who was ill in bed. With him were a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean,
a Platonist, and a doctor, who began to tell stories so absurd and
abounding in such monstrous superstition that he ended by leaving them
in disgust. None of us have, of course, ever been present at similar
gatherings, where, after starting with the inevitable Glamis mystery,
everybody in the room has set to work to outdo his neighbour in
marvellous yarns, drawing on his imagination for additional material,
and, like Eucrates, being ready to stake the lives of his children on
his veracity.

Another scoffer was Democritus of Abdera, who was so firmly convinced of
the non-existence of ghosts that he took up his abode in a tomb and
lived there night and day for a long time. Classical ghosts seem to have
affected black rather than white as their favourite colour. Among the
features of the gruesome entertainments with which Domitian loved to
terrify his Senators were handsome boys, who appeared naked with their
bodies painted black, like ghosts, and performed a wild dance.[29] On
the following day one of them was generally sent as a present to each
Senator. Some boys in the neighbourhood wished to shake Democritus's
unbelief, so they dressed themselves in black with masks like skulls
upon their heads and danced round the tomb where he lived. But, to their
annoyance, he only put his head out and told them to go away and stop
playing the fool.

The Greek and Roman stories hardly come up to the standards required by
the Society for Psychical Research. They are purely popular, and the
ghost is regarded as the deceased person, permitted or condemned by the
powers of the lower world to hold communication with survivors on earth.
Naturally, they were never submitted to critical inquiry, and there is
no foreshadowing of any of the modern theories, that the phenomenon, if