Menippus, or the Descent Into Hades (11-15)

Since we were in the dark, Mithrobarzanes led the way and I followed after, keeping hold of him, until we reached a very large meadow overgrown with asphodel, where the shades of the dead flitted squeaking about us. Going ahead little by little, we came to the court of Minos. As it chanced, he himself was sitting on a lofty throne, while beside him stood the Tormentors, the Furies, and the Avengers. From one side a great number of men were being led up in line, bound together with a long chain; they were said to be adulterers, procurers, tax-collectors, toadies, informers, and all that crowd of people who create such confusion in life. In a separate company the millionaires and the money-lenders came up, pale, pot-bellied, and gouty, each of them with a neck-iron and a hundred-pound “crow” upon him.[*] Standing by, we looked at what was going on, and listened to the pleas of the defendants, who were prosecuted by speakers of a novel and surprising sort.

MENIPPUS You know these shadows that our bodies cast in the sunshine?

FRIEND Why, to be sure!

MENIPPUS Well, when we die, they prefer charges and give evidence against us, exposing whatever we have done in our lives; and they are considered very trustworthy because they always keep us company and never leave our bodies.

But to resume, Minos would examine each man carefully and send him away to the Place of the Wicked, to be punished in proportion to his crimes; and he dealt most harshly with those who were swollen with pride of wealth and place, and almost expected men to bow down and worship them; for he resented their short-lived vainglory and superciliousness, and their failure to remember that they themselves were mortal and had become possessed of mortal goods. So, after stripping off all their quondam splendour—wealth, I mean, and lineage and sovereignty—they stood there naked, with hanging heads, reviewing, point by point, their happy life among us as if it had been adream. For my part I was highly delighted to see that, and whenever I recognized one of them, I would go up and quietly remind him what he used to be in life and how puffed up he had been then, when many men

But to return to Minos, he gave one decision by favour; for Dionysius of Sicily had been charged with many dreadful and impious crimes by Dion as prosecutor and the shadow as witness, but Aristippus of Cyrene appeared—they hold him in honour, and he has very great influence among the people of the lower world—and when Dionysius was within an ace of being chained up to the Chimera, he got him let off from the punishment by saying that many men of letters had found him obliging in the matter of money.[*]

Leaving the court reluctantly, we came to the place of punishment, where in all truth, my friend, there were many pitiful things to hear and to see. The sound of scourges could be heard, and therewithal the wails of those roasting on the fire; there were racks and pillories and wheels; Chimera tore and Cerberus ravened. They were being punished all together, kings, slaves, satraps, poor, rich, and beggars, and all were sorry for their excesses. Some of them we even recognized when we saw them, all

After making our way past these people also, we entered the Acherusian Plain, where we found the demigods and the fair women and the whole crowd of the dead, living by nations and by clans, some of them ancient and mouldy, and, as Homer says, “impalpable,” while others were still well preserved and substantial, particularly the Egyptians, thanks to the durability of their embalming process. It was not at ail easy, though, to tell them apart, for all, without exception, become precisely alike when their bones are bare. However, with some difficulty and by dint of long study we made them out. But they were lying one atop of another, ill-defined, unidentified, retaining no longer any trace of earthly beauty. So, with many skeletons lying together, all alike staring horridly and vacuously and baring