헤라클레스와 테세우스 신화가 갖는 정치․사회적 의미 － 아테네, 스파르타, 소아시아 등 다원적 관계를 중심으로

Abstract

The two Greek heroes, Herakles and Theseus, have been discussed respectively in different contexts. Herakles was regarded as an ancestor of the Herakleidai (the offspring of Herakles), that is, the Dorians including the Spartans. Herakles was not a progenitor of a definite polis, but tribes of a comprehensive concept. He came to be exploited as a symbol of worldwide states of Alexander or Rome. Theseus, however, who fought the Minotaur of Crete and the Amazons of Asia Minor in cooperation with other heroes, came to be transformed to a relatively exclusive symbol as the founder of the Athenian polis. The Greek world then was not consisted of two or three cores of power, but decentralized regions or tribes of relatively minute scale. The cooperation of Herakles and Theseus could not be understood exclusively in the structure of the antagonism between Athens and Sparta. The cooperation of them rather was exploited especially in Athens as an ideology for the unification of Attika and the extended areas of the Aegean Sea as well. Furthermore, there is a possibility that the version of their cooperation could be created by the Athenians rather than Dorians. That is, The myth of Herakles might have much more significance in Athens than Sparta. In the 5C B.C. the Athenians built the temple of Hephaistos (Hephaisteion) in the Agora of Athens and the Athenian Treasury in Delphoi, where the exploits of Theseus and Herakles were described together in the same temples. On the other hand, the significance of Heracles to the Athenians can not defined as one and the same, and the degree of hostility against Sparta varied according to each region of Attika and each individual of political propensity. Nobody, including even Euripides, cannot represent the mentality of the Athenians as a whole. Furthermore, when Euripides denounces the Spartans being murders in plenty, seeking after profits by hook or crook, speaking against their true intention and being proper to be cursed, it may not be oriented just to the Spartans but be a warning as well to the Athenians themselves who were spectators of his tragedy. In conclusion, the concepts that Herakles was a Dorian hero in the period of their immigration, conquest and settlement before the development of polis and then he was never worshipped as the hero of a developped polis need to be altered to the following : the worship of Herakles continued without suspension and spread widely even in Athens itself as elsewhere, nevertheless it was never promoted to the nationwide scale of the polis. The essential point here is not to divide between the earlier period of tribal state and the later one of advanced polis, but between the inclination for concentration of power and decentralized diversity of each region. That is, the political and social significance of the worship of Herakles refers to the diversity, localism and decentralization. On the other hand, Theseus in the 5C B.C. of Athens sometimes got exploited as a symbol of the Athenian power over the Aegean Sea.