must lie
 breathless until a full year is completed, and never come near to
 taste ambrosia and nectar, but lie spiritless and voiceless on a
 strewn bed: and a heavy trance overshadows him. But when he has spent
 a long year in his sickness, another penance more hard follows after the first. For nine years he
 is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils or
 their feasts, nine full years. But in the tenth year he comes again to
 join the assemblies of the deathless gods who live in the house of
 Olympus . Such an oath, then, did the gods
 appoint the eternal and primeval water of Styx to be: and it spouts
 through a rugged place.
 

 
 And there, all in their order, are the sources and ends of the dark
 earth and misty Tartarus and the unfruitful sea and starry
 heaven, loathsome and dank,
 which even the gods abhor. And there are shining gates and an
 immovable threshold of bronze having unending roots, and it is grown
 of itself. I.e. the threshold is of “native” metal,
 and not artificial. And beyond, away from all the gods,
 live the Titans, beyond gloomy Chaos. But the glorious allies of loud-crashing Zeus have their
 dwelling upon Ocean's foundations, even Cottus and Gyes; but Briareos,
 being goodly, the deep-roaring Earth-Shaker made his son-in-law,
 giving him Cymopolea his daughter to wed.