Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 February 1886 — The Romance of Death. [ARTICLE]

The Romance of Death.

It is not a little singular that the Greeks have scarcely eVer failed, to make the deaths of their literary heroes as marvelous as their lives. Homer, they tell us, died of a broken heart because he could not guess a riddle. As Horace had been warned by a witch that a chatterbox would be his death, so had Homer been warned by an oracle that he should be killed by a riddle. And the day came. —or rather hearing (for th* traditiAn Of his blindness is too universal to be discredited)—some young fisherman in a boat, he unfortunately asked them what sport they had met, to which they replied: “Wliat we caught we left behind us, and what wel have not caught we have brought with} us.” This was too intricate and per-) plexing a problem for the author of thqj “Iliad.” He guessed and guessed until he cftuld guess no longer and finally died of sheer despair. “Vexation and grief,” he said, “will wear out any man.” The riddle was this: The fishj ermen had no luck, so they denude*) themselves and divested their persons of vermin, casting the lice as fast as caught into the water. What they caught they left behind them; what they did not catch they brought with them. And Aristotle went off in precisely the same way as Homer, because he could not comprehend a more polite and interesting riddle set by nature—namely, the cause of the ebbing and flowing of the river Euripus. “Since,” fie indignantly and impetuously exclaimed, “I cannot conceive the Euripus, let the Euripus< receive me,” and he strangled beneath its mystic flood. Then, too, Diodorus, the ingemous inventor of the horned and vailedjmphism, having met his match in the person of Stilpo, who caught him with another sophism which he Was unable to solve, went home, wrote a book and died of despair.— Stockton Maverick.