pitiless, and he
 has a cruel trick. On those who go in he fawns with his tail and both
 his ears, but suffers them not to go out back again, but keeps watch
 and devours whomever he catches going out of the gates of strong Hades
 and awful Persephone. And there
 dwells the goddess loathed by the deathless gods, terrible Styx,
 eldest daughter of backflowing Oceanus is here regarded as a continuous stream enclosing the
 earth and the seas, and so as flowing back upon
 himself. Ocean. She lives apart from the gods in her glorious
 house vaulted over with great rocks and propped up to heaven all round
 with silver pillars. Rarely does
 the daughter of Thaumas, swift-footed Iris, come to her with a message
 over the sea's wide back. But when strife and quarrel arise among the
 deathless gods, and when any one of them who live in the house of
 Olympus lies, then Zeus
 sends Iris to bring in a golden jug the great oath of the
 gods from far away, the
 famous cold water which trickles down from a high and beetling rock.
 Far under the wide-pathed earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the
 dark night out of the holy stream, and a tenth part of his water is
 allotted to her. With nine
 silver-swirling streams he winds about the earth and the sea's wide
 back, and then falls into the main The conception of Oceanus is here different: he has nine streams
 which encircle the earth and the flow out into the
 “main” which appears to be the waste of waters on
 which, according to early Greek and Hebrew cosmology, the
 disk-like earth floated. ; but the tenth flows out from a
 rock, a sore trouble to the gods. For whoever of the deathless gods
 that hold the peaks of snowy Olympus pours a libation of her water and is
 forsworn,