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Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. In Homeric Greek, "hero" (, ) refers to the mortal offspring of a human and a god. By the historical period, the word came to mean specifically a dead man, venerated and propitiated at his tomb or at a designated shrine, because his fame during life or his unusual manner of death gave him power to support and protect the living. A hero was more than human but less than a Greek god, and various kinds of minor supernatural figures came to be assimilated to the class of heroes; the distinction between a hero and a god was less than certain, especially in the case of Heracles, the most prominent, but atypical hero.Parker gives a concise and clear synopsis of hero.
The grand ruins and Tumulus (large burial mounds) remaining from the Bronze Age gave the pre-literate Greeks of the 10th century BC a sense of a once grand and now vanished age; they reflected this in the oral epic tradition, which would become famous by way of works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Copious renewed offerings begin to be represented, after a hiatus, at sites like Lefkandi,Carla Maria Antonaccio, An Archaeology of Ancestors: Tomb Cult and Hero Cult in Early Greece (1995) and "Lefkandi and Homer", in O. Anderson and M. Dickie, Homer's World: Fiction, Tradition and Reality (1995); I. Morris, "Tomb cult and the Greek Renaissance" Antiquity 62 (1988:750–61). even though the names of the grandly buried dead were hardly remembered. "Stories began to be told to individuate the persons who were now believed to be buried in these old and imposing sites", observes Robin Lane Fox. In other words, this is a clear cut example of an origin story for Heroes and what they meant to the Ancient Greeks.
Aside from the epic tradition, which featured the heroes alive and in action rather than as objects of cultus,R. K. Hack, "Homer and the cult of heroes", Transactions of the American Philological Association 60 (1929:57–74). the earliest written reference to hero-cult is attributed to Dracon, the Athenian lawgiver of the late seventh century BC, who prescribed that gods and local heroes should both be honoured according to ancestral custom. The custom, then, was already established, and there were multiple local heroes.Carla M. Antonaccio, "Contesting the Past: Hero Cult, Tomb Cult, and Epic in Early Greece" American Journal of Archaeology 98.3 (July 1994:389–410). The written sources emphasise the importance of heroes' tombs and the temenos or sanctuary, where chthonic rites appeased their spirits and induced them to continue to favour the people who looked to them as founders, of whom were related. In the hero's restricted and local scope he "retained the limited and partisan interests of his mortal life. He would help those who lived in the vicinity of his tomb or who belonged to the tribe of which he himself was the founder," observes Robert Parker,Parker 1988:250. with the reservation that Heracles, with his pan-Hellenic scope, was again the exception.
Whitley interpreted the final stage, in which hero-cult was co-opted by the city-state as a political gesture, in the archaic aristocratic tumulus surrounded by , erected by Athens to the cremated citizen-heroes of Marathon (490 BC), to whom chthonic cult was dedicated, as the offering trenches indicate.Inscriptions reveal that offerings were still being made to the heroised dead in the first century BC; the tumulus is discussed in Whitley, "The Monuments that stood before Marathon: Tomb cult and hero cult in Archaic Attica" American Journal of Archaeology 98.2 (April 1994:213–30). On the other hand, Greek heroes were distinct from the Roman Empire cult of dead emperors, because the hero was not thought of as having ascended to Olympus or become a god: he was beneath the earth, and his power purely local. For this reason hero cults were chthonic in nature, and their rituals more closely resembled those for Hecate and Persephone than those for Zeus and Apollo: in the dark hours, sacrifices that were not shared by the living.
Two exceptions to the above were Heracles and Asclepius, who might be honored as either heroes or gods, with chthonic libation or with burnt sacrifice. Heroes in cult behaved very differently from heroes in myth. They might appear indifferently as men or as snakes, and they seldom appeared unless angered. A Pythagoras saying advises not to eat food that has fallen on the floor, because "it belongs to the heroes". Heroes if ignored or left unappeased could turn malicious: in a fragmentary play by Aristophanes, a chorus of anonymous heroes describe themselves as senders of lice, fever and boils.
Some of the earliest hero and heroine cults well attested by archaeological evidence in mainland Greece include the Menelaion dedicated to Menelaus and Helen at Therapne near Sparta, a shrine at Mycenae dedicated to Agamemnon and Cassandra, another at Amyklai dedicated to Cassandra, and another in Ithaca's Polis Bay dedicated to Odysseus. These all seem to date to the 8th century BC.In the case of the shrine to Odysseus, this is based on a single graffito from the Hellenistic period. The cult of Pelops at Olympia dates from the Archaic period.
Penelope became a moral heroine for later generations, the embodiment of goodness and chastity, to be contrasted with the faithless, murdering Clytaemnestra, Agamemnon's wife; but 'hero' has no feminine gender in the age of heroes.Finley, The World of Odysseus (1954; rev. ed. 1978), pp. 32ff.
Where local cult venerated figures such as the sacrificial virgin Iphigeneia, an archaic local has been reduced to a mortal figure of legend. Other isolated female figures represented priestess-initiators of a local cult. Iconographic and epigraphal evidence marshalled by Larson combine to depict heroines as similar in kind to heroes, but in androcentric Greek culture,"Heroine cults fit well into our modern view of ancient Greek culture as firmly androcentric, though not as androcentric as some would have had us believe" (Larson 1995:144). typically of lesser stature. This is consistent with the role that women played in not only Ancient Greece, but the ancient world as a whole — more in the shadows and service-oriented than focused on personal development and relaxation.
Most commonly in Ancient Greece, these mounds could have had any 1 of 3 main components, composed in a staircase-like format, within the mound. This staircase like structure may have 1 or 2 steps that would help carry out various ceremonial functions as well as serve as storing places for valuable items. The first step would be used for cremation and the ashes piled in after that while the second step would hold any votives or items of sentimental value. Then the whole thing would be covered by a giant mound. In the case of the Athenian monument they also surrounded it with tall, skinny stone slabs that may read an honoring message or be dedicated to any one 'hero'.
Another way in which the Cults were used was for political propaganda and manipulation. Sparta's propping up of many hero cults was out of recognition of the fact that their population reacted to them in such a way that would allow them to use the hero shrines as political propaganda. For example, Lewis Farnell believed that, because of the fact hero cults are often not found in a hero's home territory, there is a greater chance that the cults were widespread and common among most Greeks. Whereas other cults may be ancestral dating back to even the 8th century.
Only Laconia has evidence of assigning its shrines to specific heroes meaning that the rest of the shrines were not to any one specific hero but allowed for worship to a hero via one shrine. Unlike the Roman beliefs it was thought that the Heroes did not ascend to the skies and be with the gods of Olympus, but rather they would go down into and become one with the earth. This impacted not only how the Greeks treated the Heroes, but thought about them in a political sense. They were respected and worshiped, but could even at times turn vicious if ignored and be the supposed cause of diseases or mishaps.
Hero cults could also be of the utmost political importance beyond propaganda too. When Cleisthenes divided the Athenians into new for voting, he consulted Delphi on what heroes he should name each division after. According to Herodotus, the attributed their conquest of Arcadia to their theft of the bones of Orestes from the Arcadian town of Tegea. Heroes in myth often had close but conflicted relationships with the gods. Thus, Heracles's name means "the glory of Hera", even though he was tormented all his life by the queen of the gods. This was even truer in their cult appearances. Perhaps the most striking example is the Athenian king Erechtheus, whom Poseidon killed for choosing Athena over him as the city's patron god. When the Athenians worshiped Erechtheus on the Acropolis, they invoked him as Poseidon Erechtheus.
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