On Funerals (11-15)

Then they bathe them (as if the lake down below were not big enough for the people there to bathe in); and after anointing with the finest of perfume that body which is already hasting to corruption, and crowning ‘it with pretty flowers, they lay them in state, clothed in splendid raiment, which, very likely, is intended to keep them from being cold on the way and from being seen undressed by Cerberus.

Next come cries of distress, wailing of women, tears on all sides, beaten breasts, torn hair, and bloody cheeks. Perhaps, too, clothing is rent and dust sprinkled on the head, and the living are in a plight more pitiable than the dead; for they roll on the ground repeatedly and dash their heads against the floor, while he, all serene and handsome and

Then his mother, or indeed his father comes forward from among the family and throws himself upon him; for let us imagine a handsome young man upon the bier, so that the show that is acted over him may be the more moving. The father utters strange, foolish outcries to which the dead man himself would make answer if he could speak. In a plaintive tone, protracting every word, he will say: “Dearest child, you are gone from me, dead, reft away before your time, leaving me behind all alone, woe is me, before marrying, before having children, before serving in the army, before working on the farm, before coming to old age; never again will you roam the streets at night, or fall in love, my child, or drink deep at wine-parties with your young friends.”

He will say all that, and more in the same tenor, thinking that his son still needs and wants this sort of thing even after death, but cannot get it. But that is nothing. Have not many sacrificed horses, concubines, sometimes even cup-bearers, over their dead, and burned or buried with them clothing and other articles of personal adornment, as if they would use them there and get some good of them down below?

But as to the old man who mourns after this fashion, it is not, in all probability, on account of his son that he does all this melodramatic ranting that I have mentioned, and more than I have mentioned; for he knows that his son will not hear him even if he shouts louder than Stentor. Nor yet is it on his own account; for it would have been enough