The Ferry (2-4)

Klotho

What, Charon? How do you know that some pressage of business has not overtaken him? Perhaps Zeus has had to use him more than usual in matters above. He is his master, too.

Charon

Not so far as to have more than his share of control over a common servant. Certainly we have never detained him when he ought to go. But I know why it is. Down here there is nothing but asphodel and funeral libations and sacrificial cakes and offerings to the shades. All the rest is gloom and mist and darkness. But in heaven everything is radiant, and there is ambrosia in abundance, and no stint of nectar. So I imagine it is pleasanter to linger among these things. He flies from here as though he were running away from a prison. But when it is time to come down his pace is so leisurely and slow that he hardly gets here at all.

Klotho

Don't be angry any longer, Charon, for here he is himself, quite near, you see, bringing us a great many people and driving the crowd along with his staff more as if they were a herd of goats. But what is this? I see one in irons among them, and another laughing, and one has a leathern pouch slung about him and carries a club in his hand. He looks fiercely about and urges on the others. See, Hermes himself, too, is dripping with perspiration and panting, and

his feet are covered with dust. He can hardly breathe. What is the matter, Hermes? What is your hurry? It looks to us as if you were in trouble.

Hermes

It is all this wretch here, Klotho. He ran away, and I chased him till I came near deserting the ship for to-day.

Klotho

Who is he, and what did he want to run away for?

Hermes

That is easy to see-because he preferred to live. He is some king or despot, to judge from his lamentations and the things he mourns for. He says he has been deprived of great happiness of some sort.

Klotho

Then the poor fool tried to run away because he thought he could come to life again after the thread woven for him had already come to an end?

Hermes

Tried to run away, do you say? Yes, and if my very good friend here, the one with the club, had not helped me to capture him and put him in irons, he would have got clean away from us. For, from the moment Atropos handed him over to me, the whole way along he has been resisting and struggling, and he would plant his feet on the ground so that he was not exactly easy to conduct. And sometimes he would fall to supplication and prayer, begging me to let him go for a little and promising great bribes. But

I, of course, did not loose him, for I saw he was longing for the impossible. But when we had come to the very entrance and I was giving the customary inventory of the dead to Aiakos, and he was reckoning them by the memorandum sent to him by your sister, that confounded villain managed somehow to give us the slip and get off. Accordingly, there was one soul short by the count, and Aiakos, raising his eyebrows, said, "Don't use your thieving skill in all departments, Hermes. Be satisfied with your tricks in heaven. Dealings with the dead are exact, and can in no way evade scrutiny. The memorandum, you see, has 'one thousand and four' written on it, but you come bringing me one too few, unless you are prepared to say that Atropos has falsified her accounts for you." I blushed at this speech, and instantly remembered what had happened on the road, and when I cast my eye about and saw this fellow nowhere I perceived that he had run away, and gave chase as hard as I could up the road to daylight. This good soul here followed me of his own motion. We ran like racers, and only caught him at Tain- He was as near as that to getting away.