Homer gives no hint of the character or importance of the later cult of Demeter and Persephone. For him Persephone is simply the grim unapproachable Queen of the dead, Demeter invariably (and solely) a goddess of the fertility of crops[20\5]; she stands apart indeed from the rest of the Olympians, but no reference to a close association with her daughter is ever made.[21\5] Now, however, both goddesses appear in various and changing activity, but always closely associated, and it seems as if they had come to share some of their previously distinct characteristics. Both are now chthonic deities who together have in their protection the growth of the crops and the care of the souls of the dead. How in detail the change came about we can no longer discover. It may be that, in the times of the great migrations, from various centres of the worship of the two goddesses, such as had existed from great antiquity in the Peloponnese especially,[22\5] there issued forth this faith that differed so essentially from the Homeric-Ionic view of things. It must have spread just as in later times the special variety of the cult of the closely associated goddesses that was practised in Eleusis was widely propagated by regular missions. It also seems that Demeter, in whose name there was early a tendency to recognize a second "Mother Earth," in many places took the place of Gaia in religious cult, and thereby entered into closer connexion with the realm of the souls below the earth. § 2 As the numbers of the underworld beings increased, and their cult grew and expanded, these divinities began to have a very different meaning for the living from what they once had for the Greeks of the Homeric age. The upper and the lower worlds are drawn closer to each other; the world of the living borders upon that world after death over which the chthonic gods hold sway. The ancient belief that the earth-caverns of their own land, on which men dwelt and worked, were the near and accessible abode of divinity, now reappeared here and there, and was no longer completely awed into silence by the poetic lustre of the all-embracing divine world of Olympos. We have spoken in a previous chapter of Amphiaraos at Thebes, Trophonios in the Lebadean cave, and Zeus in the cave on Mt. Ida; and again of that Zeus who was seen enthroned by those who descended into a cave in Epirus. These are all vestiges of the same belief which originally underlay all local cults of underworld deities. The realm of {162} chthonic gods, of spirits and departed souls, seemed to be close at hand. _Ploutonia_, i.e. direct inlets to the underworld, existed at many places,[23\5] as also did _Psychopompeia_, clefts in the rock through which the souls can pass out into the upper world. In the middle of the city of Athens, in a natural chasm on the Areiopagos, underworld beings were reputed to have their home.[24\5] The most striking denial of the separation between the living and the