god living below the earth.[55\3] One essential characteristic indeed of such earth-spirits he lacks--he is not bound to any one particular place. An enterprising priesthood, wandering in company with the rest of their tribe, had taken with them this old established worship of theirs, and spread it far and wide, so that Asklepios himself became at home in many different places. Now, in closest relationship, though they remained more faithful to their original character, with this Zeus Asklepios stood those Boeotian earth-spirits with whom this discussion began. Trophonios, and Amphiaraos, too, might have been described as an Asklepios, who had stayed at home in his old cavern dwelling.[56\3] They, too, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, had become mortal men of a past age in the imagination of a time which could no longer properly understand such cave-spirits. But we never hear of their "graves"; for the generation which made _them_ Heroes knew nothing of mortal chieftains who after dying and being buried yet lived on with undiminished powers. But it was the belief in their uninterrupted potency that gave those strange cavern deities a secure place in men's memory. In the epic and in legends inspired by the epic they are recognized as human beings that had not died but had been translated, without any division of soul from body, to everlasting life in the depths of the earth. Ever afterwards--even when they are not only called immortal, but actually "gods"--they are reckoned as men who have _become_ immortal or godlike.[57\3] And they have become the patterns of what other mortals too may rise to. In the _Electra_ of Sophokles (836 ff.) the chorus wishing to justify the hope of a continued life for the departed, expressly appeal to the example of Amphiaraos, who still rules below the earth with all his spiritual powers intact. For the same reason these and other examples offered by ancient legend and poetry of the "translation" of individual great men to a life below the earth are important for our inquiry too. In them, as it did (in another sense) in the case of those translated to the Islands of the Blest, the Epic points beyond its own resigned and gloomy conception of the state after death towards a higher life after the visible world has been left behind. It took isolated cases of the once numerous class of cavern deities worshipped in Greek countries, and deprived {102} them of their god-head, though not of the superhumanly continued existence and (especially mantic) powers claimed for them by the belief and cult of their countrymen. Thus reduced to mortal rank, it interwove them in the fabric of the heroic mythology, and in so doing instituted a class of outstanding human individuals who had been raised to a godlike existence, far, indeed, from the upper world, but, at least, not condemned to the common realm of the souls. Instead they were given a home beneath the earth, each in a definite place in Greek