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