The story of Odysseus' journey to Hades and its expansion in conformity with the gradually increasing distinctness with which the life after death was conceived, was followed at an early period in the development of Epic poetry by further accounts of such journeys undertaken by other heroes. A Hesiodic poem described the descent of Theseus and Peirithoös to the underworld.[2\7] A Nekyia, the details of which are unknown, occurred in the poem of the _Return_ of the heroes {237} from Troy. The epic which went by the name of the "Minyas" seems to have given considerable space to a descent to Hades.[3\7] The ancient fable of Herakles' descent to Hades and conflicts in the underworld received embellishment at more than one poet's hand.[4\7] As a result of such repeated and rival interpretations of the story the stock of characters and events associated with Hades was gradually and continually being enlarged. Accident has preserved to us the fact about the little-known _Minyas_ that it, too, added to the details of the picture. To what extent popular imagination and mythology, on the one hand, and poetic inventiveness, on the other, may have been responsible for all this we can hardly say. It seems probable that here, as in the development of so many Greek myths, on the whole the balance of invention lay on the side of the poets. Purely poetic visions or pictures like that of the _translation_ of individual heroes to Elysium may have gradually won their way to popular acceptance. "Dearest Harmodios," said the Athenian Skolion, "thou art not dead indeed, but livest yet, men say, in the Islands of the Blest." Not that there was anything fixed or dogmatic on the point. In a funeral oration Hyperides represents Leosthenes and his companions in battle as meeting in Hades, among the illustrious dead, the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton.[5\7]