Ulysses was said to reach the place of the dead by crossing the ocean to the Cimmerian land, AEneas to have entered it by the Lake of Avernus. Xenophon says that Hercules went there by the peninsula of Arechusiade. Much of this, no doubt, depends on the exaggeration and misinterpretation of the accounts of voyagers; as when the Phoenicians related that, after passing the Columns of Hercules, to seek tin in Thule and amber in the Baltic, they came, at the extremity of the world, to the Fortunate Isles, the abode of eternal spring, and further on to the Hyperborean regions, where a perpetual night enveloped the country--the imagination of the people developed from this the Elysian fields, as the places of delight in the lower regions, having their own sun, moon, and stars, and Tartarus, a place of shades and desolation. In every case, however, both among pagans and Christians, the locality was somewhere in the centre of the earth. The poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome made very detailed and circumstantial maps of the subterranean regions. They enumerated its rivers, its lakes, and woods, and mountains, and the places where the Furies perpetually tormented the wicked souls who were condemned to eternal punishment. These ideas passed naturally into the creeds of Christians through the sect of the Essenes, of whom Josephus writes as follows:--"They thought that the souls of the just go beyond the ocean to a place of repose and delight, where they were troubled by no inconvenience, no change of seasons. Those of the wicked, on the contrary, were relegated to places exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather, and suffered eternal torments. The Essenes," adds the same author, "have similar ideas about these torments to those of the Greeks about Tartarus and the kingdom of Pluto. The greater part of the Gnostic sects, on the contrary, considered the lower regions as simply a place of purgatory, where the soul is purified by fire."