Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Lethe.
The gallery
The Waters of Lethe by the Plains of Elysium
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 1880
A Pre-Raphaelite tempera-and-gold painting in which a procession of weary souls crosses a barren plain toward the waters of Lethe, the underworld river of forgetfulness personified in Greek myth. On the far bank, those who have drunk the water of oblivion and shed the memory of earthly life rise renewed into the bright meadows of Elysium. The work is held by Manchester Art Gallery.
The Banks of Lethe
F. Benedict Herzog, 1907
A Pictorialist photogravure evoking Lethe, the Greek personification and stream of oblivion whose waters the dead must drink to forget their former lives. Herzog stages a softly lit figure beside the still river, translating the classical daemon of forgetfulness into the dreamlike idiom of turn-of-the-century art photography. The print is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).