Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity

William V. Harris

  • William V. Harris is Recipient of the 2007 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award

With dreams, Harris has come into a world of mirrors and uncertainties, where traditional boundaries between truth and fantasy, reality and fiction, reportage and invention have all but disappeared. I cannot think of any other ancient historian who would have dared to undertake a book like this. Its undoubted success is due as much to the clear thinking and crisp exposition of the author as to the vast erudition that underlies it.
   --G. W. Bowersock

In Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity, William Harris takes on the whole culture of ancient dreaming with characteristic wit and erudition, against a background of modern scientific, psychological and psychoanalytical theories. His wide learning gives him the ability to see the important intellectual contributions made by some ancient theorists even as he goes against the grain of contemporary thought. This is classic Harris.
   --Mary Beard

  • Cover: Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
  • A photo of the author

William V. Harris is Shepherd Professor of History at Columbia University and Director of the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean.