A Sop to Cerberus

Puck put its politics on the cover in full color, still a novelty in 1882, and Bernhard Gillam gives the front page a scene out of myth. A balding man in a classical toga and sandals hurries away through a wood, baskets on his arm, flinging a sop to a three-headed dog that wears a top hat and snarls from the underbrush. "A Sop to Cerberus" recasts a bribe or an appeasement as ancient comedy, the banner overhead sighing "What fools these mortals be." Gillam was a Puck mainstay who worked in careful, engraving-fine line. Two years later his "Tattooed Man" caricatures of James G. Blaine would help sink a presidential campaign. Here the target is softer, the classical dress doing the arguing.