20
These words spoken, at once the doom of death overwhelmed him.Iliad, 16, 502. By Heaven, if the dead man should face them, raising himself upon his elbow, and say all this, don’t you think he would be quite right? Nevertheless, the dolts not only shriek and scream, but they send for a sort of professor of threnodies, who has gathered a repertory of ancient bereavements, and they use him as fellow-actor and prompter in their silly performance, coming in with their groans at the close of each strain that he strikes up!
21
Up to that point, the wailing, the same stupid custom prevails everywhere; but in what follows, the burial, they have apportioned out among themselves, nation by nation, the different modes. The Greek burns, the Persian buries, the Indian encases in glass,See Herodotus, 3, 24, regarding this practice among the Ethiopians, also discussed by Ctesias (Diodorus 2, 15). To Lucian, SaAos certainly meant glass, and perhaps to Herodotus also. What the substance really was is uncertain. the Scythian eats, the Egyptian salts. And the latter—I have seen whereof I speak—after drying the dead man makes him his guest at table! Many a time, too, when an Egyptian wants money, his brother or his father helps him out of his straits by becoming security at the critical juncture.Compare Teles (Hense,2 p. 31, 1. 9: a lacuna in the text recedes): “and we hesitate to look at or to touch (the dead), bat they make mummies of them and keep them in the house as something handsome, and accept dead men as security. So opposed is their way to ours.” As Teles is almost certainly quoting this from Bion, it seems likely that Lucian drew from that source. But he had also read Herodotus, 2, 136.
22
Regarding grave-mounds, pyramids, tombstones, and epitaphs, all of which endure but a brief space, are they not superfluous and akin to child’s play?Compare Teles (Hense, p. 31, 1. 8): “But it seems to me that this (closing the eyes of the dead) is just child’s play on our part.”
