Greek hero cult
Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of
The grand ruins and
Nature of hero cult
Greek hero-cults were distinct from the clan-based
Aside from the epic tradition, which featured the heroes alive and in action rather than as objects of
Two exceptions to the above were Heracles and Asclepius, who might be honored as either heroes or gods, with chthonic libation or with burnt sacrifice. Heroes in cult behaved very differently from heroes in myth. They might appear indifferently as men or as snakes, and they seldom appeared unless angered. A Pythagorean saying advises not to eat food that has fallen on the floor, because "it belongs to the heroes". Heroes if ignored or left unappeased could turn malicious: in a fragmentary play by Aristophanes, a chorus of anonymous heroes describe themselves as senders of lice, fever and boils.
Some of the earliest hero and heroine cults well attested by archaeological evidence in mainland Greece include the Menelaion dedicated to
Heroes (Male) and Heroines (Female)
Hero cults were offered most prominently to men, though in practice the experience of the votary was of propitiating a cluster of family figures, which included women who were wives of a hero-husband, mothers of a hero-son (
Penelope became a moral heroine for later generations, the embodiment of goodness and chastity, to be contrasted with the faithless, murdering Clytaemnestra, Agamemnon's wife; but 'hero' has no feminine gender in the age of heroes.[13]
Where local cult venerated figures such as the sacrificial virgin
Types of hero cult
Whitley distinguishes four or five essential types of hero cult:[15]
- Oikist cults of founders.oikist. In the case of cults at the tombs of the recently heroised, it must be assumed that the identity of the occupant of the tomb was unequivocally known. Thucydides (V.11.1) gives the example of Brasidas at Amphipolis. Battus of Cyrene might also be mentioned. "Such historical examples," Whitley warns, "have clearly colored the interpretation of certain tomb cults in the Archaic period." Such Archaic sites as the heroön at Lefkandi and that close to the West Gate at Eretriacannot be distinguished by archaeological methods from family observances at tombs (tomb cults) and the cult of ancestors.
- Cults to named heroes. A number of cult sites known in Classical times were dedicated to known heroes in the Greek and modern senses, especially of the are examples.
- Cults to local heroes. Such local figures do not figure among the Panhellenic figures of epic. Examples would be Akademos and Erechtheusat Athens.
- Cults at Bronze Age tombs. These are represented archaeologically by Iron Age deposits in Mycenaean tombs, not easily interpreted. Because of the gap in time between the .
- Oracular hero cults. Whitley does not address this group of local cults where an oracle developed, as in the case of Amphiaraus, who was swallowed up by a gaping crack in the earth. Minor cults accrued to some figures who died violent or unusual deaths, as in the case of the dead from the Battle of Marathon, and those struck by lightning, as in several attested cases in Magna Graecia.
Tombs and tumuli
All across Greece and sometimes into Turkey lay burial mounds. Sometimes on ancient battlefields or just in a frequently visited common area lay giant mounds of earth. Scholars call these mounds "tumulus". Many wondered why people built these mounds and what greater purpose they served. One notable example is following the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The Athenians, having defeated the Persians, needed to bury their dead. 192 dead in total,[18] they were buried on the same field on which they had died and under a giant mound. This particular mound became what is known as the Marathon Tumuli. These mounds began popping up all over Greece as a gesture of respect to the dead, and as many scholars believe, it was also a way to connect them with the earth.[18]
Most commonly in Ancient Greece, these mounds could have had any 1 of 3 main components, composed in a staircase-like format, within the mound. This staircase like structure may have 1 or 2 steps that would help carry out various ceremonial functions as well as serve as storing places for valuable items. The first step would be used for cremation and the ashes piled in after that while the second step would hold any votives or items of sentimental value. Then the whole thing would be covered by a giant mound. In the case of the Athenian monument they also surrounded it with tall, skinny stone slabs that may read an honoring message or be dedicated to any one ‘hero'.[19]
Heroes, politics, and gods
Much of the scholarship that has been done surrounding Heroes, Gods, and the Politics that plays a role in much of what we know about them today has all come from either written accounts or archeological findings. In fact, in many cases both types of evidence may contradict each other. Written evidence can be biased or incomplete, and archeological findings do not always tell us a definitive story. However, hero cults may be a case where they collide positively. First, despite the numerous written accounts of these heroes, hero shrines are few in number and peculiar in pattern. This is proof that the cults were widespread on Greece, with multiple cities having their own iterations of each Hero to fit their own needs.[20]
Another way in which the Cults were used was for political propaganda and manipulation. Sparta's propping up of many hero cults was out of recognition of the fact that their population reacted to them in such a way that would allow them to use the hero shrines as political propaganda.[21] For example, Lewis Farnell believed that, because of the fact hero cults are often not found in a hero's home territory, there is a greater chance that the cults were widespread and common among most Greeks. Whereas other cults may be ancestral dating back to even the 8th century.[20]
Only Laconia has evidence of assigning its shrines to specific heroes meaning that the rest of the shrines were not to any one specific hero but allowed for worship to a hero via one shrine. Unlike the Roman beliefs it was thought that the Heroes did not ascend to the skies and be with the gods of Olympus, but rather they would go down into and become one with the earth. This impacted not only how the Greeks treated the Heroes, but thought about them in a political sense. They were respected and worshiped, but could even at times turn vicious if ignored and be the supposed cause of diseases or mishaps.[20]
Hero cults could also be of the utmost political importance beyond propaganda too. When
List of heroes
Greek deities series |
---|
Chthonic deities |
- Achlae – Greek river god, Achelous
- Achle, Achile – Legendary hero of the Trojan War, from the Greek Achilles
- Leuce
- Actaeon pupil of the centaur Chiron
- Aeneas
- Ajax
- Akademos
- Alexander the Great at Alexandria
- Amphiaraus
- Atalanta
- Asclepius
- Battus at Cyrene
- Bellerophon
- Bouzyges
- Cadmus – the Phoenician founder of Thebes
- Fava beans.
- Diomedes
- Athens
- Hector
- Hephaestion[22]
- Heracles
- Alexandria by Ptolemy IV Philopator
- Jason
- Leonidas
- Lycurgus
- Meleager
- Odysseus
- Athens
- Orion at Boeotia
- Orpheus
- Pandora the first woman, whose curiosity brought evil to mankind
- Penthesilea
- Peleus – he fathered the famous hero Achilles.
- Pelops at Olympia
- Perseus
- Philippus of Croton
- Theseus
- Tantalus
- Paris
See also
- Demigod
- Culture hero
- Epic poetry
- Imperial cult of ancient Rome
- Kami
- Bodhisattva
- Dharmapala
- Deification
- Shen (Chinese religion)
- Thracian religion
- Relics in classical antiquity
- Chinese hero cult
Notes
- ^ Parker gives a concise and clear synopsis of hero.
ISBN 9780191500626. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
The term 'hero' had a technical sense in Greek religion: a hero was a figure less powerful than a god, to whom cult was paid. He was normally conceived as a mortal who had died, and the typical site of such a cult was a tomb. But various kinds of minor supernatural figure came to be assimilated to the class and, as in the case of Heracles, the distinction between a hero and a god could be uncertain.
- ^ Carla Maria Antonaccio, An Archaeology of Ancestors: Tomb Cult and Hero Cult in Early Greece (1995) and "Lefkandi and Homer", in O. Anderson and M. Dickie, Homer's World: Fiction, Tradition and Reality (1995); I. Morris, "Tomb cult and the Greek Renaissance" Antiquity 62 (1988:750–61).
- ^ "The cult of Heroes everywhere has the same features as the cult of ancestors... 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." Rohde 1925:125.
- ^ Farnell 1921:283ff.
- ^ Coldstream, "Hero cults in the age of Homer", Journal of the Hellenic Society 96 (1976:8–17).
- ^ Antonaccio 1994:395.
- ^ R. K. Hack, "Homer and the cult of heroes", Transactions of the American Philological Association 60 (1929:57–74).
- ^ Carla M. Antonaccio, "Contesting the Past: Hero Cult, Tomb Cult, and Epic in Early Greece" American Journal of Archaeology 98.3 (July 1994:389–410).
- ^ Parker 1988:250.
- ^ Inscriptions reveal that offerings were still being made to the heroised dead in the first century BC; the tumulus is discussed in Whitley, "The Monuments that stood before Marathon: Tomb cult and hero cult in Archaic Attica" American Journal of Archaeology 98.2 (April 1994:213–30).
- ^ In the case of the shrine to Odysseus, this is based on a single graffito from the Hellenistic period.
- ^ Jennifer Lynn Larson, Greek Heroine Cults (University of Wisconsin Press) 1995, has marshalled the evidence.
- ^ Finley, The World of Odysseus (1954; rev. ed. 1978), pp. 32ff.
- ^ "Heroine cults fit well into our modern view of ancient Greek culture as firmly androcentric, though not as androcentric as some would have had us believe" (Larson 1995:144).
- ^ Whitley1994:220ff.
- ^ A general study of oikist cults is I. Malkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (Leiden) 1987:189–266.
- ^ Heinrich Schliemann, Mycenae, adduced by Whitley 1994:222 and note 44
- ^ a b Waterfield, Robin (1998). Herodotus: The Histories.
- S2CID 190728749.
- ^ S2CID 192969382.
- ^ Pavlides, Nicolette. "Hero-Cult in Archaic and Classical Sparta: A Study of Local Religion". University of Edinburgh Classics – via JSTOR.
- ISBN 978-1-317-86644-2.
References
- Carla Antonaccio, An Archaeology of Ancestors: Tomb and Hero Cult in Ancient Greece, 1994
- Lewis R. Farnell, Greek Hero-Cults and Ideas of Immortality (Oxford), 1921.
- E. Kearns, The Heroes of Attica (BICS supplement 57) London, 1989.
- Karl Kerenyi, The Heroes of the Greeks, 1959
- Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979.
- Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1925
- Jennifer Larson, Greek Heroine Cults (1995)
- Jennifer Larson, Ancient Greek Cults: A Guide (2007). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-32448-9
- D. Lyons, Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult (1996)
- D. Boehringer, Heroenkulte in Griechenland von der geometrischen bis zur klassischen Zeit: Attika, Argolis, Messenien (2001)
- G. Ekroth, The Sacrificial Rituals of Greek Hero-Cults (2002)
- B. Currie, Pindar and the Cult of Heroes (2005)