The ancient Egyptians were best known for their erection of elaborate and gigantic mausoleums. The invention of a punctilious topography of the netherworld as a literary topos, however, belongs to the Greeks. Few major epics in Western tradition since Homer did not include a katabasis or descent to Hades in their narratives. Yet Homer's prototype of Hades was later revised and made more elaborate by Plato in his Phaedo, in which the most meticulous pagan mythology concerning Hades and afterlife is found. After the appearance of the New Testament, however, with the grand eschatology contained mostly in St. Paul's epistles and St. John's Revelation, later epic poets such as Dante and Milton must first follow the biblical teachings in treating the conventional subject of katabasis while managing to retain some of the classical elements without jeopardizing their Christian faith. Finally, Romantic poets and those who came after them shed any systematic mythology of the netherworld or any systematic eschatology, classical or Christian, and thus faced the uncertainty of life and death on their own.