The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, we see this description of Dēmophōn as an infant hero: |233 And so it came to pass that the splendid son of bright-minded Keleos, |234 Dēmophōn, who ... Continue reading

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the athletic competition of the Ballētus is overtly described as an act of compensation, recurring at the right season into all eternity, and this c ... Continue reading

So, just as the Golden Generation is a positive image of a cult hero, the corresponding Silver Generation is a negative image. In this narrative about the Silver Generation (Works ... Continue reading

The athletic event of the mock battle or Ballētus, as featured in the Eleusinian Games, was understood to be a form of eternal compensation for the primal death of the cult hero Dē ... Continue reading

What makes the athletic events of Iliad 23 appear to be different from the “real” athletic events of the historical period is this: whatever is happening in Iliad 23 appears to hap ... Continue reading

Such myths can be understood in terms of initiation from boyhood into manhood, for the purpose of preparing men for warfare. Such a ritualized purpose is evident also in such insti ... Continue reading

Here we see the same syntactical construction that we saw in the compressed retelling of the aetiological myth that motivated the foundation of the athletic competition ‘in honor o ... Continue reading

As I note in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 259-267, the goddess Demeter foretells the tīmē aphthitos, ‘unwilting honor’ (verses 261, 263), of a seasonally-recurring athletic event th ... Continue reading

In this comment I need to concentrate on the actual form of immortalization that Dēmophōn and Achilles will be granted by the divine order. In the case of Dēmophōn, as we see in th ... Continue reading

The parallelisms in the wording of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Iliad highlight the parallelisms between Dēmophōn and Achilles as heroes who are linked with festivals. Just ... Continue reading

So, I maintain that the kleos of Homeric poetry is in its own right a seasonally recurring ritual event, since both the Iliad and the Odyssey were performed at the festival of the ... Continue reading

The death of the infant hero will be compensated by seasonally recurring rituals of athletic re-enactment, as expressed by the word tīmē, ‘honor’ (verse 263), which refers here to ... Continue reading

At the core of the narratives about Hēraklēs is the meaning of hērōs, ‘hero’, as a cognate of Hērā, the goddess of seasonality and equilibrium, and of hōrā, a noun that actually me ... Continue reading

The idea of a deeper level of understanding, made available only to initiates, is most evident in contexts where the word olbios refers to the bliss of initiation into mysteries of ... Continue reading

As we see from the testimony of the fifth-century historian Thucydides (3.104.6), the chorus of the Delian Maidens who are described in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo are to be viewed ... Continue reading

The hymning of Apollo at the cult center of his sacred island of Delos is idealized, as I have argued, in the first part of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (the second part honors the g ... Continue reading

There are three passages where the word therapeuein seems at first sight to have nothing to do with a meaning such as ‘heal, cure’. I start with Odyssey 13.265. Here the first-pers ... Continue reading

The words used here in telling about the ordeals of Hēraklēs match closely the words used at the very beginning of the Odyssey to tell about the ordeals of Odysseus:|1 That man, te ... Continue reading

I highlight again the ponoi or ‘labors’ of Socrates, which he equates with his planē or ‘wandering’ all over the world, as it were, in the course of his unending spiritual journey. ... Continue reading

Athena is in fact the goddess of intelligence, daughter of the god Zeus and of a goddess named Mētis (Hesiod Theogony 886-900); this name Mētis comes from the noun mētis, which mea ... Continue reading