§ 3
The “grave” under the Omphalos means in the case of Python the overthrow of an earth-dwelling Chthonic Daimon by the cult of Apollo. The “grave” of Zeus, which had thrust itself into the place of an older legend of the dwelling of Zeus in the cave of the mountain, expresses the same idea as this legend, but expresses it in a form current in later ages which knew of many “Heroes” who after their death and from their graves gave proof of a higher existence and a powerful influence. The Zeus that died and is buried is only a god reduced to a Hero;[34] remarkable and paradoxical is only the fact that unlike Zeus Amphiaraos, Zeus Trophonios (and Zeus Asklepios), he has not, in the usual fashion, dropped his title of god, which directly contradicted his “Hero” [98] nature. It is possible that in the case of this cave-Zeus, half-god half-Hero, a conception has been transferred merely on analogy from other cases where it was applied more properly, after they had become fully “Heroized”, to gods who according to the no longer intelligible theory had once been dwellers in the depths of the earth.
We have several accounts of Heroes who were buried in temples of gods and were sometimes associated with the cult of the higher god to whom the temple was dedicated. The way in which such legends could arise may be seen unusually clearly from the case of Erechtheus.
The Ship-Catalogue in the Iliad (ii, 546 ff.) tells us that Erechtheus was the son of the Earth, but that Athene brought him up and “settled him in her rich temple”,[35] where the Athenians every year honour him with sacrifice of sheep and bulls.[36] It is plain that Erechtheus is here thought of as still living; to honour a dead man with such offerings, repeated every year and attended by the whole community, would be a custom quite unknown to Homer. Erechtheus is, therefore, thought of as dwelling alive in the temple in which Athene has set him down, i.e. the ancient temple on the Acropolis which was enclosed in the “strong house of Erechtheus”, to which, according to the Odyssey, Athene betakes herself as her own home. On the old citadel of the Kings, royal residence and sanctuary of the goddess were combined; its foundation walls have recently been discovered on the spot where later joint worship was paid to Athene and Erechtheus in the “Erechtheion”.[37] Erechtheus dwells below the ground in a crypt of this temple,[38] like other earth-deities, in the form of a snake, immortally. He is not dead, for as Euripides still says, in a story which otherwise follows different lines, “the earth gaped and covered him over,”[39] i.e. he was translated and lived on under the earth. On the analogy of the examples already discussed it is clear that this is also a case of a primitive local deity,[40] once supposed to have been living always in a cave on the mountain-side, transformed to a Hero who has been brought there and raised to immortal life. The later belief in Heroes required a grave at which the continued existence and potency of the “Hero” was localized; by a natural process of development the Hero Erechtheus translated alive and made immortal is thought of as buried in a grave. Erichthonios, who was expressly identified with the Homeric Erechtheus, was by later ages supposed to be buried in the Temple of Polias, i.e. the oldest temple of Athene, on the Acropolis.[41] We have clearly before us the steps by which the [99] aboriginal deity, dwelling beneath the ground, the son of Earth, is made into a mortal Hero, translated to immortality and placed under the protection of the Olympian goddess who has now become more powerful than he; and finally transferred, cave and all, to the precincts of her temple, and finally reduced to the condition of a Hero like another, who had died and lies peacefully buried in the temple of the goddess on the citadel.
With this example before us we may explain several other analogous cases, in which we have only the last stage of the process, the grave of a Hero in a god’s temple, without any of the intermediate steps. A single example may be given.
At Amyklai, not far from Sparta, in the holiest temple of Laconia, stood the ancient bronze statue of Apollo upon an altar-shaped base, within which, according to legend, Hyakinthos lay buried. Through a bronze door in the side of the altar offerings for the dead were sent down to “Hyakinthos” buried below every year at the festival of the Hyakinthia.[42] The recipient of these offerings has little resemblance to the gentle youth of popular legend. The Hellenistic poets tell how he was beloved by Apollo and died by a cast of Apollo’s discus and was changed into a flower. The fable, almost destitute of local reference, has been put together from many popular themes.[43] The sculpture on the above-mentioned altar, on the other hand, represents among many gods and heroes Hyakinthos and his sister Polyboia as they are being carried up to heaven—which will not square with the metamorphosis story. Further, he is represented as bearded, and so not as the boy whom Apollo loved,[44] but as a grown man (of whose daughters indeed other legends make mention).[45] The true story of this Hyakinthos has disappeared almost without leaving a trace. But in what the monument reveals and in what we know of the yearly festival held in honour of Hyakinthos significant features emerge which perhaps can tell us the real character of the Daimon that was honoured at Amyklai together with, and as our information clearly shows, before Apollo himself.[46] Hyakinthos was given offerings that were otherwise peculiar to the gods that ruled the lower world.[47] These offerings were let down directly into the underground place where, in fact, Hyakinthos himself was supposed to dwell. In the great festival of the Hyakinthia the alternate worship of Apollo and Hyakinthos (after whom as the chief personage the festival is named) points to the incomplete amalgamation of two originally distinct cults; and the plain and unadorned, almost dismal, ceremonies of [100] the days devoted to Hyakinthos—contrasted with the more cheerful worship paid to Apollo on the middle day of the feast[48]—allow us to see clearly the real nature of Hyakinthos as a Daimon related to the gods of the underworld. On the altar-relief Polyboia was represented as his sister: she was a goddess of the underworld like Persephone.[49] Hyakinthos was, then, an old local deity of the Amyklaian countryside, dwelling below the earth, and his worship at Amyklai was older than that of Apollo. But he is a dim figure. The Olympian god (probably not before the Doric conquest of the Achæan land) has set himself down beside, and indeed over, the ancient earth-spirit, and now outshines him without quite being able to banish his worship. The divine existence of the latter under the ground could not be imagined by later ages, except as the after-existence of the psyche of a dead and buried Hero whose body lay in the “grave” under the statue of the god. Next, in order to explain their association in cult, poetic legend made the god a lover, just as in another case, and for similar reasons, it had made him the lover of Daphne.[50]