Dionysus came late into Greek religion. As we have seen, in Homer he was not a member of the Olympic circle. Mythology has preserved many stories which bear witness to the opposition which his worship received as it spread over Greece. The newcomer, like Ares and the Muses, was a Thracian. His worship was introduced by immigrants and spread gradually to the south. Apparently the cult of the god was brought into Greece by more than one wave of immigration, and by more than one route. Thebes and Orchomenos in Boeotia were early centers of his worship, from which Delphi was later influenced. In the Peloponnesus probably Argolis received the new comer first. Even before the god was established in southern Greece he may have been carried to Crete directly from his northern home. The islands of the Aegean, the cities of Asia Minor, and ultimately the remote colonies knew the divinity. In Attica tradition said that his first home was in the country demes, notably at Icaria, where Americans excavated his shrine over twenty-five years ago. Probably the early rulers at Athens received the god into the city, but it was the Pisistratidae who especially favored his worship and gave him a home on the south side of the Acropolis, where the fifth century saw presented all the glories of the Attic stage. The new god came as the god of all living things, of plants, trees, the lower animals, as well as of man. In short he was a nature divinity whose death was seen in the dead vegetation of winter and whose rebirth appeared with the revival of spring. His orgiastic rites no doubt were originally, in part at least, intended to recall the dead god to life. But in all such religions there is the tendency to see in the rebirth of the dead god the warrant of man’s future life. The hope is easily awakened that as the vegetation, whose life disappears in the ground, is revivified in the spring, so man, whose body also is laid in the earth, may be recalled to new life. The Dionysiac myth set forth the story of the god’s death and rebirth. It was natural then that men should feel that if they could secure union with the god, lose themselves in the divine, they too might attain immortality. Herodotus tells us that among the Thracian peoples the Getae believed that men at death went to dwell with their chief divinity beneath the earth.[73] Such hope of immortality Dionysus brought with him from his Thracian home.