The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Walked him straight down to hell, I did.

Well, Hades. As far as I can tell, the Romans liked Hades so much that they gacked it from the Greeks wholescale.

This is from lines four-hundred-enty to four-hundred-umpty of Book VI. Yes, I skip around, so? And Fitzgerald really needed a good sense of when to quit embellishing and flowering and cherubing and stuccoing and get on with the story. (If that makes no sense to you, think of a rococo ceiling, and recall that it is 2:30 in the morning.)

A crowd came streaming to the river's banks,
women and men, the shades of heroes and girls,
young sons laid on the pyre before their time.
Souls gathered, teeming, nameless and weightless
as paling leaves before the early frost.
They stood, and begged, and reached for the far shore.

But the boatman took whoever he pleased,
this one, that one, and turned the rest away.
"Sister, tell me," said Aeneas, moved.
"Where are they going, what test, what answer
will let them take ship and cross the water?"

"The pool is Cocytus," said the priestess,
"and Charon its ferryman. The water
will not bear paupers, those left unburied.
Until their bones are earthed, they must wander:
he may not carry them to the far shore
until they linger here a hundred years."