l
lakes running parallel, one of boiling gold, another most cold of lead,
another hard of iron, and several demons were standing by, like smiths,
who lowered down and drew up by turns with instruments the souls of
those whose criminality lay in insatiable cupidity. For when they were
red-hot and transparent through their bath in the lake of gold, the
demons thrust them into the lake of lead and dipped them in that; and
when they got congealed in it and hard as hail, they dipped them into
the lake of iron, and there they became wonderfully black, and broken
and crushed by the hardness of the iron, and changed their appearance,
and after that they were dipped again in the lake of gold, after
suffering, he said, dreadful agony in all these changes of torment. But
he said those souls suffered most piteously of all that, when they
seemed to have escaped justice, were arrested again, and these were
those whose crimes had been visited on their children or descendants.
For whenever one of these latter happened to come up, he fell into a
rage and cried out, and showed the marks of what he had suffered, and
upbraided and pursued the soul of the parent, that wished to fly and
hide himself but could not. For quickly did the ministers of torture
pursue them, and hurry them back again to Justice,[876] wailing all the
while on account of their fore-knowledge of what their punishment would
be. And to some of them he said many of their posterity clung at once,
and just like bees or bats stuck to them, and squeaked and gibbered[877]
in their rage at the memory of what they had suffered owing to them.
Last of all he saw the souls of those that were to come into the world a
second time, forcibly moulded and transformed into various kinds of
animals by artificers appointed for the very purpose with instruments
and blows, who broke off all the limbs of some, and only wrenched off
some of others, and polished others down or annihilated them altogether,
to fit them for other habits and modes of life. Among them he saw the
soul of Nero tortured in other ways, and pierced with red-hot nails. And
the artificers having taken it in hand and converted it into the
semblance of a Pindaric viper, which gets its way to life by gnawing
through its mother's womb, a great light, he said, suddenly shone, and a
voice came out of the light, ordering them to change it into something
milder, so they devised of it the animal that croaks about lakes and
marshes, f