Plutarch reported one striking dream that Julius Caesar had shortly before crossing the Rubicon River and entering Italy with a single legion, defying the express orders of the senate not to approach with the troops that had been victorious in the Gallic campaign. This invasion of his own territory was the beginning of an irresistible taking of power, which Julius exercised successively through the roles of tribune, dictator, and finally consul.

According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar had dreamed of having sex with his own mother on the eve of his crossing of the Rubicon, the first act in a long process that would lead to the destruction of the Republic and the creation of the Empire. While Julius's own initial reaction to his dream was one of embarrassment, soothsayers soon produced an interpretation that was extremely auspicious: the great man was literally preparing himself for possessing his "mother" land.

It just so happens that Suetonius dated the same dream eighteen years earlier, when Julius was thirty-three and a quaestor in Spain. The dream had occurred after Julius visited the temple of Hercules and lamented before a statue of Alexander the Great--who conquered the world before dying at thirty-three--that he had not yet managed to achieve anything comparable himself.

The discrepancy between Suetonius's and Plutarch's accounts suggests the shameless political manipulation of dream narratives for the construction of a biography. Both writers used and abused dreams as supposed causes of important historical events. In the case of Julius Caesar's maternal copulation, it is more likely that it was Plutarch who did the manipulating, attributing the dream to the historical moment when it would have the greatest impact.

To what end would he have carried out this manipulation? To favor Julius Caesar through evidence of a destiny foretold? Or to show him as a man without scruples, capable of anything? Or even, simply, to spice up the plot of an already tasty narrative?

SOURCE: Sidarta Ribeiro's The Oracle of Night: the History and Science of Dreams p. 299.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I agree with Ribeiro that Suetonius's chronology is more likely--the dream then has an obvious psychological trigger, and if it's predictive, it's long-term. If a bit fuzzy. My copy of National Geographic's Timeline of History also sides with Suetonius but dates the dream to age 30, not 33. Caesar's birthdate is also uncertain (102? 100?), so the dream might be from 72 to 67 BCE--and that's assuming Plutarch's wrong, else it'd be as late as 51 BCE. And this is a famous figure! This historical haze just worsens until (by a couple millennia BCE) it's a century or more. Much is made of the superiority of written history to folktales and archeology, but give me tree rings any day.

--Chris Wayan

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