On Funerals (16-20)

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?

“Come now, since you apparently do not know how to mourn, I will teach you to do it more truth-

If you say this, father, don't you think it will be far more true and more manly than what you said before ? “But perhaps it is something else that worries you. You are thinking of the gloom where we are, and the profound darkness, and so you fear that I may be stifled in the close custody of the tomb. On that point you should reflect that as my eyes will very soon be corrupted or even burned, if you have decided to burn me, I shall have no need either for darkness or for light as far as seeing is concerned.

“That fear, however, is perhaps reasonable enough; but what good do you think I get from your wailing, and this beating of breasts to the music of the flute, and the extravagant conduct of the women in lamenting? Or from the wreathed stone above my grave? Or what, pray, is the use of your pouring out the pure wine? You don't think, do you, that it will drip down to where we are and get all the way through to Hades? As to the burnt offerings, you yourselves see, I think, that the most nourishing part of your provender is carried off up to Heaven by the smoke without doing us in the lower world the least bit of good, and that what is left, the ashes, is useless, unless

These words spoken, at once the doom of death overwhelmed him.[*]