Nor were only many customs questionable in order
to their obsequies, but also sundry practices, fictions,
and conceptions, discordant or obscure, of their state
and future beings. Whether unto eight or ten bodies
of men to add one of a woman, as being more in-
flammable and unctuously constituted for the better
pyral combustion, were any rational practice; or
whether the complaint of Periander's wife be toler-
able, that wanting her funeral burning, she suffered
intolerable cold in hell, according to the constitution
of the infernal house of Pluto, wherein cold makes a
great part of their tortures; it cannot pass without
some question.
Why the female ghosts appear unto Ulysses, before
the heroes and masculine spirits,--why the Psyche or
soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender, who, being
blind on earth, sees more than all the rest in hell; why
the funeral suppers consisted of eggs, beans, smallage,
and lettuce, since the dead are made to eat asphodels
about the Elysian meadows:--why, since there is no
sacrifice acceptable, nor any propitiation for the cove-
nant of the grave, men set up the deity of Morta, and
fruitlessly adored divinities without ears, it cannot
escape some doubt.
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