Lucian of Samosata
On Funerals — the business of mourning
Περὶ πένθους · Second century CE, probably around 170.
Lucian looks at what people do when someone dies — the wailing, the coin for the ferryman, the expensive funeral, the food left at the tomb — and asks what any of them believe they are accomplishing. Then he lets a corpse sit up and answer his own father back. Written around 170 CE and still the sharpest thing anyone wrote about funeral custom.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
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Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
H. W. and F. G. Fowler's Clarendon Lucian (1905), by the brothers who would later write the Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It is the standard public-domain Lucian and it is very good English — brisk, idiomatic, timed for the joke — which is exactly the right instinct for this author and occasionally too free with him. They anglicise readily and are willing to find an English equivalent rather than a literal rendering, so a reader comparing with the Greek will find the wit relocated as often as translated. Their titles differ from the Loeb's: this piece is 'Of Mourning' in Fowler and 'On Funerals' elsewhere.