“The Sicyonians,” says Herodotos, “paid other honours to Adrastos, and, moreover, they celebrated his death and disasters with tragic choruses, not honouring Dionysos but Adrastos.”  We think of “tragic” choruses as belonging exclusively to the theatre and Dionysos; so did Herodotus, but clearly here they belonged to a local hero.  His adventures and his death were commemorated by choral dances and songs.  Now when Cleisthenes became tyrant of Sicyon he felt that the cult of the local hero was a danger.  What did he do?  Very adroitly he brought in from Thebes another hero as rival to Adrastos.  He then split up the worship of Adrastos; part of his worship, and especially his sacrifices, he gave to the new Theban hero, but the tragic choruses he gave to the common people’s god, to Dionysos.  Adrastos, the objectionable hero, was left to dwindle and die.  No local hero can live on without his cult.

The act of Cleisthenes seems to us a very drastic proceeding.  But perhaps it was not really so revolutionary as it seems.  The local hero was not so very unlike a local daemon, a Spring or Winter spirit.  We have seen in the Anthesteria how the paternal ghosts are expected to look after the seeds in spring.  The more important the ghost the more incumbent is this duty upon him. Noblesse oblige.  On the river Olynthiakos[41] in Northern Greece stood the tomb of the hero Olynthos, who gave the river its name.  In the spring months of Anthesterion and Elaphebolion the river rises and an immense shoal of fish pass from the lake of Bolbe to the river of Olynthiakos, and the inhabitants round about can lay in a store of salt fish for all their needs.  “And it is a wonderful fact that they never pass by the monument of Olynthus.  They say that formerly the people used to perform the accustomed rites to the dead in the month Elaphebolion, but now they do them in Anthesterion, and that on this account the fish come up in those months only in which they are wont to do honour to the dead.”  The river is the chief source of the food-supply, so to send fish, not seeds and flowers, is the dead hero’s business.

Peisistratos was not so daring as Cleisthenes.  We do not hear that he disturbed or diminished any local cult.  He did not attempt to move the Anthesteria with its ghost cult; he only added a new festival, and trusted to its recent splendour gradually to efface the old.  And at this new festival he celebrated the deeds of other heroes, not local but of greater splendour and of wider fame.  If he did not bring Homer to Athens, he at least gave Homer official recognition.  Now to bring Homer to Athens was like opening the eyes of the blind.

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