So much for life. We have seen that normally the liquid diminishes with the passing of life so as to seem in a sense its measure. What of death? The sweat that comes out of the dying would, like other sweat, seem to be loss of αἰών, but it is unnecessary to suppose that, when the conception was formed, the αἰών was believed to depart completely with the last breath. Soon, very soon in a warm dry climate, as Homer and others observed, the body dries up. Thus, by the great favour of the gods the corpse of Hector was shaded so that the ‘sun should not dry up (σκήλειε) the flesh about the sinews and limbs’, and it is a marvel how twelve days after death he is ‘dewy as if just slain’ (ἐερσήεις, which the scholiast interprets ὑγρότητα ἔχων, οủ κατεσκελετευμένος). Indeed, the dead were for the Greeks pre-eminently ‘dry’. It fits our finding that αἰών, the ‘life’, was the ‘liquid’, that Homer expresses ‘living, alive’ by ‘moist, wet’, διερός. Nausikaa reassures her attendants that Odysseus is not an enemy: ‘That mortal is not διερός and never will be born who shall come with war to the land of the Phaeacians; for very dear are they to the immortals’. Elsewhere for διερὸς βροτός Homer has зωὸς βροτός.