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.
Read more about this topic: Greek Hero Cult
Famous quotes containing the words heroes and, heroes and/or heroines:
“The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world’s standard, they are always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised as much.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The world doesn’t make any heroes anymore.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)