Greek Hero Cult - Heroes and Heroines

Heroes and Heroines

Hero cults were offered most prominently to men, though in practice the experience of the votary was of propitiating a cluster of family figures, which included women, the wife of a hero-husband, mother of a hero-son (Alcmene and Semele), daughter of a hero-father. As Moses I. Finley observed of the world of Odysseus, which he reads as a nostalgic eighth-century rendering of traditions from the culture of Dark Age Greece,

Penelope became a moral heroine for later generations, the embodiment of goodness and chastity, to be contrasted with the faithless, murdering Clytaemnestra, Agamemnon's wife; but 'hero' has no feminine gender in the age of heroes.

Where local cult venerated figures such as the sacrificial virgin Iphigeneia, an archaic local nymphe has been reduced to a mortal figure of legend. Other isolated female figures represented priestess-initiators of a local cult. Iconographic and epigraphal evidence marshalled by Jennifer Lynn Larson combine to depict heroines as similar in kind to heroes, but in androcentric Greek culture, typically of lesser stature.