RESEARCH ARTICLE Dreams in Plutarch’s Lives of Alcibiades and Demosthenes Claire Catenaccio Georgetown University Email: Claire.Catenaccio@georgetown.edu Abstract This article argues that the ante mortem dreams of Alcibiades and Demosthenes articulate key themes of moral doubt in Plutarch’s biography of each man. Alcibiades’ dream of being dressed as a courtesan alludes to his uneasy stance between masculine and feminine postures; Demosthenes’ dream of himself as a failed tragic actor draws upon his lifelong concern with performance and insincerity. In these two Lives, Plutarch deploys the ambiguity and uncertainty of dreams to pose an interpretive problem for the reader which can never fully be resolved, particularly appropriate to these unpredictable and untrustworthy men. Keywords: dreams; Plutarch; Alcibiades; Demosthenes I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn, I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers. Walt Whitman, ‘The Sleepers’ I. Introduction In his Parallel Lives, a series of at least 23 pairs of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen composed around the turn of the second century AD, Plutarch relates approximately 45 dreams in detail. 1 In what follows, I demonstrate how the dreams recounted in the Lives of Alcibiades and Demosthenes, two of Plutarch’s most complex and morally ambiguous subjects, provide vivid closing summations of the central conflicts in these men’ s lives. Further, via a highly sophisticated minimalist technique of ellipsis and contraposition, Plutarch uses uncertainties in the dream narrative to create a final, unsolvable moral aporia for the reader. The particular qualities of dreams, above all their ambiguity, provide Plutarch with a fitting means of portraying these two enigmatic men. Dreams in biography constitute a special quandary for the historian, since they are by their very nature personal and unverifiable. 2 Plutarch’s inclusion of dreams in and of itself has aroused suspicion. William Harris, in his book-length survey of ancient dream culture, © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. 1 Brenk (1975) 337. My own count is slightly higher, as I include dreams that are described in just a few words, provided Plutarch hints at their content. 2 For the ontological status of dreams as ‘historical’ evidence, cf. Hall (2011). The Journal of Hellenic Studies (2023), 1–16 doi:10.1017/S0075426923000538 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075426923000538 Published online by Cambridge University Press