Athletic contests for chieftains at the funeral of a prominent {117} one of their number were known to Homer, and we have already referred to them among other relics in epic poetry of a once powerful cult of souls.[17\4] But Homer knew nothing of their repetition, and certainly not of an annual recurrence of such funeral celebrations.[18\4] Games celebrated afresh after the lapse of a definite period became known to the Greeks only when the cult of Heroes had reached its maturity. Many of these contests were connected perpetually with the yearly festivals of individual Heroes, and were intended to honour their memory.[19\4] Even in historical times, generally on the command of the Delphic oracle, annual contests were instituted in honour of Heroes.[20\4] It was the mode of worship proper to Heroes, and men realized that in holding such contests they were really repeating the funeral ceremonies of a dead man.[21\4] The cult of Heroes was the earliest breeding ground of the Agôn, that most characteristic feature of Greek life and school of the individualism that made the greatness of Greece. It was not unreasonable that afterwards many of the victors at the great Agônes were themselves raised by popular superstition to the number of the Heroes. The greatest Games of all, to which all Greece assembled, the Pythian, Olympian, Nemean, and Isthmian, were during the historical period, it is true, celebrated in honour of gods; but that they had been originally instituted as Funeral Games of Heroes and only subsequently transferred to higher guardianship was, at any rate, the general opinion of antiquity.[22\4] § 3 The Heroes are, then, spirits of the dead, and not a species of inferior deities or "demigods";[23\4] and quite distinct again from the "daimones" known to later speculative thought and, indeed, to popular superstition. These latter are divine spirits of a lower order; but spirits which have always been exempt from death because they have never entered into the finite existence of men. The Heroes on the other hand have once been living men; from being men they have _become_ Heroes, and that only after their death.[24\4] Furthermore, they have now entered upon a higher stage of existence as a special class of beings who are named by the _side_ of gods and men.[25\4] In them we meet with something quite unknown to the Homeric poems--_souls_ which after their death and separation from the body have a higher imperishable life.