One really beautiful ghost story has, however, come down to us.[99] Phlegon of Tralles was a freedman of the Emperor Hadrian. His work is not of great merit. The following is a favourable specimen of his stories. A monstrous child was born in AEtolia, after the death of its father, Polycrates. At a public meeting, where it was proposed to do away with it, the father suddenly appeared, and begged that the child might be given him. An attempt was made to seize the father, but he snatched up the child, tore it to pieces, and devoured all but the head. When it was proposed to consult the Delphic oracle on the matter, the head prophesied to the crowd from where it lay on the ground.

Then comes the following story. The early part is missing, but Erwin Rohde, in an interesting article,[100] has cleared up all the essential details. Proclus's treatises on Plato's Republic are complete only in the Vatican manuscripts. Of these Mai only published fragments,[101] but an English theologian, Alexander Morus, took notes from the manuscript when it was in Florence, and quoted from it in a commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews.[102] One of the treatises is called [Greek: pos dei noein eisienai kai exienai psuchen apo somatos]. The ending in Phlegon[103] proves that the story was given in the form of a letter, and we learn that the scene was laid at Amphipolis, on the Strymon, and that the account was sent by Hipparchus in a letter to Arrhidaeus, half-brother of Alexander the Great, the events occurring during the reign of Philip II. of Macedon. Proclus says that his information is derived from letters, "some written by Hipparchus, others by Arrhidaeus."

Philinnion was the daughter of Demostratus and Charito. She had been married to Craterus, Alexander's famous General, but had died six months after her marriage. As we learn that she was desperately in love with Machates, a foreign friend from Pella who had come to see Demostratus, the misery of her position may possibly have caused her death. But her love conquered death itself, and she returned to life again six months after she had died, and lived with Machates, visiting him for several nights. "One day an old nurse went to the guest-chamber, and as the lamp was burning, she saw a woman sitting by Machates. Scarcely able to contain herself at this extraordinary occurrence, she ran to the girl's mother, calling: 'Charito! Demostratus!' and bade them get up and go with her to their daughter, for by the grace of the gods she had appeared alive, and was with the stranger in the guest-chamber.

"On hearing this extraordinary story, Charito was at first overcome by it and by the nurse's excitement; but she soon recovered herself, and burst into tears at the mention of her daughter, telling the old woman she was out of her senses, and ordering her out of the room. The nurse was indignant at this treatment, and boldly declared that she was not out of her senses, but that Charito was unwilling to see her daughter because she was afraid. At last Charito consented to go to the door of the guest-chamber, but as it was now quite two hours since she had heard the news, she arrived too late, and found them both asleep. The mother bent over the woman's figure, and thought she recognized her daughter's features and clothes. Not feeling sure, as it was dark, she decided to keep quiet for the present, meaning to get up early and catch the woman. If she failed, she would ask Machates for a full explanation, as he would never tell her a lie in a case so important. So she left the room without saying anything.

"But early on the following morning, either because the gods so willed it or because she was moved by some divine impulse, the woman went away without being observed. When she came to him, Charito was angry with the young man in consequence, and clung to his knees, and conjured him to speak the truth and hide nothing from her. At first he was greatly distressed, and could hardly be brought to admit that the girl's name was Philinnion. Then he described her first coming and the violence of her passion, and told how she had said that she was there without her parents' knowledge. The better to establish the truth of his story, he opened a coffer and took out the things she had left behind her—a ring of gold which she had given him, and a belt which she had left on the previous night. When Charito beheld all these convincing proofs, she uttered a piercing cry, and rent her clothes and her cloak, and tore her coif from her head, and began to mourn for her daughter afresh in the midst of her friends. Machates was deeply distressed on seeing what had happened, and how they were all mourning, as if for her second funeral. He begged them to be comforted, and promised them that they should see her if she appeared. Charito yielded, but bade him be careful how he fulfilled his promise.

"When night fell and the hour drew near at which Philinnion usually appeared, they were on the watch for her. She came, as was her custom, and sat down upon the bed. Machates made no pretence, for he was genuinely anxious to sift the matter to the bottom, and secretly sent some slaves to call her parents. He himself could hardly believe that the woman who came to him so regularly at the same hour was really dead, and when she ate and drank with him, he began to suspect what had been suggested to him—namely, that some grave-robbers had violated the tomb and sold the clothes and the gold ornaments to her father.

"Demostratus and Charito hastened to come at once, and when they saw her, they were at first speechless with amazement. Then, with cries of joy, they threw themselves upon their daughter. But Philinnion remained cold. 'Father and mother,' she said, 'cruel indeed have ye been in that ye grudged my living with the stranger for three days in my father's house, for it brought harm to no one. But ye shall pay for your meddling with sorrow. I must return to the place appointed for me, though I came not hither without the will of Heaven.' With these words she fell down dead, and her body lay stretched upon the bed. Her parents threw themselves upon her, and the house was filled with confusion and sorrow, for the blow was heavy indeed; but the event was strange, and soon became known throughout the town, and finally reached my ears.

"During the night I kept back the crowds that gathered round the house, taking care that there should be no disturbance as the news spread. At early dawn the theatre was full. After a long discussion it was decided that we should go and open the tomb, to see whether the body was still on the bier, or whether we should find the place empty, for the woman had hardly been dead six months. When we opened the vault where all her family was buried, the bodies were seen lying on the other biers; but on the one where Philinnion had been placed, we found only the iron ring which had belonged to her lover and the gilt drinking-cup Machates had given her on the first day. In utter amazement, we went straight to Demostratus's house to see whether the body was still there. We beheld it lying on the ground, and then went in a large crowd to the place of assembly, for the whole event was of great importance and absolutely past belief. Great was the confusion, and no one could tell what to do, when Hyllus, who is not only considered the best diviner among us, but is also a great authority on the interpretation of the flight of birds, and is generally well versed in his art, got up and said that the woman must be buried outside the boundaries of the city, for it was unlawful that she should be laid to rest within them; and that Hermes Chthonius and the Eumenides should be propitiated, and that all pollution would thus be removed. He ordered the temples to be re-consecrated and the usual rites to be performed in honour of the gods below. As for the King, in this affair, he privately told me to sacrifice to Hermes, and to Zeus Xenius, and to Ares, and to perform these duties with the utmost care. We have done as he suggested.

"The stranger Machates, who was visited by the ghost, has committed suicide in despair.

"Now, if you think it right that I should give the King an account of all this, let me know, and I will send some of those who gave me the various details."

The story is particularly interesting, as the source of Goethe's Braut von Korinth. In Goethe's poem the girl is a Christian, while her lover is a pagan. Their parents are friends, and they have been betrothed in their youth. He comes to stay with her parents, knowing nothing of her death, when she appears to him. As in the Greek story, her body is material, though cold and bloodless, and he thinks her still alive. He takes her in his arms and kisses her back to life and love, breathing his own passion into her. Then the mother surprises them, and the daughter upbraids her for her cruelty, but begs that she and her lover may be buried together, as he must pay for the life he has given her with his own.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 79: Philops., 27.]

[Footnote 80: Herod., v. 92.]

[Footnote 81: Human Personality, ii. 348.]

[Footnote 82: Ep., v. 5.]

[Footnote 83: Suet., Gaius, 59.]

[Footnote 84: Suet., Otho, 7.]

[Footnote 85: If that is the meaning of [Greek: exerruparou] in the Homeric Scholia of Theopompus.]

[Footnote 86: Cic., De Div., i. 27, 56. Cp. Val. Max., i. 7; Libanius, iv. 1101.]

[Footnote 87: The Grateful Dead, by G.H. Gerould.]

[Footnote 88: The Grateful Dead, p. 27.]

[Footnote 89: Ibid., p. 10.]

[Footnote 90: 6. 6. 7.]

[Footnote 91: AElian, Fragm., 82.]

[Footnote 92: Herod., iv. 14, 15.]

[Footnote 93: Hist. Mir., 11.]

[Footnote 94: N.H., 7. 52. 174.]

[Footnote 95: 67. 16.]

[Footnote 96: N.H., 7. 52. 174.]

[Footnote 97: Vagina.]

[Footnote 98: Human Personality, ii. 383.]

[Footnote 99: Phlegon of Tralles, De Rebus Mirabilibus, ad fin.]

[Footnote 100: Rhein. Mus., vol. xxxii., p. 329.]

[Footnote 101: Mai, Script. Vet. Nov. Coll., ii. 671.]

[Footnote 102: London, 1616.]

[Footnote 103: [Greek: errho]]



VII

WARNING APPARITIONS

As we should expect, there are a number of instances of warning apparitions in antiquity; and it is interesting to note that the majority of these are gigantic women endowed with a gift of prophecy.

Thus the younger Pliny[104] tells us how Quintus Curtius Rufus, who was on the staff of the Governor of Africa, was walking one day in a colonnade after sunset, when a gigantic woman appeared before him. She announced that she was Africa, and was able to predict the future, and told him that he would go to Rome, hold office there, return to the province with the highest authority, and there die. Her prophecy was fulfilled to the letter, and as he landed in Africa for the last time the same figure is reported to have met him.

So, again, at the time of the conspiracy of Callippus, Dion was meditating one evening before the porch of his house, when he turned round and saw a gigantic female figure, in the form of a Fury, at the end of the corridor, sweeping the floor with a broom. The vision terrified him, and soon afterwards his only son committed suicide and he himself was murdered by the conspirators.[105]

A similar dramatic story is related of Drusus during his German campaigns.[106] While engaged in operations against the Alemanni, he was preparing to cross the Elbe, when a gigantic woman barred the way, exclaiming, "Insatiate Drusus, whither wilt thou go? Thou art not fated to see all things. Depart hence, for the end of thy life and of thy deeds is at hand." Drusus was much troubled by this warning, and instantly obeyed the words of the apparition; but he died before reaching the Rhine.

We meet with the same phenomenon again in Dio Cassius, among the prodigies preceding the death of Macrinus, when "a dreadful gigantic woman, seen of several, declared that all that had happened was as nothing compared with what they were soon to endure"—a prophecy which was amply fulfilled by the reign of Heliogabalus.

But the most gigantic of all these gigantic women was, as we should only expect from his marvellous power of seeing ghosts, the one who appeared to Eucrates in the Philopseudus.[107] Eucrates has seen over a thousand ghosts in his time, and is now quite used to them, though at first he found them rather upsetting; but he had been given a ring and a charm by an Arab, which enabled him to deal with anything supernatural that came in his way. The ring was made from the iron of a cross on which a criminal had been executed, and doubtless had the same value in Eucrates' eyes that a piece of the rope with which a man has been hung possesses in the eyes of a gambler to-day. On this particular occasion he had left his men at work in the vineyard, and was resting quietly at midday, when his dog began to bark. At first he thought it was only a favourite boy of his indulging in a little hunting with some friends; but on looking up he saw in front of him a woman at least three hundred feet high, with a sword thirty feet long. Her lower extremities were like those of a dragon, and snakes were coiling round her neck and shoulders. Eucrates was not in the least alarmed, but turned the seal of his ring, when a vast chasm opened in the earth, into which she disappeared. This seems rather to have astonished Eucrates; but he plucked up courage, caught hold of a tree that stood near the edge, and looked over, when he saw all the lower world lying spread before him, including the mead of asphodel, where the shades of the blessed were reclining at ease with their friends and relations, arranged according to clans and tribes. Among these he recognized his own father, dressed in the clothes in which he was buried; and it must have been comforting to the son to have such good evidence that his parent was safely installed in the Elysian Fields. In a few moments the chasm closed.

Dio Cassius[108] relates how Trajan was saved in the great earthquake that destroyed nearly the whole of Antioch by a phantom, which appeared to him suddenly, and warned him to leave his house by the window. A similar story is told of the poet Simonides, who was warned by a spectre that his house was going to fall, and thus enabled to make his escape in time.

I will include here a couple of stories which, if they cannot exactly be classed as stories of warning apparitions, are interesting in themselves, and may at least be considered as ghost stories. Pliny the Younger[109] tells us how a slave of his, named Marcus, imagined that he saw someone cutting his hair during the night. When he awoke, the vision proved to have been a true one, for his hair lay all round him. Soon afterwards the same thing happened again. His brother, who slept with him, saw nothing; but Marcus declared that two people came in by the windows, dressed in white, and, after cutting his hair, disappeared. "Nothing astonishing happened," adds Pliny, "except that I was not prosecuted, as I undoubtedly should have been, had Domitian lived; for this happened during his principate. Perhaps the cutting of my slave's hair was a sign of my approaching doom, for accused people cut their hair," as a sign of mourning. One may be allowed to wonder whether, after all, a fondness for practical joking is not even older than the age of the younger Pliny.

This story, like nearly every other that we have come across, has a parallel in the Philopseudus. Indeed, Lucian seems to have covered almost the whole field of the marvellous, as understood at that time, in his determination to turn it into ridicule in that amusing dialogue. In this case we are told of a little statue of AEsculapius, which stood in the house of the narrator of the story, and at the feet of which a number of pence had been placed as offerings, while other coins, some of them silver, were fastened to the thighs with wax. There were also silver plates which had been vowed or offered by those who had been cured of fever by the god. The offerings and tablets are just such as might be found in a Catholic church in the South of Europe to-day; but the coins, in our more practical modern world, would have found their way into the coffers of the church. One would like to know what was the ultimate destination of these particular coins—whether they were to be sent as contributions to one of the temples of AEsculapius, which were the centre of the medical world at this period, and had elaborate hospitals attached to them, about which we learn so much from Aristides.

In this case they were merely a source of temptation to an unfortunate Libyan groom, who stole them one night, intending to make his escape. But he had not studied the habits of the statue, which, we are told, habitually got down from its pedestal every night; and in this case such was the power of the god that he kept the man wandering about all night, unable to leave the court, where he was found with the money in the morning, and soundly flogged. The god, however, considered that he had been let off much too easily; and he was mysteriously flogged every night, as the weals upon him showed, till he ultimately died of the punishment.

AElian[110] has a charming story of Philemon, the comic poet. He was still, apparently, in the full vigour of his powers when he had a vision of nine maidens leaving his house in the Piraeus and bidding him farewell. When he awoke, he told his slave the story, and set to work to finish a play with which he was then busy. After completing it to his satisfaction, he wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down upon his bed. His slave came in, and, thinking he was asleep, went to wake him, when he found that he was dead. AElian challenges the unbelieving Epicureans to deny that the nine maidens were the nine Muses, leaving a house which was so soon to be polluted by death.

Many stories naturally gather round the great struggle for the final mastery of the Roman world which ended in the overthrow of the Republic. Shakespeare has made us familiar with the fate of the poet Cinna, who was actually mistaken for one of the conspirators against Caesar and murdered by the crowd. He dreamt, on the night before he met his death, that Caesar invited him to supper, and when he refused the invitation, took him by the hand and forced him down into a deep, dark abyss, which he entered with the utmost horror.

But there is a story connected with the crossing of the Rubicon by Caesar that certainly deserves to be better known than it is.[111] It is only fitting that an event fraught with such momentous consequences should have a supernatural setting of some kind; and Suetonius relates that while Caesar was still hesitating whether he should declare himself an enemy of his country by crossing the little river that bounded his province at the head of an army, a man of heroic size and beauty suddenly appeared, playing upon a reed-pipe. Some of the troops, several trumpeters among them, ran up to listen, when the man seized a trumpet, blew a loud blast upon it, and began to cross the Rubicon. Caesar at once decided to advance, and the men followed him with redoubled enthusiasm after what they had just seen.

It is to Plutarch that we owe the famous story of the apparition that visited Brutus in his tent the night before the battle of Philippi, and again during the battle. Shakespeare represents it to be Caesar's ghost, but has otherwise strictly followed Plutarch. It would be absurd to give the scene in any other words than Shakespeare's.[112]

BRUTUS. How ill this taper burns! Ha! who comes here? I think it is the weakness of mine eyes That shapes this monstrous apparition. It comes upon me. Art thou any thing? Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil, That mak'st my blood cold, and my hair to stare? Speak to me what thou art!

GHOST. Thy evil spirit, Brutus.

BRUTUS. Why com'st thou?

GHOST. To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.

BRUTUS. Well; then I shall see thee again?

GHOST. Ay, at Philippi.

BRUTUS. Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then. Now I have taken heart, thou vanishest: Ill spirit, I would hold more talk with thee.

But it had already disappeared, only to meet Brutus again on the fatal day that followed.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 104: Ep., vii. 27.]

[Footnote 105: Plutarch, Dion, ii. 55.]

[Footnote 106: Dio Cassius, 55. 1. Cp. Suet., Claud., i.]

[Footnote 107: Lucian, Philops., 20.]

[Footnote 108: 68. 25.]

[Footnote 109: Ep., vii. 27. 12.]

[Footnote 110: Fragm., 84.]

[Footnote 111: Suet., Julius, 32.]

[Footnote 112: Julius Caesar, iv. 3.]

THE END

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