In the same way the larger groups into which the Athenian state since the time of Kleisthenes was divided were unable to dispense with the practice of association for the cult of a commonly worshipped Hero. The Heroes of the newly organized _phylai_[50\4] had their temple, land, priests, statues, and regular cult; and so also had the Heroes of the smaller purely local divisions, the demes. Here, too, the fiction of ancestor-worship was kept up; the names of the phylai, always patronymic in form, represent the members of each _phyle_ as the descendants of the Hero Eponymos or Archegetes of the phyle.[51\4] The demes also in many cases have patronymic titles which for the most part are also known to us as the names of aristocratic families.[52\4] It is evident that in such demes the members of individual aristocratic families had settled down together or near each other. The Archegetes, whether real or fictitious, of the family must then have been regarded as the Archegetes of the deme. We thus see how the cult of a family ancestor, taken over by a wider group of worshippers, might be preserved and extended--little as the cult might benefit in sincerity by such political enlargement. The cult of Heroes everywhere has the same features as the cult of ancestors; at least, the more influential Heroes, those worshipped by the greater communities, were everywhere regarded as the forefathers and progenitors of the groups of countryfolk, citizens, or kinsmen who honoured them. The fact that the persons of these prehistoric Heroes owed their existence almost without exception solely to poetry or fancy allows us to conclude that at the time when ancestor-worship had its re-birth in Hero-worship, the memory of the real Archegetai of the country, the ancestors of the ruling families and clans, together with their cult, had fallen into oblivion. A great or illustrious name was introduced where the real name was no longer known. More often, even when the real forefather of the clan was still well known, the name of a great man of the primeval past was placed at the head of the list in order to throw the origin of the family as far back into the past as possible and connect it the more closely with a divine source.[53\4] Men thus came to worship a phantom, often a mere symbol, of an ancestor. But they held fast to the imitation of real ancestor-worship; the remains of a true cult of ancestors provided the model and were the real starting-point for the later belief and cult of Heroes. {126} § 7