had been preserved at least in occasional remote corners of the Greek countryside. But it was only the dead of a legendary past who were regarded by Hesiod as "Daimones": the poet could relate no similar marvels from more recent periods, and still less of men in his own lifetime. Thus, we have in this case traces of _ancestor-worship_ indeed, but not of a general worship of souls that is elsewhere the normal development of the worship of ancestors. So, then, in the worship of Heroes, what we have before us is not a general cult of the soul but a cult of ancestors. We may express the matter in this way: in the cult of the "Hero" a still burning spark of ancient belief is kindled to renewed flame--it is not the appearance of something entirely strange and new, but something long past and half-forgotten is awakened to new life. Those Daimones which arose from the men of the earlier golden and silver ages--whom the poet of the "Works and Days" had situated in the dimmest and remotest past--what are they but the "Heroes" worshipped by later ages under a new name and brought down nearer to the period of contemporary life? § 4 How it came about that the cult of ancestors was rescued from partial, and more than partial, oblivion, and rose to a new and lasting importance, that, indeed, we cannot say. We can give no real explanation indicative of the origin and progress of this important development in Greek religious life. We know neither the time nor the place of the first serious revival of this newly awakened primitive worship; nor can we tell the manner or stages of its diffusion during those obscure years of the eighth and seventh centuries. We can, however, bring the fact of the revival of ancestor-worship into relation with a number of other facts which prove that during those years many hitherto buried or repressed ideas about the life of gods and men came to the surface again out of the depths of popular faith and out of an older worship of the gods that had never quite died out. This revival did not, indeed, suppress the Homeric view entirely--that never occurred--but it did set itself on a level with that view. The great movement with which we shall be dealing in the next chapter also contributed to the progress of the belief in Heroes. Many other favouring {121} circumstances may in detail have helped to strengthen that belief. Even the epic itself had in one point at least approached the ideas that were receiving a new life in the worship of Heroes. Many of the local gods who had faded before the new deities of common Hellenic belief had been reduced to the rank of humanity and joined in heroic adventure. By a sort of compromise effected with the local cult of such gods the epic poets had been led, in a few cases, to the creation of a remarkable series of figures in which the divine and the human was wonderfully mixed. These champions and seers of old time, as they had once been mortal men among other men, so now after