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Pliny the Younger

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Long and intricate stories of ghosts are told to us by Pliny the Younger, Pliny the Older nephew, who, as we can easily see - reading tales as to one of Athenodorus’s -was a firm believer in haunted houses and ghostly manifestation and also reported some of them. Thus he was writing to a friend
“My leisure offer me the capacity to learn and to you the one to teach. Then I want to know if you believe in the existence of ghosts and if you deem that they have their own shape, or if, empty and inane, they take the shape that our own fright lends to them. I am induced to believe in their existence by what I know that happened to Curtius Rufus
He, at this time, still of humble and obscure condition, went to Africa with the new proconsul. In the evening, while he was strolling in the porch, a woman appeared to him. She was taller and more beautiful than any human creature. She told him that she was Africa and that she wanted to predict him his future: He would go back to Italy, she said, and he would have a successful career. He would also reach the greatest authority and then he would return in this same province where he now was and here he would die. Everything proved to be correct. They told me that, as Curtius Rufus was going to Chartago, at the landing he saw, coming on the beach toward him, the same figure of woman. As very soon he fell ill and as he already knew his future, he understood that from fortune he had to pass to adversity; He knew that he had to die and, while nobody gave a great importance to his ailing, he abandoned every hope of recovery and died.