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Long before Socrates and Plato mapped the course of underground rivers in the Phaedo, poets and philosophers had been fascinated by the metaphorical implications the earth’s mysterious subterranean landscapes. Flowing through this netherworld under various names were rivers that remain familiar today--Acheron, Cocytus, Plegethon, Lethe, and Styx. Our goal in this course will be to follow in detail the course of these rivers through the vastly different landscapes created by three epic poets: the grey world of Shades in the watery depths of Homer’s Odyssey; the elaborately structured geography of punishment in Dante’s Inferno; and, finally, the strangely contiguous landscapes of Hell and Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Along the way, we will touch briefly on descriptions of the underworld in other Western classics; as a class, we will also investigate parallel stories of subterranean rivers in the literature and mythology of world cultures.