Ulysses Consulting the Shadow of Tiresias

On this ceramic, Ulysses invokes the souls of the dead and of the soothsayer Tiresias.
Ghosts and spectres also haunted the stories of the Ancients: in Rome, people spoke of how to conjure up the Lemurs, spirits that had to be appeased for fear that they would come to haunt the living. Heroes, like Ulysses, Aeneas or Orpheus, go to confront them. Fantasy also serves to blur the boundaries between the world of the living and that of the dead, while playing upon people’s primitive fears.