Heroes and heroines

The Greeks sacrificed and prayed to a class of supernatural beings they called the heroes, of which the heroes in Homeric epic formed only a subset. No taxonomy of the heroes and heroines can be completely satisfying because they are a large and varied group, sometimes resembling the medieval saints with respect to the way their relics are manipulated, other times the restless and vengeful dead in their malicious and ghostlike activities, and yet other times functioning as tutelary deities who help shape the identity of the polis and protect its lands. The Greeks looked back with intense interest on their own heroic past, and believed that the first generations of men had possessed godlike powers and stature. Hesiod (Op. 123, 141) speaks of early races that died out, yet became “pure ones dwelling on the earth, kindly ones, guardians of mortals” and “blessed ones under the earth.” Most of the epic heroes died (Op. 166-73), yet a privileged few were brought to the Islands of the Blessed to live an existence like that of the gods. Homer and Hesiod are concerned with Panhellenic, shared traditions about the heroes, so they have little to say about heroic cult, which is a varied phenomenon, distinctive to each place.

Since we must generalize about the worship of heroes and heroines, we can say that their cult places were usually their purported tombs, or ancient structures they supposedly once inhabited. Because they were imagined as dwellers below the earth and were therefore related to the common dead and the underworld gods, they occasionally received sacrifices with what are considered “chthonian” features: a nocturnal setting, a black victim, special blood rituals, and/or the burning of the carcass whole with no attendant feasting. While this grim, renunciatory form of sacrifice “as to a hero” was opposed in the minds of many Greeks to the standard sacrifice “as to a god,” the archaeological and epigraphic evidence shows that people were rarely willing to expend resources so lavishly. The prevailing mode of sacrifice for heroes and heroines seems to have been the slaughter of the animal followed by a ritual meal. In these cases the status of the recipient as a hero, hence one of the dead, might be indicated through the blood rituals mentioned above (allowing it to flow on the ground, or pouring into the tomb), the burning of

A portion of meat (as opposed to the whole animal), or the requirement that all the meat be eaten on the spot, and not removed from the sanctuary. There was much local variation in sacrifices for the heroes, but the same was true for the gods. In many cases, heroes and heroines were simply “little gods,” concerned for the most part with the daily comings and goings in their own neighborhoods. As such, they might be called simply “the hero at the salt-marsh” or “the heroines at the gate.” The epigraphic record gives us numerous examples of such minor heroes, whose existence we would not otherwise have suspected.