We may take it then that the ‘euphemistic’ epithets were applied at first in all simplicity and faith to heroes and underworld gods by the race that worshipped them. The devotees of the new Achaean religion naturally regarded the heroes and saints of the old as demons. Such was in later days the charitable view taken by the Christian fathers of the Olympian gods in their turn. All the activities that were uncongenial, all the black side of things, were carefully made over by the Olympians to the divinities they had superseded. Only here and there the unconscious use of a crystallized epithet like ‘Blameless’ lets out the real truth. The ritual prescription that heroes should be worshipped by night, their sacrifice consumed before dawn, no doubt helped the conviction that as they loved the night their deeds were evil. Their ritual too was archaic and not lacking in savage touches. At Daulis[876] Pausanias tells of the shrine of a hero-founder. It was evidently of great antiquity, for the people of the place were not agreed as to who the hero was; some said Phocos, some Xanthippos. Service was done to him every day, and when animal sacrifice was made the Phocians poured the blood of the victim through a hole into the grave; the flesh was consumed on the spot. Such plain-spoken ritual would go far to promote the notion that the hero was bloodthirsty. Sometimes a ritual prescription marks clearly the antipathy between old and new, between the hero and the Olympian. Pausanias[877] describes in detail the elaborate ceremonial observed in sacrificing to Pelops at Olympia. The hero had a large _temenos_ containing trees and statues and surrounded by a stone wall, and the entrance, as was fitting for a hero, was towards the west. Sacrifice was done into a pit and the victim was a black ram. Pausanias ends his account with the significant words: ‘Whoever eats of the flesh of the victim sacrificed to Pelops, whether he be of Elis or a stranger, _may not enter the temple of Zeus_.’ But we are glad to know from Pindar[878] that no spiteful ritual prescription of the Olympian could dim the splendour of the local hero: ‘In goodly streams of flowing blood outpoured Upon his tomb, beside Alpheios’ ford, Now hath he still his share; Frequent and full the throng that worship there.’ The scholiast comments on the passage: ‘Some say that it was not (merely) a tomb but a sanctuary of Pelops and that the followers of Herakles sacrificed to him before Zeus.’ At yet another great Pan-Hellenic centre there is the memory, though more faded, of the like superposition of cults. The scholiast on Pindar[879] says that the contest at Nemea was of the nature of funeral games (ἐπιτάφιος) and that it was in honour of Archemoros, but that later, after Herakles had slain the Nemean lion, he ‘took the games in hand and put many things to rights and ordered them to be sacred to Zeus.’