Generals' Dreams before Battle: An Overview of a Recurring Motif in Ancient Historiography (4th c. BC - 3rd c. AD)

There are dozens of references in the ancient historiographers and biographers to dreams experienced and/or reported, during military operations. The references include brief mentions as well as descriptions of various lengths of these dreams and their consequences. Many of the recorded dreams are said to have occurred during preparations for expeditions,1 during sieges,2 or shortly before battle. In this paper, I will limit the overview to a specific type of situation that recurs in the accounts of ancient historians and biographers: dreams of generals that occurred very shortly before battles. I will look at twenty such occasions, from the earliest examples set in Greco-Roman contexts in the fifth century BC to the first century AD, and argue that there is a fairly formalized narrative structure that the historians of the Classical, Hellenistic, and early Imperial eras employed to describe this type of dreaming and dream-sharing event. I will also argue that while the motif was probably based on an actual practice of interpreting dreams during times of war, it could also be used for various literary purposes, and that one of its most important functions was to demonstrate the working of divine intervention in military conflicts.