Roman ghosts (again)

I'm probably I'm going to get a reputation as some sort of strange crank for going on about this but this time I'm going to blame Mary Beard.

I've been spending the past few hot sticky afternoons rereading her 'Confronting the Classics', which is basically a collection of reviews written for various classical journals and literary magazines.

The first time around I must admit I tended to dismiss it as 'professors arguing with professors', but this time, perhaps because I know more and have thought more, I can see more depth to the collection.

Anyway, in discussing Boudicca she mentions a theory that she was buried on Gop hill in Flintshire and that her ghostly chariot can sometimes be seen careering about (personally I suspect Boudicca's body was lost and thrown into a mass grave at best).

However, I'd never heard of Gop hill, so I looked it up and it turns out to be a substantial prehistoric mound of unknown purpose.

The various sites I looked at didn't mention any legend of Boudicca's burial but one did mention a legend that the ghost of Aurelian (identified as Ambrosius Aurelianus) was sometimes seen on the site, and included a link to an online database of ghost sightings in the UK.

Now, normally I wouldn't bother with such things, but as my post about Roman ghost sightings in the nineteenth century was one of my most popular blog posts in 2023, I thought I'd take a look at the database for mentions of Roman ghosts and I was immediately struck by two things:

(a) where the provenance of a story is known it is from the nineteen twenties at the earliest

(b) many of the stories repeat features from other stories, eg a group of Roman soldiers is seen walking down a street, but are cut off at the knees, presumably because the Roman road surface was lower than today's, suggesting a degree of re-invention.

Which kind of reinforces my view that ghosts of dead Romans were not a nineteenth century thing ...