luck, without revealing themselves to sight or hearing or touch, I suppose we can hardly call them ghosts. The Thasians, for instance, at one time were told by the Delphic oracle that their bad harvests were due to the wrath of the dead athlete Theagenes, whose statue they had dishonoured. At Anagyrus in Attica, one is told in the Lexicon of Suidas, a man cut down the grove of the local hero, with the result that his wife first died, that then, when he married again, his second wife became possessed by a passion for his son, and falsely accused him to his father, that he then blinded his son, and marooned him on a lonely island, and finally hanged himself; the stepmother committed suicide by throwing herself into a well. No doubt the idea of such activity, beneficent or maleficent, on the part of dead men was common, and must have clung to innumerable burialplaces over the Greek country-side. Especially the spirits of men who had been murdered were felt as a dreadful unseen presence in the neighbourhood of their graves. Plato in the 'Laws' (IX, 865, Jowett's translation) speaks of

'a tale of olden time which is to this effect: He who has suffered a violent end, when newly dead, if he has had the soul of a free man in life, is angry with the author of his death; and being himself full of fear and panic by reason of his violent end, when he sees his murderer walking about in his own accustomed haunts, he is stricken with terror and becomes disordered, and this disorder of his, aided by the guilty recollection of the other, is communicated by him with overwhelming force to the murderer and his deeds.'

There is, however, here no suggestion of an actual appearance of the troubled spirit. But in some of the stories we do hear of the appearance of a hero. Sometimes it is a beneficent hero. At the battle of Marathon, says a legend recorded in Plutarch, not a few of the fighters believed that they saw in front of them the apparition (paoua) of Theseus, clad all in armour, charging upon the barbarians.' And there is the other Marathon legend recorded by Pausanias. It befell that in the battle there was present a man of rustic aspect and dress, who slaughtered many of the barbarians with a plough, and vanished after the fight. When the Athenians inquired of the god, the only answer he vouchsafed was to bid Vol. 246.-No. 487.

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them honour the hero Echetlæus.' The story was told on the spot to Pausanias in the second century A.D. some 600 years after the event, but an old painting of the fifth century B.C. showed the figure of the hero Echetlus or Echetlæus in the Greek ranks. Browning, it may be remembered, has taken the story as the subject of a poem. At Salamis the Greeks called upon the spirits of the ancient heroes, Ajax and Telamon, before the battle to be present, and there were those who believed that they saw them-'phantoms of armed men stretching their hands out from Ægina to protect the Greek ships.' At the battle of Leuctra people thought they saw-or so it was afterwards said—the ghost of Aristomenes fighting on the Theban side. Long afterwards when the Spaniards were fighting against the Mexicans they believed they saw St James at their head charging on his white horse against the heathen. As lately as 1914 one of the strange stories going about in the first month of the Great War, was that some of the British soldiers, worn out and almost delirious in the terrible retreat from Mons, thought they saw the soldiers of Marlborough marching alongside of them in the old uniforms near the places where they had fought and fallen 200 years ago. Probably such stories do go back to actual experiences some men have in the abnormal excitement and strain of war.

Sometimes the ghost is maleficent. At Orchomenos there was a legend that the spirit of Acteon had once gone about' with a stone in its hand,' ravaging the land, and it was only laid when the Orchomenians made an image of it in bronze and clamped it firmly to a rock. We have on a coin a reproduction of this portrait of a ghost. It is disappointing to learn from Sir James Frazer (in his note on Pausanias) that it looks just like an ordinary human being.' Pausanias, however, describes for us a more satisfactory portrait of a ghost. This one was horrid in appearance, black, and dressed in a wolf's skin. The ghost in question had haunted Temesa in South Italy, and made itself so obnoxious that the people of Temesa began seriously to think of emigrating from Italy altogether. However, the Delphic oracle explained to them that it was the ghost of a stranger whom the people of the land had put to death long before, and that he would be quite quiet, if they built him a temple and

devoted to him annually the fairest maiden of the land. And so they did, year by year, till the 77th Olympiad (from 472 to 469 B.C.) when the great boxer Euthymus came that way. Euthymus put on armour and fought the ghost, so successfully that the ghost ran down to the sea, jumped in, and vanished for ever. It was after that that the portrait of the ghost was painted which Pausanias saw.

All these stories, however, are only legends, picked up by antiquaries like Pausanias from the mouths of the people many generations after the events were supposed to have occurred. Can we connect ghoststories with any of the persons we know of in antiquity as substantial historical persons, of whose lives there is a record going back to contemporary documents? Plutarch, who was a believer in ghosts, thinks he can bring two instances to confute unbelievers.

'A kind of talk,' he writes, 'goes on amongst those who deny the reality of such things to the effect that no sensible person would see the apparition of a supernatural being or a ghost. It is only, they say, children and foolish women and people disordered by weakness, who in some distraction of their minds or some unhealthy bodily condition get all kinds of baseless uncanny ideas. The evil spirit, we are told, is in themselves, and its name is Superstition. But if two men like Dio and Brutus, men of grave character, philosophers, not easily upset or dominated by any feeling or emotion, were so affected by seeing a ghost as to narrate their experience to others, I do not see how we can avoid accepting the strange theory of men of long ago, namely that the spirits which are evil and jealous envy good men and put obstacles in the way of their activity, inducing trouble of mind and fear, shaking and unsteadying virtue, in order that they may not walk in the right way, without stumbling or sin, and so attain after death to a happier lot than their own' ('Life of Dio,' 2).

That is Plutarch's theory of malignant ghosts. But what were the experiences of Dio and of Brutus to which Plutarch refers? Perhaps it is hardly necessary to retell the stories, since one is embodied in a well-known poem of Wordsworth's and the other is in Shakespeare. Yet there may be some who have never cared to see how they are told in the original text.

As for Dio, we are told that a little while before his

assassination in the year 354 B.C., he was sitting one day in the evening dusk in a veranda of his house, alone and sunk in thought, when he suddenly heard an odd noise at the other end of the colonnade. He looked up in the direction and saw (for there was still enough light) a woman extraordinarily tall, just like one of the Eumenides, as they are described in the tragedies. She had something like a broom in her hand, and with this she was sweeping, sweeping. Dio experienced a sensation of horrible fear and called his friends. They remained with him the whole night in case the apparition should return. But nothing more was seen. Only the catastrophe of Dio's life soon followed.

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The story about Brutus is that very late one night, just before he took his army across from Asia Minor to Macedonia, where the final battles were fought near Philippi, he was awake in his tent, meditating. The tent was dimly lit. All around the camp was still. Suddenly he thought he heard some one come into the tent. He glanced up towards the entrance and saw a strange and frightful figure standing there close to him without speaking. Brutus had the courage to address it and say, Who on earth are you, man or god, and what do you want?' And the apparition answered, 'I am thy evil genius, Brutus, and thou shalt see me at Philippi.' 'Very well,' Brutus said quietly, I shall see you then.' The apparition vanished, and Brutus called in his slaves. They all said that they had heard nothing and seen nothing. According to some accounts which Plutarch had before him, the apparition did recur at Philippi; but Plutarch himself is sceptical about this second appearance. He points out that a philosophic companion of Brutus, who was with him at the time and wrote an account of the campaign, records other omens, but says not a word about the second apparition.*

Of course, the stories of Dio and Brutus are of a very different character from the popular legends we were considering just now. The account in Plutarch is drawn from the writings of contemporaries who had

* One may notice that the story is changed in one important particular in Shakespeare. Shakespeare makes the apparition the ghost of Julius Cæsar. There is nothing to this effect in Plutarch. It was some nameless evil power hostile to Brutus.

known Dio and Brutus personally, and Plutarch says that they professed to give the odd experience as it had been told by the two men themselves. It seems quite possible that both Dio in the veranda and Brutus in his tent did have the impression of seeing something uncanny. There is one circumstance, though, about the Brutus story, which makes it more doubtful than it would otherwise be. This is that what is practically the same story is told by Valerius Maximus about a man called Cassius, not Cassius the celebrated fellow-conspirator of Brutus, but an obscurer man, Cassius of Parma, before the battle of Actium. Brutus is a much more important historical figure than this Cassius, and one knows that famous characters have a way of attracting to themselves popular stories that are floating about. It is more likely that a story originally told about Cassius of Parma should get attached to Brutus than the other way round. In any case the stories could be perfectly well explained by sceptics as nightmares coming to men on the verge of sleep, or hallucinations due to nervous overstrain in days of fearful crisis. And our account, even if based on what Dio and Brutus told their friends, is not, as it reaches us, first-hand. We do not know how much it has been embroidered in transmission. Have we from classical antiquity any firsthand account of seeing a ghost? I do not know that we have. Plutarch mentions the case of a haunted building in his own city of Charonea, where in his own day-so he tells us-uncanny things were seen and heard by people living in the neighbourhood. The building in question was an old vapour-bath-house. About two

centuries before, in the days of Lucius Lucullus, a man called Damon, who had been carrying on brigandage in the country round, had been decoyed into the city and then murdered whilst he was in the bath-house. After this apparitions were seen in the place, and noises heard, as of a soul in pain. Plutarch had heard the stories from people of the older generation in Charonea-and in consequence the door of the building had been walled up, but the haunting, as we have seen, went on. This is very nearly first-hand, because in a little place like Chæronea, Plutarch himself must in all probability have talked to the people who said that they had seen or