heroes

heroes (Gk. hērōēs)In archaic and classical Greece the Greeks thought that in times past there was living in Greece a race of men and women who were bigger, stronger, braver, and more beautiful than the men and women of their own day. These were heroes and heroines, the offspring or descendants of unions between gods and mortals, but still essentially human. The age in which they lived, the Heroic age, was quite short, embracing no more than two or three generations, and not wholly remote; it was the period of the Theban wars (see SEVEN AGAINST THEBES) and the siege of Troy, the latter dated to the early twelfth century BC by the Greeks, who believed both events to be historical. The exploits of the heroes at Thebes and Troy was the stuff of epic poetry, often called in consequence ‘heroic’ poetry. The fact that Greek myths are dominated by stories about them rather than about gods makes them different from the myths of other cultures and gives them their human scale and interest. The close association of heroes and gods and the latters' interventions in the heroes' lives often give a moral significance to heroic myths and to the characters of the heroes. From the eighth century BC onwards, when the Homeric epics became widely popular (see HOMER), ancient burial sites came to be thought of as the graves of Homer's heroes, and, since they had been superhumanly powerful, sacrifices and rites were performed by the graves in the hope that in return for cult the heroes would actively defend their own locality, rising from the dead when the need arose. Only Heracles, exceptional in this as in other respects, was both hero and god, his apotheosis following upon his death. Any community would be glad to have its own hero; aristocratic clans often claimed descent from one. The poet Hesiod, in his myth of the five ages of humankind (see WORKS AND DAYS and GOLDEN AGE), described the heroes as constituting the glorious race that existed before this present sadly degenerate age of iron. In practice, however, not all so-called heroes belonged to the heroic age or were the offspring of gods: ordinary men who were outstanding in some way were sometimes paid heroic honours after death as being the possessors of power that might be channelled to good use: the Spartan general Brasidas was so honoured after his death in battle in 422 BC.