nd asked why he had been brought back
to life and not left in peace."

One is reminded of the dead man being carried out to burial who meets
Dionysus in Hades, in Aristophanes' _Frogs_, and expresses the wish that
he may be struck alive again if he does what is requested of him. If
ghosts are often represented as "all loath to leave the body that they
love," they are generally quite as loath to return to it, when once they
have left it, though whether it is the process of returning or the
continuance of a life which they have left that is distasteful to them
is not very clear. The painfulness of the process of restoration to life
after drowning seems to favour the former explanation.

These cases of resurrection are, of course, quite different from
ordinary necromancy--the summoning of the shade of a dead man from the
world below, in order to ask its advice with the help of a professional
diviner. As religious faith decayed and the superstitions of the East
and the belief in magic gained ground, necromancy became more and more
common. Even Cicero charges Vatinius[67] with evoking the souls of the
dead, and with being in the habit of sacrificing the entrails of boys to
the Manes. Tacitus mentions a young man trying to raise the dead by
means of incantations,[68] while Pliny[69] speaks of necromancy as a
recognized branch of magic, and Origen classes it among the crimes of
the magicians in his own day.

After murdering his mother, Nero often declared that he was troubled by
her spirit and by the lashes and blazing torches of the Furies.[70] One
would imagine that the similarity of his crime and his punishment to
those of Orestes would have been singularly gratifying to a man of
Nero's theatrical temperament; yet we are informed that he often tried
to call up her ghost and lay it with the help of magic rites. Nero,
however, took particular pleasure in raising the spirits of the dead,
according to the Elder Pliny,[71] who adds that not even the charms of
his own singing and acting had greater attractions for him.

Caracalla, besides his bodily illnesses, was obviously insane and often
troubled with delusions, imagining that he was being driven out by his
father and also by his brother Geta, whom he had murdered in his
mother's arms, and that they pursued him with drawn swords in their
hands. At last, as a desperate resource, he endeavoured to find a cure
by means of necromancy, and called up, among others, the shade of h