Cerberus

Cerberus and Furies, and that Lack of Light

The Cerberus-visages of dogs we see,

no one is so much a child as to fear Cerberus and the darkness and the ghostly garb of skeletons clinging together by their bare bones.

The prison of the underworld has been described, and the region overwhelmed in perpetual night, in which "the huge doorkeeper of Orcus, lying upon half-gnawed bones in his gory cave, with everlasting barking terrifies the bloodless shades.

— By now I would rather you feared Cerberus than spoke things so ill-considered.

do those things terrify you — the three-headed Cerberus among the dead, the roaring of Cocytus, the ferrying across Acheron, Tantalus touching the surface of the water with his chin yet wasted with thirst;

first she bore Orthus the hound of Geryones, and then again she bore a second, a monster not to be overcome and that may not be described, Cerberus who eats raw flesh, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, relentless and strong.

One of those natures that the ancient fables tell of, said I, as that of the Chimaera or Scylla or Cerberus, and the numerous other examples that are told of many forms grown together in one.

He has deceived the vigilance of Cerberus, ‘whose multifarious head’ he says, ‘struck me as being decidedly bad on special demurrer.

I took out my cornet, and, standing by his side, executed a series of cadences that would have moved the bowels of Cerberus.