The men of the Silver generation, on account of their refusal to pay due honour to the Olympians, are "hidden" by Zeus under the earth, and are now called "mortal Blessed Ones that live below the earth, second in rank, yet worship is paid to them also" (141-2). Thus, the poet knows of the souls of men who likewise belonged to the distant past, whose home is in the bowels of the earth, who receive religious honour and who must therefore have been conceived as powerful. The poet has not specified the nature of their influence upon the upper world. It is true that he does not distinctly call the spirits of this second generation "good", as he had done the first (122), and he makes them spring from the less perfect Silver age and seems to have given them inferior rank. But it does not follow that he here anticipated later speculation and thought of the second generation as a class of wicked demons whose nature it is to work evil.[40\2] Only to the Olympians do they seem to stand in a rather more distant relationship--almost one of hostility. They had before paid the gods none of their pious dues, and so now they are not called, like the souls of the first race, "Daimones appointed by Zeus to be Watchers of men." The poet refers to them with a remarkable expression, "mortal Blessed Ones," that is, mortal gods. This very singular denomination, the two parts of which really cancel one another, points to a certain embarrassment felt by the poet in making use of an expression taken from the Homeric vocabulary (to which the poet felt himself confined) to designate clearly and effectively a class of beings that was unknown to Homer.[41\2] The disembodied souls of the first race he had simply called Daimones. But this name, common as it was both to the race of those who from mortality had achieved immortality and to the immortal gods, left the essential difference between the two classes of immortal beings unexpressed. For that very reason the name was never employed in Hesiod's fashion by later ages,[42\2] who always {74} called such as, not having been born immortal, had achieved immortality, by the name of "Heroes". Hesiod, who could not use the word in this sense, described them by the bold oxymoron: mortal Blessed Ones, human gods. As immortal spirits they resembled the gods in their new state of being. But their nature was still mortal, and hence their bodies had to die, and this constituted their difference from the everlasting gods.[43\2]