Truly, it is well worth while to observe what most people do and say at funerals, and on the other hand what their would-be comforters say; to observe also how unbearable the mourners consider what is happening, not only for themselves but for those whom they mourn. Yet, I swear by Pluto and Persephone, they have not one whit of definite knowledge as to whether this experience is unpleasant and worth grieving about, or on the contrary delightful and better for those who undergo it. No, they simply commit their grief into the charge of custom and habit. When someone dies, then, this is what they do—but stay! First I wish to tell you what beliefs they hold about death itself, for then it will become clear why they engage in these superfluous practices.

The general herd, whom philosophers call the laity, trust Homer and Hesiod and the other mythmakers in these matters, and take their poetry for a law unto themselves. So they suppose that there is a place deep under the earth called Hades, which is large and roomy and murky and sunless; I don’t know how they imagine it to be lighted up so that everything in it can be seen. The king of the abyss is a brother of Zeus named Pluto, who has been honoured with that appellative, so I was told by one well versed in such matters, because of his wealth of corpses.

The Greeks derived the name Ploutdn (Pluto) from ploutein (to be rich), and generally held that it was given to Hades because he owned and dispensed the riches that are in the earth. So Lucian in the Timon(21). Here, however, we have in substance the view of Cornutus (5): “He was called Pluto because, of all that is perishable, there is nothing which does not at last go down to him and become his property.”

This Pluto, they say, has organized his state and the world below as follows. He himself has been allotted the sovereignty of the dead, whom he receives, takes in charge, and retains in close custody, permitting nobody whatsoever to go back up above, except, in all time, a very few for most important reasons.

His country is surrounded by great rivers, fearful even in name; for they are called “Wailing,” “Burning Fire,’ and the like. But the principal feature is Lake Acheron, which lies in front and first receives visitors; it cannot be crossed or passed without the ferryman, for it is too deep to ford afoot and too broad to swim across—indeed, even dead birds cannot fly across it!

Many places on earth, men thought, exhaled vapours so deadly that birds, attempting to cross them, fell dead; the most famous of these “Plutonia” was the lake near Cumae, called “Aopyos par excellence, whence Avernus. Iflive birds could not fly across Avernus, surely the ghost of a bird could not fly across Acheron.

Hard by the descent and the portal, which is of adamant, stands the king’s nephew, Aeacus, who is commander of the guard; and beside him is a three-headed dog, very long-fanged, who gives a friendly, peaceable glance to those who come in, but howls at those who try to run away and frightens them with his great mouth.

After passing the lake on going in, one comes next to a great meadow overgrown with asphodel, and to a spring that is inimical to memory; in fact, they call it “Oblivion” for that reason. All this, by the way, was told to the ancients by people who came back from there, Alcestis and Protesilaus of Thessaly, Theseus, son of Aegeus, and Homer's Odysseus, highly respectable and trustworthy witnesses, who, I suppose, did not drink of the spring, or else they would not have remembered it all.