e Mahabharata, we find a sort of heaven for the virtuous and a hell
for the vicious. While the academic thought of Brahmanism and the
altruistic systems of Jainism and Buddhism looked to the absorption of
the departed into the All, the popular Hindu faith held fast to the
scheme of happiness and wretchedness in the future.[172] As in Dante's
_Divina Commedia_, the heaven was somewhat colorless, the hell more
distinct and picturesque; pain is acute and varied, happiness is calm
and uniform.

+83+. The later Egyptian eschatological development was not unlike the
later Hindu. The good were rewarded with delightful habitations in the
West or with the Sun; the bad were tortured in a gloomy place.[173]

+84+. As regards the early Greek eschatological scheme, it is suggested
by S. Reinach[174] that the descriptions of punishments in Tartarus (as
in the cases of Tantalus and others) arose from misunderstood
representations of the condition of the dead in the other world, they
being represented either as engaged in the occupations of this life, or
as they were at the moment of death. The great punishments, in fact, are
assigned only to heroic mythical offenders, but there seems to be no
reason why the idea of retribution should not be supposed to enter into
such descriptions. Separation of the good from the bad on ethical
grounds appears in Greece in the time of Plato. In various passages he
describes the savage places (Tartarus and others) to which criminals go
after death, and the happy abodes of the virtuous.[175] These abodes
were not with the gods; the occasional translations to heaven (Heracles,
Ganymede) are exceptional honors paid to heroes and favorites.

+85+. The Jewish conception of a punitive future belongs to the Greek
period of Jewish history, and was probably developed on Hebrew lines
under Greek and Egyptian influence. A combination of the Old Testament
view of future retribution on earth with the conception of torture in
the other world is given in Enoch.[176] In some circles Sheol was placed
in the West and divided into two regions, one of happiness, the other of
punishment,[177] or the good dwell with the angels in heaven, the bad in
hell.[178] By others the abodes of the dead were placed in the heavenly
regions: of the seven heavens, the second was assigned to the bad and
the third to the good.[179] With all the variation of locality, the
separation of the bad from the good is made permanent, and this
dist