Greek and Roman Ghost Stories | Page 5

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.[25]
Greek religion, it is true, found expression to a large extent in
mythology; but the 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.[26] 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.[27]
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.
Plutarch placed great faith in ghosts and visions. In his Life of Dion[28]
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