539 | Closing Eyes of Dead, and Other Funerary Practices sources ; e . g . Odessy 11 : 424 - 426 ; Plato, Phaedo 118 ; Virgil, Aeneus 9 : 487 ; Pliny, Hist . Nat 11 : 55 . 2 And in Vol . 1, p . 433 note 3, I wrote that “the purification process of the corpse as described in the Jewish sources resembles that of the romans, including the closing of the eyes… “etc . This requires slight modification in view of what we read in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History 11 . 55 . 150 : there is an important sacred rite among the romans to close the eyes of the dying and to open them again on the pyre ( on which they would be cremated ) , for customs suggest that it is not right for the eyes to be seen by a human at the final moment and that it is also wrong for the eyes not to be displayed to the heavens . raphael Patai, in his On Jewish Folklore, Detroit 1983, p . 243 records that : after the washing ] of the corpse [ , the sons of the deceased ] in Meshed, Persia [ sprinkled some dust into his eye...
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