Hero-cult
I think I am going to leave it here for the seminars on this module, as the last one was simply a revision session ahead of the exam – you can access the passages we used on the Greek Mythology page.
This was quite a difficult topic for students to get their heads round. Quite simply, our conception of ‘hero’ is rather different from that of the ancient Greeks. A hero, in Greek thought, was an individual who lived in the pre-historical ‘heroic’ age – up till the end of the Trojan War. To us, ‘hero’ implies Superman, or a war-veteran, or a fireman who saves kittens from a burning building (or even some depictions of Heracles) – someone who has done something special, above and beyond the call of duty, something ‘heroic’.
It was difficult then, to reconcile this notion with the heroes under question: Heracles, Oedipus, and Neoptolemus. All were figures of the heroic age, all were worshipped in cult, but all were very ambivalent characters. Heracles is a particularly good (or bad) example – he is a uniquely transgressive figure, and as such is worshipped as both god and hero. Yet there seems to be no mention of a heroon for him – plenty of shrines, but no real centre of ‘hero’ cult. Oedipus is similarly transgressive, and his cult centre is at Athens, where he came, a suffering old man, at the end of his life. Neoptolemus is most famous for his bad behaviour during the Trojan War – throwing Astyanax off the walls, murdering Priam, installing Andromache as his concubine and parading her in front of his wife…there is even ambiguity as to his death; whether he went to Delphi to challenge Apollo or to propitiate him.
My students were puzzled by the question ‘why are these figures worshipped?’ They were not ‘good guys’, but were intrinsically flawed individuals. And so a lot of ensuing discussion focused on the role of heroes in Greek literature, society and religion; trying to strip away our 21st-century cultural colouring and address the issue of what it means to be a ‘hero’ in the ancient Greek world.
