by Sydney Tan, PsyD

On they went, beneath the lonely night,
through the desolate halls and empty kingdom of death:
like a path through a wood at daybreak,
under an uncertain moon, where Jupiter has buried the sky
in shadow, and black night snatches the color from things.
There at the entrance, in the foremost jaws of hell
grief and avenging troubles lay their beds;
pallid malady dwells there, and sad old age too,
and dread, and ill-advising hunger, and vile need,
forms frightful to perceive: death and toil
then death’s brother sleep, and evil pleasures of the soul,
and, on the opposite threshold, deadly war,
and the iron chamber of the Furies, and raving discord,
her snaky hair bound up in blood-stained ribbons.
In the middle, an enormous shadowy elm tree
spreading her ancient branches and boughs, the seat,
they say, that false dreams hold, clinging under each leaf.
And various other monsters stabled at the gates:
Centaurs, the bi-formed Scylla, hundred-handed Briareus,
and the Hydra of Lerna, hissing horrendously,
the Chimaera armed with a blazing fire,
Gorgons, Harpies, and the triple-bodied ghost, Geryon.
And here, Aeneas, seized by sudden terror, draws tight
his sword and presents its naked edge as they come,
And, if his learned companion had not warned him
these were but thin lifeless images flitting without form,
he would have rushed them, and in vain struck empty shadows with his sword.

—Virgil, The Aeneid, translated from the Latin by Sydney Tan