The Dream or Lucian’s Career (16-18)

After all this had been shown to me and I to the men who applauded, she brought me back again, no longer dressed in the same clothing that I wore when I began the flight ; I dreamed that I came back in princely purple. Finding my father standing and waiting, she pointed him out my clothing and the

That is the dream which I remember having had when I wasa slip of a lad; it was due, I suppose, to my agitation on account of the fear inspired by the thrashing.

Even as I speaking, “Heracles!!” someone said, “what a long and tiresome dream!” Then someone else broke in: “A winter dream, when the nights are longest ; or perhaps it is itself a product of three nights, like Heracles![*] What got into him to tell us this idle tale and to speak of a night of his childhood and dreams that are ancient and superannuated ?_ It is flat to spin pointless yarns. Surely he doesn't take us for interpreters of dreams?” No, my friend; and Xenophon, too, when he told one time. how he dreamed that a bolt of lightning, striking his father’s house, set it afire, and all the rest of it—you know it—did not do so because he wanted the dream interpreted, nor yet because he had made up his mind to talk nonsense, particularly in time of war and in a desperate state of affairs, with the enemy on every side; no, the story had a certain usefulness.[*]

So it was with me, and I told you this dream in order that those who are young may take the better direction and cleave to education, above all if poverty