Hero-worship had become purely symbolic, and often perhaps a mere formality. But from such a fictitious ancestor-worship the cult of the graves of Heroes cannot possibly have arisen; such fictions are themselves only intelligible as copies of another and more vivid worship, of a cult of real ancestors. If no such cult had existed in actual fact before men's eyes, it would be impossible to understand how men came to imitate ancestor-worship in the shape of such purely imaginary creatures. A copy implies the existence of a model; a symbol requires the contemporary or earlier existence of the reality symbolized. We should certainly know more of the worship of ancestors among the ancient royal families if in nearly all the Greek states monarchy had not been abolished at an early period and all traces of it suppressed. Sparta alone provides us with a solitary example of what may once have been the prevailing custom in all the seats of royal authority. When a Spartan king died his funeral was celebrated with extreme pomp. His body (which, even when he had died abroad, was embalmed and brought home to Sparta was laid beside the other dead of his family, and honour was paid to him, in Xenophon's words, not as a man, but as a _Hero_.[46\4] In this case, which undoubtedly represents a traditional usage handed down from remote {124} antiquity, we have the rudiments of Hero-worship as applied to the dead of a royal family. The members of noble families who, like the Eupatridai of Athens, sometimes traced their descent from a king,[47\4] must also have retained from ancient times the practice of ancestor-worship. As of all unofficial cults, we hear little of the cults of the old clans based on blood-relationship and connexion by marriage (~ge/nê, pa/trai~). But just as out of their combination first the village communities and then the fully organized Greek Polis grew up, so, too, the religious cults which were paid to the ancestors of these unions of kinsfolk set a pattern for the manifold social groups out of which the developed state was built up.[48\4] § 6