Charon guards the passage into the underworld, ferrying the properly buried dead across the River Styx while refusing the unburied, who must wait a hundred years on the near shore.
Hecate guards the crossroads and thresholds of the Underworld, guiding souls through liminal passages between the living and the dead.
Pluto received the Underworld by lot when the three brothers divided the cosmos after the Titanomachy, and Proserpina reigns beside him as queen of the dead, half the year bound to the realm below.
Orcus held the Underworld as his domain of punishment, his gaping mouth the gateway through which oath-breakers and the wicked were dragged to their doom, his name becoming a Roman word for death itself.
The Roman Underworld encompasses Avernus as its volcanic gateway near Cumae and Elysium as the sunlit fields where the blessed dead dwell in eternal spring.
The Roman Underworld is the same realm as the Greek Hades — Virgil's geography in Aeneid 6 draws directly on Homer's Nekuia, preserving Charon's ferry, the rivers Styx and Acheron, and the division between Tartarus and Elysium.
Aeneas descended alive into the Underworld through the cave at Avernus, guided by the Sibyl and bearing the Golden Bough as his token of passage, to seek his father Anchises among the blessed dead of Elysium.
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