A two-tier vanishing. A single line — and in it a double census of the dead: first the "much-hymned" (πολυύμνητοι), already "handed over to oblivion" (λήθῃ παραδέδονται — a verb of legal conveyance: fame delivers its bearers to oblivion as an item on an inventory), then the singers themselves (ὑμνήσαντες), "long since out of the way" (πάλαι ἐκποδών). The argument compresses the regress of 4.19: posthumous fame lives in the memory of rememberers, but the rememberers are just as mortal; the praise and the praiser go into the same ground. There is no one left to prolong the hymn — and no one will be left to prolong the prolonger.

DOGMAFame as a relay of extinction. Cf. Med. 2.17 (ὑστεροφημία δὲ λήθη — "posthumous fame is oblivion"); 4.19 (the chain of rememberers going out one after another); 4.33 (names once on every tongue — now archaic glosses: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus); 3.10 (even the longest memory is a point). An exercise of the same family as the catalogues of the dead (4.48) and the meditation on death, but applied not to life itself — to its echo: if life is short, its reflection in others' memory is doubly short, for it depends on others' short lives. The discipline is desire: quenching the thirst for recognition (τιμή) by a sober reckoning of its term.