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Phantoms of the murdered people

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

It was quite common that in the case in which an house was haunted by a spectre, the ghost was that of a man who in this house had been murdered by treachery and then thrown without any burial rite in the first ditch found nearby. For the people of the ancient times this was one of the most frequent cause of those phenomena, and this belief was so widespread and rooted that Plautus, in one of his comedy, the “Mostellaria”, shows how, using this kind of story, a sly slave succeeded in keeping the master of the house, the father of his young master, out of it. The slave terrified the old man relating to him a long and horrible tale about the ghost of a man that in this house had been robbed and murdered. Then he added that, appearing in one of the young man’s dream, the same spectre had told him all his sad story.
While he so talked, and while the actor who played the role of the father of the witched young man was showing all the signs of his dismay, the audience heard a frightful uproar of sound and blows: Of course they were the results of the unrestrained behaviour of his son and his girlfriend who, in the house, were getting drunk, and for a moment, the slave, fearing that the old man would smell a rat, was in a cold sweat, but picking up again his spirits he ascribed the racket to the restive and clumsy ghost. At this, while his dissolute son resumed his illicit love affair, the unhappy old man went desperately out trying to find a more restful place.
As all ghost tales of the antiquities this comedy was based on the belief, strongly rooted in the people, that the ghosts haunted the houses in which the crime had confined them.