Pausanias, Pcriegesis, VI, Elis II, n, 5-7, relates that, at Thasos, one of the rivals of the champion runner, Theagenes, was in the habit of thrashing his statue every night, and that finally to punish the man it fell upon him and crushed him : "The children of the dead man then brought action against the statue for murder, and following one of the Draconian laws, the Thasians threw it into the sea." But a blight oracle declared that it was because the Thasians "had forgotten the greatest of their fellow-citizens." So they fished up the statue and reerected it in its original position.
Pope Formosus was put on trial in 897. Unfortuneately at that point in time he had been dead for eight months:
The Cardinals, the Bishops, and many other Church dignitaries, assembled in Sanhedrin. The Pope's body, wrested from the tomb in which it had been lying for eight months, was clothed in the pontifical robes and seated on a throne in the Council hall. Pope Stephen's attorney arose and turned towards the horrible mummy at its side sat a terrified deacon who had been designated to act as its counsel. [Animals too had their attorneys.] The prosecutor read the charges. Then the living Pope inveighed at the dead Pope in a mad violence: 'Why, ambitious man, didst thou usurp the Apostolic See of Rome, thou who wert Bishop of Porto?' The attorney of Formosus answered in his defence so far as terror did not paralyze
his tongue. The dead Pope was convicted and his punishment fixed.
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