your child? Again, if we do not find something to eat when we come out of the bath, our tutor does not try to moderate our appetite, but beats the cook. Why, did we appoint you tutor of the cook, man? No; but of our child. It is he whom you are to correct and improve. By these means even when we are grown up, we appear children. For an unmusical person is a child in music; an illiterate person, a child in learning; and an untaught one, a child in life.
FOOTNOTES:
[113] From the "Discourses." Translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Copyright, 1890, by Little, Brown & Co.
LUCIAN
Born at Samosata, Syria, about 120 a.d.; died about 200; apprenticed to his maternal uncle, who was a sculptor, but ran away in dislike of the art; becoming interested in the Rhetoricians, began to write himself; his works, as collected in English, comprize four volumes, among them "Dialogues of the Gods," "Dialogues of the Dead," "Zeus, the Tragedian," "The Ferryboat," and "Toxaris."[114]
I
A DESCENT TO THE UNKNOWN[115]
Dawn was approaching when we went down to the river to embark; he had provided a boat, victims, hydromel, and all necessaries for our mystic enterprise. We put all aboard, and then, Troubled at heart, with welling tears, we went. For some distance we floated down stream, until we entered the marshy lake in which the Euphrates disappears. Beyond this we came to a desolate, wooded, sunless spot; there we landed, Mithrobarzanes leading the way, and proceeded to dig a pit, slay our sheep, and sprinkle their blood round the edge. Meanwhile the Mage, with a lighted torch in his hand, abandoning his customary whisper, shouted at the top of his voice an invocation to all spirits, particularly the Pœnæ and Erinyes,
Hecate's dark might, and dread Persephone,
with a string of other names, outlandish, unintelligible, and polysyllabic.
As he ended, there was a great commotion, earth was burst open by the incantation, the barking of Cerberus was heard far off, and all was overcast and lowering:
Quaked in his dark abyss the King of Shades;
for almost all was now unveiled to us, the lake, and Phlegethon, and the abode of Pluto. Undeterred, we made our way down the chasm, and came upon Rhadamanthus half dead with fear. Cerberus barked and looked like getting up; but I quickly touched my lyre, and the first note sufficed to lull him. Reaching the lake, we nearly missed our passage for that time, the ferry-boat being already full; there was incessant lamentation, and all the passengers had wounds upon them; mangled legs, mangled heads, mangled everything; no doubt there was a war going on. Nevertheless, when good Charon saw the lion's skin, taking me for Heracles, he made room, was delighted to give me a passage, and showed us our direction when we got off.
We were now in darkness; so Mithrobarzanes led the way, and I followed holding on to him, until we reached a great meadow of asphodel, where the shades of the dead, with their thin voices, came flitting round us. Working gradually on, we reached the court of Minos; he was sitting on a high throne, with the Pœnæ, Avengers, and Erinyes standing at the sides. From another direction was being brought a long row of persons chained together; I heard that they were adulterers, procurers, publicans, sycophants, informers, and all the filth that pollutes the stream of life. Separate from them came the rich and usurers, pale, pot-bellied, and gouty, each with a hundredweight of spiked collar upon him. There we stood looking at the proceedings and listening to the pleas they put in; their accusers were orators of a strange and novel species.
We left the court at last, and came to the place of punishment. Many a piteous sight and sound was there—cracking of whips, shrieks of the burning, rack and gibbet and wheel; Chimera tearing, Cerberus devouring; all tortured together, kings and slaves, governors and paupers, rich and beggars, and all repenting their sins. A few of them, the lately dead, we recognized. These would turn away and shrink from observation; or if they met our eyes, it would be with a slavish cringing glance—how different from the arrogance and contempt that had marked them in life! The poor were allowed half-time in their tortures, respite and punishment alternating. Those with whom legend is so busy I saw with my eyes—Ixion,[116] Sisyphus, the Phrygian Tantalus in all his misery, and the giant Tityus—how vast, his bulk covering a whole field!
Leaving these, we entered the Acherusian plain, and there found the demigods, men and women both, and the common dead, dwelling in their nations and tribes, some of them ancient and moldering "strengthless heads," as Homer has it, others fresh, with substance yet in them, Egyptians chiefly, these—so long last their embalming drugs. But to know one from another was no easy task; all men are so like when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we could make them out. They lay pell-mell in undistinguished heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left. With all those anatomies piled together as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not how to tell Thersites[117] from Nireus the beauty, beggar Irus from the Phæacian king, or cook Pyrrhias from Agamemnon's self. Their ancient marks were gone, and their bones alike—uncertain, unlabeled, indistinguishable.
When I saw all this, the life of man came before me under the likeness of a great pageant, arranged and marshaled by Chance, who distributed infinitely varied costumes to the performers. She would take one and array him like a king, with tiara, body-guard, and crown complete; another she drest like a slave; one was adorned with beauty, another got up as a ridiculous hunchback: there must be all kinds in the show. Often before the procession was over she made individuals exchange characters; they could not be allowed to keep the same to the end; Crœsus must double parts and appear as slave and captive; Mæandrius, starting as slave, would take over Polycrates'[118] despotism, and be allowed to keep his new clothes for a little while. And when the procession is done, every one disrobes, gives up his character with his body, and appears, as he originally was, just like his neighbor. Some, when Chance comes round collecting the properties, are silly enough to sulk and protest, as tho they were being robbed of their own instead of only returning loans. You know the kind of thing on the stage—tragic actors shifting as the play requires from Creon to Priam, from Priam to Agamemnon; the same man, very likely, whom you saw just now in all the majesty of Cecrops or Erechtheus, treads the boards next as a slave, because the author tells him to. The play over, each of them throws off his gold-spangled robe and his mask, descends from the buskin's height, and moves a mean ordinary creature; his name is not now Agamemnon son of Atreus, or Creon son of Menœceus, but Polus son of Charicles of Sunium, or Satyrus son of Theogiton of Marathon. Such is the condition of mankind, or so that sight presented it to me.
Philip. Now, if a man occupies a costly towering sepulcher, or leaves monuments, statues, inscriptions behind him on earth, does not this place him in a class above the common dead?
Menippus. Nonsense, my good man; if you had looked on Mausolus[119] himself—the Carian so famous for his tomb—I assure you, you would never have stopt laughing; he was a miserable unconsidered unit among the general mass of the dead, flung aside in a dusty hole, with no profit of his sepulcher but its extra weight upon him. No, friend, when Æacus gives a man his allowance of space—and