You’ll put down drachmas two, or else don’t talk to me.
Dionysus.
One drachma and a half? A bargain? Come, take that.
Corpse.
May I be—resurrected, if I do!
Xanthias.
What airs!
The cursed scamp! Plague take him! I will go myself.”
Dionysus and his servant had made their entrance with a donkey, ridden by Xanthias who was carrying the traps on a pole over his shoulder. No age has allowed the donkey to escape his manifest destiny of bearing burdens, nor has age or custom exhausted his capacity of occasional revolt. The persevering attack of the Trojans on Ajax could be likened only to the cudgelling by boys of a lazy ass which has strayed into a cornfield and will not desist from wasting the deep crop—an episode as modern as it is Homeric. But for the most part the little beasts carry patiently everything that is portable, as they did when, in the annual transportation of the properties used in the Eleusinian Mysteries, their dull share in a great business became proverbial. Their panniers of lemons and oranges and crates of water-jars are both antique and modern, and a famous lost picture of Polygnotus comes to life in a donkey loaded with fresh green boughs, moving toward the spectator.
That Dionysus, in search of a carrier, so conveniently saw a corpse in the street was due to the Athenian custom of bearing the dead to the grave on open biers. The same custom, shocking to foreign observers, prevails to-day; and at almost any hour, in any thoroughfare, may be seen one of these funeral processions, with the cover of the coffin carried in front and the uncovered face exposed to the curious and the indifferent. Thus exposed, the dead Alcestis was brought out from her palace, and the cortège, with which the modern procession seems to mingle, moves off the stage with prayers that Hermes and Persephone may kindly welcome this traveller to their realm. These deities have been forgotten, but their business is transferred to him who was once their grim agent. To the modern Greek peasant Charon is Death. Alcestis dreaded him as a messenger and ferryman:—