Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity

by D. Felton

Stories of ghostly spirits who return to this world to warn of danger, to prophesy, to take revenge, to request proper burial, or to comfort the living fascinated people in ancient times just as they do today. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, the author combines a modern folkloric perspective with literary analysis of ghost stories from classical antiquity to shed new light on the stories' folk roots. The author begins by examining ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about death and the departed and the various kinds of ghost stories which arose from these beliefs. She then focuses on the longer stories of Plautus, Pliny, and Lucian, which concern haunted houses. Her analysis illuminates the oral and literary transmission and adaptation of folkloric motifs and the development of the ghost story as a literary form. In her concluding chapter, the author also traces the influence of ancient ghost stories on modern ghost story writers, a topic that will interest all readers and scholars of tales of hauntings.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Horror, Ghosts, Folklore, Paranormal, Literary Criticism

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Debbie Felton has degrees in English from UCLA (B.A. 1986) and in Classics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A. 1990, Ph.D. 1995). She has taught at UMass since 1999. Her main research interest is folklore in classical literature, with particular attention to the supernatural and the monstrous. She is Editor of the journal Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural (Penn State Press) and has served as Associate Review Editor for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts for many years.

Professor Felton's first book, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (UT Press, 1999), examined the oral and literary transmission of ancient folklore about ghosts as well as analyzing the development of the ghost story as a literary form. Her forthcoming book, Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers of Classical Myth and History, examines the likelihood that stories of familiar monsters as well as of certain human characters from ancient literature were based on an understanding of real-life serial mutilation murders.

Reviews

[Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating treatise on the role of ghost stories, specifically haunted houses, in the literature and culture of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and how such lore affected later Western concepts of ghosts and hauntings. Felton delves into classical literature to explore how these elements originated. Focusing on the specific examples of stories surviving from the works of three classical authors, Plautus, Pliny, and Lucian. Each of their tales includes tropes that remain familiar to the modern reader, including rattling chains, secret murders, and even an element of the tongue in cheek. I loved learning about ancient Roman idioms as a student of Latin, so I found the discussion of the numerous synonyms and names for ghosts, spirits, hauntings, and other spooky things to be particularly interesting. All in all, Felton's study is extremely informative on the history of the ghost story, and her evocative writing makes even the driest topic of folklore shine.

[Doria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an intriguing and well-organized book, surprisingly succinct and very informative on the subject of Greek and Roman antecedents for many well-known and (now) venerable Western European and American ghost story themes and motifs. I was interested to find how many famous tropes in this genre are almost certainly directly derived from ancient Greek and Latin sources, many of which were probably known to and disseminated by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as later post-Enlightenment novelists, including Dickens and Wilde (who was a gifted Classics scholar long before he wrote fiction).

All in all, a relatively quick and easy read, covering some very entertaining and spooky material, all based on sound and extremely well-presented research. All presented in clear, brisk and decidedly un-stuffy language, a real find!

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great stuff. I knew Debbie Felton a little, whilst attending UMass Amherst. Just finished re-reading it again, and it really is full of fun stuff, and cites original texts in end notes (something I missed the first time).

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delight to read, and tremendously well-researched. Felton writes with both rich detail rewarding to the Classicist and skillful storytelling incredibly entertaining to the more casual reader. What a gift of a book.

[Squeaky Skull · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be cool if they had a shelf for "re-reading," which is what I'm doing with this one. Excellent study of classical ghost stories, excellent bibliography.

[Thalassapolis · Rating 5 out of 5]

2002 de sanırım okumuştum yıllar sonra tezim için yeniden okudum

[a hooded figure from your friendly neighbourhood dog park · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting material, but too drily presented to enjoy the research experience

[Samuel Goldberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just really fantastic. It seems to have grabbed everything there is to grab on the subject and even oozed put a little more on the sides. I’d say “I want more” but according to the book, this is it, as far as we have surviving copies of.

I would have liked an examination of the Pliny story over time, as it’s so archetypal it seems like it either had a huge influence OR that classic ghost stories are so uniform that cultures simply create them in that form on their own.