Abstract
We have seen that, in Hesiod, men of the golden species received, after their death, a royal geras by becoming " daimones on the earth ", while men of silver received a timē as " blessed mortals under the earth ". After a brief semantic study of the terms geras and timē, it turns out that they are virtually synonymous in Hesiod's text, and mark the recognition of a post-mortem status sanctioned by mortal homage. However, nothing of the sort is associated with the heroes of the fourth human species from which today's men are descended. The archaic hexametric poetry preserved bears no trace of rituals allotted to figures called hērōes. The first firm attestation of the term to designate the recipient of a cult is found in Pindar evoking Battos, the founder of Cyrene, whom the people venerate as a hero on the city's agora. After a brief review of the plethora of bibliography on the theme of heroic cults, we hypothesize that it was during the 6th century that the term ἥρως, as lord of the epic and therefore a figure of bygone times, could be attributed to the deceased honored collectively by the civic communities in the process of being formed since the 8th century. This hypothesis needs to be tested in the light of epigraphic documentation.
