As regards the imagery and geography of Hades the ordinary Greeks do not seem to have greatly troubled themselves. There were the views of poets and painters, and there were the more definite and dogmatic views of the professors of Orphic lore. These the people received or neglected as suited the bent of the mind of each. Hades was a realm of the imagination, as to the nature of which each man might innocently indulge his own hopes and aspirations. In the epitaphs of later times we find, as will be shown in a future chapter[45], numerous allusions to the realm of Hades and Persephone. But they do not strike the reader as embodying strong belief; often they are of an epideictic or rhetorical character, like the statements which also occur that the soul of the dead has made its way to the Islands of the Blest or to the abodes of the gods. The beliefs which confined the spirits of the dead to the tomb and its neighbourhood belong to a lower and worse-educated stratum of the population, but have more vitality. Greek religion and tradition knew of many mortals who had gone down alive into the earth, and there abode, giving for the most part oracles from their hiding-places. Such was Amphiaraus, the Argive hero, who after the bootless siege of Thebes went down with chariot and horses into the ground, and whose shrine was in later times a great oracular seat. Such was Trophonius of Lebadeia, whose cave is described for us by Pausanias. Caeneus, when overwhelmed with rocks by the Centaurs, vanished alive into the earth, and there lived on. It is, in fact, a marked feature of the cultus of heroes that their power is exercised only at the place where they disappeared or where their bodies were laid. They are intensely local, earth-daemons who possess a piece of land, and whose favour must be conciliated by any one who expects that land to yield him increase. Pelopidas, in the course of a campaign against the Spartans[46], unwittingly slept near the graves of some virgins of Leuctra, who had in old time been violated and slain by the Spartans. They appeared at night to the Theban general, and promised him victory if he made them the sacrifice of a foal. This is but one among a hundred instances of the fact that a hero had power only at his spot of burial: elsewhere he was helpless.