Ovid ensured the survival of Greek metamorphosis stories, but there was no equivalent figure for hero stories.
Heroes are consistently present from the earliest to the latest retellings of Greek myths.
The prominence of heroes cannot be solely attributed to the popularity of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Stories can feature four character types:
Gods and supernatural creatures
Ordinary people
Animals
Heroes: Humans with innate or acquired abilities beyond normal, retaining them after death to benefit living worshippers.
Greek myths focus very little on ordinary people, animals, but instead, focuses on gods and heroes, unlike African and Native American myths.
Animals in Greek myths often serve as tools or are connected to gods and heroes.
Stories of metamorphosis focus more on the transformation process than the animal itself.
Animals in myths are often abnormally large, fierce, swift, or hybrids connected with a god or a hero.
Defining the Hero
Provisionally, heroes are humans with status and abilities beyond ordinary people, retained after death to benefit living worshippers.
This definition covers a diverse group in Greece; at one end of the spectrum is someone like Perseus, the son of Zeus, who traveled to the end of the world and beheaded Medusa (9=3).
Perseus's adventures are fantastic, similar to Jason and Odysseus.
At the other end are heroes like Thymoetes, eponym of the Athenian deme Thymoetidae, whose more grounded story lacks fantastic elements, but he was still worshipped as a hero who could benefit their lives if he were properly worshipped.
Further, is Iops, a Spartan hero who received worship at a shrine outside the local marketplace about whom we know only, as Pausanias says, that he was born "in the time of Lelex or Myles."
There is also Thoricus, the eponym of the Athenian deme Thoricus, who received sacrifice twice a year according to inscriptions but who is otherwise unknown.
Oedipus is in the middle; resembling Perseus, he also killed a terrible monster, but Oedipus's story was possible within the everyday world of the audiences who heard his story.
Ion also belongs in the middle of the spectrum as well.
Menelaus belongs in the middle of the spectrum, too.
The Greeks called all of these men "heroes," and so have modern scholars.
Heroes were so important to the Greeks that the definition of a hero remained flexible; the Greeks preferred to be able to add to the ranks someone who would help them if he received proper cult.
The Delphic Oracle encouraged the establishment of cults to heroes previously unknown.
The category of heroes was flexible, sometimes overlapping with ordinary humans.
Ordinary humans were understood to have special powers as disembodied souls after death.
The key distinction between heroes and ghosts is time: ghosts fade when forgotten, while heroes remain powerful across generations.
Heroes attract worshippers from a larger range of people, unlike ghosts that concern primarily their families.
Categorizing Heroes
Modern attempts to categorize heroes have failed due to flawed premises and the desire for inclusivity.
Greeks likely agreed that some heroes like Heracles were greater than others, but no Greek author ever suggests that there was any functional or ontological difference amongst the heroes.
The variety within the class of heroes made them useful for reflection. Many heroes had ordinary lives, blurring the distinction between heroes and the people who worshipped them.
Heroes who fought in the Trojan War were closer to the average worshipper because Greeks listened to their stories.
Adventures and ancestry linked heroes, implying that the gap between an ordinary man in the street and a hero like Hercules was not impossibly vast.
The Attic hero Antiochus is an example; he runs in all the right circles and shone in the reflected light of his relatives; Demosthenes and several later authors mention that he had been sired by Heracles upon an Athenian girl and that his own sons had spearheaded the return of the Heracleidae.
Continuity of descent connected remarkable heroes to ordinary people; with this suggested a continuity of descent that ran from Perseus, a remarkable slayer of monsters, all the way down through lesser heroes and finally to the man on the Spartan street.
The father of both Perseus and Heracles was Zeus, which could be taken to hint, if one chose to read it that way, that ordinary Spartans weren't utterly different from the very gods themselves.
The chapter will focus on heroes whose stories were well-known within and outside their geographic area of worship, similar to Perseus and Menelaus.
Heroes without myths or with scarcely known myths are excluded.
Male heroes are the primary focus due to the greater number of stories about them and differing narratives between male and female.
Gods versus Heroes
Greek myths contain both gods and heroes; the focus is more on heroes, particularly in epics.
Focus on heroes is also found in poems that fall under the terms “melic” or “lyric."
Two of the three remaining genres of Archaic and Classical poetry center on heroes (the third uses both gods and heroes).
The two genres are epinician and tragedy.
Epinician poetry was drawn to stories of the heroes because heroes, who typically require great strength, nimbleness, and endurance, mirrored the athletic feats performed by the victors being celebrated.
Heroes, moreover, like the athletes, but in contrast to the gods, were human.
Stories of the heroes were told by poets.
Few formal, polished narratives focusing on the gods exist.
Stories about gods were told informally.
Stories about the gods were embedded within compositions that focused on the heroes.
Greek Heroes and Their Neighbors
In Greece, when it came to the formal narration of myths, myths that focused on the heroes were far more popular than myths that focused on the gods - roughly a three-to-one ratio.
There is an emphasis on heroes in Greek culture.
The narratives that we inherit from other ancient Mediterranean cultures are markedly more interested in gods than they are in heroes.
In ancient Mediterranean cultures, there are more accounts of gods than there are those of heroes.
Factors Behind Hero Prominence
Modern categories of heroes have largely foundered.
The Greek Hero has been used to study Greek Myths as well as Christianity.
Biblical Authors, in fact, may have been motivated by the perception that their religion-which fought to establish itself within unwelcoming territory-needed the additional appeal that thrilling human narratives could provide by borrowing from Greek Myths.
Narratives from other cultures are markedly more interested in gods than they are in heroes.
Compared to Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Anatolia, and Egypt whose narratives are mostly about gods, Greek narratives focus on their heroes.
Heroes from Greek narratives were a hot commodity.
Greeks preferred stories about heroes to stories about gods more than did people in Near Eastern cultures.
The narratives of heroes in Greek myths as well as in ancient Near East are as follows:
Lugalbanda is the father of Gilgamesh, Sargon is the grandfather of Naram-Sin and Danel is the father of Aqhat, for instance.
They have no complex web of interrelationships with one another or with a larger cadre of heroes.
Greek identity was negotiated during the Dark Age and during the early Archaic Age. The development of a shared pantheon of gods during this period and shared sanctuaries to those, gods that drew worshippers from far and wide was one of the factors that helped to bind the independent groups into a collectivity.
Ancient Near Eastern cultures that were ruled by a single individual had no room for plurality of other humans who achieved divine of semi-divine status.
Since monotheism was embarks upon Israel, it refused to grant superhuman power to even its most important found figures.
The Greeks held a perception that they were wanderers by nature.
Institutions and practices highlight the potential of the human and the value of the individual were first manifested in Greece.
Canonical Greek Hero
Greek poets were hired to elaborate upon the heroes' accomplishments and expand their stories.
An informal canon of heroic traits developed, presenting the ideal hero who had things like a divine parent, received help or advice from the gods, used intellectual and physical skills, was a good warrior, founded cities, killed or conquered monsters, and more.
Relatively few heroes from other cultures have a divine parent.
Having a divine parent marks a hero between humans and gods, implying that the two aren't impossibly different.
Many Greek heroes kill or conquer monsters.
Greek Cults
In sharp contrast to the distinct lack of hero cults elsewhere, hero cults were a highly distinctive characteristic of Greek religion-which brings us back, again, to the point that heroes are defined by their relationship to death.
If they are to become a fully powerful figure, heroes must eventually die, and only then will they reach their full potential to help their worshippers of ages yet to come.
Hero as Narrative Character
The time during which the heroes occupied the living human realm was understood by the historical Greeks to have preceded the time when they themselves have come into existence.
As such, the heroes were technically dead, but recipients of cults, they were understood to wield significant amounts of power capable of things such as protecting cities at times of war.
Part of the heroes' appeal thus lay in their ambiguous nature, which made them seem like godlike entities who had once been mortal.
Monsters and Gods
Near Eastern tales often featured God battling a monster.
Most of the stories were in forms that were “snaky."
In contrast, battles between Greek gods and monsters are relatively rare because not nearly so many survived as when compared with the ancient Near East.
When the gods fought monsters, human help often becomes a critical factor.
Even the story of Typhon itself was adapted to bring mortals to the fore as the Archaic period rolled on.
Monsters and Heroes
Hesiod shows a glimpse heroic monster killing.
Greek myths nuance heroic battles with monsters, too.
Most heroes receive divine help in conquering monsters, Athena being the most constant companion, followed by Hermes.
The basic identity of the hero as a human is emphasized throughout being set apart from other humans. The individual is essentially elevated by the fact that they are on the receiving end when it comes to divine help in order to complete the task, and is the one doing all of the heavy lifting.