Heroon in the context of "Pleuron of Aetolia"

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, 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 minor 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 century 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.

The Library of Celsus (Greek: Βιβλιοθήκη του Κέλσου) is an ancient Roman building in Ephesus, Anatolia, located near the modern town of Selçuk, in the İzmir Province of western Turkey. The building was commissioned in the years 110s CE by a consul of the Roman Empire, Tiberius Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, as a funerary monument for his father Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, former proconsul of Asia, and completed during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, sometime after Aquila's death.

The Library of Celsus is considered an architectural marvel, and is one of the few remaining examples of great libraries of the ancient world located in the Roman Empire. It was the third-largest library in the Greco-Roman world behind only those of Alexandria and Pergamum, and is believed to have held around 12,000 scrolls. Celsus is buried in a crypt beneath the library in a decorated marble sarcophagus. The interior measured roughly 180 square metres (2,000 square feet).

In Greek mythology, Cleodaeus (Ancient Greek: Κλεοδαῖος) was one of the Heracleidae, a grandson of Heracles. He was the son of Heracles's eldest son Hyllus and Iole of Oechalia. He became father of Aristomachus, who led the third attempt to capture Mycenae and failed. He also had a daughter Lanassa, who married Neoptolemus and had by him several children, one of whom was named Pyrrhus. Cleodaeus had a heroon (hero-shrine) at Sparta.

Cleodaeus was also the name of a son of Heracles with an unnamed female slave of Omphale.

The name Alcon (/ˈælkɒn/; Ancient Greek: Ἄλκων) or Alco can refer to a number of people from classical mythology:

• Alcon, a Laconian prince as the son of King Hippocoon, usurper of Tyndareus. He was one of the hunters of the Calydonian Boar. Alcon was killed, together with his father and brothers, by Heracles, and had a heroon at Sparta.
• Alcon, a son of Erechtheus, king of Athens, and father of Phalerus the Argonaut. Gaius Valerius Flaccus represents him as such a skillful archer that once, when a serpent had entwined his son, he shot the serpent without hurting his child. Virgil mentions an Alcon, whom Servius calls a Cretan, and of whom Servius relates almost the same story as that which Valerius Flaccus ascribes to Alcon, the son of Erechtheus.
• Alcon, son of Abas, king of the Abantes in Euboea and thus, brother to Arethousa and Dias. He may also be a brother to Canethus and Chalcodon, father of Elephenor.
• Alcon, a son of Ares, and another one of the hunters of the Calydonian Boar, according to Hyginus.
• Another Alcon is mentioned by Ovid as a craftsman who made a wonderful mixing bowl given to Aeneas by Anius king of Delos.
• Another, otherwise unknown personage, of the same name occurs in Cicero.

In Greek mythology, Pergamus (/ˈpɜːrɡəməs/; Ancient Greek: Πέργαμος) was the son of the warrior Neoptolemus and Andromache. Pergamus's parents both figure in the Trojan War, described in Homer's The Iliad: Neoptolemus was the son of Achilles and fought on the Greek side, while Andromache was the Trojan prince Hector's wife. After the death of both Achilles and Hector, and the fall of Troy, Neoptolemus captured the newly widowed Andromache for his concubine and went to rule in Epirus. After Neoptolemus's death, some sources say that Andromache returned to Asia Minor with her youngest son, Pergamus, although this is probably a later addition to the legend.

The Kingdom of Pergamon (or Pergamum), while it was independent, seems to have created new mythology about Pergamus. According to them, upon traveling to Asia Minor with his mother, Pergamus killed the king of Teuthrania, renamed the capital after himself to Pergamum, and ruled as king. Andromache's descendants would include the royal family of Epirus (and thus Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great), and Pergamus's line would include Attalus, the forefather of the Attalid rulers (although not a king himself and considered of common stock). This account is distrusted as transparently created to build a link between the Attalid dynasty, the rulers of Pergamon; and Alexander the Great, the great source of legitimacy that Hellenistic rulers sought to link to themselves. It does not appear to have been a major part of Attalid propaganda (unlike their claimed link to the hero Telephus), but at least one small heroon (shrine) in Pergamon was dedicated to Pergamos Ktistes, probably built in the 3rd century BC.