STYX, a river which the Greeks fabled to flow in the world of the dead. Horner speaks of it as a river of Hades by which the gods swore their most solemn oaths, and he couples it with the Cocytus and the Pyriphlegethon, the river of wailing and the river of burning fire. Hesiod says that Styx was a daughter of Ocean, and that, when Zeus summoned the gods to Olympus to help him to fight the Titans, Styx was the first to come and her children with her; hence as a reward Zeus ordained that the most solemn oath of the gods should be by her and that her children (Emulation, Victory, Power, and Force) should always live with him. In another passage he says that Styx (whom, somewhat contradictorily, he describes as abhorred by the immortal gods) dwells far off from the gods in a beautiful house overarched with rocks and supported by tall silver pillars, which may be meant as a description of a stalactitic cave. Again Hesiod tells us that if any god, after pouring a libation of the water of Styx, forswore himself, he had to lie in a trance for a year without speaking or breathing, and that for nine years afterwards he was excluded from the society of the gods. In historical times the Styx was identified with a lofty waterfall near Nonacris in Arcadia. Pausanias describes the cliff over which the water falls as the highest he had ever seen, and indeed the fall is the highest in Greece. The scenery is wild and desolate. The water descends in two slender cascades, which, after winding among the rocks, unite and fall into the river Akrata (the ancient Crathis). The ancients regarded the water as poisonous, and thought that it possessed the power of breaking or dissolving vessels of every material, with the exception of the hoof of a horse or ass, or (according to others) of horn. ...