In the religion of historic Greece, from the Ionian age to the establishment of Christianity, the most active, and, so to say, practical element is, we repeat, that of hero-worship, worship of dead men. The great temples of the gods of Greece in general, especially of the oracular Apollo, and of Athene in Athens, Artemis in Ephesus, Artemis Orthia at Sparta, and so on, were maintained in splendour and enriched with treasures of gold-work, silver, and bronze. The god or goddess and the shrines were centres of pilgrimages, and pilgrimages were good for trade. By them were the cities nourished, as the maker of silver shrines at Ephesus declared. Miracles were wrought, the blind saw, the lame walked. The local deity was of as great economic service to a city of Greece as the bones of the Apostle were to St. Andrews, and the relics of St. Thomas to Canterbury.
But for practical purposes of securing supernormal aid in war or famine, the dead heroes were to each town or village what St. Aignan was to Orleans, a very present help in trouble. For near a thousand years St. Aignan routed the foes of the good city, and his image was adored and carried in processions in 1429. Thus "to Lycurgus, after he was dead, the Spartans erected a temple, and paid him great worship."[33] "So that, as might be supposed ... they straightway shot up and became prosperous." The Spartans, therefore, determined to annex Arcadia, but were defeated by the forces of Tegea. Later, in the sixth century, during the time of Croesus, the Spartans asked the Delphic Oracle to direct their choice of a patron god. They were bidden to bring home the bones of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, which were in hostile Tegea. In Tegea, Lichas found the coffin which contained the bones, seven cubits long (half a cubit longer than Goliath), of Orestes, and carried them to Sparta. Thenceforth the Spartans were victorious. The bones were not in a cairn, for a blacksmith of Tegea first found the coffin when he was digging a well.[34] He would not dig for water in a tumulus or cairn.
We need not multiply examples of hero-worship and relic-snatching, and of such tricks of ghost-scaring as Cleisthenes played when, unable to cast the hero Adrastus bodily out of Sicyon, he drove him away by introducing the worship of the deadly foe of Adrastus, Melanippus.[35] Colonists carried the worship of Achilles into the coasts and isles of the Euxine, and even to Tarentum; while, according to Clemens Alexandrinus, the Spartans worshipped Zeus Agamemnon.[36] All this saint-worship and care for relics is, of course, absolutely un-Homeric.
The Odyssey[37] gives the perhaps Phoenician case of Ino, daughter of Cadmus, once a mortal, now a sea-goddess. But to Homer a dead man, be he Achilles or Aias, is merely a dead man. The cairn covers his bones; he has no chapel, no sacrifice; no men covet the possession of his relics; he can neither help nor harm; his spirit is in Hades, with the powerless peoples of the Dead. Trojans would leap and boast on the cairn of Menelaus if he fell at Troy (Iliad, iv. 174-182). Historic Greeks would have made offerings at the tomb. No such rites were in the belief of the society for which Homer sang. Had they been worshippers of the dead, the epic poet could not play the heresiarch, and tell them that their faith and hope were void and vain. No poet, no set of poets, who lived by pleasing could afford to horrify their hearers by such impiety. No poets could ignore the existence of normal rites that were familiar in practice to all. The most advanced modern novelist cannot ignore the Christian rites of marriage and burial, however much he may despise and detest them. It is, then, an historical fact that the society for which Homer sang did not adore and do sacrifice to dead men, did not make gods of them and do them sacrifice, did not scramble for their relics, as was the practice of proto-historic and historic Greece down to the time of Pausanias at least.
[1] Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 105.
[2] Helbig in Roscher, s.v. Minos, ii. 2. 3000. On this matter there is much controversy.
[3] See several examples in Evans, "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Worship." J. H. S., vol. xxi.
[4] Ibid. p. 108.
[5] Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 121.