LETHE(fpθη, oblivion) is sometimes used as the name of a river in the infernal regions. It seems to have been an idea current in the religion of the mysteries that there were in the lower world two streams, one of memory and one of oblivion. The initiated were taught to distinguish between them, and directions for this purpose written on a gold plate have been found in a tomb at Petilia, buried doubtless with some initiated person. So beside Lebadea, at the oracle of Trophonius, which was counted an entrance to the lower world, the two springs Mnemosyne and Lethe were shown. This thought begins to appear in literature in the end of the 5th century e.c., when Aristophanes {Frogs, 186) speaks of the plain of Lethe. Plato {Rep., x.) embodies the idea in one of his finest myths of the future life. It is difficult to find any passage in the earlier writers showing acquaintance with this idea. Hesiod makes Lethe one of the children of Eris, along with Toil, Hunger, Pains, àc.; but his meaning probably is that ingratitude and forgetfulness spring from strife. In the epitaph on Anacreon attributed to Simonides, but reckoned by Bergk spurious, the expression A,ηθη<s δό/χοι occurs; but even if the epigram be an early one it is not certain that the words have any mythological sens·'.