23
Ion, Deinomachus, Cleodemus, and the rest of them, open-mouthed, were giving him unwavering attention, old men led by the nose, all but doing obeisance to so unconvincing a colossus, a woman half a furlong in height, a gigantic bugaboo! For my part I was thinking in the meantime: “They associate with young men to make them wise and are admired by many, but what are they themselves? Only their grey hair and their beard distinguishes them from infants, and for the rest of it, even infants are not so amenable to falsehood.”
24
Deinomachus, for instance, said: “Tell me, Eucrates, the dogs of the goddess—how big were they?” “Taller than Indian elephants,” he replied; “black, like them, with a shaggy coat of filthy, tangled hair.— Well, at sight of her I stopped, at the same time turning the gem that the Arab gave me to the inside of my finger, and Hecate, stamping on the ground with her serpent foot, made a tremendous chasm, as deep as Tartarus; then after a little she leaped into it and was gone. I plucked up courage and looked over, taking hold of a tree that grew close by, in order that I might not get a dizzy turn and fall into it headlong. Then I saw everything in Hades, the River of Blazing Fire, and the Lake, and Cerberus, and the dead, well enough to recognise some of them. My father, for instance, I saw distinctly, still wearing the same clothes in which we buried him.”
24
“What were the souls doing, Eucrates?”’ said Ion. “What else would they be doing,” he said, “except lying upon the asphodel to while away the time, along with their friends and kinsmen by tribes and clans?”’ “Now let the Epicureans go on contradicting holy Plato,” said Ion, “and his doctrine about the souls! But you did not see Socrates himself and Plato among the dead?” “Socrates I saw,” he replied, “and even him not for certain but by guess, because he was bald and pot-bellied; Plato I could not recognise, for one must tell the truth to friends, I take it.
