Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/103

 And one may say the same of men who are drunk. As if any one denied that when a man has awakened he ceases to think his dreams true; and that a man whose frenzy has passed away, no longer conceives those things to be real which appeared so to him during his madness. But that is not the question: the question is, how those things appear to us, at the time when they do appear. Unless, indeed, we suppose that Ennius heard the whole of that address—

(if, indeed, he did dream it), just as he would have heard it if he had been awake. For when awake, he was able to think those things phantoms—as, in fact, they were—and dreams. But while he was asleep, he felt as sure of their reality as if he had been awake. Again, Iliona, in that dream of hers, where she hears—

does she not believe that her son has spoken, just as she would have believed it if she had been awake? On which account she adds—

Does she here seem to place less trust in what she has seen than people do when awake?

XXVIII. Why should I speak of madmen?—such as your relation Tuditanus was, Catulus. Does any man, who may be ever so much in his senses, think the things which he sees as certain as he used to think those that appeared to him? Again, the man who cries out—

does he not twice cry out that he is seeing what he never sees at all? Again, when Hercules, in Euripides, shot his own sons with his arrows, taking them for the sons of Eurystheus,—when he slew his wife,—when he endeavoured even to slay his father,—was he not worked upon by false ideas, just as he might have been by true ones? Again, does not your own Alcmæon, who says that his heart distrusts the witness of his eyes, say in the same place, while inflamed by frenzy—