heroes associated with a martial context. The sites and shrines at which heroes were
worshiped were so diverse in their physical types, overlapped to such a degree with
other varieties of monument, and were so informed by local conventions that we
depend upon literary or epigraphic evidence to identify them securely. Because of
the way in which heroes were strongly rooted in local areas, they could function as
valuable expressions of local identity, and the possession of the body of a particular
hero could advance a community’s claim to precedence over its neighbors. Hence it
was not uncommon for a hero’s bones to be transferred between territories, or for
their location to be kept secret, to protect them from theft. But sometimes a hero
could be appropriated merely through the elaboration of a new version of his myth.
We turn then, in Part III, to the mechanisms of communicating with the divine,
moving from regular verbal communication by means of prayer and hymn, through
symbolic and ritualized communication by means of sacrifice, to the more focused
and interactive variety of communication found in divination.William D. Furley
(Chapter 7) discusses prayers and hymns, the means by which the Greeks attempted
to communicate with the divine through the voice. The silent, meditative variety of
prayer familiar from contemporary Christian practice was unknown to the Greeks, for
whom prayer more typically took place in the context of public performance. Indeed,
it is possible to conceptualize sacrificial procedure as constituting a ritual framework
for a multi-media prayer. Greek prayers traditionally had a tripartite structure of
invocation–argument–prayer (proper). The argument sections, which sought to per-
suade the god that the petitioner deserved his help, often reminded the god of
sacrifices he had previously made, or used an ‘‘advent myth’’ of the god’s arrival to
crystallize the notion of his current attendance in the mind of worshipers. Prayers
could also be classified on the basis of the standing the petitioner perceived himself to
be in with the god: if one had already deserved well of the god, one used aeuche ̄;if
one had no existing claim to his favor, one used ahiketeia, or ‘‘supplication.’’ For the
most part prayers were spoken and hymns were sung, but hymns were also designed
to please and entertain the god with their artistic beauty, and formed part of a
reciprocalcharisbetween man and god. Within the types of hymn a broad distinction
may be made between dactylic-hexameterprooimia, third-person narratives of the
god’s deeds, which could be used to introduce performances, and lyric, second-
person addresses to the god, used in cultic contexts.
Jan N. Bremmer(Chapter 8) looks at sacrifice. He begins by outlining the details
of the normative process as laid out by Homer, and then contextualizes these against
later evidence, especially that from classical Athens, in which the various aspects of
sacrificial practice were more heavily dramatized. The most popular sacrificial victims
were adult sheep and goats, cheaper than full-grown cows or pigs. Sometimes the
age, sex, and color of the victim could be significant, and perfection of form always
was. The kill itself was accompanied by a tension-breaking cry of joy from the women
present. The dead animal was carved up, and attention was directed first to the parts
to be given to the god, the thigh-bones wrapped in fat, or parts of the innards. Then
meat was distributed, after cooking, to the mortals present: the notion that all human
participants shared in the meat equally was honored more at the ideological level than
at the practical one. The principal modern interpretations of ancient sacrifice are
critiqued: Meuli’s view that sacrifice was essentially ritual slaughter, Burkert’s that
the shared aggression of sacrificial killing bonded communities, and Vernant’s
Introduction 5