If now we inquire into the nature and essence of this species of higher beings that was as yet unknown to, or disregarded by, the epic we get little information on the subject from direct statements as to their nature by writers of antiquity. We can, however, learn a great deal about them from what we are told of individual Heroes and more particularly from what we know of the peculiar nature of the religious worship paid to them.[7\4] The Heroes were worshipped with sacrifice like the gods; but these sacrifices were very different from the offerings that were made to the Olympians.[8\4] They differ in time, place, and character. Sacrifice was made to the gods in broad daylight, to Heroes towards evening or at night;[9\4] and not on raised altars, but on low, and sometimes hollow, sacrificial hearths close to the ground.[10\4] For them were slain animals of black colour and male sex,[11\4] and in sacrificing, the heads of the animals were not turned upwards towards heaven as they were when offered to the gods, but were bent down to the ground.[12\4] The blood of these animals was allowed to run down into the ground or into the sacrificial hearth, that the Heroes might have their "appeasement of blood".[13\4] The carcass was completely burnt, for no living man might taste of it.[14\4] This peculiar mode of worshipping the Heroes was in strict usage described by a different name from that used of the sacrifices to the gods.[15\4] On special occasions a sacrificial meal of cooked food was prepared, to which the Hero was invited as a guest.[16\4] They are near by in the earth itself, and there is no need in their case, as for the Olympians, to send up the savour of sacrifice in smoke to heaven. This sacrificial ritual is in those features which distinguish it from that commonly in use for the gods of Olympos precisely identical with that by which the gods who dwelt under the earth, and, later, even the souls of dead men, were honoured. This will seem quite natural if we regard the Heroes as closely related to the chthonic deities on the one hand, and to the dead on the other. In fact, they are nothing else than the spirits of dead men who now dwell beneath the earth, immortal like the gods of that underworld, and almost equal to them in power. Their real nature as the souls of great men of the past, who have died but have not been deprived of conscious existence, is made plain by another mode of doing honour to them originally belonging to them and them only--I mean the yearly repeated celebration of Funeral Games.