Book 5, lines 282-299

[Previous: lines 261-281]

Pilate is agonizing over whether to have Jesus executed.

Romanum interea monet ipsa exterrita visis
per somnum coniux, iuvenis ne sanguine sese
polluat, abstiueat capto: portenta minari
magna deum in somnis. “Is erat is candidus ille                 [285]
agnus,” ait, “(numquam ludunt me somnia vana)
quem circumfusique canes, sudibusque petebant
pastorum globus omnis. Eum mox omnia ademtum
pascuaque, et notis flebant cum saltibus agri.
At pater altitonans manifesta percitus ira                         [290]
desuper auctores caedis saevibat in ipsos.
Turbatum extemplo visum ruere undique caelum,
et campos late, ac silvas quatere horrida grando.
Tum subito audita ex alto, voxque acta per auras:
‘Parce Deo, Romane, hominum compesce furorem.’        [295]
Credo equidem hunc (non te fallit) genus esse deorum.
Parce manus scelerare, pio, vir, parce cruori.
Ipsi haec caelicolae placidi portenta refutent,
Iudaeosque petant solos, generique minentur.”

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Meanwhile the Roman learnt of a frightening
dream of his wife’s: she urged him not to pollute
himself with the captive youth’s blood: warned off
by great God in a dream: “He came to me white              [285]
as a lamb,” she said, “(my dreams never lie)
beset by eager dogs and, holding sharp stakes,
a mob of shepherds. And his capture made
the flocks, the very fields and woods weep for him.
Then high-thundering God showed his anger                   [290]
raging above at the authors of this outrage.
It seemed to me the sky fell crumbling around me,
the fields and woods battered with this rough hail.
And suddenly a voice was heard from heaven:
‘Spare this god, Roman! Restrain mankind’s anger!’         [295]
I do believe (don’t fool yourself) he is divine.
Don’t stain your hands, my love, with his sacred blood.
May heaven’s inhabitants undo this curse—
on the Jews and their descendants let it fall.”

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The curious detail of Pilate’s wife’s dream derives from a single Biblical verse:

While he [Pilate] was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent to him, saying, “Have nothing to do with that just Man, for I have suffered many things today in a dream because of Him.” [Matthew 27:19]

We are not vouchsafed her name, although later Christian tradition calls her ‘Procla’ (indeed, she is venerated as Saint Procla by the Oriental Orthodox Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church). Was she a real person? It is likely that Pilate was married, but rather less likely that he brought his wife with him to Judea. Governors were either discouraged or else legally prevented from taking their wives with them. This seems to have been the law during the time of the Republic, and although Tiberius attempted to relax this rule it's not clear that he actually did so, following a ‘famous speech delivered before the Senate by A. Caecina Severus in A.D. 21, that urged that governors' wives be banned from accompanying their husbands because of their disastrous meddling in matters of imperial administration’ [Anthony J Marshall ‘Roman Women in the Provinces’, Ancient Society 6 (1975), 109]. Women were seen as a distraction where duty was concerned (Roman soldiers were not permitted to marry, for instance):

Until the close of the Republican period, it remained the rule that wives did not accompany provincial officials. It was the loyal wife's duty to see her husband off at the city gate or port of embarcation and be there to greet him on his return. For a governor's wife, this might also mean parting with her sons, who would often accompany their father in preparation for their own careers. [Marshall, 113]

It was possible to get exemptions to the rule, for instance by petitioning the Emperor, and maybe Pilate did this, but there's no evidence he did. It's even possible that Matthew (or whatever the sources were from which Matthew drew) assumed Pilate's wife was in Jerusalem with him (after all, she would not be visible to the public even if present) because he had a statue erected to her:

There were other ways in which a wife's presence might be felt in the provinces, despite her physical absence. A city of her husband's province would often pay her the honour of a statue, erected it were in absentia, in a tribute which recognized her as a part of the husband's official persona. Cato is already to be found attacking this practice in 184 B.C., but the mothers, wives and daughters of governors continued to invade their provinces in statue form. The wife, mother and daughter of L. Valerius Flaccus, governor of Asia in 62 B.C., were all three honoured by statues erected in Magnesia-on-Maeander, and the honour paid to these absent ladies clearly constitutes a form of tribute to Flaccus himself. However much conservative Romans may have frowned on this practice ... the wife of a prominent publicanus might also aspire to appear in statue form in an eastern city. [Marshall, 115]

At some point in the 1st-century, and certainly in subsequent centuries, governor's wives became more common figures in the provinces. But whilst it's not impossible Pilate had his wife with him, it's surely more likely that this small incident by Matthew records a belief that one of the spiritual duties of wives, as the early Christians understood things, was to attempt to draw their worldly husbands back to religious considerations.

When it comes to the content of Pilate's wife's dream Vida has a more-or-less free hand. What he goes with is twofold: the vision of Christ as the lamb of god whose shepherds, instead of protecting him from dogs, are doing the savage opposite, and even joining the hounds in attacking the innocent creature. I like this, which seems to me to touch on an intriguing paradox in Christian faith by which Jesus is at the same time the lamb being shepherded and the Good Shepherd Himself, such that we are his flock. Then Pilate's wife dreams a warning voice from heaven, before capping off her dream with a stingingly anti-Semitic touch.

It serves its purpose, in Vida's narrative, but it doesn't, I think, have the vibe of an actual dream. It's more like a message delivered, unambiguous and one-dimensional. Real dreams aren't like that. Adam Phillips, in Terrors and Experts, says this about the interpretation of dreams: ‘a dream is enigmatic—it invites interpretation, intrigues us—because it has transformed something unacceptable, through what Freud calls the dream work, into something puzzling. It is assumed that the unacceptable is something, once the dream has been interpreted, that we are able to recognize and understand. And this is because it belongs to us; we are playing hide-and-seek, but only with ourselves. In the dream the forbidden may become merely eccentric or dazzlingly banal; but only the familiar is ever in disguise. The interpreter, paradoxically—the expert on dreams—is in search of the ordinary.’ [64]

But why must the extraordinary be turned into the ordinary? That sounds like false reckoning (or false translation) to me. The implication here is ‘because it started out that way’; but that's surely not true: dreams are as likely, or are more likely, to grind their metaphorical molars upon extraordinary aspects of our life. The perfectly habitual aspects of it won't snag the unconscious's interest. So could it be that dream-interpreters turn the extraordinary into the ordinary only because the ordinary sounds more comprehensible to us, because it produces the sort of narrative the dreamer prefers to wake up to? (‘...those skinny cattle eating the fat cattle and not getting fat? That's about harvests, mate.’) But if the currency of dreams is the extraordinary, common sense suggests that the interpretation of dreams should be extraordinary too—suggests that the function of the dreaming is bound-up with its extraordinariness. The sense of recognition Phillips is talking about here, that ‘aha! that's what it means!’ is all about the transcendent rush, the poetry, not about the mundanity. But the very fact that it's a rush, the very thrill of it, ought to make us suspicious. It is not the currency of true memoroy to elate us, after all. It's cool, but it's not the truth.

This is the flaw in the Biblical narrative of Joseph: his dreams are too rational, too strictly allegorical. They don't have the flavour, the vibe, of actual dreams. We can, I think, tell the difference between a report of an actual dream and the faux-dream confected for, as it might be, a novel. Writer C K Stead says as much: ‘In my most recently published novel I decided one or other of the central characters should experience or remember a significant dream in each of seven chapters. When I tried to invent these they seemed in some indefinable way fake; so I hunted through old notebooks and found dreams I had recorded which could be used with a minimum of alteration.’ Most writers will know what he means.

At the head of this post is ‘The Dream of Pilate's Wife’ (1879), an engraving by Alphonse François, after Gustave Doré.

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