Our leisure furnishes me with the opportunity of learning from you, and you with that of instructing me.  Accordingly, I particularly wish to know whether you think there exist such things as phantoms, possessing an appearance peculiar to themselves, and a certain supernatural power, or that mere empty delusions receive a shape from our fears.  For my part, I am led to believe in their existence, especially by what I hear happened to Curtius Rufus.  While still in humble circumstances and obscure, he was a hanger-on in the suite of the Governor of Africa.  While pacing the colonnade one afternoon, there appeared to him a female form of superhuman size and beauty.  She informed the terrified man that she was “Africa,” and had come to foretell future events; for that he would go to Rome, would fill offices of state there, and would even return to that same province with the highest powers, and die in it.  All which things were fulfilled.  Moreover, as he touched at Carthage, and was disembarking from his ship, the same form is said to have presented itself to him on the shore.  It is certain that, being seized with illness, and auguring the future from the past and misfortune from his previous prosperity, he himself abandoned all hope of life, though none of those about him despaired.

Is not the following story again still more appalling and not less marvelous?  I will relate it as it was received by me: 

There was at Athens a mansion, spacious and commodious, but of evil repute and dangerous to health.  In the dead of night there was a noise as of iron, and, if you listened more closely, a clanking of chains was heard, first of all from a distance, and afterwards hard by.  Presently a specter used to appear, an ancient man sinking with emaciation and squalor, with a long beard and bristly hair, wearing shackles on his legs and fetters on his hands, and shaking them.  Hence the inmates, by reason of their fears, passed miserable and horrible nights in sleeplessness.  This want of sleep was followed by disease, and, their terrors increasing, by death.  For in the daytime as well, though the apparition had departed, yet a reminiscence of it flitted before their eyes, and their dread outlived its cause.  The mansion was accordingly deserted, and, condemned to solitude, was entirely abandoned to the dreadful ghost.  However, it was advertised, on the chance of some one, ignorant of the fearful curse attached to it, being willing to buy or to rent it.  Athenodorus, the philosopher, came to Athens and read the advertisement.  When he had been informed of the terms, which were so low as to appear suspicious, he made inquiries, and learned the whole of the particulars.  Yet none the less on that account, nay, all the more readily, did he rent the house.  As evening began to draw on, he ordered a sofa to be set for himself in the front part of the house, and called for his notebooks, writing implements, and a light.  The whole of