The Greek doctrines were also introduced among the Etruscans and combined with the beliefs of this people as to an underworld in which the Manes of the dead were threatened by horrible demons and protected by beneficent genii. This Greek influence and its alliance with the native traditions appear in Etruria in a great number of funeral monuments on which we find represented many figures which, according to mythology, peopled the kingdom of Pluto. One of the most significant is the fine sarcophagus, discovered a few years ago at Torre San Severo near Bolsena, which seems to date from the third century B. C.[178] The two long sides hold corresponding reliefs, the one showing Achilles’ sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners on the grave of Patroclus, the other the sacrifice of Polyxena, last of Priam’s daughters, on the tomb of Achilles. These scenes, borrowed from the Greek epic poetry, are placed between two Etruscan demons, winged figures which bear serpents and are male on one side and female on the other. The small sides are decorated by two scenes from the Odyssey, the myth of Circe changing the companions of Ulysses into animals—perhaps an allusion to metempsychosis—and Tiresias’ evocation of the shades of the dead, the Elysian Fields being curiously indicated. This instance—and many others might be cited—shows how closely the Hellenic legends of Hades had been intermingled with Etruscan demonology. This Greek conception of the infernal regions, which literature and art were to popularise and perpetuate even after credence had ceased to be given to it, remains familiar to us. Taken altogether and in the large, it is that of a kingdom imagined as an imitation of the cities of our world, in which, however, there reigns such a rigorous justice as is on our poor earth no more than a dream of minds morally disposed. This underground state, of which the frontier is defended by an unbridged river, the Styx, is governed by powerful rulers, Pluto and Proserpina. It has its judges, Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus; its executioners, the Erinyes or Furies; and its prison, Tartarus, surrounded by high walls. This jail, in which the guilty, laden with chains, suffer the torments enacted in Greece by the penal laws or others more atrocious,[179] is distinctly contrasted with the abode of the good citizens who freely enjoy in delightful gardens all the pleasures which make the joy of human beings.