§ 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] “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] Machaon’s son, too, Polemokrates, healed sicknesses in his temple of Eua in Argolis.[93] 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] Another Hero Iatros, whose name is given as Aristomachos, had an oracle of healing at Marathon.[95] 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] Besides these Odysseus, too, had a dream-oracle among the Eurytanes in Aetolia,[97] Protesilaos one at his grave-monument at Elaious in the Thracian Chersonnese,[98] Sarpedon in Cilicia and another (alleged) in the Troad,[99] Menestheus, the Athenian leader, far away in Spain,[100] Autolykos in Sinope,[101] and perhaps also Anios in Delos.[102] A Heroine called Hemithea had a dream-oracle, from which she dispensed cures in sickness, at Kastabos in Karia;[103] Pasiphaë gave prophecies in dreams at Thalamai on the Laconian coast.[104] 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] [134]