§ 92. But when the body is about to be finally buried, the relations announce the appointed day to the judges, and to all the friends of the deceased, declaring that he is about to pass the lake of the Nome: and forty two judges being collected, and placed in a semicircle, which is prepared beyond the lake, a boat is brought up, which had been provided for the purpose, conducted by a boatman who is called, in their language, Charon, [the Silent]: whence they say that Orpheus, in former times, having travelled into Egypt, and seen this custom, invented the fable of Hades, partly from imitating what he saw, and partly from his own imagination: but when the boat was brought into the lake, before the coffin with the dead body was put on board, it was lawful, for any person who thought proper, to bring forwards his accusation against the deceased: and if he showed that the deceased had led an evil life, the judges declared accordingly, and the body was deprived of the accustomed sepulture: but if the accuser failed of establishing what he advanced, he was subject to very heavy penalties. When there had been no accuser, or when the accusation had been repelled as unjust, the relations, laying aside their mourning, pronounced encomiums on the deceased: not enlarging upon his descent, as is usual among the Greeks, for they hold that all the Egyptians are equally noble: but relating his earliest education and the course of his studies, and then his piety and justice in manhood, and his temperance, and the other virtues that he possessed, they supplicated the infernal deities to receive him as a companion of the pious: the multitude in the mean time applauded, and joined in extolling the glory of the deceased, as being about to remain to eternity with the virtuous in the regions of Hades. The body is then placed, by those who have family catacombs already prepared, in the compartment allotted to it: those who are not possessed of catacombs construct a new apartment for the purpose, in their own houses, and set the coffin upright against the firmest of the walls. Those who are debarred of the rites of burial, on account of the accusation which has been brought forwards against them, or on account of debts which they have contracted, are placed in their own houses: and then, if their children’s children happen to be prosperous, they are frequently released from the impediments of their creditors and their accusers, and at length obtain the ceremony of a magnificent funeral.
§ 93. It is most solemnly established in Egypt, to pay a more marked respect to their parents and their ancestors, when they are removed to their everlasting habitations. It is also usual among them to deposit the bodies of their deceased parents, as pledges for the payment of money that they borrow: and those who do not redeem these pledges are subject to the heaviest disgrace, and are deprived of burial after their death....
§ 96. We must now enumerate such of the Greeks as have visited Egypt in ancient times, for the acquirement of knowledge and wisdom. The priests of the Egyptians relate, from the records preserved in their sacred volumes, that they were visited by Orpheus and Musaeus, and Melampus and Daedalus; by Homer, the poet, and Lycurgus, the Spartan: by Solon, the Athenian, and Plato, the philosopher: and that Pythagoras, of Samos, also came there, and the mathematician Eudoxus: and Democritus of Abdera, and Oenopides of Chius. All these they identify by some distinct marks, either portraits, or appellations derived from their residences or their works: and they produce evidence from the branches of knowledge, which they respectively cultivated, that they had only borrowed, from the Egyptians, all that acquired them the admiration of their countrymen. That Orpheus had learned of them the greatest part of his mystical ceremonies, and the orgies that celebrate the wanderings [of Ceres], and the mythology of the shades below: for that the rites of Osiris and of Bacchus are the same: and those of Isis extremely resemble those of Ceres, with the change of name only: and the punishments of the impious in Tartarus, and the Elysian plains of the virtuous, and the common imagery of fiction, were all copied from the ceremonies of the Egyptian funerals: that Hermes, the conductor of souls, was, according to the old institution of Egypt, to convey the body of Apis to an appointed place, where it was received by a man wearing the mask of Cerberus, [probably the Cteristes of the temporary nomenclature;] and that Orpheus having related this among the Greeks, the fable was adopted by Homer, who makes the Cyllenian Hermes call forth the souls of the suitors, holding his staff in his hand:
Cyllenius now to Pluto’s dreary reign
Conveys the dead, a lamentable train!
The golden wand that causes sleep to fly,
Or in soft slumber seals the wakeful eye,
That drives the ghosts to realms of night or day,
Points out the long, uncomfortable way.
Trembling the spectres glide, and plaintive vent