Dreams That Shaped Rome by Charity Bishop

Prophetic visions, Dream Seers & Divine Warnings in Ancient Rome

While doing research for my book series about Claudia Procula, The Claudia Chronicles, I started wondering about the strange little detail Matthew includes in the gospels during the trial of Jesus.

Imagine the scene (fleshed out from my imagination). Jesus has been roughed up, interrogated and hauled in front of the Roman Governor on trumped-up treason charges. The Sanhedrin (the Jewish religious authorities, who hated Jesus only a little more than they loathed Pilate) are outside, because to enter the governor’s household would make them unclean just a few hours before the Passover. (Gotta obey the religious rules when you’re trying to get a man murdered, am I right?)

It seems fairly cut and dried. This Jesus hippie is causing trouble. The Sanhedrin insist he claims to be a king. Caesar frowns on that, so obviously you’ve gotta kill him. Now would be good. Before breakfast. Or before his followers wake up and cause trouble. Like a riot or something.

Pilate has been aware of this for a few hours, since his spies informed him in the middle of the night that the temple folks were “up to stuff.” And now this mess is on his doorstep. Seems like the only thing to do is stamp the execution order and go back to bed.

Then his wife sends him an urgent message: “I had bad dreams about this exact thing last night. HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.”

Now, to a modern reader, “I had a nightmare” is not compelling enough evidence to halt a trial.

But Pilate was a Roman.

And Romans lived in a culture saturated with omens, superstitions, divination, and a belief that the gods used dreams to warn people, guide them, or foreshadow future events. When Claudia interrupted his One Job to tell him, “Babe, I had a dream,” he heard, “The gods are telling you not to do this.”

Pilate took her at her word and tried to pass the buck off to his frienemy, Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, and a man of piss-poor judgment in women and in life. Surely that sucker would fall into this trap and take the blame. But Herod LOL’d and went nah, you deal with this, Big Roman Head Honcho, and sent Jesus right back to Pilate, leaving him between a cosmic rock and a divine hard place.

Romans Believed Dreams Could Predict the Future

Dreams were serious business in the ancient world.

Some people wanted divine dreams so badly that they deliberately slept in sacred temples, hoping a god would appear to them with a message. This practice, called dream incubation, was particularly associated with healing deities, such as the Greek god Asclepius. The prospective dreamer hoped Asclepius would appear to them in a dream to provide a cure or medical advice. While this practice started in Greece, it soon spread into Rome, where Asclepius had a temple on Tiber Island.

There is an interesting biblical parallel here, which shows us that all ancient people thought the same way, even if the Jews ascribed divine messages to One God, instead of to many. The prophet Samuel, as a child, sleeps in a sanctuary near the Ark of God when Adonai (God) calls to him during the night. Samuel thinks his master, Eli, is calling to him, until Eli realizes Adonai is speaking to the boy. (To be clear, Samuel was not sleeping there hoping to receive a dream; he was just an innocent kid, left to serve at the temple, who rolled out his bedroll in a dark corner and fell asleep.)

The theology behind these events is different, but the basic concept was familiar throughout the ancient world: sleep in a holy place, and the gods will speak to you, and the divine speak through dreams. The difference is that the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians had to ask, “Who sent me this dream and why?” and the Hebrews would assume, if a dream was a true revelation, that it had to be Adonai.

Romans took supernatural warnings seriously enough that dreams, omens, auguries, and other forms of divination influenced everything from private decisions to military actions. Some powerful Romans accumulated famous stories about dreams.

When Romans Dreamed, History Changed

Julius Caesar lay claim to one of the most awkward dreams in recorded history. You know, the kind you don’t want to tell your mother about, because… eh. It involves her. And incest. Fortunately, his interpreters recognized that the squick factor was symbolic rather than literal. That “his mother” meant Mother Earth, the land itself. The dream suggested Caesar would therefore “possess” or conquer the earth. On with global domination! A gleeful Ceasar set out to conquer lands and march into Rome with his legions.

But an even more interesting dream occurred shortly before Caesar’s assassination. His wife, Calpurnia, had a terrifying dream the night before. Accounts differ on what exactly she saw, but the outcome is the same: stay out of the Senate tomorrow, or you’re a dead man. She begged him to listen to her, and he listened. (As all good husbands should.) But then someone who I would view with suspicion later, if I were any of his Actual Friends, persuaded him to go anyway.

Within hours, he was dead.

The moral of this is obvious: if your wife dreams you are gonna die, you better listen. Pilate, being a knight and therefore educated, probably would have known about this incident, and her dream, as part of the lore of the rise of Caesar Augustus, who decided to avenge his uncle and wipe out those responsible before taking the “throne.”

This story creates an interesting parallel with Claudia Procula’s dream.

Calpurnia, a powerful Roman man’s wife, has a dream and warns her husband not to proceed, he ignores her and ends up dead.

Claudia, a powerful Roman man’s wife, has a dream, warns her husband not to proceed, and…

No wonder the trial ground to a halt, and Pilate looked for the nearest chump who could take the guilt off his hands. An ominous dream from the wife of an important Roman official was a serious warning about what he was about to do.

Pilate probably knew about a few other dreams…

The Dream That Saved Augustus

In 42 BCE, the future Emperor Augustus went to war against Julius Caesar’s assassins. He got super sick before the Battle of Philippi and was resting inside his tent. His physician, Artorius, dozed off and had a vivid dream in which he was warned that if Augustus did not leave the camp immediately, he would die. Augustus hauled ass out of there, carried out by his guards. A few hours later, his enemies attacked and reportedly stabbed his empty bed, believing he was still in it. (The old “pillow under the covers” trick? Who knew it originated so early in history!?)

How Did Romans Know Which Dreams Were Prophetic?

Romans didn’t just wake up from dreams and act on them; they thought dreams were divided into two categories: “I had too much shellfish last night” (irrelevant dreams) and “prophetic warnings and visitations” (I was well-fed, well-rested, and not freaking out about anything beforehand, so Jupiter approves of my plan to assassinate my mother-in-law).

Ancient dream interpreters developed systems for distinguishing meaningless dreams from important ones by asking a bunch of impertinent questions (were you hot, cold, hungry, tired, sexually frustrated, anxious?). Then they would ask a ton of other questions about your status, family life, and so on, because slaves didn’t receive the same interpretations as a general would. (Another way Adonai is different; he frequently spoke through “the least of these.”)

Ancient writers eventually developed elaborate systems for classifying dreams, but they roughly fell into three categories:

Symbolic dreams that concealed their meaning and required interpretation (the kind my heroine experiences early in her life)
Dreams in which a god, dead ancestor, or teacher appeared and delivered a specific message
Visions that appeared to show a future event directly before it happened

Obviously, most people could figure out the latter two kinds of dreams on their own, but for the first one, you needed a dream interpreter. These interpreters weren’t just randos off the street; they were professionals who worked in temples and who had an enormous resource library full of dream symbols, previous cases, cultural associations, and reported outcomes to consult. Pilate could have walked in and said, “Claudia had a bad dream and told me to have nothing to do with this dude,” and they could have looked at their chart, and brought out a scroll copied down from a dream diviner they met in Crete, and then ominously said, “You had better listen, because Caesar ignored his wife’s advice, and we all know how that turned out.”

The most important surviving authority on dream interpretation is Artemidorus, from the second century, who wrote five volumes on how to analyze and understand dreams. (Bet he was super fun at parties and people lined up to talk about three-headed crocodiles!) He divided them into dreams reflecting what’s going on inside of you, and those that told you what was about to happen. Basically, “I had too much shellfish” vs. “Jupiter wants a word.” He was also quite keen to expound on this material in depth. (Want to know what incest in a dream means? Here are a bunch of ways to interpret it, based on… um… positions and where the inappropriate behavior took place and what color she was wearing. Ahem).

Artemidorus specified dreams did not mean the same thing for different people; so Pilate would have heard “your name will be Mudd if you don’t listen to her,” and a slave would have heard something else (like, “don’t lick your master’s sandal the next time he tells you to; you’ll die of poison”). He actually traveled around collecting stuff for his library, talking to interpreters and recording what people dreamed and what happened later, so he built the first ancient world unhinged dream database.

See? History can be fun!

This is all relevant to Pilate’s wife, which is why I made dream interpretation central to her story, and particularly in the first novel, The Dream Diviner.

Roman Dreams vs. Biblical Dreams

The Bible is full of dreams.

Jacob dreams of a ladder between heaven and earth. Joseph has prophetic dreams as a boy and later interprets Pharaoh’s dreams about the coming famine. Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams. Mary’s husband Joseph repeatedly receives divine instructions through his dreams. The Magi are even warned in a dream not to return to Herod.

And then there is Pilate’s wife.

In the Roman world, dreams were part of divination and involved numerous gods, omens, astrological signs, and other methods of divining the truth. Biblical dream narratives insisted instead that Adonai alone is the source of genuine revelation, and he always receives the credit. Joseph does not claim to be a dream diviner or possess special knowledge; he says God gave him the answers. Daniel rejected the idea that he possessed any superior wisdom and said God revealed its mysteries to him.

A Roman interpreter and a Hebrew prophet might both look at a dream and ask, “What does this mean?” but they came from radically different worldviews about who was speaking and why. Jewish readers of Matthew would have interpreted it through its Jewish theological framework (all divine inspiration comes from Adonai) but Pilate would have interpreted it through his Roman framework (“the divine world is warning me that something terrible will happen if I condemn this innocent man”).

What Did Claudia Actually Dream About?

This is where a historian has no answers, and the storyteller gets to come out and theorize.

Matthew never tells us. Maybe he didn’t know.

Storytellers throughout Christian history have speculated. Some say a divine messenger came to her and warned her. Some say Satan told her to warn off her husband, so hell would be emptied of its prisoners (leaving him lonely). Wow, even Satan has to tell Pilate not to do dumb stuff? Awkward.

Others speculate that she saw her husband being eternally condemned to hell (probably a medieval interpretation; hell was popular in those days).

One of the spicier interpretations is where she has literal visions of Jesus’s impending crucifixion. She sees the injustice of the trial, the physical horrors of the cross, and the cosmic darkness that follows. Struck with terror, she wakes aware that this deed will forever stain Pilate’s hands with blood. And guilt.

Another theory is that she heard part of the Apostles’ Creed being echoed across the centuries until the end of time, blaming her husband for Jesus’s death and making him into a notorious villain.

Could she have seen her husband’s downfall? Maybe. That would fit the usual Roman interpretation. But Matthew gives us no clues.

Obviously, a storyteller gets curious to explore the “what if’s” that the greatest mystery in history leaves us with (what did she see in her dream?), and that led to The Dream Diviner, the first book in my series about Claudia Procula and Pilate. Here, Claudia is young and innocent. A fresh-faced, curious girl living a good life in Rome, but troubled by deeply symbolic dreams that she struggles to interpret until it’s too late. Desperate to find someone to help her, she befriends a traveling Jewish teacher named Avram, aware that becoming interested in his god in a time of rampant anti-Hebrew sentiments in Rome isn’t the best idea she ever had.

But sometimes, dreams get so loud that you just can’t ignore them…