you had to pass the famous River Styx, or the sad river. Over this you were ferried by Charon, the son of Hell and Night, for the small consideration of an obolus,[1] which the ancients, for this reason, used to put in the mouths of the dead. But woe unto those shadows whose bodies had had no burial: for a hundred years had they to wander by the side of the river, before they could hope to induce the grim ferryman to carry them over. And grim he was, this ferryman, and far from prepossessing, if the portrait drawn of him by Virgil may be considered a correct likeness:—a frightfully ugly old man, with glaring eyes and a bushy, matted beard; a dirty, dark-coloured mantle, fastened with a knot, hanging down from his left shoulder. The River Styx, or the Stygian Lake, as it was also called, encircled hell in a sevenfold embrace. There dwelt a marvellous power in the name, to which even the highest divinities were subject. If any of the gods swore falsely by it, a hundred years' exile from heaven, with loss for that time of all the rights, privileges, and other appurtenances belonging to divinity, punished the perjurer. Four other rivers, besides Styx, flowed through the sad realms of Death—the Acheron, the Cocytus, the Phlegeton, and the Lethe. The Phlegeton was a lake of liquid fire; whoever drank of the waters of Lethe forgot all that was past. According to the doctrine of the
- ↑ An Athenian coin, worth about five farthings of our money.
