Greek and Roman Ghost Stories | Page 3

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
Ægospotami, 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 _Phædo_[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 Larvæ are the ghosts that haunt houses. Apuleius, however, is
wholly uncritical, and the distinction between Larvæ and Lemures is
certainly not borne out by facts.
The Larvæ 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 Larvæ 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
Larvæ" 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 Larvæ 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 Larvæ 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