[26] As we read Homer, we notice that in many different places he distinctively calls the good “godlike” [127] and “peers of the gods” [128] and “having prudence gained from the gods,”[129] but that the epithet derived from the demigods (or daemons) he uses of the worthy and worthless alike[130]; for example:
Daemon-possessed, come on! Why seek you to frighten the Argives
Thus ?[131]
and again “When for the fourth time onward he came with a rush, like a daemon[132];” and
Daemon-possessed, in what do Priam and children of Priam
Work you such ill that your soul is ever relentlessly eager
Ilium, fair-built city, to bring to complete desolation ?[133]
The assumption, then, is that the demigods (or daemons) have a complex and inconsistent nature and purpose; wherefore Plato[134] assigns to the Olympian gods right-hand qualities and odd numbers, and to the demigods the opposite of these. Xenocrates also is of the opinion that such days as are days of ill omen, and such festivals as have associated with them either beatings or lamentations or fastings or scurrilous language or ribald jests have no relation to the honours paid to the gods or to worthy demigods, but he believes that there exist in the space about us certain great and powerful natures, obdurate, however, and morose, which take pleasure in such things as these, and, if they succeed in obtaining them, resort to nothing worse.
Then again, Hesiod calls the worthy and good demigods “holy deities” and “guardians of mortals” [135] and “Givers of wealth, and having therein a reward that is kingly.[136] ” Plato[137] calls this class of beings an interpretative and ministering class, midway between gods and men, in that they convey thither the prayers and petitions of men, and thence they bring hither the oracles and the gifts of good things.
Empedocles[138] says also that the demigods must pay the penalty for the sins that they commit and the duties that they neglect:
Might of the Heavens chases them forth to the realm of the Ocean;
Ocean spews them out on the soil of the Earth, and Earth drives them
Straight to the rays of the tireless Sun, who consigns them to Heaven’s
Whirlings; thus one from another receives them, but ever with loathing;
until, when they have thus been chastened and purified, they recover the place and position to which they belong in accord with Nature.