Moreover, irreligious people are notoriously superstitious, and at this period it would be very difficult to say just where religion ended and superstition began.

We have one or two ghost stories connected with early Greek mythology.  Cillas, the charioteer of Pelops, though Troezenius gives his name as Sphaerus, died on the way to Pisa, and appeared to Pelops by night, begging that he might be duly buried.  Pelops took pity on him and burnt[85] his body with all ceremony, raised a huge mound in his honour, and built a chapel to the Cillean Apollo near it.  He also named a town after him.  Strabo even says that there was a mound in Cillas’ honour at Crisa in the Troad.  This dutiful attention did not go unrewarded.  Cillas appeared to Pelops again, and thanked him for all he had done, and to Cillas also he is said to have owed the information by which he was able to overthrow OEnomaus in the famous chariot race which won him the hand of Hippodamia.  Pelops’ shameless ingratitude to OEnomaus’s charioteer, Myrtilus, who had removed the pin of his master’s chariot, and thus caused his defeat and death in order to help Pelops, on the promise of the half of the kingdom, is hardly in accordance with his treatment of Cillas, though it is thoroughly Greek.  However, on the theory that a man who betrays one master will probably betray another, especially if he is to be rewarded for his treachery with as much as half a kingdom, Pelops was right in considering that Myrtilus was best out of the way; and he can hardly have foreseen the curse that was to fall upon his family in consequence.

With this story we may compare the well-known tale of the poet Simonides, who found an unknown corpse on the shore, and honoured it with burial.[86] Soon afterwards he happened to be on the point of starting on a voyage, when the man whom he had buried appeared to him in a dream, and warned him on no account to go by the ship he had chosen, as it would undoubtedly be wrecked.  Impressed by the vision, the poet remained behind, and the ship went down soon afterwards, with all on board.  Simonides expressed his gratitude in a poem describing the event, and in several epigrams.  Libanius even goes so far as to place the scene of the event at Tarentum, where he was preparing to take ship for Sicily.

The tale is probably mythical.  It belongs to a group of stories of the grateful dead, which have been the subject of an interesting book recently published by the Folk-Lore Society.[87] Mr. Gerould doubts whether it really belongs to the cycle, as it is nearly two centuries earlier, even in Cicero’s version, than any other yet discovered; but it certainly inspired Chaucer in his Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and it may well have influenced other later versions.  The Jewish version is closer to the Simonides story than any of the others, and I will quote it in Mr. Gerould’s words.[88]