ere
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 Poenae, 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 Phaeacian king, or cook Pyrrhias from Agamemnon's self.
Their ancient marks were gone, and their bones alike--uncertain,
unlabeled, indistingui