Now, even when Homer touches on the tale of Meleager, he says nothing of that fairy property the "soul-box" or "life-token," the brand snatched from the burning; or of the visit of the Spaewives, the Fates, and their prophecy. He actually does not seem to know that incident. Althaea, mother of Meleager, in Homer (_Iliad_, ix. 565-572), prays to the Erinnyes and they hear her. She has not her son's "soul-box" or "life-token" in her hands to burn it, and slay him. In Pausanias (x. 31. 3), Meleager is killed by Apollo, who is fighting for the Curetes against the Aetolians. Meleager died, like Achilles, by Apollo's hand, though Paris was an accomplice of the God in the case of Achilles. Pausanias follows the Hesiodic _Eoiai_, which Kuhnert supposes to have known the same story as Homer.[7] As Kuhnert justly observes, the poetry of Homer is _knightly_. "An der Hofen wurden die homerische Gedichte versungen ... the hero must find his death at a divine hand in glorious warfare." The Athenian tragedians are our oldest source for the Moirae and the fatal life-token: a property very common in _Märchen_; but when the incident first attached itself to Meleager we cannot know. This avoidance of the folk-element, the _Märchen_, in the _Iliad_ is one of the things that distinguishes Homer from the Ionian Cyclic poets, the Hesiodic school, and the Athenian tragedians. Homer, again, in another way, stands apart from the genealogising poets of the eighth to seventh century (such as the school of "Hesiod," and "Eumelus" of Corinth) by his method of handling tradition or saga. These genealogising poets aimed at constructing history, and preluded to the "logographers" in prose of the sixth century. Both they and the logographers have the same simple method, that of the would-be historic early mediaeval writers on Scotland and Ireland. Their plan is to invent for each town or people an eponymous hero, whose name is simply the name of the city or people (as, in Scotland, Fib for Fife, Loth for Lothian, Scota for the Scoti). The hero, or heroine, founds the city, or is first ancestor of the people. Next follow the legends about heroic characters, as Perseus, Athamas, Pelops, Theseus, Aietes, Phrixus, which are mere _Märchen_ of world-wide diffusion, localised, with named persons for the characters. The region of legend expands with the expansion of geographical knowledge. Cities hasten, like Athens and Corinth, to attach themselves to sagas, as that of Argo, in which they had no original part. Hesiod extends the old saga, and carries descendants of the old characters, as of Odysseus, to Italy, to Latium and Etruria. "Eumelus" drags Corinth into the cycle of the Argonautic expedition: Athens, we have said, brings Medea to Athens, and into her Theseus fable. Later the logographers, in prose, continue the process and alter the genealogies to suit their historical theories.