Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON HERMOTIMUS. [1] As for Hermotimus. His soul, they say, would go missing during sleep, as though seizing the chance to slip out of a man who was, so to speak, on holiday, leaving his body behind. His wife made this known. His enemies caught him sleeping and, taking him for dead, cremated him. When the soul returned — rather too late, I should think — it had only itself to blame for the murder. The citizens of Clazomenae consoled Hermotimus in his temple. His wife did not come near, on account of her ill repute. [2] What is the point of this story? Simply this: lest, because it is easy for the crowd to suppose that sleep is the soul's temporary withdrawal, credulity should also enlist the case of Hermotimus as its argument. It was rather a case of an especially heavy sort of slumber, of the kind presumed in nightmare-possession — or that flaw of health which Soranus counters by ruling out the incubus altogether — or some such disorder as also drove Epimenides into legend, sleepy for nearly fifty years. Suetonius, too, denies that Nero ever dreamed at all, and Theopompus says the same of Thrasymedes — except that Nero, perhaps, dreamed once, at the very end, after his terrors had overtaken him. [3] What if Hermotimus, too, was such a case, that the soul's idleness, doing nothing in his sleep, was mistaken for a divorce from the body? You should suspect anything sooner than this license of a soul playing truant without dying — and doing so, moreover, as a regular habit. For if such a thing were said to happen only once, like an eclipse of the sun or moon, so too of the soul, I should readily be persuaded it happened by divine agency; for it would fit that a man be either warned or terrified by God, as though by a swift lightning-stroke, with the blow of a momentary death — unless it were nearer the truth to believe it a dream, which ought rather to have happened to him while awake — unless, I say, it were rather to be believed a dream.