The Bearers

by Artemidorus of Daldis, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The inn at the turning for Daldis stands where the Sardis road crosses a stream that is a river for two months of the year and a bed of white stones for the rest. After the vintage the road is full of mules carrying new wine down to the coast in skins, and the yard of the inn smells of must and dung, and wasps come in through the shutters and drown in the cups. I had walked from Sardis that day with a boy to carry the satchel, and I meant to be in Daldis the next evening. My mother's tomb wanted a new inscription. The old one had been cut by a man who could not spell, and for eleven years she had been lying under a mistake.

The woman who kept the inn was called Tatia. She had kept it when I was a boy and her mother before her, and she knew me as she knew the stream, as a thing that came and went. She gave me the bench by the wall, which is warm because the oven is on the other side of it, and a bowl of lentils with too much cumin, and she told the room, without lowering her voice, that I was the man from Ephesus who wrote down dreams.

That is how most of my evenings on the road begin. A room of strangers is a room of dreams, and some innkeeper always says so.

A carter came first, who had dreamed of his dead brother and wanted to know if his brother was angry. I asked him about the brother, and about the carting, and about the night before the dream, and it came out that he had spent it under his cart in the rain at Hypaipa thinking about money his brother had left him and the brother's widow had not. That was the day and the night and the money, and nothing more, and I told him so. He was pleased to hear his brother was not angry, though I had not said it. Then a girl came who had dreamed of a hare, and her mother, who would not let her tell it; and then a priest of some god from up the valley who wished it to be known that he did not need me. I wrote down the hare. It was a good deal later, when the lamp by the door had been trimmed twice and the carters had gone out to their carts, that the young man came and sat at the other end of my bench.

---

He had been at the table by the door all evening with a cup of water and a piece of bread, and he had watched me the way a man watches a dog he is not sure of. He was perhaps twenty-five, clean-shaven, of middle height, in a hooded cloak of brown wool that was too heavy for the room. He kept it on. His Greek was good, the Greek of a city and a schoolroom, and he chose his words before he used them, as people do who have been corrected often.

"They say you ask questions first," he said.

"I do. Tell me the dream whole, every part of it, the small parts too. But first tell me about yourself."

"What do you need to know?"

"Whatever is true. Man or woman I can see. Slave or free, rich or poor, sick or well, married or not, your trade, your age, where you were born and where you are going."

He answered in order, as if he had made a list. His name was Hermias. He was free-born, of Smyrna. He was a clerk; he kept accounts and wrote letters for a contractor who had the paving of a stretch of road beyond Daldis, and he was going there to the works. He was twenty-four. He was in health. He was not married.

"Your hand," I said.

He looked at it. There was a scar on the back of the left hand, white and puckered, running from the knuckle of the first finger halfway to the wrist.

"A lamp," he said. "When I was a boy. I knocked it over on the table and caught the oil."

On the right hand, on the inside of the second finger at the first joint, there was a hard yellow ridge where a pen rests. A clerk's finger. I have one myself. I nodded and said, "Go on."

---

He had dreamed, he said, that he was dead.

He did not know how he had died. He was simply dead, laid out on a board in a room he did not know, and someone had washed him, because he could feel that his skin was clean and the water had been warm. He was dressed in white. There was a wreath on his head; he could feel the leaves against his forehead. Then four men came in and lifted the board onto their shoulders and carried him out.

"Did you know them?"

"No."

"Not one?"

He thought. "No. They were strangers. They didn't speak. They didn't weep either. There was no one weeping."

"Was anyone walking behind? Flute-players, women, anyone?"

"No one. Only the four, carrying."

They carried him out of the town and a long way down a road. He could see the sky going past above him, and the tops of trees. They walked a long time. Then they came to a place where roads met, and they set the board down on the ground in the middle of it, and went away, all four together, back the way they had come. He lay there. It grew light.

"And then?"

"Then I woke."

"Is that all of it?"

"That's all of it."

"How did you feel? Not now. In the dream."

He took longer over that than over anything else. Outside in the yard a mule kicked the wall of the shed, twice, and a carter swore at it.

"Glad," he said.

"Glad to be dead?"

"Glad to be carried. Glad when they put me down." He looked at the table. "It wasn't cold, at the crossroads. I thought it would be cold."

---

There are questions I ask of every dream before I ask what it means, and the first is whether it means anything at all. A great many dreams are made of the day and the body and nothing else. I asked him what he had done the day before he dreamed it.

"Walked."

"From where?"

He hesitated, very slightly. "From the coast."

"Did you pass a burial on the road? A tomb being opened, a procession, a pyre, anything with the dead in it?"

"No."

"Had anyone you know died lately?"

"No one."

"Were you ill that night? Feverish? Had you drunk too much, or eaten nothing?"

"I'd eaten," he said. "I was tired, that's all. I'd walked a long way."

So the walking might be the day: a tired man dreams of being carried. I set the carrying aside, or rather I put it to one side where I could still see it. But he had not been carried as a tired man is carried in a cart or on a friend's back. He had been washed and dressed and garlanded and taken out as the dead are taken out, and he had been glad. That did not come from a long road. That was the part left over, and the part left over is where I begin.

I have recorded many dreams of dying. They are not, most of them, dreams of death; a man who dreams that he is dead is not much more likely to die than a man who dreams that he is a horse is to start eating oats. Death in a dream is commonly an image of an ending and a change of state, and what it signifies depends on what state the dreamer is in and what change lies open to him. For a sick man it can be the plain thing, and I am careful with sick men. For a man abroad it can be the return home, because the dead go back to the earth they came from. For an unmarried man in health it points, very often, to a marriage. I have seen this come true too many times to doubt it. And the likeness is not hard to find, if you have ever been to both. At a wedding and at a funeral alike there is washing, and white clothes, and garlands, and a procession through the street with everyone watching; and both are the ending of one state and the beginning of another, from which nobody comes back as he was.

"You're not married," I said.

"No."

"Is there any talk of it? A woman, a family, a match your father or your patron has spoken of?"

"No," he said. Then, after a moment: "Not that I know."

"Then I'll tell you what I think, and why, so that you can judge it. For an unmarried man in health, a dream of being dead and carried out commonly points to a marriage. The washing, the white, the wreath, the procession: those belong to a wedding as much as to a funeral. That the bearers were strangers I would read as a marriage among people you do not yet know: a wife from outside your city, or outside your circle. That there was no weeping is good. That you were glad is good. The crossroads I can't read with any confidence. It may mean only that the matter is not settled, that it lies open in more than one direction; it may mean nothing at all. I would not build on it. It is not a decree. Nobody is obliged to marry because of a dream."

He listened to all of it without moving. He was not, I thought, a man who was pleased. Nor was he disappointed, quite. He looked like a man who has been handed a coin in a currency he does not use, and is turning it over to see whose head is on it.

"That's the meaning?"

"That's the meaning for you. For you as you've told me you are."

"And if I were someone else?"

"Then I should have asked you different questions."

He leaned forward a little, into the light of the oven-wall.

"If I'd been a slave," he said. "Say that. If I'd sat down here and told you I was a slave. The same dream, every part of it. What would it have meant?"

I have been asked that question, or questions like it, a hundred times. People like to hear that the same dream is not the same dream in two lives; it makes them feel the art is subtle, and sometimes it makes them feel their own lives are subtle, and they like to try the dream on other people, as they might try on a cloak in the market. A potter asks what his dream would mean for a king. A wife asks what it would mean for her husband. It is a harmless game, and I usually play it, because it teaches them something about the method, and because I am vain of the method.

So I played it.

"For a slave," I said, "dying would be a different thing. A slave has a master, and he works, and both of those end at death. The dead have no master and do no work. So for a slave I should read death as freedom: not the end of his life but the end of his slavery. Strangers carrying him out of the house would fit: he leaves the household he belongs to and nobody of it goes with him. No weeping would fit; a household does not weep for a man who is freed, not much. And the crossroads—"

I stopped, because I could not read the crossroads for a slave any better than for a free man, and I do not like to pretend.

"Go on," he said.

"The crossroads I still can't tell you. A choice of roads. A place where things are left. I wouldn't build on it." I shrugged. "But you aren't a slave, so it's no use to you. For you it's a wife."

"No," he said. "It's no use to me."

He sat back out of the light. Then he took a coin out of his belt and put it on the bench between us: a drachma, a worn one, of Smyrna. He said that he had to be on the road early, and thanked me, in the careful Greek, and went out to the room Tatia let to travellers who could pay for a bed. He left the hood up.

---

I copied the day onto papyrus by the lamp, as I do every evening, wherever I am. The carter and his brother I put into my notes among the dreams that signify nothing, with the money and the rain at Hypaipa. The girl's hare I wrote down as she had told it, before her mother stopped her, and marked it to ask about if I passed that way again. Then I wrote Hermias.

Clerk, of Smyrna, free-born; about twenty-four; unmarried; in health. Scar on the left hand, a lamp, in childhood. Dreamed himself dead, washed, in white, garlanded; carried out by four strangers, no mourners; set down at a crossroads; it grew light. Felt glad; not cold. Day: walking. Read as marriage, among strangers. Crossroads not read.

That was the reading, and I had given it, and it was finished. Then, because it is my habit to write down what was said after the reading as well as the reading, I wrote under it: Asked what it would mean for a slave. Told him: freedom.

I looked at that line for some time. It was true, and it was in the wrong place. It sat beneath the reading like a second answer to the same sum.

---

In the morning he had gone before light. Tatia said he had paid for the bed the night before and left without breakfast, which she disapproved of, as a waste of a paid-for bed. I ate mine. The boy loaded the satchel. I was paying Tatia at the yard gate when two men rode in on hired horses from the Sardis road, and the elder of them got down, stiffly, as a man gets down who has been riding since dark, and asked for her by name.

He was a Pergamene, he said, and his name was Philonides, and he found runaways. He did not say it as if it were anything to be ashamed of, and in that country it isn't. He had a letter with a seal on it and a notice written out on a sheet of papyrus, and he read the notice to Tatia in the yard, slowly, in a voice for reading to people who could not read, while the other man watered the horses.

Epagathos, slave of Claudius Attalos, citizen of Pergamum. About twenty-five years old. Of middle height, clean-shaven, pale. Speaks Greek well, and Latin. Writes a fine hand and the short signs. A scar on the back of the left hand from a burn. Has taken with him a cloak of brown wool with a hood and some silver of his master's. Whoever brings him back shall have two hundred drachmas; whoever shows where he is sheltering, a hundred.

Tatia listened, and said nothing, and looked at me.

That was enough for Philonides. He was not a stupid man; men in his trade can't afford to be. He came across the yard to me and asked, civilly, whether I had seen such a man.

"A man sat on my bench last night," I said. "He told me a dream."

"Him?"

"He had a brown cloak, with a hood, and a scar on the left hand. He said it was from a lamp."

"A lamp." Philonides nodded, as if this were a thing he heard every day, as perhaps it was. "His master's cook threw a pan at him when he was ten. Where was he going?"

"He told me he was a clerk on his way to the road-works beyond Daldis."

"Did he say he was free?"

"He said he was free-born, of Smyrna."

Philonides laughed. It was not an unpleasant laugh. "They're all free-born of Smyrna," he said. "Every one I ever caught. I don't know why it's always Smyrna." Then, still friendly: "What was the dream?"

I have thought since about the answer I gave him, and I have not changed my mind about it. I answer what I am asked. I told him the dream as Hermias had told it to me, every part, the washing and the white and the four strangers and the crossroads. I told him that I had read it, for a free man of Smyrna, unmarried and in health, as a marriage.

"A marriage!" He liked that very much. He called it across to the other man by the horses, who did not laugh. "He'll be married," said Philonides, "to a chain. And when did he leave?"

"Before light," said Tatia, behind me. "I don't know which way. I was asleep. The door was barred when I went to bed and open when I got up."

That was true, as far as I know. Philonides believed it, or did not care to argue. He looked at the roads, the one back to Sardis and the one on north to Daldis and the cart-track down along the stream towards the Hermus, and he looked at the ground of the yard, which was trodden by a hundred mules, and he sighed, and gave Tatia an obol for watering the horses. I was not asked anything more, and I did not tell him anything more. He had not asked what the dream would mean for a slave. A man who finds runaways has no need of that reading; he knows what he is.

They rode off on the Sardis road, back the way they had come, to try the coast, the elder one said. The other one did not look as though he agreed.

---

I have set this down at the length I would give it in the book, though it will not go into the book, because I have nothing to put at the end of it. I do not know where he went. I do not know if he was taken, on that road or another, or whether he is in some city now with a different name and a free man's hand, keeping accounts for a contractor. A reading is a forward thing, and I record the readings that came true and the readings that came to nothing, as well as I can find them out. This one I shall never find out. The dreamer will not come back to tell me, either way.

But that is not what troubles me, or not most.

I did my work properly that night. I asked who he was before I asked what he dreamed. I asked how he felt. I asked about the day. I set aside the walking and read what was left over, and I read it through the man in front of me, as I have taught my son to do, and the reading was sound. It was a good reading of a free clerk of Smyrna who did not exist. And the man who did exist sat at the other end of the bench and listened to it, and then asked me, as a game, what it would mean for someone else, and I told him, as a game. He did not need me to know who he was. He needed me not to know. And I gave him, without knowing, the only reading that was his.

I have said all my life that the same dream is not the same dream in two different lives. I still say it. I have fourteen hundred cases behind it. But I had always supposed that the dreamer brings me his life along with his dream, and I read the one through the other; and that night a man brought me the dream and kept his life back, and chose for himself which of the two readings to carry away. I don't know what to call that. He used it the way a man uses a balance, putting the same weight in first one pan and then the other, to see which way it goes. I made the pans.

In the copy of the entry that I keep, I have not struck anything out. Free-born, it says, and I have written above it, small, said. And beside the second line, Told him: freedom, I have written nothing at all.

---

The boy and I left an hour after the riders. Below the inn, where the track to Daldis goes off from the Sardis road, there is a heap of stones that travellers add to and a post with a worn face cut on three sides of it, and people leave things there: a cake, a lamp, a strip of cloth tied round the post. The boy wanted to stop and look, as boys do, for anything worth eating. There was nothing new on it that I could see. The ground round it was trodden by mules, like the yard.

A string of wine-mules was coming down from the north, eight of them, with the skins swaying and dark at the seams, and we stood aside at the crossroads to let them by. The driver at the back raised his hand to us. When they had gone past, the road to Daldis was empty as far as the first bend, and so was the road to Sardis behind us, and so was the cart-track going down to the river, and the dust the mules had raised hung over all three in the still air for a long while before it settled.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Artemidōrō Daldiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Artemidorus of Daldis, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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