Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture by Patricia Cox Miller

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS675 of "selective adaptation" within traditional forms of Greco-Roman art (pp. 109ff). The author follows this process through the adaptation of terra-cotta lamps to Christian purposes, showing how Christian demand created a market for lamps decorated with "good shepherd" motifs in the Annius and other central Italian workshops from the late second century forward. In even more deta ü, he relates how Roman Christians obtained possession of the CalUstus catacomb south of Rome Ln the early third century, and then coaxed the officina managers and workers who decorated these funerary chambers with ceUing and waU paintings to use "symbol-specific images" appropriate to Christian tastes (pp. 197ff). As these were chthonic places commemorating death, the images employed were usuaUy of a"salvational or soteriological"nature, such as Isaac spared from the knife,Jonah saved from the fish, Lazarus raised from the dead, and the good shepherd saving his lost sheep, Ui order to give hope of the Christian God's saving power to the relatives of the interred Christian dead. In short, "the waU and ceiling images are semeia, signs or tokens of divine intervention . They served as reminders of God's saving action on behatf of certain representative figures within Israelite and early Christian myth. But these teknteria leave undisclosed and hidden the true eidos of divinity" (p. 281). Professor Finney makes broad and sweeping claims Ui his attempts to reinterpret the origins of early Christian art, but offers evidence from a very narrow material focus and a very limited chronological framework (lamps and catacomb paintings Ui and around Rome.ca. 180-230). He makes no reference to L. Michael White's Building God's House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation among Pagans, fews, and Christians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), which has much to say about the above-ground material remains of third-century Christians. However, the evidence Finney presents is thoroughly analyzed and abundandy Ulustrated. Read in conjunction with White's book, it offers valuable information on the emergence ofearly Christian art and material culture in the pre-Constantinian period. Scholars ofearly Christian history and art wUl want it in their libraries. Charles M. Odahl Boise State University, Idaho Dreams in LateAntiquity:Studies in the Imagination ofa Culture. By Patricia Cox MUler. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1994. Pp. xU, 273. $39.50.) In the Passio Sanctorum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, the dreamer Perpetua says that she awakened from a dream in which she received cheese to eat; "stUl eating something unknown to me but sweet/conmanducans adhuc dulce nescio quid." How are we to understand diis remark? How does the oneiric world of abstract imagining, a world of shape but no substance, a world unlike die conscious world, give rise to her beUef that Ui her present awakened, conscious 676book reviews state she retained Ui her mouth the taste of a sweet food given to her by a greyhaired male figure Ui her dream? Perpetua's reflection is crucial to the thesis of MUler's book as it presents Ui microcosm much of the argument. MUler contends that for die late-antique citizen, dreams are a discourse, an "ancient semiotics ," which provide a representation of meaning not possible m a narrative more indebted say to causal logic. Rightly critical of the rigid dualism of certain modern theorists who stigmatized dreams and divination of antiquity as flights from reason, MUler imaginatively explains late antique dreams as "imaginai category [ies] " capable of representing intangibles,recording the play between primordial antagonists, like IUe and death, Ulustrating conscious and unconscious states, and as a permeable membrane between time and space. It is the expressed aim of this volume to show how dreams are significant vehicles for the construction of meaning in late antiquity. The book is divided into two parts and consists of an introduction and nine chapters. Part I is a general inquiry into the social function of dreams, theories of dreams, and an explanation ofthose systems designed to classify dreams;part II is a series of essays which present her reading of autobiographical dreams. Since space does not aUow a consideration ofthe innumerable points and selections MUler considers, I shall summarize her major points...