Chapter XLIV.—The Story of Hermotimus, and the Sleeplessness of the Emperor Nero. No Separation of the Soul from the Body Until Death.

With regard to the case of Hermotimus, they say that he used to be deprived of his soul in his sleep, as if it wandered away from his body like a person on a holiday trip. His wife betrayed the strange peculiarity. His enemies, finding him asleep, burnt his body, as if it were a corpse: when his soul returned too late, it appropriated (I suppose) to itself the guilt of the murder. However the good citizens of Clazomenæ consoled poor Hermotimus with a temple, into which no woman ever enters, because of the infamy of this wife.  Now why this story? In order that, since the vulgar belief so readily holds sleep to be the separation of the soul from the body, credulity should not be encouraged by this case of Hermotimus. It must certainly have been a much heavier sort of slumber: one would presume it was the nightmare, or perhaps that diseased languor which Soranus suggests in opposition to the nightmare, or else some such malady as that which the fable has fastened upon Epimenides, who slept on some fifty years or so. Suetonius, however, informs us that Nero never dreamt, and Theopompus says the same thing about Thrasymedes; but Nero at the close of his life did with some difficulty dream after some excessive alarm. What indeed would be said, if the case of Hermotimus were believed to be such that the repose of his soul was a state of actual idleness during sleep, and a positive separation from his body? You may conjecture it to be anything but such a licence of the soul as admits of flights away from the body without death, and that by continual recurrence, as if habitual to its state and constitution.  If indeed such a thing were told me to have happened at any time to the soul—resembling a total eclipse of the sun or the moon—I should verily suppose that the occurrence had been caused by God’s own interposition, for it would not be unreasonable for a man to receive admonition from the Divine Being either in the way of warning or of alarm, as by a flash of lightning, or by a sudden stroke of death; only it would be much the more natural conclusion to believe that this process should be by a dream, because if it must be supposed to be, (as the hypothesis we are resisting assumes it to be,) not a dream, the occurrence ought rather to happen to a man whilst he is wide awake.

CAPUT XLIV.

Caeterum, de Hermotimo. Anima, ut aiunt, in somno carebat, quasi per occasionem vacaturi hominis proficiscente de corpore. Uxor hoc prodit. Inimici dormientem nacti pro defuncto cremaverunt. Regressa anima tardius, credo, homicidium sibi imputavit. Cives Clazomenii Hermotimum templo consolantur. Mulier non adit, ob notam uxoris. Quorsum istud? Ne quia facile est vulgo existimare secessionem animae esse somnum , hoc quoque Hermo imi argumento credulitas subornetur. Genus 0724C fuerat gravioris aliquanto soporis, ut de incubone praesumptio est, vel valetudinis, quam Soranus opponit, excludens incubonem, aut tale quid vitii, quod etiam Epimenidem in fabulam impegit, quinquaginta pene annos somniculosum. Sed 0725A et Neronem Suetonius , et Thrasimedem Theopompus , negant unquam somniasse: nisi vix Neronem, in ultimo exitu, post pavores suos. Quid si et Hermotimus ita fuit, ut otium animae nihil operantis in somnis divortium crederetur . Omnia magis conjectes, quam istam licentiam animae sine morte fugitivae, et quidem ex forma, continuam . Si enim tale quid semel accidere dicatur, ut deliquium solis aut lunae, ita et animae; sane persuaderer divinitus factum; congruere enim hominem seu moneri, seu terreri a Deo, velut fulgure rapido, momentaneae mortis ictu; si non magis in proximo esset somnium credi, quod vigilanti potius accidere deberet, si non somnium magis credi oporteret .