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Reviewed by:
  • Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity, and: Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and Dead in Ancient Greece
  • Adrienne Mayor
Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity. By D. Felton. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Pp. xvii + 148, introductions, notes, bibliography, indexes.)
Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and Dead in Ancient Greece. By Sarah Iles Johnston. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xxi + 329 , prologue, notes, bibliography, indexes.)

The appearance of two books on ghosts, hauntings, and other visitations from beyond the grave in classical antiquity is a happy event for folklorists. Much has been written on ancient perceptions of death, the soul, and the afterlife, but the details of ghostly manifestations and the "rules" governing the relationships between the living and dead in Greece and Rome have not received critical analysis. As Sarah Johnston notes in Restless Dead, "Greek literature abounds with incidents in which the living and the dead interact" (p. ix), and yet, as D. Felton remarks in Haunted Greece and Rome, despite the popularity of such tales in antiquity, "little has been written about ghosts as folkloric or literary figures" in the ancient world (pp. xi-xii). Fortuitously for folklorists, there is scarcely any overlap between these two engaging books, and together they provide a remarkably nuanced picture of everyday dealings with the world of the dead in antiquity. And both authors succeed admirably in making their interdisciplinary studies accessible to nonclassicists.

Felton is a classicist equally at home with folkloristic and literary approaches to the development of oral ghostlore in ancient (and modern) adaptations in literature. Noting that folklorists tend to read literature for individual motifs without noticing how the folkloric elements contribute to the literary value of the full story (a tendency noted by Alan Dundes in The Study of Folklore [Prentice Hall, 1965]), Felton goes far beyond motif hunting to explore the wider meanings of ghost stories for their Greek and Roman audiences, and for their modern inheritors.

Haunted Greece and Rome begins by surveying the various folk beliefs, legends, and anecdotes about the dead, with vivid examples of a variety of oral hauntinglore preserved in ancient writings. Felton identifies the many archaic beliefs that still have resonance today, such as the insubstantial, filmy appearance of ghosts; their favorite haunts (crossroads, abandoned [End Page 110] buildings) and times of day (midnight and midday); their disappearance at dawn; and the idea that animals can detect their presence. The ghosts' motivations for imposing on the living are eminently familiar: revenge drives ghosts of those who met a violent or untimely demise; others seek proper burial; some warn or comfort the living; and still others simply reenact their former daily pursuits. Felton's thoughtful discussions of the emotional and psychological reasons for recurrent themes in ghostlore are valuable. As today, the threads of humor in terror stories about unhappy spirits serve as ways to defuse fears of death (notably, humor is not missing from either Felton's or Johnston's prose). Particularly valuable is Felton's use of modern paranormal literature (e.g., E. R. Dodds and G. H. M. Tyrrell) to illuminate the tension between philosophical or scientific skepticism about the nature of supernatural phenomena and popular superstition in antiquity.

In chapter 2, Felton classifies classical ghosts into types for analysis: Revenants are embodied phantoms who interact in the real world; two examples are the ghost of a slain sailor from Odysseus's crew who returned to kill randomly and the phantom of a young woman who returned to spend the night with a guest in her parents' home. Crisis apparitions appear to friends and family around the time of death, sometimes to reveal their murderers. Warning or prophesying apparitions are active during military or political crises; one example is the giant trumpeter who led Julius Caesar's army across the Rubicon. Poltergeist activity was recorded in antiquity, too: the rustic childhood home of the Emperor Augustus was plagued by mysterious forces that hurled people out of bed. Continual apparitions fall into two classes: some record and replay past events, such as the ghostly armies reported over centuries at the Marathon battlefield; and others are...

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