Literature and folklore in Propertius 4.7
Juliette Harrisson
This chapter is about the elasticity of the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘not real’. Ideas about the afterlife are both ‘real’ and ‘not real’ – ‘real’ to those who believe them to be true, ‘not real’ to those who do not, and in a liminal space between the two for the many who are uncertain what may or may not await us after death. These ideas are then expressed in different forms of literature – some purporting to tell ‘true’ stories of real events, and some telling obviously and selfconsciously fictional stories that are products of the author’s imagination and are clearly not ‘true’ or ‘real’. Still other stories exist between these two poles, especially those anonymous stories referred to as ‘folklore’. Where folklore is blended with literary fiction, authors can use the tension between these various ideas and attitudes towards the afterlife to express a sense of ambiguity that reflects the ambiguity many people feel towards ideas about life after death.
This chapter will explore these tensions through two connected studies. First, a body of modern online folklore will be examined in order to provide a point of comparison with the ancient material. This section will demonstrate the inherent ambiguity that comes with the telling of ghost stories, and the willing desire on the part of the audience for ghost stories to ‘believe’ for the duration of the story, regardless of their everyday ‘beliefs’, or lack thereof. This will be followed by a case study of the blending of literary and folkloric motifs relating to the representation of life after death in Propertius 4.7. By drawing on both literary and popular influences, Propertius heightens the ambiguity in an already ambiguous literary genre (Latin love elegy), expressing the sense of uncertainty that so many feel about the very existence or otherwise of a life after death.
The study will incorporate the use of comparative methods in two different ways. The traditional ‘historic-geographic’ method of comparison that has for a long time been at the core of folklore research (if somewhat less popular today) is represented in the discussion of folkloric motifs in Propertius’ poem. However, it is not my intention, in covering the modern material, to look for particular folklore motifs or tale types and compare them to ancient narratives. Rather, I am interested in the attitudes expressed towards these narratives by both tellers and receivers, which in the case of online stories has been preserved in comments sections on websites where stories appear. This kind of conversation is rarely accessible from ancient texts, and even those texts which express similar thoughts about the ‘truth’ value of popularly told ghost stories (see for example Pliny, Letters 7.27) tend to preserve only one half of the conversation. In modern contexts, this sort of evidence is usually only available if specific research has been carried out using interviews or questionnaires (see for example Bennett, 1999). Online folklore, therefore, represents a new body of source material in which the responses of the audience have been volunteered largely unprompted, rather than sought by researchers and modified in that light, which may be used to shed light on attitudes towards folklore and folkloric literature from other periods. As Goldstein, Grider and Thomas put it, they create a new ‘context for dialogue about those traditions’ (Goldstein, Grider and Banks Thomas, 2007, p. 220).1
Over the past few decades, there has been much lively discussion about the concept of ‘belief’ and the extent to which it can be applied to ancient religion and religious practice. Much of this has assumed a position of difference between the ancient and modern (Western) worlds; scholars have largely come from backgrounds dominated by Christian and Jewish religious thought (regardless of whether or not they subscribe to these beliefs themselves) and have sought to clarify the Otherness of ancient religion, with its lack of religious dogma or sacred text.2
There are areas, however, in which the ancient and modern worlds are not so different. In ancient Rome, as now, the prospect of whether or not there was life after death was hotly contested, and no overall consensus reached. Both belief and disbelief were expressed in both text and epigraphy (see the Introduction to this volume). The idea of life after death, and of the possibility that the dead might re-visit the living, can be a difficult one to shake, even for the ardent nonbeliever. It is no coincidence that Paul Veyne uses the fear of (not ‘belief’ in) ghosts to explain the theory that we do not think about all things with the same part of our brains, describing his own feelings of fear despite not believing in ghosts (Veyne, 1988a, p. 87). Ghost stories exist on the fringe of ‘real’ and ‘not real’.
There are two main types of ghost story – literary ghost stories, and folklore. ‘Folklore’, like ‘myth’ or ‘religion’, is notoriously difficult to define. The term itself is not unproblematic and is sometimes seen as a ‘colonizing label’, Othering the literatures of subaltern peoples (Bacchilega, 2012, p. 452). In the past, it has often been associated with oral tradition, but as Anderson points out, there are numerous sources of folklore (including epitaphs and various forms of textual ephemera) that reach us in textual or other forms, and not all oral tradition is folklore (Anderson, 2006, p. 3). Bendix and Hasan-Rokem suggest simply that ‘there is not one unambiguous way of defining what folklore is and what its study comprises’ (Bendix and Hasan-Rokem, 2012, p. 2).3 Anderson, a little more positively, suggests that folklore is ‘anonymously transmitted culture’ (2006, p. 4) – stories with no clear, definable author, shared among members of a particular group.
Literary ghost stories are works of fiction with an identifiable author, such as the famous ghost stories written by M. R. James or Charles Dickens. They are generally considered to be ‘not real’ – discussing ghost stories in the Victorian Gothic, for example, Alexandra Warwick observes that the increasing popularity of theatrical and literary ghost stories in the nineteenth century resulted in stories of ‘real’ ghosts gradually being ‘relegated to folk culture’ (Warwick, 2014, pp. 370–371). However, ‘literary’ and ‘folk’ ghosts cannot always be so easily separated; for example, Goldstein, Grider and Banks Thomas have explored the impact of folklore on modern popular culture, including numerous examples of literary ghost stories in film and television that have been influenced by modern ghost folklore (Goldstein, Grider and Banks Thomas, 2007). Propertius 4.7 is a literary ghost story, but one that has been influenced by, and incorporates elements of, popular folklore.
Ever since the early days of the World Wide Web, ‘folkloric’ stories and tales – some fictional, some claiming to be true stories – have proliferated online (Blank, 2009, pp. 3–4). Internet communication exists somewhere in between oral communication and writing, and there are similarities in the mode of transmission of folk tales orally and online (see Bronner, 2009, p. 23; Foley, 2008). Like the ancient folklore that survives, online ghost stories are textual stories shared through a textual medium, but inspired by an oral tradition. These stories may have been experienced by someone who has written them down in order to tell others about the experience, or they may have been told by one or more people to others and then written down, or they may have been invented and written down as if they were experienced or transmitted orally.
The stories selected for this case study were all published on the website Jezebel.com, between 2011 and 2017. Every year, the website runs a scary story competition for Halloween, in which the rules are that 1) the story must be ‘true’ and 2) it must be ‘scary’. All of the stories posted are, therefore, what in Gillian Bennett’s terminology would be ‘memorates’ – stories that, according to the narrator, either happened to them, or to a friend, or to a friend of a friend (as opposed to a ‘fabulate’, a story that is well known and to which the narrator has no personal connection; see Bennett, 1999, p. 4).4
The informal ‘competition’, when it started in 2011, was focused specifically on ghost stories (North, 2011a). However, various other supernatural phenomena are also represented in the ten ‘winning’ stories chosen by the site’s editors and published in a separate post that year, including demons, omens and even Death himself (North, 2011b).5 Notable by their absence from any winning or runner-up stories across the years 2011 and 2013–2017 (there was no ‘winners’ post in 2012) are stories about witches, vampires, werewolves, or fairies (one story from 2014, ‘James’, shares some features in common with older stories about fairies, but the word ‘fairy’ or ‘faerie’ does not appear; Ryan, 2014). For a memorate-type story, told in fairly plain terms without the literary trappings of a novel or short story, to be scary, it has to be something at least some readers believe to be genuinely possible. In 21st century America, ghosts and demons seem to belong on the edges of the realm of possibility in the cultural imagination – witches, vampires and werewolves belong solely to literature.
However, an increasing number of winning or runner-up stories over the years have not featured any supernatural element at all, and from 2015 onwards it was made clear that non-supernatural stories were equally as welcome as ghost stories, as long as they were ‘scary’ (Davies, 2015a). 16 winning or runner-up stories 2013–2017 are about sinister or threatening human males – peeping toms, murderers, stalkers and abusive men – and an additional story featured a sinister human being of unknown gender. Comments from Madeline Davies, who has been reading the submissions and choosing the winners since 2015, indicate that the number of non-supernatural submissions has been increasing; by 2017, she was exclaiming ‘so many intruder stories, you guys!’ (Davies, 2017b).
This increase has presumably been prompted by the very positive response some of the early ‘realistic’ stories received, sometimes on the grounds that they were more believable, and therefore scarier, than the ghost stories. For example, in 2015 one commenter said, ‘I love that this year, a number of the scariest stories centered (sic) on non-ghost incidents . . . Sometimes the spookiest stories are the ones about other humans’ (Davies, 2015b). By 2016, five of the ten winning stories were about sinister human men. Belief in ghosts or demons varies from person to person, but all readers acknowledge the existence of serial killers, violent burglars and stalkers – and so, by 2016, the biggest fear that was felt to produce the scariest stories on a website aimed at women was living human men (see further Tucker, 2009 on online folklore and its relationship to women’s safety and fears).
However, supernatural stories and ghost stories have also continued to be popular, and responses to both types are not as simple as the assumption that ‘ghost story = fiction’ and ‘realistic story = true’. In theory, all the stories that are submitted are supposed to be ‘true’, and this rule is strictly enforced. The instructions for 2017 specify, ‘You are on the honor (sic) system here and – of course – when we’re talking about ghosts, the truth is relative to what you believe. To clarify: It must be experienced or sincerely believed by YOU the teller’ (Davies, 2017a). In 2015, Davies explained that a non-paranormal story about serial killer John Wayne Gacy did not make the winners’ list because she ‘wasn’t convinced’ it was a ‘true’ story, as it seemed too well written (Davies, 2015b), and in 2017, Davies noted that she had ‘cut out some well-told, but obviously fake tales’ (Davies, 2017b). When one of the 2016 winners admitted her story was fiction, the story was removed from the list of winning tales and the story in eleventh place was promoted to the top 10 (Davies, 2016b).
However, this rule about ‘truth’ is understood differently by different people. Many readers simply assume that any paranormal stories, despite the ‘truth’ rule, are fiction. For example, one commenter on the 2015 collection said that,
I know ghost stories make for fun family lore, and I get that folks experience sleep paralysis or have homes that make strange sounds. It’s probably very fun to make up a story and enter it in this contest. But since we live in a world of logic, there’s nothing actually *frightening* about those stories. Real life shit is scary enough. The Craigslist ad, the woman buried alive, etc. There’s plenty of genuine accounts of things to keep you up at night.
I will say though, sleep paralysis is no joke. I’ve only had it once, but it was the most frightening experience of my life. And if I had not understood what was happening to me, I would have been *even more* frightened, and I’d have a ‘ghost story’ of my own.
(Davies, 2015b)
In this comment, the author expresses the conviction that ghost stories are ‘made up’, but also suggests that some are the result of people experiencing sleep paralysis and ‘not understanding’ what is happening to them, and so interpreting it as a paranormal experience. This is a completely different act to ‘making a story up’ – and is probably the reason for the clarification in 2017 that the ‘truth’ requirement refers to the writer believing that the story happened to them, regardless of how others might interpret it. This assumption that paranormal stories are either ‘made up’ or are the result of misunderstanding a scientific phenomenon also did not go down well (to put it mildly) with some other readers, with another commenting:
That’s a shitty and incredibly patronizing thing to say. Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean you need to dismiss everyone who has had those experiences. It doesn’t have anything to do with logic. Go stroke your own dick to a true crime show.
The conversation continued for some time; another user commented that, 'I get sleep paralysis about 2× a week its (sic) not a ghost ... I believe in ghosts btw [by the way]', while another added, 'Why be offended by the suggestion that a scary story may have an un-scary explanation?' Another said, 'JESUS you're a buzzkill. It's Halloween, enjoy a damn ghost story'.
Some readers want stories that are ‘not real’, despite the ‘true story’ rule – for example, one commenter expressed horror at the volume of non-paranormal stories among the 2016 winners, saying:
Dammit, these are supposed to be *Ghost Stories*! I should be able to have a little shiver and then rationalize that ghosts don’t exist and we’re all just dirt when we die. I do not approve of all these real life scary dude invasion stories! ESCAPISM OVER REALITY!
(Davies, 2016a)
This reader actively prefers something they firmly believe to be fiction, wrapped in the idea of ‘truth’ as a narrative device, and resists the inclusion of stories they believe could really happen.
Others, however, prefer the stories to contain a supernatural element and find that it is this unexplained, mysterious aspect that makes them scary. A conversation in 2017 about whether at least part of the story ‘Natalie’s Dad’ could be explained by sleep paralysis led one commenter to say,
But what if sleep paralysis is just a convenient way to explain away truly paranormal experiences?
(I know nothing about sleep paralysis, just want to keep the creepy stories creepy without a logical explanation)
(Davies, 2017b)
For this reader, the ambiguity of the supernatural experience is the attraction. A story including elements that may or may not be ‘real’ is more exciting than a more mundane, if extreme, experience. Others express a hope that the more sentimental stories are true, like one commenter who said, ‘This is Maria’ was my favorite (sic) one. Hoping that submission is a true story. I especially like any story shared by people of experiences with the recently passed in dreams or otherwise’ (the story in question featured the long-dead daughter of an elderly man who had just died calling the man’s neighbour to let her know the daughter was taking him; Davies, 2016a). This can apply to really frightening stories as well – in praising a non-paranormal story, ‘The Invitation’, one 2016 commenter said, ‘Yeah, that one seemed like it could be real’, and this is understood as a compliment to the story, perhaps regardless of whether it is really true or not – the important thing is that it seems to be real (Davies 2016b). A story that is overtly, obviously fictional will not be appreciated. One 2015 user criticised a story because it ‘seemed like fiction from the first sentence’ and expressed concern about stories that are too ‘well written’.
What these conversations and attitudes towards the competition’s ‘true story’ rule reveal is the constant negotiation between ‘real’ and ‘not real’ that is a part of ghost folklore. Some believe wholeheartedly and are insulted by invented stories because they feel tricked. Others assume that all stories about ghosts are fictional, but choose to pretend that they are real as part of the narrative experience. Some are undecided about the reality of ghosts and other phenomena, and the stories form part of the evidence to be weighed up, making their veracity extremely important, while for others, it is the very ambiguity of ghost stories that is their appeal.
The genre of Latin love elegy also exists in a liminal space between ‘true’ and ‘not true’, ‘real’ and ‘not real’. The poems are presented as first-person narratives of a love affair, told in the poet’s own name. Ancient and modern scholars alike have tended to identify Catullus’ Lesbia and her ‘pretty’ (pulcher) friend Lesbius (Catullus, 79.1), with Clodia Metella, known as Clodia Pulchra, and her brother Clodius Pulcher. In the case of the other elegists, however, we have no comparable evidence for a real woman or a real love affair. Apuleius suggested that Propertius’ ‘Cynthia’ was a pseudonym for a real woman called Hostia (Apuleius, Apologia 10), but most modern scholars tend to assume that Cynthia, along with most other elegiac women, is largely or even entirely fictitious. In part, this is because it is increasingly recognised that all the elegiac women, including Lesbia/Clodia (see Wyke, 2002, pp. 36–38), are fictionalised constructs, whose relationship to any ‘real’ lovers is murky at best – the fictionality and poetic, literary nature of the elegiac puella (‘girlfriend’) has now become a ‘critical commonplace’ (Liveley and Salzman-Mitchell, 2008, p. 4).
That blurring of the line between fiction and reality, the grey area which ensures that we can never quite be sure whether the poet’s mistress and their affair are ‘real’ or not, is a deliberate aspect of the poet’s work. Propertius writes in his own name and he knows that his audience will wonder whether his mistress is real or not, and how much of his account of their affair is ‘true’, and he plays up that ambiguity throughout. A number of scholars have observed that there is little consistency to his characterisation of Cynthia, whether referring to her status, or her character.6 Alison Sharrock points out that the ‘tricks of realism’ in Propertius’ elegy – the use of the first-person narrative, the question marks around the ‘reality’ of the mistress – ‘enrich our involvement in the poetry’, becoming ‘a mimetic game between poet and reader’ (Sharrock, 2000, p. 264).
This issue of ‘reality’ and ‘unreality’, and of inconsistency across a body of work, has been at the core of a debate about the very nature of Latin love elegy. Paul Veyne argued that the core purpose of Roman love elegy of this period was not to talk about love, sex or romance, but to produce a highly literary play on status and poetics that would amuse the elite male audience of these elite male writers, concluding that it is about ‘aestheticization’ more than it is about love, truth or anything else (Veyne, 1988b, pp. 178–179). By contrast, Duncan Kennedy has argued that writing about love can also be an act of expressing love itself (‘A discourse on love is a lover’s discourse’, Kennedy, 1993, p. 82), while Joy Connolly compares love elegy to romance novels, suggesting that both employ the same techniques of delaying the representation of the satisfaction and culmination of love in order to increase a feeling of desire, always stopping short of allowing character or reader to achieve their ultimate erotic goal (Connolly, 2000, pp. 70–75). Are these love poems about ‘love’ at all, or is that merely an excuse to play around with literary form?
Propertius Book 4 has often been placed at the heart of this debate, because its tone, themes and structure are so markedly different from the rest of Propertius’ work and it seems to jump around in subject matter. Book 4 comprises eleven poems. Five deal with elements of Roman mythology and history (‘zeroing in on the embarrassments of Roman history’, as Micaela Janan suggests; Janan, 2001, p. 9), including the death of Tarpeia. One deals directly with the then-current Emperor Augustus. The other five, as well as the poem about Tarpeia, all refer in some way to the death of erotic love. The sequence starts with a metaphor, as a wife whose husband is away on campaign complains that the torches for their wedding were lit from a funeral pyre (3.14), but Propertius quickly moves on to talk about death more literally with the story of Tarpeia, executed when she demanded a wedding (4.88–92), an angry elegy for a dead witch-procuress (5), the appearance of Cynthia’s ghost (7), a description of events leading up to Cynthia’s death (8), and a message from a dead wife to her surviving husband (11). In Book 2, the poet-narrator had suggested he would prefer death to marriage (2.2.7–12); here, he is confronted with the reality of that choice, but not through his own death, as he had anticipated, but the death of the already-discarded mistress. The death of love, of sex, of women, probably written shortly after Augustus passed the first of his laws against adultery (the Lex Julia de Maritandis Ordinibus in 18 BC, with Book IV probably written around 16 BC – see Booth, 1995, p. xxviii), functions as Propertius’ own The Tempest, his farewell to elegy. It is only fitting, therefore, that this final cycle of poems should ‘kill off’ his fictionalised lover – but the way in which he does so is unusual.
Of all the Propertian poems, the question of whether the story is ‘real’ or ‘not real’ has been of particular concern in the analysis of poems 4.7 and 4.8. In 4.7, the reader may be shocked to discover that, sometime after the end of their affair as recounted in 3.24 and 3.25, Cynthia has died. Her ghost visits the poet and berates him for allowing her murderer, a slave called Lygdamus (using a poison procured from a woman called Nomas), to go free. Then suddenly, in 4.8, Cynthia reappears alive – however, during the course of that poem, she attacks the poet and demands that Lygdamus be sold. Sometimes, the reverse narrative produced by the placement of 4.7 before 4.8 has been used to emphasise the unreality of the poetry and the elegiac mistress in particular (see for example Veyne 1988b, p. 48; Wyke, 2002, p. 104). However, the odd order of the poems by itself does not necessarily indicate that the puella does not exist. Both are clearly set around the same time, the one slightly before the other; 4.7 sets up a mystery (why has Cynthia been murdered?) which is solved by 4.8 (she demanded that Lygdamus be sold). We should understand, however, that Cynthia is not suddenly alive again in the way that many scholars have implied – just because Propertius says ‘tonight’ at 4.8.1 does not mean the poem is set at a time after 4.7, only that the narratorial voice is speaking in an earlier setting. That being said, the unexpected narrative ordering of the poems emphasises the question around their ‘reality’ or otherwise – are these poems drawing on real events, which the narrator has simply chosen to reveal in reverse order, or are they jumping about in time because they are pure fiction and not bound by reality?
Even the fundamental nature of the experience described in 4.7 is ambiguous, as it is not entirely clear whether Propertius is supposed to be asleep and dreaming, or awake. When Cynthia appears, the poet says that he has not slept since her funeral and she chides him for already starting to fall asleep again (4.7.5; 4.7.14), leading at least one scholar to read the poem as a story about an insomniac (Allison, 1984, p. 357). Most, however, consider the poem to be a story about a dream due to the overt references to dreams towards the end, including a reference to the Gates of Sleep/Dream. In ancient ghost stories, the visitation of a ghost through a dream does not necessarily indicate that the experience is not ‘real’, as visiting through dreams was one way it was imagined that ghosts might be able to visit the living – but it was also understood that many dreams are the product of the dreamer’s mind, and therefore ‘not real’.7 The piece is constructed in such a way as to play up all the ancient uncertainty surrounding dreams and ghosts, to the poet’s advantage.
Much of the construction of 4.7 is clearly and self-consciously ‘literary’, drawing on elements Propertius would expect his elite audience to recognise as literary motifs. His description of the underworld is suffused with literary references, name-checking such elements of the literary underworld as Cerberus, Lethe, and the Elysian Fields, while the references to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women (ll. 55–70) are mildly reminiscent of the parade of mythological women in Homer’s Odyssey (11.225–333). The inter-textuality of Propertius’ poetry in general, and the many literary reference points of this particular poem including Hellenistic poetry, epic poetry (especially Virgil and Homer) and comedy, have been described by many other scholars.8 I will restrict myself here to discussing one example relating to the representation of the afterlife in particular – the reference at the end of the poem to the Gates of Dreams.
The Gates of Dreams, or Gates of Horn and Ivory, appear originally in a brief comment from Penelope in the Odyssey. Penelope says that there are two gates of dreams, one of horn and one of ivory, and that the dreams that come through the ivory gate deceive men and are not fulfilled, but the dreams that come through the horn gate show true things that do happen (Homer, Odyssey 19.559–569). The origin and meaning of the Gates of Dreams has been the cause of some debate, with most scholars since Late Antiquity connecting them with either allegory or punning.9 The connection of the Gates with dream interpretation (Penelope brings them up because she is trying to interpret a dream she has had) suggests that the latter is more likely, as punning is a common method of interpretation found in dream books (see Harrisson, 2013, pp. 189–193) and can also be found in Near Eastern dream interpretation (Noegel, 2007, p. 193). Penelope’s explanation that the Gate of Horn, κεράς, keras, produces dreams which are fulfilled, κραίνω, krainō, while Ivory, ἐλέφας, elephas, produces dreams which are harmful, ἐλεφαίρομαι, elephairomai, indicates that she is using a recognised method of dream interpretation to interpret her own dream (Homer, Odyssey 19.559–569).
If the whole rather brief statement is based on a pun, this would suggest that it bears little, if any, relation to how people conceptualised their dreams, never mind the fate of their souls after death. The Gates make no appearance during Odysseus’ katabasis in Odyssey 11. In Odyssey 24, Hermes leads the shades of the dead suitors on their way to the underworld past ‘the gates of Helios and the land of dreams’ (παρ᾽ Ἠελίοιο πύλας καὶ δῆμον ὀνείρων, par Helioio pulas kai dēmon oneirōn, Odyssey 24.12), which may imply that the Gates of Helios are the ‘gates of dreams’ through which dreams enter the world, but which makes no reference to horn or ivory, and these gates do not lead to the part of the underworld for which the ghosts of the suitors are bound. The Homeric Gates, then, are connected to early Greek and ancient Near Eastern ideas about dreams and their interpretation, but are less connected to the underworld or afterlife belief, though they may be imagined as located near the entrance to Hades (see further Safari Grey in this volume).10
It is Virgil who makes famous the idea that the Gates of Sleep/Dream are positioned at the border of the underworld, in Aeneid 6. As Aeneas leaves the underworld at the end of his katabasis, he sees the Gates of Sleep/Dream (Somnus in Latin, which can mean either ‘sleep’ or ‘dream’), one of horn, which easily allows true shades to pass out through it, and one of ivory, through which the Manes send false and bad dreams to heaven. Anchises sends Aeneas and the Sibyl out through the ivory gate (Virgil, Aeneid 6.893–898). Precisely why Virgil chose to connect the Gates of Sleep/Dream with the underworld is bound up with the endlessly debated question of why, following Aeneas’ vision of the glorious future of Rome in the underworld, Virgil describes him leaving through the gate of false dreams, and this is a subject that has been comprehensively covered by other scholars, albeit with little agreement.11 The chief importance of the true/false dichotomy as far as ancient conceptualisations of ghosts and the afterlife is concerned, is that a ghost seen in a dream may be a figment of the dreamer’s imagination, or may really be the spirit of a dead person. This pre-existing ambiguity concerning dream experiences relating to the dead (see above) may be one of the reasons that Virgil places the Gates at the border of the underworld.
Lucian claims that ‘common people’ (ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs) are persuaded by the ‘myth-makers’, or writers of fiction (μυθοποιός, muthopoios), Homer and Hesiod and others, who lead them to believe in the existence of Hades underneath the earth (Lucian, On Mourning 2). However, the ancient evidence suggests that, while people may indeed have believed in the real existence of Hades in broad terms, they did not necessarily sincerely believe in all of the details provided in poetry. The Gates of Sleep/Dream rarely, if ever, appear on graves (although images of the dead as sleeping figures are common; see Koortbojian, 1995, p. 131), in epitaphs, in letters or anything else that might suggest a sincerely held belief or idea. The only reference to the Gates in a consolatory text appears in poetic form.12 There is no mention of the Gates of Dreams, or indeed any gates, in the Orphic Gold tablets found in the graves of some mystery cult initiates (Graf and Johnston, 2013). The association of the Gates with the afterlife also appears to be restricted to Latin texts following in the tradition of Virgil, as Greek references to the Gates, even late ones, tend to associate them entirely with dreams and understand them in the Homeric sense.13 Lattimore even suggested that Hades himself/itself are not as much the objects of sincere belief as the less specific Manes, the divine shades of the dead (Lattimore, 1942, p. 90).
However, although the poem is a clearly literary construct and presented as such, within that narrative construct, Propertius also aims to present the experience as potentially ‘real’ and connect it to a possible ‘reality’. The opening line of the poem, ‘Sunt aliquid Manes’, ‘The Shades are something’, makes a clear statement of intent for the poem – there is something after death. The line inverts Achilles’ realisation, having been confronted with Patroclus’ ghost in a dream, that ‘a soul and shadow’, ‘ψυχὴ καὶ εἴδωλον’ ‘psuchē kai eidōlon’, remains in Hades after death, but with no heart/mind/will (φρήν, phrēn) (Homer, Iliad 23.103–104). Propertius, by contrast, asserts firmly that the Shades, whatever their nature, are something significant (see Dué, 2001, pp. 402–404).
In order to emphasise this aspect of the poem, the suggestion that there just might really be something after death, Propertius blends those aspects of his poem based in the literary world and inspired by the constructed reality of epic poetry with elements drawn from folklore. Identifying folkloric elements in a textual source written two thousand years ago is, of course, not a straightforward exercise. However, it is possible to identify core elements that recur in multiple texts from the ancient world, or in folklore from other places and periods, which may be assumed to represent motifs that formed part of ancient folklore. This is the ‘historic-geographic’ comparative method for analysing folklore which is still often the most practical method for assessing whether elements of a literary work may have their basis in folk tradition (see Virtanen, 1986, p. 222; Hansen, 1990, pp. 241–242).
In folklore studies, a ‘motif’ is ‘the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition’, broadly similar to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ‘mythemes’ (Thompson, 1938, p. 105; Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 211).14 They are ‘the basic building blocks of narratives’, the elements that make up a ‘tale’ or ‘tale type’ (Uther, 2004, p. 10). It is not a perfect system, but it remains, in Alan Dundes’ words, a ‘valuable tool’ (Dundes, 2007, p. 101). By comparing the elements that make up Propertius’ poem with other texts concerning ghosts from the ancient world15 and with Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (which, itself, includes some ancient material),16 we may be able to identify folkloric tropes appearing in the poem. Having identified these elements using comparative methods, we can go on to interpret how and why Propertius uses them.
The crux of this poetic ghost story is that Cynthia visits the living from the underworld, having been murdered. This is one of the most common reasons for a ghost to haunt the living in any type of ghost story, murder victims being the most restless of the ‘restless dead’, those spirits who have died violently or prematurely (on the ancient ‘restless dead’, see Johnston, 1999, pp. 83–84; Ogden, 2002, p. 146; for the folklore motif, see Motif-Index E411.10 ‘Persons who die violent or accidental deaths cannot rest in grave’, E413 ‘Murdered person cannot rest in grave’). The fear of a murder victim returning from beyond the grave to avenge their own death was so prevalent that it was the focus of some ‘real-life’ ritual practices. For example, the Roman festival of the Lemuria focused on appeasing the lemures and the larvae, potentially malevolent spirits belonging to categories of the ‘restless dead’ (see further Lennon, 2013, p. 162). The Greek ritual of maschalismos may also have been intended to prevent a murder victim from being able to rise from their grave to attack their killer (see Doroszewska and Kucharski in this volume).
Cynthia demands vengeance on her murderer, which is also extremely common in cases where the ghost is unable or unwilling to take their revenge themselves. Particularly well known ancient examples can be found at Cicero, De Divinatione 1.57, Virgil, Aeneid 1.353–359, and Apuleius, Metamorphoses 8.8 and 9.29–31 (see also Motif-Index E231 ‘Return from dead to reveal murder’, E231.1, ‘Ghost tells name of murderer’, and E234.0.1, ‘Ghost returns to demand vengeance’; Pausanias 6.20.15–17 offers a clear example of ancient folklore following this pattern). She may or may not be appearing in a dream (D1810.8.2.3 ‘Murder made known in a dream’, E279.2 ‘Ghost disturbs sleeping person’). She returns to haunt her lover, who she complains is faithless (Motif E211 ‘Dead sweetheart haunts faithless lover’).17
Cynthia brings Propertius a chilling prediction that he will soon join her (‘Others may own you now. Soon I alone shall hold you / You’ll be with me and bone on mingled bone I’ll grind’ in Guy Lee’s translation, ll. 93–94). The appearance of a dead loved one to inform the living that they will soon be joining them is a common trope in ancient historical literature (for example, Sulla’s dream in which either his deceased son or his own divine spirit told him to come to him, reported or alluded to in Appian, Civil Wars 1.12.105; Pliny, Natural History 7.43, and Plutarch, Sulla 37) and is not dissimilar to the modern story ‘This is Maria’ mentioned above. The reference to ‘grinding’ or ‘rubbing’ may also have a sexual double meaning, as another common story in Greek and Roman ghost folklore is that of sexual relations with the dead, either with the corpse or a ghost (see Ogden, 2008, pp. 146–169, with examples, the most well-known of which is the story of the tyrant Periander and his dead wife Melissa at Herodotus 5.92. Sex with a ghost can be found in Phlegon of Tralles, Mirabilia 1.1–18). In this case, Cynthia may be humourously implying that the two will resume their relationship in a post-mortem state.
Cynthia’s death is apparently recent and she has not long been buried (E586, ‘Dead returns soon after burial’). Unlike many ancient ghosts who return to demand proper burial (see Felton, 1999, pp. 9–11 for examples and analysis), Cynthia has been buried properly, but she chastises Propertius for failing to attend her funeral and denying her proper mourning rites (E235, ‘Return from dead to punish indignities to corpse, or ghost’, E412.3 ‘Dead without proper funeral rites cannot rest’, E419.8 ‘Ghost returns to enforce its burial wishes or to protest disregard of them’). It is established as far back as Homer that a spirit cannot access the underworld without proper burial (Homer, Iliad, 23.62–76).18 Although Horace suggests three handfuls of earth are all that is required for proper burial (Odes, 1.28), in other cases, even where a corpse is buried properly, it still matters how. Melissa, for example, complains because her clothes have not been burnt properly and she is naked in the underworld (Herodotus 5.92) and mutilating the body to prevent the ghost rising may have been one purpose of maschalismos (Doroszewska and Kucharski in this volume). Roman examples include the emperor Caligula, who was half-cremated and hastily buried but apparently his spirit did not rest until proper funeral rites were performed (Suetonius, Caligula, 69), and a (probably fictional) son whose ghost had been visiting his mother but could be bound in his grave with iron (Quintilian, Major Declamations, 10.2).
In this poem, then, Propertius blends folkloric motifs with literary devices to produce something that is literary, but also recognisable as Roman ghost folklore. If the poem existed on a plane that was purely literary, the reader would be more removed from it. A purely literary work of fantasy cannot make someone think twice about what they believe about the real world (and any world that might exist beyond it). Pure literary fantasy is also, as we have seen from the online evidence, less scary. Central to Jezebel.com’s readers’ enjoyment of scary stories, whether they believed them or not, was the idea that the story might be true.
Did Propertius’ readers believe that the poems were telling ‘true’ stories? If they knew the poet, perhaps they knew whether his lover was a real person or not, or could guess to whom the poems might refer. Apuleius’ comment (Apologia 10) implies that in later periods, it was assumed that at the very least there was a real lover behind the poetry. However, this does not mean Propertius’ audience necessarily expected every detail to be accurate. Like the scary stories told on the internet, it is the appearance of truth that is important – the story has to be believable, and the audience have to be able willingly to pretend that it is true for the duration of the telling. The first person narration and the use of elements of the poet’s real life give love elegy a ring of truth that forms its power when describing love and romantic relationships.
This element of ‘truth’, or possible truth, is equally important in the telling of a ghost story in 4.7, but used to different effect – to provoke some consideration of what may await us after death, even within the highly literary form of an elegiac poem. ‘Real’ and ‘not real’ are deliberately blended, confused and mingled, not to suggest that this event literally happened, but to provide a setting that opens up the possibility that it might have happened. Like all Latin love elegy, the story is presented in a form that also blends the highly literary and the more immediate; a first-person narrated poem, it is presented in the form of a memorate, but in a highly literary, clearly fictionalised construction. It purports to tell a true story relating to the life of the poet, but which author and audience are aware is, in fact, a fiction – but the audience are unaware of how much is fiction, and how much may be based, however, loosely, in fact. It is a highly literary work, but it is also a passionate piece about love and sex and death.
‘Why do sensible people tell modern legends’, asks one folklore scholar, ‘disbelieving but also believing the incredible and almost incredible? Because they are wrestling with the problems inherent in the fairness of their world, because they are testing their ideas about life’ (Goldberg, 1986, p. 164). Many modern ghost memorates include overt statements about the narrator’s belief, or lack thereof, in ghosts, establishing a ‘truth’ claim for their story, even if many readers assume the story to be pure fiction (see Bennett, 1999, p. 115). Propertius does exactly the same in 4.7, overtly discussing the question of the possible existence of life after death at the opening of the poem in order to provoke consideration of the idea in his listeners or readers. This is not to say that 4.7 is a ‘memorate’ in the true sense, a story Propertius claims actually happened to him. The presence of literary motifs like the Gates of Dream (Propertius' somnia implying 'dreams' rather than 'sleep') reassures us that we are in the land of fiction. However, the use of folkloric motifs gives the fiction an added air of plausibility, a sense that all of this could be true, even if the reader or listener knows that it is not. This enhances the deeper thrust of the poem – the Shades are something. Propertius places his poem firmly in the literary world, but he also touches on real ideas and real beliefs – and it is from this combination that the poem draws its power.
1 For ethical reasons, commenters have been anonymised (see Pihlaja, 2017).
2 For a very brief survey of this issue, see the Introduction to this volume, with references.
3 An old tripartite division of myth, legend and folklore that goes back to the Grimm brothers defined each in terms of belief. Myths were traditional tales which are believed, legends were tales told but there is some doubt as to how true they are, while folktales were fictional stories told for entertainment (see Anderson, 2006, p.63; see also Shuman and Hasan-Rokem, 2012, p. 57). However, this distinction has long since been broken down and the relationship between folklore, folk belief and religion has become a frequent subject of study (see Bennett, 1999; Magliocco, 2012, pp. 144–147).
4 Details about the nationality, gender, race, class and so on of the narrators are hard to obtain as all are anonymous. As a broad summary, all narrators who gave an indication of their nationality were from the United States with only four out of 98 stories taking place outside of the US (three of these experienced by visitors from the United States) and the majority of the narrators who gave an indication of their gender were female (Jezebel.com is marketed primarily to women) but a reasonable proportion were clearly male.
5 Of the 98 stories that were either winners or runners-up across 2011 and 2013–2017 (not including the disqualified story from 2016), 31 featured ghosts (clearly defined ghost stories and those that suggest the phenomenon was a ghost through vocabulary such as ‘haunting’), three featured demons, and 29 featured definitely paranormal events of an uncertain nature. Six stories express uncertainty about whether the events had a paranormal cause or not. One story features Death in person, two involve talking toys, four feature living adult women, two involve living human children. Two feature dreams and two involve prophecies or omens.
6 In poem 1.3, Cynthia is portrayed waiting at home for the poet like a faithful wife (matrona) or mistress (meretrix); in 2.23 her ‘man’ (vir, possibly but not necessarily ‘husband’) keeps her under guard; in 4.3 she has a lena (madam) so her status as free woman, Roman wife or prostitute is unclear and shifting (see Miller, 2004, pp. 61–63). Trevor Fear has suggested that this deliberate ambiguity around the status of the puella relates to the political and social context of the poems; that, during the period these poems flourished, there was a general cultural anxiety around matronae behaving like meretrices (like Clodia/Lesbia, for example), an anxiety the poets play with by positioning their fictionalised lovers as both (Fear, 2000, p. 220). Cynthia’s personality is similarly variable; Connolly has argued that the individual character of the mistress is simply ‘not relevant to elegy’s project’ (Connolly, 2000, p.88; her italics). Veyne suggests that Propertius’ poems offer ‘not the “story” of Cynthia but rather the Cynthia cycle: a gallery of genre scenes’ (Veyne, 1988b, p.32). As McCoskey and Torlone put it, ‘Propertius’ work persistently defies any attempt to produce a single or coherent romantic narrative, for contradictions and inconsistencies . . . abound’ (McCoskey and Torlone, 2014, p. 24).
7 Ogden has suggested dreams were ‘the usual way’ for the living to experience a ghost in antiquity and Felton claims that many of the earliest ghost stories are in the form of dreams (Felton, 1999, p. 19; Ogden, 2002, p. 147). There are, in fact, numerous examples from throughout antiquity of ghosts appearing to those who are awake, and one source even suggests that dreams did not represent ‘real’ encounters, while waking experiences did (Quintilian, Major Declamations, 10). However, as I have argued elsewhere, dreams remained a common vehicle for ghosts to visit, especially in Roman literature, and the fact that a ghost was seen in a dream did not necessarily indicate that it was not a ‘real’ encounter with a spirit – see Harrisson, 2013, pp. 136–139.
8 On the Hellenistic influences, see especially Papanghelis, 1987. Numerous scholars have discussed the relationship between Propertius’ fourth book in general, and 4.7 in particular, and epic; see among others Allison, 1984: 357–8; Booth, 1995, pp. 56–63; Dué, 2001; Wyke, 2002, pp. 81, 106; Hutchinson 2006: 189. On the comic elements of the poem, see for example Allison, 1984, p. 357; Veyne, 1988b, p. 48; Johnson, 2012.
9 Allegorical interpretations, proposed by both Servius (Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii, 6.893) and Eustathius (Commentarios in Homeri Iliadem et Odysseam, 1877.33–39) continue to be popular; see for example Haller, 2009, p. 398; Rozokoki, 2001, p. 6.
10 When the Gates are mentioned by Plato (Charmides, 173a), they are connected simply with dreams, and with whether certain dreams are true or false. One of Aesop’s fables has a sculptor meet the living god Hermes in a dream, standing at the Gates of Dreams (ἐν πύλαις ὀνειρείαις, en pulais oneireiais), and Hermes jokes that the sculptor will make either a god or a corpse of him (because his statue will either be placed at a tomb or dedicated to him), but this is not an indication that the gates themselves are connected with death (Babrius, 30).
11 For a sizeable bibliography, see Horsfall, 1995, p. 146. For a history of philological and editorial work on this section, see Thomas, 2001, pp. 193–198.
12 In Statius’ lament for his father (Silvae 5.3), the poet prays that his father’s shade will be allowed to go to the grove where the better gate of horn overcomes that of ivory, allowing him to teach Statius as he used to, in the image of a dream (Statius, Silvae, 5.3.288–289). This poem is followed by a poem (5.4) that asks the god Somnus (Sleep/Dream) to relieve the poet’s insomnia, and then another poem of consolation (5.5). Sleep or sleeplessness, death and grief are, therefore, over-arching themes that tie together these particular poems, and so Statius follows Virgil in connecting the traditional Gates of Sleep/Dream with death and the dead.
13 Lucian uses the Gates as part of his consistent scathing references to Homer as a liar, referring only to the Gate of Ivory (the false gate), on the Island of Dreams (Lucian, True Story, 2.32). Philostratus the Elder, describing a painting depicting the incubation oracle of Amphiaraus at Oropos, which depicts the Gate of Dreams (ὀνείρων πύλη, oneirōn pulē, a slightly odd singular reference to one of a double set of gates) and the god Dream (Ὄνειρος, Oneiros), says ‘and he carries in his hands a horn, showing that he brings up dreams through [the gate] of truth’ (ἔχει καὶ κέρας ἐν ταῖν χεροῖν, ὡς τὰ ἐνύπνια διὰ τῆς ἀληθοῦς ἀνάγων, echei kai kepas en tain cheroin, hōs ta enupnia dia tēs alēthous anagōn) (Philostratus Major, Imagines, 1.26). See also the later texts Colluthus, The Rape of Helen, 319–326; Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 34.89 and 44.50.
14 See further Alan Dundes on the relationship between Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology, which Dundes argues is more ‘comparativist’ than ‘structuralist’, and folklore tale types; Dundes, 1997, p. 41.
15 For more complete treatments of ancient ghost stories, their types and themes, see Felton 1999; Johnston 1999; Ogden, 2009, pp. 146–178.
16 During the latter two thirds of the twentieth century, Classical scholarship and scholarship on folklore drifted apart (see Hansen 1997, p. 277), and as a result, Classical examples are relatively rare in folklore motif indexes (Mayor, 2000, p. 123), but some do appear in Thompson’s Motif-Index.
17 The existence of this as a motif in folklore may even offer a possible explanation for another inconsistency in 4.7 as compared to the rest of Propertius’ poems; Cynthia in 4.7 represents herself as the faithful one, not Propertius, as he has implied throughout the rest of the corpus, including 4.8.
18 While this idea may have been relaxed over time, it continued to recur in some stories; see Johnston, 1999, pp. 9–10.
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