On the other hand, these immortals who were once men are clearly distinguished from the everlasting gods, "who have their Olympian dwellings," by being called Daimones "who rule upon earth".[37\2] And though they are given the name, familiar to everybody from Homer, of Daimones, i.e. gods, they, nevertheless, form a class of beings which is entirely unknown to Homer. Homer knows of certain individual men who are raised or translated, body and soul together, to undying life. The later Epos can tell of certain also who, like Memnon or Achilles, receive a new life after their death and now live on in undivided unity of body and soul. But that the soul outside Erebos could carry on a conscious life of its own and influence living men--of this there is no mention in Homer. Yet this is exactly what has happened according to the Hesiodic poem. The men of the Golden Age have died and now live on divided from their bodies, invisible and godlike, and therefore called gods. Just as in Homer, the gods themselves assume manifold shapes and visit the cities of men, observing the good and evil deeds of men,[38\2] so also do the souls of the dead in Hesiod. For the beings who here, after their separation from the body, have become Daimones, are _Souls_--that is to say, beings who after their {72} death have entered in any case upon a higher existence than was theirs while they were united to the body. This, however, is an idea that we never meet with in the Homeric poems. And yet it is quite unthinkable that this remarkable conception is the independent and passing invention of the Boeotian poet. He comes back to it again later on in the course of his poem. "Thirty thousand," that is, innumerable immortal Watchers over mortal men wander invisibly in the service of Zeus over the earth, taking note of right and wrong (_Op._, 252 ff.). The conception is important to him for ethical reasons; if he is to make use of it in his argument he must not have invented it himself. And, in fact, nothing that belongs to the sphere of religious belief and cultus, or even the lower levels of superstition, has been invented by this earnest-minded poet. The Boeotian school of poetry to which he belonged was far removed from, and indeed, hostile to the free inventiveness and roaming fancy with which the Homeric school ". . . know how to put forward many lies and make them seem like truth" (_Th._, 27). In pursuance of their purpose not simply to please but always in some sense to teach, the Boeotian poets never innovate in the region of the purely mythical, but simply order or piece together, or merely register what they find in the tradition. In religion especially invention lies farthest from their minds, though they do not by any means deny themselves the right of independent speculation about the traditional. Thus, what Hesiod tells us about the men of a previous age, whose souls after death become Daimones, came to him from tradition. It might still be objected that this