22
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.
22
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.
22
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.
22
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.
22
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.
