Artemidorus takes himself very seriously. "For one thing, there is no book on the interpretation of dreams that I have not acquired, for I had great enthusiasm for this; and, in the next place, though the prophets (_manteon_) in the market-place are much slandered, and called beggars and quacks and humbugs by the gentlemen of solemn countenance and lifted eye-brows, I despised the slander and for many years I have associated with them--both in Greece, in cities and at festivals, and in Asia, and in Italy, and in the largest and most populous of the islands, consenting to hear ancient dreams and their results."[69] This patient research has resulted in principles of classification.[70] There are dreams that merely repeat what a man is doing (_enuphnia_); and others (_oneipoi_) which are prophetic. These last fall into two classes--theorematic dreams, as when a man dreams of a voyage, and wakes to go upon a voyage, and allegoric dreams. The latter adjective has a great history in regions more august, but the allegoric method is the same everywhere, as an illustration will show. A man dreamed he saw Charon playing at counters with another man, whom he called away on business; Charon grew angry and chased him, till he ran for refuge into an inn called {227} "The Camel," and bolted the door, whereupon "the daemon" went away, but one of the man's thighs sprouted with grass. Shortly after this dream he had his thigh broken--the one and sole event foretold. For Charon and the counters meant death, but Charon did not catch him, so it was shown that he would not die; but his foot was threatened, since he was pursued. The name of the inn hinted at the thigh, because of the anatomy of a camel's thigh; and the grass meant disuse of the limb, for grass only grows where the earth is left at rest.[71] The passage is worth remembering whenever we meet the word allegory and its derivatives in contemporary literature. Artemidorus has five books of this stuff--the last two dedicated to his son, and containing instances "that will make you a better interpreter of dreams than all, or at least inferior to none; but, if published, they will show you know no more than the rest."[72] The sentence suggests science declining into profession. [Sidenote: Apuleius] Far more brilliant, more amusing and more attractive than any of these men, whom we have considered since we left Lucian, is Apuleius of Madaura. Rhetorician, philosopher and man of science, a story-teller wavering between Boccaccio and Hans Andersen, he is above all a stylist, a pietist and a humorist. For his history we depend upon himself, and this involves us in difficulties; for, while autobiography runs through two of his works, one of these is an elaboration of a defence he made on a charge of magic and the other is a novel of no discoverable class but its own, and through both runs a vein of nonsense, which makes one chary of being too literal.