ABSTRACT
The man in the Greek or Roman street might be thought of as having little to do with fantasy, the more reflect on it, the more difficult it is to avoid the fantastic in the course of everyday experience. Walk along a major road and the tombstone inscriptions will urge the passer-by to stop and read the lives of the eloquent dead. The boundary between the living and the dead, impassable in fact, is one of the most frequent sources of fantasy in antiquity. Sepulchral epigrams apart, the rhetorical figure eidolopoiia can enable the dead to speak to the living in a climate where the normal rules of biology are suspended. In the hands of Lucian, a whole sub-genre of miniature Dialogues of the Dead can be seen to emerge. Apart from thematic subject-matter, are able to consider several examples of fantasy in specific texts.
