Well, Pluto and Persephone, as these people said,
are the rulers and have the general over-lordship,
with a great throng of understrappers and assistants
in administration—Furies, Tormentors, Terrors, and
also Hermes, who, however, is not always with them. Hermes had to serve two masters, Zeus and Pluto. See Downward Journey, 1-2 (ii, 5). 

 
As prefects, moreover, and satraps and judges, there
are two that hold court, Minos and Rhadamanthus
of Crete, who are sons of Zeus. These receive the
good, just men who have lived virtuously, and when
many have been collected, send them off, as if to a
colony, to the Elysian Fields to take part in the best
life.

 

But if they come upon any rascals, turning
them over to the Furies, they send them to the
Place of the Wicked, to be punished in proportion
to their wickedness. There—ah! what punishment
do they not undergo? They are racked, burned,
devoured by vultures, turned upon a wheel; they
roll stones uphill; and as for Tantalus, he stands
on the very brink of the lake with a parched throat,
like to die, poor fellow, for thirst!

 

But those of
the middle way in life, and they are many, wander
about in the meadow without their bodies, in the
form of shadows that vanish like smoke in your


 

fingers. They get their nourishment, naturally,
from the libations that are poured in our world and
the burnt-offerings at the tomb; so that if anyone
has not left a friend or kinsman behind him on
earth, he goes about his business there as an unfed
corpse, in a state of famine.

 
So thoroughly are people taken in by all this that
when one of the family dies, immediately they bring
an obol and put it into his mouth, to pay the ferryman
for setting him over. They do not stop to consider
what sort of coinage is customary and current in the
lower world, and whether it is the Athenian or the
Macedonian or the Aeginetan obol that is legal
tender there; nor, indeed, that it would be far
better not to be able to pay the fare, since in that
case the ferryman would not take them and they
would be escorted back to life again.