Greek and Roman Ghost Stories | Page 2

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 Giosuè 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 æterna" 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. Æneas beheld them on the
banks of the Styx, stretching out their hands "ripæ ulterioris amore."