The vase is of late style, and the artist has forgotten that the snake is the hero; he makes him a sort of tame attributive pet, feeding out of the wine-cup. The snake is not bearded, but he has a touch of human unreality in that he is about to drink out of the wine-cup. These humanized snakes are fed with human food; their natural food would be a live bird or a rabbit. Dr Gadow kindly tells me that a snake will lap milk, but if he is to eat his sacrificial food, the _pelanos_, it must be made _exceedingly thin_; anything of the nature of a cake or even porridge he could not swallow. And yet the snake on the Acropolis had for his monthly due a ‘honey cake,’ and at Lebadeia[904] in the shrine of Trophonios, where it was a snake who gave oracles, the inhabitants of the country ‘cast into his shrine flat cakes steeped in honey.’ Representations of the hero reclining at a feast occur very frequently on votive reliefs of a class shortly to be discussed. They appear very rarely on vases and only on those of late style. A good instance is the design in fig. 104 from a late red-figured krater in the Berlin Museum[905]. The attempt to give a name to the recumbent man is quite fruitless: the great snake marks him as a dead hero. The woman and boy can scarcely be said to be worshippers, though the boy brings cakes and fruit; it is rather the feast that went on in life figured as continuing after death. * * * * * It remains to examine some of the class of votive reliefs closely analogous to the vase-painting in fig. 104, reliefs usually known as ‘Hero-Feasts’ or ‘Funeral Banquets.’ They are monuments especially instructive for our purpose, because nowhere else is seen so clearly the transition from hero to god, and also the gradual superposition of the Olympians over local hero-cults. THE ‘HERO-FEASTS.’ Plato[906] in the _Laws_ arranges the objects of divine worship in a regular sequence: first the Olympian gods together with those who keep the city; second the underworld gods whose share are things of unlucky omen; third the daemons whose worship is characterized as ‘orgiastic’; fourth the heroes; fifth ancestral gods. He concludes the list with living parents to whom much honour should be offered. As early as Hesiod[907] theology attempted some differentiation between heroes and daemons; daemons being accounted divine in some higher sense. Of all this minute departmentalism ritual knows nothing. The only recognized distinction is that burnt offerings are the meed of the Olympians, offerings _devoted_ (ἐναγισμοί) of the chthonic gods. Between the chthonic gods and the whole class of dead men, heroes and daemons, the only distinction observed is, as already noted, that certain chthonic gods from sheer conservatism reject the service of wine, whereas it is apparently acceptable to dead men, to heroes and to daemons not fully divinized.