Hades, Tartaros, Elysion (page 131, with art)

Beazley Archive Pottery Database

♦ Palermo, Museo Archeologico Regionale 2141 (V996): Attic black-figure lekythos with unwinged male and female figures (eidola) carrying water to pithos, an old man (Oknos?), and a donkey

Archäologische Zeitung 1871, pl. 31.2

Beazley Archive Pottery Database

♦ Polygnotos’ Nekuia painting at Knidian Lesche, Delphi (known through Pausanias’ description and modern reconstructions)

♠ Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.29.1

After them is a man seated, said by the inscription to be Ocnus (Sloth). He is depicted as plaiting a cord, and by him stands a she-ass, eating up the cord as quickly as it is plaited. They say that this Ocnus was a diligent man with an extravagant wife. Everything he earned by working was quickly spent by his wife.  Greek Text

Detail with Oknos, from C. Robert’s reconstruction of Polygnotos’ Nekuia, J.G. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece, vol. V, Commentary (2nd ed. 1913), pl. opposite p. 372.

♠ Plato, Gorgias 493b

in these uninitiate that part of the soul where the desires are, the licentious and fissured part, he named a leaky jar in his allegory, because it is so insatiate. So you see this person, Callicles, takes the opposite view to yours, showing how of all who are in Hades—meaning of course the invisible—these uninitiate will be most wretched, and will carry water into their leaky jar with a sieve which is no less leaky.  Greek Text

♠ Plato, Republic 2.363d

But the impious and the unjust they bury in mud in the house of Hades and compel them to fetch water in a sieve.  Greek Text

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Tags:

#eidola, #Oknos, #rock, #Sisyphos