It is not their higher morality--that only interrupted the series of continually worsening generations. Nor would he in that case have dismissed the subject with a few words which barely suffice to connect this section with the theme of moral development. Further, it is not the fights and great deeds done at Thebes or Troy that interest him for he says nothing of their greatness, and at once declares that the cruel war and the dread fury of battle destroyed the Heroes. This, again, does not discriminate between the Heroes and the men of the Bronze age who also, being destroyed by their own deeds, had to go down to Hades. What distinguishes the Heroic age from the others is the way in which some of the Heroes depart from this life without dying. This is the point that interests the poet, and this it must have been that chiefly induced him to bring in here his account of the fourth race of men. He combines clearly enough with his main purpose of describing the advancing moral decline of man, a secondary aim--that of telling what happened after death to the representatives of each successive race. In introducing the Heroic race of men this secondary aim becomes the chief one, and justifies what would otherwise have been merely an intrusive episode. It is this aim, too, which gives the Hesiodic narrative its importance for our present inquiry. § 2 The men of the Golden Age, after sleep has overcome them and they have died and been laid in the earth, become by the will of Zeus "Daimones"--Daimones upon earth, watchers of men, wandering over all the earth, veiled in clouds, {71} observing justice and injustice,[34\2] dispensing riches like kings. These men of the earliest times have then become effective realities. They are not spirits confined to an inaccessible region beyond this world, but powers acting and working amongst men. In this exalted state Hesiod calls them _Daimones_, and thus describes them by a name which is otherwise applied by him as well as by Homer only to the immortal gods. The name so employed is not to be understood as implying a separate class of immortals, an intermediate class of beings between gods and men, as later speculation used the word.[35\2] These later beings of an intermediate class were thought of as possessing an originally immortal nature like the gods, and as dwelling in an intermediate region of their own. Hesiod's Daimones, on the contrary, have once been men and have only after their death become immortals invisibly[36\2] roaming the earth. When they are given the name Daimones nothing more is implied than that they now share the invisible might and unending life of the gods, and to that extent may be called gods--with as much right as Ino Leukothea, for instance, who, according to Homer, became a goddess after being a mortal; or as Phaëthon, who, according to the Hesiodic Theogony, was raised by Aphrodite from the world of mortality and is now called a "godlike Daimon" (_Th._, 991).