Even in the petty details of the life of individuals the Heroes played their part, helping or hindering, as once in mythical times the gods had done. Everyone will be reminded of well-known legends of the gods, and will at the same time be able to measure the difference between the sublime and the merely idyllic, in reading Herodotos' naive and circumstantial tale of how Helen once appeared in person to a nurse at Therapne. The nurse was praying at Helen's grave for her ill-favoured foster-child, when the Heroine appeared to her and with a touch of her hand made the child the most beautiful maiden in Sparta.[133\4] So, too, we read how the Hero Astrabakos, in the likeness of Ariston, king of Sparta, visited in secret the king's wife and made her the mother of Demaratos.[134\4] The heroön of this Astrabakos was situated by the door of Ariston's house,[135\4] and it was a frequent custom thus to place a Hero's shrine before the house-door where he might give a special protection to his neighbour.[136\4] In all the circumstances of human life, in happiness or in need, for individuals or the city, the Heroes are thus very near to men. It is now often said of the Hero worshipped by a city (just as it was said of the city's gods) that he rules it, is its possessor, or is lord over it;[137\4] he is its true guardian and protector. It may, indeed, have been the case in many cities, as it was said to be in some, that the belief in the city-Hero was more deeply held there than the belief in the gods worshipped by all Greece in common.[138\4] The relation of man to the Heroes is closer than it is to the majestic gods above: {138} the faith in Heroes gave a different and a more familiar bond of union between men and the spirit-world above them. The worship of Heroes began as an ancestor-cult and an ancestor-cult it remained in essence, but it had now been widened to a cult of certain greater human souls who had raised themselves above their fellows by peculiar powers exercised in many, and by no means predominantly moral, directions. Many of them were of later ages or even of the quite recent past, and in this lies the peculiar importance of their cult. They show that the company of the spirits is not fixed and made up; individual mortals are still continually being raised to that higher circle after the completion of their earthly life. Death does not end all conscious existence nor does the gloom of Hades swallow up all life.