We can now deal with the purely Hellenic evidence. Confining our view first to the cults and legends of the higher divinities of Hellas, we cannot affirm that the death and resurrection of the deity is a primitive tradition of the Hellenes. We may suspect it to have been a leading motive in some of the local Arcadian cults of Artemis, if, for instance, we interpret the Arcadian Kallisto as a form of the great goddess herself; but it is very probable that Artemis in Arcadia and many other of her cult-centres represents the pre-Hellenic divinity of birth and fruitfulness. What we may dare to call the Hellenic spirit seems to speak in the answer given by Xenophanes to the people of Elea when they asked him whether they ought to sacrifice to Leukothea and bewail her: “If you regard her as a deity, do not bewail her; if as human, do not sacrifice.”[261.4] But when we descend from the higher religion to {262} the old Hellenic agrarian cults associated with the heroes or daimones of the soil and field, we find evidence of sorrowful rites, ceremonies of bewailing, which belong to the same type as that of Tammuz; and in the Greek, as in the Babylonian, the personage to whom they are attached is a youthful hero or heroine of vegetation: such are Linos, perhaps the earliest theme of a melancholy harvest-song of pre-Homeric days; Hyakinthos, the “youth” of the Laconian land who may or may not have been Hellenic, to whom the greater part of the Hyakinthia were consecrated; Eunostos of Tanagra; Erigone, “the early-born,” of Ikaria. The life of all these passes away as the verdure passes, or as the crops are gathered in; and to one of them at least, Hyakinthos, and perhaps to the others, the idea of an annual resurrection was attached. But none of these came like Tammuz to play a world-part; they remain the naïve, half-realised forms of poetic folk-religion. Like to them is Bormos of Bithynia,[262.1] whose death was bewailed at the harvest-time with melancholy songs, accompanied by sad flute-music, and Lityerses of Phrygia, whom the reapers lamented around the threshing-floor. Shall we say that all these are merely reflections cast afar by the great cult-figure of Babylon? Then we must say the same of the peasant-hero “German” whom the modern Bulgarians adore and bewail, of the Russian Yarilo,[262.2] and our own John Barleycorn. And at this point we shall probably fall back on the theory of independent similar developments, and shall believe that peasant religion in different parts of the world is capable of evolving strikingly parallel {263} figures in obedience to the stimulus of similar circumstances and needs.