ABSTRACT
It has often been noted that among primitive peoples the character of the deceased has very little to do with the way in which his memory, or rather his continued presence as a ghost, is regarded. Ghosts, to a civilized imagination, are commonly impalpable things, and so indeed they generally were in Greek thought. Beyond the occasional traces, however, scarcely more of the old idea survives in Greece than in our own customs of to-day. The mana-ful persons, then, are the heroes, and it remains to ask how the Greeks supposed themselves to know when a man had enough mana to achieve this quasi-divine feat of not dying to so large an extent as his less fortunate fellows. More important, for the wide-spread cult of heroes is of the same order of ideas, is the preferential treatment accorded certain great men.
