Lemures

The lemures /ˈlɛmjəriːz/ were shades or spirits of the restless or malignant dead in Roman religion, sometimes used interchangeably with the term larvae (from Latin larva, 'mask'). The term lemures was first used by the Augustan poet Horace (in Epistles 2.2.209), and was the more common literary term during the Augustan era, with larvae being used only once by Horace. However, lemures is also uncommon: Ovid being the other main figure to employ it, in his Fasti, the six-book calendar poem on Roman holidays and religious customs. Later the two terms were used nearly or completely interchangeably, e.g. by St. Augustine in De Civitate Dei.

The word lemures can be traced to the Proto-Indo-European stem *lem-, which also appears in the name of the Greek monster Lamia.