# drinking from Lethe

idiom · CEFR C2

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/drinking-from-lethe
Updated: 2026-07-29

## Meaning

To forget completely, as if wiping away all memory of something.

## Examples

- After the long holiday, work felt like drinking from Lethe.
- He wished he could forget the argument entirely, as though drinking from Lethe and starting the friendship over clean.
- The survivors spoke of wanting to forget the war as if drinking from Lethe, yet the very act of testifying forced them to summon back every detail they most longed to erase.

## Origin

Deep in the underworld ran a second river, quieter than the Styx and stranger — the river Lethe, whose name meant forgetting. Its water was cool and clear and utterly still, and it wound through the shadowed meadows where the dead drifted like smoke. Every soul, before it could leave the world behind, came at last to the bank of Lethe and stooped to drink. With that single draught the whole of a life was washed away — every face once loved, every grief, every joy, every name the soul had answered to when it walked in the sun. The water took it all, gently, and left the mind smooth and empty as new snow. Some told the story further: souls destined to be born again into new bodies had to drink at Lethe first, so they would carry no memory of the underworld, no echo of a former life, into the cradle. To live again, they had first to forget entirely. The river became the ancient image of total forgetting — not the ordinary slipping of a name from the tongue, but the deep, clean erasure of everything a person had ever known, drunk down in a single silent mouthful. To speak of drinking from Lethe is to invoke that erasure: to forget so completely that a thing might as well never have happened, wiped from the mind as if the memory had been poured out and lost.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.