The Configuration of the Archaic Greek Epic Hero through Homer and Hesiod

The emergence of the heroic cult has relevant aspects of the ancient Greek social organization. The Greeks conceived its legendary heroes as great men of a legendary and glorious past, but also as superhuman entities capable of providing protection for which surrender them honors by means of sacrifices and offerings. The great figures of Homeric poetry, Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, probably began his epic career as kings, warriors and mycenaeans nobles of the oral tradition of the dark ages. Subsequently, they were transfigured in semi gods. So, it seems feasible that Homer and Hesiod had conceived the distant past as an era in which the world was inhabited by a semi divine race. Archaeology seems to show that past perception emerged shortly before the composition of the great epic poems, toward mediated the 8th century BC, in a time of relevant social changes. The cult of the mythical heroes, that renowned families legitimating their prestige associated with heroic ancestors, was giving way to the desire of communities to benefit from the protection of heroes. In the classicism, would continue to be heroic prototypes quasi divine, influential in domestic political organization.