interpreter. The professional draws on precedents. He recalls that two of the legendary “sage kings” of ancient China dreamed of rising to the sky before they rose to take the throne. Yao dreamed that he climbed up to the sky. Tang dreamed he rose to the sky and licked it. Both dreamers became emperors, ranked among the “sage kings” because of their wisdom and innovation. The dream interpreter declared that Deng Sui’s dream was “unspeakably auspicious.”
    For a second opinion, a face reader was called. He studied Deng Sui’s physiognomy and pronounced that her features closely resembled those of the sage king Cheng Tang. Therefore her destiny would be tremendous, as the dream seemed to promise.
    Still in her teens, Deng Sui was selected as a consort of the young Emperor He. A slightly older consort, Yin, was raised to the status of empress. Jealous and scheming, Yin hired sorcerers to attack Deng Sui with black magic. When this was discovered, Yin was deposed and Deng Sui took her place on the throne. When the emperor died, she became the regent for his child successor, and ruled China as dowager empress for several years, fulfilling the dream prophecy.

My source for Deng Sui's dream is an excellent new scholarly study of shamanism, religion and poetry in early China: Gopal Sukhu, The Shaman and the Heresiarch: A New Interpretation of the Li sao. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012). This is the first book-length study in English of the Chinese poetic classic, the Li sao, attributed to Qu Yuan, a high official of the kingdom of Chu in the 3rd century BCE who lost his position thanks to the jealous intrigues of rivals.
    The title is translated here as “Encountering Sorrow”. It might also be rendered as "Departing from Sorrow". In his sorrow, the poet contemplates suicide; according to tradition Qu Yuan drowned himself in a river in 278BCE, an event memorialized by the Duanwu or Dragon Boat festival. Yet the force of the poet's violent emotions is also the departure lobby for vividly described shamanic journeys between the worlds. He rides on dragons and phoenix-like birds, summons elemental powers, talks with gatekeepers of heaven worlds. 

I sent Wangshu, the moon's charioteer, ahead as my herald,
And Feilian, the wind god, to the back as rear guard.
Male huan birds were my fore-runners,
And the Lord of Thunder would warn me of the unforeseen.

    The long poem is full of challenges for modern readers, especially in its elaborate floral codes (have as many flowers and herbs ever been named in another poem?) and in the gender-twisting narrative voice; Gopal Sukhu deftly traces the rival paths of interpretation and contributes a new translation with detailed notes.