Baby, Baby, Baby: Why Did the Ancient Greeks Turn Dead Children into Heroes?

When we use the term “hero” today while discussing Greek mythological figures, it usually designates a man whose superhuman exploits and semi-divine parentage make him a person of legend. But in real-life ancient Greece, heroes were venerated at their own shrines, and deceased men figured in popular imagination somewhere between divine gods and Average Joes. Adult superheroes weren’t the only ones honored; deceased young ones, highlighted by Prince Opheltes and the children of Heracles and Medea, sometimes had their own hero cults too.

In her important An Archaeology of Ancestors, Duke University classicist Carla Antonaccio discusses the difficulty of defining a “hero” who deserves his own cult. She ties the idea into ancestor worship. Some hero cults honored mythological figures, like Heracles, and some honored real-life folks, such as the Spartan general Brasidas who died a long time ago. But the clear distinction between “fictional” and “real” characters (and what defines fact versus fiction, vis-a-vis legend) is likely more of a modern retrojection than one the Greeks may have made. The theoretical discussions of what makes a cult hero are better left to specialists on the topic, such as Gregory Nagy and Bruno Currie (both of whose excellent works on the subject are cited below).

Ruins of a hero-shrine or heroon at Sagalassos, Turkey. (Tijl Vereenooghe/CC BY SA 2.5)