into the region of shadows, he makes himself very much at home there. In another of these dialogues he cross-examines all the officials whom he meets, with the air of a traveller anxious for information; and his caustic will does not spare the dead a whit more than it had spared the living. He begs Æacus to show him some of "the lions" in this new region. He professes great surprise at seeing the figures which once were Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles, now mere bones and dust; and asks to be allowed just to give Sardanapalus, whom the Cynic hates especially for his luxury and debauchery, a slap in the face; but Æacus assures him that his skull is as brittle as a woman's. Even the wise men and philosophers, he finds, cut no better figure here. "Where is Socrates?" he asks his guide. "You see that bald man yonder?" says Æacus. "Why, they are all bald alike here," replies Menippus. "Him with the flat nose, I mean." "They've all flat noses," replies Menippus again, looking at the hollow skulls round him. But Socrates, hearing the inquiry, answers for himself; and the new-comer into the lower world is able to assure the great Athenian that all men now admit his claim to universal knowledge, which rests, in fact, on the one ground of being conscious that man knows really nothing. But he learns something more about the Master of the Sophists from a little dialogue which he has with Cerberus.
MENIPPUS AND CERBERUS.
Menippus. I say, Cerberus (I'm a kind of cousin
