"Alas! . . . I am buried alive!"

-- Kallirrhoe in Chariton's Chaireas and Kallirrhoé

"Gracious Creator of Day! to be buried alive for eighteen years!"
--Mr. Lorry in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

"Watch what you're doing, my master; don't try to bury yourself alive,
nor send yourself down there like a bottle put to cool in some pit."

-- Sancho Panza in Cervantes' Don Quijote

An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, ex-
cept now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had
passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through
that long labyrinth of darkness. -- Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

In Chariton's Chaireas and Kallirrhoé, as we have seen, the heroine is buried alive,
her husband believing he has killed her. The heroine's relatives console them-
selves with an impressive burial. In Hermokrates' magnificent (megaloprepēs)
tomb by the sea Kallirrhoe is laid--and comes back to life to a strong aroma of
spices amid a clutter of gold and silver objects. She cries aloud for help, and then
bewails her fate: Oimoi . . . zōsa katōrygmai! ("Alas! . . . I am buried alive!" 62).
Rescued inadvertently by Theron and his bandits, and newly "married" to Dio-
nysios, Kallirrhoé can return the compliment of her spouse. Thinking Chaireas
dead, she insists on creating a great cenotaph for him: "entirely the same as her
own in Syracuse, in design, in size, in expensiveness" (116). As the narrator com-
ments, this new grand tomb, this duplicate is also "the same" in a way Kallirrhoé
does not suspect--it is also for one who still lives. Chaireas never gets into this
tomb, but he does experience burial alive, elsewhere, in Caria, where he and his
enslaved companions are thrown into the dark hut from which the sixteen des-
peradoes break out.

The characters in Xenophon's Ephesiaka experience similar restrictions
and imprisonments. In order to keep her vow to Habrokomes--not only a formal
marriage vow but a private mutual pledge--Anthia determines to resist the
forced marriage to Perilaos. She buys what she thinks is a lethal poison from an
Ephesian doctor and drinks it on the eve of the unwanted wedding. Like Shake-
speare's Juliet, Anthia is to all appearances lifeless. The grieving Perilaos bewails
his fiancée, the maiden bride-to-be, the "nymph." He takes her corpse to the
city's cemetery (tēs poleōs taphous) and deposits her in a monumental funeral

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