Heraclitus B98 · B98

A strange, spare image: 'the souls smell throughout Hades.' In the house of the dead, where there are no bodies and no eyes, the soul is given the one sense that works without light or contact — <em>osmē</em>, smell, the hound's sense that tracks the invisible. Perception does not simply cease at death; it changes register.

How to read it is genuinely open. It may fit Heraclitus's fire-doctrine: souls are exhalations, and smell is the perception of vapours, so a soul in Hades senses in the medium proper to it. Or it may be grim — the dead reduced to sniffing shades. Either way it belongs with his refusals to let the boundary between living and dead stay clean (B62, B88); even among the dead something perceives, in the mode nearest to breath and fire.

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