Hero

HERO. - From the Greek ἥρως "lord, prince," of uncertain etymology, it denotes, in general, one who raises himself above others by strength, power and nobility. The figure of the hero is found in the mythology and cult of all peoples because it answers the need to give concrete form in a human being, sublimated into the heaven of divinity, to the history and character of the human group that fashioned him.

In general the hero is a man, author of glorious and difficult deeds for the benefit of his group, deeds that after death procured for him the veneration that surrounds his tomb, which became a place of cult and a seat of oracles. That he is an originally human being is demonstrated by the fact that the kind of cult paid to the hero is that proper to the dead and to the infernal divinities; that is: sacrifice of an expiatory type (ἐναγνωμός), performed at night, not upon an altar but upon a low mound of earth (ἐσχήρα) similar to the domestic hearth, immolating black victims, turned with their snouts toward the ground, and burning the victim completely (holocaust). The difference from the funerary ritual consists in the diversity of purpose, which for the dead is that of sustaining their shadowy life, slaking them with the blood of the victim, while for heroes it is instead impetratory on behalf of the one who performs it. Greece is the country that most accentuated the cult of heroes, born from the faith in the survival of those great spirits who in life were benefactors of their own group. The influence that radiates from their tomb is above all of two kinds: either healing (Asclepius, Alcene, Jatro) or mantic (Calchas, Tiresias, Glaucus, Amphiaraus, Trophonius). The Delphic sanctuary was the legislator of the cult of heroes, inasmuch as it fell to it to regulate the diffusion of colonies, fixing the cult to be paid to the founder hero (οἰκονής). At Delphi a festival dedicated to the heroes was celebrated annually, that is, to the dead of Delphi ἥρωις, Plut. Quaest. gr., 12).

Also with regard to artistic representation the hero is a divinized ancestor; he is in fact depicted with the things used in life: horse, dog, weapons, or symbolized by a serpent, which is the chthonic soul par excellence. His relics, true or fictitious, are the radiating center of his power.

The hero is therefore a man divinized after death because of his deeds: this is the ascending process of heroization, upheld by E. Rohde, U. Wilamowitz, M. Nilsson. But sometimes a descending process has also occurred: namely when certain divinities have fallen to the level of demigods or heroes because of the spread of new, more comprehensive and universal divinities, a process that occurred in parallel with the greater unification of the Greek stocks (E. Meier, H. Usener, G. De Sanctis); this is the case of Agamemnon, Menelaus, Neleus; the spread of the Homeric epic contributed greatly to this degradation.

An exception to this twofold process of heroization, ascending or descending, is the case of the myths proper to primitive populations with a totemistic social regime. These generally recognize their mythical hero in an animal (wolf, kangaroo, raven, mantis) which would have performed extraordinary deeds, guiding the clan to the place of its dwelling, establishing the tribal laws, etc. The emblem of this mythical hero adorns the entrance of the village, is reproduced on the weapons or on the bodies of the warriors; the living species that represents him is made the object of special interdictions and constitutes the center of a great festival directed to the persistence and increase of the tribe.

The cult of heroes has always been favored among human groups, because their figure is closer to men than that of the gods.

There enter into Greece, into the category of heroes, illustrious dead men, founders of colonies, political founders or restorers of cities, founders of a cultic association or of a philosophical school, etc.

With the Hellenistic age, which facilitated the rise of new cultic associations, there also arose the veneration of private heroes, until this epithet ended, as the inscriptions of the period attest, by being synonymous with "deceased."

Nicola Turchi