Your Dream and Mine

As for your charge of perjury: since you refer me to your book, and since I have made my reply to you and to Calpurnius in the earlier books, it will be enough here to observe that you demand of me in my sleep what you have never yourself carried out in your waking hours. It seems I am guilty of a great crime because I told girls and virgins of Christ that they had better not read secular works, and because I once promised, when I was warned in a dream, not to read them. But your ship, announced by revelation to the city of Rome, promises one thing and does another. It came to do away with the puzzle of the astrologers; what it actually does is to do away with the faith of Christians. It made its run with sails full set over the Ionian and Aegean, the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas, only to be shipwrecked in the port of Rome. Are you not ashamed of hunting up nonsense of this kind and putting me to the trouble of bringing up similar things against you? Suppose someone had seen a dream about you of a kind that might make you vain. It would have been modest as well as wise of you to seem not to know of it, instead of boasting of other people’s dreams as serious testimony to yourself. What a difference there is between your dream and mine! Mine tells how I was humbled and checked; yours boasts over and over again how you were praised. You cannot say, “It matters nothing to me what another man dreamed.” For in those most enlightening books of yours you tell us that this was the motive that led you to make the translation: you could not bear that an eminent man should have dreamed in vain. This is the whole of your effort. If you can make me out guilty of perjury, you think you will be counted no heretic. [a]