CHAPTER IV

HEROES

§ 1

When about the year 620 Drakon at Athens for the first time collected and committed to writing the customary law of his country he also ordained that the gods and the national Heroes should be honoured together according to ancestral usage.[1\4]

We are thus for the first time introduced to _Heroes_ as beings of a higher kind, mentioned side by side with the gods, and like them to be worshipped with regularly offered sacrifice. Their cult, like that of the gods, is by implication of long standing: it does not have to be reorganized, but is merely established in the form ancestral ordinances had given it. We see at this turning-point of Greek religious development how defective our knowledge is of the history of religious ideas in primitive Greece. This is our earliest record, and it has been preserved to us by a mere accident, but it points backwards and beyond itself to a long previous history in the worship of such guardian deities of the country--of which, however, we have hardly a scrap of early evidence.[2\4] We should in fact, from the meagre remains of the literature that is so important from this point of view, especially the lyric poetry of the seventh and early sixth centuries, hardly have derived a suspicion of the existence of this quite un-Homeric element in the religious life of Greece.[3\4] When at last the stream of surviving literature begins to flow more broadly, then, indeed, the Heroes are often referred to. Pindar's Hymns of Victory and Herodotos' History cover the generations that lived through the Persian wars and the following fifty years. From them we can see with overwhelming distinctness how strong at that time was the belief in the existence and potency of Heroes even among men of education who had not been too much influenced by the fashionable enlightenment of the time. In the beliefs of the people, in the religious customs of countries and cities, the national Heroes have their recognized place beside the gods. The representatives of states swear by the gods and the Heroes of the country:[4\4] it is to the gods and Heroes of Greece that the pious attribute the victory over the Barbarians.[5\4] So well established, indeed, was the validity of the Greek belief in Heroes that even the Persian magi in the army of Xerxes made libation by night in the Troad to the Heroes buried there.[6\4] {116}

§ 2

If now we inquire into the nature and essence of this species of higher beings that was as yet unknown to, or disregarded by, the epic we get little information on the subject from direct statements as to their nature by writers of antiquity. We can, however, learn a great deal about them from what we are told of individual Heroes and more particularly from what we know of the peculiar nature of the religious worship paid to them.[7\4] The Heroes were worshipped with sacrifice like the gods; but these sacrifices were very different from the offerings that were made to the Olympians.[8\4] They differ in time, place, and character. Sacrifice was made to the gods in broad daylight, to Heroes towards evening or at night;[9\4] and not on raised altars, but on low, and sometimes hollow, sacrificial hearths close to the ground.[10\4] For them were slain animals of black colour and male sex,[11\4] and in sacrificing, the heads of the animals were not turned upwards towards heaven as they were when offered to the gods, but were bent down to the ground.[12\4] The blood of these animals was allowed to run down into the ground or into the sacrificial hearth, that the Heroes might have their "appeasement of blood".[13\4] The carcass was completely burnt, for no living man might taste of it.[14\4] This peculiar mode of worshipping the Heroes was in strict usage described by a different name from that used of the sacrifices to the gods.[15\4] On special occasions a sacrificial meal of cooked food was prepared, to which the Hero was invited as a guest.[16\4] They are near by in the earth itself, and there is no need in their case, as for the Olympians, to send up the savour of sacrifice in smoke to heaven.

This sacrificial ritual is in those features which distinguish it from that commonly in use for the gods of Olympos precisely identical with that by which the gods who dwelt under the earth, and, later, even the souls of dead men, were honoured. This will seem quite natural if we regard the Heroes as closely related to the chthonic deities on the one hand, and to the dead on the other. In fact, they are nothing else than the spirits of dead men who now dwell beneath the earth, immortal like the gods of that underworld, and almost equal to them in power. Their real nature as the souls of great men of the past, who have died but have not been deprived of conscious existence, is made plain by another mode of doing honour to them originally belonging to them and them only--I mean the yearly repeated celebration of Funeral Games.

Athletic contests for chieftains at the funeral of a prominent {117} one of their number were known to Homer, and we have already referred to them among other relics in epic poetry of a once powerful cult of souls.[17\4] But Homer knew nothing of their repetition, and certainly not of an annual recurrence of such funeral celebrations.[18\4] Games celebrated afresh after the lapse of a definite period became known to the Greeks only when the cult of Heroes had reached its maturity. Many of these contests were connected perpetually with the yearly festivals of individual Heroes, and were intended to honour their memory.[19\4] Even in historical times, generally on the command of the Delphic oracle, annual contests were instituted in honour of Heroes.[20\4] It was the mode of worship proper to Heroes, and men realized that in holding such contests they were really repeating the funeral ceremonies of a dead man.[21\4] The cult of Heroes was the earliest breeding ground of the Agôn, that most characteristic feature of Greek life and school of the individualism that made the greatness of Greece. It was not unreasonable that afterwards many of the victors at the great Agônes were themselves raised by popular superstition to the number of the Heroes. The greatest Games of all, to which all Greece assembled, the Pythian, Olympian, Nemean, and Isthmian, were during the historical period, it is true, celebrated in honour of gods; but that they had been originally instituted as Funeral Games of Heroes and only subsequently transferred to higher guardianship was, at any rate, the general opinion of antiquity.[22\4]

§ 3

The Heroes are, then, spirits of the dead, and not a species of inferior deities or "demigods";[23\4] and quite distinct again from the "daimones" known to later speculative thought and, indeed, to popular superstition. These latter are divine spirits of a lower order; but spirits which have always been exempt from death because they have never entered into the finite existence of men. The Heroes on the other hand have once been living men; from being men they have _become_ Heroes, and that only after their death.[24\4] Furthermore, they have now entered upon a higher stage of existence as a special class of beings who are named by the _side_ of gods and men.[25\4] In them we meet with something quite unknown to the Homeric poems--_souls_ which after their death and separation from the body have a higher imperishable life.

But though the Heroes have once been men, it does not follow that all men become Heroes after their death. On the contrary, the Heroes, even though their number was not fixed {118} and limited, but continually admitted additions, remained an _exception_, a select minority which for that reason alone can be contrasted with ordinary humanity. The chief figures, the outstanding representatives of this heroic company, we may say, were those whose lifetime was fixed by legend or history in the distant past--who were in fact the ancestors of later humanity. The worship of Heroes is not, then, a cult of souls, but in a narrower sense a cult of _ancestors_. Even their name, as it appears, distinguishes the Heroes as men of the past. In the Iliad and the Odyssey "Hero" is the honourable title of chieftains, and also, generally, of all free men.[26\4] Poetry of later centuries, so far as it touched upon the events of the legendary past, continued to use the word "Hero" in this sense. But when in post-Homeric times the speaker, whether he is a poet or prose-writer, regards the matter from the point of view of contemporary life, then by "Hero", if he is referring to a man at all, he means a man of those days when, according to the Homeric poems, this honourable title was still in use among living men--he refers in a word to men belonging to the legendary _past_ celebrated in poetry.[27\4] In Hesiod's narrative of the Five Ages of Men, the use of the word Hero is confined to the Champions of the wars at Thebes and Troy; they are called, as though by their special name, the "divine race of Heroes".[28\4] For Hesiod the "Heroes" are by no means the transfigured dead of past generations.[29\4] He knows well enough of such transfigured dead of a still earlier past, but these he calls "Daimones". And so, too, when in after times the name of Hero is applied to these favoured individuals who enjoy a higher life after their death, the name which in itself did not imply the higher nature of such departed spirits is evidently intended to show that the _lifetime_ of those who had received this privilege after their death occurred in a legendary past. As these men of the distant past had been "Heroes" during their life, so, too, they must be called after their death. But the meaning of the word Hero has undergone a change, and now contains the additional notion of unending transfigured existence. The worship of the Heroes reveals itself as something quite new, a form of religious belief and cult, of which the Homeric poems at least gave no inkling. And, indeed, the conception of such transfigured ancestral souls living on in a higher state must have been a novel one, if no special word of ancient coinage could be found to express it, and a long-standing word of the epic vocabulary had to be pressed into a new sense.

Whence came this new thing? If we try to derive it from {119} a natural process of development in the Homeric view of life we shall find ourselves in the greatest perplexity when it comes to showing the connecting links between two such widely different conceptions. It would not avail us much to say that the prestige of the epic was such that those whom it had honoured in song must have appeared so glorious and distinguished among mankind that it was natural for later imagination to transform them to demigods and to worship them as such. The Homeric poems, so violently opposed to any idea of a conscious or active existence of the soul after death, could hardly have brought it about that those very champions whom it had represented as indeed dead and departed to the distant land of Hades should be regarded as still living and exercising an influence from out their graves. Moreover, it is in the highest degree improbable that in the process of historical development it should have been just the champions of the epic from whose worship the cult of Heroes arose; for in cult, at any rate, with negligible exceptions, those champions played little part. And, indeed, that any cult at all should have arisen from the mere suggestions of fancy, such as the epic offered, is in itself unlikely. And it is essentially upon a religious cult that the belief in Heroes is founded.

In fact after all that has been hitherto shown, what we see most plainly is the _contrast_ between the belief in Heroes and Homeric conceptions. The fanciful thought of the translation of individuals to Islands of the Blest or the underground dwellings did not itself conflict with the implications of Homeric eschatology. The miraculous preservation in an immortal existence of men whom the gods loved did not involve the separation of soul from body, nor the consequence of that separation--the dim borderland existence of the disembodied soul. But the belief in Heroes was a different matter; that involved the continuation of a conscious mode of being, in the neighbourhood of the living, after death, and in spite of the separation of soul from body. This directly contradicts Homeric psychology. We should have to give up the attempt altogether to bring this new belief into any real relationship with earlier development--if we could not draw upon what we have learnt from our previous investigations. In the Homeric poems themselves, in striking contrast with the general conception there prevailing of the insubstantiality of the disembodied soul, we found vestiges of a once-vigorous _cult of the soul_ which implied the existence of a corresponding belief in the conscious after-life of the soul and its lingering {120} in the neighbourhood of the living. From the study of Hesiod's picture of the Five Ages of Men, we saw that, in fact, vestiges of an ancient belief in the continued and enhanced existence of dead men, of which no clear trace remained in Homer, had been preserved at least in occasional remote corners of the Greek countryside. But it was only the dead of a legendary past who were regarded by Hesiod as "Daimones": the poet could relate no similar marvels from more recent periods, and still less of men in his own lifetime. Thus, we have in this case traces of _ancestor-worship_ indeed, but not of a general worship of souls that is elsewhere the normal development of the worship of ancestors. So, then, in the worship of Heroes, what we have before us is not a general cult of the soul but a cult of ancestors. We may express the matter in this way: in the cult of the "Hero" a still burning spark of ancient belief is kindled to renewed flame--it is not the appearance of something entirely strange and new, but something long past and half-forgotten is awakened to new life. Those Daimones which arose from the men of the earlier golden and silver ages--whom the poet of the "Works and Days" had situated in the dimmest and remotest past--what are they but the "Heroes" worshipped by later ages under a new name and brought down nearer to the period of contemporary life?

§ 4

How it came about that the cult of ancestors was rescued from

## partial, and more than partial, oblivion, and rose to a new and

lasting importance, that, indeed, we cannot say. We can give no real explanation indicative of the origin and progress of this important development in Greek religious life. We know neither the time nor the place of the first serious revival of this newly awakened primitive worship; nor can we tell the manner or stages of its diffusion during those obscure years of the eighth and seventh centuries. We can, however, bring the fact of the revival of ancestor-worship into relation with a number of other facts which prove that during those years many hitherto buried or repressed ideas about the life of gods and men came to the surface again out of the depths of popular faith and out of an older worship of the gods that had never quite died out. This revival did not, indeed, suppress the Homeric view entirely--that never occurred--but it did set itself on a level with that view. The great movement with which we shall be dealing in the next chapter also contributed to the progress of the belief in Heroes. Many other favouring {121} circumstances may in detail have helped to strengthen that belief. Even the epic itself had in one point at least approached the ideas that were receiving a new life in the worship of Heroes. Many of the local gods who had faded before the new deities of common Hellenic belief had been reduced to the rank of humanity and joined in heroic adventure. By a sort of compromise effected with the local cult of such gods the epic poets had been led, in a few cases, to the creation of a remarkable series of figures in which the divine and the human was wonderfully mixed. These champions and seers of old time, as they had once been mortal men among other men, so now after their departure must they live on and have influence eternally like the gods. We can easily see the close resemblance that exists between such figures as Amphiaraos or Trophonios and the Heroes of later belief; in fact, both of them, when they were not called gods, were frequently reckoned among these Heroes. But for all that, they are only _quasi-Heroes_; prototypes of the real Heroes they can never have been. They have been translated during their lifetime, and live on immortally just because they have never tasted death. They, with those others translated to the Islands of the Blest, represent the idea of immortality in the only form recognized by the Homeric poetry. The Heroes of the newly awakening creed, on the contrary, have died unmistakably; and yet they continue to live on, though relieved of their bodies. They are entirely distinct from the translated few of the epic tradition. They emerge out of the obscurity of the half-remembered past as something strange--as something, indeed, opposed to the circle of ideas influenced by the epic.

It was not from poetic imagination or story that the Heroes took their origin, but from the remains of an ancient pre-Homeric belief which local worship had preserved alive.

§ 5

The worship of a Hero is everywhere connected with the site of his grave. That is the general rule proved in innumerable cases. That is why in the case of a more than ordinarily revered Hero, his grave as the centre of his worship is set up in some prominent and honourable place--the market-place of the city, the Prytaneion,[30\4] or, like the grave of Pelops in the Altis at Olympia, in the very middle of the holy precinct, in the thick of the festival crowd.[31\4] Or else the Hero who guarded the city and the land might have his grave in the wall of the city gate or upon the farthest border of its territory.[32\4] Where his grave is, there the Hero is fast bound; that is his {122} dwelling-place.[33\4] This idea prevails everywhere, though it may not be given such blunt expression as at Tronis, in the country of the Phocians, where the blood of the offering made to the Hero was poured down through an opening immediately into his grave mound.[34\4] It is implied, as a rule, in these cases that the grave contains the bones of the Hero. The bones--all that is left of his mortality--chain the Hero to his grave. Hence, when it was thought desirable to attach a Hero and his protective power to a city his bones (or what were taken for such) on the command of an oracle were brought from a foreign land and laid to rest in his native country. We possess many accounts of such transference of relics.[35\4] Most of them occurred in the distant past, but we also read how in the full light of history in the year 476 enlightened Athens brought over the bones of Theseus from Skyros;[36\4] and not until they were buried in the Theseion was Theseus properly attached to Athens.

Since the possession of the corporeal remains[37\4] of the Hero secured the possession of the Hero himself, the cities often protected themselves against strangers, who might remove the treasured bones, by keeping the position of the grave a secret.[38\4] A grave is always necessary to fix the Hero at a definite place, or, at least, an "empty tomb", which sometimes had to do duty for a grave.[39\4] In such cases the Hero was perhaps thought of as bound by a spell to that place.[40\4] As a rule, it is the remains of his former body that hold him fast. But these remains are a part of the Hero himself; though dead (and mummified, as we are told in one case),[41\4] he works and acts just the same; his psyche, his invisible counterpart and double, hovers in the neighbourhood of the body and the grave.

These are all very primitive conceptions such as have, as a rule, only been preserved among peoples who have remained at a very undeveloped stage of culture.[42\4] When we find them in force among Greeks of post-Homeric times, we cannot really believe that they arose then for the first time, in complete contrast with the clear-sighted freedom of the men of the Homeric age. They have only re-emerged from the repressive influence of the Homeric rationalism. It would be natural to think that the same ideas that have been described as underlying the belief in Heroes were already in the minds of those prehistoric Greeks who in Mycenae and elsewhere took such care (even it seems going so far as to embalm them)[43\4] to preserve the bodies of their princes from destruction, and who put ornaments and utensils in their graves for future use {123} or enjoyment. It has been explained above how, in the times of which Homer's poems give us a picture, the alteration in sentiment as well as the spread of the custom of completely destroying the bodies of the dead with fire must have weakened the belief in the confinement of the soul to this world and to the remains of the body. This belief never entirely perished. It was preserved alive, perhaps for a long time only by a few, in those places where there remained a cult attached to a _grave_. Such a cult would not, indeed, extend to those whose death had occurred within more recent times, but it did not allow the old-established worship of the great dead of the past to die out entirely. Over the royal graves on the citadel at Mycenae stood a sacrificial hearth,[44\4] which bears witness to the continuance of the ancient worship of the kings buried there. The Catalogue of Ships in Homer mentions the "grave of Aipytos", an old Arcadian local monarch, as a landmark of the district;[45\4] may not the sanctity of that grave have been preserved? In many places, at any rate, graves were pointed out and honoured that belonged to Heroes who owed their existence solely to poetic fancy or were even mere personifications--abstractions of the names of places and countries whose ancestors they purported to be. In such cases the Hero-worship had become purely symbolic, and often perhaps a mere formality. But from such a fictitious ancestor-worship the cult of the graves of Heroes cannot possibly have arisen; such fictions are themselves only intelligible as copies of another and more vivid worship, of a cult of real ancestors. If no such cult had existed in actual fact before men's eyes, it would be impossible to understand how men came to imitate ancestor-worship in the shape of such purely imaginary creatures. A copy implies the existence of a model; a symbol requires the contemporary or earlier existence of the reality symbolized. We should certainly know more of the worship of ancestors among the ancient royal families if in nearly all the Greek states monarchy had not been abolished at an early period and all traces of it suppressed. Sparta alone provides us with a solitary example of what may once have been the prevailing custom in all the seats of royal authority. When a Spartan king died his funeral was celebrated with extreme pomp. His body (which, even when he had died abroad, was embalmed and brought home to Sparta was laid beside the other dead of his family, and honour was paid to him, in Xenophon's words, not as a man, but as a _Hero_.[46\4] In this case, which undoubtedly represents a traditional usage handed down from remote {124} antiquity, we have the rudiments of Hero-worship as applied to the dead of a royal family. The members of noble families who, like the Eupatridai of Athens, sometimes traced their descent from a king,[47\4] must also have retained from ancient times the practice of ancestor-worship. As of all unofficial cults, we hear little of the cults of the old clans based on blood-relationship and connexion by marriage (~ge/nê, pa/trai~). But just as out of their combination first the village communities and then the fully organized Greek Polis grew up, so, too, the religious cults which were paid to the ancestors of these unions of kinsfolk set a pattern for the manifold social groups out of which the developed state was built up.[48\4]

§ 6

The "clans" that we meet with at Athens and in other Greek states are, as a rule, groups for which a demonstrable common kinship is no longer a condition of membership. The majority of such politically recognized, self-contained clans assemble together for the common worship of particular gods but many also honour a Hero as well, who generally in such cases gives his name to the clan. Thus, the Eteoboutadai at Athens paid honour to Boutes, the Alkmaionidai to Alkmaion, the Bouzygai to Bouzyges, in Sparta and Argos Talthybios was worshipped by the Talthybiadai, etc. And in these cases, as the name of the clan itself shows, the Hero of their common worship was regarded as the _ancestor_ of the clan.[49\4] Further, this ancestor-worship and the name derived from a common, even if fictitious, ancestor, distinguished the clans from the cult-associations of a different origin which since the time of Kleisthenes had been put on a footing of legal equality with the clans in the phratries. The members of these associations (Orgeones) lacked a common name, the existence of which, therefore, indicated in the case of the members of a clan a closer bond of union than mere membership of a religious association which had been chosen at will, and was not decided by the fact of birth.

Everywhere these clans kept up the outward formalities of ancestor-worship; and the formality must once have had meaning. However the publicly recognized clans may have developed their own special characteristics, in their origin, at least, they must go back (like the Roman _gentes_) to associations of kinsfolk developed from the family (extended through the male line and held together by a real bond of kinship. Even the purely symbolical ancestor-worship of the later "clans", of which hardly a single one could have shown the {125} pedigree of its descent from the reputed common ancestor, must have arisen from the real ancestor-worship of genuine groups of kinsfolk. The imitation in this case, too, points to the existence at some time of an original.

In the same way the larger groups into which the Athenian state since the time of Kleisthenes was divided were unable to dispense with the practice of association for the cult of a commonly worshipped Hero. The Heroes of the newly organized _phylai_[50\4] had their temple, land, priests, statues, and regular cult; and so also had the Heroes of the smaller purely local divisions, the demes. Here, too, the fiction of ancestor-worship was kept up; the names of the phylai, always patronymic in form, represent the members of each _phyle_ as the descendants of the Hero Eponymos or Archegetes of the phyle.[51\4] The demes also in many cases have patronymic titles which for the most part are also known to us as the names of aristocratic families.[52\4] It is evident that in such demes the members of individual aristocratic families had settled down together or near each other. The Archegetes, whether real or fictitious, of the family must then have been regarded as the Archegetes of the deme. We thus see how the cult of a family ancestor, taken over by a wider group of worshippers, might be preserved and extended--little as the cult might benefit in sincerity by such political enlargement.

The cult of Heroes everywhere has the same features as the cult of ancestors; at least, the more influential Heroes, those worshipped by the greater communities, were everywhere regarded as the forefathers and progenitors of the groups of countryfolk, citizens, or kinsmen who honoured them. The fact that the persons of these prehistoric Heroes owed their existence almost without exception solely to poetry or fancy allows us to conclude that at the time when ancestor-worship had its re-birth in Hero-worship, the memory of the real Archegetai of the country, the ancestors of the ruling families and clans, together with their cult, had fallen into oblivion. A great or illustrious name was introduced where the real name was no longer known. More often, even when the real forefather of the clan was still well known, the name of a great man of the primeval past was placed at the head of the list in order to throw the origin of the family as far back into the past as possible and connect it the more closely with a divine source.[53\4] Men thus came to worship a phantom, often a mere symbol, of an ancestor. But they held fast to the imitation of real ancestor-worship; the remains of a true cult of ancestors provided the model and were the real starting-point for the later belief and cult of Heroes. {126}

§ 7

We can no longer follow in detail the process of development and extension which the idea of the Hero underwent. The accounts which we possess show us the fully developed product, not the steps which led up to this result. We first get an idea of the number of Hero-cults existing in Greece during the greatest period of its history from the enormous number of graves or cults of Heroes mentioned by Pausanias in the account of his travels in the age of the Antonines over the most important countries of the Greece that was now fast falling into decay. Nearly all the legendary figures celebrated in epic poetry were now worshipped as Heroes, whether in their own homes (as Achilles in Thessaly, Aias at Salamis, etc.) or in other places that either claimed to possess their graves (as the Delphians did that of Neoptolemos, the people of Sybaris that of Philoktetes, etc.) or else, through the genealogical relationship of their leading families with the Heroes, regarded themselves as closely connected with them (as, for example, the Athenians with Aias and his sons). In the colonies especially the Hero-cults, like the ingredients of the population, may have been a motley crew; thus, in Tarentum the Atreidai, the Tydidai, the Aiakidai, the Laertiadai, and especially the Agamemnonidai were worshipped in a combined Hero-cult, and Achilles also had a temple of his own.[54\4]

There were Heroes with famous names who may yet have owed their subsequent elevation to that position, during the times of the greatest extent of the cult, in part to their fame in ancient poetry. Side by side with these were a host of obscurer figures whose memory had been kept alive by their cult alone, which a small circle of country or city folk had paid to them from primitive times. These are the real "national Heroes", of whose worship Drakon had spoken; as true forebears and real ancestors of their country they, too, are called "Archegetai".[55\4] We are told the names of the seven Archegetai of Plataea to whom Aristeides was commanded by the Delphic oracle to sacrifice before the battle of Plataea; not one of them is ever heard of again.[56\4] It might happen that the name of a Hero to whom worship had been paid from time immemorial might no longer be known even to the dwellers near his grave. In the market at Elis there stood a little temple whose roof was supported on wooden pillars; men knew that this was the chapel belonging to a grave, but no one could give the name of the Hero buried there.[57\4] In the market at Herakleia on the Black Sea was a monument of a Hero {127} overshadowed by wild olive-trees; it contained the body of that Hero whom once the Delphian oracle had bidden the founders of Herakleia to placate. The learned differed as to his name; the inhabitants of Herakleia called him simply "the local Hero".[58\4] In the Hippodrome at Olympia stood a round altar at which the chariot horses used to shy. It was disputed what Hero lay buried there, but the people called him, after the effect he had on the horses, simply Taraxippos.[59\4] In the same way many Heroes, instead of being called by their real names, were more often referred to by adjectives which recalled their nature or their power or some external detail of their appearance.[60\4] At Athens there was a Hero Physician, a Hero General, and a Hero Garland-bearer.[61\4] Many a Hero may have been known to the neighbourhood which worshipped him simply as "the Hero".[62\4] In such cases it was entirely due to the grave and the cult attached to the grave that the Hero's memory had been preserved at all. There might, indeed, be stories current as to his doings and nature as a "spirit", but what it was that had marked him out in his lifetime and caused his elevation to a Hero was totally forgotten. Undoubtedly these are precisely the oldest Hero-cults. In the instances quoted from Elis, Herakleia and Olympia, first one and then another of the famous champions of antiquity were supposed to be buried under that nameless gravestone. But, often enough, the doubt was suppressed, and by an arbitrary and successful imposition some famous name out of the heroic legend may have been substituted as occupant of such ownerless or unclaimed grave sanctuaries.

§ 8

As a rule there was no difficulty in securing great or famous names when it was necessary to find a patron-Hero for the city. In

## particular the founder of the city and its regular worship of the

gods, and the whole divine circle which hedged round the life of the citizens, was regularly worshipped with high honour as Hero Archegetes.[63\4] Naturally, they were mostly mythical or even arbitrarily invented figures to whom the greater or lesser cities of Greece, as well as their offshoots in foreign lands, did honour as their "Founder".

But from the times when colonies were frequently dispatched and laid out in accordance with a carefully thought-out plan, under the leadership of a single person (generally named by an oracle) who was given plenipotentiary powers,[64\4] this real _Oikistes_ was himself usually promoted after his death to the rank of Hero. Pindar speaks of the sacred grave of the {128} Hero-founder of Kyrene in the marketplace of the city;[65\4] the inhabitants of the Thracian Chersonnese made sacrifices to Miltiades the son of Kypselos as their Oikistes, "as the custom is," and held games annually in his honour;[66\4] at Katana, in Sicily, Hieron of Syracuse was buried, and was worshipped with the honours of a Hero as the Founder of the city.[67\4] At Abdera the Teians on the occasion of the second founding of the city restored to his position of Hero its original founder Timesios.[68\4] On the other hand, the original and real Oikistes of a colony might be deprived of his worship if the inhabitants quarrelled with the mother country, and another "Founder" chosen after the event and given the highest honours of a Hero in his place. This was what happened in the year 422 with Hagnon and Brasidas in Amphipolis.[69\4]

In these cases Hero-making leaves the sacred mists of antiquity and enters the light of the contemporary world: faith and cult become profaned by political motives. The name of Hero, once applied only to the glorified figures of the far distant past, now that such Heroizing of the recent dead was possible, must have begun to have the more general meaning of one who has come to enjoy a higher nature and enlarged capacities after his death. In fact, any kind of prominence during a man's lifetime seems at last to have given him a virtual claim to heroic honours after his death. As Heroes are now regarded, great kings such as Gelon of Syracuse, law-givers such as Lykourgos of Sparta,[70\4] and even representatives of poetic genius from Homer down to Aeschylus and Sophokles,[71\4] no less than the most famous victors in the contests of bodily skill and strength. One of the Olympic victors, Philippos of Kroton, was reputed to be the most beautiful man in Greece of his time. Over his grave the people of Egesta, so Herodotos (v, 47) tells us, erected a Hero's temple and paid honour to him with sacrifice as to a Hero merely on account of his great personal beauty.

Still, religious or superstitious motives were not always absent. They were particularly to the fore in the numerous cases where the extent and importance of the world of Heroes were added to on the recommendation of the Delphic oracle. Ever since the Delphic priesthood had risen from its obscure beginnings to a recognized position as the supreme authority in all questions of spiritual right, the opinion of the oracle had been sought on all occurrences that seemed to have any connexion with the unseen world. Especially in the case of prolonged drought or infertility of the soil, or when pestilential sicknesses had attacked a part of the country, was the oracle {129} requested to state the origin of the misfortune. In many cases the answer of the oracle would be that the origin of the evil lay in the anger of a Hero who was to be placated by sacrifice and the foundation of a permanent worship; or it would command that the plague should be averted by the recovery of the bones of a Hero from a foreign land, which should then be preserved at home and be the object of an official cult.[72\4] Innumerable cults had their origin in this way, nor do the examples all belong to a half-legendary past. When pestilence and dearth broke out in the island of Cyprus after the death of Kimon, the oracle bade the inhabitants of Kition "not to slight" Kimon, but to regard him as a "higher" being, i.e. do him honour as a Hero.[73\4] So, too, when some one possessed by special religious scruples inquired the cause of a strange vision that he had had, or of the remarkable appearance of the body of one lately dead,[74\4] the oracle would often trace the matter to the action of a Hero who must forthwith be given an official cult. When a serious undertaking lay before a state, whether it was the invasion of a foreign land or a decisive battle in war, the oracle would bid the inquirers first placate the Heroes of the country that was to be attacked or where the battle was to be fought.[75\4] Sometimes the oracle of its own accord, without being applied to, commanded the honours of a Hero to be paid to a dead man.[76\4]

A peculiar case is that of Kleomedes of Astypalaia. This man had at the 71st Olympic festival (486) killed his opponent in the boxing match. He was disqualified by the Hellanodikai from taking his crown and returned home to Astypalaia full of indignation. There he tore down the pillar which supported the roof of a boys' school, and on the destruction of the boys fled to Athene's temple where he hid himself in a chest. His pursuers vainly sought to open the lid of the chest and at last the chest itself had to be broken into by main force. But Kleomedes was not found inside, either alive or dead. The envoys sent to inquire of the oracle were informed that Kleomedes had become a Hero, and that he must be honoured with sacrifice since he was no longer a mortal.[77\4] And so the inhabitants of Astypalaia paid honour to Kleomedes as a Hero. In this case the simple conception of a Hero as one raised to divine power after his death is united with the ancient belief, which had never quite died out since the great days of the epic, in the _translation_ of individual mortals who without dying disappear from sight to enter immortal life with body and soul complete. Such a miracle seemed to have occurred once again in the case of Kleomedes. He had "disappeared" and {130} been "carried away".[78\4] He could, however, only be called a "Hero" because there was no common name to describe the effect of translation which made men no longer mortals nor yet gods. The oracle called Kleomedes "the last of the Heroes"; indeed, it might well appear time to close at last the already over-lengthy list of "Heroes". The Delphic oracle[79\4] had itself contributed largely to their increase, and with full intent; nor did it observe for long its own decision to make an end now.[80\4]

It is easy to understand the reasons for the universal acceptance among the Greeks of the unquestioned authority of the oracle in all matters connected with the Heroes. The god does not invent new Heroes or add to the number of local divinities at his own caprice or by the exercise of his own authority. He merely sees them where human eyes are not clear-sighted enough. He, the all-seeing, recognizes them as one spirit does another, and is able to see them at work when men only feel the results of their activity. Thus, he enables inquirers to be rid of their difficulties, to understand supernatural occurrences by the recognition and worship of invisible powers. For the believer he is in this, as in all other directions of religious life, "the true Expositor".[81\4] He only points out what already exists; he does not invent anything new, though the information that he gives may be something quite new to men. We, indeed, may be permitted to inquire what motive the shrewd Delphic priesthood may have had in the creation or renewal of so many Hero-cults. There is very evident method in their promotion of the belief in Heroes, as there is in all the activities of the oracle in religious and political matters. Was it ecclesiastical policy that made the priests of Delphi, in this as so many other cases, search out and multiply to the greatest possible extent the objects of belief and cult? The more widespread and the more deeply ingrained was the uneasy dread of an invisible all-powerful spirit-world, the greater became the authority of the oracle that alone could give guidance in this confused turmoil of ghostly activities. Superstition had achieved a power that the Homeric age never knew, and it cannot be denied that the oracle encouraged this _deisidaimonia_ and did its best to increase it. Still, the priests of the oracle themselves were undoubtedly subject to the beliefs of their age; at any rate, they shared the belief in Heroes. They would think it quite natural, when faced by anxious inquiries as to the cause of disease or dearth, to confirm the half-expressed attribution of the evil to the action of an angry Hero. They had rather {131} to give their sanction to what was already anticipated than invent something new. They only applied to the particular case (with free scope in the invention of details) what the popular belief of the times had already settled in principle. But what it all meant was that the oracle took under its protection everything that could promote and strengthen the cult of _souls_: and in so far as it is possible to speak of a "Theology of Delphi", the popular belief in the survival of the soul after death and the cult of the disembodied soul formed two of the most important articles in its creed. We shall have more to say on this subject hereafter. In any case, if the priests lived in the atmosphere of such ideas, it was natural for them in times of need and stress, when strange things happened, to regard as the author of the disturbance some dead legendary Hero's ghost or even a powerful spirit of more recent times, and to direct the faithful accordingly. Thus, the Delphic god became the patron of the cult of Heroes, just as he was a patron of the Heroes themselves, and invited them every year at the _Theoxenia_ to a meal in his own temple.[82\4]

§ 9

Thus encouraged on all sides, Hero-worship began to multiply the objects of the cult beyond all counting. The great wars of freedom against the Persians had aroused the deepest and most religious feelings of the Greeks, and it did not seem too much when whole companies of those who had fallen for freedom were raised to the rank of Hero. Thus, even into a very late period, the solemn procession every year to honour the Greeks who had been left on the field of Plataea was never omitted; and at the sacrifice the archon of the city called upon the "brave men who had laid down their lives for Greece" and invited them to a meal and satisfaction of blood.[83\4] At Marathon, also, those who had once fallen in battle and been buried there were worshipped as Heroes.[84\4]

Out of the enormous multitude of those who had thus become Heroes an aristocracy of Heroes of a higher rank came to be formed, chiefly composed of those who had been honoured in legend and poetry from the earliest times and had acquired fame all over Greece. Examples of these are those whom Pindar[85\4] in one place names together: the descendants of Oineus in Aetolia, Iolaos in Thebes, Perseus in Argos, the Dioscuri in Sparta, the many-branched heroic family of the Aiakidai in Aegina, Salamis, and many other places. Indeed, a brighter lustre seemed to illumine some of the greater Heroes {132} and to distinguish them almost in kind from the rest of their fellows. Thus, Herakles was now elevated to the gods, though Homer did not even know him as a "Hero" in the later sense, and though in many places he was still worshipped as a Hero.[86\4] Asklepios is sometimes a Hero and sometimes a god, as he had been originally.[87\4] Then many other Heroes began to receive sacrifice as gods,[88\4] not without the assistance of the Delphic oracle, which in the case of Lykourgos, at least, seems itself to have given the lead in the elevation of that Hero.[89\4] The boundary line between the Hero and the god seems to become more and more uncertain; sometimes a Hero of the narrowest local observance is called a "god",[90\4] without our having any reason for thinking of a formal elevation to divine honour in his case or any corresponding alteration of ritual. The title of Hero seemed already to have lost some of its value, though the time had not yet come when to name a dead man as Hero hardly distinguished him at all from all the other dead.

§ 10

However much the meaning attached to the name of Hero may have widened or even deteriorated, the belief in the Heroes lost none of its significance and long retained its hold on the people. The belief in such a class of spirits stood almost on a par with the belief in gods. If the circle of influence possessed by some

## particular local-Hero was narrow and restricted, that only made him

seem all the nearer to his worshippers. The spirits of their ancestors, their own and the country's peculiar possession and shared with no one else, seemed more intimately theirs than other invisible powers even of higher rank. Permanent as the gods themselves, such Heroes were honoured as hardly second to the gods, "though they cannot equal them in might."[91\4] "Not equal"--for their efficacy was confined within bounds; it did not reach beyond the limits of their home and the little band of their worshippers. They were bound to the soil as the Olympian gods no longer were--(a Hero who breaks free from local limitations soon achieves divinity). In particular those Heroes who send up, from beneath the earth where they dwell, relief in sickness or prevision of the future are certainly bound to one spot. Only at their graves can such assistance be expected, for that is their dwelling-place. In their case the relationship between the belief in Heroes and the belief in those subterranean deities, of whom something was said in the previous chapter, is peculiarly plain. Indeed, in so far as their influence is limited {133} to a single locality and their powers concerned especially with _iatromantic_ manifestations, these two classes of spirits essentially coincide.

Such relief in sickness was expected, not only from Asklepios himself, but from the Asklepiadai, Machaon--who had a grave and temple at Gerenia on the coast of Laconia--and Podaleirios. The latter was buried in Apulia, near Mount Garganus. In his heroön those who sought his aid laid themselves down to sleep on the skin of the ram that had been previously sacrificed. In sleep they received other revelations from the Hero besides remedies for the ailments of man and beast.[92\4] Machaon's son, too, Polemokrates, healed sicknesses in his temple of Eua in Argolis.[93\4] In Attica there was a _Heros Iatros_ in the city whose efficacy in curing disease was witnessed to by innumerable silver ex voto facsimiles of various parts of the body restored to health by him.[94\4] Another Hero Iatros, whose name is given as Aristomachos, had an oracle of healing at Marathon.[95\4] Healing of disease was rarely attributed to any other than these Asklepiad Heroes. Dream-revelations of other kinds, however, were vouchsafed from their graves especially by those Heroes who had been seers also in their lifetime, such as Mopsos and Amphilochos at Mallos in Cilicia, Amphilochos, again, in Akarnania, Teiresias at Orchomenos, Kalchas in Apulia near the just-mentioned heroön of Podaleirios.[96\4] Besides these Odysseus, too, had a dream-oracle among the Eurytanes in Aetolia,[97\4] Protesilaos one at his grave-monument at Elaious in the Thracian Chersonnese,[98\4] Sarpedon in Cilicia and another (alleged) in the Troad,[99\4] Menestheus, the Athenian leader, far away in Spain,[100\4] Autolykos in Sinope,[101\4] and perhaps also Anios in Delos.[102\4] A Heroine called Hemithea had a dream-oracle, from which she dispensed cures in sickness, at Kastabos in Karia;[103\4] Pasiphaë gave prophecies in dreams at Thalamai on the Laconian coast.[104\4] Since from none of these Heroes did the epic tradition give any particular grounds in legend for expecting a display of mantic powers, we must suppose that knowledge of the future and communication of such knowledge to the living was regarded as belonging naturally to the spiritual nature of the glorified souls of Heroes. The notices which have come down to us allow us to hear of a few regular and permanently established Hero-oracles, but there may have been numbers of them of which we know nothing, and isolated and occasional manifestations of oracular powers by other Heroes may not have been entirely out of the question.[105\4] {134}

§ 11

The oracular Heroes are regularly confined to the neighbourhood of their graves. In addition, what we know of the legends that were told of the appearances or the unseen activities of these Heroes shows that, like the spirits that haunt ancient castles or caverns in our own popular mythology, they were confined within the boundaries of their native country, the neighbourhood of their graves or the site of their cult. They are, as a rule, artless stories of the anger displayed by a Hero whose rights have been infringed or whose cult neglected. At Tanagra[106\4] there was a Hero Eunostos, who, having been deprived of his life through the machinations of a woman, would tolerate no woman in his grove or near his grave.[107\4] If any of the hated sex intruded there was danger of an earthquake or drought, or else the Hero was seen going down to the sea (which washes away all pollutions) to cleanse himself. In Orchomenos there was a spirit who went about "with a stone" devastating the neighbourhood. This was Aktaion, whose earthly remains were therefore buried with much ceremony on the command of an oracle. A bronze statue of him was also set up and fastened with chains to a rock, and honoured every year in a feast of the dead.[108\4] Herodotos solemnly tells us of the wrath of Minos with the Cretans, who had not avenged his own violent end, whereas they had gone to the aid of Menelaos.[109\4] There is a deeper sense in the legend, also related by Herodotos, of Talthybios who was enraged not for any private grievance but because of a violation of the moral law and order. He himself as the protector of heralds and messengers punished the Spartans for their murder of the Persian envoys.[110\4] But the most awe-inspiring legend of the revenge of a Hero was told of a local-Hero of the Athenian parish of Anagyros. A countryman had cut down the Hero's sacred grove.[111\4] The Hero first caused the death of the man's wife and then inspired the second wife with a guilty passion for his son, her stepson. The latter opposed her wishes and when she denounced him to her husband was blinded by him and banished to a desert island. The father, having become an object of loathing to all men, hanged himself; the stepmother threw herself into a well.[112\4] This story is remarkable for the fact that in it the Hero, like the gods themselves, is regarded as able to affect men's consciousness, their feelings, and their resolves. Many of the details may have been improved upon by a taste accustomed to poetry of a higher style.[113\4] But as a rule the legends of Heroes bear a {135} thoroughly popular stamp. They are a kind of vulgar mythology, which still put forth fresh shoots in this way now that the myths of ancient gods and champions have become merely traditional and have been given over to the never-ending operations of the poets. Such myths were no longer thrown off naturally by the creative instinct of the people. The gods seemed too far removed, their visible influence in the affairs of men seemed only credible in the legends of a far-distant past. The spirits of Heroes hovered nearer to men; in good fortune and bad men traced their handiwork. In the myths and legends of the people arising out of the events of the immediate present they now constitute the supernatural element without which neither life nor stories would offer any attraction or meaning to the simple-minded.

We can learn what these legends were like from a single example, which happens to have been preserved to us and which must stand for the numbers of similar stories which once must have been current. At Temesa, in Lucania, there was a Hero who went about destroying any of the inhabitants that he could lay his hand on. The Temesians, who had got as far as thinking of leaving Italy, turned in their distress to the Delphic oracle, and were told that the ghost was the spirit of a stranger who had once been stoned to death by the inhabitants of the country for the violation of a maiden.[114\4] A sacred precinct must be dedicated to him, and a temple built, where every year the most beautiful maiden in Temesa must be delivered up to him. The citizens of Temesa did as they were told, and the spirit left them in peace, but every year the awful sacrifice took place. To this place there came in the 77th Olympiad a famous boxer, Euthymos of Locri, returning with his crown of victory back to Italy. He heard at Temesa of the sacrifice that was about to take place, and entered the temple where he saw the chosen maiden waiting for the Hero. Pity and love filled his heart; and when the Hero arrived the victor of so many single combats dared to try conclusions with this new foe and finally threw him into the sea and rid the country of the monster. It is just as in our own fairy tale of the youth who went forth to learn how to shudder;[115\4] and, of course, now that the land is delivered there is a brilliant wedding and the "Knight of Good Courage" marries the beautiful maiden he has rescued. He lived on to extreme old age, and even then he did not die but was translated alive and is now himself a Hero.[116\4]

Such champions of the Pan-Hellenic contests, of whom {136} Euthymos was one, are the favourite figures of popular legend both in their lifetime and, after their death, as spirits. A story was told also of one of the contemporaries of Euthymos, Theagenes of Thasos, one of the most famous victors in the great games, and how after his death one of his opponents went and thrashed his statue by night till one night the statue fell on him and killed him. The Thasians then threw the murderous image into the sea, but were thereupon plagued with barrenness as a result of the Hero's anger. This went on until, after the several times repeated command of the Delphic oracle, they fished up the statue from where it had sunk and restored it to its old position and sacrificed to it "as to a god".[117\4] The remarkable thing about this story is the way in which the crude and primitive notion, common to almost all image-worshipping peoples, that the strength of a "spirit" resides in his effigy, is here more than usually striking and applied to the belief in Heroes. It lies at the bottom of many stories of the revenge of dumb statues against those who offend them.[118\4] The statue of Theagenes, indeed, cured fevers even in later ages,[119\4] as did the statue of another famous boxer, Polydamas of Skotoussa.[120\4] An Achæan Olympic victor, Oibotas of Dyme, had for centuries prevented the Achæans from winning in any contest by a curse.[121\4] When he had been appeased the Achæans, on starting out to take part in a contest at Olympia, used to do sacrifice to his statue.[122\4]

§ 12

But the belief in Heroes rose to still greater heights. Not merely in peaceful athletic contests, but in real need, in struggles when they were fighting to defend the highest possessions of all--the freedom and safety of their country--the Heroes were found on the side of the Greeks. Nowhere do we see more plainly how real and vivid was the faith of contemporary Greece in the Heroes than in the stories told of the appeals then made to them and of their

## participation in the Persian wars. At Marathon there were many who

saw an apparition of Theseus in full armour fighting in the front of the battle against the barbarians.[123\4] In the painting of Panainos (the brother of Pheidias) in the Stoa Poikile at Athens there was shown among the fighters at Marathon a certain Hero, Echetlos, of whose appearance at the battle a peculiar story was told.[124\4] In the war against Xerxes Delphi was preserved by two of the local Heroes of the land against a Persian raid.[125\4] In the morning before the battle of Salamis the Greeks prayed to the gods, but they called directly {137} upon the Heroes to give them practical help: Aias and Telamon were summoned from Salamis, and a ship was sent to fetch Aiakos and the other Aiakidai from Aegina.[126\4] So little were these Hero spirits mere symbols or great names to the Greeks. Their actual physical participation in the decisive hour was confidently expected. And, indeed, they came and helped:[127\4] after the battle had been won a trireme out of the spoil was dedicated to the Hero Aias as well as to the gods as a thankoffering.[128\4] A Salaminian local Hero, Kychreus, had also come to the help of the Greeks, as a snake, in which form the Heroes, like the earth spirits, frequently appeared.[129\4] After the battle everyone was fully persuaded that they owed their victory to the gods and Heroes.[130\4] As Xenophon puts it, it was the Heroes and their aid which "made Greece unconquerable" in the fight against the barbarians.[131\4] Less frequently we hear of the active

## participation of national Heroes in the fights of one Greek state

against another.[132\4]

Even in the petty details of the life of individuals the Heroes played their part, helping or hindering, as once in mythical times the gods had done. Everyone will be reminded of well-known legends of the gods, and will at the same time be able to measure the difference between the sublime and the merely idyllic, in reading Herodotos' naive and circumstantial tale of how Helen once appeared in person to a nurse at Therapne. The nurse was praying at Helen's grave for her ill-favoured foster-child, when the Heroine appeared to her and with a touch of her hand made the child the most beautiful maiden in Sparta.[133\4] So, too, we read how the Hero Astrabakos, in the likeness of Ariston, king of Sparta, visited in secret the king's wife and made her the mother of Demaratos.[134\4] The heroön of this Astrabakos was situated by the door of Ariston's house,[135\4] and it was a frequent custom thus to place a Hero's shrine before the house-door where he might give a special protection to his neighbour.[136\4]

In all the circumstances of human life, in happiness or in need, for individuals or the city, the Heroes are thus very near to men. It is now often said of the Hero worshipped by a city (just as it was said of the city's gods) that he rules it, is its possessor, or is lord over it;[137\4] he is its true guardian and protector. It may, indeed, have been the case in many cities, as it was said to be in some, that the belief in the city-Hero was more deeply held there than the belief in the gods worshipped by all Greece in common.[138\4] The relation of man to the Heroes is closer than it is to the majestic gods above: {138} the faith in Heroes gave a different and a more familiar bond of union between men and the spirit-world above them. The worship of Heroes began as an ancestor-cult and an ancestor-cult it remained in essence, but it had now been widened to a cult of certain greater human souls who had raised themselves above their fellows by peculiar powers exercised in many, and by no means predominantly moral, directions. Many of them were of later ages or even of the quite recent past, and in this lies the peculiar importance of their cult. They show that the company of the spirits is not fixed and made up; individual mortals are still continually being raised to that higher circle after the completion of their earthly life. Death does not end all conscious existence nor does the gloom of Hades swallow up all life.

But for that reason the cult of Heroes cannot be the origin of the belief in an immortality belonging to all human souls by their very nature. Nor can this ever have been its effect. In the beginning, among the hosts that streamed down to Hades, the special individuals who had another fate were a small class apart and favoured above all others--and so it still remained. Though the numbers of the heroic figures might be increased enormously, yet every individual case of the transition of a human soul into the ranks of the Heroes was a fresh and special miracle. Such exceptional cases, however frequently repeated, could never produce a general rule applying without distinction to all men alike.

The belief in Heroes in its gradual evolution and extension unquestionably led far away from the course taken by the Homeric belief in the things after death. In fact, it pointed in the opposite direction. But with the belief in Heroes men had not yet arrived at the belief in an immortality proper to the human soul by virtue of its own nature, nor yet (which would be something different again) was a general cult of souls thereby founded. In order that such beliefs might arise after, but not out of, the cult of Heroes, and maintain themselves side by side with an undiminished cult of Heroes, a movement was first necessary that had its origin in different sources.

NOTES TO