(ll. 758-766) And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods.  The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven.  And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea’s broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze:  whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast:  and he is hateful even to the deathless gods.

(ll. 767-774) There, in front, stand the echoing halls of the god of the lower-world, strong Hades, and of awful Persephone.  A fearful hound guards the house in front, 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 whomsoever he catches going out of the gates of strong Hades and awful Persephone.

(ll. 775-806) And there dwells the goddess loathed by the deathless gods, terrible Styx, eldest daughter of back-flowing (23) 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 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 (24); 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 is forsworn, lies breathless until a full year is completed, and never comes near to taste ambrosia and nectar, but lies 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 and an harder follows after the first.  For nine years he is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils of 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 primaeval water of Styx to be:  and it spouts through a rugged place.

(ll. 807-819) 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 immoveable threshold of bronze having unending roots and it is grown of itself (25).  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.