The Text
Meditations IX.24
Children’s squabbles and make-believe, and little souls bearing up corpses36—the Invocation of the Dead37 might strike one as a more vivid reality!
- 36.iv. 41 πνευμάτιον = ψυχάριον.
Pneumation, “little breath”; psycharion, “little soul.”
- 37.Possibly refers to the Νέκυια of Homer (Odyssey xi). Menippus (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Menippus 6) also wrote a Νέκυια (compare above, vi. 47). But it was a term for the invocation of the dead, see Justin Martyr’s Apology i. 18.
Nekyia, “the Invocation of the Dead,” is the name given to Book XI of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus summons the shades of the dead to question them. Menippus of Gadara was a Cynic satirist. In First Apology 18 Justin Martyr cites the “evoking of departed human souls” among the practices that show the dead retain sensation.