The same belief in a guardian-deity presiding over each human life is to be found throughout ancient Greek literature. In Homer the name for such a _genius_ is Κὴρ (at any rate if it be of an evil sort), in later writers δαίμων--both of them vague terms which embrace other kinds of deities as well, yet not so vague but that with the aid of context we can readily discover in them the equivalent of the ‘guardian-angel’ or other modern _genius_. From Homer onwards the word λαγχάνειν is regularly used of the allotment of each human life from the moment of birth to one of these guardians, and the belief in their attendance upon men throughout, and even after, life seems to have had general acceptance. In the _Iliad_ the wraith of Patroclus is made to speak of the hateful _Ker_ to whom he was allotted at the hour of birth[776], and the _Ker_ here mentioned is not, I think, merely fate in the abstract but as truly a person as that baneful _Ker_ of battle and carnage ‘who wore about her shoulders a robe red with the blood of heroes[777].’ After Homer the word δαίμων is preferred, but there is no change in the idea. The famous saying of Heraclitus, ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμον, ‘the god that guides man’s lot is character,’ is in no wise dark, but Plato throws even clearer light upon the popular belief in guardian-_daemons_. ‘It is said that at each man’s death his _daemon_, the _daemon_ to whom he had been allotted for his lifetime, has the task of guiding him to some appointed place[778],’ where the souls of men must assemble for judgement. Here the words ‘it is said’ indicate the popular source of the doctrine; and this is confirmed by another passage in which Plato[779] protests against the fatalism involved in the allotment of souls to particular _daemons_, and prefers to hold that the soul may choose its own guardian. Again in a fragment of Menander there is a simple statement of the belief in a form which robs fatalism of its gloom: Beside each man a daemon takes his stand E’en at his birth-hour, through life’s mysteries A guide right good[780]. But there were others who did not take so cheerful a view, at any rate of their own guardian-deities; ‘alas for the most cruel _daemon_ to whom I am allotted[781]’ is a complaint of a type by no means rare in Greek literature, and the word κακοδαίμων came as readily as εὐδαίμων to men’s lips[782]. From these passages it is evident that in general each man was believed to have one, and only one, attendant _genius_, and his happiness or misery to depend on the character of the guardian allotted to him by fate. But sometimes this injustice of destiny was obviated by a belief similar to the modern belief in both good and bad angels in attendance on each man. The comment of Servius on Vergil’s line, ‘Quisque suos patimur manes[783],’ sets forth this view: ‘when we are born two _Genii_ are allotted to us, one who exhorts us to good, the other who perverts us to evil.’