Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx the Peloponnesus, in an inlet still visible on the Cape Matapan. In front of the gates is Cerberus, a three-headed dog, who guards the entrance of the gate and frightens all the potential souls who enter into Hades. The soul in the boat ultimately chooses his destiny by looking toward Hell and ignoring the angel on the river-bank in Paradise that beckons him to the more difficult path to Heaven. Patinier utilised a "Weltlandschaft" ("world landscape") composition with a three-colour scheme typical of his work, moving from brown in the foreground, to bluish-green, to pale blue in the background). This
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