In Mark of Athena, Jason meets his sibling, Hercules. He sees what the idealized hero is, and how that person can get bitter and selfish along the way. Hercules mostly blames everyone else and the gods. There's a lot of things that screwed up Jason's life that he could blame on the gods. Instead, he helps them over and over again.
It's pretty interesting how every bit of who Jason is has to do with the gods. His conception came from Beryl's want to meet Zeus again, and his name came from Hera's favorite hero. Up until TLH, Jason's only been doing things as a demigod- embracing his Roman side but not really his mortal side. Then, he spends his next few months confused and learning more about his demigod identity as to if he's more Greek or Roman, only to be used for some grand prophecy. Jason's offered only a couple of weeks of normalcy as a mortal, between HoO and ToA, but he does mention monsters in his school and Apollo interrupts his life. When it comes to Jason, he can't ever escape. Everything about him is for the gods' use.
Anyway, he's called a hero a fair amount (all of the seven are) but he's one of the few characters in which he is nothing more than his identity of a demigod. There's not much to Jason outside of his "hero" label. Which is really curious because... Jason was prescribed this label long before he knew what it meant. TLH's title, The Lost Hero, refers to Jason being gone from Camp Jupiter and losing his memories. Can he still be a hero if he doesn't remember what he did?
Regardless... his arc was about his identity, and I suppose some part of that was trying to figure out what "hero" means. Jason learns a lot from meeting the famed Percy Jackson, hero of CHB, but also learning from his best friends, Leo and Piper who are his personal heroes (It's Piper who says the third quote by the way), along with the rest of the crew. He meets quite a few people who are typically called heroes but don't act that way at all, like Hercules, and those who were constantly scorned and rejected but the most heroic of all, like Nico. So Jason gains a pretty good understanding by the time we see him again in ToA- this is part of his identity finding.
Still. I guess it's up to debate if Jason is a hero, or if he ever was deserving of the title.
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