THE RISE OF THE HERO CULT AND THE NEW SIMONIDES
The publication of the new Simonides has once again raised the problem of heroization at Plataea.1 In the discussions of the text the terms ‘heroization’ and ‘hero cult’ are often employed rather loosely, as they usually are in literary and archaeological discussions of hero cult in general. It seems therefore useful to look in detail at the problem as to when we can speak, sensu stricto, of ‘hero cult’. Having considered this problem, we will focus on the new Simonides in order to see whether it is justified to speak of heroization in this particular case.
1. The rise of the hero cult As a point of departure for my investigation into the origin of the hero cult, I have chosen the discussions in the handbooks of Nilsson and Burkert, and the recent lemma ‘Heroen’ in Der Neue Pauly. The first is, basically, the product of the thinking of the first half of the twentieth century,2 the second exemplifies the turn towards structuralism and functionalism of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the third may be expected to reflect the current position. Nilsson (1874-1967) published the first edition of his still useful handbook
1 This is the annotated version of a lecture given in Paris on May 17, 2006. A shorter version was part of my lecture ‘Divinisation, Heroization and the Afterlife: Three Snapshots’ at the Second Biennial Graduate Conference, Harvard, Classics Department, 17 April 2004. For information and comments I thank the audiences, Annemarie Ambühl, Claude Calame, Bob Fowler, Rudolf Kassel, Robert Parker and François de Polignac. 2 For the late nineteenth century we now have the splendid analysis of Jacob Burckhardt’s ‘Der griechische Heroencultus’ in Jacob Burckhardt Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Band 20: Griechische Culturgeschichte. Band II (Munich and Basel, 2005) 207-52.