Cicero's Dream of Scipio and Macrobius' Comment

Cicero, Macrobius · Constitution of Man Series · 14 pages

Cicero's Somnium Scipionis with the commentary of Macrobius. The dream forms a digression within the sixth book of De re publica, and in it Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus meets his adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus, hero of the Second Punic War, and travels through the planetary spheres. Comparisons have long been drawn between this closing section of Cicero's treatise and the Myth of Er in Plato's Republic, to which De re publica is said to respond.

Compressed as it is, the vision carries digressions on cosmology, dream-interpretation, prophecy, time-cycles and geography, a doctrine of the nature of the soul, and the Pythagorean idea of the Music of the Spheres — which is why it belongs in this section rather than among the Hellenic papers. Macrobius, writing around the turn of the fifth century, studied it and produced the commentary that was valued throughout the Middle Ages and is printed here with it. The transmission is worth noting for its reach: the dream was known to Boethius, referenced explicitly by Chaucer in the Parliament of Foules and the Nun's Priest's Tale, and set as a short opera, Il sogno di Scipione, by the sixteen-year-old Mozart.

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