Hesiod as Cult Hero

The poet who names himself in his own poem becomes, in the Life of Hesiod tradition that grew up around him, a figure absorbed into the genealogical structure his poem inaugurated. Nagy’s reading is decisive: “the figure of Hesiod in the Life of Hesiod tradition fits perfectly the characteristic morphology of the cult hero” (Nagy 1979). The themes of his death, the funeral games, the local cult — all conform to “the typical mythology surrounding the cult of a typical epichoric hero.”

Nagy’s structural argument is that the parallelism is exact: “whereas the generic warrior is the therapôn of Ares, the generic poet is the therapôn of the Muses. Furthermore, the parallelism in itself indicates that the poet, as therapôn of the Muses, is thereby worthy of being a cult hero” (Nagy 1979). The investiture by the Muses on Helicon is in the same gesture an investiture into the heroic order. To be the master of truth who serves the daughters of Mnemosyne is to be a candidate for the same posthumous structure that absorbs Achilles.

For the depth tradition this matters because it locates the act of poetic composition itself inside the genealogical/heroic frame the composition narrates. Hesiod is the first Western voice for whom the imaginative act and the imagined cosmos meet inside a single text. The Theogony’s prologue is therefore not biographical decoration but a charter: the poet who names the gods becomes himself nameable within the order he names. The Lineage’s later understanding of the imaginal as a real order — of mundus imaginalis as a place where the soul may be transformed — has its archaic precedent here.

Relationships

• hesiod
• muses
• mnemosyne
• hero-cult
• dichterweihe
• masters-of-truth

Primary sources

• nagy-best-of-achaeans (Nagy 1979)