In an earlier chapter we spoke of the continuance theory of life after death, and of the retribution theory as marking an advance upon this in ethical feeling.[469] At the opening of the historical period in Greece we find the primitive unethical continuance theory in existence, but in a state of transition into the retribution theory. The early Greek Hades, like the Babylonian Arallu and the Hebrew Sheol, was a place where moral distinctions were not recognized. The same phantom life was the lot of all alike who went down to the world of shadows. The Elysian Fields, it is true, had already been created, but these were simply a sort of aristocratic heaven, a “Greek Valhalla,” the abode of the great heroes of the race;[470] and Tartarus also had been called into existence, but this was a prison house only for those who had incurred the special enmity of the gods. The fables of Tantalus, Ixion, and the Danaïdes show that the belief in an after life had no ethical significance for the masses.[471] But already in Pindar these ideas of the after life, through virtue of an ethical necessity, have undergone great changes.[472] Just as the poet moralizes the Homeric conception of the gods, so does he moralize the Homeric conception of the underworld. Alongside the continuance theory we find now the retribution theory. The life beyond the grave is conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. The Elysian Fields have been “opened to moral worth,” and a tribunal, called into existence by a growing moral consciousness like that which created the Egyptian Judgment of the Dead, has been set up, and Rhadamanthus apportions the destiny of souls according to their merit and demerit.[473] From the Persian war on, the life after death had ethical significance for all men, and not simply for exceptional cases. In the literature there are allusions in growing numbers to the retribution awaiting the wicked and the blessedness in store for those “unstained with vice.” In Plato this moral evolution attains a stage almost identical with that reached by medieval Christian ethics. We find in the _Republic_ a threefold division of the realm of the dead corresponding closely to the Schoolmen’s purgatory, heaven, and hell.[474] Punishment is conceived as having for aim and end, in all save cases of abominable and incurable wickedness, the purification of earth-stained souls. All these modifications in the topography, the classifications, and the arrangements of the underworld, like the similar changes effected by the modern spirit in the medieval conception of hell, were the work of a gradually clarifying moral sense, and bear witness to the progressive development of Greek ethical thought between the Homeric and the Alexandrian Age. [Sidenote: The evolution of the doctrine of divine envy into that of Nemesis]