Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

310 Daimon and Hero [ch.
by year at the Anthesteria reemerge themselves and send or rather
bring back as flowers and fruit the buried seed. A writer in the
Hippocratic Corpus 1 tells us, if any one saw the dead in a dream
dressed in white and giving something, it was a good omen, for
'from the dead come food and increase and seeds'
And as Aristophanes 2 has it
:
When a man dies, we all begin to say
The sainted one has 'passed away,' has 'fallen asleep,'
Blessed therein that he is vexed no more
Yes, and with holy offerings we sacrifice
To them as to the gods—and pour libations,
Bidding them send good things up from below.
We have next to establish a further step in our argument.
The 'hero' takes on not only the form and general function of
the daimon but also his actual life-history as expressed and
represented in his ritual. This further step is, as will presently be
seen, for the understanding of the origin of the drama of paramount
importance. We shall best understand its significance by
taking a single concrete case that occurs in the mythology and
cultus of the quasi-historical hero, Theseus. Theseus is an
example to us specially instructive because his cult took on
elements from that of Dionysos. He too not only absorbed the
functions of an Agathos Daimon but like Pegasos, like Ikarios,
like the nameless hero in Fig. 92 'received' the god.
Theseus as Hero-daimon.
To pass from Cecrops or even Erichthonios to Theseus is to
breathe another air. Cecrops is the eponymous hero of the
Cecropidae, the Basileus, the imagined head of a Gens 3 ,
;
later mis-
understood as a constitutional monarch. He is also a being on
whom as medicine-king the fertility of people and crops depended,
a snake-daimon. Theseus lays no claim to be autochthonous.
1 De Somn. n. p. 14 ...and yap tu>v airodavbvTuv ai rpo