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Greek and Roman Ghost Stories
GREEK AND ROMAN GHOST STORIES
by
LACY COLLISON-MORLEY
Formerly Scholar of St. John's College, Oxford
Author of "Giuseppe Baretti and His Friends," "Modern Italian
Literature"
Oxford B. H. Blackwell, Broad Street London Simpkin, Marshall & Co.,
Limited
MCMXII
This collection was originally begun at the suggestion of Mr. Marion
Crawford, whose wide and continual reading of the classics supplied
more than one of the stories. They were put together during a number
of years of casual browsing among the classics, and will perhaps
interest others who indulge in similar amusements.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE POWER OF THE DEAD TO RETURN TO EARTH 1
II. THE BELIEF IN GHOSTS IN GREECE AND ROME 13
III. STORIES OF HAUNTING 19
IV. NECROMANCY 33
V. VISIONS OF THE DEAD IN SLEEP 45
VI. APPARITIONS OF THE DEAD 54
VII. WARNING APPARITIONS 72
I
THE POWER OF THE DEAD TO RETURN TO EARTH
Though there is no period at which the ancients do not seem to have
believed in a future life, continual confusion prevails when they come
to picture the existence led by man in the other world, as we see from
the sixth book of the _AEneid_. Combined with the elaborate mythology
of Greece, we are confronted with the primitive belief of Italy, and
doubtless of Greece too--a belief supported by all the religious rites
in connection with the dead--that the spirits of the departed lived on
in the tomb with the body. As cremation gradually superseded burial,
the idea took shape that the soul might have an existence of its own,
altogether independent of the body, and a place of abode was assigned
to it in a hole in the centre of the earth, where it lived on in
eternity with other souls.
This latter view seems to have become the official theory, at least in
Italy, in classical days. In the gloomy, horrible Etruscan religion,
the shades were supposed to be in charge of the Conductor of the
Dead--a repulsive figure, always represented with wings and long,
matted hair and a hammer, whose appearance was afterwards imitated in
the dress of the man who removed the dead from the arena. Surely
something may be said for Gaston Boissier's suggestion that Dante's
Tuscan blood may account to some extent for the gruesome imagery of
the _Inferno_.
Cicero[1] tells us that it was generally believed that the dead lived
on beneath the earth, and special provision was made for them in every
Latin town in the "mundus," a deep trench which was dug before the
"pomerium" was traced, and regarded as the particular entrance to the
lower world for the dead of the town in question. The trench was
vaulted over, so that it might correspond more or less with the sky, a
gap being left in the vault which was closed with the stone of the
departed--the "lapis manalis." Corn was thrown into the trench, which
was filled up with earth, and an altar erected over it. On three
solemn days in the year--August 25, October 5, and November 8--the
trench was opened and the stone removed, the dead thus once more
having free access to the world above, where the usual offerings were
made to them.[2]
These provisions clearly show an official belief that death did not
create an impassable barrier between the dead and the living. The
spirits of the departed still belonged to the city of their birth, and
took an interest in their old home. They could even return to it on
the days when "the trench of the gods of gloom lies open and the very
jaws of hell yawn wide."[3] Their rights must be respected, if evil
was to be averted from the State. In fact, the dead were gods with
altars of their own,[4] and Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, could
write to her sons, "You will make offerings to me and invoke your
parent as a god."[5] Their cult was closely connected with that of the
Lares--the gods of the hearth, which symbolized a fixed abode in
contrast with the early nomad life. Indeed, there is practically no
distinction between the Lares and the Manes, the souls of the good
dead. But the dead had their own festival, the "Dies Parentales," held
from the 13th to the 21st of February, in Rome;[6] and in Greece the
"Genesia," celebrated on the 5th of Boedromion, towards the end of
September, about which we know very little.[7]
There is nothing more characteristic of paganism than the passionate
longing of the average man to perpetuate his memory after death in the
world round which all his hopes and aspirations clung. Cicero uses it
as an argument for immortality.[8]
Many men left large sums to found colleges to celebrate their memories
and feast at their tombs on stated occasions.[9] Lucian laughs at this
custom when he represents the soul of the ordinary man in the next
world as a mere bodiless shade that vanishes at a touch like smoke. It
subsists on the libations and offerings it receives from the living,
and those who have no friends or relatives on earth are starving and
famished.[10] Violators of tombs were threatened with the curse of
dying the last of their race--a curse which Macaulay, with his intense
family affection, considered the most awful that could be devised by
man; and the fact that the tombs were built by the high road, so that
the dead might be cheered by the greeting of the passer-by, lends an
additional touch of sadness to a walk among the crumbling ruins that
line the Latin or the Appian Way outside Rome to-day.
No one of the moderns has caught the pagan feeling towards death
better than Giosue Carducci, a true spiritual descendant of the great
Romans of old, if ever there was one. He tells how, one glorious June
day, he was sitting in school, listening to the priest outraging the
verb "amo," when his eyes wandered to the window and lighted on a
cherry-tree, red with fruit, and then strayed away to the hills and
the sky and the distant curve of the sea-shore. All Nature was teeming
with life, and he felt an answering thrill, when suddenly, as if from
the very fountains of being within him, there welled up a
consciousness of death, and with it the formless nothing, and a vision
of himself lying cold, motionless, dumb in the black earth, while
above him the birds sang, the trees rustled in the wind, the rivers
ran on in their course, and the living revelled in the warm sun,
bathed in its divine light. This first vision of death often haunted
him in later years;[11] and one realizes that such must often have
been the feelings of the Romans, and still more often of the Greeks,
for the joy of the Greek in life was far greater than that of the
Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and
"Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions. The
life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and joyless copy of an
earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be
the serf of a poor man upon earth than Achilles among the shades.
When we come to inquire into the appearance of ghosts revisiting the
glimpses of the moon, we find, as we should expect, that they are a
vague, unsubstantial copy of their former selves on earth. In
Homer[12] the shade of Patroclus, which visited Achilles in a vision
as he slept by the sea-shore, looks exactly as Patroclus had looked on
earth, even down to the clothes. Hadrian's famous "animula vagula
blandula" gives the same idea, and it would be difficult to imagine a
disembodied spirit which retains its personality and returns to earth
again except as a kind of immaterial likeness of its earthly self. We
often hear of the extreme pallor of ghosts, which was doubtless due to
their being bloodless and to the pallor of death itself. Propertius
conceived of them as skeletons;[13] but the unsubstantial, shadowy
aspect is by far the commonest, and best harmonizes with the life they
were supposed to lead.
Hitherto we have been dealing with the spirits of the dead who have
been duly buried and are at rest, making their appearance among men
only at stated intervals, regulated by the religion of the State. The
lot of the dead who have not been vouchsafed the trifling boon of a
handful of earth cast upon their bones was very different. They had
not yet been admitted to the world below, and were forced to wander
for a hundred years before they might enter Charon's boat. AEneas
beheld them on the banks of the Styx, stretching out their hands
"ripae ulterioris amore." The shade of Patroclus describes its hapless
state to Achilles, as does that of Elpenor to Odysseus, when they meet
in the lower world. It is not surprising that the ancients attached
the highest importance to the duty of burying the dead, and that
Pausanias blames Lysander for not burying the bodies of Philocles and
the four thousand slain at AEgospotami, seeing that the Athenians even
buried the Persian dead after Marathon.[14]
The spirits of the unburied were usually held to be bound, more or
less, to the spot where their bodies lay, and to be able to enter into
communication with the living with comparative ease, even if they did
not actually haunt them. They were, in fact, evil spirits which had to
be propitiated and honoured in special rites. Their appearances among
the living were not regulated by religion. They wandered at will over
the earth, belonging neither to this world nor to the next, restless
and malignant, unable to escape from the trammels of mortal life, in
the joys of which they had no part. Thus, in the _Phaedo_[15] we read
of souls "prowling about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they
tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not
departed pure ... These must be the souls, not of the good, but of the
evil, which are compelled to wander about such places in payment of
the penalty of their former evil way of life."
Apuleius[16] classifies the spirits of the departed for us. The Manes
are the good people, not to be feared so long as their rites are duly
performed, as we have already seen; Lemures are disembodied spirits;
while Larvae are the ghosts that haunt houses. Apuleius, however, is
wholly uncritical, and the distinction between Larvae and Lemures is
certainly not borne out by facts.
The Larvae had distinct attributes, and were thought to cause epilepsy
or madness. They were generally treated more or less as a joke,[17]
and are spoken of much as we speak of a bogey. They appear to have
been entrusted with the torturing of the dead, as we see from the
saying, "Only the Larvae war with the dead."[18] In Seneca's
_Apocolocyntosis_,[19] when the question of the deification of the
late Emperor Claudius is laid before a meeting of the gods, Father
Janus gives it as his opinion that no more mortals should be treated
in this way, and that "anyone who, contrary to this decree, shall
hereafter be made, addressed, or painted as a god, should be delivered
over to the Larvae" and flogged at the next games.
Larva also means a skeleton, and Trimalchio, following the Egyptian
custom, has one brought in and placed on the table during his famous
feast. It is, as one would expect, of silver, and the millionaire
freedman points the usual moral--"Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for
to-morrow we die."[20]
The Larvae were regular characters in the Atellane farces at Rome,
where they performed various "danses macabres." Can these possibly be
the prototypes of the Dances of Death so popular in the Middle Ages?
We find something very similar on the well-known silver cups
discovered at Bosco Reale, though Death itself does not seem to have
been represented in this way. Some of the designs in the medieval
series would certainly have appealed to the average bourgeois Roman of
the Trimalchio type--e.g., "Les Trois Vifs et les Trois Morts," the
three men riding gaily out hunting and meeting their own skeletons.
Such crude contrasts are just what one would expect to find at
Pompeii.
Lemures and Larvae are often confused, but Lemures is the regular word
for the dead not at rest--the "Lemuri," or spirits of the churchyard,
of some parts of modern Italy. They were evil spirits, propitiated in
early days with blood. Hence the first gladiatorial games were given
in connection with funerals. Both in Greece and in Rome there were
special festivals for appeasing these restless spirits. Originally
they were of a public character, for murder was common in primitive
times, and such spirits would be numerous, as is proved by the
festival lasting three days.
In Athens the Nemesia were held during Anthesterion (February-March).
As in Rome, the days were unlucky. Temples were closed and business
was suspended, for the dead were abroad. In the morning the doors were
smeared with pitch, and those in the house chewed whitethorn to keep
off the evil spirits. On the last day of the festival offerings were
made to Hermes, and the dead were formally bidden to depart.[21]
Ovid describes the Lemuria or Lemuralia.[22] They took place in May,
which was consequently regarded as an unlucky month for marriages, and
is still so regarded almost as universally in England to-day as it was
in Rome during the principate of Augustus. The name of the festival
Ovid derives from Remus, as the ghost of his murdered brother was said
to have appeared to Romulus in his sleep and to have demanded burial.
Hence the institution of the Lemuria.
The head of the family walked through the house with bare feet at dead
of night, making the mystic sign with his first and fourth fingers
extended, the other fingers being turned inwards and the thumb crossed
over them, in case he might run against an unsubstantial spirit as he
moved noiselessly along. This is the sign of "le corna," held to be
infallible against the Evil Eye in modern Italy. After solemnly
washing his hands, he places black beans in his mouth, and throws
others over his shoulders, saying, "With these beans do I redeem me
and mine." He repeats this ceremony nine times without looking round,
and the spirits are thought to follow unseen and pick up the beans.
Then he purifies himself once more and clashes brass, and bids the
demons leave his house. When he has repeated nine times "Manes exite
paterni," he looks round, and the ceremony is over, and the restless
ghosts have been duly laid for a year.
Lamiae haunted rooms, which had to be fumigated with sulphur, while
some mystic rites were performed with eggs before they could be
expelled.
The dead not yet at rest were divided into three classes--those who
had died before their time, the [Greek: aoroi], who had to wander till
the span of their natural life was completed;[23] those who had met
with violent deaths, the [Greek: biaiothanatoi]; and the unburied, the
[Greek: ataphoi]. In the Hymn to Hecate, to whom they were especially
attached, they are represented as following in her train and taking
part in her nightly revels in human shape. The lot of the murdered is
no better, and executed criminals belong to the same class.
Spirits of this kind were supposed to haunt the place where their
bodies lay. Hence they were regarded as demons, and were frequently
entrusted with the carrying out of the strange curses, which have been
found in their tombs, or in wells where a man had been drowned, or
even in the sea, written on leaden tablets, often from right to left,
or in queer characters, so as to be illegible, with another tablet
fastened over them by means of a nail, symbolizing the binding effect
it was hoped they would have--the "Defixiones," to give them their
Latin name, which are very numerous among the inscriptions. So real
was the belief in these curses that the elder Pliny says that everyone
is afraid of being placed under evil spells;[24] and they are
frequently referred to in antiquity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Tusc. Disp._, i. 16.]
[Footnote 2: Ov., _Fast._, iv. 821; Fowler, _Roman Festivals_, p.
211.]
[Footnote 3: Macrob., _Sat._, i. 16.]
[Footnote 4: Cic., _De Leg._, ii. 22.]
[Footnote 5: "Deum parentem" (Corn. Nep., _Fragm._, 12).]
[Footnote 6: Cp. Fowler, _Rom._ _Fest._]
[Footnote 7: Rohde, _Psyche_, p. 216. Cp. Herod., iv. 26.]
[Footnote 8: _Tusc._ _Disp._, i. 12, 27.]
[Footnote 9: Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, p.
259 _ff._]
[Footnote 10: _De Luctu_, 9.]
[Footnote 11: Carducci, "Rimembranze di Scuola," in _Rime Nuove_.]
[Footnote 12: _Il._, 23. 64.]
[Footnote 13: "Turpia ossa," 4. 5. 4.]
[Footnote 14: Paus., 9. 32.]
[Footnote 15: 81 D.]
[Footnote 16: _De Genio Socratis_, 15.]
[Footnote 17: Cp. Plautus, _Cas._, iii. 4. 2; _Amphitr._, ii. 2. 145;
_Rudens_, v. 3. 67, etc.; and the use of the word "larvatus."]
[Footnote 18: Pliny, _N.H._, 1, Proef. 31: "Cum mortuis non nisi
Larvas luctari."]
[Footnote 19: Seneca, _Apocol._, 9. At the risk of irrelevance, I
cannot refrain from pointing out the enduring nature of proverbs as
exemplified in this section. Hercules grows more and more anxious at
the turn the debate is taking, and hastens from one god to another,
saying: "Don't grudge me this favour; the case concerns me closely. I
shan't forget you when the time comes. One good turn deserves another"
(Manus manum lavat). This is exactly the Neapolitan proverb, "One hand
washes the other, and both together wash the face." "Una mano lava
l'altra e tutt'e due si lavano la faccia," is more or less the modern
version. In chapter vii. we have also "gallum in suo sterquilino
plurimum posse," which corresponds to our own, "Every cock crows best
on its own dunghill."]
[Footnote 20: Petr., _Sat._, 34.]
[Footnote 21: [Greek: thhyraze, keres, oukhet Anthesteria.] Cp. Rohde,
_Psyche_, 217.]
[Footnote 22: _Fast._, v. 419 _ff._]
[Footnote 23: Tertull., _De An._, 56.]
[Footnote 24: _N.H._, 28. 2. 19.]