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Hauntings in Ancient Greece and Rome

By Robin Swope, Pittsburgh Paranormal Examiner
February 9th, 2011 3:50 pm ET

These next few months I am finally finishing up my

Masters Degree, something I left undone for almost 20
year. I was hired at Port Crane Alliance Church in the
spring of 1992 following a successful internship there
and left two courses to complete for my Master of
Divinity degree from Alliance Theological Seminary.
Finally, after many failed attempts I am completing
those last courses; a study of 1 & 2ndCorinthians and
the Greek Bible in the Ancient Western Mediterranean
World. While doing some essays for the second class
which focused on ancient Greco-Roman religion I
remembered an old article in the April 2001 issue of
Fortean Times Magazine by Barry Baldwin, Fellow of
the Royal Society of Canada and Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Calgary. I found it
very fascinating and thought I’d share it with you; it is the 12tharticle in his continuing column “Classical
Corner” entitled “Greco-Roman Ghosts”. Here is his gleanings of the classics, with the actual texts
inserted by yours truly:

“Ghosts…

The Romans feared them enough to hold an annual May festival of appeasement. Ovid (Fasti bk5
vv19-92) describes this Lemuria: at midnight you tasted and spat nine beans to be consumed by the
supposedly bean loving phantoms, intoning ‘With these I ransom me and mine,’ after which you gonged
out the ghosts with a clash of cooking utensils.”

The text actually says:

"It will be the ancient sacred rites of the Lemuria,

When we make offerings to the voiceless spirits.

The year was once shorter, the pious rites of purification, februa,

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Were unknown, nor were you, two-faced Janus, leader of the months:

Yet they still brought gifts owed to the ashes of the dead,

The grandson paid respects to his buried grandfather’s tomb.

It was May month, named for our ancestors (maiores),

And a relic of the old custom still continues.

When midnightcomes, lending silence to sleep,

And all the dogs and hedgerow birds are quiet,

He who remembers ancient rites, and fears the gods,

Rises (no fetters binding his two feet)

And makes the sign with thumb and closed fingers,

Lest an insubstantial shade meets him in the silence.

After cleansing his hands in spring water,

He turns and first taking some black beans,

Throws them with averted face: saying, while throwing:

‘With these beans I throw I redeem me and mine.’

He says this nine times without looking back: the shade

Is thought to gather the beans, and follow behind, unseen.

Again he touches water, and sounds the Temesan bronze,

And asks the spirit to leave his house.

When nine times he’s cried: ‘Ancestral spirit, depart,’

He looks back, and believes the sacred rite’s fulfilled.

Why the day’s so called, and the origin of the name,

Escapes me: that’s for some god to discover."

(Poetryintranslation.com Ovid Fasti book 5 Translated by A. S. Kline ©2004)

Baldwincontinues:

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“Though classified as nocturnal by Horace (Epistles, bk2 n02 v209)-his fifth Epode features a revenant
boy haunting the beldames(ugly old women)who had sacrificed him – and in Persius (Satires, No5 v85),
classical ghosts often appear in the empty hours of the Mediterranean siesta. Also, the prevalence of
urban life did not encourage tales of remote haunted castles.”

“Herodotus (Histories, bk6 ch9 para1, bk8 ch84 para2) serves up a nocturnal male phantom in a Spartan
queen’s bed and a diurnal female appearing to the Greeks at Salamiswith strategic instructions.”

Baldwinalso relates that Suetonius’ “Lives of the Ceasars” contains three anecdotes of hauntings:

1) “The site of Caligula’s murder and burial witnessed nightly ‘fearsome apparitions’ until the corpse was
moved and the house burned down;(Suetonius, Lives; Caligula, ch 59)

The text reads:

“He lived twenty-nine years and ruled three years, ten months and eight days. His body was conveyed
secretly to the gardens of the Lamian family, where it was partly consumed on a hastily erected pyre and
buried beneath a light covering of turf; later his sisters on their return from exile dug it up, cremated it,
and consigned it to the tomb. Before this was done, it is well known that the caretakers of the gardens
were disturbed by ghosts, and that in the house where he was slain not a night passed without some
fearsome apparition, until at last the house itself was destroyed by fire. With him died his wife Caesonia,
stabbed with a sword by a centurion, while his daughter's brains were dashed out against a
wall.” (Nero,ch34 para1)

2) “his (Caligula’s) mother’s ghost haunted her matricide son Nero;”

Actually, this appears in paragraph 3 and 4; the text reads:

“On learning that everything had gone wrong and that she had escaped by swimming, driven to
desperation he secretly had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman Lucius Agermus, when he
joyfully brought word that she was safe and sound, and then ordered that the freedman be seized and
bound, on the charge of being hired to kill the emperor; that his mother be put to death, and the pretence
made that she had escaped the consequences of her detected guilt by suicide. 4 Trustworthy authorities
add still more gruesome details: that he hurried off to view the corpse, handled her limbs, criticising some
and commending others, and that becoming thirsty meanwhile, he took a drink. Yet he could not either
then or ever afterwards endure the stings of conscience, though soldiers, senate and people tried to
hearten him with their congratulations; for he often owned that he was hounded by his mother's ghost
and by the whips and blazing torches of the Furies. He even had rites performed by the Magi, in the effort
to summon her shade and entreat it for forgiveness. Moreover, in his journey through Greece he did not
venture to take part in the Eleusinian mysteries, since at the beginning the godless and wicked are
warned by the herald's proclamation to go hence.”

3) “Otho was persecuted by the shade of Galba, whom he had usurped ( Otho, ch7 para2)”

I include paragraph 1 as well to give the piece a proper background,

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“1 Next, as the day was drawing to its close, he entered the senate and after giving a brief account of
himself, alleging that he had been carried off in the streets and forced to undertake the rule, which he
would exercise in accordance with the general will, he went to the Palace. When in the midst of the other
adulations of those who congratulated and flattered him, he was hailed by the common herd as Nero, he
made no sign of dissent; on the contrary, according to some writers, he even made use of that surname
in his commissions and his first letters to some of the governors of the provinces. Certain it is that he
suffered Nero’s busts and statues to be set up again, and reinstated his procurators and freedmen in their
former posts, while the first grant that he signed as emperor was one of fifty million sesterces for finishing
the Golden House.

2 It is said that he had a fearful dream that night, uttered loud groans, and was found by those who ran to
his aid lying on the ground beside his couch; that he tried by every kind of expiatory rite to propitiate the
shade of Galba, by whom he dreamt that he was ousted and thrown out; and that next day, as he was
taking the auspices, a great storm arose and he had a bad fall, whereat he muttered from time to time:
‘With long pipes what concern have I?’

( The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by C. Suetonius Tranquillus; translation by J. C. Rolfe, published in
the Loeb Classical Library, 1913)

Baldwin continues:

“Tacitus (Annals, bk11 ch21 para1) unsceptically recounts how African governor Curtius Rufus was
promised this future honour by a noontime female phantom when a low grade civil servant there.”

The text says:

“As to the origin of Curtius Rufus, whom some have described as the son of a gladiator, I would not
promulgate a falsehood and I am ashamed to investigate the truth. On reaching maturity, he joined the
train of a quaestor to whom Africa had been allotted, and, in the town of Adrumetum, was loitering by
himself in an arcade deserted during the mid-day heat, when a female form of superhuman size rose
before him, and a voice was heard to say: "Thou, Rufus, art he that shall come into this province as
proconsul." With such an omen to raise his hopes, he left for the capital, and, thanks to the bounty of his
friends backed by his own energy of character, attained the quaestorship, followed — in spite of patrician
competitors — by a praetorship due to the imperial recommendation; for Tiberius had covered the
disgrace of his birth by the remark: "Curtius Rufus I regard as the creation of himself." Afterwards, long of
life and sullenly cringing to his betters, arrogant to his inferiors, unaccommodating among his equals, he
held consular office, the insignia of triumph, and finally Africa; and by dying there fulfilled the destiny
foreshadowed.”

Next Baldwin tells us of stories from Tacitus' friend Pliny:

“Pliny (Letters, bk7 no27) Retells this tale to justify his own belief in ghosts, adding another. A house in
Athens was haunted by a ghastly old man, complete with clanking chains. The philosopher Athenodorus
investigated, followed the thing to the garden, dug up the spot where it vanished, and found a fettered

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skeleton. After he re-buried the bones, the phantom came no more.”

Pliny relates the story this way:

“There was at Athens a large and spacious, but ill‑reputed and pestilential house. In the dead of the night
a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively,
sounded like the rattling of fetters; at first it seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees;
immediately afterward a phantom appeared in the form of an old man, extremely meagre and squalid,
with a long beard and bristling hair; rattling the gyves on his feet and hands. The poor inhabitants
consequently passed sleepless nights under the most dismal terrors imaginable. This, as it broke their
rest, threw them into distempers, which, as their horrors of mind increased, proved in the end fatal to their
lives. For even in the day time, though the spectre did not appear, yet the remembrance of it made such
a strong impression on their imaginations that it still seemed before their eyes, and their terror remained
when the cause of it was gone. By this means the house was at last deserted, as being judged by
everybody to be absolutely uninhabitable; so that it was now entirely abandoned to the ghost. However,
in hopes that some tenant might be found who was ignorant of this great calamity which attended it, a bill
was put up, giving notice that it was either to be let or sold.

It happened that Athenodorus the philosopher came to Athens at this time, and reading the bill
ascertained the price. The extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion; nevertheless, when he heard
tbe whole story, he was so far from being discouraged, that he was more strongly inclined to hire it, and,
in short, actually did so. When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him in the
fore‑part of the house, and after calling for a light, together with his pen and tablets, he directed all his
people to retire within. But that his mind might not, for want of employment, be open to the vain terrors of
imaginary noises and apparitions, he applied himself to writing with all his faculties. The first part of the
night passed with usual silence, then began the clanking of iron fetters; however, he neither lifted up his
eyes, nor laid down his pen, but closed his ears by concentrating his attention. The noise increased and
advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked round and saw the
apparition exactly as it had been described to him: it stood before him, beckoning with the finger.
Athenodorus made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and bent again to his writing, but the
ghost rattling its chains over his head as he wrote, he looked round and saw it beckoning as before.
Upon this he immediately took up his lamp and followed it. The ghost slowly stalked along, as if
encumbered with its chains; and having turned into the courtyard of the house, suddenly vanished.
Athenodorus being thus deserted, marked the spot with a handful of grass and leaves. The next day he
went to the magistrates, and advised them to order that spot to be dug up. There they found bones
commingled and intertwined with chains; for the body had mouldered away by long Iying in the ground,
leaving them bare, and corroded by the fetters. Thc bones were collected, and buried at the public
expense; and after the ghost was thus duly laid the house was haunted no more.” (http://www.vroma.org
/~hwalker/Pliny/Pliny07-27-E.html)

Baldwin concludes:

“Lucian burlesques bogey stories in his ‘Lover of Lies’. This must reflect contemporary beliefs, otherwise

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has no point. Indeed, though switching its locale to Corinth, he rehearses Pliny’s haunted house tale.
Other items include a giant middayfemale apparition, the ghost of a wife returning to nag her husband,
and a poltergeist statue.”

“Byzantine hagiographers are full of weird tales, for typical example John Moschus (Spiritual Meadow
ch70) on an Egyptian tomb-robber blinded by the suddenly-resurrected victim whose corpse he had just
despoiled.”

Ghost stories and investigations are not a new thing, they have been around for thousands of years.
However the Greco-Roman world had a very different understanding of what a ghost was. But we’ll take
a look at that next time. I am sure it will be an eye opener.

Barry Baldwin still writes for Fortean Times, it is a magazine I highly recommend for anyone interested in
the paranormal and unexplained. It truly has no equal. If you want a fair and even handed exploration of
all things unexplained by scholarly professionals, it is the magazine to read. Ask for it at a bookstore near
you or visit them online at www.forteantimes.com.

Tags: hauntings, ghosts, Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Prof. Barry Baldwin

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