Lucian Contemplantes 22

CHARON

There is one thing more that I wanted to know about, Hermes, and when you point it out to me you will have done your full duty as guide; it is to see the places where they stow the bodies, where they bury them, I mean.

HERMES

They call such places vaults, tombs and graves. Do you see those heaps of earth and slabs of stone and pyramids in front of the cities? All those are for the reception of corpses and the storage of bodies.

CHARON

Why is it, then, that those people are putting garlands on the stones and anointing them with perfume? There are others also who have built pyres in front of the mounds and have dug trenches, and now they are burning up those fine dinners and pouring wine and mead, as far as one may judge, into the ditches.

HERMES

I don’t know what good these things are to men in Hades, ferryman; they are convinced, however, that the souls, allowed to come up from below, get their dinner as best they may by flitting about the smoke and steam and drink the mead out of the trench.

CHARON

What, they eat and drink, when their skulls are dry as tinder? But it is silly for me to tell that to you, who bring them down below every day; you know whether they can come back to earth when they have once gone under ground! I should be in a fine predicament, Hermes, and should have no end of trouble if I were obliged not only to bring them down but to bring them up to drink! What folly, the idiots! They do not know what an impassable frontier divides the world of the dead from the world of the living, and what it is like among us; that

Death maketh mortals alike, be they buried or lying unburied.

Equal is lrus the beggar in honour to King Agamemnon;

Fair-haired Thetis’ son is no better a man than Thersites,

Aye, they are all of them nothing but skeleton relics of dead men,

Bare, dry bones that are scattered about in the asphodel meadow.

A cento from Homer patched up out of Iliad9, 319-320; Odyssey10, 521; 11, 539, 573.

Charon

There is still one thing I had a fancy to see. Show me the receptacles into which they put the corpses, and your office will have been discharged.

Hermes

Ah, sepulchres, those are called, or tombs, or graves. Well, do you see those mounds, and columns, and pyramids, outside the various city walls? Those are the store-chambers of the dead.

Charon

Why, they are putting flowers on the stones, and pouring costly essences upon them. And in front of some of the mounds they have piled up faggots, and dug trenches. Look: there is a splendid banquet laid out, and they are burning it all; and pouring wine and mead, I suppose it is, into the trenches! What does it all mean?

Hermes

What satisfaction it affords to their friends in Hades, I am unable to say. But the idea is, that the shades come up, and get as close as they can, and feed upon the savoury steam of the meat, and drink the mead in the trench.

Charon

Eat and drink, when their skulls are dry bone? But I am wasting my breath: you bring them down every day;— you can say whether they are likely ever to get up again, once they are safely underground! That would be too much of a good thing! You would have your work cut out for you and no mistake, if you had not only to bring them down, but also to take them up again when they wanted a drink. Oh, fools and blockheads! You little know how we arrange matters, or what a gulf is set betwixt the living and the dead!

The buried and unburied, both are Death’s.

He ranks alike the beggar and the king;

Thersites sits by fair-haired Thetis’ son.

Naked and withered roam the fleeting shades

Together through the fields of asphodel.

Hermes

Bless me, what a deluge of Homer!