Some steps farther he stopped before three venerable looking old men, seated upon a judgment seat, judging, as it seemed, a man newly come to Pluto's kingdom.
They were Minos, Æacus and Rhadamanthus, the three judges of Hades, whose duty it was to punish the guilty by casting them into a dismal gulf, Tartarus, whence none might ever emerge, and to reward the innocent by transporting them to the Elysian Fields where delight followed delight in endless pleasure.
These judges could never be mistaken because Themis, the Goddess of Justice, held in front of them a pair of scales in which she weighed the actions of men. Their decrees were instantly carried out by a pitiless goddess, Nemesis, or Vengeance by name, armed with a whip red with the gore of her sinful victims.
III
BLACK TARTARUS AND THE ELYSIAN FIELDS
Immediately on quitting the presence of the three judges, Hercules saw them open out before him an immense gulf whence arose thick clouds of black smoke. This smoke hid from view a river of fire that rolled its fiery waves onwards with a deafening din.
Not far remote from this rolled Cocytus, another endless stream, fed by the tears of the wretches doomed to Black Tartarus, in which place of eternal torment Hercules now found himself.
The rulers of these mournful regions were the Furies who, with unkempt hair and armed with whips, tormented the condemned without mercy by showing them continually in mirrors the images of their former crimes.
Into Tartarus were thrown, never to come out again, the shades or manes of traitors, ingrates, perjurers, unnatural children, murderers and hypocrites who had during their lives pretended to be upright and honorable in order to deceive the just.
But these wretches were not the only denizens of Black Tartarus. There were to be seen great scoundrels who had startled the world with their frightful crimes. For these Pluto and the Furies had invented special tortures.