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 the spot to be dug up. There they found bones commingled and intertwined with chains; for the body had mouldered away by long lying in the ground, leaving them bare, and corroded by the fetters. The bones were collected, and buried at the public expense; and after the ghost was thus duly laid the house was haunted no more.'

'This story,' Pliny adds, 'I believe upon the affirmation of others.' If, however, the story was 150 years old, it may have gone through a good many transmitters before it reached Pliny. Pliny then goes on to say that he knows one ghost-story at first-hand :

'I have,' he says, 'a freedman named Marcus, who has some tincture of letters. One night, his younger brother, who was sleeping in the same bed with him, saw, as he thought, somebody sitting on the couch, who put a pair of shears to his head, and actually cut off the hair from the very crown of it. When morning came, they found the boy's crown was shorn, and the hair lay scattered about on the floor. After a short interval a similar occurrence gave credit to the former. A slave-boy of mine was sleeping amidst several others in their quarters, when two persons clad in white came in (as he tells the story) through the windows, cut off his hair as he lay, and withdrew the same way they entered. Daylight

revealed that this boy too had been shorn, and that his hair was likewise spread about the room. Nothing remarkable followed-unless it were that I escaped prosecution; prosecuted I should have been, if Domitian (in whose reign these things happened) had lived longer.'

This story of the ghosts who shave the head of slaveboys is, so far as I know, the only ghost-story in classical literature which the writer tells us expressly that he gathered from the persons who professed to have had the experience at first-hand, and a very poor, unconvincing story it is. That the figures in white came in through the windows is a suspicious circumstance; it suggests that they were really something more solid than ghosts. I am afraid if such a story were submitted to the Psychical Research Society, they would think that the hypothesis of some one playing tricks was, on the face of it, more probable than that of supernatural agency.

On the other hand, the story of the haunted house at Athens conforms closely to the type of ghost-story which we hear still told to-day-the ghost of a murdered man which haunts a house and is ultimately laid when the corpse, or what remains of it, is discovered and decently buried. Probably it was the normal type of ghost-story in antiquity. You can see this by the ghost-stories which are professedly made up as fiction. In Lucian's satirical dialogue, entitled 'Philopseudes,' 'The Lover of Lies,' in which he represents a company of would-be grave philosophers telling each other a series of supernatural stories, one more outrageous than the last, there is a concocted story parodying this type of ghost-story, perhaps envisaging the story about Athenodorus in particular.

In the play of Plautus, 'Mostellaria,' 'The Haunted House,' a cock-and-bull ghost-story is made up by the slave Tranio to deter his master Theopropides from entering his house, when he comes back after a long time spent abroad. This, too, is evidently based on stories of the same type. And the ancient ghost-story is fairly parallel so far to those commonly current to-day. But in some of the ancient stories of apparitions which have been referred to, there is one noticeable difference from modern ones. In modern stories the apparitions are nearly always those of human beings, dead or at a

distance, whereas in antiquity the unseen world was thought to be tenanted by all sorts of vague powers who were not human at all. The tall woman, like one of the Eumenides, whom Dio saw in the veranda, was not, so far as we gather, the ghost of any dead woman, but one of these vague hostile powers. The figure which appeared to Brutus (or to Cassius of Parma) was again not the ghost of a man, but an evil genius. The figure which appeared to Curtius Rufus described itself, as we saw, in Pliny's version as Africa, the personified spirit of the province. That is quite unlike modern stories; we never heard of anybody who professed to have seen Britannia. Of course, in mediæval stories, appearances of angels and devils are common, and occasionally even in modern times stories go about of such appearances. Fairies have been photographed! But for the great mass of people to-day who believe in manifestations from the other world, such manifestations are thought of exclusively as those of the spirits of men and women who have lived in this world. Even in antiquity, malignant demons may be the spirits of bad men. That, as we saw, was Plutarch's view. The spirits of bad men tried to hinder the living in the path of virtue out of envy.

It is odd that stories of the appearances of living men and women at a distance, upon which the modern theory of telepathy is built up, are so rare in antiquity. There are, of course, stories of people seeing their absent friends in dreams, and the ancients may have classed telepathic appearances of the living under the category of dreams, though in modern accounts they are definitely distinguished from dreams, as occurring to people when they have, in other respects, an ordinary waking consciousness. There is one story in Cicero which looks like telepathy, but as Cicero does not tell us his authority for it, or when it occurred, we cannot build much on it. Two friends, Arcadians, on a journey came to Megara. One of them took up his abode for the night in a private house, the other one went to an inn. In the night the one in the private house suddenly heard his friend calling him. He thought it was a dream, and turned over again to sleep. Presently he saw the figure of his friend-in a dream,' Cicero says. The figure spoke to

him, and said, 'Though, when I was alive and called to you, you would not come and save me, do not at any rate leave my death unavenged.' The friend went on to say that he had been murdered by the innkeeper, and that his body had been put on a cart covered over with manure, to be taken in the morning out of the city. He asked his living friend to go early and watch at the city-gate for the cart. The living friend went accordingly, and when a cart full of manure came out of the gate, he demanded of the slave who drove it what he had there. The man fled in terror, the corpse was discovered, and the innkeeper brought to justice ('De Divin.' I, § 57).

So far we have been considering only stories in which the apparition occurs spontaneously, but, of course, in antiquity, as to-day, the living often took the initiative in attempts to bring back the dead into communication with themselves. All through the ancient world people resorted to necromancy-the idea and the practice was not confined to any nation or any age. In the Old Testament you have the story of the witch of Endor calling up the spirit of Samuel, and Isaiah rebukes his contemporaries because they resorted to wizards 'who peep and mutter,' that is, probably, speak in a state of trance in a strange thin voice, not their own, understood to be a voice from the other world. On behalf of the living.' Isaiah asks indignantly, 'should men seek unto the dead?'

Amongst the Greeks you find the idea of calling up the spirits of the dead as early as Homer, and you find necromancy rife in the last decadence of Greek civilisation. But there is a great difference in the mode by which communication with the dead was sought in antiquity, and the mode by which it is sought to-day. In the practice of modern spiritualists the method is a corporate effort, a séance, in which many people combine with the medium to 'generate power'-I think the phrase is-and the spirit is supposed to communicate by signs, such as table-rapping or automatic writing-only in exceptional cases, as spiritualists call it, materialising.' So far as I know, you hear nothing about séances or table-rapping in ancient times. The spirit was called up by a magician or a witch, acting as

an individual, in virtue of certain rites and ceremonies which had magical power, rites and ceremonies often pretty horrible; the spirit did not communicate by signs, but appeared and spoke, if the magic was successful. Sometimes the professional necromancers were attached to a particular shrine, to which people would come to receive oracles from the dead. If you wanted to communicate with the dead, that is to say, you did not ask your friends to sit with you round a table, but you went to the professional wizard or witch and let him or her do it all for you. If you knew the way, and the proper rites and formulas, you might perhaps do it for yourself.

In the earliest description we have of calling up the spirits of the dead in Greek literature, the 11th book of the 'Odyssey,' Odysseus, instructed by the witch Circe, does it for himself. Apparently in the earliest stratum of the story, as we have it in that book, Odysseus does not go to the world of the dead. He is made to do so in the later interpolations in the story, and according to the conversation between himself and Circe in the previous book, which is accommodated to the later idea of his journey. In the original story he sails across the Ocean to the land and city of the Cimmerians, a people of flesh and blood, though, since they live at the extremities of the inhabited earth in a land of perpetual mist and night, it may naturally be easier to establish communications there between this world and the realm of the dead. On the shores of the Ocean, that is to say, still in this living world, Odysseus performs the acts which will have power to bring up the spirits of the dead to him in visible shape from the house of Hades. He digs a small trench, pours libations to the dead of honey and wine and water, sprinkles white meal, prays to the dead, promising future offerings if they will appear, and cuts the throats of the sheep to be sacrificed, so that their blood gushes into the little trench and fills it. And then the shadowy hosts of the dead appear, drawn eagerly to the hot blood. But they are only phantoms without intelligence till they have drunk the blood. Then for a moment they recover the mind they had as living men and converse with the living man.

The great motive which led men to resort to necromancy was not the common motive in modern times,