Gloser n’est pas jouer. Les formules de jeux dans les recueils parémiographiques
Résumé
Games rarely feature in literary dreams (Suetonius, Vita Augusti, 94, 8, may refer to a ritual rather than a game proper), and are indeed rather marginal in Artemidorus’ treatise of dream interpretation, where children are fundamentally passive: they appear mainly in two passages, an annex to ephebia, about the exercises of young men, including hoops (Interpretation of Dreams, I, 55), and the first addendum of book III, about dice and board-games, which testifies to the popularity of race-games, rather than war-games, in Roman times (III, 1). To this, we may add the — paradoxically favourable— dream that mice throw a party in the dreamer’s house (III, 28), and the famous dream of Alexander at the siege of Tyre, about a dancing satyr (IV, 24), where Artemidorus may in fact be closer to the source material than Plutarch (Vita Alexandri, 24, 8-9).