The Belief in Ghosts in Greece and Rome
By Lacy Collison-Morley
© 2006 by http://www.HorrorMasters.com
Ghost stories play a very subordinate part in classical literature, as is only to be expected.
The religion of the hard-headed, practical Roman was essentially formal, and consisted
largely in the exact performance of an elaborate ritual. His relations with the dead were
regulated with a care that might satisfy the most litigious of ghosts, and once a man had
carried out his part of the bargain, he did not trouble his head further about his deceased
ancestors, so long as he felt that they, in their turn, were not neglecting his interests. Yet
the average man in Rome was glad to free himself from burdensome and expensive duties
towards the dead that had come down to him from past generations, and the ingenuity of
the lawyers soon devised a system of sham sales by which this could be successfully and
honourably accomplished.
Greek religion, it is true, found expression to a large extent in mythology; but t
he sanity
of the Greek genius in its best days kept it free from excessive superstition. Not till the
invasion of the West by the cults of the East do we find ghosts and spirits at all common
in literature.
The belief in apparitions existed, however, at all times, even among educated people.
The younger Pliny, for instance, writes to ask his friend Sura for his opinion as to
whether ghosts have a real existence, with a form of their own, and are of divine origin,
or whether they are merely empty air, owing their definite shape to our superstitious
fears.
We must not forget that Suetonius, whose superstition has become proverbial, was a
friend of Pliny, and wrote to him on one occasion, begging him to procure the
postponement of a case in which he was engaged, as he had been frightened by a dream.
Though Pliny certainly did not possess his friend s amazing credulity, he takes the
request with becoming seriousness, and promises to do his best; but he adds that the real
question is whether Suetonius s dreams are usually true or not. He then relates how he
himself once had a vision of his mother-in-law, of all people, appearing to him and
begging him to abandon a case he had undertaken. In spite of this awful warning he
persevered, however, and it was well that he did so, for the case proved the beginning of
his successful career at the Bar. His uncle, the elder Pliny, seems to have placed more
faith in his dreams, and wrote his account of the German wars entirely because he dreamt
that Drusus appeared to him and implored him to preserve his name from oblivion.
The Plinies were undoubtedly two of the ablest and most enlightened men of their time;
and the belief in the value of dreams is certainly not extinct among us yet. If we possess
Artemidorus s book on the subject for the ancient world, we have also the Smorfia of
to-day, so dear to the heart of the lotto-playing Neapolitan, which assigns a special
number to every conceivable subject that can possibly occur in a dream not excluding
u murtu che parl (the dead man that speaks) for the guidance of the believing
gambler in selecting the numbers he is to play for the week. © 2006 by http://www.HorrorMasters.com
Plutarch placed great faith in ghosts and visions. In his Life of Dion he notes the
singular fact that both Dion and Brutus were warned of their approaching deaths by a
frightful spectre. It has been maintained, he adds, that no man in his senses ever saw a
ghost: that these are the delusive visions of women and children, or of men whose
intellects are impaired by some physical infirmity, and who believe that their diseased
imaginations are of divine origin. But if Dion and Brutus, men of strong and philosophic
minds, whose understandings were not affected by any constitutional infirmity if such
men could place so much faith in the appearance of spectres as to give an account of
them to their friends, I see no reason why we should depart from the opinion of the
ancients that men had their evil genii, who disturbed them with fears and distressed their
virtues. . . .
In the opening of the Philopseudus, Lucian asks what it is that makes men so fond of a
lie, and comments on their delight in romancing themselves, which is only equalled by
the earnest attention with which they receive other people s efforts in the same direction.
Tychiades goes on to describe his visit to Eucrates, a distinguished philosopher, who was
ill in bed. With him were a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a doctor,
who began to tell stories so absurd and abounding in such monstrous superstition that he
ended by leaving them in disgust. None of us have, of course, ever been present at similar
gatherings, where, after starting with the inevitable Glamis mystery, everybody in the
room has set to work to outdo his neighbour in marvellous yarns, drawing on his
imagination for additional material, and, like Eucrates, being ready to stake the lives of
his children on his veracity.
Another scoffer was Democritus of Abdera, who was so firmly convinced of the non-
existence of ghosts that he took up his abode in a tomb and lived there night and day for a
long time. Classical ghosts seem to have affected black rather than white as their
favourite colour. Among the features of the gruesome entertainments with which
Domitian loved to terrify his Senators were handsome boys, who appeared naked with
their bodies painted black, like ghosts, and performed a wild dance. On the following day
one of them was generally sent as a present to each Senator. Some boys in the
neighbourhood wished to shake Democritus s unbelief, so they dressed themselves in
black with masks like skulls upon their heads and danced round the tomb where he lived.
But, to their annoyance, he only put his head out and told them to go away and stop
playing the fool.
The Greek and Roman stories hardly come up to the standards required by the Society
for Psychical Research. They are purely popular, and the ghost is regarded as the
deceased person, permitted or condemned by the powers of the lower world to hold
communication with survivors on earth. Naturally, they were never submitted to critical
inquiry, and there is no foreshadowing of any of the modern theories, that the
phenomenon, if caused by the deceased, is not necessarily the deceased, though it may be
an i
ndication that some kind of force is being exercised after death which is in some way
connected with a person previously known on earth, or that the apparitions may be
purely local, or due entirely to subjective hallucination on the part of the person
beholding them. Strangely enough, we rarely find any of those interesting cases,
everywhere so well attested, of people appearing just about the time of their death to
friends or relatives to whom they are particularly attached, or with whom they have made
a compact that they will appear, should they die first, if it is possible. The classical
instance of this is the wellknown story of Lord Brougham who, while taking a warm bath
in Sweden, saw a school friend whom he had not met for many years, but with whom he
had long ago committed the folly of drawing up an agreement written with our blood, to
the effect that whichever of us died first should appear to the other, and thus solve any
doubts we had entertained of the life after death. There are, however, a number of stories
of the passing of souls, which are curiously like some of those collected by the Society
for Psychical Research, in the Fourth Book of Gregory the Great s Dialogues.
Another noticeable difference is that apparitions in most well-authenticated modern
ghost stories are of a comforting character, whereas those in the ancient world are nearly
all the reverse. This difference we may attribute to the entire change in the aspect of the
future life which we owe to modern Christianity. As we have seen, there was little that
was comforting in the life after death as conceived by the old pagan religions, while in
medieval times the horrors of hell were painted in the most lurid colours, and were
emphasized more than the joys of heaven.
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