But though the Heroes have once been men, it does not follow that all men become Heroes after their death. On the contrary, the Heroes, even though their number was not fixed {118} and limited, but continually admitted additions, remained an _exception_, a select minority which for that reason alone can be contrasted with ordinary humanity. The chief figures, the outstanding representatives of this heroic company, we may say, were those whose lifetime was fixed by legend or history in the distant past--who were in fact the ancestors of later humanity. The worship of Heroes is not, then, a cult of souls, but in a narrower sense a cult of _ancestors_. Even their name, as it appears, distinguishes the Heroes as men of the past. In the Iliad and the Odyssey "Hero" is the honourable title of chieftains, and also, generally, of all free men.[26\4] Poetry of later centuries, so far as it touched upon the events of the legendary past, continued to use the word "Hero" in this sense. But when in post-Homeric times the speaker, whether he is a poet or prose-writer, regards the matter from the point of view of contemporary life, then by "Hero", if he is referring to a man at all, he means a man of those days when, according to the Homeric poems, this honourable title was still in use among living men--he refers in a word to men belonging to the legendary _past_ celebrated in poetry.[27\4] In Hesiod's narrative of the Five Ages of Men, the use of the word Hero is confined to the Champions of the wars at Thebes and Troy; they are called, as though by their special name, the "divine race of Heroes".[28\4] For Hesiod the "Heroes" are by no means the transfigured dead of past generations.[29\4] He knows well enough of such transfigured dead of a still earlier past, but these he calls "Daimones". And so, too, when in after times the name of Hero is applied to these favoured individuals who enjoy a higher life after their death, the name which in itself did not imply the higher nature of such departed spirits is evidently intended to show that the _lifetime_ of those who had received this privilege after their death occurred in a legendary past. As these men of the distant past had been "Heroes" during their life, so, too, they must be called after their death. But the meaning of the word Hero has undergone a change, and now contains the additional notion of unending transfigured existence. The worship of the Heroes reveals itself as something quite new, a form of religious belief and cult, of which the Homeric poems at least gave no inkling. And, indeed, the conception of such transfigured ancestral souls living on in a higher state must have been a novel one, if no special word of ancient coinage could be found to express it, and a long-standing word of the epic vocabulary had to be pressed into a new sense.