§ 2
The conception of the departed spirit as one who has been raised to a higher state of dignity and power receives clearer and more conscious expression where the departed one is called a Hero.
This class of intermediate beings standing on the border line between mankind and godhead—the world of the Heroes—was in no danger of extinction at this period of Greek religious belief. The attitude of mind that could think of certain special souls as withdrawn from the limitations of visible existence and raised to a higher spiritual state remained still vigorous and was even able to give birth to new conceptions.
In its original and proper sense the name Heros never indicated an independent and self-sufficient spirit. Archegetes, “leader” or “originator”, is his real and distinctive title. The Heros stands at the beginning of a series, taking its origin [528] from him, of mortal men for whom he is the leader and “ancestor”. The genuine Heroes are the ancestors, whether real or imaginary, of a family or a house; in the “Heroes”, after whom they wish to be called, the members of a society, a clan, or even a whole race honour the archegetai of those groups. They are always men of power and influence, prominent and distinguished from other men, who are regarded as having thus entered into the life of Heroes after their death. And even in later times the Heroes of a more recent elevation, though they may no longer be the leaders of a train of descendants taking their origin from them, are yet regarded as distinguished from the people who worship them by their peculiar virtue and dignity. To become a Heros after death was a privilege reserved for a few great and uncommon personalities who even in their lifetime were not as other men were.
The companies of these old and specially chosen Heroes did not suffer the fate of forgetfulness which would have been their second and real death. The love of country and city, undying among the Greeks, attached itself in reverent memory to the illuminated spirits of the past who had once protected and defended their native land. When Messene was refounded in the fourth century the Heroes of the country were solemnly called upon to become inhabitants of the city as they had been before—more particularly Aristomenes, the never-forgotten champion of Messenian freedom.[33] Even at Leuctra he had appeared in the melée of the fight, doing battle for the Thebans.[34] Before the battle, Epameinondas had secured the favour of the Heroines of the place, the daughters of Skedasos, by means of prayer and sacrifice.[35] These were events of the last heroic age of Greek history, but the cult and memory of the local Heroes of the Greek countries survived into a much later age. Leonidas was worshipped by the people of Sparta for many centuries,[36] and the champions of the Persian Wars, the saviours of Hellas, were worshipped by their remote descendants.[37] Even in imperial times the inhabitants of the island of Kos still worshipped those who had fallen to secure their freedom centuries before.[38] Such individual cases allow us to see what was the general rule: the memory and cult of a Hero lived on as long as the community remained in existence whose duty it was to maintain his worship. Even those Heroes—a class by themselves—who have secured their immortality through their fame in ancient poetry[39] still retained their cult undiminished. The heroic [529] figure of Hektor still preserved life and reality for his worshippers in the Troad or at Thebes.[40] Even in the third century of our era the district of Troy and the neighbouring coasts of Europe still kept fresh the memory and the cult of the Heroes of Epic renown.[41] Of Achilles, who had a special fate, we must speak in another [connexion].[42]
Nor did less splendid figures vanish from the memory of their narrower associations of worshippers. Autolykos the founder of Sinope retained his cult even in the time of Lucullus.[43] At a quite late period the relics of the specially popular Heroes of the Pan-Hellenic games were still the subject of many superstitions[44] that bear witness to their continued influence. Heroes to whom healing powers were ascribed continued to do works of healing and to be worshipped, and their number was even extended.[45] Mere local spirits, whose very names had been forgotten, nevertheless lost none of the honour that came to them from their beneficent miracles; such were, for instance, that Philopregmon of Poteideia who was celebrated by a late poet,[46] or the Hero Euodos of Apollinopolis in Egypt who dispensed “good journey” to those who honoured him in passing by his monument.[47]
But all Heroes were not yet reduced to such casual salutations from occasional passers-by. In many places[48] the regular festivals and sacrifices to Heroes still survived—even human sacrifice was still sometimes made to spirits who were held capable of special exhibitions of power.[49] In a few cases the festivals of Heroes are the chief feasts in the annual calendar of a city.[50] The names of Heroes quite as much as of Gods were used in oath-taking[51] at treaties made by Greek cities so long as they retained their independence. Foundations were dedicated to the honour of Gods and Heroes together.[52] Cult associations called themselves after the Heroes they met to worship.[53] Special priests of certain Heroes were regularly appointed.[54] Even in the second century, in his book of travels, Pausanias is able to inform us of not a few Heroes whose cult, as he distinctly says, had gone on unbroken in their cities down to his own day.[55] The annual festival of the Heroes who had fallen at Plataea was still celebrated with the greatest pomp in the time of Plutarch, who describes every detail of its archaic ceremonial.[56] And at Sikyon, at the same time, the Heroic festival of Aratos, the founder of the Achæan League, was still celebrated, though here the centuries had robbed the occasion of many of its former glories.[57] [530]
In all such ceremonies it was to a single and definite spirit-personality that the devotion of men was offered. Each of them received the cult that was due to him by the terms of some old-established and sanctified foundation. Nothing was further from men’s minds than the loose and vague conception, expressed sometimes by ancient writers, that all brave men of the past or all outstanding individuals of whatever time are to be regarded forthwith as Heroes.[58] It was still clearly and consciously felt that elevation to the rank of Hero was not a privilege that belonged as a matter of course to any particular class of mankind, but, wherever it occurred, was essentially a ratification of quite exceptional worth and influence displayed already in the lifetime of the Hero. Following this conception even the Hellenistic age added to the number of the Heroes by drawing upon the great men of the present. A little earlier Pelopidas and Timoleon had been honoured in this way, and now the figures of Leosthenes, Kleomenes, and Philopoimen were raised to heroic glory.[59] Even Aratos, the very incarnation of the sobriety of a too matter-of-fact age, at the end of a life devoted with ardour but without enduring success to the service of his country, was supposed by his countrymen to have passed over in a mysterious manner into the realm of heroic semi-divinity.[60]
As in these cases whole populations honoured individuals so also did narrower and much humbler associations, even in this rationalist age, elevate their helpers and protectors to the rank of Hero and honour them as such. The slaves of Kos thus honoured their former comrade and leader Drimakos;[61] at another place there was a Hero who protected all refugees who took shelter with him;[62] at Ephesos there was a Hero who had been a simple shepherd.[63] At the time of Augustus, a benefactor of his city, Athenodoros, the philosopher, had been made a Hero by grateful Tarsians after his death.[64] It sometimes happens that a Hero of the distant past may find himself confused with a descendant of the same name whom his contemporaries put in the place of his own ancestor and worship in his stead.[65]
So little were men grown out of the ideas centred round the cult of Heroes that, accustomed to the ever-increasing adoration of the “Mightier and Better”, every age was eager to add to their number from the men of the present. They did not always wait for the death of the individual so honoured before beginning to address him as Heros; even in his lifetime he must enjoy a foretaste of the honour that was destined [531] to be his after his departure from this life. Thus, Lysander was saluted as a Hero after his victory by the Greeks whom he had liberated from the despotism of Athens; and in the Hellenistic age many a fortunate army commander or mighty king received the same honour. Of the Romans Flamininus the friend of the Greeks was the first to receive it.[66] This misapplication of the cult of Heroes to the living then became still further extended.[67] It may be that sometimes it was a real feeling of unusual merit that fired the impulsive temperament of the Greeks; but in the end the custom became almost a meaningless convention; even private individuals were thus called Hero in their lifetime[68] and heroic honours—even the foundation of annual athletic games—were granted to living persons almost indiscriminately.[69] And at last when it was necessary to honour an individual whom the love and passionate regret of a monarch elevated to the rank of Hero after his death then, indeed, the age could hardly do enough in the hyperbole of pomp and ceremony. The funeral honours paid to the dead Hephaistion are an extravagant example of this.[70]
If in such cases the limits between the worship of a Hero and the adoration of a god seemed almost to have disappeared, we still have evidence of individual cases in which the survivors, without actually naming them Heroes, offer to their much-loved dead a memorial cult that hardly falls short of full heroic honours.[71] Nor is it only in such cases as these that we perceive the signs of a tendency to exalt the Cult of Souls everywhere and to approximate it to the worship of ancestors in the ancient Cult of Heroes. It emerges clearly enough, for all the brevity of their language, from the multitude of epitaphic inscriptions in which members of simple citizen families are addressed with the title of Heros. At any rate, it betokens an increase in the importance and dignity of the dead when a tombstone expressly announces that an individual citizen has been “heroized” by the city after his death. And this is what not infrequently happened—early in Thera and later on in many other places as well.[72] The same conclusion must be drawn when we hear of associations declaring a dead member to be a Heros;[73] or when a society recognizes a dead man as Heros on the formal motion of an individual.[74] Families, too, become accustomed to giving the name to those of their number that have died before the rest; and a son will thus speak of his father, parents of a son, and a wife of her husband—either informally or by a formal declaration naming [532] the dead one as Heros.[75] A higher and mightier form of existence after death must be imagined for the departed when he is thus distinguished so explicitly from the ordinary multitude of the dead—still more so in those cases when the dead man, elevated to a mystic communion with higher forms of life, loses his own name and receives in exchange that of a Hero of long-standing honour, or even that of a God.[76]
In every case that is known to us, the “heroizing” of a dead person by the city or a society or the family is carried out entirely on the independent authority of those bodies. The Delphic Oracle, without whose deciding voice it was hardly possible in early times for the company of the elect to receive any addition,[77] was, in these days when the prestige of the oracle had sunk almost to nothing, no longer applied to for its sanction. The consequence was hardly avoidable that the licence thus accorded to corporations and families should widen still further the bounds of the Heroes’ kingdom. In the end, these boundaries broke down entirely. There were cities and countries where it became the custom to apply the title of “Hero” as an epithet of honour belonging to all the dead without distinction. It seems that this extension of “heroizing” to all the dead first became common in Boeotia,[78] though here it was not quite universal—Thespiai was an exception.[79] Thessalian grave-inscriptions give the fullest evidence for the heroizing of the dead of every age and description. But the custom spread to every country populated by Greeks;[80] only Athens is less unrestrained[81] in the bestowal of the title of Hero upon the dead—a title which retained no more of the old and essential meaning of the word (which perhaps survived longest in Athens) than to say that the dead were really now dead.[82]
In spite of such indiscriminate application the name “Hero” still continued to be something of a title of honour. An honour, indeed, that was thus accorded to everyone without distinction was in danger of becoming the reverse of an honour. But isolated phrases of a naive and popular character make it clear that a difference was still felt to exist between the “Hero” and those who were not honoured with this distinguishing epithet.[83] When the name of Hero was thus applied to all the dead, not in exceptional cases but as a rule, the glory and distinction of which the idea of the “Hero” was thus deprived must have fallen in some measure upon the individual dead, if they [533] and the Heroes could meet on common ground. Thus, even the dissipation of the heroic honour and its indiscriminate application to all the dead is in reality but another indication of the fact that even in the decline of the ancient world the power and dignity of the departed soul had not declined too, but had, on the contrary, grown greater.