This last example is instructive because it shews that the king is something more than a priest. He prays not only to the spirits of his fathers but to his own spirit. He is clearly raised above the standard of mere humanity; there is something divine about him. Similarly we may suppose that the Spartan kings were thought not only to be descended from the great god Zeus but also to partake of his holy spirit. This is indeed indicated by a curious Spartan belief which has been recorded by Herodotus. The old historian tells us that formerly both of the Spartan kings went forth with the army to battle, but that in later times a rule was made that when one king marched out to fight the other should stay at home. “And accordingly,” says {p49} Herodotus, “one of the kings remaining at home, one of the Tyndarids is left there too; for hitherto both of them were invoked and followed the kings.”​[182] The Tyndarids are, of course, the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, the sons of Zeus; and it should be remembered that the two Spartan kings themselves were believed to be descended from twins​[183] and hence may have been credited with the wondrous powers which superstition often associates with twins.​[184] The belief described by Herodotus plainly implies that one of the heavenly twins was supposed to be in constant attendance on each of their human kinsmen the two Spartan kings, staying with them where they stayed and going with them wherever they went; hence they were probably thought to aid the kings with their advice in time of need. Now Castor and Pollux are commonly represented as spearmen, and they were constantly associated or identified, not only with stars, but also with those lurid lights which, in an atmosphere charged with electricity, are sometimes seen to play round the masts of ships under a murky sky.​[185] Moreover, similar lights were observed by the ancients to glitter in the darkness on the points of spears. Pliny tells us that he had seen such lambent flames on the spears of Roman sentinels {p50} as they paced their rounds by night in front of the camp;​[186] and it is said that Cossacks riding across the steppes on stormy nights perceive flickerings of the same sort at their lance-heads.​[187] Since, therefore, the divine brothers Castor and Pollux were believed to attend the Spartan kings, it seems not impossible that they may have been thought to accompany the march of a Spartan army in a visible form, appearing to the awe-stricken soldiers in the twilight or the darkness either as stars in the sky or as the sheen of spears on earth. Perhaps the stories of the appearance of the heavenly twins in battle, charging on their milk-white steeds at the head of the earthly chivalry, may have originated in similar lights seen to glitter in the gloaming on a point here and there in the long hedge of levelled or ported spears; for any two riders on white horses whose spearheads happened to be touched by the mystic light might