By degrees, the burial grounds of the Early Iron Age had accumulated round the central settlement on all four points of the compass (FIG. 1). To the north lay the main cemetery of Knossos (AS-no. 62), where interments began well back in the eleventh century BC and were 1 The following abbreviations, other than those m general use. are employed: Anmisos = J. Schafer ed.i. Anmisos. nach den archdologischen. historischen und epigraphischen ^cugnissen des Altertums und der .\euz.eit {Berlin. 1992}.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Hellenic Studies. This content downloaded from 86.25.108.15 on Mon, 17 Nov 2014 12:07:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HERO-CULTS IN THE AGE OF HOMER'MUCH hero-cult was directly engendered by the powerful influence of Homeric and other epics.... We so often hear how saga reflects cult that we are in danger of ignoring the reverse truth that cult may reflect saga; for cult was often mimetic of past events, and the memory of these was preserved mainly by saga-poetry.' Thus L. R. Farnell, in 1921.1 He was doing his best to create order out of chaos, writing at a time when it had been fashionable to explain away almost all heroes as faded deities. His method was to sort out the various categories of hero: the genuine faded deities, the vegetation spirits, the epic heroes, the ancestors, the eponymous figures, and finally the heroes who lived in historical times. Greek hero-worship has always been a rather untidy subject, where any general statement is apt to provoke suspicion; yet no one has since shown any good reason for rejecting Farnell's groundwork.2 This in itself is a tribute to the clarity and thoroughness with which he presented the literary evidence in the first place. Nevertheless, if a new edition of his book were contemplated today, it would need some substantial archaeological footnotes; indeed, during the last fifty years, every type of hero-cult has been illumined in some measure by the results of excavation-especially the cults of epic heroes, to which most of this paper is devoted; for the interval since 1921 includes most of the digging careers of Blegen, Wace, and Marinatos-to name the three archaeologists whose fieldwork has supplied in greatest measure the most abundant kind of evidence that we are looking for: that is, the evidence of veneration shown by later Greeks for the tombs of their Mycenaean predecessors.It is fitting that we should begin with these tomb cults, as it was in his tomb that a hero's strength was supposed to be concentrated; thus the aged Oedipus is made to prophesy aid for his Athenian hosts, and harm for his Theban fellow-countrymen, when in a later age their armies were to meet and fight a battle round his tomb.3 To check the conclusion of Farnell, that these cults came into being through the diffusion of epic poetry, we should pay special attention to the votives deposited in Mycenaean tombs, and belonging to what may be called the 'Age of Homer': i.e. within the approximate limits of 750 and 650 B.C3. If Farnell was right, none of the votives should be earlier than this period.In his...

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Impressed by the prevalence of Italic dress ornaments in the earliest colonial graves of Pithekoussai, G. Buchner reasonably argued for widespread intermarriage between the first Euboean colonists and women from Italy. The paper pursues the implications of this hypothesis, and envisages how mixed marriages could well have resulted from Euboean precolonial contacts, notably with southern Etruria. The bilingual offspring of such marriages would have played a leading role in the spread of alphabetic literacy, and in the sharing of other ideas between the first Western Greeks and the Italic mainland. At other frontiers of the early Greek world, parallel cases of widespread intermarriage are considered, leading to similar results: early Ionians in Caria, and Levantine master craftsmen settling among Cretans. Finally, returning to the West, 1 offer some fresh thoughts on the Aristonothos krater, seen in the context of several generations of intermarriage between Euboeans and Etruscans.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. , the first anniversary of her death.1 I should like to put on record my gratitude to her for the constant help and encouragement she gave me in the early years of my interest in Geometric pottery.Evelyn Smithson was an established member of the Agora team when I first came to Athens as a research student in 1957. As one of several regular visitors in that year to the Stoa of Attalos from the British School, I found in Evelyn a sympathetic mentor and a generous friend. She not only allowed me to work through the Early and Middle Geometric deposits in her care but also spared much time to discuss them with me, to compare notes, and to exchange ideas.In those days the earlier phases of Attic Geometric had not attracted much attention, and even their definition was not universally agreed. General inquiry into the whole Attic sequence had been largely the preserve of German scholars, who, after the great pioneering paper by Peter Kahane,2 still divided Attic Geometric into four art-historical phases: Early, Severe, Ripe, and Late. For different reasons, both Evelyn and I found this system diffcult to apply to excavated deposits. She preferred, especially for the plainer domestic wares, a more strictly chronological subdivision, and to me, thinking of Geometric styles elsewhere, there were many places far from Athens where severity and ripeness could not be guaranteed. Thus, quite independently, we both chose to invoke the ubiquitous trinity of Early, Middle, and Late, which could be applied easily to almost every regional style in Greece. Even so, the Early and Middle phases were then little known and somewhat undervalued in a historical context. From the Agora area, the only full and analytical study of Geometric finds had been Rodney Young's volume on the Late Geometric plot of graves under the Classical Tholos.3 Furthermore, it was fashionable to think of the Late Geometric period 1 For illustrations, and permission to include them here, I am grateful to the American School of Classical Studies (Pls. 97:b, 99:a, b), to the Deutsches ArchAologisches Institut (P1. 98:c), and to Mr. Mervyn Popham (P1. lOO:a-c, e). All other illustrations are of vases from the North Cemetery at Knossos, of which Plates 98:a, b, d, 99:c, d, and 100:d have not previously been published; my thanks are due to the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens for permission to present them here, in advance of the final report (Knossos, the North Cemetery: Eary Greek Tombs [BSA Suppl., forthcoming], H. W. C...