Jorge J. Bravo III
Abstract
The myth of Opheltes, a child who was ominously slain at Nemea during the visit of the Seven Against Thebes, served as the aetiology of the historical Nemean Games, traditionally established in 573 BC, and was celebrated at his shrine within the Sanctuary of Zeus. This chapter explores the value of projecting this myth into the history of Nemea within the context of rivalry among the archaic city-states of the Peloponnese. The myth associated the festival with the Seven Against Thebes, who were an integral part of Argive identity, and thus it reinforced the claim of Argos to manage the festival. By association with epic tradition, moreover, the myth of Opheltes bolstered the prestige of the Games. The situation at Nemea can be regarded as one among several examples of the use of hero cult to tie the mythic past to the realities of rivalry and competition within the Archaic Peloponnese. Other examples include the displacement of the cult of Adrastus in favor of the cult of Melanippus at Sicyon, Corinth’s establishment of the cult of Melicertes at Isthmia and the institution of the cult of Pelops at Olympia.
Introduction
Visitors to the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea today find themselves in a picturesque setting, framed by rolling foothills and the seemingly flat-topped Mt. Apesas at the southern end of the Nemea Valley. The Temple of Zeus commands their attention now as it surely did in antiquity, but for the ancient visitor another shrine, more rudimentary in its construction, also played an important role in the life of the Sanctuary: the heroön or hero shrine of Opheltes. It was in this place that a child hero was worshipped whose myth constituted the aetiology of the Nemean Games, one of the four most prestigious athletic festivals of ancient Greece. In this chapter I shall explore the value of this combination of myth and cult within the political and historical context of the Archaic Peloponnese, demonstrating how it creates an important historical bond to the Nemea Valley for the city-state of Argos and arguing that this practice participates in a kind of rivalry, expressed through manipulations of cult and myth, that was being conducted by city-states around the Peloponnese at about the same time.
Opheltes, Nemea and Argos
The myth of Opheltes at Nemea may be unfamiliar to many, but apart from its significance within the Sanctuary of Zeus, it finds expression to various degrees of detail throughout the art and literature of antiquity.1 In its main outline, the story begins with a visit from the Seven Against Thebes, who have just set out from Argos on their way to war. Upon their arrival in Nemea, they encounter the nurse Hypsipyle, who is charged with carrying the infant child Opheltes. They ask her for water and in her haste to fulfill the heroes’ request, she takes them to a spring, either laying the child on the ground before setting off or doing so once they arrive at their destination.
It is in this moment of vulnerability that disaster strikes, in the form of a monstrous snake that kills the child. Hypsipyle reacts in horror and the Seven, who are too late to save Opheltes, quickly dispatch the snake. The Argive seer Amphiaraus, interpreting the child’s death as an omen of their own forthcoming disaster at Thebes, bestows a new name on the child, Archemorus, meaning ‘the Beginning of Doom’. The seer also instructs the Seven to bury the child with due rites and conduct funeral games in his honor, in an attempt to avert the omen. The renaming of the child, which comes only after the hero’s death and before his funeral rites, is consequently an important pivot in the myth, for it signals the transition from myth to cult. In the myth, it introduces the hero as a recipient of cult and in the cult its very etymology would recall for worshippers the narrative context of the myth that is used to authorize it. Thus, because the change of Opheltes’ name to Archemorus so neatly bridges myth and cult, it is an important recurring element in the ancient sources.
Within the mythic narrative of the death of Opheltes, the new name Archemorus is but one manifestation of the hero’s newfound cult. The ancient sources repeatedly emphasize the aetiological connection between the hero’s death and the foundation of the Nemean Games, which begin as the funeral games held by the Seven. The earliest instance is found in Bacchylides’ ninth Epinician Ode, composed for Automedon of Phlius, a victor in the pentathlon at the Nemean Games in the mid-fifth century BC. In lines 10–14 we read:
κε[ῖθι φοι]νικάσπιδες ἡμίθεοι 10
πρ[ώτιστ]ον Ἀργείων κριτοὶ
ἄθλησαν ⟨ἐ⟩π’ Ἀρχεμόρῳ, τὸν ξανθοδερκής
πέφν’ ἀωτεύοντα δράκων ὑπέροπλος,
σᾶμα μέλλοντος φόνου.
There the crimson-shielded heroes, 10
the chosen men of the Argives, first
competed in honor of Archemorus, whom the yellow-eyed
monstrous snake did slay as he plucked flowers,
a marker of slaughter to come.2
The ancient sources also make an explicit connection between the athletic contest and the tomb of Opheltes. On occasion the act of burial receives special attention, but more generally we encounter references to the tomb, variously called σῆμα, ἤριον, τάφος, sepulcrum and tumulus, as another lasting consequence of the hero’s demise, parallel with the establishment of the Nemean festival.3
The excavations of the University of California at Berkeley, directed by Stephen G. Miller, first brought to light the Hero Shrine of Opheltes, located in the southwestern part of the Sanctuary of Zeus, in 1979 (Fig. 1). Continuing in 1980 and 1983 and again during a five-year period from 1997 to 2001, the excavations reveal that the Shrine flourished at Nemea for about three centuries, the period when the Nemean Games were celebrated here in the Sanctuary of Zeus. It was established in the second quarter of the sixth century BC, based on the finds within the construction layers of the shrine, an archaeological date that generally agrees with the literary tradition, which dates the establishment of the Games to 573 BC.4
The shrine originally had the shape of a broad, low earthen mound elevated 1.5 to 2 meters above the surrounding terrain. Stone rubble lined much of the perimeter of the mound and the principal feature on the surface of the mound was a construction of large unworked conglomerate stones. It was in the vicinity of this feature, particularly to the south of it, that the greatest concentration of ash, burnt bone, pottery and other votive material was found, suggesting that it served as a focal point of the ritual activity in the shrine. It may thus be identified as the marker of the tomb of Opheltes, a feature reported by Pausanias when he visited Nemea many centuries later.5 Subsequently, in the early third century BC, the mound shrine was furnished with a new enclosure wall of stone blocks. By the end of the second quarter of the third century, however, the shrine fell into disuse, along with the rest of the Sanctuary of Zeus, for the Nemean Games were moved to the urban center of Argos, the city-state that administered the festival.
The archaeology also makes clear that the mound itself is but the southern extension of a long earthen embankment, which was constructed together with it (Fig. 1). It extended for at least 100 meters away from the shrine in a north-northeasterly direction and served as the western embankment of the Early Stadium at Nemea. In addition, it may have served as a viewing area for the Hippodrome, where the equestrian events took place, located to the west. Accordingly, we now understand that the contiguity of embankment and shrine and the juxtaposition of this cult center with the two venues for the performance of the Nemean Games physically underscore the aetiological bond between the Games and the hero Opheltes that permeates the literary tradition of the hero’s myth.6
As for the myth of Opheltes, most scholars treating this issue assert that the story formed part of the epic tradition of the Theban War, perhaps as early as the eighth century BC. Others have argued that it originated as an old, local legend later added to the Theban War tradition. An alternative to be considered, however, is that both the myth and the cult arise at the same time in the sixth century BC. There are plenty of examples throughout ancient history of the institution of new cults predicated upon the ‘rediscovery’ of an old, long-forgotten, or otherwise unknown, tradition, often sanctioned by an oracle: the Athenians’ institution of a cult of the farmer-hero Echetlus, who appeared for the first time at the Battle of Marathon, is one. In such cases, the rediscovery is a fiction that lends authority to the new cult.7
What, then, was the motivation for taking the myth of Opheltes, whether old or new, and establishing a cult in his honor in connection with this new athletic festival? The answer lies, at least in part, in its importance for Argos, the city that administered the Sanctuary and the festival. One of the unvarying elements of the myth of Opheltes is its setting within the larger narrative of the expedition of the Seven Against Thebes. This myth is explicitly linked to Argos, for it is the Argive heroes who precipitate Opheltes’ death and so incur the ritual obligation to commemorate continually the death of the hero. Consequently, establishing the cult of Opheltes in conjunction with the Nemean Games creates an enduring reminder that it is the city of Argos that is responsible for the conduct of the Games, and thus the city’s prestige becomes linked to that of the Games. Claiming the Sanctuary and festival as part of Argive identity was also important given the location of the Sanctuary at the extreme limits of the territory of Argos. By giving the Sanctuary a definitive Argive stamp, Argos could assert the extent of its territory in the face of any competing claims from another state.8
The Nemean festival and the cult of Opheltes thus become another part of a network of cult sites and monuments that express Argive identity by reference to the mythical past of Argos.9 One of these is a shrine for the Seven that was established in the Agora of the city; stone fence posts have been found bearing inscriptions in the Archaic Argive epichoric alphabet that document the existence of their cult in the sixth century BC.10 Another indication of the importance of the Seven to Argive identity comes from additional epigraphic evidence, showing that Argive aristocrats of the archaic period were named after Adrastus and the other heroes.11
A final consideration is the value of epic tradition itself. To the extent that the Theban Expedition was already the subject of Panhellenic epic by the Archaic period, an association of Nemea with the Seven elevates the status of the Nemean myth, in tandem with the aim of organizing the Nemean Games as a Panhellenic festival.12 Having such a festival would have been of great value in the early sixth century BC, for it is in this period that a number of Greek city-states appear to have established similar new cults and festivals. In the pages that follow, I will focus on a set of similar developments elsewhere within the Peloponnese.
Adrastus and Cleisthenes of Sicyon
Because of its proximity, the city-state of Sicyon in particular may have been interested in the actions of Argos in the Nemea Valley, and conflict between the two city-states in this era seems to lie behind the well-known actions taken by the tyrant Cleisthenes of Sicyon to express his antipathy toward Argos. As recounted by Herodotus (5.67), Cleisthenes ended the contests of rhapsodes performing the Homeric poems, on the grounds that they gave too much importance to Argos. He also wished to expel the Argive hero Adrastus, who had a shrine in the agora of Sicyon. After being denied permission to do so by Delphi, he accomplished his aim by bringing in the worship of another hero, the Theban Melanippus, and ascribing Adrastus’ rites to him, apart from the choral performances, which were transferred to Dionysus. Malcolm McGregor has connected these actions with later Pindaric scholia, to argue that these steps should be seen as part of a reorganization of a local Pythian festival of Sicyon, which the scholia say had been founded by Adrastus. McGregor dates the change to sometime in the 570s BC.13
The archaeological record unfortunately offers no insight into these cultic actions and our understanding of them necessarily involves some speculation, but I think it is a plausible claim that in reorganizing the festival, Cleisthenes was aiming to refashion one form of the expression of Sicyonian identity in a way that he as tyrant saw fit. At the very least he was trying to distance the identity of his city from that of Argos; and here it is worth noting the special myth-historical problem that Cleisthenes faced. Herodotus makes clear (5.67.4) that it was already embedded in the Sicyonians’ sense of their early history that Adrastus of Argos had become king of Sicyon as the maternal grandson of King Polybus, who did not have a son of his own. It was for this reason, he tells us, that the Sicyonians so greatly revered Adrastus, and this sense of history may also be reflected in the stern rebuke that Cleisthenes allegedly received from the oracle at Delphi, that Adrastus was king of Sicyon, while he was but a thrower of stones (5.67.2).
It also seems plausible that Cleisthenes’ reform of the Pythian festival was not just a matter of substituting cult and ritual but also in some fashion was aimed to elevate the status of its appeal to other Greeks in a bid to make his city’s festival more panhellenic. Herodotus does not say this, of course, but such an aim would seem consistent with the tyrant’s other aggrandizing actions such as his notable participation in the competitions at Delphi and Olympia and, of course, the handling of the betrothal of his daughter, Agariste.14
In choosing to bring in the cult of Melanippus to displace Adrastus, finally, it is remarkable that Cleisthenes uses the same playbook as Argos, for once more it is the epic tradition of the Theban War that provides the mythic substance for his politically motivated manipulation of cult. Cleisthenes selected this hero for a new cult in Sicyon precisely because of the epic tradition that Melannipus fought against the Seven at Thebes and in fact killed Adrastus’ brother Mecisteus and his son-in-law Tydeus. So too Cleisthenes’ ban on the recitation of Homeric epics, on the grounds that he perceived them as glorifying Argos, acknowledges the political implications of epic poetry for the Archaic city-state.15
Melicertes-Palaemon at the Isthmus of Corinth
Less than a decade earlier, according to the literary tradition, that is to say in the late 580’s BC, it appears that the city-state of Corinth also decided to enhance its Sanctuary of Poseidon at the Isthmus by organizing a new competitive festival and associating it with a new hero cult, in honor of the child hero Melicertes. His myth, moreover, was inserted into the historical consciousness of Corinth as an event that most accounts place in the reign of Sisyphus.16
In many respects the myth of Melicertes is similar to that of Opheltes at Nemea and the two heroes are often linked together in our ancient sources. For he too died an untimely death, when his mother Ino plunged into the sea with him to escape her mad husband Athamas; his body was subsequently transported to the Isthmus on the back of a dolphin, a detail portrayed in his shrine during the Roman Period, as we know from coins of Corinth.17 Sisyphus found the body washed ashore near a pine tree, and after having it buried with due honors, he celebrated funeral games for him, thus originating the Isthmian Games. The child hero was also given a new name, Palaemon, or ‘Wrestler’, just as Opheltes was renamed Archemorus.
It is regrettable, however, that the archaeological record so far offers us no confirmation about the cult of Melicertes before Roman times; no trace of an earlier phase of the cult has ever been securely identified by the excavators.18 Thanks to the testimony of Pindar, however, we can be reasonably sure that the hero was worshipped in the fifth century BC, and his cult may well have begun in conjunction with the establishment of the Isthmian Games. Indeed Catherine Morgan has argued that the parallelism between the myths of Melicertes and Opheltes is due precisely to the establishment of their festivals as part of the ancient circuit of athletic festivals within a short time span in the early sixth century BC.19 As for the competitions themselves, there is now good archaeological evidence to confirm a date in the first half of the sixth century for their inauguration, even though the Sanctuary of Poseidon itself had come into existence much earlier, perhaps as early as the eleventh century BC.20
Pelops and Olympia
At Olympia too we can productively think about the use of cult and myth by city-states of the Archaic Peloponnese thanks to the work of Helmut Kyrieleis, whose excavations in the area of the hero shrine of Pelops in the 1990s have revised the picture of activity in the Sanctuary.21 That the cult of Pelops, centered around his grave, as well as the myth of his chariot race against Oenomaus for the hand of Hippodameia and for kingship, were central parts of the Olympic festival by the Classical Period is clear from the evidence of Pindar as well as the iconography of the east pediment of the Temple of Zeus.22 Throughout the twentieth century, however, a debate persisted about the age of the cult of Pelops, with some scholars claiming that it preceded the cult of Zeus and extended back to the Late Bronze Age.23 Based on his excavations, however, Kyrieleis has shown that the cult of Pelops could only have been established after 600 BC. While he makes a strong argument that the new cult should be connected with the same building program that led to a refurbishment of the sanctuary at about this time, or slightly thereafter, he admits that a later date in the sixth century cannot be ruled out; the only clear terminus ante quem is the testimony of Pindar in the early fifth century.24
Accordingly, the cult of Pelops at Olympia constitutes one more example of a new hero cult of the sixth century BC. Why then did Elis choose to adopt this cult and attach it to the Olympic festival, in both myth and cult, at this period of time, long after the festival was instituted? Kyrieleis’ thoughts align with those I have been pursuing so far. He argues that by the seventh century Pelops was recognized as the ancestor of prominent Greek heroes, who were tied to the mythic histories of city-states throughout what accordingly became known as the Peloponnese. Consequently, the regional or even panhellenic importance of Pelops, as well as the lack of any clear pre-existing ties to a city-state, may explain the Eleans’ choice to establish his cult at Olympia. The addition of the hero cult, moreover, was only one aspect of the redevelopment of the sanctuary, which can generally be viewed as an effort to accommodate greater participation and enhance the prestige of the sanctuary and its festival, and thereby that of the city-state of Elis itself.25
The phenomena that I have explored in this chapter in regard to Nemea, Sicyon, the Isthmus of Corinth and Olympia can be related to other manipulations of hero cult and myth within the Archaic Peloponnese, such as the transfer of the bones of Orestes from Tegea by Sparta.26 The myth and cult of Opheltes at Nemea should now be recognized as an important and well-documented example of a wider phenomenon of the Archaic period, in which city-states associate new hero cults with festivals as a means of forging a historical bond, one that connects the ritual present with a mythic past embodied in poetic, especially epic, tradition. This bond creates and sustains claims of identity and prestige within the city-state, and also projects those claims outward to other city-states by virtue of the participatory nature of the festivals. And yet the political message of these new myths and cults is not lost on the Greeks and can lead to rivalry and resentment, as the case of Cleisthenes’ response to Argos demonstrates. Archaeological research of recent decades has, furthermore, enhanced our understanding of the relative contemporaneity of these phenomena, suggesting that we see them as the consequence of emulation and rivalry among the city-states rather than spontaneous and independent developments. Finally, in the case of Nemea, archaeology has established how the translation of the myth of Opheltes into the history of Argos and the Nemea Valley was expressed not just in mythic narrative and cult practice, but also physically in the juxtaposition of the hero shrine with the early athletic venues of the Nemean Games.
Fig. 1: Restored plan of the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea, showing the locations of the Shrine of Opheltes (‘Heroön’) and related features. Courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley, Nemea Excavation Archives, no. PD 03.1 (with enhancements by J. Bravo).
Bibliography
Boedeker, D. 1998. Hero Cult and Politics in Herodotus: The Bones of Orestes. In Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, eds. Dougherty, C. and Kurke, L., 164–177. Oxford. →
Bravo, J.J. 2018. The Shrine of Opheltes (Excavations at Nemea IV). Berkeley. a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k
Doffey, M.-C. 1992. Les mythes de fondation des Concours Néméens. In Piérart (1992) 185–193. →
Ekroth, G. 2012. Pelops Joins the Party: Transformations of a Hero Cult within the Festival at Olympia. In Greek and Roman Festivals: Content, Meaning and Practice, eds. Brandt, J.R. and Iddeng, J.W., 95–137. Oxford. a, b
Forsdyke, S. 2012. Slaves Tell Tales: And Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece. Princeton. a, b
Gebhard, E.R. and Dickie, M.W. 1999. Melikertes-Palaimon, Hero of the Isthmian Games. In Hägg (1999) 159–165. →
Hägg, R. (ed.) 1999. Ancient Greek Hero Cult (SkrAth 8˚ 16). Stockholm.
Hall, J.M. 1995. How Argive Was the ‘Argive’ Heraion? The Political and Cultic Geography of the Argive Plain, 900–400 B.C. AJA 99: 577–613. →
Hall, J.M. 1999. Beyond the Polis: Multilocality of Heroes. In Hägg (1999) 49–59. a, b
Kyrieleis, H. 2006. Anfänge und Frühzeit des Heiligtums von Olympia: Die Ausgrabungen am Pelopion 1987–1996 (Olympische Forschungen XXXI). Berlin. a, b, c, d
Maehler, H. (ed.) 1970. Bacchylidis. Carmina cum fragmentis. Leipzig. →
Marchand, J.C. 2002. Well-built Kleonai: A History of the Peloponnesian City Based on a Survey of the Visible Remains and a Study of the Literary and Epigraphic Sources. Berkeley (Ph.D. Diss. University of California). a, b
McCauley, B. 1999. Heroes and Power: The Politics of Bone Transferal. In Hägg (1999) 85–98. →
McGregor, M.F. 1941. Cleisthenes of Sicyon and the Panhellenic Festivals. TAPA 72: 266–287. →
Miller, S.G. 2015. Excavations at Nemea, 1997–2001. Hesperia 84: 277–353.
Morgan, C. 1990. Athletes and Oracles: The Transformation of Olympia and Delphi in the Eighth Century B.C. Cambridge. →
Morgan, C. 1999. The Late Bronze Age Settlement and Early Iron Age Sanctuary (Isthmia VIII). Princeton. →
Morgan, C. 2002. The Origins of the Isthmian Festival: Points of Comparison and Contrast. In Olympia 1875–2000: 125 Jahre Deutsche Ausgrabungen, ed. Kyrieleis, H., 251–271. Mainz. →
Musti, D. and Torelli, M. 1986. Pausania guida della Grecia, II, La Corinzia e l’Argolide. Rome. →
Pache, C.O. 2004. Baby and Child Heroes in Ancient Greece. Urbana. a, b
Pariente, A. 1992. Le monument argien des ‘Sept contre Thèbes’. In Piérart (1992) 195–225. a, b
Piérart, M. (ed.) 1992. Polydipsion Argos (BCH Suppl. 22). Paris.
Piérart, M. and Touchais, G. 1996. Argos: Une ville grecque de 6000 ans. Paris.
Notes
1
For a thorough treatment of the literary and artistic tradition of the myth of Opheltes, see now Bravo (2018) 101–170.
2
The Greek text is from the Teubner edition of Maehler (1970). All English translations of ancient texts are my own. For further discussion of the text, see Bravo (2018) 104–105.
3
Bravo (2018) 139.
4
For a detailed study of the physical remains of the Shrine of Opheltes, see Bravo (2018) 3–78, on which the present account is based. For a discussion of the traditional date of 573 BC, see Bravo (2018) 34 with n. 99.
5
Paus. 2.15.3 (ed. Musti and Torelli [1986]): ἐνταῦθα ἔστι μὲν Ὀφέλτου τάφος, περὶ δὲ αὐτὸν θριγκὸς λίθων καὶ ἐντὸς τοῦ περιβόλου βωμοί (“here there is a grave of Opheltes; around it is a fence of stones and within the enclosure are altars”). For discussion of this passage in relation to the physical remains, see Bravo (2018) 35–37.
6
Bravo (2018) 50–56. For a lengthier discussion of the evidence for the Early Stadium and Hippodrome, see Miller (2015) 323–331, 344–348.
7
Bravo (2018) 103–104. On the hero Echetlus, see Paus. 1.15.3; 1.32.5.
8
Doffey (1992) 193; Hall (1999) 55; Marchand (2002) 178–179; Bravo (2018) 103.
9
Bravo (2018) 103, citing Hall (1995) 608–609. See also Pariente (1992) 218; Hall (1999).
10
Pariente (1992).
11
Marchand (2002) 178 n. 87, citing Piérart and Touchais.
12
Bravo (2018) 103.
13
McGregor (1941) 282–283.
14
See Hdt. 6.126–130. Forsdyke (2012) 108–110 independently develops a similar argument. On Agariste, see Levaniouk in this volume.
15
Forsdyke (2012) 91–113 argues that later popular tradition has distorted Herodotus’ account of Cleisthenes, so that she calls into question the historical veracity of his description of Cleisthenes’ cultic manipulations and proposes an alternative account of what actually happened at Sicyon. Even under her reconstruction, however, the events still illustrate the competitive manipulation of cult in the early sixth century BC, as she readily acknowledges (see previous note).
16
On the myth and cult of Melicertes-Palaemon at the Isthmus, see Pache (2004) 135–180.
17
See Pache (2004) 169, with figs. 60–63.
18
Gebhard and Dickie (1999) 159–160.
19
Morgan (1990) 220.
20
Morgan (1999); Morgan (2002).
21
Kyrieleis (2006).
22
Pindar refers to the shrine of Pelops in two passages, O. 1.93 and 10.24–25.
23
For a summary of the debate, see Kyrieleis (2006) 55 n. 198; Ekroth (2012) 96 n. 8.
24
Kyrieleis (2006) 55–57, 79.
25
Kyrieleis (2006) 79–83. See also Ekroth (2012) 106–107.
26
On the significance of this cultic act, see Boedeker (1998); McCauley (1999).