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 guise in which I had returned, and even reminded him gently of the plans that they had narrowly escaped making for me.

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!

The Alexandrians called Heracles “him of the three nights,” because Zeus tripled the length of the night which he spent with Alcmene. See Dual. of the Gods 14 (vulg. 10).

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.

Anabasis 3, 1,11. Lucian, perhaps confusing this with a later dream (4, 3, 7), evidently thinks that it was told to the soldiers to hearten them, but this is not the case. Xenophon was unable to interpret it until after the event, and did not tell it to anyone until he put it into his book.

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 is making any one of them faint-hearted and inclining him toward the worse, to the detriment of a noble nature. He will be strengthened, I am very sure, by hearing the tale, if he takes me as an adequate example, reflecting what I was when aspired to all that is finest and set my heart on education, showing no weakness in the face of my poverty at that time, and what I am now, on my return to you—if nothing more, at least quite as highly thought of as any sculptor.