22–23
Charon
Eat and drink, when their skulls are dry bone? But I am wasting my breath: you bring them down every day;— you can say whether they are likely ever to get up again, once they are safely underground! That would be too much of a good thing! You would have your work cut out for you and no mistake, if you had not only to bring them down, but also to take them up again when they wanted a drink. Oh, fools and blockheads! You little know how we arrange matters, or what a gulf is set betwixt the living and the dead! The buried and unburied, both are Death’s. He ranks alike the beggar and the king; Thersites sits by fair-haired Thetis’ son. Naked and withered roam the fleeting shades Together through the fields of asphodel.
5
Hermes
Bless me, what a deluge of Homer!
And now I think of it, I must show you Achilles’s tomb. There it is on the Trojan shore, at Sigeum. “And across the water is Rhoeteum, where Ajax lies buried.
Charon
Rather small tombs, considering. Now show me the great cities, those that we hear talked about in Hades; Nineveh, Babylon, Mycenae, Cleonae, and Troy itself. I shipped numbers across from there, I remember. For ten years running I had no time to haul my boat up and clean it.
