Athenodorus' Ghost and Pliny the Younger: The Story Behind Western Civilization's First Paranormal Encounter
Pliny the Younger, or Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, as he would have been known in Latin to his Roman contemporaries began what is quite possibly Western Civilization’s first ever account of a haunted house with these ominous words: “There was in Athens, a large and spacious, but ill-reputed and pestilential house.” (from Letters VII: 27 Pliny the Younger) After the famed orator and statesman Cicero, Pliny the Younger is the Roman world’s best known letter writer and politician of the first and second centuries A.D. Today there are ten surviving volumes of letters, over 350 missives in total, that survive and bear the name of Pliny the Younger. (Beard pp. 424-425) He lived between the years 60 A.D. and circa 115 A.D, reaching heights of great fame for his learning and erudition throughout the Roman Empire, before dying suddenly at around the age of fifty-five while traveling away from Rome in Asia Minor in what is present day Turkey. At least, this is how historians today believ