dead, and with being in the habit of sacrificing the entrails of boys to
the Manes. Tacitus mentions a young man trying to raise the dead by
means of incantations,[68] while Pliny[69] speaks of necromancy as a
recognized branch of magic, and Origen classes it among the crimes of
the magicians in his own day.

After murdering his mother, Nero often declared that he was troubled by
her spirit and by the lashes and blazing torches of the Furies.[70] One
would imagine that the similarity of his crime and his punishment to
those of Orestes would have been singularly gratifying to a man of
Nero's theatrical temperament; yet we are informed that he often tried
to call up her ghost and lay it with the help of magic rites. Nero,
however, took particular pleasure in raising the spirits of the dead,
according to the Elder Pliny,[71] who adds that not even the charms of
his own singing and acting had greater attractions for him.

Caracalla, besides his bodily illnesses, was obviously insane and often
troubled with delusions, imagining that he was being driven out by his
father and also by his brother Geta, whom he had murdered in his
mother's arms, and that they pursued him with drawn swords in their
hands. At last, as a desperate resource, he endeavoured to find a cure
by means of necromancy, and called up, among others, the shade of his
father, Septimius Severus, as well as that of Commodus. But they all
refused to speak to him, with the exception of Commodus; and it was even
rumoured that the shade of Severus was accompanied by that of the
murdered Geta, though it had not been evoked by Caracalla. Nor had
Commodus any comfort for him. He only terrified the suffering Emperor
the more by his ominous words.[72]

Philostratus[73] has described for us a famous interview which