The second-century a.d. writer of dreams, Artemidorus of Daldis, and his book on the taxonomic classification of dreams have become a veritable cottage industry since the 1990s. Europe in particular has been a hub of activity: in Germany, B. Näf, C. Walde and G. Weber; in France, A.-M. Bernardi, J. du Bouchet and C. Chandezon (participants in the Artémidore de Montpellier); in Italy, D. el Corno and G. Guidorizzi; and in Greece, C. Angeliki and M. Mavroudi. H.-M., however, seems oblivious to much of this work, a point to which I shall return.

What distinguishes this volume from past translations of Artemidorus is the inclusion of the Greek text; a comprehensive commentary that excels in discussing philological/lexicographic and source-critical matters (although it falls short in anthropological, cultural and social historic matters); and a very serviceable introduction. The finest translations of the text (Mavroudi, modern Greek; Del Corno, Italian; and Brackertz, German) either do not contain the Greek text or offer fairly brief commentary (Krauss's German translation has a short commentary written with the help of Freudians and Jungians). H.-M.'s translation is a vast improvement on the 1975 (1990 reprint with minor corrections) English translation of White, and scholars of the Oneirocritica will be grateful for the accurate and yet very readable rendering of the Greek. H.-M. has captured well Artemidorus' oneirocritical language, for example ‘a certain man imagined’ for ἔδοξε τις and ‘observe’ for variants of ὁράω, rather than White's inaccurate ‘A man dreamt’ and ‘dream’. The correctives of White's translation are also important. For instance, H.-M. translates πλάσις τῆς ψυχῆς (p. 5, p. 15 Pack) as ‘composition of the soul’ (versus White's ‘condition of the soul’), thereby reinforcing Artemidorus' belief that dreams are an active, not passive, creation of the soul.

The commentary is a masterful example of source criticism. H.-M. is to be complimented for his thoroughness in dealing with nearly every lexical aspect of the text. His discussions of the organisation of the Oneirocritica, the relation of Books 4–5 to Books 1–3 and Artemidorus' interpretative methods such as numerology rank among the best written. There are quibbles here and there. For example, H.-M. seems mystified why Artemidorus mentions that food can trigger nocturnal emissions; but see the lengthy list of foods and herbs that cause wet dreams in J. Bilbija, ‘The Dream in Antiquity: Aspects and Analyses’ (Ph.D. diss., Vrije Universiteit, 2012), pp. 383–96 (discussion on pp. 296–306). Or H.-M. refers to the Harvard psychiatrist Allan Hobson's research on anxiety but does not pursue it. Hobson shows that a third of dreams are anxiety-focused, a fact that sheds light on the Oneirocritica. A quick check of the statistics in I. Hahn's Traumdeutung und gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit: Artemidorus Daldianus als sozialgeschichtliche Quelle (1992) reveals an even higher frequency of anxiety dreams in the Oneirocritica, a fact that can be related to the world in which Artemidorus and his readers lived.

A gap in the commentary is a lack of an anthropological approach to dreams and dreaming. H.-M. could have profitably used feminist and gender theory in his too brief and insufficient discussion of Artemidorus' remarks on sex, for example. He refers to Winkler's 1990 brilliant but outdated article, but appears unaware of the work of more recent scholars such as B. Brooten, H. Parker, A. Richlin and M. Skinner. Brooten could have shed better light on Artemidorus' categories of ‘in accordance with/in opposition to’ ἔθος, νόμος and ϕύσις, while Richlin is a sine qua non for understanding the cultural abhorrence of oral sex. Artemidorus' views on female–female relations are particularly important for the history of gender, and feminist studies of hermaphroditism would have been relevant to H.-M.'s brief reference to a binary grid of sexual acts (although it is actually a teratogenic grid); useful is P. Sander, ‘Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law’, in Women in Middle Eastern History. Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (1991), pp. 74–97.

Related to this is the lack of historical context for the Oneirocritica. The classification, typology and interpretative methods of Artemidorus owe much to the Near East, especially Babylonian and Assyrian texts (for the relation of Greek dreaming and Babylonia see P.J. van der Eijk, ‘Divination, Prognosis and Prophylaxis: the Hippocratic Work “On Dreams” [De Victu 4] and Its Near Eastern Background’, in Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco–Roman Medicine [2004], pp. 187–218); but H.-M. gives only a discussion of dreams in Greece (and briefly at that). A few words on dreams in the Imperial age are necessary, and why nothing about Artemidorus' reception in Western Europe, where the Oneirocritica was the most important dream text until Freud came along? Critical questions are not asked, and so never answered: was Artemidorus even an interpreter? How unique is the Oneirocritica? H.-M. says that Artemidorus ‘participates in a long prestigious tradition of oneirocritical texts’. But nearly everything we know about Graeco-Roman oneirocriticism comes from Artemidorus. We do have a few philosophical texts, scattered treatments by physicians (see the exhaustive study of M.A.A. Hulskamp, ‘Sleep and Dreams in Ancient Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis’ [Ph.D. diss., University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2008]), and the Asclepian evidence (Aelius Aristides and the Epidaurian stelae). But overall Artemidorus is our evidence for oneiromancy. And is Artemidorus a reliable cultural informant? Are the interpreters who are the butt of Artemidorus' scathing criticism strawmen, or were they real-life tradesmen of the craft as Artemidorus writes? Are the hundreds of dreams recorded even real, or are some, if not most, fictitious constructs meant to showcase Artemidorus' wit and intellect? W. Harris' excellent corrective of the misconception that the ancients held a pervasive belief in the prophetic value of dreams could have been engaged more by H.-M. (W.V. Harris, Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity [2009]).

Certain technical aspects of the book will frustrate some readers. The reprint of Pack's 1963 Teubner edition is very welcome, but why does H.-M. not retain Pack's page and line numbers? All scholarship on Artemidorus since 1965 (and that is nearly all of it) quotes only Pack, and so Pack's numbering would be helpful. Also, the commentary refers only to clusters of page numbers of the Greek text (e.g. pp. 284–96). H.-M. leaves it up to the reader of the commentary to locate the appropriate place in the Greek. H.-M. also deals insufficiently with the Arabic translation of Artemidorus (see M. Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation [2002], pp. 128–236, esp. 135–42). The Arabic text is an important witness of the Greek text, but H.-M. simply lists, without any comment, 31 variants (25 from the Arabic translation) from Pack's edition. Mavroudi in her translation of Artemidorus discusses the lacunae and corruptions, and demonstrates, thanks to intimate knowledge of Arabic and Arabic oneirocriticism, how the Arabic translation can repair the text. The frustrations multiply when one reaches the bibliography and indexes. The bibliography focuses on source criticism (that is, the commentary) and omits the best work recently, or currently being, done on Artemidorus and on dreams in antiquity generally. The indexes are a disappointment. H.-M. claims in his preface that the Oneirocritica provides ‘a rich mine of information for scholars of all stripes and, in particular, the social historian’. But H.-M. then makes it difficult for these scholars to discover this treasure. The only true index is for the introduction and commentary. There is an Index of Contents but this is a non-alphabetical list of each chapter's contents in Books 1–4 (Book 5 is not included on the grounds that the book is composed only of individual dreams). A comprehensive index of the Oneirocritica is still a desideratum and this book could have provided a good start.

These criticisms should not diminish the importance of H.-M.'s book. Although a new edition of the Greek was not needed and White's translation was serviceable for non-Greek readers, a single book containing Pack's text with a vibrant and scrupulously accurate translation on facing pages is well worth the stiff price set by Oxford. Add a superlative and quite brilliant commentary done in the finest tradition of source criticism, and the book becomes priceless for scholars of the Roman Empire in the East and for researchers of dreams.