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: Ælian, _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: errhô]]
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 Æsculapius, 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 Æsculapius, 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.
Ælian[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 Piræus 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. Ælian 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 Cæsar and
murdered by the crowd. He dreamt, on the night before he met his death,
that Cæsar 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 Cæsar
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 Cæsar 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. Cæsar 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 Cæsar'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 Cæsar_, iv. 3.]
THE END
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