DISCOVERY 



51 



of attaining bliss after death through purification. 

 They preached, in fact, a gospel of " salvation'' and 

 were the first proselytisers in the Greek world. 



Orphic doctrines, with their insistence upon the 

 reality of individual survival after death, not only 

 influenced the wise, but also coloured the popular 

 view. A minor but conclusive proof is supplied bv 

 popular vocabulary. In the fifth century B.C., as 

 in modern Greece, the polite equivalent for " the late 

 lamented" is " the blessed one," and " Go to Blessed- 

 ness " is a form of objurgation to be found in the 

 comedies of Aristophanes. Perhaps connected with 

 Orphic theories of purification is the Platonic account 

 (early in the fourth century B.C.) of the apparition of 

 ghosts among tombs. In the Phaedo Plato explains 

 that death is a liberation of the soul from the body, 

 but that earthy natures are not easily and immedi- 

 ately purified sufficiently to obtain complete release. 

 Its impurities in such cases weigh down the soul to 

 earth and also cause it to be visible.' 



Classical Ghosts 



In drafting his legislation in the Laws Plato takes 

 into account another popular belief, that the ghosts 

 of those who had suffered a violent death continued 

 to walk and were dangerous and vengeful. This 

 belief probably has its roots in the primitive convic- 

 tion that unexpiated murder, or the failure to carry 

 out funeral ceremonies, brought spiritual danger to 

 the community of which the dead man had been a 

 member. It is doubtful whether this danger was 

 originally personified as the ghost of the dead man. 

 I am inclined to think not, and I know of no satis- 

 factory evidence for the existence of the vengeful 

 ghost in Homer.- But certainly before the time of 

 .-Eschylus it was. currently believed that the ghost 

 of a murdered man demanded vengeance, and that 

 until it was satisfied it was likely to attack with 

 peculiar violence those near relations upon whom fell 

 primarily the duty of seeing that vengeance was 

 exacted. An extension of this line of thought leads 

 to the belief that the ghost of a man secretly done to 

 death is likely to haunt the place of the crime. This 



' The English reader may care to be reminded of Milton's 

 splendid version of this belief (in his Comus. 1. 470), which 

 ends with the lines : 



" Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp, 

 Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres. 

 Lingering and sitting by a new made grave 

 .\s loth to leave the body that it loved." 



—Ed.] 



^ The threats of Hector (Iliad, xxii. 358) and Elpenor (Odyssey, 

 xi. 73) are not of haunting by vengeful ghosts, but of the anger 

 of the gods. Some scholars have held that the Erinyes, the 

 Furies, were originally vengeful ghosts. Others more probably 

 regard them as personifications of the power of the curse. 



forms the motive of the most common and least 

 interesting type of ghost story, an example of which 

 is to be found in the letters of the Younger Pliny 

 (about the end of the first century a.d.). The ghost 

 of an old man with clanking chains rendered a 

 house in Athens uninhabitable until the philosopher 

 .\thenagoras undertook a piece of psychical research. 

 The ghost duly appeared, the philosopher followed 

 its beckoning, and marked the place in the court- 

 yard where it suddenlv vanished. Digging operations 

 ne.xt dav brought to light a skeleton bound with chains ; 

 this was given proper burial and the ghost walked no 

 more. 



A curious vengeful ghost story is mentioned by 

 several classical authors in connection with a celebrated 

 Italian bo.xer Euthymus, who won his first victory 

 at the Olympic Games in 484 B.C. In the course of 

 his wanderings (seven centuries earlier, according to 

 the traditional dating for the fall of Troy) Odysseus 

 had put in at Temesa, where a tipsy sailor ravished a 

 maiden, and was consequently stoned bv the natives. 

 The ghost of the sailor then began to kill the people 

 of Temesa, until an oracle advised them to appease 

 him by building him a shrine and offering him every 

 year a most beautiful maiden to wife. On his way 

 home from the Olympic Games Euthymus arrived 

 at Temesa when one of these ceremonies was about 

 to take place, fell in love with the girl, fought the 

 ghost for her, and drove it into the sea. Euthymus 

 himself, like many athletes, was worshipped as a hero 

 after his death. Pausanias (in the second century .\.D.) 

 tells us that he had seen a copy of an old painting of 

 the story. " The ghost was of a horrid black colour, 

 and his whole appearance was most dreadful and he • 

 wore a wolfskin." Classical ghosts, indeed, were 

 usually black, not white. Thus the boys who un- 

 successfully tried to play a practical joke upon the 

 sceptic Democritus dressed themselves in black with 

 death's-head masks, and the ghost- dances of the 

 Emperor Domitian {\.D. 81- 96) were performed b}- 

 boys with bodies painted black. 



An allusion in Aristophanes shows that in the fifth 

 century B.C. the possibility of meeting a ghost was 

 regarded w-ith terror ; and the superstition that it 

 was well to keep silence when passing a tomb for fear 

 of attracting the hostile attention of the spirit of the 

 dead man is first mentioned by Myrtilus, a comic 

 poet of the generation before Aristophanes, but it is 

 repeated by Menander in the fourth century B.C. 

 and by Strabo in the reign of Augustus (31 B.C.- a.ti. 14). 



That popular opinion as to the location of the 

 spirit after death showed inconsistency is hardly 

 matter for surprise. The ghost, as we have seen, is 

 sometimes thought to be resident at the tomb, but it 

 was also thought that it went at death to the realm 



