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. We are left to conjecture as to the nature of Lucian’s “crow,” for the word does not seem to be used elsewhere in a similar application. The extreme weight, however, suggests something resembling ball-and-chain, a weight attached by a hook to a chain which perhaps was fastened to the neck-iron. It would have to be carried in the and. 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.



 

 FRIEND 
Who were they, in Heaven’s name? Don’t
hesitate to tell me that also.
 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

 

stood at his portals in the early morning awaiting
his advent, hustled about and locked out by his
servants, while he himself, bursting upon their
vision at last in garments of purple or gold or gaudy
stripes, thought that he was conferring happiness
and bliss upon those who greeted him if he
proffered his right hand or his breast, to be covered
with kisses. They chafed, I assure you, as they
listened!
 
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. Aristippus had lived at the court of Dionysius the Younger. Among the men of letters there present were Plato, Xenocrates, Speusippos, and Aeschines the Socratic. 

 
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


 

that were recently dead. But they covered their
faces and turned away, and if they so much as
cast a glance at us, it was thoroughly servile and
obsequious, even though they had been unimaginably
oppressive and haughty in life. Poor people, however, were getting only half as much torture and
resting at intervals before being punished again.
Moreover, I saw all that is told of in the legends—
Ixion, Sisyphus, Tantalus the Phrygian, who was
certainly in a bad way, A reflection (purposely bald and prosaic, in order to fetch a smile) of Homer’s χαλέπ᾽ ἄλγε' ἔχοντα (Odyssey, 11, 582). and earthborn Tityus—
Heracles, how big he was! Indeed, he took up land
enough for a farm as he lay there! He covered nine pelethra; Odyssey, 11,577; unfortunately we do not know how much a Homeric pelethron was. But when Athena took the measure of Ares, who could shout as loud as nine or ten thousand soldiers, it was but seven pelethra (Il. 5, 860; 21, 407). 

 
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




 

their teeth, I questioned myself how I could distinguish Thersites from handsome Nireus, or the
mendicant Irus from the King of the Phaeacians, or
the cook Pyrrhias from Agamemnon; for none of
their former means of identification abode with
them, but their bones were all alike, undefined,
unlabelled, and unable ever again to be distinguished
by anyone.