Somnium Scipionis

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The Dream of Scipio, or Somnium Scipionis, is a dream vision described by Cicero in his work De re publica. It centers on Scipio Aemilianus, two years before he oversaw Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, and his visit to Africa by his adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus. The tale has Scipio looking down on Carthage from a high, starry vantage and learning that Rome is only a small part of a vast universe. His grandfather explains that the universe has nine celestial spheres: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and, at the top, heaven containing the supreme God. Between Earth and heaven lie these spheres, and as the planets move they produce the “music of the spheres,” a sweet sound that Scipio hears. The Earth is at the center and at rest, while the heavens move above it. The journey touches on the belts of the Earth’s climate and discusses the Divine, the soul, and virtue from a Stoic viewpoint. The story is linked to Plato’s Myth of Er, with astral projection and the idea that the soul can travel beyond the body. The influence of Somnium Scipionis has been wide. It survived largely through Macrobius’s fifth‑century commentary on the work, which quoted large portions of Cicero and led to many medieval copies. Medieval writers and artists, including Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Chaucer, and Raphael, drew on it, and Mozart even wrote an early opera inspired by the dream. In modern times, novels and poems continue to reference Scipio’s celestial journey and its sense of Earth’s small place in the cosmos. Today, the text survives mainly in copies attached to Macrobius’s commentary, and the medieval transmission is too tangled to trace a single original text.