Home › Glossary › Letter L

Lemures

Mythology
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Spirits of the restless or malevolent dead in Roman mythology, often appeased during the Lemuria festival to prevent haunting.

Detailed Definition
The Lemures are ghostly shades of the dead who return to haunt the living, especially during the Lemuria festival in May. They represent unresolved grief, ancestral guilt, and the fear of the afterlife. In Roman poetry, they appear as omens or manifestations of moral disorder. Later poets use them in Gothic or elegiac contexts to explore themes of memory, guilt, and the uncanny presence of the past.
Example
Example in poetry:
Lemures, restless spirits of the dead, are appeased in Ovid’s Fasti during the Lemuria festival; They appear in Horace’s Epodes as “shades that haunt midnight doorways”; Virgil’s Aeneid describes Aeneas seeing Lemures in the underworld’s outskirts; In Roman elegy, Lemures symbolize guilt and ancestral curses; Propertius fears “Lemures of lovers wronged”; Juvenal warns that unburied dead become Lemures, crying for rites.
Additional Notes
Lemures are malevolent spirits of the prematurely or violently dead, appeased during the Lemuria festival (May 9, 11, 13); described by Ovid in Fasti as ghostly, voiceless shades; symbolize guilt, ancestral curses, and the need for ritual closure; useful in ghost poetry, elegy, or horror; students should distinguish them from Lares (benevolent house spirits) and Manes (general dead); the paterfamilias performed rites barefoot, tossing black beans to banish them; they reflect Roman anxiety about improper burial.
Also Known As
Restless Dead Night Specters Unquiet Shades Ghosts of the Unburied Lemure
Skip to main content