Greek underworld are the unburied which can't be taken across from bank to bank until they receive a proper burial. Across the river, guarding the gates of the underworld is Cerberus. There is also an area where the Judges of the underworld decide where to send the souls of the person — to Elysium, the Fields of Asphodel, or Tartarus. While Tartarus is not considered to be directly a part of the underworld, it is described as being as far beneath the underworld as the earth is beneath the sky. It is so dark that the "night is poured around it in
The Dog It Was That Died be seen as the mad dog of the poem. Stoppard may have borrowed the idea to use this quotation from British novelist W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 "The Painted Veil", in which the protagonist's husband, bitter at her infidelity, brought her to cholera-stricken China in hopes that she would take ill and die. When he catches cholera instead, he dies with the quotation "The dog it was that died" on his lips. The words also occur in a speech by Wormold, the lead character in Graham Greene's 1958 novel "Our Man in Havana" – also an entertaining tale of Cold War