From the prosperous village of Solos vigorous and patient pedestrians may reach the most famous of all the waters of Arcadia, and the most characteristic also of a country in which gentle charms, however real, are always subsidiary to a primitive wildness. These waters are the Falls of the Styx, as familiar in English as in Greek literature. They descend over a perpendicular cliff amid scenery which some consider grander and more imposing than that at Delphi. The surroundings so impressed themselves on the sensitive Greek imagination that from the time of Homer the Styx was one of the dread rivers of death and the lower world, fit companion-piece to nether darkness and the monstrous hound of hell, fit invocation even for gods when on their oath. “Let earth be witness unto this and heaven broad and yon down-flowing water of the Styx, which is the oath the greatest and most terrible among the blessed gods,” the immortals, from Zeus to Calypso, are ever exclaiming. Hesiod contributed the fancy that Iris, in a vessel of gold, brought water from the Styx to Olympus, so that the gods might swear by its material presence. The spray of the falls is said to take on at midday the lovely colors of the rainbow, which had its divine personification in the fair messenger of the gods. And it has also been pointed out that Hesiod, in addition to describing accurately the Styx as trickling down from a high and steep rock, by a fine figure suggests a view in winter when huge icicles form over the cliff and the clouds settle down so closely upon its summit that the water looks as if it were descending straight from the sky. The Styx, he says, dwelt in “glorious chambers, vaulted with long rocks, and round about a colonnade of silver pillars reared against the sky.” To him also as to Homer the dweller in this icicled palace was “terrible, hated by all the immortals.” The traveller who must sacrifice the lakes and rivers of Arcadia to seeing the temple of Apollo comes directly by train from Athens to Megalopolis in the great south-western plain. Here he is detained only by a fourth century theatre and other more fragmentary remains of the ancient city before turning northward by carriage or horse.