Athena Shakes Hands With Hera. The goddesses symbolize the states of Athens and Samos. The relief crowns an inscription
which records Athens' gratitude to Samos for loyalty even after the defeat at Aegospotami in 405 B.C. The decree begins
with the name of the officiating registrar, then an address 'to those Samians who stood with the Athenian people'. The stele
was found on the Acropolis at Athens.
Alongside men and gods there was a third estate, that of heroes. The term 'hero' had a technical sense in Greek religion: a
hero was a figure less powerful than a god, to whom cult was paid. He was normally conceived as a mortal who had died,
and the typical site of such a cult was a tomb. But various kinds of minor supernatural figure came to be assimilated to the
class and, as in the case of Heracles, the distinction between a hero and a god could be uncertain. From Attica alone several
hundred heroes are known; some have names and even legends, while others are identified merely as 'the hero beside the
salt-pit' or the like. (In such a case it was presumably the existence of a conspicuous tomb that evoked the cult.)
These heroes of cult were not identical with the heroes (this is Homer's word) of epic poetry, Achilles, Odysseus, and the
rest, but the classes were not altogether distinct. Many of the poetic heroes did receive cult, and one reason for worshipping
heroes must surely have been the feeling that they had been beings such as Homer described, stronger and altogether more
splendid than the men of today. Large Mycenaean tombs, visible tokens of an ampler past, were often centres of hero-cult.