The River Cocytus (or Kokytos) is also called the River of Wailing, a river of cries and lamentation. In his Frogs, the comic playwright Aristophanes has a character curse a villain by saying, "And the crag of Acheron dripping with gore can hold you." Plato (in The Phaedo) described Acheron windily as "the lake to the shores of which the souls of the many go when they are dead, and after waiting an appointed time, which is to some a longer and to some a shorter time, they are sent back again to be born as animals." It was said to have had an oracle of the dead beside it. There are several rivers in the upper world named Acheron: the best known of these was in Thesprotia, which flowed through deep gorges in a wild landscape, occasionally disappearing underground and passing through a marshy lake before emerging into the Ionian sea. The Acheron is the River of Woe or the River of Misery and in some tales it is the principal river of the Underworld, displacing the Styx, so in those tales the ferryman Charon takes the dead across the Acheron to transport them from the upper to the lower world. In Greek mythology, the Acheron is one of the five Underworld rivers that fed from a swampy lake called Acherousia or Acherousian lake. Lucan quotes the ghost of Julia in his Pharsalia: "Me not the oblivious banks of Lethe's stream/Have made forgetful," as Horace quips that certain vintages make one more forgetful and "Lethe's true draught is Massic wine."
Reported as a real-life body of water in modern-day Spain, Lethe was also the mythological River of Forgetfulness. Some tomb inscriptions dated to 400 BCE say that the dead could keep their memories by avoiding drinking from the Lethe and drink instead from the stream flowing from the lake of Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory). Lethe was first mentioned as a river of the underworld in Plato's Republic the word lethe is used in Greek when the forgetfulness of former kindnesses results in a quarrel. Lethe is also the name of the goddess of forgetfulness who was the daughter of Eris. Upon entering the Underworld, the dead would have to drink the waters of Lethe to forget their earthly existence. Lethe is the river of oblivion or forgetfulness. If a god swore falsely by the water he would be deprived of nectar and ambrosia for a year and banished from the company of other gods for nine years. Homer called Styx "the dread river of oath." Zeus used a golden jug of water from the Styx to settle disputes among the gods. Cereberus, a monstrous dog with multiple heads and the tail of a serpent, waits on the further side of the Styx where Charon lands with the shades of the departed. The waters of the Styx is where Achilles was dipped by his mother Thetis, endeavoring to make him immortal she famously forgot one of his heels. She was said to live at the entrance of Hades, in a "lofty grotto supported by silver columns."
In Greek, the word Styx means to hate or abhor, and it was named after the nymph of the river, a daughter of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys. The Styx flowed out of Oceanus, the great river of the world.
Best known, the river Styx is the principal river of Hades, circling the Underworld seven times thus separating it from the land of the living.
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