§ 4
How it came about that the cult of ancestors was rescued from partial, and more than partial, oblivion, and rose to a new and lasting importance, that, indeed, we cannot say. We can give no real explanation indicative of the origin and progress of this important development in Greek religious life. We know neither the time nor the place of the first serious revival of this newly awakened primitive worship; nor can we tell the manner or stages of its diffusion during those obscure years of the eighth and seventh centuries. We can, however, bring the fact of the revival of ancestor-worship into relation with a number of other facts which prove that during those years many hitherto buried or repressed ideas about the life of gods and men came to the surface again out of the depths of popular faith and out of an older worship of the gods that had never quite died out. This revival did not, indeed, suppress the Homeric view entirely—that never occurred—but it did set itself on a level with that view. The great movement with which we shall be dealing in the next [chapter] also contributed to the progress of the belief in Heroes. Many other favouring [121] circumstances may in detail have helped to strengthen that belief. Even the epic itself had in one point at least approached the ideas that were receiving a new life in the worship of Heroes. Many of the local gods who had faded before the new deities of common Hellenic belief had been reduced to the rank of humanity and joined in heroic adventure. By a sort of compromise effected with the local cult of such gods the epic poets had been led, in a few cases, to the creation of a remarkable series of figures in which the divine and the human was wonderfully mixed. These champions and seers of old time, as they had once been mortal men among other men, so now after their departure must they live on and have influence eternally like the gods. We can easily see the close resemblance that exists between such figures as Amphiaraos or Trophonios and the Heroes of later belief; in fact, both of them, when they were not called gods, were frequently reckoned among these Heroes. But for all that, they are only quasi-Heroes; prototypes of the real Heroes they can never have been. They have been translated during their lifetime, and live on immortally just because they have never tasted death. They, with those others translated to the Islands of the Blest, represent the idea of immortality in the only form recognized by the Homeric poetry. The Heroes of the newly awakening creed, on the contrary, have died unmistakably; and yet they continue to live on, though relieved of their bodies. They are entirely distinct from the translated few of the epic tradition. They emerge out of the obscurity of the half-remembered past as something strange—as something, indeed, opposed to the circle of ideas influenced by the epic.
It was not from poetic imagination or story that the Heroes took their origin, but from the remains of an ancient pre-Homeric belief which local worship had preserved alive.
§ 5
The worship of a Hero is everywhere connected with the site of his grave. That is the general rule proved in innumerable cases. That is why in the case of a more than ordinarily revered Hero, his grave as the centre of his worship is set up in some prominent and honourable place—the market-place of the city, the Prytaneion,[30] or, like the grave of Pelops in the Altis at Olympia, in the very middle of the holy precinct, in the thick of the festival crowd.[31] Or else the Hero who guarded the city and the land might have his grave in the wall of the city gate or upon the farthest border of its territory.[32] Where his grave is, there the Hero is fast bound; that is his [122] dwelling-place.[33] This idea prevails everywhere, though it may not be given such blunt expression as at Tronis, in the country of the Phocians, where the blood of the offering made to the Hero was poured down through an opening immediately into his grave mound.[34] It is implied, as a rule, in these cases that the grave contains the bones of the Hero. The bones—all that is left of his mortality—chain the Hero to his grave. Hence, when it was thought desirable to attach a Hero and his protective power to a city his bones (or what were taken for such) on the command of an oracle were brought from a foreign land and laid to rest in his native country. We possess many accounts of such transference of relics.[35] Most of them occurred in the distant past, but we also read how in the full light of history in the year 476 enlightened Athens brought over the bones of Theseus from Skyros;[36] and not until they were buried in the Theseion was Theseus properly attached to Athens.
Since the possession of the corporeal remains[37] of the Hero secured the possession of the Hero himself, the cities often protected themselves against strangers, who might remove the treasured bones, by keeping the position of the grave a secret.[38] A grave is always necessary to fix the Hero at a definite place, or, at least, an “empty tomb”, which sometimes had to do duty for a grave.[39] In such cases the Hero was perhaps thought of as bound by a spell to that place.[40] As a rule, it is the remains of his former body that hold him fast. But these remains are a part of the Hero himself; though dead (and mummified, as we are told in one case),[41] he works and acts just the same; his psyche, his invisible counterpart and double, hovers in the neighbourhood of the body and the grave.
These are all very primitive conceptions such as have, as a rule, only been preserved among peoples who have remained at a very undeveloped stage of culture.[42] When we find them in force among Greeks of post-Homeric times, we cannot really believe that they arose then for the first time, in complete contrast with the clear-sighted freedom of the men of the Homeric age. They have only re-emerged from the repressive influence of the Homeric rationalism. It would be natural to think that the same ideas that have been described as underlying the belief in Heroes were already in the minds of those prehistoric Greeks who in Mycenae and elsewhere took such care (even it seems going so far as to embalm them)[43] to preserve the bodies of their princes from destruction, and who put ornaments and utensils in their graves for future use [123] or enjoyment. It has been explained above how, in the times of which Homer’s poems give us a picture, the alteration in sentiment as well as the spread of the custom of completely destroying the bodies of the dead with fire must have weakened the belief in the confinement of the soul to this world and to the remains of the body. This belief never entirely perished. It was preserved alive, perhaps for a long time only by a few, in those places where there remained a cult attached to a grave. Such a cult would not, indeed, extend to those whose death had occurred within more recent times, but it did not allow the old-established worship of the great dead of the past to die out entirely. Over the royal graves on the citadel at Mycenae stood a sacrificial hearth,[44] which bears witness to the continuance of the ancient worship of the kings buried there. The Catalogue of Ships in Homer mentions the “grave of Aipytos”, an old Arcadian local monarch, as a landmark of the district;[45] may not the sanctity of that grave have been preserved? In many places, at any rate, graves were pointed out and honoured that belonged to Heroes who owed their existence solely to poetic fancy or were even mere personifications—abstractions of the names of places and countries whose ancestors they purported to be. In such cases the Hero-worship had become purely symbolic, and often perhaps a mere formality. But from such a fictitious ancestor-worship the cult of the graves of Heroes cannot possibly have arisen; such fictions are themselves only intelligible as copies of another and more vivid worship, of a cult of real ancestors. If no such cult had existed in actual fact before men’s eyes, it would be impossible to understand how men came to imitate ancestor-worship in the shape of such purely imaginary creatures. A copy implies the existence of a model; a symbol requires the contemporary or earlier existence of the reality symbolized. We should certainly know more of the worship of ancestors among the ancient royal families if in nearly all the Greek states monarchy had not been abolished at an early period and all traces of it suppressed. Sparta alone provides us with a solitary example of what may once have been the prevailing custom in all the seats of royal authority. When a Spartan king died his funeral was celebrated with extreme pomp. His body (which, even when he had died abroad, was embalmed and brought home to Sparta) was laid beside the other dead of his family, and honour was paid to him, in Xenophon’s words, not as a man, but as a Hero.[46] In this case, which undoubtedly represents a traditional usage handed down from remote [124] antiquity, we have the rudiments of Hero-worship as applied to the dead of a royal family. The members of noble families who, like the Eupatridai of Athens, sometimes traced their descent from a king,[47] must also have retained from ancient times the practice of ancestor-worship. As of all unofficial cults, we hear little of the cults of the old clans based on blood-relationship and connexion by marriage (γένη, πάτραι). But just as out of their combination first the village communities and then the fully organized Greek Polis grew up, so, too, the religious cults which were paid to the ancestors of these unions of kinsfolk set a pattern for the manifold social groups out of which the developed state was built up.[48]
§ 6
The “clans” that we meet with at Athens and in other Greek states are, as a rule, groups for which a demonstrable common kinship is no longer a condition of membership. The majority of such politically recognized, self-contained clans assemble together for the common worship of particular gods but many also honour a Hero as well, who generally in such cases gives his name to the clan. Thus, the Eteoboutadai at Athens paid honour to Boutes, the Alkmaionidai to Alkmaion, the Bouzygai to Bouzyges, in Sparta and Argos Talthybios was worshipped by the Talthybiadai, etc. And in these cases, as the name of the clan itself shows, the Hero of their common worship was regarded as the ancestor of the clan.[49] Further, this ancestor-worship and the name derived from a common, even if fictitious, ancestor, distinguished the clans from the cult-associations of a different origin which since the time of Kleisthenes had been put on a footing of legal equality with the clans in the phratries. The members of these associations (Orgeones) lacked a common name, the existence of which, therefore, indicated in the case of the members of a clan a closer bond of union than mere membership of a religious association which had been chosen at will, and was not decided by the fact of birth.
Everywhere these clans kept up the outward formalities of ancestor-worship; and the formality must once have had meaning. However the publicly recognized clans may have developed their own special characteristics, in their origin, at least, they must go back (like the Roman gentes) to associations of kinsfolk developed from the family (extended through the male line) and held together by a real bond of kinship. Even the purely symbolical ancestor-worship of the later “clans”, of which hardly a single one could have shown the [125] pedigree of its descent from the reputed common ancestor, must have arisen from the real ancestor-worship of genuine groups of kinsfolk. The imitation in this case, too, points to the existence at some time of an original.