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

326 Daimon and Hero [ch.
Heracleidae 1 who were thus nurtured by the Athenians, but
the greater number agree with the above.'
Theseus, the individual hero, for reasons political now lost to
us, won and survived, though when we read the shifts to which
Plutarch is put to ' do him honour ' we feel his triumph is a sorry
one. But honest Plutarch' 2 knew and cannot conceal that the
rites were really in the hands not of an individual hero, but a
group, a gens, the Phytalidae, the ' Plant-Men.' Very fitly did
such a group hold presidency over harvest ceremonies : their
function was to promote the fertility of all growths fit for human
food. The group of the Phytalidae project of course an eponymous
hero Phytalos, Plant Man. Phytalos received Demeter into his
house, as Ikarios ' received ' Dionysos ; she gave him for guerdon
the gift of the fig-tree 3 . Translated into the language of fact,
this means that the group of the Plant-Men at one time or
another began cultivating the fig, a tree which seems long to
have preceded in Greece the culture of the vine.
Pausanias 4 saw—and the sight is for us instructive—the
sepulchre of Phytalos, and on it was an inscription
Here the lordly hero Phytalos once received the august
Demeter, when she first revealed the autumnal fruit
Which the race of mortals names the sacred fig ;
Since when the race of Phytalos hath received honours that wax not old.
Phytalos is lord (aval;) and hero (r/pws), and he has a tomb
(t«(£o9), but does even the wildest Euhemerist dream that he ever
existed ? The writer of the epitaph knew that he was the merest
eponym ; it is the race (yevos) of Phytalos, not the individual hero,
that has deathless honours.
The climax of a preposterous aetiology is reached by Plutarch 5
in commenting on the Phytalidae. He knows of them and their
local presidency; knows of their tribal contribution to the cere-
monial house by house feast which Theseus took to himself; and
' The Phytalidae superintended the sacrifice,
what does he say ?
Theseus having handed it over to them in return for their Jiosjntality.'
Very handsome of him, for it was the gens of the Phytalidae who
1 For Herakles as arch-hero see infra, p. 36i. - Op. tit. xxiii. sub Jin.
3 Paus. i. 37. 2.
4
i. 37. 2, trans. Frazer.
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