“This Statement Has Long Been Understood As Reflecting A Basic Distinction In Greek Religious Practice

“This statement has long been understood as reflecting a basic distinction in Greek religious practice between the different kinds of worship offered, on the one hand to the Olympian gods, and on the other to heroes, the dead and certain other ‘chthonic’ (i.e. associated with the Underworld) powers. A god has a temple (naos), a cult statue and a raised altar (bomos), at which an animal is sacrificed with its head pulled back so that the throat is pointing heavenwards when cut; a hero usually has a shrine (heroon) at the site of his grave, with a low hearth (eschara) or pit (bothros), where the sacrificial victim's blood can flow directly down into the ground. To sacrifice to the Olympians is to ‘fumigate’ (thuein), because the gods were thought to enjoy the smell of the fatty smoke rising and, after the kill, meat from the sacrificial victim is shared in a communal feast; when sacrificing to chthonians, one had to ‘devote’ (enagizein) the victim, usually by burning it whole (a ‘holocaust’).

Recent scholarship, however, has tended to revise this traditional sharp opposition, preferring to think of individual cults as on a ‘sliding scale’ between the two extremes; significantly, it “has been shown that many heroes received the kind of sacrifice which was followed by feasting, and that there is no clear distinction between types of altar before the Roman period.

At the same time, studies of Herakles have questioned the extent to which Herodotus’ idea of a dual cult was ever put into practice, pointing to the fact that the majority of the evidence seems rather to emphasize his divine nature. Nonetheless, there remain some notable features in Herakles’ cult which cannot easily be explained unless we understand them as reflecting something of the ambiguous status he has in myth."

Herakles, by Emma Stafford