However much the meaning attached to the name of Hero may have widened or even deteriorated, the belief in the Heroes lost none of its significance and long retained its hold on the people. The belief in such a class of spirits stood almost on a par with the belief in gods. If the circle of influence possessed by some particular local-Hero was narrow and restricted, that only made him seem all the nearer to his worshippers. The spirits of their ancestors, their own and the country's peculiar possession and shared with no one else, seemed more intimately theirs than other invisible powers even of higher rank. Permanent as the gods themselves, such Heroes were honoured as hardly second to the gods, "though they cannot equal them in might."[91\4] "Not equal"--for their efficacy was confined within bounds; it did not reach beyond the limits of their home and the little band of their worshippers. They were bound to the soil as the Olympian gods no longer were--(a Hero who breaks free from local limitations soon achieves divinity). In particular those Heroes who send up, from beneath the earth where they dwell, relief in sickness or prevision of the future are certainly bound to one spot. Only at their graves can such assistance be expected, for that is their dwelling-place. In their case the relationship between the belief in Heroes and the belief in those subterranean deities, of whom something was said in the previous chapter, is peculiarly plain. Indeed, in so far as their influence is limited {133} to a single locality and their powers concerned especially with _iatromantic_ manifestations, these two classes of spirits essentially coincide.