For clothing they use delicate
purple spider-webs. As for themselves, they have
no bodies, but are intangible and fleshless, with only
shape and figure. Incorporeal as they are, they
nevertheless live and move and think and talk. In
a word, it would appear that their naked souls go
about in the semblance of their bodies. Really, if
one did not touch them, he could not tell that what
he saw was not a body, for they are like upright
shadows, only not black. Nobody grows old, but
stays the same age as on coming there. Again, it is
neither night among them nor yet very bright day,
but the light which is on the country is. like the
gray morning toward dawn, when the sun has not
yet risen. Moreover, they are acquainted with only
one season of the year, for it is always spring there
and the only wind that blows there is Zephyr.

 

The country abounds in flowers and plants of all
kinds, -cultivated and otherwise.
 Lucian makes a villainous pun here, contrasting hemeros (cultivated) with skieros (fond of darkness), as if the former
word meant-‘fond of daylight.’ (hemera)! The grape-vines
yield twelve vintages a year, bearing every month;
the pomegranates, apples and other fruit-trees were
said to bear thirteen times a year, for in one month,
their Minoan, they bear twice. Instead of wheat-ears,
loaves of bread all baked grow on the tops of the



 

halms, so that they Jook like mushrooms. In the
neighbourhood of the city there are three handed
and sixty-five springs of water, as many of honey,
five hundred of myrrh—much smaller, however—seven rivers of milk and eight of wine.

 
Their table is spread outside. the city in the Elysian
Fields, a very beautiful mead with thick woods of
all sorts round about it, overshadowing the feasters.
The couches they lie on are made of flowers, and they
are attended and served by the winds, who, however,
do not pour out their wine, for they do not need anyone to do this. There are great trees of the clearest
glass around the table, and instead of fruit they bear
cups of all shapes and sizes. When anyone comes to
table he picks one or two of the cups and puts them
at his place. These fill with wine at once, and
that is the way they get their drink. Instead of
garlands, the nightingales and the other song-birds
gather flowers in their bills from the fields hard by
and drop them down like snow, flying overhead and
singing. Furthermore, the way they are scented is
that thick clouds draw up myrrh from the springs
and the river, stand over the table and under the
gentle manipulation of the. winds rain down a
delicate dew.

 

At the board they pass their time
with poetry and song. For the most part they
sing the epics of Homer, who is there himself and
shares the revelry, lying at table in the place above
Odysseus. Their choruses are of boys and gnris, fed


 

and accompanied by Eunomus of Locris, Arion of
Lesbos, Anacreon and Stesichorus. There can be
no doubt about the latter, for I saw him there—by
that time Helen had forgiven him.
 Stesichorus had said harsh words of Helen, and was
blinded by Castor and Pollux for his presumption. He
recanted in a famous Palinode, of which some lines are still
preserved (Plato, Phaedrus, 243), and so recovered his eyesight. When they
stop singing another chorus appears, composed of
swans and swallows and nightingales, and as they
sing the whole wood renders the accompaniment,
with the winds leading.