Cacus

Dante's Inferno: Canto XXV, Circle 8, Bolgia 7: Thieves

'In all of Hell's corrupt and sunken halls
I found no shade so arrogant toward God,
not even him who fell from the Theban walls!

Without another word, he fled; and there
I saw a furious Centaur race up, roaring:
"Where is the insolent blasphemer? Where?"

I do not think as many serpents swarm
in all the Maremma as he bore on his back
from the haunch to the first sign of our human form.

Upon his shoulders, just behind his head
a snorting dragon whose hot breath set fire
to all it touched, lay with its wings outspread.

My Guide said: "That is Cacus. Time and again
in the shadow of Mount Aventine he made
a lake of blood upon the Roman plain.

He does not go with his kin by the blood-red fosse
because of the cunning fraud with which he stole
the cattle of Hercules. And thus it was

his thieving stopped, for Hercules found his den
and gave him perhaps a hundred blows with his club,
and of them he did not feel the first ten."