Commentary on the Dream of Scipio

Readers familiar with the early Middle Ages will know that many scholars were engaged in efforts to preserve the wisdom of the Classical world while at the same time others were destroying the ancient pagan sources at the behest of the Church. A number of people were compiling "encyclopedias" (in

Show More

the sense of detailed accumulations of information and quoted material) which epitomized especially the philosophical writings of the ancients, and by the fifth century hardly any of the popular "encyclopedists of the day were still using primary sources. Instead they were dealing with copies of copies of the work of other epitomizers and after a while they were often quoting each other without attribution. This practice has made it very difficult for scholars to assign attribution to any one of the late Latin sources because much of it had entered what we would term the public domain. This effort toward epitomizing, summarizing and synthesizing while staying under the radar of the Church led to the permanent loss of many Classical works, notably those of Cicero and the Greek philosophers, and many others as well. Virgil, who was considered — along with Plato and Cicero — a giant among the wise, seems to have survived, not so much because of the beauty of his poetry but because of its susceptibility to writers taking flowery but ambiguous phrases from his works and turning them to their own uses.

One of the most influential early Medieval compilers was Macrobius, who had glommed onto an episode from the final book of Cicero's De re publica, which was reminiscent of the Vision of Er that concludes Plato's Republic. During the next thousand years, the selection from Cicero was almost the only part of De re publica that had survived, and thanks to Macrobius it has come down to us under the rubric of Somnium Scipionis, or The Dream of Scipio. Macrobius wrote a so-called Commentary on the Somnium which turned out to provide a pretext for performing a mind dump of encyclopedic proportions that expounded on every conceivable topic even remotely suggested by Scipio's dream as originally recorded by Cicero.

If The Dream of Scipio seems familiar, it was discussed by C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image, which develops an extensive and detailed discussion of the Medieval world view of which the Somnium Scipionis provided a succinct summary. It is only 288 lines of Latin prose but it is packed and pithy — hardly a word is wasted. Lewis was attempting to construct a model of that world view through a review of the literature, and one could shorten the learning curve regarding the materials in Lewis's book by absorbing the Somnium Scipionis and by at least perusing Macrobius's Commentary and William Harris Stahl's sixty-page introduction in particular. It presents a useful roadmap to the Commentary and the outlines of Medieval learning.

Readers of Chaucer's dream visions such as The House of Fame or The Parliament of Fowls, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy or even Dante's Divine Comedy will have noted multiple references to Macrobius and the "dream of Scipioun" and will recognize the pattern established by Scipio's dream.

Additionally and as an aside, Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) also wrote a novel called The Dream of Scipio (2002) that I have been meaning to read, but I understand it has nothing to do with Cicero's work.

Cicero's De re publica — of which a large section was discovered in the Vatican library in 1820 as a palimpsest concealed under a fourth or fifth century manuscript commentary on the Psalms by St. Augustine — was modeled after Plato's Republic. Where Plato outlined an ideal state, Cicero was concerned with the ideal operation of the Roman Republic. Plato concluded his work with the Vision of Er which speaks of the afterlife and the heavenly spheres. Apparently the Epicureans ridiculed Plato's use of visionary materials, and Macrobius tells us that Cicero, in a desire to avoid such criticism, chose the form of a dream to speak of the rewards of an afterlife for virtuous statesmen (and others who were pure in heart) and to describe the path the soul takes going to and from the heavenly spheres.

So what exactly was this dream? Scipio the Younger dreamed that he had been carried away into the heavens to the sphere of the fixed stars by his grandfather Scipio the Elder where he also met his deceased father, and looking down saw the earth and Rome and how small they were in relation to all of creation. Scipio was advised by his elders to lead a virtuous life and was shown the path souls take going to and from heaven via the nine planetary spheres.

The point of Cicero's Somnium Scipionis is to promote principles of justice in the government of a state:

"Nothing that occurs on earth, indeed, is more gratifying to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the establishment of associations and federations of men bound together by principles of justice, which are called commonwealths. The governors and protectors of these proceed from here [i.e., the heavens] and return hither after death."

* * * * *

"Scipio, [said his father] cherish justice and your obligations to duty, as your grandfather here, and I, your father, have done; this is important where parents and relatives are concerned, but is of utmost importance in matters concerning the commonwealth. This sort of life is your passport into the sky, to a union with those who have finished their lives on earth and who, upon being released from their bodies, inhabit lives on earth and who, upon being released from their bodies, inhabit that place at which you are now looking (it was a circle of surpassing brilliance gleaming out amidst the blazing stars), which takes its name, the Milky Way, from the Greek word."

Thus, this dream vision is undoubtedly the culmination of Cicero's excursus on leadership in Rome and concerns the welfare of the commonwealth as well as the individual.

The point of Macrobius's Commentary, which is surprisingly lucid and informative compared to other similar works from the early Middle Ages, is to present a thorough and critical explanation of the important elements in the Somnium Scipionis. It provides the beginnings of an understanding of the early epitomizers and how they operated.

Modern critics have praised Cicero's Somnium Scipionis for its poetry despite its being entirely in Latin prose — Ciceronian prose to be sure: "Hardly from the lips of Virgil himself does the noble Latin speech issue with a purer or more majestic flow." (J.W. Mackail) The fact that The Dream of Scipio formed a complete episode combined with the unusually suggestive content lent encouragement to its being excerpted and published as a stand-alone subject worthy of commentary.

Most people today are probably unaware of the extent of Macrobius's influence across at least a millennium in the West. One of the most popular and interesting chapters in the Commentary is concerned with the five categories of dreams. While this classification as well as many other parts of the work are apparently not original with Macrobius, he is credited with conveying this and other elements of Classical lore through the long Dark Ages.

Not only is this an almost sentence-by-sentence commentary on The Dream of Scipio and an encyclopedic compendium of medieval and classical "knowledge" regarding astronomy, astrology, physiology, Pythagorean number theory, the harmony of the spheres, the five geographic zones of Earth, a classification of the virtues and much, much more, but it is also a summary of Neoplatonic philosophy as interpreted by Macrobius based on Plotinus and Porphyry. Cicero, who was indeed a Platonist, would have been surprised to know that his Somnium Scipionis was a Neoplatonic tract!

Anyone who is interested in the underpinnings of Medieval and Renaissance thought, philosophy and literature will find this book to be surprisingly readable and even entertaining to some degree. Where Macrobius gets into the esoteric doctrines of Pythagorean numbers, harmony or geocentric descriptions of the planetary spheres, one can become lost in the weeds because so much is primitive when compared with modern understandings. But this is a small detraction from an otherwise excellent and eye-opening book. Despite Macrobius's obvious goal of clarity, some of his "scientific" explanations are difficult to follow because they are based on outdated science or esoteric theories that in some cases seem outlandish in the twenty-first century.

Show Less