"

There the blessed ones found respite and peaceful joys in flowery
fields, pure breezes, social fellowship, and the similitudes of
their earthly pursuits. In this placid clime, lighted by its own
constellations, favored souls roamed or reposed in a sort of
ineffectual happiness. According to the pagans, here were such
heroes as Achilles, such sages as Socrates, to remain forever, or
until the end of the world. And here, according to the Christians,
the departed patriarchs and saints were tarrying expectant of
Christ's arrival to ransom them. Dante thus describes that great
event:

"Then he, who well my covert meaning knew,
Answer'd, Herein I had not long been bound,
When an All puissant One I saw march through,
With victory's radiant sign triumphal crown'd.
He led from us our Father Adam's shade,
Abel and Noah, whom God loved the most,
Lawgiving Moses, him who best obey'd,
Abraam the patriarch, royal David's ghost;
Israel, his father, and his sons, and her
Whom Israel served for, faithfully and long,
Rachel, with more, to bliss did He transfer:
No souls were saved before this chosen throng." 12

At the opposite extremity of Hades was supposed to be an opening
that led down into Tartarus, "a place made underneath all things,
so low and horrible that hell is its heaven." Here the old earth
giants, the looming Titans, lay, bound, transfixed with
thunderbolts, their

12 Parsons's trans. Dell' Inferno, canto iv. ii. 55-63.

mountainous shapes half buried in rocks, encrusting lava, and
ashes. Rivers of fire seam the darkness, whose borders are braided
with sentinel furies. On every hand the worst criminals,
perjurers, blasphemers, ingrates, groan beneath the pitiless
punishments inflicted on them without escape. Any realization of
the terrific scenery of this whole realm would curdle the blood.13
There were fabled entrances to the dread under world at Acherusia,
in Bithynia, at Avernus, in Campania, where Ulysses evoked the
dead and traversed the grisly abodes, through the Sibyl's cave at
Cuma, at Hermione, in Argolis, where the people thought the
passage below so near and easy that they neglected to give the
dying an obolus to pay ferriage to Charon, at Tanarus, the
southern most point of Peloponnesus, where Herakles went down and
dragged the three headed dog up into day, at the cave of
Trophonius, in Lebadea, and at several other places.

Similar conceptions have been embodied in the ecclesiastical
doctrin