We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μἴα, 'one form of many names'. Each tribe, each little community, sometimes one may almost say each caste--the Children of the Bards, the Children of the Potters--had its own special gods. Now as soon as there was any general 'Sunoikismos' or 'Settling-together', any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers, these innumerable gods tended to melt into one another. Under different historical circumstances this process might have been carried resolutely through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which each god had his proper function and there was no overlapping--one Korê, one Kouros, one Sun-God, and so on. But in Greece that was impossible. Imaginations had been too vivid, and local types had too often become clearly personified and differentiated. The Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb some other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with her of Cythêra or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the Argive Korê or the Delian or the Brauronian. What happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. The Korai of Cyprus, Cythêra, Corinth, Eryx, and some other places were felt to be one, and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis absorbed a quantity more, including those of Delos and Brauron, of various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as we saw, the fertility Korê of Ephesus. Doubtless she and the Delian were originally much closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity, the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the same way were absorbed into some half-dozen great mythological shapes, Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, and the like. As so often in Greek development, we are brought up against the immense formative power of fiction or romance. The simple Korê or Kouros was a figure of indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like the Roman functional gods, such beings were hardly persons; they melted easily one into another. But when the Greek imagination had once done its work upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become, for all practical purposes, a definite person, almost as definite as Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth or Falstaff. They crystallize hard. They will no longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary temperature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal about the gods all being one, 'Zeus the same as Hades, Hades as Helios, Helios the same as Dionysus',[64:1] but the amalgamation only takes place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of religious mysticism.