In the opening of his Life of Cimon, Plutarch relates a violent episode from his own city, Chaeronea. A young man named Damon killed a Roman commander, fought the city’s authorities, returned under a promise of reconciliation and was himself murdered in a vapour-bath. The bath then became associated with phantoms and groaning sounds. Its doorway, Plutarch says, was walled up.
The passage is a valuable ancient record of a local haunting tradition. It is not a report that Plutarch personally watched a ghost appear. He distinguishes what earlier generations told from what neighbours continued to believe. The story also serves a wider purpose in his biography: it explains Chaeronea’s gratitude to the Roman statesman Lucullus.
Damon and the Roman commander
Plutarch introduces Damon as an orphan, surnamed Peripoltas, belonging to a family with a distinguished martial past. He describes him as physically impressive, spirited and harshly trained. A Roman officer wintering with his cohort at Chaeronea became interested in him and, after gifts and persuasion failed, appeared ready to use force.
The threat is central to Plutarch’s account. Damon feared coercion and enlisted companions against the officer. There were sixteen in the group. They darkened their faces with soot, drank together and attacked at daybreak while the commander was sacrificing in the marketplace. They killed him and several followers before leaving the city.
These are details of the narrative Plutarch records. They should be attributed to him rather than presented as a newly reconstructed criminal case with surviving depositions. The text gives no basis for inventing the commander’s name, a precise market address or an independently verified motive beyond the account itself.
A city trying to survive
The city council condemned the killers to death. Plutarch says this decision later formed part of Chaeronea’s defence to the Roman authorities. Damon and his men then returned while magistrates were dining together, killed them and fled again. The city was caught between a Roman response and violence from its own outlawed inhabitants.
Lucius Lucullus happened to pass through with an army. Plutarch describes him investigating while memories of the events were still fresh and deciding that the city itself was not responsible but had also suffered. Lucullus removed the garrison with him. This is the inquiry described in the passage: it concerns civic responsibility for killings, not an investigation into a ghost at the bath.
Damon continued raiding the surrounding country and threatening the community. The citizens eventually persuaded him to return through conciliatory measures and appointed him gymnasiarch. That office belongs to the civic setting of the story. It does not establish that he was killed because of a particular sporting contest or that the bath’s location can be recovered from the title alone.
Death in the vapour-bath
According to Plutarch, Damon was killed while anointing himself in the vapour-bath soon after his return. The compressed account does not name the killers or give the immediate circumstances in the detail expected from a modern investigation. The apparent reconciliation ends in another act of violence, after which the bathing place acquires its frightening reputation.
Plutarch reports that phantoms appeared and groans were heard there for a long period afterwards. He expressly credits earlier generations for that part of the account. The door was walled up, and neighbours in his own time still regarded the place as a source of alarming sights and sounds.
The phrasing matters. There is a claim of continuing local belief, but no list of individually dated sightings, no description of a single apparition’s clothes or face, and no account of a controlled vigil. A modern retelling that supplies those details would be adding evidence the original passage does not contain.
What the blocked doorway establishes
The doorway is a concrete element within the tradition. It connects a feared place with an act of avoidance or containment. But a narrated blocked entrance cannot, on its own, establish what caused the noises or visions. Nor does the passage describe who ordered the wall built, how the work was checked or whether the reports stopped immediately afterwards.
The wall should therefore not become an invented successful exorcism. Plutarch does not recount a ritual confrontation with Damon’s spirit. He records a place that remained alarming in neighbourhood memory despite the closure. That is a different and more interesting claim than a simple ghost-banishing ending.
The narrative also does not explicitly identify every phantom as a visible likeness of Damon. The association follows from the sequence of his murder and the reports at the bath. It is reasonable to describe the case as the haunting connected with Damon, while avoiding a claim that the author supplies a positively recognised portrait of his ghost.
Why the story begins a biography
The next chapter explains a dispute in which Chaeronea’s neighbours at Orchomenus pursued the city over the Roman soldiers’ deaths. Lucullus’s testimony helped save the community from condemnation. The citizens erected his statue, and Plutarch presents his own biographical writing as a later expression of gratitude.
This setting helps explain why the Damon episode appears before the account of Cimon’s career. It introduces local memory and the city’s relationship with Lucullus, who is paired with Cimon in the Parallel Lives. The haunting is embedded within that civic and biographical explanation, rather than presented as an isolated technical study of apparitions.
Recognising an author’s purpose does not prove that every detail is false. It tells the reader what kind of source is being used and what questions it was written to answer. Here, the source combines a story of local violence, inherited fear and the moral obligation to remember a benefactor.
Place, date and image
Approximate map area: 38.49551, 22.84424, the modern village reference for Chairóneia in Boeotia. The pin does not identify Damon’s bath or murder site. This article has not established a surviving structure that can safely be labelled the haunted bath, and it gives no permission to enter ruins or private land.
The incident year remains unassigned. Plutarch places the episode within a Roman historical setting but does not give the ghost reports a precise calendar year. Assigning one from the lifespan or campaigns of a named figure would create precision absent from this source review. The readable period describes it as ancient and undated.
The 1882 landscape illustration supplies geographical context only. It was published many centuries after the story and does not show an authenticated bath, Damon or a ghost. Its caption distinguishes those roles explicitly.
Assessment and primary reading
The case has insufficient evidence for an independently established haunting. Plutarch’s text documents the tradition and his account of its continuing local reputation. It does not supply enough observation records to demonstrate an apparition, identify the cause of the sounds or attach them securely to a surviving building.
Read Plutarch, Life of Cimon, chapters 1–2, in Bernadotte Perrin’s public-domain 1914 translation reproduced by LacusCurtius. The important distinctions appear in chapter 1.6 and the following discussion of Lucullus. The locality reference is GeoNames, Chairóneia. Sources and image rights checked 13 November 2026.