that
these are the delusive visions of women and children, or of men whose
intellects are impaired by some physical infirmity, and who believe that
their diseased imaginations are of divine origin. But if Dion and
Brutus, men of strong and philosophic minds, whose understandings were
not affected by any constitutional infirmity--if such men could place so
much faith in the appearance of spectres as to give an account of them
to their friends, I see no reason why we should depart from the opinion
of the ancients that men had their evil genii, who disturbed them with
fears and distressed their virtues ..."

In the opening of the _Philopseudus_, Lucian asks what it is that makes
men so fond of a lie, and comments on their delight in romancing
themselves, which is only equalled by the earnest attention with which
they receive other people's efforts in the same direction. Tychiades
goes on to describe his visit to Eucrates, a distinguished philosopher,
who was ill in bed. With him were a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean,
a Platonist, and a doctor, who began to tell stories so absurd and
abounding in such monstrous superstition that he ended by leaving them
in disgust. None of us have, of course, ever been present at similar
gatherings, where, after starting with the inevitable Glamis mystery,
everybody in the room has set to work to outdo his neighbour in
marvellous yarns, drawing on his imagination for additional material,
and, like Eucrates, being ready to stake the lives of his children on
his veracity.

Another scoffer was Democritus of Abdera, who was so firmly convinced of
the non-existence of ghosts that he took up his abode in a tomb and
lived there night and day for a long time. Classical ghosts seem to have
affected black rather than white as their favourite colour. Among the
features of the gruesome entertainments with which Domitian loved to
terrify his Senators were handsome boys, who appeared naked with their
bodies painted black, like ghosts, and performed a wild dance.[29] On
the following day one of them was generally sent as a present to each
Senator. Some boys in the neighbourhood wished to shake Democritus's
unbelief, so they dressed themselves in black with masks like skulls
upon their heads and danced round the tomb where he lived. But, to their
annoyance, he only put his head out and told them to go away and stop
playing the fool.

The Greek and Roman stories hardly come up to the standards requi