“By the mute sea-monsters riven.”
It needs hardly be mentioned here that the restless state of the dead body in death by drowning, implied, according to the sensuous metaphysics of the vulgar Greeks, an equally restless condition of the soul in Hades. Hence the point of Achilles’ wrath against Lycaon, in Iliad XXI. 122—
“Go, and with the fishes lay thee; they shall lick thy bloody wound
With a greedy unconcern; thy mother shall not weep for thee
There, nor dew thy bier with sorrow; but Scamander’s whirling flood
To the bosom deep shall bear thee of the broad and briny sea.”
And, in the same book, of another victim of the same inexorable wrath it is said—
“To the eels and to the fishes, occupation meet he gave,
As they gnawed his flesh, and nicely picked the fat from off his bones.”
—v. 203.