"My recent predecessors, in their eagerness for literary fame, thought they would assure their renown if they left behind writings on the interpretation of dreams. But practically all they did was to make copies of one another or take a few of the apt remarks of the earlier writers and interpret them badly or add a lot of nonsense. They wrote not from experience but offhand, each as the spirit moved him. Some perused all the older literature; others did not, missing some works that, because of their antiquity, were rare or corrupted. I, in contrast—in the first place, there is no book on the interpretation of dreams that I did not procure... and in the second place, although public diviners have been much maligned by the sober-faced and the eyebrow-raisers (who stigmatize them as beggars and sorcerers and buffoons), I disdained the slander and spent many years with them, attending them in the cities and festivals in Greece and Asia and Italy and in the biggest and most populous of the islands, to hear about old dreams and their outcomes. There really was no other way to obtain this training. And the result is that out of an abundance of information I am able to discourse on each point truly and without nonsense, and to give simple, manifest proofs, easy for all to comprehend, of the instances I cite—except... where the matter is... clear..."