Note 69.1 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

Hero-cult.—This aspect of the public religion is further emphasised by the prevailing custom of hero-worship which appears to have gathered strength in this second period. The hero in the technical sense was one whose tomb was honoured with semi-divine rites and who was regarded either as a glorious man of the past or as the mortal ancestor of the State or the tribe or the clan. The first clear evidence of this in literature is in the poem of Arktinos of Miletos called the ‘Aithiopis,’ that may belong to the end of the eighth century, in which the apotheosis of Achilles was described. But there is, as has been said, strong reason for believing that the practice of ‘heroising’ the dead descended from the pre-Homeric age. Nevertheless, of the multitude of hero and ancestor cults recorded in ancient Hellas, the greater number are probably post-Homeric. We find the Delphic oracle giving vigorous encouragement to the institution of them, and in the sixth century cities begin to negotiate and dispute about the possession of the relics of heroes. Some of these in the older cults may have been actual living men, dimly remembered, some were fictitious ancestors, like Arkas and Lakedaimon, some may have been faded deities, such as were Eubouleus at Eleusis and Trophonios at Lebadeia. But all were imagined by the worshipper to have been once men or women living upon the earth. This, then, becomes a fact of importance for the religious thought of the world, for it engenders, or at least encourages, the belief that human beings might through exceptional merit be exalted after death to a condition of blessed immortality, not as mere spirits, but as beings with glorified body and soul. Furthermore, certain ancient heroes, long endeared to the people as the primeval parent or the war-leader of their forefathers, become raised to the position of the high God and merged in his being; Erechtheus shares the altar and even the title of Poseidon and Zeus, Aipytos of Arcadia becomes Hermes, Agamemnon in Laconia at last is fused with Zeus.69.1