Auteur(s) : John PERCIVAL (Univ. of Wales, Cardiff, Grande-Bretagne)
Titre : Saints, Ghosts and the Afterlife of the Roman Villa
Revue : L’Antiquité Classique
Volume : 65
Date : 1996
Pages : 161-173

Abstract:
The appearance, in a number of fifth-century and later Lives of saints, of ghost stories involving unburied bodies in derelict buildings, raises the possibility that such stories, though clearly part of a largely literary tradition, may nevertheless reflect in some way the realities of life in post-Roman Europe. Linked as they may well be with the well attested practice of using abandoned Roman villas as places of burial, they can collectively be used to throw light on social conditions and values in this period, and to illustrate ways in which, even as ruins, the villas continued to have an influence on the pattern of rural settlement.