The Interpretation of Dreams, By that most celebrated Philosopher Artimedorus. First written in Greek, and afterwards translated into divers foreign Languages, and now made into English. Being a Treatise of great Value and Esteem, and very useful and entertaining for all sorts of People.

ARTEMIDORUS, DALDIANUS.

Published by London: Printed for J. Bew, No. 28, Paternoster-Row, 1786.

About this Item

129, [3]pp., 12mo. Stab-sewn in original sheep; neatly rebacked. "A New Edition", including four pages of "To the Reader" by its original English translator Robert Wood. Artimedorus was a renowned soothsayer in Ephesus in the third century; his Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams) draws on many earlier authors and it went on to become a major influence both in the Byzantine Empire and on Islamic dream-interpretation through the ninth-century Arabic translation by Hunayn b. Ishâq. The work was lost to Western Europe until the sixteenth century and then became widely circulated, with Robert Wood s translation first appearing in 1606. One copy of that is recorded in STC, and subsequent editions are either similarly rare or lost altogether. There survive a handful of seventeenth-century editions, and from the eighteenth century three (1710, circa 1740, and a "twenty-third" edition of 1755) in addition to the present one, of which the only other located copy is at the British Library. One recent critic described the Oneirocritica as "the most complete and painstaking study of dream-interpretation as practised in the Graeco-Roman world," and that Freud, in addition to co-opting Artemidorus s title for his own study insisted "on affinities between that work and his own.".

Seller Inventory # 14226

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Interpretation of Dreams, By that most celebrated Philosopher Artimedorus. First written in Greek, and afterwards translated into divers foreign Languages, and now made into English. Being a Treatise of great Value and Esteem, and very useful and entertaining for all sorts of People.
• Publisher: London: Printed for J. Bew, No. 28, Paternoster-Row, 1786.