a blood-sucker. The only way to obtain deliverance from their molestations is by disinterring the dead body, by cutting off the head, by driving a stake through the breast, by transfixing the heart, or by burning the corpse to ashes.”
It may be remarked here that although in the course of this book there will be occasion to deal with many ghosts of the vampire family and to treat of cognate superstitions and traditions the essential feature of the Vampire proper lies in the fact that he is a dead body re-animated with an awful life, who issues from his tomb to prey upon the living by sucking their blood which lends him new vitality and fresh energies. Since he is particularly found in Greece it is to a Greek writer we may go for a description of this pest. One of the earliest—if indeed he were not actually the first—of the writers of the seventeenth century who deals with vampires is Leone Allacci, (Alacci), more commonly known as Leo Allatius.[57] This learned scholar and theologian was born on the island of Chios in 1586, and died at Rome 19th January, 1669. At the age of fourteen he entered the Greek College in Rome, and when he had finished his academic course with most honourable distinction, returned to Chios where he proved of the greatest assistance to the Latin Bishop Marco Giustiniani. In 1616 Allacci received the degree Doctor of Medicine from the Sapienza, and a little later, after having been attached to the Vatican library, he professed rhetoric at the Greek College. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV sent him to Germany to superintend the transportation to Rome of the Palatinate library of Heidelberg, which Maximillian I had presented to the Pope in return for large subsidies that enabled the war to be carried on against the federation of Protestant Princes. This important task, which owing to a disturbed state of the country was one of immense difficulty, Allacci accomplished most successfully, and during the reigns of Urban VIII and Innocent X he continued his work in the Vatican library, especially concentrating upon the Palatinate manuscripts. In 1661 Alexander VI, as a recognition of his vast researches and eminent scholarship, appointed him custodian of the Library. He was an earnest labourer for reunion, in which cause he wrote his great work De Ecclesiae, Occidentalis atque Orientalis perpetua consensione, published at Cologne in 1648, a dissertation wherein all points of agreement are emphasized, whilst the differences are treated as lightly as possible.
