ἔνθεος

According to the historian Dio (Epitome 57.9), Domitian invited prominent senators and knights to dinner that was held in an entirely black room that evoked a tomb. Gravestones inscribed with the names of guests and tomb lamps were placed near each guest who reclined on funeral couches. Boys painted black assumed the roles of the guests’ death spirits and sat at their feet as black funeral offerings and sacrifices were served to the guests on black dishes. The emperor alternated between deadly silence and conversation about death as if the guests were already among the dead. 

After the dinner, the tombstone and other dinner serving pieces were brought to the homes of the guests, who were expecting imminent death. As though to signal their return to life, however, the boys who had been painted black as their death spirits returned washed and dressed in white.”

No carpenter’s ever built a door strong enough to deny a cat or a lover.

Do you think I’m his mother, to give him a pleasant time? My name is Black Earth, my name is Black Tombstone, and I make mothers part from sons and wives from husbands, I make poor sisters part from their brothers.

But see, there he was coming down the plains on horseback. He was black, his clothes were black, and his horse was black.

Politis 219.11-12

—To ride as hard at life as that ten-year-old girl galloping flat-out over the prairie!

Because that’s how hard death is thundering at you, his knuckles white on the black pommel; too late you’ll see the east gate has been shut, spurs glitter on his needle-toed boots.

"Prognosis: 50-50," Elise Patridge

Ἀκρίτης κάστρον ἒχτισε, Χάρος νὰ μὴν τὸν εὕρη, διπλοῦν τριπλοῦν τὸ ἒχτισε σιδερογκαρφωμένο. Ἐγύρισε κι ἐτράνησεν, Χάρος τὸν παραστέκνει.

Akritis built a fortress, so that Charos could not find him. He built it with double, treble walls and nailed it with iron. He turned and looked—Charos was there beside him.

Euripides Alc. 259-263, trans. David Kovacs

A girl from Thrace who died at the age of twenty in the influenza epidemic of 1917 was heard to shout out, an hour before she died, “There he is! A young man is coming with a spear to cut me up! Bring me the long knife. He is going to slaughter me.” She then engaged in an imaginary but fierce fight.

                     The Muse, you know, binds together gold and white ivory with the lily flower she has taken      from under the dew of the sea.

Meanwhile Achilles prowled among the huts, rousing all his Myrmidons to arms. Like wolves, flesh-eating, hearts of hungry rage,  who in the mountains slayed some antlered stag, ripped it to shreds, jaws red with dripping gore, stream out in packs to lap dark surface water in a spring with slender tongues, to belch up clots of blood from bulging guts, while in their chest their hearts are beating strong: so the generals, lords of Myrmidons,  rushed up to gather ‘round brave Patroklos...

The Dipsas: The young man Aules ... stepped upon a Dipsas, which twisted back its head and bit him. Hardly was there pain or a sensation of a bite, and even death’s appearance is not malignant and the injury does not look threatening. Look--the silent venom creeps along, and devouring fire eats away the marrows and with hot decay it sets the guts ablaze. The poison drinks up moisture spread around the vital parts and starts to parch the tongue on his dry palate; there was no sweat to pass along the tired frame, the stream of tears recoiled from the eyes. ... Deep he probes for channels in the arid sand ... salt water gives him pleasure but yet does not suffice. And he is not aware of the type of doom and death by poison, but thinks it thirst; and he steeled himself to open with his sword his swelling veins and fill his mouth with blood.

The Seps: A tiny Seps was fastened to the leg of miserable Sabellus; as it clung with cunning fang he tore it off and with his javelin pinned it to the sands. It is a serpent small in size, but so much bloody death no other brings. For the skin nearest to the wound burst, shrank back, uncovered pale-coloured bones; and now as the cavity gapes, the wound is bare without a body; the limbs are drenched with pus, the calves have melted, the knee was bare of covering, and even every muscle of the thighs dissolves, and the groin drips with black decay. The membrane which binds the belly bursts apart, and out melt the entrails; and not as much as there should be from an entire body melts into the ground. ... All that makes a human being is uncovered by the unholy nature of the killer: the muscles, ligaments, the rib-cage, the chest-cavity, and everything concealed by vital organs lay exposed in death.

The Prester: Look, there comes a form of death the opposite of liquefaction. Nasidius, a farmer of the Marsian land, a scorching Prester struck. A fiery redness set alight his face, and swelling strains the skin, confounding all his features, their shape destroyed; now larger than his entire body and exceeding human size, the pus is exuded over all his limbs as the poison exerts its power far and wide; the man himself is out of sight, buried deep in bloated body, and his breast-plate cannot hold the swelling of his bursting chest. ... No longer can the shapeless mass and torso with its jumbled bulk contain the swollen limbs. Untouched by beaks of birds and destined to provide for wild beasts a banquet not without danger, they did not dare consign the body to the tomb but ran away as it still grew, its limit not yet fixed.

At once the frozen blood grew hot and warmed the blackened wounds and ran into the veins and limbs’ extremities.  At its pulse, the lungs beneath the chill chest quiver, and into marrow disaccustomed steals new life, mixed with death. Then all his frame pulsates, the muscles strained; and the corpse lifts himself up from the ground not gradually, limb by limb, but thrust away from the earth and raised erect at one go. Uncovered are his eyes with gaping stare: there was in him the look of someone not yet living, already dying; the pallor and the stiffness both remain; and he is stunned by his arrival in the world. But his sealed lips sound with no muttering: voice and tongue are given him only to reply.

ლ(́◉◞౪◟◉‵ლ) ʸᵉᵃʰᵎ THUMOS!!! People have literally written books on thumos, but this is my general understanding of thumos, at least in its Homeric usage.

Your thumos (θυμός) lives in your chest, usually your phren (φρήν), which is the area around the heart, the diaphragm, the breathing organs. The thumos is your hot blood life force. It’s the thing that exists inside when your body’s alive and feeling things, directly connected to bodily powers—this being in opposition to your psyche (ψυχή), which can exist outside the body and is an independent being of its own, something closer to what we think of as a “soul.” When you take a spear to the liver and you’re spilling black blood and night falls over your eyes, your psyche flees to the underworld, but the thumos dies with your body. It’s intrinsically tied with the physical condition of your meat self. If you faint, your thumos is what returns when you revive—it is not inside of you unless you’re alive and experiencing life.

In Homer, the thumos is the organ of intellect, will, deliberation. Often it’s mentioned when a decision is being made between two difficult alternatives, usually when the character is really fired up and passionate. When Agamemnon offends Achilles in Book I:

Achilles’ chest was a rough knot of painTwisting around his heart: should heDraw the sharp sword that hung by his thigh,Scatter the ranks and gut Agamemnon,Or control his temper, repress his rage (thumos)?

Il. I.188-192, trans. Stanley Lombardo

“Tell me, maiden,” he said, “What is this crowd? What do the spirits seek? What rule decides which leave the banks, which are borne across the leaden stream with oars?”

“The color livida is most unusual. It also is ambiguous since it can be taken as a substitute for blue (caeruleum), or white ... either they swept the livid shoals with oars or they swept (i.e. beat) the shoals livid with oars. ... In the Latin language the color was associated with autumn, bruises on the body, and with envy.”

“Vergil was apparently looking for a Latin equivalent for the Greek kyaneos, a word rich in associations for mourning and death in Greek poetry, and with particular significance for the underworld. In earlier poets the word seems to have been little more than a poetic equivalent of black (melas) but later came to mean a dark blue.”

Kyaneos is used of:

the bottom of the whirlpool Charybdis, the veil of Thetis mourning for her son (Homer); the chamber of Persephone (Sappho); the eyebrows of Hades (Euripides); a painting of the demon of the underworld, described as somewhere between kyaneos and melas, a color like that of meat flies (Pausanias)