Pliny the Younger.

— The rest we enjoy permits you to teach and permits me to learn. I would like, then, to know whether phantoms have anything real about them, whether they have a true countenance, whether they are spirits or whether they are nothing but vain images, sketched by imaginations disturbed by fear. What leads me to believe that there are true specters is what I have been told happened to Curtius Rufus. At the time when he possessed neither fortune nor name, he had accompanied to Africa the man to whom the governorship had fallen. As night was falling, he was walking beneath a portico when a woman, of a superhuman image and beauty, presented herself to him and said: “I am Africa. I come to foretell what is going to happen to you. You will go to Rome, you will hold the highest offices and then you will return to govern this province, where you will die.” Everything happened as she had predicted. It is even said that, landing at Carthage, as he stepped off the ship the same figure presented itself to him, coming to meet him on the wharf.

“What is true is that he fell ill and, judging the future by the past, the misfortune that threatened him by the good fortune he had enjoyed, he soon despaired of his cure, despite the optimistic opinion of those around him.

— “But here is another story, no less surprising and far more terrifying. I shall narrate it just as I received it: “There was in Athens a very large and very comfortable house, but discredited and deserted. In the deepest silence of the night, sounds of iron were heard and, if one paid closer attention, a noise of chains, which at first seemed to come from afar and then to draw near. Soon there appeared a specter resembling an old man, very thin, quite haggard, with a long beard, hair standing on end, chains on his feet and wrists, which he shook horribly. Hence the dreadful and sleepless nights for the inhabitants of that house. The prolonged insomnia brought on illness, and this, redoubling the dread, was followed by death. During the day, although the specter did not appear, the impression it had left always revived it before everyone’s eyes, and the fear it caused provoked new fear. At last, the house was abandoned and left entirely to the phantom. Nevertheless, they put up a notice that it was for sale or for rent, on the supposition that someone, less warned of so terrible an inconvenience, might come to be deceived. “The philosopher Athenodorus came to Athens. He saw the notice and asked the price. Its lowness made him suspicious; he sought to inform himself. They told him the story and, far from breaking off the deal, he took care to conclude it without delay. He installed himself, and in the evening he ordered that his bed be prepared in the front room, that his writing tablets, his pen, and a light be brought to him, and that the other people withdraw to the back of the house. Fearing that his imagination might reach so frivolous a dread as to make him believe in phantoms, he applied his mind, his eyes, and his hand to writing. At the beginning of the night a deep silence reigned throughout the house as everywhere. Then he began to hear the clashing of iron and the noise of the chains; he did not raise his eyes nor leave off his pen; he calmed himself and made an effort to listen. The noise increased and drew near to him; it seemed to arise beside the door of the room. He looked and perceived the specter, just as it had been described to him. The phantom was standing and was calling him with its finger. With his hand Athenodorus made it a sign to wait a little, continuing to write as if nothing were happening. The specter resumed the noise with the chains, wounding the philosopher’s ears. He looked once again and perceived that he was still being called with the finger. Then, without further delay, he rose, took the light, and followed it. The phantom marched at a slow pace, as if the weight of the chains oppressed it. Reaching the courtyard of the house, it suddenly disappeared, leaving our philosopher there, who took herbs and leaves and placed them on the spot where it had left him, in order to be able to recognize it. The next day he went to seek out the magistrates and asked that they order that place to be excavated. They dug and found bones still attached to the chains; time had consumed the flesh. After everything had been carefully gathered, they held the burial publicly, paid the dead man the final honors, and from then on nothing more disturbed the peace of that house. “What I have just related I believe upon the word of another. But here is what I can assure others upon my own faith:

— “I have a freedman named Marcus, who is by no means ignorant. He was lying down with his little brother when it seemed to him that he saw someone seated on his bed who brought a pair of scissors close to his head and went so far as to cut his hair above the forehead. When day broke, he perceived that the hair had been cut at the top of his head and was scattered around him. Shortly afterward a similar adventure happened to one of my household members, and I no longer allowed myself to doubt the veracity of the other. One of my young slaves was sleeping with his companions in the place assigned to them. Two men dressed in white — that is how he told it — came in through the window, shaved his head while he was lying down, and went off as they had come. By the light of the next day they found him shorn, as they had found the other, and the cut hair lay scattered on the floor. “These adventures had no consequence, except that I was accused before Domitian, under whose reign they occurred. I would not have escaped had he lived, for they found in his portfolio a petition against me, lodged by Carus. From this one may conjecture that, since it is the custom of the accused to neglect their hair and let it grow, those who had cut the hair of my people indicated that I was out of danger. I beg you, then, to bring all your erudition to bear here. The subject is worthy of profound meditation, and perhaps I am not unworthy to share in your enlightenment. If, as is your custom, you weigh the two contrary opinions, make the balance tilt to one side or the other, in order to draw me out of the disquiet in which I find myself, since it is only for that that I consult you. Farewell.”

ANSWERS OF PLINY THE YOUNGER TO THE QUESTIONS PUT TO HIM AT THE SESSION OF THE SOCIETY OF JANUARY 28, 1859.

Evocation.

Answer. – Speak; I shall answer.

Although you have been dead for 1743 years, do you have recollection of your existence in Rome in the time of Trajan?

Answer. – Why, then, should we Spirits not remember? You remember many acts of your childhood. What, then, is a past existence for the Spirit but the childhood of the existences through which we must pass before reaching the end of our trials? Every earthly existence, or one enveloped by the material veil, is a journey toward the ether and, at the same time, a spiritual and material childhood: spiritual because the Spirit is still at the beginning of its trials; and material because it is only entering upon the coarser phases through which it must pass, in order to purify and instruct itself.

Could you tell us what you have done since that time?

Answer. – It would be long to tell what I have done; I sought to do good; doubtless you do not wish to spend whole hours until I recount everything; content yourselves, then, with one answer. I repeat: I sought to do good, to instruct myself, and I led earthly and wandering creatures to draw near to the Creator of all things, to the one who gives us the bread of spiritual and material life.

What world do you inhabit now?

Answer. – It matters little; I am a little everywhere; space is my domain, as it is that of many others. These are questions that a Spirit who is wise and enlightened by the holy and divine light should not answer, or should answer only on very rare occasions.

In a letter you wrote to Sura you relate three cases of apparition. Do you remember them?

Answer. – I confirm them, because they are true. You have similar facts daily, to which you pay not the least attention; they are quite simple, yet at the time in which I lived we found them surprising. You must not be astonished; set these things aside, for you have others far more extraordinary.

Nevertheless, we would like to put a few questions to you concerning them.

Answer. – Provided that I answer you in a general manner; this must suffice for you. Ask, then, if you absolutely insist; I shall, however, be laconic in my answers.

In the first case, a woman appears to Curtius Rufus and tells him that she is Africa. Who was this woman?

Answer. – A great figure. It seems to me that she is too simple for enlightened men, such as those of the nineteenth century.

What was the reason that drove the Spirit who appeared to Athenodorus, and why that noise of chains?

Answer. – A mark of slavery, a manifestation; a means of convincing men, of calling their attention, by making the matter spoken of and proving the existence of the spiritual world.

You defended, before Trajan, the cause of the persecuted Christians. Was it for simple humanitarian reasons or out of conviction of the veracity of their doctrine?

Answer. – I had both motives, but the humanitarian aspect occupied the second place.

What do you think of your panegyric of Trajan?

Answer. – It would need to be redone.

You wrote a history of your time which has been lost. Could you repair that loss by dictating it to us?

Answer. – The world of the Spirits does not manifest itself especially through these things. You have certain kinds of manifestations, but they have their purpose: they are so many markers, planted to the right and to the left along the great road of truth; but set them aside and do not occupy yourselves with this, nor devote your studies to it. To us belongs the care of seeing and judging what it matters for you to know. Each thing has its time; do not stray, then, from the line we trace for you.

We are glad to render justice to your good qualities and, above all, to your disinterestedness. It is said that you demanded nothing from the clients you defended. Was this disinterestedness as great in Rome as it is among us?

Answer. – Do not flatter my past qualities. I attribute no importance to them. Disinterestedness is not much cultivated in your century. In every two hundred men you will find only one or two truly disinterested; you well know that it is the century of egoism and of money. The men of the present are made of mire and clothed in metal. Formerly there was heart, the true strength of the ancients; today there exists only social position.

Without claiming to absolve our century, it seems to us that it is still preferable to the one in which you lived, where corruption reached its apogee and denunciation knew nothing sacred.

Answer. – I am making a generalization that is quite true. I know that at the time in which I lived there was not much disinterestedness; nevertheless, there was that which you do not possess, or at least which you possess in a very weak dose: the love of the beautiful, of the noble, of the great. I speak for everyone. The man of the present, above all the peoples of the West, the French particularly, have the heart ready to do great things, but this is nothing but a flash of lightning. Soon comes reflection, and reflection weighs and says: the positive, the positive before all else; and money and egoism come back to take the lead. We manifest ourselves precisely because you are straying from the great principles given by Jesus. Farewell. You do not yet understand it. Observation. – We understand very well that our century still leaves much to be desired; its wound is egoism, and egoism engenders cupidity and the thirst for riches. In this respect it is far from the disinterestedness of which the Roman people offered so many sublime examples at a certain epoch, but which was not that of Pliny. Nevertheless, it would be unjust to fail to recognize its superiority in more than one point, even over the most beautiful times of Rome, which also had their examples of barbarism. There was, then, ferocity even in greatness and in disinterestedness, whereas our century will be marked by the softening of customs, by the sentiments of justice and of humanity that preside over all the institutions it sees born, and even in the quarrels between peoples. Allan Kardec.

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[1] [See by the same author Epistolarum libri X - Google Books, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus — 1529.]