The busy expansion of the legendary material went on in epics that finally lost themselves in genealogical poems. To what extent it may have made use of the _motif_ of translation or transfiguration we can no longer accurately judge. The materials at our disposal are quite insufficient to warrant any conclusion. When such a misty figure as Telegonos is deemed worthy of immortality, it may be supposed that in the mind {67} of the poet all the heroes of Epic tradition had come to be possessed of a virtual claim to a share in this mode of continued existence in a life after death. Certainly the more important among them could not be left out--those at least of whose end the Homeric poems themselves had not already given a different version. The poem of the Return of the Heroes from Troy may especially have given scope for many translation stories.[32\2] We may, for example, ask whether Diomedes, at least, whose immortality is often vouched for by later mythology, was not already added to the number of the immortals in the epics of the Heroic cycle. An Attic folk-song of the fifth century can speak with assurance of Diomedes as not having died but as living in the "Islands of the Blest". Thus a far greater company of the Heroes of the Trojan War was thought of by the poetry of Homeric tradition as gathered together in "Isles of the Blest", far out to sea, than we should guess from the summaries of the post-Homeric Epics which accident has preserved to us. This conclusion must be drawn from the lines of a Hesiodic poem which give us some remarkable information about the oldest Greek forms of the Cult of the Souls and belief in immortality, and the lines, therefore, must be subjected to a closer examination. II The Hesiodic poem known as the "Works and Days" consists of a number of independent pieces of didactic or narrative interest loosely strung together. In it, not far from the beginning, comes the story of the Five Ages of Men. As regards its subject-matter, the train of thought which unites this section to the passages which precede and follow it is hardly discoverable; in form it is quite disconnected.