Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

“Meting Out” 1 the Bones of
Heroes in Ancient Greece
Amanda Earl
Those who won the worship of the ancient Greeks can be as enigmatic and difficult
to study as the events of Greek history itself. There is much debate surrounding
the dates and circumstances of the establishment of ancestor and hero
cults and the transferal of heroic bones in ancient Greece. Some scholars have
argued that the claim to or appropriation of a mythological or epic hero by a
region in the seventh or sixth century B.C.E. served primarily geopolitical or
propagandistic purposes. Others have challenged this analysis by pointing out
the “internal” circumstances and collective identity of the city-state at the time
of the appropriation (De Polignac, 1995). Despite this debate, the involvement
of heroes of various types in the telling of history aids one’s understanding of
the emergence of the archaic Greek city-state if viewed from a more
comprehensive viewpoint that takes into account both the political and
psychological changes of the Greeks during the 6 th century B.C.E. By examining
the context of heroic bone transferals in Herodotus and Plutarch, it can be
surmised that such “cult warfare” in places like Sikyon, Sparta, and Athens
occurred as city-states tried to cope with the changing power dynamics of this
period. By “meting out” a particular currency of power, namely the bones of
heroes, powerful city-states were able to justify themselves both politically and
religiously.
Based on archaeological evidence Carla Antonaccio has concluded that
contrary to the bias Homeric epic spreads, early cults were not necessarily hero
based but rather tomb based, more kinship or family-oriented, and shorter in
duration (49). This distinction provides a new perspective on the establishment
of hero-cult because it points to the development of archaic Greek society as a
whole. Whereas in the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age “tomb cult” and
certain burial practices such as tomb reuse represented the reverence of the
family for their own dead individual or ancestor, with the emergence of the citystate
and political consolidation in archaic Greece, respect for individual
families produced tension and gave way to a need for a more communal form of
worship (Antonaccio, 1993: 49-50; De Polignac, 1995: 132-133).
Heroes are different from leaders of a community, though often founders
of a city (archegetai) and extremely popular political figures are compared or
1 Hdt. (1.67, 35).
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