time.

I will include here a couple of stories which, if they cannot exactly be
classed as stories of warning apparitions, are interesting in
themselves, and may at least be considered as ghost stories. Pliny the
Younger[109] tells us how a slave of his, named Marcus, imagined that he
saw someone cutting his hair during the night. When he awoke, the vision
proved to have been a true one, for his hair lay all round him. Soon
afterwards the same thing happened again. His brother, who slept with
him, saw nothing; but Marcus declared that two people came in by the
windows, dressed in white, and, after cutting his hair, disappeared.
"Nothing astonishing happened," adds Pliny, "except that I was not
prosecuted, as I undoubtedly should have been, had Domitian lived; for
this happened during his principate. Perhaps the cutting of my slave's
hair was a sign of my approaching doom, for accused people cut their
hair," as a sign of mourning. One may be allowed to wonder whether,
after all, a fondness for practical joking is not even older than the
age of the younger Pliny.

This story, like nearly every other that we have come across, has a
parallel in the _Philopseudus_. Indeed, Lucian seems to have covered
almost the whole field of the marvellous, as understood at that time, in
his determination to turn it into ridicule in that amusing dialogue. In
this case we are told of a little statue of Æsculapius, which stood in
the house of the narrator of the story, and at the feet of which a
number of pence had been placed as offerings, while other coins, some of
them silver, were fastened to the thighs with wax. There were also
silver plates which had been vowed or offered by those who had been
cured of fever by the god. The offerings and tablets are just such as
might be found in a Catholic church in the South of Europe to-day; but