WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar are conjoined in a complex time that does not separate the narrative
time of interpretation from that of its lived history. Because the dream is a dream about the
entirety of time, even the organizing principle of the story’s events, its historical date of
occurrence, becomes a formal aspect of the narrative, erasing the difference between narration
and interpretation.
Daniel’s second chapter does not describe Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of time; it develops
his vision as time itself through a very allusive process that only grows from this original
rhetorical concern with time in which the time of interpretation is no different from that of
narration: “vidit Nabuchodonosor somnium, et conterritus est spiritus eius, et somnium eius fugit
ab eo” ‘Nebuchadnezzar saw a dream, and his spirit was terrified, and the dream fled from him.’
Once upon a time, Nebuchadnezzar saw a vision of time that made him afraid just as the fleeing
of time. The king’s experience of a dream of time in itself was the experience of the passing of
time. Alluding to the Virgilian “tempus fugit” in the Georgics, the narrative instills fear to
Nebuchadnezzar through a “memento mori” ‘reminder of death.’ 160 The fear that comes from the
dream’s passage is twofold. Firstly, it is a reminder of death in so far as the failure to arrest the
dream parallels the failure to pause time. Secondly, it threatens to make historical reality another
figural presentation in so far as time is but a dream.
When Nebuchadnezzar attempts to understand the dream outside of its narrative time, his
actions work in two levels: literally as a “praeceptum,” a ‘command’ that must be followed on
the penalty of death, but also figuratively as a “prae-ceptum,” a ‘seizing beforehand,’ as if the
160 That Virgil’s Georgics were in the back of Jerome’s mind when he translated Daniel can be seen in his Prologus
in Danihele Proheta where, after alluding to the clear “rhetorical flowers” of Quintillian and Cicero, he
ventriloquizes Virgil in an exhortation from a Hebrew to finish the hard task of translating the work: “Verum,
adhortante me Hebraeo et illud mihi sua lingua crebrius ingerent: ‘labor omnia vicit improbus,’ [Georgics 1.145-
146], qui mihi videbar sciolus inter eos, coepi rursum discipulus esse chaldaicus” ‘But with a Hebrew exhorting me
to throw myself more closely in his language: ‘bold work conquers all,’ which I saw myself as a mere amateur
amongst them, I began again to be a student of Chaldean’ (Qtd. in Régis Courtray, Prophète des Temps Derniers
(Paris: Beauschesne, 2009) 77 note 59).
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