The Orphics, who were the first to separate in the underworld the region of Tartarus from the Elysian Fields, were also innovators as regarded the character of these contrasting dwelling-places. Notably, there was among their books a Descent into Hades (Κατάβασις εἰς Ἅιδου), which described its joys and pains. If the blessed were admitted to the flowery meadows where they enjoyed the delight of a perpetual feast, the profane, those who had not been purified by the rites of the sect, were plunged in darkness and mire, which was either intended to recall the moral uncleanness of all who had not taken part in the cathartic ceremonies, or else implied that these shades were figured like the penitents who, seated in the mud of the road, proclaimed their sins to passers-by.[429] Orphism conceived the suffering undergone beyond the tomb as an expiation. The soul which had not been able on earth to keep itself from the pollution of matter and to escape from the passions, thus found again the qualities which it had lost. After a fixed term, it returned to another life wherein it had another chance to render itself worthy of the lot of the Blessed—we shall speak presently of this transmigration. Moreover, the intercession of the living in favour of the dead, the sacrifices offered up on their behalf, could, according to the Orphics, deliver them from their pains. But the Orphics taught also that side by side with those who thus purified themselves in infernal regions before returning to earth, there were others, more guilty, who were vowed to eternal punishment. The old Homeric belief was thus taken up and developed. The evil souls, whose ways nothing could mend, were immured for ever in the underground prison, where they became the companions of the great criminals whom mythology plunged in Tartarus. This capital distinction between the two classes of the inhabitants of hell, those condemned for a time and those condemned in perpetuity, was transmitted down to Virgil and appears distinctly in the Aeneid.