[39]
20. "But let us leave oracles and come to
dreams. In his treatise on this subject Chrysippus,
just as Antipater does, has assembled a mass of
trivial dreams which he explains according to Antiphon's rules of interpretation. The work, I admit,
displays the acumen of its author, but it would
have been better if he had cited illustrations of a
more serious type. Now, Philistus, who was a
learned and painstaking man and a contemporary
of the times of which he writes, gives us the following
story of the mother of Dionysius, the tyrant of
Syracuse: while she was with child and was carrying this same Dionysius in her womb, she dreamed
that she had been delivered of an infant satyr.
When she referred this dream to the interpreters of
portents, who in Sicily were called ' Galeotae,' they
[p. 271]
replied, so Philistus relates, that she would bring
forth a son who would be very eminent in Greece
and would enjoy a long and prosperous career.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
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