were fully persuaded that the spectres
which sometimes appear are no other than the souls of persons lately
deceased, and in their country they knew no remedy so proper to put a
stop to this kind of apparition as to cut off the head of the dead
person, or to impale him, or pierce him through the body with a stake,
or to burn it, as is now practiced at this day in Hungary and Moravia
with regard to vampires.

The Greeks, who had derived their religion and theology from the
Egyptians and Orientals, and the Latins, who took it from the Greeks,
believed that the souls of the dead sometimes appeared to the living;
that the necromancers evoked them, and thus obtained answers
concerning the future, and instructions relating to the time present.
Homer, the greatest theologian, and perhaps the most curious of the
Grecian writers, relates several apparitions, both of gods and heroes,
and of men after their death.

In the Odyssey,[381] Ulysses goes to consult the diviner Tyresias; and
this sorcerer having prepared a grave full of blood to evoke the
manes, Ulysses draws his sword, and prevents them from coming to drink
this blood, for which they appear to thirst, and of which they would
not permit them to taste before they had replied to what was asked of
them; they (the Greeks and Latins) believed also that souls were not
at rest, and that they wandered around the corpses, so long as they
remained uninhumed.[382] When they gave burial to a body, they called
that _animam condere_,[383] to cover the soul, put it under the earth
and shelter it. They called it with a loud voice, and offered it
libations of milk and blood. They also called that ceremony, hiding
the shades,[384] sending them with their body under ground.

The sybil, speaking to AEneas, shows him the manes or shades wandering
on the banks of the Acheron; and tells him that they are souls of
persons who have not received sepulture, and who wander about for a
hundred years.[385]

The philosopher Sallust[386] speaks of the apparitions of the dead
around their tombs in dark bodies; he tries to prove thereby the dogma
of the metempsychosis.

Here is a singular instance of a dead man, who refuses the rite of
burial, acknowledging himself unworthy of it. Agathias relates[387]
that some pagan philosophers, not being able to relish the dogma of
the unity of a God, resolved to go from Constantinople to the court of
Chosroes, King of Persia, who was spoken of as a humane prin