It is natural to feel surprise that in none of these stories is there any mention of translation to a common meeting-place of the Elect, such as the Elysian plain seemed to be. We must on that account be content to leave unanswered the question to what precise extent these lines of the Odyssey which describe the translation of Menelaos to Elysium may have influenced the development of translation stories in the post-Homeric Epics. The influence must clearly have been {66} considerable.[31\2] The stories of the translation of individual heroes to a solitary after-life in secluded abodes of immortality show, at any rate, the same direction of fancy as that which produced the fields of Elysium. No longer does Eos, after she has snatched him from Hades, raise her son to be among the gods as once she had raised Kleitos and others of her favourites. Memnon enters upon a peculiar state of being that differentiates him from the rest of mankind as much as from the gods. The same applies to Achilles and the other translated heroes. Thus did poetry increase the number of those who belonged to this middle realm; who, born in **mortality have, outside the realms of Olympos, achieved immortality. It is still only favoured individuals who enter this kingdom; it is still poetical aspiration, giving free rein to its creative instinct, that continues to transport an ever-increasing number of the bright figures of Legend into the illumination of everlasting life. Religious worship can have had no more influence in the development of these stories than it had in the narrative of the translation of Menelaos. Achilles, for example, may in later times have had a cult paid to him on an island at the mouth of the Danube, supposed to be Leuke. But the cult was the result and not the motive or the cause of the story. Iphigeneia was certainly the epithet of a Moon-goddess; but the poet who told of the translation of her namesake, the daughter of Agamemnon, had no suspicion of the latter's identity with a goddess--otherwise he would never have regarded her as Agamemnon's daughter. Nor, we may be fairly certain, can it have been an accidental meeting with the cult of the goddess Iphigeneia, which induced him to invent an immortality _iure postlimini_ for his mortal Iphigeneia, by the machinery of translation. Both for the poet and his contemporaries the importance and the essence of his narrative--whether free invention or a reconstruction out of older material--lay in the fact that it told of the raising of a mortal maiden, the daughter of mortal parents, to immortal life, and not to religious veneration which could not have made itself very apparent to the maiden relegated to the distant Tauric country.