Whereas katabasis involved the living visiting the dead and necromancy forced the dead to come to you, hauntings were (and are) cases of the dead visiting the living of their own accord rather than being summoned by the living through magical means. The dead may return for benign reasons, such as to warn the living of danger, to prophesy, or to comfort the living. In Greek literature and folk-belief, however, most of the dead who return do so for less altruistic reasons. The Greeks and Romans identified three main types of dead whose restless spirits might haunt the living: the aoroi, those who had died before their time and whose spirits had to wander until the span of their natural lives was completed; the biaiothanatoi, those who had died violently; and the ataphoi, the unburied. These categories were not mutually exclusive; a person could certainly be murdered and left unburied. The biaiothanatoi and the ataphoi were considered particularly dangerous and malevolent (Rohde 1925:594-5), and the Greeks had many tales of the vengeful dead.
Plutarch, for example, records a story ‘‘told by many people’’ about how the Spartan Pausanias was haunted by the ghost of a girl named Cleonice, who was from a distinguished family. Pausanias lusted after her, and her parents, fearing to displease him, abandoned her to him. He summoned her to his bedroom, but as she approached the bed she tripped in the dark and Pausanias, startled by the noise and mistaking her for an assassin, stabbed her to death. Her phantom then kept appearing to him in his sleep, accusing him of murder. As the harassment showed no signs of abatement, the exhausted Pausanias went the oracle of the dead at Heracleia Pontica and summoned the spirit of Cleonice, beseeching her to give up her anger against him. She cryptically replied that his troubles would soon end when he came to Sparta, a reply that hinted at his impending death (Cimon 6.4-6). Pausanias was soon after starved to death by the Spartans for allegedly stirring up a helot revolt, and so his spirit, too, was restless and seems to have brought down a curse upon the Spartans, who had to appease him with the offering of two bronze statues (Fontenrose 1978:129-30; Faraone 1991b:184-7).
But from the earliest Greek literature down through Roman times lack of burial was the main motivation in antiquity for the disembodied dead to haunt the living. An unburied body was no longer among the living but had also not yet crossed into Hades, and was caught in a liminal state of unrest. A proper burial usually solved the problem. For example, the ghost of Patroclus, appearing to Achilles in a dream, states that once Achilles holds a funeral for him, he will no longer return from the dead: ‘‘For I will not come again out of Hades, when you have granted me the right of funeral fire’’ (Iliad 23.75-6). At Odyssey 11.52 the ghost of Odysseus’ shipmate Elpenor, who has died unnoticed in a drunken fall from Circe’s roof, meets Odysseus just outside of Hades and complains that he cannot enter until his body is buried; when Odysseus returns to Circe’s island, one of the first things he does is give Elpenor a proper burial.
Moreover, it was not enough simply to be buried: the burial must have been performed according to certain rituals desired by the deceased or his soul could not rest. For example, after Achilles was shot by Paris, he was cremated and his ashes mixed in an urn with those of Patroclus. Achilles’ spirit was still not at rest, however, and when the victorious Greeks were preparing to sail home from Troy his ghost appeared to them and would not let them leave, because they were departing without leaving any offering on his tomb. His ghost then demanded the sacrifice of King Priam’s daughter Polyxena, and when the Greeks cut her throat over Achilles’ tomb, saturating it with her blood, his ghost was appeased (Euripides, Troades 622-33; Hecabe 35-582; see also Hughes 1991:60-5).
A story about a haunted house at Athens was circulating in the time of the Roman author Pliny the Younger, who wrote it down in a letter to his friend Sura in AD 102. This is probably the most famous ghost story from antiquity. Its opening is quite effective and, if it were not set in Athens, could easily be set in any town in any era:
In Athens there was a large and roomy house, but it had a bad reputation and an unhealthy air. Through the silence of the night you could hear the sound of metal clashing and, if you listened more closely, you could make out the clanking of chains, first from far off, then from close by. Soon there appeared a phantom, an old man, emaciated and filthy, with a long beard and unkempt hair. He wore shackles on his legs and chains on his wrists, shaking them as he walked. And so the inhabitants of this house spent many dreadful nights lying awake in fear. Illness and eventually death overtook them through lack of sleep and their increasing dread. For even when the ghost was absent, the memory of that horrible apparition preyed on their minds, and their fear itself lasted longer than the initial cause of that fear. Eventually the house was deserted and condemned to solitude, left entirely to the ghost. But the house was advertised, in case someone unaware of the evil should wish to buy or rent it. (Pliny the Younger, Letters 7.27.5-6)
Finally, a philosopher named Athenodorus rents the house and bravely faces the ghost. The ghost beckons to him and he follows it into the courtyard, where the ghost vanishes. When the townspeople dig up the courtyard on Athenodorus’ advice, they find a skeleton entwined with chains. After they give the bones a proper burial, the hauntings cease. This story has many characteristics of an urban legend: it has a real setting, Athens; it takes place in the recent past; and the story is told by a person of some education, i. e. Pliny, who says only that he will tell the story as he heard it, but does not name his source (7.27.4). In this version, someone has been killed on the property and buried secretively, without proper rites. The spirit of the deceased haunts the place until the mortal remains are found and buried according to ritual (Felton 1999:65-73).
Some spirits, however, angry at the lack of funeral ceremony in their honor, take vengeance against the living rather than requesting belated rites. Pausanias tells of a ghost in the town of Temesa who, furious at the lack of a funeral, actually started killing people and had to be appeased. Odysseus is forced ashore at Temesa in southern Italy by a storm, where one of his sailors gets drunk and rapes a local girl. The people of Temesa take vengeance by stoning him to death. Odysseus either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care (the story of Elpenor does suggest a lack of attention on Odysseus’ part as to the fate of his individual crewmen), and sails away without burying the dead man, whose ghost then begins killing the inhabitants of Temesa. They consult the Delphic oracle, who tells them the ghost could be propitiated by dedicating a sanctuary to him and by annually sacrificing a maiden to him. These sacrifices end when the famous boxer Euthymus comes to town. Euthymus falls in love with that year’s sacrificial maiden, who promises to marry him if he saves her, so Euthymus waits for the ghost and wins a physical fight with him. The ghost disappears, and Euthymus marries the girl (Odyssey 6.6.7-11; also Strabo C255). This ghost evidently has a corporeal component; the story suggests that it is a reanimated corpse, or revenant, since it has the ability to cause physical harm to the living rather than simply haunting them as a spectral appearance.
These myths and local legends involve the ghosts of heroes, and the haunting of Temesa in particular has many folkloric analogs such as the story of Perseus and Andromeda. But many towns around Greece had their own local legends of haunted sites, reflecting popular beliefs in restless spirits. Places where men were killed were often expected to be haunted. Pausanias reported that on the plain of Marathon the sounds of men fighting could be heard at night, as if the battle were still being fought (1.32.4). A spirit known as Taraxippus, or ‘‘Horse-Troubling,’’ haunted the racetrack at Olympia, frightening the horses at a certain turn, and another Taraxippus haunted the racetrack at Corinth. The latter was said to be the soul of Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, who had been devoured by his own horses who went mad after losing a chariot race (Pausanias 6.20.19). Whose spirit haunted the horses at Olympia, though, was a source of disagreement. Another haunted site is described by Plutarch, who says that in his native city of Chaeronea in Boeotia a criminal named Damon had been murdered in the public bath, and that even down to Plutarch’s own time apparitions appeared at the place and ghostly groanings were heard emanating from the spot, causing the baths to be walled up (Cimon 1.6). As with many sites that garnered a bad reputation from crimes committed there, the place was abandoned. Neither Pausanias’ nor Plutarch’s stories give any indication that purification rituals were performed or offerings given in an attempt to placate the spirits. Rather, the ghosts continued to haunt these places.
It is clear from accounts in myth and folklore that in Greek religion the single most important factor connected to the appearance of ghosts is a death without the proper ceremonies. We need not look far for explanations of the emphasis placed on burial in ancient Greece and other societies around the world, including our own. Burial ceremonies help the living sever emotional ties with the recently deceased, and the rite of passage involved in death, burial, and the rituals accompanying it brings a sense of finality for the living. The rituals also provide a way to symbolically join the dead person to all those who have gone to the afterlife before; in other words, the rituals provide a transition for both the living and the dead. The separation of living and dead remains paramount, its importance emphasized by the development of extramural burial. Attempts by the living to interact with the dead, and by the dead to interact with the living, are momentary and ephemeral, as reflected in various Greek myths and legends. Stories of katabasis, necromancy, and hauntings all illustrate problems with disturbing the boundary between life and death. Heracles brings Cerberus up to the land of the living, but the creature has no place in that realm, so Heracles returns it to Hades. Theseus descends to Hades, but barely returns to earth - without Peirithous. Orpheus tries to bring Eurydice back to life, but fails. Odysseus, after the dead gather to drink the blood sacrifice, tries to embrace his mother’s ghost, but cannot. Restless spirits must be dealt with by proper rituals or by abandonment of the haunted property. Although the Greeks’ beliefs about survival after death varied, their beliefs about the necessity of keeping the living and the dead separate were surprisingly consistent.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
For the ancient conceptualization of death and the underworld in general Rohde 1925 remains indispensable; see also Vermeule 1979, Hopkins 1983 and Richardson 1985. For Greek burial customs and festivals see Kurtz and Boardman 1971, Parke 1977, and Garland 2001. For the underworld gods and other underworld personnel, see Burkert 1985 and Garland 2001. For katabasis see Clark 1979. For restless spirits and the trouble they could cause, see Luck 1985, Faraone 1991b, and Johnston 1999a. For human sacrifice to appease spirits, see Hughes 1991. For necromancy see Ogden 2001. For ancient ghost stories, with particular attention to their comparative and folkloric context, see Felton 1999.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I thank David M. Johnson for his comments on and criticisms of this chapter.
World History
