Greek hero cult

• 1. Introduction

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  Greek hero cults present one of the most unusual phenomena in ancient religion: a system of worship aimed not at gods in the sky, but at dead men beneath the earth. In Homeric Greek, the word "heros" referred to the mortal offspring of a human and a god. By the time Greek civilization had entered its historical period, something stranger had happened to that word. It had come to mean simply a dead man whose fame in life, or whose unusual manner of death, gave him continuing power over the living.

  These were not gods. A hero was more than human but less than divine, and that peculiar in-between status shaped everything about how the Greeks approached them. The rituals happened in the dark hours. The offerings went into the earth. The shrines were fewer than the written accounts might suggest, and they were peculiar in their patterns. What force drove thousands of ordinary Greeks to pour libations at ancient tombs, to name their cities after figures from epic poetry, or to steal the bones of heroes from rival towns? The answers lie in the ground itself, in the politics of the polis, and in an oral tradition that gave names to forgotten graves.

• 2. Ruins and Epic Memory

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  Around the 10th century BC, pre-literate Greeks were living among ruins they did not build. The grand tumuli and crumbling stone structures left over from the Bronze Age spoke of a vanished world. Robin Lane Fox observed that stories began to be told to individuate the persons believed to be buried in these old and imposing sites. This was, in his reading, a clear origin story for what heroes meant to the ancient Greeks.

  At sites like Lefkandi, copious renewed offerings begin to be represented after a long hiatus, even though the names of those grandly buried there were hardly remembered. The oral epic tradition stepped in to fill that silence. Works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey became the vehicles through which a pre-literate people gave faces and names to the imposing mounds around them.

  Lewis Farnell observed that hero cult was more deeply influenced by the epic tradition than by simple ancestor worship, because epic poetry "suggested many a name to forgotten graves". This mattered enormously for the Dorians, a population that had arrived in regions dominated by Mycenaean history. Coldstream believed the popularity of epic poetry explained why Dorians left votive offerings at tombs of heroes who were, strictly speaking, from a culture that preceded them. Large Mycenaean tholos tombs became focal points for cults at Thorikos and Menidhi in Attica. Not all the heroes venerated at these sites were even known by name.

• 3. Rituals of the Underworld

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  Dracon, the Athenian lawgiver of the late seventh century BC, gave the earliest written reference to hero cult by prescribing that gods and local heroes should both be honored according to ancestral custom. That instruction assumed the practice was already established. The character of those rites was markedly different from worship of the Olympian gods.

  Hero cults were chthonic in nature, meaning they were directed downward, toward the earth and the underworld. Their rituals more closely resembled those for Hecate and Persephone than those for Zeus and Apollo: libations poured in the dark hours, and sacrifices that were not shared by the living. A temenos, or designated sanctuary, and the hero's tomb were the sites where these chthonic rites appeased the spirit and kept it favorably disposed toward the surrounding community.

  Two figures stood partially outside this pattern. Heracles and Asclepius could be honored either as heroes or as gods, receiving either chthonic libation or burnt sacrifice. The ambiguity around Heracles was especially pronounced. The distinction between hero and god was never quite certain in his case, and he occupied a pan-Hellenic scope that most heroes, with their strictly local power, did not share.

  Heroes in cult behaved very differently from heroes in myth. They might appear as men or as snakes, and they seldom manifested unless angered. A Pythagorean saying warned against eating food that had fallen on the floor because it belonged to the heroes. In a fragmentary play by Aristophanes, a chorus of anonymous heroes described themselves as senders of lice, fever, and boils. Robert Parker observed that a hero retained the limited and partisan interests of his mortal life, helping those who lived near his tomb or who belonged to the tribe he had founded.

• 4. Five Types of Cult

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  Whitley distinguished four or five essential types of hero cult, and the differences between them reveal how varied the practice actually was. Oikist cults honored the founder, or oikist, of a colony at his grave. Such cults arose in colonies across Magna Graecia and Sicily. Thucydides gave the example of Brasidas at Amphipolis, and Battus of Cyrene is another figure in this category. Whitley cautioned that these well-documented historical examples have colored interpretations of older sites, making it harder to separate formal cult from ordinary family observances at tombs.

  A second category comprised cults to named heroes, especially figures from the Iliad and other works of the Epic Cycle. Whitley noted that the earliest of these sites associate the male hero with earlier and stronger female presences, and that figures such as Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Menelaus all carry strong local connections. Among the earliest cult sites attested by archaeological evidence are the Menelaion dedicated to Menelaus and Helen at Therapne near Sparta, a shrine at Mycenae for Agamemnon and Cassandra, one at Amyklai dedicated to Alexandra, and one in Ithaca's Polis Bay for Odysseus. These all seem to date to the 8th century BC.

  Third were cults to purely local heroes who did not figure among the Panhellenic epic figures at all. Akademos and Erechtheus at Athens are examples. Fourth were cults established at Bronze Age tombs, represented archaeologically by Iron Age deposits in Mycenaean structures. A sherd found above Grave Circle A at Mycenae is simply inscribed "to the hero". Whitley suggested the unnamed race of the Silver Age may have been invoked there. A fifth type comprised oracular hero cults, where an oracle developed around a figure, as in the case of Amphiaraus, who was said to have been swallowed by a gaping crack in the earth.

• 5. Heroes, Women, and the Heroines

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  Hero cults were offered most prominently to men, but the actual experience of worship involved a cluster of family figures that included women as well. Wives of hero-husbands, mothers such as Alcmene and Semele, and daughters of hero-fathers all received veneration alongside the primary male figure. Finley observed of the world of Odysseus, which he read as a nostalgic eighth-century rendering of traditions from Dark Age Greek culture, that Penelope became a moral heroine for later generations as the embodiment of goodness and chastity. Yet the word "hero" had no feminine gender in the age of heroes itself.

  Where local cult venerated figures such as Iphigeneia, the sacrificial virgin, an archaic local nymphe had been reduced to a mortal figure of legend in the process. Other isolated female figures represented priestess-initiators of particular local cults. Larson marshalled iconographic and epigraphic evidence to depict heroines as similar in kind to heroes, but typically of lesser stature in androcentric Greek culture. The gap in stature between male and female figures within these cults reflected, as scholars have noted, the broader role women played across the ancient world.

• 6. Politics and Stolen Bones

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  Sparta understood clearly what hero cults could do for a governing power. Sparta's propping up of numerous hero cults was grounded in the recognition that the population responded to these shrines in ways that could serve as political propaganda. Lewis Farnell observed that hero cults are often not found in a hero's home territory, suggesting they were deliberately spread and adapted across Greek communities. Only Laconia has evidence of assigning its shrines to specific heroes; elsewhere, a single shrine could serve as a site of worship for a hero without being exclusive to one figure.

  When Cleisthenes reorganized the Athenians into new demes for voting, he consulted Delphi on which heroes should name each division. The oracle's answers thus shaped the political geography of Athens. According to Herodotus, the Spartans attributed their conquest of Arcadia entirely to their theft of the bones of Orestes from the Arcadian town of Tegea. Moving a hero's physical remains could, in this worldview, transfer his protection and power to a new location.

  The Athenians memorialized the 192 dead from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC by burying them on the field where they fell, beneath a mound that became known as the Marathon Tumuli. Whitley interpreted this tumulus, surrounded by stone stelae, as the city-state co-opting hero cult as a political gesture in the archaic manner. The offering trenches at the site indicate the chthonic cult that followed. Heroes could be invented, imported, stolen, or newly minted from recent history. The Athenian king Erechtheus, killed by Poseidon for Athens choosing Athena as its patron deity, was worshiped on the Acropolis under the joint name Poseidon Erechtheus, folding a divine killer into the memory of his victim. Heracles's own name means "the glory of Hera", even though Hera tormented him throughout his life. That tension between a hero's mythology and his cult was never fully resolved.