E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Janet Blenkinship, Brian Janes, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/) 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 As cremation gradually superseded burial, the idea took shape that the soul might have an existence of its own, altogether independent of the body, and a place of abode was assigned to it in a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_.