tradition while being older than Hesiod may, nevertheless, be more recent than Homer, and be the result of post-Homeric speculation. It is unnecessary to develop the reasons which make such a view untenable; the course of our inquiry up to the present has made it possible for us to maintain decidedly that in what Hesiod here says we have a fragment of primitive belief reaching back far beyond Homer and surviving in the secluded Boeotian countryside. We have found even in the poems of Homer vestiges of a cult of the dead sufficient to make us believe that once in a distant past the Greeks resembled the majority of other nations and believed in the continued, conscious existence of the psyche after its separation from the body and in its powerful influence upon the world of men. We found, too, that in accordance with this belief, religious honours of various sorts were paid to the disembodied souls. In Hesiod's narrative we simply have documentary confirmation of {73} what could only be with difficulty extracted from the study of Homer. Here we encounter the still living belief in the elevation of the soul after death to a higher life. They are the souls, it must be noted, of a race of men long since disappeared, about whom this belief is held. The belief in their godlike after-life must therefore be long-standing, and the worship of these souls as powerful beings still continues. For when it is said of the souls of the second race "these also receive worship"[39\2] (_Op._, 142), it is distinctly implied that the Daimones of the first or Golden generation _a fortiori_ received worship.