Obviously, today, most people realize that ghosts are not real. In ancient times, however, it seems that belief in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena was apparently quite widespread. In his satirical novel The Lover of Lies, the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (who wrote exclusively in ancient Greek) tells a very humorous anecdote about an elaborate prank that was allegedly pulled on the wise philosopher Demokritos of Abdera.
According to Loukianos, Demokritos was a man of reason who firmly denied the existence of ghosts. To prove to everyone that ghosts were not real, Demokritos shut himself away in a tomb outside his home city of Abdera, where he remained all day and all night, working on his philosophical treatises (of which, unfortunately, none have survived) without any distractions.
Some young rapscallions, hoping to trick Demokritos into believing in ghosts, dressed themselves up in long, black robes and put on skull masks over their faces. Then, in the middle of the night, they went into the tomb and surrounded Demokritos, forming a circle around him. They then began to dance a spooky dance in an attempt to frighten him. Demokritos, however, saw through their disguises in an instant and merely responded by saying, “Come, enough of that nonsense.”
This story is notable for several reasons. Firstly, it gives us an idea of what people in Loukianos’s time believed ghosts were supposed to look like. Secondly, it demonstrates that, even in ancient times, there were already many people who knew enough about the world to be skeptical of ghosts and other supposed paranormal phenomena.
SOURCES
Loukianos of Samosata. The Lover of Lies.
IMAGE CREDITS
The featured image for this article is an ancient Roman mosaic of a skull from the city of Pompeii. This image was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. This image is in the public domain in the United States of America.
