The world of the tragedy in such cases involved a condensed, polarized version of the “men walked with gods” facet of the heroic age.

Perceptions pertaining to the heroic age involved a spectrum of modalities of interaction between deities and mortals, with the intimacy of the erotic contact between deity and mortal who will have a child by the deity at one end, and mortals who never had any closer contact with a deity than the ordinary people of fifth-century Athens at the other.