a sort of competition, as wealthy families sought to outdo one another in the extravagance with which they
commemorated their own. But this type of rivalry was inimical to the communal spirit required by the
developing polis.

Somehow – and the details of this process are subject to vigorous scholarly debate – the polis found a
way to channel that eagerness for funerary display into a new type of communal funerary commemoration
with the introduction of hero cults in the second half of the eighth century. The Greeks were aware,
because of the perpetuation in legend of heroic stories and because of the visible evidence of impressive
ruins from the Mycenaean Period, that at some point in the distant past their poleis had been more
prosperous and more powerful than in the immediately preceding Dark Age. There is evidence that in
some places rituals were occasionally carried out during the Dark Age at the site of ancient Mycenaean
tombs, satisfying a desire to connect with the distant past by ritual means. These rituals had the effect of
incorporating the supposed glories of the past directly into the life of the present, thereby redefining the
past through a process of selective appropriation. We do not know whether the participants in these rituals
considered themselves to be direct descendants of those whom they venerated, nor do we know, in most
instances, exactly whom they thought they were venerating. Beginning around the end of the eighth century,
there is a good deal of evidence for regular ritual observance at locations that were thought to be the
graves of specific individuals considered to be prominent warriors or members of royal families from the
distant past. These individuals were called by the Greek word heros, “hero,” that is, a deceased mortal
who became the object of ritual observance by the polis and whose rituals it would be dangerous for the
polis to omit. Gradually, the accounts of who these heroes and heroines were and what they had done
while alive were subject to elaboration and embellishment, not to mention outright invention. And, just as
it is the poets who were expected to mold the myths and ritual practices relating to the gods, so the poets
had the authority to explain who the heroes were whom the polis revered and what they had done.

We have seen that Hesiod inserted an age of heroes into his myth of the generations of humans,
interrupting the otherwise steady degeneration represented by increasingly base (and increasingly
destructive) metals. Hesiod tells us that these heroes, whose generation occurred between the violent
bronze age and the depraved iron age in which Hesiod himself lives, included those who died “fighting
for the sake of Oedipus’ flocks at Thebes of the seven portals” and those who went by sea to fight at Troy
“for the sake of Helen of the lovely tresses.” Hesiod knew, and obviously expected his audience to know,
at least in outline, the stories of these legendary battles. These stories were recounted in epic poems
belonging to an oral tradition that was in existence for some centuries before Hesiod’s own time. As it
happens, some descendants of that oral tradition were written down and were copied and recopied often
enough that hundreds of copies still survive today. Two of those descendants, the Iliad and the Odyssey,
which the ancient Greeks considered to be the work of a poet named Homer, are among the greatest and
most influential works of poetry in Greek or in any language.

The Poems of Homer

The Iliad, a poem of nearly sixteen thousand verses, takes place during the Trojan War and is concerned
with the quarrel between two Greek basileis, Achilles and Agamemnon, and the disastrous consequences
of that quarrel. The Odyssey, about twelve thousand lines long, recounts the adventures of Odysseus,
another Greek basileus, and the difficulties he encounters as he attempts to return home after the end of the
Trojan War. Among the many striking features of these poems – their inexhaustible literary merit being the
most notable – is how remarkably similar in language, meter, and dialect they are both to each other and
to the poems of Hesiod. Their consistency with each other is not surprising if they are, in fact, the work of
a single poet, but their similarity to the works of Hesiod requires some other explanation. Straightforward