their departure must they live on and have influence eternally like the gods. We can easily see the close resemblance that exists between such figures as Amphiaraos or Trophonios and the Heroes of later belief; in fact, both of them, when they were not called gods, were frequently reckoned among these Heroes. But for all that, they are only _quasi-Heroes_; prototypes of the real Heroes they can never have been. They have been translated during their lifetime, and live on immortally just because they have never tasted death. They, with those others translated to the Islands of the Blest, represent the idea of immortality in the only form recognized by the Homeric poetry. The Heroes of the newly awakening creed, on the contrary, have died unmistakably; and yet they continue to live on, though relieved of their bodies. They are entirely distinct from the translated few of the epic tradition. They emerge out of the obscurity of the half-remembered past as something strange--as something, indeed, opposed to the circle of ideas influenced by the epic. It was not from poetic imagination or story that the Heroes took their origin, but from the remains of an ancient pre-Homeric belief which local worship had preserved alive. § 5 The worship of a Hero is everywhere connected with the site of his grave. That is the general rule proved in innumerable cases. That is why in the case of a more than ordinarily revered Hero, his grave as the centre of his worship is set up in some prominent and honourable place--the market-place of the city, the Prytaneion,[30\4] or, like the grave of Pelops in the Altis at Olympia, in the very middle of the holy precinct, in the thick of the festival crowd.[31\4] Or else the Hero who guarded the city and the land might have his grave in the wall of the city gate or upon the farthest border of its territory.[32\4] Where his grave is, there the Hero is fast bound; that is his {122} dwelling-place.[33\4] This idea prevails everywhere, though it may not be given such blunt expression as at Tronis, in the country of the Phocians, where the blood of the offering made to the Hero was poured down through an opening immediately into his grave mound.[34\4] It is implied, as a rule, in these cases that the grave contains the bones of the Hero. The bones--all that is left of his mortality--chain the Hero to his grave. Hence, when it was thought desirable to attach a Hero and his protective power to a city his bones (or what were taken for such) on the command of an oracle were brought from a foreign land and laid to rest in his native country. We possess many accounts of such transference of relics.[35\4] Most of them occurred in the distant past, but we also read how in the full light of history in the year 476 enlightened Athens brought over the bones of Theseus from Skyros;[36\4] and not until they were buried in the Theseion was Theseus properly attached to Athens.