Tartarus (Underworld), the second primeval god to follow Chaos, is the divine personification of the dark and stormy pit beneath the earth (Gaea).
Many of these would have been considered by the 18th-century elite as at the bottom of endeavour, and yet Stubbs's Hambletonian, Rubbing Down (1799-1800) remains an overwhelming masterpiece, while James Barry's Elysium and
Tartarus (1777-1801) is a minor curiosity, 42 feet long.
The classical and Christian ideas of the underground being the underworld location of Hades,
Tartarus, or Hell had been largely dismissed by the end of the seventeenth century, though this did not stop cave visitors and writers from making use of the descent narratives of Virgil, Ovid or Dante; as Henri Lefebvre argued, there was a difference between representational space, where the underworld was Hades, and representations of space, where Hades is a myth that enables us to perceive and understand our fear of the underground (Lefebvre 33).
In every religion, and in every superstition that the world has ever beheld, accordingly, there has been a
Tartarus as well as an Elysium; a place provided for the punishment of the wicked, as well as one for the reward of the just.
Although defeated by Zeus and confined to
Tartarus, (21) from Typhon's maimed and smoldering body still comes [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (the wet might of blowing winds) (Theog.
Remorseful, the gods locked Pandora away in
Tartarus, ruled by Hades.
Elizabeth Gaskell's condition-of-England novel North and South (1854-1855) and Herman Melville's transatlantic diptych "The Paradise of Bachelors and the
Tartarus of Maids" (1855), for example, were both written in the decade after Fuller's visit to Manchester and within two years of Hawthorne's travels through Lancashire.
For his transgressions, Sisyphus is sentenced to the barren, craggy hills of
Tartarus in the underworldwhere his rock is waiting.
(20) The "ripe waste of his heart'sdecay" is from "Group from
Tartarus," a poem inwhich Harwood's character Professor Eisenbart, a cold andarrogant scientist, is forced to confront his own inner emptiness.