There are strong reasons also for believing that the cult of hero-ancestors was already a part of the pre-Homeric religion, as it was a prominent part of the post-Homeric. The elaborate tendance of the dead attested of the Mycenæan period by the graves discovered at Tiryns and Mycenæ, could easily develop into actual worship if it was maintained through many generations, as it was at Menidi in Attica. Doubtless, the common and promiscuous worship of the dead was a morbid development of the later polytheism. But Homer, who is generally silent about such cults, and in a well-known passage about the Twin-Brethren[36.3] seems to ignore deliberately their divine or semi-divine character, almost reveals his knowledge of the worship of Herakles,[36.4] and certainly was aware of the Attic cult of Erechtheus, unless the passage that refers to it was the work of the interpolator.[36.5] It is a difficult question how we are to estimate and how far we can trust the Homeric evidence on this important point of religion. Even if we trust it so far as to say that the Achæans at least practised {37} no real worship of the dead, it yet remains probable that they found it existing here and there in the lands in which they settled. It is important to emphasise this gloomier side of Greek religion; but it is detrimental to exaggerate it, as has been the tendency of some modern writers in a pardonable revolt from the old shallow theories of orthodox classicism. We ought to recognise that at no period of his history was the ordinary Hellene ghost-ridden, worried and dismayed by demoniac terrors, or by morbid anxiety about the other world or his destiny after death; at least he will not appear so, when we compare his religious and mythologic records with those of Babylon, Egypt, and Christendom.[37.1] Nor dare we affirm that the prehistoric Hellene was weaker-minded and more timorous in respect of such matters than the later. He may even have been stronger-minded, and at least as willing to eat a sacramental meal in company with the ‘Theoi Meilichioi’ (shadowy powers of the lower world), or with the Nether-Zeus, or the Nether Earth-Mother, and with his departed family-spirits, as were his later descendants at Lokris, Mykonos and other places.[37.2] The earliest myths have little of the goblin element. Homer indeed himself was cognisant of such forms of terror as a black ‘Ker’--Penelope likens Antinoos to one;[37.3] the ancient folklore of Argolis was aware of a bad spirit that once ravaged its homes.[37.4] The early popular imagination was sure to have inherited or to have evolved such creations of fear; and a black Earth-Goddess with a horse’s {38} head and snake-locks, who lived in a dark cave at Phigaleia, almost certainly in the pre-Homeric period, was a sufficiently terrifying personality.[38.1]