Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

“Meting Out” the Bones of Heroes in Ancient Greece 57
three traditionally Dorian tribes and added a new “leader” tribe, the Archelaoi,
in which he placed himself. Thus his actions too had weakened the aristocracy
and replaced it with a more state-oriented tyranny. But his were more mocking
than genuine, more selfish than revolutionary.
The transferal of heroic bones involved in Kleisthenes of Sikyon’s rise to
power is also portrayed by Herodotus in a way that serves to underscore and
praise the eventual rise of isonomia in Athens (De Polignac, 1995: 147; Boedeker,
1993: 172). Because Argos was a rival of Sikyon in the time of Kleisthenes’
tyranny, the tyrant not only banned from the city Homeric rhapsodes who tended
to glorify Argos, but he also sought to drive out the Argive hero Adrastos from
Sikyon and replace him with a borrowed hero, Melanippus of Thebes. It does
not matter much that at the time Argos was promoting its Achaean history. The
appropriation of a new hero was needed by Kleisthenes anyway, not only to
spite the Argives, but also as affirmation for his state as a whole that the change
he was bringing about was legitimate. This endeavor intended to serve two purposes:
both to claim supremacy over Argos (rather than to distinguish Sikyon
from Argos) and to further unify the citizenry under a new leader. But it was not
one-sided, points out De Polginac, since recent discoveries in the agora of Argos
point to a “heroon of the Seven against Thebes’” erected at around the same
time as the activities of Kleisthenes. Thus at this time “cult warfare” was developing
not simply as a conniving maneuver to be used by the arrogant tyrant, but
as a legitimate currency through which to negotiate (or fight over) power relations.
Yet the larger picture is the more important one: whatever Kleisthenes’
personal or political motives, he had to “contrive” to secure the bones of a new
hero because the endeavor was not completely legitimate according to the dominant
religious authority at the time, the oracle at Delphi, and therefore
according to the people (Herodotus.I.67). The oracle actually opposes the
tyrant’s intention in Herodotus, and indeed a cult is never really established for
Melanippus, nor do Kleisthenes’ new tribes endure long after his death. As
McCauley states: “Negative responses are given, as a rule, to impious requests”
(1999: 92). The historian ends the account of Sikyon by adding that the
“Sikyonians” themselves (and not a specific leader) kept the names of the tribes
for sixty years after the tyrant’s death and then renamed them after their old
hero, Adrastus. (Herodotus.I.68) Clearly the new hero was never fully accepted
into the society; the people never changed their identification from Adrastus to
Melanippus and thus Kleisthenes’ actions were never fully justified. This
“heroic manipulation” ultimately failed, points out Herodotus, and a similar
endeavor by a specific leader does not succeed until Kleisthenes’ grandson at the
end of the same century establishes “isonomia” and his city-state eventually
becomes worthy in the eyes of the oracle and of Herodotus of a “democratic”
hero (Theseus) and eventually an empire.
The instance of the transferal of Orestes’ bones in Herodotus is most interesting
when viewed, as Deborah Boedeker suggests it should be, as a means of