Abstract :
[en] This paper explores the entanglement between social status and the bestowal of heroic honours upon deceased political leaders and elite members in the late-classical and early Hellenistic period. Epigraphic and literary sources shedding light on the establishment, justification and social impact of heroic honours practised by different social groups will be discussed, to investigate the implications of the social status of cult agents and recipients upon the definition of the position of honoured humans in relation to the superhuman sphere. This will also imply exploring the types of relationships existing between private heroic foundations and royal divine foundations in the studied period. Contrary to a generally accepted assumption, it will be argued that heroization was common for members of elite families, while it was not the primary option to reward local political leaders, since their honours were principally modelled after godlike honours.
For instance, when they came into existence during the mid-Hellenistic period, cults for high-ranking civic leaders were largely modelled on godlike honours for monarchs, but were decreed after death – it will be argued – to preserve a hierarchical distinction between the social status of their recipients. The posthumous bestowal explains why honours for great civic benefactors also drew on typically heroic honours, such as public burial inside the city. However, similar contaminations of heroic and divine honours had already been exploited for the worshipped deceased kings of the early Hellenistic period (e.g. Alexander at Alexandria, Demetrius at Demetrias), so that a certain mixture of divine and heroic features could be said to have been directly transferred from royal to non-royal leaders. In neither case, however, did the presence of heroic features imply that cultic honours for Hellenistic political leaders would be commonly labelled as heroic. A revealing case is that of the Hellenistic leader Aratus, whose “fitting honours” decreed at Sicyon (Polyb. 8.12-7-8; Plut., Arat. 53) are labelled as heroic by moderns only because they were decreed posthumously. Similarly, at Megalopolis, the posthumous honours for the commander Philopoimen comprised a public tomb in the agora – a typically heroic honour – but were labelled as “honours equal to the gods”, not as heroic. We must wait for the late-Hellenistic and Imperial period to trace a significant multiplication of honours for political leaders explicitly labelled heroic.
