Philip HOLT What is a
Hero Cult? Definitions and Borderlines
What distinguishes hero cult from more modest forms of
tendance or worship of the dead? The term is easy to
define in principle, and it is used freely, but applying
it in particular cases becomes troublesome. This paper
will discuss why it is hard to draw the line, offer some
criteria for where to draw it, and consider how (and
indeed, whether) the criteria work in some borderline
instances. I am concerned here with the lower boundary of
hero cult, the distinction between it and cult of
ordinary dead; the upper boundary&emdash;the difference
between heroes and gods&emdash;is not my present concern.
Hero cult is hard to delimit because Greeks conceived of
all dead as active to some extent, worthy of honor at
their graves long after their funerals and potentially
able to lurk, hover, and cause trouble as ghosts. Hero
cult is a heightened form of tendance of the dead, and
any dead Greek was a hero in miniature. We can
distinguish hero cult from cult of the dead, ancestor
worship, and so on only as we distinguish bands on a
spectrum: there are visible differences between colors,
but they blur together at the boundaries, and anyway they
are all manifestations of the same form of energy. The
differences are of degree, not of kind.
I propose speaking of a thing as a hero cult if it meets
two criteria, previously adumbrated but not
systematically applied. They are reasonably clear and
often answerable on available ancient evidence. First,
the scope of the worshiping community: does it extend
beyond close kin? Second, duration: does cult continue
for more than a century or so, past the three generations
over which families commonly honored ordinary dead?
I also discuss how these criteria work on some marginal
cases of hero cult such as burial in prominent places,
memorial endowments, the use of "hero" on tombstones for
ordinary dead, and the elaborate public funerals of
Spartan kings. Some pass, some fail, some gray areas
remain, and it will help if we keep in mind that Greeks
sometimes speak of people as heroes without implying that
they received hero cult.
Abstracts
Index