* The Romans apparently had no word in Latin for this exact idea of poetic, spiritual, or religious imagination that produced a symbolic representation of inner truth. The word imagination meant in classical Latin “fictitious,” in the sense that the picture is not the same as the external object that it represents. Roman writers came to use the Greek word phantasía when they wanted to speak of the human faculty by which we express the contents of the soul by using poetic or spiritual imagery. Cicero used the Greek characters to write the word.