The realm of Hades appears in the more antique parts of the poems of Homer as a land where shades dwell under the rulership of King Hades and august Persephone, living a life which is a sort of reflex and corollary of the past. Orion, the mighty hunter, still pursues in that land the spectres of wild beasts over the meadows of asphodel. Agamemnon still deplores his sad fate, Ajax will not be reconciled to his enemy Odysseus, Achilles lives on the memory of his past exploits, and rates the life of the greatest heroes in Hades as beneath that of the meanest serving-man on earth. Even these shadowy passions do not stir the hearts of the dead until they have drunk of the blood of the sacrifice, and their vital force is thus in some degree renewed. To Teiresias alone, says Circe, has Persephone granted that even after death he shall have living sense, while the rest flit like shadows. It is quite clear that this view, which removes the dead to Hades, and deprives them of all sense and power, is not to be reconciled with some of the customs of Homeric cultus, especially with the offering of victims, animal and human, at the tombs of heroes. This, however, is not strange: cultus has infinitely greater power of persistence among men than mere speculative beliefs; and among peoples of all religions we find a want of harmony between the religious belief and the religious custom which needs explanation. Homer does not fear the dead; but the burial customs described in his poems must have arisen at a time when the dead were greatly feared, and regarded as meddlesome in human affairs. And this marked inconsistency which we find in the Homeric age persists throughout Greek history. The customs of the cultus of the dead are, as we have seen, persistent among all Greek tribes, though more fully appreciated by some than others, and remain in force down to the very decline of Paganism. But at the same time speculation as to the world of spirits and the condition of the departed went on, on lines almost independent of custom and cultus. If the dead were safe in Hades they could not also live in their tombs; why then take offerings thither? If their life was the life of dreams and of shadows, why did they need food, both animal and vegetable, and abundant drink? This is sufficiently obvious to us. Yet Greek belief in all ages must have found some means of reconciling theory and cultus, and of preventing the course of speculation as to the state of the departed from interfering with the practical piety of the worship of ancestors.