Dreams & Visions of Early Byzantine Emperors

With the kind permission of Dr Meaghan McEvoy, below is an excerpt from her chapter entitled “Dynastic Dreams and Visions of Early Byzantine Emperors (ca. 518–565 AD)” in Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium, edited by Bronwen Neil & Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 99–117.

Dreams, visions and portents relating to imperial succession are common literary devices in early Byzantium and have their antecedents in the period of pre-Christian Roman rule. Suetonius reports, for example, that the emperor Nero in the last days of his reign was admonished in a dream to take the sacred chariot of Jupiter Optimus Maximus from its shrine to the house of Vespasian; Cassius Dio reports that he was inspired to write and publish a little book about the dreams and portents which gave Septimius Severus reason to hope for imperial power; while Severus himself dreamt of being suckled by a she-wolf. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, among the various frightening omens of the death of the emperor Constantius II in 361 was a dream:

[A]t night he was alarmed by apparitions, and when he was not yet wholly sunk in sleep, the ghost of his father seemed to hold out to him a fair child; and when he took it and set it in his lap, it shook from him the ball which he held in his right hand and threw it to a great distance. And this foretold a change in the state, although the seers gave reassuring answers.[1]

Constantius II died only days later, leaving the throne to his rebellious cousin Julian, whose reign, the last of his dynasty, survived less than 2 years. 

Not all such visions of imperial demises or future successions arose from sleep either: the poet Claudian in the late 4th century wrote of the general Stilicho being presented with a consular gown in 400 AD on which was embroidered a scene of his daughter Maria, then married to the emperor Honorius, giving birth to an imperial heir—an event which certainly never occurred. On occasion such portents or visions of the future could even consist simply of observing a future emperor asleep—as Procopius reports in the case of Marcian, whose rest was sheltered by an eagle hovering above him while a captive in North Africa, an episode which the Vandal king Geiseric recognised as a foreshadowing of Marcian’s future accession.

Imperial dreams in the early Byzantine period are predominantly dreams concerned with the succession. Whether explaining an imperial accession, an imperial downfall or the passing over of imperial heirs, such dreams reflect the preoccupations of court society of the time, the expectations of dynastic succession, and the anxieties surrounding

periods of regime-change. Yet—to raise a final question—were emperors really supposed to spend their time dreaming? One of the virtues for which we frequently find emperors praised in our ancient sources is their vigilance and their watchfulness over the wellbeing of their subjects—not their luxurious sleep habits or exotic dreams. According to Seneca, writing in the 1st century, “the watchfulness of Caesar guards all men’s sleep”, while Ammianus in the 4th century praises the emperor Julian fulsomely for his discipline in needing little sleep and putting the night hours to good use:

[H]e divided his nights according to a threefold schedule—rest, affairs of state, and the Muses, a course which Alexander the Great used to practise; but Julian was far more self-reliant. For Alexander used to set a bronze basin beside his couch and with outstretched arm hold a silver ball over it, so that when the coming of sleep relaxed the tension of his muscles, the clanging of the ball as it fell might break off his nap. But Julian could wake up as often as he wished, without any artificial means. And when the night was half over, he always got up, not from a downy couch or silken coverlets … but from a rough blanket and rug … In these austere conditions he paid diligent heed to all his public duties. And after bringing these (as his lofty and serious tasks) to an end, he turned to the exercise of his mind … These, then, were the nightly evidences of his self-restraint and his virtues.[2]

The emperor Justinian too, a few centuries later again, is praised by John Lydus as “the emperor who never sleeps”—spending the night when his subjects were sleeping attending to vital matters of state. Yet such habits are susceptible of malicious redeployment too—according to Procopius, in his infamous Secret History, Justinian’s night-time sleeplessness was an indication of a demonic nature:

[H]e was not given to sleep, as a general thing … after sleeping perhaps one hour he would spend the rest of the time walking about constantly. And yet, if he had been willing to spend just that amount of time in good works, affairs would have advanced to a very high degree of prosperity … For he made it his task to be constantly awake and to undergo hardships and to labour for no other purpose than to contrive constantly and every day more grievous calamities for his subjects. For he was, as has been said, particularly keen in devising and swift in executing unholy deeds, so that in the end even his natural good qualities resulted in the undoing of his subjects.[3]

The habits of rulers were always held up to scrutiny in the Byzantine world, and vigilance was more valued than sleep. Perhaps for that reason when sources do report upon the dreams of emperors, they are most often about matters of great import—such as the imperial succession. Emperors might dream infrequently, and sleep was perhaps a luxury in an imperial life, but when they did dream, they had portentous dreams—at least so far as our sources report them. And while perhaps those dreams might really be regarded as literary devices rather than actual imperial dreams—stories which explained unexpected courses of events through divine interventions or revelations—they can nevertheless tell us much about the preoccupations of the time with matters of imperial dynastic succession and court politics.

Notes

[1] Ammianus Marcellinus 21.14.1. Trans. J. C. Rolfe (1940) Res gestae, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA), 166–167.

[2] Ammianus Marcellinus 16.5.4–8. Trans. Rolfe (1935) Res gestae, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA), 216–219.

[3] Procopius,Anecdota, 13. 28–33. Trans. H. B. Dewing (1935) Secret History, or Anecdota(Cambridge, MA), 164–167 (translation modified).

Mosaic

Emperor Justinian, Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna.