On Funerals (13-16)

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

If his son should receive permission from Aeacus and Aidoneus to put his head out of the mouth of the pit for a moment and stop his father’s silliness, he would say: “Unfortunate man, why do you shriek? Why do you trouble me? Stop tearing your hair and marring the skin of your face!- Why do you call me names and speak of me as wretched and ill-starred when I have become far better off and happier than you? What dreadful misfortune do you think I am undergoing? Is it that I did not get to be an old man like you, with your head bald, your face wrinkled, your back bent, and your knees trembling,—like you, who in short are rotten with age after filling out so many months and so many Olympiads, and who now, at the last, go out of your mind in the presence of so many witnesses? Foolish man, what advantage do you think there is in life that we shall never again partake of? You will say drinking, no doubt, and dinners, and dress, and love, and you are afraid that for the want of all this I shall die! But are you unaware that not to thirst is far better than drinking, not to hunger than eating, and not to be cold than to have quantities of clothing?