Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. In Homeric Greek, "hero" (ἥρως, hḗrōs) refers to the mortal offspring of a human and a god. By the historical period, however, the word came to mean specifically a dead man, venerated and propitiated at his tomb or at a designated shrine, because his fame during life or his unusual manner of death gave him power to support and protect the living. A hero was more than human but less than a god, and various kinds of supernatural figures came to be assimilated to the class of heroes; the distinction between a hero and a god was less than certain, especially in the case of Heracles, the most prominent, but atypical hero.

The grand ruins and tumuli (large burial mounds) remaining from the Bronze Age gave the pre-literate Greeks of the 10th and 9th centuries BC a sense of a once grand and now vanished age; they reflected this in the oral epic tradition, which would become famous by way of works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Copious renewed offerings begin to be represented, after a hiatus, at sites like Lefkandi, even though the names of the grandly buried dead were hardly remembered. "Stories began to be told to individuate the persons who were now believed to be buried in these old and imposing sites", observes Robin Lane Fox. In other words, this is a clear cut example of an origin story for Heroes and what they meant to the Ancient Greeks.