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"Down to the inmost core of this our mother Earth,
To the sad realm of shades, where Pluto sits enthroned,
In gloomy majesty, grim King of Death;

And Phlegethontic rills roll waves of lurid fire-
There will I lead, an thou wilt follow me."

KLOPSTOCK.

THEY were brethren three, sons of Old Time, who shared among them the dominion of the world. Jupiter, the eldest of them, assumed the supreme rule of heaven and earth; to Neptune was given the empire of the sea; Pluto had assigned to his sway the interior of the earth—the realm of death.

The name of Pluto is taken from a Greek word signifying wealth, and was therefore most appropriately given to the master of all the hidden treasures of the earth. The Latins called the king of the infernum, Dis—i.e., Dives, the wealthy.

The gate to the dominions of Pluto was guarded by the many-headed dog Cerberus.* To get there

* Three heads only and three necks are generally given to this marvellous beast; Hesiod, however, the second father of most of those creatures of the imagination, yclept the gods of Greece, gives Cerberus fifty heads; whilst Horace, more bountiful still, supplies him with a hundred of these useful appendages.

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,* 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.

transmigration of souls taught by Pythagoras,* in the sixth century B.C., the souls of the departed were made to drink the waters of Lethe, when quitting the infernal regions to return to the surface of the earth to animate new bodies there.

Pluto, the supreme lord and ruler over this subterranean realm, sat here enthroned in gloomy majesty, on a seat of ebony, a crown of the same wood encircling his "portentous brow," and a twopronged sceptre in his right hand. On voyages of inspection through his dominions, he rode in a chariot of dark hue, drawn by four jet-black steeds. No temples nor altars were ever raised to him by man; no hymns ever chanted in his praise; and strange enough, from some tacit understanding among the learned of all nations, evidently dictated by some universal mysterious intuitive sense of the "fitness of things," the starry heavens are, even to the present day, left without a representative of his Yet was he acknowledged to be a powerful god, and trembling man would not dare to withhold from him the propitiatory sacrifice: the blood

name.

* Pythagoras travelled through Egypt, Central Asia, and Hindostan in search of knowledge. On his return he opened a school of philosophy in Lower Italy, about the time of Servius Tullius or of Tarquinius Superbus. He believed in the transmigration of souls, and affirmed that he could distinctly remember several previous existences of his own. His scholars yielded him the most implicit faith, and thought it sufficient to reply to a controverting argument, "himself has said it."

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