The futility of grief at the tomb. A chain of conditional questions that dissects the cult of the dead into absurdity. Do the mourners still sit (Panthea, Pergamus for Verus; Chabrias, Diotimus for Hadrian) by the tombs? "Ridiculous" (γελοῖον). But even if they did — "would the dead perceive it?" (ἔμελλον αἰσθάνεσθαι;), and if they perceived — "would they be pleased?", and if pleased — "would that make them immortal?". The ladder of four "and ifs" lays bare that posthumous honour never reaches its addressee and changes nothing in his lot.

The mourners too will die. A turn upon the grievers themselves: EXERCISEthey too are "fated (εἵμαρτο) first to grow old, then to die" — so what would the dead "do" after the death of their own dead? The whole edifice of mourning collapses from both ends. The close is a sharp EXERCISEphysical definition: "all this is stench (γράσος) and gore (λύθρος) in a bag (θύλακος)": both the body of the honoured and the body of the honourer are a leather sack of rotting stuffing (cf. 8.24 — the bath as oil-sweat-filth; 9.36). There are no term-lemmata in the text. The governing discipline is desire (not to cling to posthumous memory), the sustaining one assent (to break the spell of the body by the bare definition).