A 1999 ADVERTISEMENT cast Greece as the ‘longest running theatrical event’, a status paradoxically endorsed by ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’. The caption underneath the full page advert stated, ‘Ask anyone who has been to Greece about the spectacular open air amphitheatres. Witness the grandeur of these astonishing monuments either as a visitor or a spectator in the musical shows, theatrical plays and other cultural events featured each summer in the land that is the birthplace of the dramatic arts’ (my italics). The advertisement's background picture shows a drama in mid-flow, staged in the Odeion of Herodes Atticus (built in the second century AD) at the foot of the Acropolis. Assuming for a moment that the drama in question is a re-enactment of an ancient Greek tragedy, the disjuncture between image and text (and even context) becomes apparent. It is precisely this often uneasy alliance between image and text that this chapter examines in relation to the figure of the ghost or, more specifically, the eidôlon.

Greece was not only the birthplace of the dramatic arts, it was also the birthplace of the stage-ghost, a much neglected but utterly fascinating dramatic character. Since Ruby Hickman's 1938 monograph, Ghostly Etiquette on the Classical Stage, there has been no comprehensive study of ghosts in ancient Greek drama. ‘Ghostly etiquette’ demands that a ghost appear at night to one unaccompanied person, a code of behaviour which renders all ancient Greek stage-ghosts rather impertinent, appearing as they do in broad daylight, in the open-air theatre of Dionysus, often in the presence of the chorus – not to mention the spectators. Ghosts are slippery customers and classification does cause problems. Hickman (1938: 16, 62–3, 124–5, 160), for example, categorises ghosts in Greek and Roman tragedy as dream-ghosts, stage-ghosts, off-stage-ghosts, doubtful ghosts, anonymous ghostly shapes, hallucination, pseudo-ghosts, borderline-ghosts, fictitious dream-ghosts and minor pseudo-ghosts. In order to avoid such complicated categorisation and its attendant problems I have focused on the word eidôlon, the term which is used to designate stage-ghosts in the dramatis personae of ancient Greek tragedy and which, although it does in many ways support the kinds of distinction that Hickman makes, certainly facilitates the attempt to categorise such elusive figures as ghosts.