r you go, and that
your cheerful countenance shall everywhere be a signal for hilarity.
The whole city, out of gratitude, bestows upon you exceptional honors,
enrolling your name as one of its patrons, and decreeing that your
likeness in bronze shall be erected as a perpetual memorial of to-day."

PLINY, THE YOUNGER

_Letter to Sura_

Our leisure furnishes me with the opportunity of learning from you, and
you with that of instructing me. Accordingly, I particularly wish to
know whether you think there exist such things as phantoms, possessing
an appearance peculiar to themselves, and a certain supernatural power,
or that mere empty delusions receive a shape from our fears. For my
part, I am led to believe in their existence, especially by what I hear
happened to Curtius Rufus. While still in humble circumstances and
obscure, he was a hanger-on in the suite of the Governor of Africa.
While pacing the colonnade one afternoon, there appeared to him a
female form of superhuman size and beauty. She informed the terrified
man that she was "Africa," and had come to foretell future events; for
that he would go to Rome, would fill offices of state there, and would
even return to that same province with the highest powers, and die in
it. All which things were fulfilled. Moreover, as he touched at
Carthage, and was disembarking from his ship, the same form is said to
have presented itself to him on the shore. It is certain that, being
seized with illness, and auguring the future from the past and
misfortune from his previous prosperity, he himself abandoned all hope
of life, though none of those about him despaired.

Is not the following story again still more appalling and not less
marvelous? I will relate it as it was received by me:

There was at Athens a mansion, spacious and commodious, but of evil
repute and dangerous to health. In the dead of night there was a noise
as of iron, and, if you listened more closely, a clanking of chains was
heard, first of all from a distance, and afterwards hard by. Presently
a specter used to appear, an ancient man sinking with emaciation and
squalor, with a long beard and bristly hair, wearing shackles on his
legs and fetters on his hands, and shaking them. Hence the inmates, by
reason of their fears, passed miserable and horrible nights in
sleeplessness. This want of sleep was followed by disease, and, their
terrors increasing, by death. For in the daytime as well, though the