In the same way the larger groups into which the Athenian state since the time of Kleisthenes was divided were unable to dispense with the practice of association for the cult of a commonly worshipped Hero. The Heroes of the newly organized phylai[50] had their temple, land, priests, statues, and regular cult; and so also had the Heroes of the smaller purely local divisions, the demes. Here, too, the fiction of ancestor-worship was kept up; the names of the phylai, always patronymic in form, represent the members of each phyle as the descendants of the Hero Eponymos or Archegetes of the phyle.[51] The demes also in many cases have patronymic titles which for the most part are also known to us as the names of aristocratic families.[52] It is evident that in such demes the members of individual aristocratic families had settled down together or near each other. The Archegetes, whether real or fictitious, of the family must then have been regarded as the Archegetes of the deme. We thus see how the cult of a family ancestor, taken over by a wider group of worshippers, might be preserved and extended—little as the cult might benefit in sincerity by such political enlargement.
The cult of Heroes everywhere has the same features as the cult of ancestors; at least, the more influential Heroes, those worshipped by the greater communities, were everywhere regarded as the forefathers and progenitors of the groups of countryfolk, citizens, or kinsmen who honoured them. The fact that the persons of these prehistoric Heroes owed their existence almost without exception solely to poetry or fancy allows us to conclude that at the time when ancestor-worship had its re-birth in Hero-worship, the memory of the real Archegetai of the country, the ancestors of the ruling families and clans, together with their cult, had fallen into oblivion. A great or illustrious name was introduced where the real name was no longer known. More often, even when the real forefather of the clan was still well known, the name of a great man of the primeval past was placed at the head of the list in order to throw the origin of the family as far back into the past as possible and connect it the more closely with a divine source.[53] Men thus came to worship a phantom, often a mere symbol, of an ancestor. But they held fast to the imitation of real ancestor-worship; the remains of a true cult of ancestors provided the model and were the real starting-point for the later belief and cult of Heroes. [126]
§ 7
We can no longer follow in detail the process of development and extension which the idea of the Hero underwent. The accounts which we possess show us the fully developed product, not the steps which led up to this result. We first get an idea of the number of Hero-cults existing in Greece during the greatest period of its history from the enormous number of graves or cults of Heroes mentioned by Pausanias in the account of his travels in the age of the Antonines over the most important countries of the Greece that was now fast falling into decay. Nearly all the legendary figures celebrated in epic poetry were now worshipped as Heroes, whether in their own homes (as Achilles in Thessaly, Aias at Salamis, etc.) or in other places that either claimed to possess their graves (as the Delphians did that of Neoptolemos, the people of Sybaris that of Philoktetes, etc.) or else, through the genealogical relationship of their leading families with the Heroes, regarded themselves as closely connected with them (as, for example, the Athenians with Aias and his sons). In the colonies especially the Hero-cults, like the ingredients of the population, may have been a motley crew; thus, in Tarentum the Atreidai, the Tydidai, the Aiakidai, the Laertiadai, and especially the Agamemnonidai were worshipped in a combined Hero-cult, and Achilles also had a temple of his own.[54]
There were Heroes with famous names who may yet have owed their subsequent elevation to that position, during the times of the greatest extent of the cult, in part to their fame in ancient poetry. Side by side with these were a host of obscurer figures whose memory had been kept alive by their cult alone, which a small circle of country or city folk had paid to them from primitive times. These are the real “national Heroes”, of whose worship Drakon had spoken; as true forebears and real ancestors of their country they, too, are called “Archegetai”.[55] We are told the names of the seven Archegetai of Plataea to whom Aristeides was commanded by the Delphic oracle to sacrifice before the battle of Plataea; not one of them is ever heard of again.[56] It might happen that the name of a Hero to whom worship had been paid from time immemorial might no longer be known even to the dwellers near his grave. In the market at Elis there stood a little temple whose roof was supported on wooden pillars; men knew that this was the chapel belonging to a grave, but no one could give the name of the Hero buried there.[57] In the market at Herakleia on the Black Sea was a monument of a Hero [127] overshadowed by wild olive-trees; it contained the body of that Hero whom once the Delphian oracle had bidden the founders of Herakleia to placate. The learned differed as to his name; the inhabitants of Herakleia called him simply “the local Hero”.[58] In the Hippodrome at Olympia stood a round altar at which the chariot horses used to shy. It was disputed what Hero lay buried there, but the people called him, after the effect he had on the horses, simply Taraxippos.[59] In the same way many Heroes, instead of being called by their real names, were more often referred to by adjectives which recalled their nature or their power or some external detail of their appearance.[60] At Athens there was a Hero Physician, a Hero General, and a Hero Garland-bearer.[61] Many a Hero may have been known to the neighbourhood which worshipped him simply as “the Hero”.[62] In such cases it was entirely due to the grave and the cult attached to the grave that the Hero’s memory had been preserved at all. There might, indeed, be stories current as to his doings and nature as a “spirit”, but what it was that had marked him out in his lifetime and caused his elevation to a Hero was totally forgotten. Undoubtedly these are precisely the oldest Hero-cults. In the instances quoted from Elis, Herakleia and Olympia, first one and then another of the famous champions of antiquity were supposed to be buried under that nameless gravestone. But, often enough, the doubt was suppressed, and by an arbitrary and successful imposition some famous name out of the heroic legend may have been substituted as occupant of such ownerless or unclaimed grave sanctuaries.
§ 8
As a rule there was no difficulty in securing great or famous names when it was necessary to find a patron-Hero for the city. In particular the founder of the city and its regular worship of the gods, and the whole divine circle which hedged round the life of the citizens, was regularly worshipped with high honour as Hero Archegetes.[63] Naturally, they were mostly mythical or even arbitrarily invented figures to whom the greater or lesser cities of Greece, as well as their offshoots in foreign lands, did honour as their “Founder”.
But from the times when colonies were frequently dispatched and laid out in accordance with a carefully thought-out plan, under the leadership of a single person (generally named by an oracle) who was given plenipotentiary powers,[64] this real Oikistes was himself usually promoted after his death to the rank of Hero. Pindar speaks of the sacred grave of the [128] Hero-founder of Kyrene in the marketplace of the city;[65] the inhabitants of the Thracian Chersonnese made sacrifices to Miltiades the son of Kypselos as their Oikistes, “as the custom is,” and held games annually in his honour;[66] at Katana, in Sicily, Hieron of Syracuse was buried, and was worshipped with the honours of a Hero as the Founder of the city.[67] At Abdera the Teians on the occasion of the second founding of the city restored to his position of Hero its original founder Timesios.[68] On the other hand, the original and real Oikistes of a colony might be deprived of his worship if the inhabitants quarrelled with the mother country, and another “Founder” chosen after the event and given the highest honours of a Hero in his place. This was what happened in the year 422 with Hagnon and Brasidas in Amphipolis.[69]
In these cases Hero-making leaves the sacred mists of antiquity and enters the light of the contemporary world: faith and cult become profaned by political motives. The name of Hero, once applied only to the glorified figures of the far distant past, now that such Heroizing of the recent dead was possible, must have begun to have the more general meaning of one who has come to enjoy a higher nature and enlarged capacities after his death. In fact, any kind of prominence during a man’s lifetime seems at last to have given him a virtual claim to heroic honours after his death. As Heroes are now regarded, great kings such as Gelon of Syracuse, law-givers such as Lykourgos of Sparta,[70] and even representatives of poetic genius from Homer down to Aeschylus and Sophokles,[71] no less than the most famous victors in the contests of bodily skill and strength. One of the Olympic victors, Philippos of Kroton, was reputed to be the most beautiful man in Greece of his time. Over his grave the people of Egesta, so Herodotos (v, 47) tells us, erected a Hero’s temple and paid honour to him with sacrifice as to a Hero merely on account of his great personal beauty.
Still, religious or superstitious motives were not always absent. They were particularly to the fore in the numerous cases where the extent and importance of the world of Heroes were added to on the recommendation of the Delphic oracle. Ever since the Delphic priesthood had risen from its obscure beginnings to a recognized position as the supreme authority in all questions of spiritual right, the opinion of the oracle had been sought on all occurrences that seemed to have any connexion with the unseen world. Especially in the case of prolonged drought or infertility of the soil, or when pestilential sicknesses had attacked a part of the country, was the oracle [129] requested to state the origin of the misfortune. In many cases the answer of the oracle would be that the origin of the evil lay in the anger of a Hero who was to be placated by sacrifice and the foundation of a permanent worship; or it would command that the plague should be averted by the recovery of the bones of a Hero from a foreign land, which should then be preserved at home and be the object of an official cult.[72] Innumerable cults had their origin in this way, nor do the examples all belong to a half-legendary past. When pestilence and dearth broke out in the island of Cyprus after the death of Kimon, the oracle bade the inhabitants of Kition “not to slight” Kimon, but to regard him as a “higher” being, i.e. do him honour as a Hero.[73] So, too, when some one possessed by special religious scruples inquired the cause of a strange vision that he had had, or of the remarkable appearance of the body of one lately dead,[74] the oracle would often trace the matter to the action of a Hero who must forthwith be given an official cult. When a serious undertaking lay before a state, whether it was the invasion of a foreign land or a decisive battle in war, the oracle would bid the inquirers first placate the Heroes of the country that was to be attacked or where the battle was to be fought.[75] Sometimes the oracle of its own accord, without being applied to, commanded the honours of a Hero to be paid to a dead man.[76]