Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/202

 19G THE CITT. BOOK in. The bodies ■u'ere buried either in the city itself or upon its territory; and as, according to the belief which we have already described, the soul did not quit the bod}', it followed that these divine dead were attached to the soil where their bodies were buried. From their graves they watched over the city; they protected the country, and were, in some sort, its chiefs and masters. This expression of chiefs of the country, applied to the dead, is found in an oracle addressed by the Pythia to Solon: "Honor with a worship the cliiefs of the coun- try, the dead who live under the earth." ' Tiiese notions came from the very great power which the ancient generations attributed to the human soul after death. Every man who had rendered a great service to the city, from the one who had founded it to the one who had given it a victory, or had improved its laws, became a god for that city. It w'as not even necessary for one to have been a great man or a benefactor; it was enough to have struck the imagination of his con- temporaries, and to have rendered himself the subject of a popular tradition, to become a hero — that is to say, one of the powerful dead, whose jn-otection was to be desired and whose anger was to be feared. The Thebans continued during ten centuries to offer sac- rifices to Etcoclcs and Polynices. The inhabitants of Acanthus worshipped a Persian who had died among them during the expedition of Xei'xes. Ilippolytus was venerated as a god at Trcezene. Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, was a god at Delphi only because lie died and was buried there. Crotona worshipped a hero for the sole reason that during his life he had been the hand- somest man in the city.* Athens adored as one of its » Plutarch, Solon, 9.
 * Pausanias, IX. 18. Herodotus, VII. 117. Diodorus, IV.