Definition of "Lethe"

Lethe

/ˈliːθi/

proper noun
1. (Greek mythology) The personification of oblivion, daughter of Eris.
2. (Greek mythology) The river which flows through Hades from which the souls of the dead drank so that they would forget their time on Earth.
  Quotations
  No wonder these mortal Folks have so many Complaints, […] if they were dead now, and to be settled here for ever, they'd be damn'd before they'd make such a Rout come over—“But care, I suppose, is thirsty; and till they have drench’d themselves with Lethe, there will be no quiet among ’em” however, I’ll e’en to work; and so, friend Æsop, and brother Mercury, good bye to ye.
  1740, David Garrick, Lethe: or Aesop in the Shade‎, published 1782
  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
  1820, John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
  For two-and-twenty years he [Doctor Guillotin], unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Cæsar’s.
  1837, Thomas Carlyle, chapter IV, in The French Revolution: A History […], volume I (The Bastille), London: Chapman and Hall, book IV (States-General)
  A well-fed man is not driven to drink by the craving that torments the hungry; and the comfortable do not crave for the boon of forgetfulness. Gin is the only Lethe of the miserable.
  1890, William Booth, chapter 6, in In Darkest England and the Way Out‎
  When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven.
  1891, Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”, in Intentions
  oblivion n.: Lethe. In Greek mythology, Lethe (pronounced LEEthee) is one of the several rivers of Hades. Those who drink from it experience complete forgetfulness. Today it is used to refer to one in an oblivious or forgetful state.
  2015, Peter E. Meltzer, The Thinker's Thesaurus, W. W. Norton & Company