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.