Since the possession of the corporeal remains[37\4] of the Hero secured the possession of the Hero himself, the cities often protected themselves against strangers, who might remove the treasured bones, by keeping the position of the grave a secret.[38\4] A grave is always necessary to fix the Hero at a definite place, or, at least, an "empty tomb", which sometimes had to do duty for a grave.[39\4] In such cases the Hero was perhaps thought of as bound by a spell to that place.[40\4] As a rule, it is the remains of his former body that hold him fast. But these remains are a part of the Hero himself; though dead (and mummified, as we are told in one case),[41\4] he works and acts just the same; his psyche, his invisible counterpart and double, hovers in the neighbourhood of the body and the grave. These are all very primitive conceptions such as have, as a rule, only been preserved among peoples who have remained at a very undeveloped stage of culture.[42\4] When we find them in force among Greeks of post-Homeric times, we cannot really believe that they arose then for the first time, in complete contrast with the clear-sighted freedom of the men of the Homeric age. They have only re-emerged from the repressive influence of the Homeric rationalism. It would be natural to think that the same ideas that have been described as underlying the belief in Heroes were already in the minds of those prehistoric Greeks who in Mycenae and elsewhere took such care (even it seems going so far as to embalm them)[43\4] to preserve the bodies of their princes from destruction, and who put ornaments and utensils in their graves for future use {123} or enjoyment. It has been explained above how, in the times of which Homer's poems give us a picture, the alteration in sentiment as well as the spread of the custom of completely destroying the bodies of the dead with fire must have weakened the belief in the confinement of the soul to this world and to the remains of the body. This belief never entirely perished. It was preserved alive, perhaps for a long time only by a few, in those places where there remained a cult attached to a _grave_. Such a cult would not, indeed, extend to those whose death had occurred within more recent times, but it did not allow the old-established worship of the great dead of the past to die out entirely. Over the royal graves on the citadel at Mycenae stood a sacrificial hearth,[44\4] which bears witness to the continuance of the ancient worship of the kings buried there. The Catalogue of Ships in Homer mentions the "grave of Aipytos", an old Arcadian local monarch, as a landmark of the district;[45\4] may not the sanctity of that grave have been preserved? In many places, at any rate, graves were pointed out and honoured that belonged to Heroes who owed their existence solely to poetic fancy or were even mere personifications--abstractions of the names of places and countries whose ancestors they purported to be. In such cases the