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Rh appeal from their decrees! Instant execution attended their sentences. The officials upon whom devolved the execution of the judgments given by this model Star-chamber, were presided over by three most unamiable females, holding lighted torches in their hands, and with a fanciful arrangement of snakes dangling round their heads, in lieu of hair—Alecto, the never resting; Megæra, the type of envy; Tisiphone, the avenger of blood.

The empire of the dead was divided into two parts—Tartarus, or hell proper, and Elysium, or the Elysean fields.

Tartarus was the place of punishment assigned to the criminals condemned by the dark tribunal. Here might be seen the Titans and the Giants who had dared to “war ’gainst heaven’s king;” here Salmoneus of Elis, who had impiously attempted to imitate Jupiter’s thunder by rattling his torch-lighted chariot over a bridge of brass; here the robber Sisyphus, condemned to the eternal fruitless labour of rolling an immense stone to the top of a high mountain, which it has hardly reached when it rolls down again; here Tityus, the giant offspring of Earth, who had been so ill-advised as to compete with Jupiter for the possession of Latona, but was straightways cast down into hell by the indignant god. Here he covered nine acres of land, as he lay stretched on the ground, with vultures on both sides devouring his entrails, which kept on growing afresh as fast as they were eaten away; here Ixion, tied with serpents to an eternally turning wheel, for