The same thought is sometimes expressed less brutally, almost touchingly. Thus a comedian, who has spouted many verses and tramped many roads, voices in his epitaph the conviction that life is a loan, like a part in a play: “My mouth no longer gives out any sound; the noise of applause no longer reaches me; I paid my debt to nature and have departed. All this is but dust.”[20] Another actor, who recited Homer’s verses in the festivals, tells us that he “laughs at illusions and slumbers softly,” returning to the Epicurean comparison of death with an unconscious sleep which has no awakening.[21] Some wordier unbelievers felt the need of enlarging on their negations.[22] “There is no boat of Hades, no ferryman Charon, no Aeacus as doorkeeper, no dog Cerberus. All we, whom death sends down to the earth, become bones and ashes and no more.... Offer not perfumes and garlands to my stele: it is but a stone; burn no fire: the expenditure is vain. If thou have a gift, give it me while I live. If thou givest to my ashes to drink, thou wilt make mud: and the dead will not drink.... When thou scatterest earth on my remains, say that I have again become as I was when I was not.” This last thought occurs frequently. Thus on a Roman tomb we read: “We are and we were nothing. See, reader, how swiftly we mortals go back from nothingness to nothingness.”[23] Sometimes these dead adopt a joking tone which is almost macabre. Thus a freedman, merry to the grave, boasts of the amenities of his new state: “What remains of man, my bones, rests sweetly here. I no longer have the fear of sudden starvation; I am exempt from attacks of gout; my body is no longer pledged for my rent; and I enjoy free and perpetual hospitality.”[24]