User:Mleahy64/Greek hero cult

== Thomas Leahy - I just want to note that halfway through the transfer of my stuff from the sandbox to wikipedia my computer crashed and I lost most of todays work. I had been working throughout the semester on this and today went in and really made it final with the footnotes and all that but then my computer opened up a ton of files and said something about an unidentified caller trying to "unlock my keychain." I am no tech wizard but that sounded suspect so I shut my laptop down and upon a restart everything was gone. I tried my best to recreate the missing half and did what I could with the citations but in all honesty I was devastated when I lost the work and I have a final at 8am tomorrow (12/14). Thankfully I got almost all of the first half of my work into the article just fine. But the second half is not what it should be. ==

I. Religion vs Hero Cult
Explain difference between the two and cite examples.

II. Nature of the Hero Cult
A. Well explained and thought out, but lacks a more substantive layer.

III. Heroes and Heroines
A. This can go. It is too deeply intertwined with the list of heroes later on and could

be incorporated more seamlessly into the narrative through other subheadings like types of hero cults or heroes politics & gods

IV. Types of Hero Cults
A. This section seems good to go. I haven’t found many types of Hero Cults that

differ from the ones listed so this seems like a good place that I will either add to

as I continue my research further into this idea or leave alone all together. In other

words, this section has been clearly curated by Wikipedia admins.

VI. Tombs and Mounds
A. Following the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the Athenians, having defeated the Persians, needed to bury their dead. 192 dead in total, they were buried on the same field they had died under a giant mound. These mounds began popping up all over Greece as a gesture of respect to the dead, and as many scholars believe, a way to connect them with the earth. In any one of these mounds could be 3 main components composed in a staircase like format. In any mound, they may have 1 or 2 steps that would help carry out various functions. The first step would be used for cremation and the ashes piled in after that while the second step would hold any votives or items of sentimental value. Then the whole thing would be covered by a giant mound. In the case of the Athenian monument they also surrounded it with tall, skinny stone slabs that may read a message or be dedicated to any one ‘hero'. (Whitely)

VII. Heroes, Politics, and Gods
Throughout history much of the scholarship that has been done surrounding Heroes, Gods, and the Politics that plays a role in much of what we know about them today has all come from either written accounts or archeological findings. In fact, in many cases both types of evidence may contradict each other. Written evidence can be biased or incomplete, and archeological findings do not always tell us a definitive story. First, hero shrines are few in number and peculiar in pattern. For example, Sparta’s propping up of many hero cults was out of recognition of the fact that their population reacted to them in such a way that would allow them to use the hero shrines as political propaganda. For example, Lewis Farnell believed that, because of the fact hero cults are often not found in a hero's home territory, there is a greater chance that the cults were widespread and common among most Greeks. Whereas other cults may be ancestral dating back to even the 8th century.

Hero cults could be of the utmost political importance. When Cleisthenes divided the Athenians into new demes for voting, he consulted Delphi on what heroes he should name each division after. According to Herodotus, the Spartans attributed their conquest of Arcadia to their theft of the bones of Orestes from the Arcadian town of Tegea. Heroes in myth often had close but conflicted relationships with the gods. Thus, Heracles's name means "the glory of Hera", even though he was tormented all his life by the queen of the gods. This was even truer in their cult appearances. Perhaps the most striking example is the Athenian king Erechtheus, whom Poseidon killed for choosing Athena over him as the city's patron god. When the Athenians worshiped Erechtheus on the Acropolis, they invoked him as Poseidon Erechtheus. Hero cults and the political treatment around them are a prime example of a case in which the evidence gathered by archeologists clashes with written evidence. First, hero shrines are few in number and peculiar in pattern. For example only Laconia has evidence of assigning its shrines to specific heroes meaning that the rest of the shrines were not to any one specific hero but allowed for worship to a hero via one shrine. Further, unlike the Roman beliefs it was thought that the Heroes did not rise up to the skies and be with the gods of Olympus, but rather they would go into the earth. This impacted not only how the Greeks treated the Heroes, but thought about them in a political sense. They were respected and worshiped, but could even at times turn vicious if ignored and be the supposed cause of diseases or mishaps.