Your Greed Stains Your Soul with the Stench of Ruin

• Introduction
• Aeschylus’ Eumenides - The Chorus of the Furies
  • Passages with this Imagery
• Megapenthes in Lucian
  • Lucian, Cataplus sive Tyrannus (also “Voyage to the Lower World”)
  • What Happens
  • The Fates / Judges’ Condemnation
  • Greek Vocabulary of “Stench” and “Pollution”
  • Moral & Philosophical Meaning
  • Synthesis: “Greed stains your soul with the stench of ruin.”
  • In Summary
• Thematic Sources - the Tyrant’s Soul in Hades
  • Plato - Republic (Book 10, Myth of Er, 614b–619d)
  • Plato - Gorgias (523a–526d)
  • Pindar - Olympian 2.55–83 (Hieron of Syracuse, a tyrant himself!)
• See also

Introduction

"Your Greed Stains Your Soul with the Stench of Ruin" - Said often by Dr DCA Hillman PhD.

Where does this line come from?
We hear it used nearly every time Dr Hillman lectures.
But where did he hear it?
He says the Ancient Greeks believed it, and lived by it.
Avoided the corruption of greed, because they believed it would stain their soul, causing ruin

Aeschylus’ Eumenides - The Chorus of the Furies

When Dr Hillman told us in Ammon U - 03 “it goes back to the chorus of the Furies”. He's likely referring to the Erinyes (Ἐρινύες), the goddesses of vengeance, who appear in Aeschylus’ Eumenides — the third play of the Oresteia trilogy.

In that play, the chorus of Furies embodies the moral and spiritual pollution (miasma) caused by crimes of hubris, blood-guilt, and — crucially — avarice and corruption of soul. Their language is visceral, sensory, and moral:
they speak of stench, rot, and taint, as though immoral acts literally stink and cling to the soul like decay.

In Eumenides, the Chorus is made up of the Erinyes — ancient daimonic powers of blood vengeance.
They are not metaphorical beings but personifications of miasma (pollution), the moral and physical “stink” left by unatoned crimes, especially those committed within the family (blood-for-blood).

They are called:

παλαιαὶ θεαί — “ancient goddesses,”and they describe themselves as ἄπαιδες, ἀνδρῶν ἀθέοι, φθοράς φίλαι — “childless, manless, loving destruction.”

They live and breathe the language of stench, rot, and ruin — the corruption that arises when the moral balance (Δίκη) is violated.

Passages with this Imagery

For example, the Furies say things like

The Furies are tracking the odor of guilt - sin as stench, ruin as smell - exactly like the phrase “greed stains your soul with the stench of ruin.”

The Erinyes are olfactory spirits — they “sniff out” guilt, as hounds of conscience.
Hence greed, murder, betrayal — all become a kind of spiritual rot whose “odor” betrays the soul’s inner decay.

In the Greek moral imagination, moral decay and olfactory corruption were paired metaphors — κακότης (moral badness) is also μίασμα (pollution, rot).
So to say “greed stains the soul with the stench of ruin” is perfectly Aeschylean: it’s what the Furies chant when they pursue the polluted tyrant.

Here, the Erinyes speak directly of πλοῦτος (wealth) and ὕβρις (arrogance, excess) — greed in the moral sense.
The punishment is not just external — it’s decay, μόρος (“doom,” but from the same root as “mortal”) creeping through the soul like a disease or stench.

The Furies see greed and unatoned guilt as a kind of spiritual putrefaction:

• φθορά (decay, ruin) literally means rot, dissolution, the process of perishing.
• They associate it with blood and with earth drinking the polluted fluids of the dead.

So the phrase, “Your greed stains your soul with the stench of ruin,” could almost be a summary of their theology:
a crime or greed is not simply wrong; it leaves a trace — an odor, a pollution, a rot that clings to the soul and demands cleansing through ritual or vengeance.

This “stench” or miasma is the opposite of μύρον (myrrh, perfume), the scent of sanctity and initiation.

Aeschylus, being from Eleusis, knew this polarity intimately.
In Eumenides, the Erinyes represent the old ritual order of vengeance, the pre-Apollonian chthonic law, where moral infection was literally sensed as smell.

When Athena finally transforms them into Eumenides (“Kindly Ones”), she symbolically converts their odor — their miasmic pollution-scent — into the sweet incense of civic justice.
It is the purification of the air, the soul, and the city.

Megapenthes in Lucian

Lucian’s Voyage to the Lower World (Nekyomantia or Menippus in Hades*) also revisits this exact theme.

The tyrant Megapenthes, dripping with jewels and fear, descends into Hades and finds himself naked and stripped of wealth, mocked by the shades. Accosted by the Fates (or spirits of the dead) for his greed and luxury comes from Lucian’s satirical dialogue Νεκυομαντεία (“The Downward Journey” or “Voyage to the Lower World”), also called Cataplus in Latin titles.

The Fates tell him:

and when he protests, Menippus laughs, saying he still reeks of the corruption of his deeds — a comic echo of Aeschylus’ tragic pollution.

Lucian is parodying that older tragic-mystery framework:
in the Mystery, the initiate must be purified of miasma before entering the sacred realm.
In Lucian, the tyrant’s greed leaves an indelible smell on his soul —
the comic inversion of the mystery purification.

So the imagery of greed or guilt “staining the soul with the stench of ruin” ultimately originates from the Furies’ ancient tragic language of moral pollution (μίασμα), especially as sung in Aeschylus’ Eumenides.

Lucian then takes that same imagery — the moral odor of greed and ruin — and reuses it satirically for Megapenthes.

Lucian, Cataplus sive Tyrannus (also “Voyage to the Lower World”)

Setting: Lucian imagines Hermes Psychopompos ferrying a group of the newly dead to Hades.

Among them are:

• Megapenthes, a rich and ruthless tyrant — his name literally means “Great-Sorrow.”
• Micyllus, a poor cobbler — cheerful, witty, and virtuous in contrast.

The journey is a comic-parodic mystery of judgment after death, written in Greek prose around the 2nd century CE.

Lucian, with characteristic irony, puts Greek moral philosophy into sharp, visual satire.

What Happens

As they descend, Megapenthes tries to bring his gold, fine clothes, perfumes, and slaves — but Hermes forces him to strip.

When Hermes commands the tyrant to remove his luxury, Lucian writes (in Greek):

That phrase — ἀπώλεια ἔζευξεν — literally, “ruin yoked itself to him.”
You can see where the “stain of ruin” idea comes from. It is inseparable from him.

Lucian continues:

The image is moral and physical corruption: the ψυχή itself diseased, foul, ulcerated by greed.
The tyrant’s soul stinks of its own corruption.

Later, Hermes and the shades mock the stench:

This is an almost direct parallel to "Your Greed Stains your Soul with the Stench of Ruin"

The Fates / Judges’ Condemnation

When the group arrives before the underworld judges, the Fates (Μοῖραι) and other chthonic figures confront Megapenthes. They weigh his deeds and declare that his luxury and greed have polluted his soul beyond recognition.

He is dragged off to Tartarus, still struggling to keep his gold, still reeking of his moral rot.

The moral is explicit: greed pollutes; it cannot be washed off.
In Lucian’s mythic irony, even after death, the tyrant smells of his own ruin.

Greek Vocabulary of “Stench” and “Pollution”

Lucian uses words resonant with the Orphic-Platonic moral language:

So when Lucian describes Megapenthes’s ψυχή as ulcerous, foul, and breathing out wealth and hubris “like putrefaction,” he’s deliberately combining Platonic ethics and comic realism: greed has left a literal smell of ruin on the soul.

Moral & Philosophical Meaning

Lucian is writing a Cynic-Stoic moral satire:

• Megapenthes represents πλεονεξία (greed) and ὕβρις (arrogant overreaching).
• Micyllus represents σωφροσύνη (temperance), εὐψυχία (good spirit), and καθαρότης ψυχῆς (purity of soul).

Lucian dramatizes what Plato said philosophically:

But Lucian makes you see and smell it — literally turning the moral disease into a physical stench that clings to the dead tyrant.

Synthesis: “Greed stains your soul with the stench of ruin.”

That phrase is a poetic condensation of Lucian’s scene.

If we render it back into Greek to match Lucian’s diction:

This captures Lucian’s image exactly:

• πλεονεξία (greed)
• μίασμα (pollution)
• δυσωδία (stench)
• ἀπώλεια (ruin, damnation)

In Summary

So the story of Megapenthes in Lucian’s Voyage to the Lower World is precisely the one that embodies the line:

Lucian gave that idea its most vivid literary form in Greek: a comic descent to Hades where the tyrant’s polluted soul reeks of its crimes.

Thematic Sources - the Tyrant’s Soul in Hades

Plato - Republic (Book 10, Myth of Er, 614b–619d)

Plato describes the souls of tyrants descending into Hades after death, bearing the scars and stains of their earthly greed and injustice:

Plato then has the judges of the dead command the souls:

And he describes the souls as “stained and scarred” (κεκηλιδωμένοι) by their lives of greed, cruelty, and tyranny.
In some later commentaries this is explicitly glossed as μίασμα — moral pollution, the same word used for the stench of a rotting corpse or the odor of sacrilege.

So the imagery is:

• the tyrant’s soul carries the pollution of his greed into the underworld;
• the stench of moral decay marks him to the judges.

Plato - Gorgias (523a–526d)

Here, Socrates gives the vivid myth of the soul judged naked in Hades:

Then he describes how the tyrant’s soul is revealed:
The word ἀκαθαρσία literally means filth, pollution, and in Orphic mystery language it was imagined as a physical stench.
Hades smells these souls — the moral corruption has a stench.

So this passage is the “greed stains your soul with the stench of ruin” concept, in Greek philosophical-mystery terms.

Pindar - Olympian 2.55–83 (Hieron of Syracuse, a tyrant himself!)

Pindar describes the fate of the blessed and the wicked after death:

And of the unjust rulers he writes:
The “wage of hubris” (μισθὸς ὕβρεως) was described by later commentators as a stench that clung to them — again, miasma.

See also

• see also: Ammon U - 03 - Dr Hillman says it comes from the Furies