§ 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] At Marathon, also, those who had once fallen in battle and been buried there were worshipped as Heroes.[84]
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] 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] Asklepios is sometimes a Hero and sometimes a god, as he had been originally.[87] Then many other Heroes began to receive sacrifice as gods,[88] 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] 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] 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.