The third judgment was given
in a matter of precedence between Alexander,
son of Philip, and Hannibal of Carthage, and the
decision was that Alexander outranked Hannibal,
so his chair was placed next the elder Cyrus of
Persia.
 Cf. Dialogues of the Dead, 25. 

 

We were brought up fourth; and he asked
us how it was that we trod on holy ground while still
alive, and we told him the whole story. Then he
had us removed, pondered for a long time, and
consulted with his associates about us, Among
many other associates he had Aristides the Just, of
Athens. When he had come to a conclusion,
sentence was given that for being inquisitive and
not staying at home we should be tried after death,
but that for the present we might stop a definite
time in the island and share the life of the heroes,
and then we must be off. They set the length of our
stay at not more than seven months.

 

Thereupon our garlands fell away of themselves,
and we were set free and taken into the city
and to the table of the blessed. The city itself is
all of gold and the wall around it of emerald.
 Lucian’s city is not necessarily a paredy on the New
Jerusalem, though the scholiast so understood it. It
has seven gates, all of single planks of cinnamon.
The foundations of the city and the ground within
its walls are ivory. There are temples of all the
gods, built of beryl, and in them great monolithic
altars of amethyst, on which they make their great






 

burnt-offerings. Around the city runs a river of
the finest myrrh, a hundred royal cubits wide and
five deep, so that one can swim in it comfortably.
For baths they have large houses of glass, warmed
by burning cinnamon; instead of water there is hot
dew in the tubs.

 

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.