Roman Ghostbusters

As the Halloween season hits, Mary and Charlotte turn to the wealth
of ghost stories from the ancient world to ask: did the Greeks and
Romans really believe in ghosts and why are their stories so
similar to ours when many of our beliefs are so different? 
Mary and Charlotte recount a ghost story recounted by Pliny the
Younger about a haunted house in Athens and the successful attempt
by a philosopher to both encounter the ghost and lay its spirit to
rest. They also tell the story, written down in Greece in the 3rd
century CE, about a young man who is seduced by a vampire. And they
discover the Roman methods of exorcism, which involves chewing on
some beans and throwing them behind you. When it came to
ghostbusting, then as now, don’t cross the beans!  Some Romans
even believed that the city itself was haunted by the restless
spirit of Remus who - in one telling of Rome’s favourite origin
story - was murdered by his brother Romulus to take sole control of
the new city.    @instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and
YouTube @insta_classics for X email: instantclassicspod@gmail.com
Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci Producer: Jonty
Claypole  Executive Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford Video
Editor: Jak Ford Theme music: Casey Gibson Learn more about your ad
choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices