Nor in this second period were such heroic honours reserved for the remote ancestor or the great king or warrior of old, but were sometimes paid to the recently dead, to the men who had served the State well by arms or by counsel. On the assumption that Lykourgos of Sparta was a real man--and no other theory that bears scrutiny has been put forward about him--his case is the earliest recorded instance of the ‘heroising’ of a personage of the historic period. A great stimulus about this time was given to this practice by the expansion of Greek colonisation, the greatest world-event of the period, which reacted in many ways on religion. As the new colonists could not take with them the tombs or the bones of the aboriginal hero of their stock, they must institute a new hero-cult, so as to bind the new citizens together by the tie of heroic kinship. The {70} most natural person to select for this high honour was the founder or leader of the colony, the κτίστης or ἀρχηγέτης as he was called; and we may regard it as the usual rule that, when he died, he would be buried within the city and his tomb would become a ‘ἡρῶον’ and would be visited yearly with annual offerings. That the ordinary head of the private household in this period received posthumous honours amounting to actual worship cannot be definitely proved. The tendance of the dead had become indeed a matter of religion, and at Athens was attached to the ritual of the state by the commemorative feast of All Souls, the χύτροι, or ‘Feast of Pots,’ the last day of the Anthesteria. But nothing that is recorded of this ghost-ceremony convicts it of actual worship; the ghosts are invited to spend the day with the household that holds them in affection; they are offered pots of porridge, and then at sunset are requested or commanded to depart. Prayers are proffered in their behalf to the powers of death, but not directly to the ghosts themselves; no cult is offered them as to superior beings endowed with supernatural power over the lives of individuals and states.[70.1] Nevertheless, the passionate service of lamentation and the extravagant dedication of gifts which marked the funeral ceremonies of the eighth and seventh centuries and which certain early legislation was framed to check, reveals a feeling about the dead bordering on veneration and such as might inspire actual worship. We may safely assume that the growing interest of the States in hero-cult intensified the family {71} aspect of the State-religion; the hero as the glorious kinsman is invited to the sacrifices of the higher deities, and to the hospitable ritual known as the ‘theoxenia’ in which the God himself is the host.