After death, as I have said, the soul awaited in Hades its rebirth, but its stay in Hades, like its life on earth, was a period of reward or punishment: “They who are righteous beneath the rays of the sun, when they die have a gentler lot in a fair meadow by deep-flowing Acheron.... But they who have worked wrong and insolence beneath the rays of the sun are led down beneath Cocytus’s watery plain into chill Tartarus.”[78] So this stay in Hades was a period of punishment and of purification, as life itself was a period of penance. The duration of this intermediate stay in Hades was conceived perhaps as a thousand years. In any case, after due season the soul entered upon a new incarnation, which apparently was determined by the innocence or guilt of its former life. Rebirth was not always into human form, as the Orphic verses show: “Wherefore the changing soul of man, in the cycles of time, passes into various creatures: sometimes it enters a horse, ... again it is a sheep, then a bird dread to see; again it has the form of a dog with heavy voice, or as a chill snake creeps along the ground.”[79] The poet-philosopher Empedocles declared that before his present existence he had been “a youth, a maiden, a bush, a bird, and a fish of the sea.”[80] So the soul was buffeted from birth to death and back to birth again. Of those who had been guilty of most grievous sins Empedocles says: “There is an oracle of Necessity, an ancient, eternal decree of the gods sealed with strong oaths: when one in sin stains his hands with murder, or when another joining in strife swears falsely, they become the spirits who have long life as their portion, who are doomed to wander thrice ten thousand seasons far from the blessed, being born in the course of time into all forms of mortal creatures, shifting along life’s hard paths. For the might of the air drives them to the sea and the sea spews them on the ground, and the land bares them to the rays of the bright sun, and the sun throws them in whirls of ether. One receives them from another, but all hate them. Of this number am even I now, an exile from god and a wanderer, for I put my trust in mad strife.”[81] The number of reincarnations was not fixed so far as we know, though apparently ten thousand years was thought to be the limit of the process for the ordinary soul. Probably it was believed that there was no end of rebirths for the wicked, but that they were condemned to their repeated fate forever; or that they were doomed to endless punishment without rebirths.