We can learn what these legends were like from a single example, which happens to have been preserved to us and which must stand for the numbers of similar stories which once must have been current. At Temesa, in Lucania, there was a Hero who went about destroying any of the inhabitants that he could lay his hand on. The Temesians, who had got as far as thinking of leaving Italy, turned in their distress to the Delphic oracle, and were told that the ghost was the spirit of a stranger who had once been stoned to death by the inhabitants of the country for the violation of a maiden.[114] A sacred precinct must be dedicated to him, and a temple built, where every year the most beautiful maiden in Temesa must be delivered up to him. The citizens of Temesa did as they were told, and the spirit left them in peace, but every year the awful sacrifice took place. To this place there came in the 77th Olympiad a famous boxer, Euthymos of Locri, returning with his crown of victory back to Italy. He heard at Temesa of the sacrifice that was about to take place, and entered the temple where he saw the chosen maiden waiting for the Hero. Pity and love filled his heart; and when the Hero arrived the victor of so many single combats dared to try conclusions with this new foe and finally threw him into the sea and rid the country of the monster. It is just as in our own fairy tale of the youth who went forth to learn how to shudder;[115] and, of course, now that the land is delivered there is a brilliant wedding and the “Knight of Good Courage” marries the beautiful maiden he has rescued. He lived on to extreme old age, and even then he did not die but was translated alive and is now himself a Hero.[116]
Such champions of the Pan-Hellenic contests, of whom [136] Euthymos was one, are the favourite figures of popular legend both in their lifetime and, after their death, as spirits. A story was told also of one of the contemporaries of Euthymos, Theagenes of Thasos, one of the most famous victors in the great games, and how after his death one of his opponents went and thrashed his statue by night till one night the statue fell on him and killed him. The Thasians then threw the murderous image into the sea, but were thereupon plagued with barrenness as a result of the Hero’s anger. This went on until, after the several times repeated command of the Delphic oracle, they fished up the statue from where it had sunk and restored it to its old position and sacrificed to it “as to a god”.[117] The remarkable thing about this story is the way in which the crude and primitive notion, common to almost all image-worshipping peoples, that the strength of a “spirit” resides in his effigy, is here more than usually striking and applied to the belief in Heroes. It lies at the bottom of many stories of the revenge of dumb statues against those who offend them.[118] The statue of Theagenes, indeed, cured fevers even in later ages,[119] as did the statue of another famous boxer, Polydamas of Skotoussa.[120] An Achæan Olympic victor, Oibotas of Dyme, had for centuries prevented the Achæans from winning in any contest by a curse.[121] When he had been appeased the Achæans, on starting out to take part in a contest at Olympia, used to do sacrifice to his statue.[122]
§ 12
But the belief in Heroes rose to still greater heights. Not merely in peaceful athletic contests, but in real need, in struggles when they were fighting to defend the highest possessions of all—the freedom and safety of their country—the Heroes were found on the side of the Greeks. Nowhere do we see more plainly how real and vivid was the faith of contemporary Greece in the Heroes than in the stories told of the appeals then made to them and of their participation in the Persian wars. At Marathon there were many who saw an apparition of Theseus in full armour fighting in the front of the battle against the barbarians.[123] In the painting of Panainos (the brother of Pheidias) in the Stoa Poikile at Athens there was shown among the fighters at Marathon a certain Hero, Echetlos, of whose appearance at the battle a peculiar story was told.[124] In the war against Xerxes Delphi was preserved by two of the local Heroes of the land against a Persian raid.[125] In the morning before the battle of Salamis the Greeks prayed to the gods, but they called directly [137] upon the Heroes to give them practical help: Aias and Telamon were summoned from Salamis, and a ship was sent to fetch Aiakos and the other Aiakidai from Aegina.[126] So little were these Hero spirits mere symbols or great names to the Greeks. Their actual physical participation in the decisive hour was confidently expected. And, indeed, they came and helped:[127] after the battle had been won a trireme out of the spoil was dedicated to the Hero Aias as well as to the gods as a thankoffering.[128] A Salaminian local Hero, Kychreus, had also come to the help of the Greeks, as a snake, in which form the Heroes, like the earth spirits, frequently appeared.[129] After the battle everyone was fully persuaded that they owed their victory to the gods and Heroes.[130] As Xenophon puts it, it was the Heroes and their aid which “made Greece unconquerable” in the fight against the barbarians.[131] Less frequently we hear of the active participation of national Heroes in the fights of one Greek state against another.[132]
Even in the petty details of the life of individuals the Heroes played their part, helping or hindering, as once in mythical times the gods had done. Everyone will be reminded of well-known legends of the gods, and will at the same time be able to measure the difference between the sublime and the merely idyllic, in reading Herodotos’ naive and circumstantial tale of how Helen once appeared in person to a nurse at Therapne. The nurse was praying at Helen’s grave for her ill-favoured foster-child, when the Heroine appeared to her and with a touch of her hand made the child the most beautiful maiden in Sparta.[133] So, too, we read how the Hero Astrabakos, in the likeness of Ariston, king of Sparta, visited in secret the king’s wife and made her the mother of Demaratos.[134] The heroön of this Astrabakos was situated by the door of Ariston’s house,[135] and it was a frequent custom thus to place a Hero’s shrine before the house-door where he might give a special protection to his neighbour.[136]
In all the circumstances of human life, in happiness or in need, for individuals or the city, the Heroes are thus very near to men. It is now often said of the Hero worshipped by a city (just as it was said of the city’s gods) that he rules it, is its possessor, or is lord over it;[137] he is its true guardian and protector. It may, indeed, have been the case in many cities, as it was said to be in some, that the belief in the city-Hero was more deeply held there than the belief in the gods worshipped by all Greece in common.[138] The relation of man to the Heroes is closer than it is to the majestic gods above: [138] the faith in Heroes gave a different and a more familiar bond of union between men and the spirit-world above them. The worship of Heroes began as an ancestor-cult and an ancestor-cult it remained in essence, but it had now been widened to a cult of certain greater human souls who had raised themselves above their fellows by peculiar powers exercised in many, and by no means predominantly moral, directions. Many of them were of later ages or even of the quite recent past, and in this lies the peculiar importance of their cult. They show that the company of the spirits is not fixed and made up; individual mortals are still continually being raised to that higher circle after the completion of their earthly life. Death does not end all conscious existence nor does the gloom of Hades swallow up all life.
But for that reason the cult of Heroes cannot be the origin of the belief in an immortality belonging to all human souls by their very nature. Nor can this ever have been its effect. In the beginning, among the hosts that streamed down to Hades, the special individuals who had another fate were a small class apart and favoured above all others—and so it still remained. Though the numbers of the heroic figures might be increased enormously, yet every individual case of the transition of a human soul into the ranks of the Heroes was a fresh and special miracle. Such exceptional cases, however frequently repeated, could never produce a general rule applying without distinction to all men alike.
The belief in Heroes in its gradual evolution and extension unquestionably led far away from the course taken by the Homeric belief in the things after death. In fact, it pointed in the opposite direction. But with the belief in Heroes men had not yet arrived at the belief in an immortality proper to the human soul by virtue of its own nature, nor yet (which would be something different again) was a general cult of souls thereby founded. In order that such beliefs might arise after, but not out of, the cult of Heroes, and maintain themselves side by side with an undiminished cult of Heroes, a movement was first necessary that had its origin in different sources.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IV
[1] Porph., Abst. 4, 22, p. 268, 23 Nauck.