So we, too, though we leave behind us Homer and the Epos and enter upon the tortuous paths of the later history of Greek soul worship and belief in immortality, may still for a time be guided by the Ariadne thread of the epic. In our subject, too, there are links which connect the Homeric with following ages. Soon enough the thread will break, and we shall have to enter the new field of inquiry depending on our own resources. . . . § 1 Prominent among the chieftains, who, under the leadership of Adrastos, came to the help of Polyneikes and laid siege to Thebes, was Amphiaraos the Argive hero and seer descended from the mysterious priest and prophet Melampous. He was drawn into the war against his will, for he foresaw its unhappy end. After the decisive struggle in which the opposing brothers fell slain by each other's hand, the Argive host turned to flight, and with them fled Amphiaraos. But before Periklymenos, who was pursuing him, could drive his spear into the fugitive's back, Zeus made the earth open before him in a flash of {90} lightning and Amphiaraos with his horses, his chariot, and his charioteer, was swallowed up in the depths where Zeus made him _immortal_. So runs the legend of the fate of Amphiaraos as we learn it from innumerable sources from Pindar onwards,[1\3] and we may be sure that thus it was told in the Thebaïs, the old epic poem of the war of the Seven against Thebes, which was taken up into the Epic Cycle.[2\3] At Thebes, then, Amphiaraos lived on for ever under the earth. Northwards in the Boeotian countryside, near Lebadeia, men told of a similar marvel. In a cave of the mountainous ravine, before which Lebadeia lies, lived Trophonios for ever immortal. The legends that professed to explain his miraculous cave-existence do not quite agree among themselves, as, indeed, is generally the case with those figures who were not early taken up by the poets and given a fixed place in the narratives of heroic adventure. But all accounts (the oldest of which perhaps go back to the "Telegoneia") agree in the assumption that Trophonios, like Amphiaraos, was first a _man_, a famous master-builder, who while flying from his foes, had dived underground at Lebadeia and now lives for ever in the depths of the earth whence he foretells the future to those who come and question him there. These stories, then, claim to speak of men who during their lifetime were swallowed up by the earth, and who now live on for ever at the places where they were taken down into the depths--places situated in quite definite localities of the Greek countryside.