Because Athens alone is really alive to us, because we know Sophocles as human poet, Asklepios as divine Healer, the case of Amynos, Asklepios, Sophocles seems specially vital and convincing. But we must take it only as one instance of the ladder from earth to heaven that had its lowest rungs planted in every village scattered over Greece—a ladder that reached sometimes, but not always or even often, up to high Olympus itself. Whether a local hero became a god depended on a multitude of chances and conditions, the clue to which is lost. If a local hero became famous beyond his own parish the Olympian religion made every effort to meet him half-way. Herakles was of the primitive Pelasgian[898] stock. His name, if the most recent etymology[899] be accepted, means only _the_ young dear Hero—_the_ Hero _par excellence_. No pains were spared to affiliate him. He is allowed the Olympian burnt sacrifice[900], he is passed through the folds of Hera’s robe to make him her child by adoption[901], he is married in Olympus to Hebe, herself but newly translated, the vase-painter[902] diligently paints his reception into Olympus, he is always elaborately entering, yet he is never really _in_, he is too much a man to wear at ease the livery of an Olympian, and literature, always over-Olympianized, makes him too often the laughing-stock of the stage. [Illustration: FIG. 103.] More often it is the fate of a hero to become locally a divinity of healing, but never to emerge as a Pan-Hellenic god. In the design in fig. 103 we have a good instance—from a vase[903] found in Boeotia and now in the National Museum at Athens. On the obverse a bearded man, wearing a wreath, reclines at a banquet. A table with cakes stands by his couch. An enormous coiled snake is about to drink from the wine-cup in his hand. On the reverse a woman-goddess holding a sceptre is seated, a girl brings offerings—an oinochoë, cakes, a lighted taper. Above are hung votive offerings—a hand, two legs, such as hang in the shrines of saints in Brittany and Italy to-day. An interpreter unversed in the complexity of hero-cults would at once name the god with the snake on the obverse Asklepios, the goddess with the votive limbs on the reverse Hygieia; but to these names they have no sort of right. Found as the vase was in Boeotia, the vase-painter more probably intended Amphiaraos, or possibly Trophonios, and Agathe Tyche. All we can say is that they are a couple of healing divinities—hero and heroine divinized. [Illustration: FIG. 104.]