Types of “restless” dead, relatively active ghosts likely to manifest themselves (and convenient for magical exploitation):
1. Aoroi (from αωροσ, untimely): “those dead before their time.” Those cheated of their full stint of life bitterly stayed back to haunt the land of the living of which they had been deprived. In theory anyone who died of anything other than of natural causes in old age could generate a ghost restless qua aoros, although as a class aoroi tended to be conceptualized primarily as the ghosts of children or babies. 2. Bi(ai)othanatoi (from βιαιος and θανατος, violent and death): “those dead by violence.” The battle-dead and executed criminals, although murder victims and suicides provide the bitterest ghosts in this class. 3. Agamoi (from αγαμος, unmarried): “those dead before marriage.” Both male and female ghosts could be assigned this category, although the female ones were regarded as particularly bitter, insofar as marriage and the motherhood consequent upon it were a woman’s defining rights in antiquity. 4. Ataphoi (from αταφος, unburied): “those deprived of burial.” Whatever the circumstances of death, a ghost could not achieve rest without the due funeral rights. These were importantly distinct from the mere insertion of the corpse into a hole in the ground, and indeed the concealment of a dead body in precisely this way is often presented as the chief obstacle to the peace of its soul.
[Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds]
