Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  This agent of mass slaughter and perpetrator of atrocity, this “monstrous man” as Priam justly calls him, Achilles, is still “the best of the Achaeans,” the supreme exemplar of heroic virtue. Back in camp he presides at splendid funeral games for Patroclus. As instigator of the games and giver of the prizes he does not compete: were he to do so, he would, of course, be unbeatable. He consoles the losers, arbitrates wherever there is a dispute, sends all home happy with the generosity of his awards. His rage has left him. When Agamemnon wishes to compete as spear thrower, risking an embarrassing situation if he loses, Achilles intervenes to prevent him by tactful flattery, acknowledging, as he once so passionately refused to do, his commander’s superiority: “You are the best by far.” Even his deference is princely. He is courteous, judicious, munificent, a lord among men. In a warrior culture, nobility coexists comfortably with a capacity for mass murder.

  For twelve days Hector’s body lies unburied. For twelve days Achilles mourns for Patroclus, wandering distraught along the beach, or time and again lashing his enemy’s corpse to his chariot and dragging it three times around his beloved’s tomb. At last the gods intervene. Thetis comes to tell her son that it is Zeus’s will he return the body. That night, helped by Hermes, who has led him unseen past the Greek sentries, old King Priam appears in Achilles’ tent, and begs to be allowed to ransom Hector’s body. He offers in exchange magnificent gifts: twelve of the brocaded robes for which the weavers of Troy are celebrated all over the known world, tripods and cauldrons, ten bars of gold, a priceless Thracian cup. Achilles, who has repeatedly spurned Agamemnon’s attempts to conciliate him with rich gifts, accepts.

  His doing so is a signal that he may be ready to exchange the quasi-divinity of the warrior enraged for the compromised condition of the socialized human being. On the wonderful shield Hephaestus forged for him two cities are depicted, two visions juxtaposed. One is that of a world of war, where even allies quarrel over tactics, where animals and men alike are promiscuously and wastefully killed, where the only way of resolving differences is by the slaughter of opponents. The other is a microcosm of civilized life, typified first by weddings and dancing, emblems of union and cooperative creation, and, most pointedly, by the detailed representation of a dispute resolved, not by violence, but by argument culminating in financial payment. A man has been murdered. The killer and the victim’s kinsman have come into the marketplace so that the case may be publicly debated. The killer offers to pay the blood price. The other refuses to accept it. Both ask for a judge to “cut the knot” of their antagonism, to save them from the horrors of vendetta. The elders of the city, in turn, propose solutions. Money, not blood, will end this quarrel.

  Mercenary exchange has frequently been held to be antithetical to the heroic ideal. One who allows himself to be bought off forfeits his claim to glory. Plato censured Homer for showing the great Achilles trading a corpse for gifts. A hero should not be represented as suffering from the “disease of mean-spirited avarice.” Sallust, the Roman historian, praised the great men of Rome’s early days for their disdain for gold, their preference for fame: “To be seen of all while doing a splendid deed, this they considered riches.” Virgil, whose hero was the Trojan prince Aeneas, cast Achilles as the archenemy, not only of Troy but of civilization in general, and took every opportunity of discrediting him: in the Aeneid the events of the Iliad are conflated so as to suggest that Achilles was driven by financial greed, that he killed Hector with the ignoble intention of selling him. The distaste for deal making has proved persistent. At the beginning of the twentieth century members of the European nobility still thought twice before marrying their children to nouveaux riches who had made their fortunes in trade.

  The heroes of the Iliad have no such scruples. In the terrifyingly belligerent world Homer describes, the making of a financial deal seems like a blessed release from the otherwise inevitable cycle of killing and counterkilling. As Ajax argues, “Any man will accept the blood-price paid / for a brother murdered, a child done to death.” Once the price has been paid, the murderer can be reincorporated into society and the injured man must “curb his pride, his smouldering, vengeful spirit.” Such transactions may run counter to the individual’s craving for vengeance, but they are necessary to the preservation of the community. Far from being dishonorable, they are manifestations of praiseworthy forbearance. Achilles’ refusal to accept Agamemnon’s gifts along with his apology is a sign that he is still death-bent, an enemy of his own kind, a “hard, ruthless man.”

  He accepts the exchange Priam proposes because the old king asks it not only for his own sake but also for that of Achilles’ father, who will some day grieve as he does now for the loss of a glorious son. Touched at last, Achilles weeps with him. The rage which had made him emotionally inviolable is passed. He feels pity, for Priam, for his own father, for Patroclus, for himself. He is no longer isolated, no longer either superhuman or subhuman, but part of a family, part of a race. He urges Priam to eat, as Odysseus and Thetis have each on earlier occasions urged him, the need for food being something which humbles people, reminds them of their vulnerability and of the imperative need for cooperation. He seems almost ready to countenance the compromises and sacrifices a social existence requires, to accept the limitations physicality sets to a human’s behavior. Ever since Briseis was taken from him he has been set on a suicidal course. “Only death submits to no man,” says Agamemnon, infuriated by his obduracy, but Achilles has been as implacable as death, and implacably set on dying. Perhaps, if it were open to him to chose again, he might this time chose survival. But he is given no second chance. Priam returns to Troy with Hector’s body. For twelve days both sides observe a truce while the Trojans celebrate the funeral rites. Shortly after the fighting resumes Achilles falls.

  The Romans had a legend that in earliest times a chasm opened up in the center of the Forum, threatening to yawn wide enough to swallow the city. The terrified citizens consulted the oracles, which told them that the horrid mouth would close only if Rome’s greatest treasure were cast into it. A splendid young man named Curtius, handsome, brave, and nobly born, at once sprang upon his horse, and, fully armed as though for battle, put his spurs to its sides and leapt into the abyss. The earth closed over him. The city was saved. Similarly the death of Achilles, “the best of the Achaeans,” opens the way for a Hellenic victory. Once their supreme warrior, their greatest treasure, has been sacrificed, the Greeks take Troy.

  When the war is over, when the fabled towers of Troy are shattered, its riches plundered and its people slaughtered or enslaved, when the Greeks at last have sailed away, Poseidon and Apollo throw down the massive rampart that protected the Greek ships. The proper sacrifices were not made before building began. The prodigious wall is an impious defacement of the landscape. The gods call upon the waters of the earth to wash it away. Rivers in flood, torrential rain, the sea’s breakers all batter against it until there is nothing left of that desperate labor. This war, the most celebrated in human history, is to leave no trace upon the face of the earth.

  “You’d think me hardly sane,” says Apollo to a fellow god, “[i]f I fought with you for the sake of wretched mortals. / Like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire, / feeding on earth’s gifts, than they waste away and die.” Human affairs, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, are of gnatlike insignificance. Human aspirations are absurd. Human quarrels are petty and the human life span as short as summer’s lease.

  For Homer’s heroes life’s pathetic brevity renders it all the more precious. They have no faith in a sublime afterlife to compensate for this one’s evanescence. The souls of the dead survive, but once parted from their bodies their existence is shadowy and mournful. When a warrior dies his soul goes “winging down to the House of Death, / wailing its fate, leaving his manhood far behind, / his young and supple strength.” Physical beauty, the marvelous vigor and grace of the human body, these are life’s splendors. The pleasures of the intellect, o
f stratagem and storytelling and debate, are prized as well, but they too are a part of corporeal life, dependent for their very existence on ear and tongue and brain.

  Achilles and his fellows treat bodies, alive or dead, with reverence and tenderness—or with a violence which deliberately outrages the body’s acknowledged sanctity. More than half of the fighting described in the Iliad consists of battles over corpses, as a warrior’s enemies try to strip his fallen body of armor (which, poignantly, is far more durable than its wearers) while his comrades struggle to defend him from such posthumous indignity, giving their lives sometimes to save one already dead. It is the flesh that is precious; without it the spirit is of little consequence. Funerals are awesome, long drawn out, and prodigally expensive. Funeral games honor the dead by celebrating the survivors’ bodily strength and swiftness and skill, insisting, even in commemoration of one who has lost it, that the breath of life is of ineffable value. And once gone it is irretrievable. Achilles refuses all Agamemnon’s proffered presents, and he would refuse them even if they were as numberless as the sand, for all the world’s wealth is worth less than his little time in the sun. “A man’s life’s breath cannot come back again once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.”

  But just as the disincarnate spirit is a sad and paltry thing, so the inanimate flesh is gross and open to the most squalid abuse. The dignity of embodied man is exquisitely precarious. “Oh my captains,” cries Patroclus, grieving over the beleaguered Greeks. “How doomed you are … to glut with your shining fat / the wild dogs of battle here in Troy.” The Homeric warriors, who have lived for over nine years by a battlefield, the horrors of war perpetually before their eyes, are haunted by the knowledge that the strong arms, the tireless shoulders, the springy knees in which they take such pride are also so much grease to be melted and swallowed up by the impartial earth, so many joints of meat. In one of this harsh poem’s most desolating passages King Priam foresees his own death: “The dogs before my doors / Will eat me raw … The very dogs / I bred in my own halls to share my table … mad, rabid at heart they’ll lap their master’s blood.” Death cancels all relationship, annuls all status. “The dogs go at the grey head and the grey beard / and mutilate the genitals.” Even a king like Priam, his life’s breath gone, is reduced to unlovely matter, defenseless, disgusting. When Zeus sees Achilles’ immortal horses weeping for Patroclus he apologizes to them for having sent them to live with mortals, whose inevitable destiny is so pitiful, so degrading: “There is nothing alive more agonised than man.”

  There is one way to salvage something from the brutal fact of death. To the Homeric warriors it seemed that the fearless confrontation of violence with more violence might be a way to transform themselves from destructible things into indestructible memories. A man without courage is mere evanescent matter. “You can all turn to earth and water—rot away,” Menelaus tells the Greeks when none among them is brave enough to take up Hector’s challenge to single combat. But a man ready to go out and meet death, cheats it. The battlefield, as Homer tells us over and over again, is where “men win glory,” and the winning of glory, for the ancients, had a precise and urgent purpose. “Ah my friend,” says Sarpedon to his comrade, “if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal, / I would never fight on the front lines again / or command you to the field where men win fame. / But now as it is, the fates of death await us / … and not a man alive / Can flee them or escape—so in we go for the attack! / Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves.” Only glory could palliate the grim inexorability of death. The man who attained it distinguished himself in life from the mass of his fellows, and when he died he escaped oblivion.

  Achilles’ surpassing beauty is precious not because of any erotic advantage it may give him but because, along with his strength and prowess, it renders him outstanding. His celebrity is profoundly important to him, as it would be to any of his peers. It is not frivolous vanity that makes him prize it so. A man who is praised and honored while he is alive may be remembered even after his body is reduced to ashes and his spirit has gone down into the dark. To be forgotten is to die utterly. To Agamemnon, facing defeat as the Trojans close on the Greek ships, the most terrible aspect of the fate awaiting him and his army is that, once they have been massacred so far from home, their memory will be “blotted out.” The only moment in the Iliad when Achilles shows fear is when the river Xanthus comes close to overpowering him, to sweeping him away ignominiously “like some boy, some pig-boy” and threatens to bury him in slime and silt so deep that his bones will never be found, and no fine burial mound will ensure his lasting fame.

  St. Augustine understood the ancients’ craving for fame, and what seemed to him their overvaluation of the “windy praise of men.” Looking back from the standpoint of one to whom Christ’s death had offered the hope of Heaven, he wrote forgivingly of the folly with which they tried to extend and to give significance to their pathetically finite lives: “Since there was no eternal life for them what else were they to love apart from glory, whereby they chose to find even after death a sort of life on the lips of those who sang their praise?”

  That windy afterlife could be attained by killing. Better still, it could be achieved by being killed in battle. In the Odyssey Achilles’ shade and that of Agamemnon meet in the underworld. Agamemnon who, alive, insisted so vehemently on his supremacy, now defers to the other, paying tribute to Achilles’ glorious end. Rank confers honor, but only a soldier’s death brings glory. Murdered on his return to Mycenae by his wife Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, as the victim of a squalid and abhorrent crime, is degraded in perpetuity. He wishes, and Achilles agrees that he is right to do so, that he had been killed at Troy. Enviously he describes Achilles’ funeral, the eighteen days of unbroken mourning and somber ceremony, the tears, the dirges, the burnt offerings, the games, the long cortege of men in battle armor, the resounding roar that went up when the pyre was lit, the great tomb built over the hero’s bones. “Even in death your name will never die. / Great glory is yours, Achilles, / for all time, in the eyes of all mankind.”

  The gods held to their side of the bargain Achilles made. His fame has yet to die. For the Greeks of the classical era, for the Romans after them, and—after a lapse of nearly a thousand years during which the Greek language was all but forgotten in the West—for every educated European gentleman (and a few ladies) from the Renaissance until the beginning of the twentieth century, the two Homeric epics were the acknowledged foundations of Western culture, and “the best of the Achaeans” the prototypical hero.

  In 334 BC Alexander, the twenty-two-year-old king of Macedonia, already remarkable for his daring and his vast ambition, chose to make his first landfall in Asia on the beach traditionally held to be the one where, some nine centuries earlier, the Greeks’ black ships were drawn up throughout the ten harrowing years that they laid siege to Troy. Alexander slept every night with a copy of the Iliad, which he called his “journey-book of excellence in war,” beneath his pillow along with a dagger. He claimed that his mother was descended from Achilles. He encouraged his courtiers to address him by Achilles’ name. As his fleet neared the shore he dressed himself in full armor and took the helm of the royal trireme. Before embarking on his world-subduing campaign Alexander had come to pay tribute to his model.

  At Troy, at this period a mere village, he refused the citizens’ offer of the instrument on which Paris (also known as Alexander) used to serenade Helen. “For that lyre,” he told them, “I care little. I have come for the lyre of Achilles, with which, as Homer says, he would sing of the prowess and glories of brave men.” Achilles sang to himself in his tent, evoking the reputation of the heroes dead and gone among whom he wished to be numbered: so Alexander, at this momentous starting point, solemnly honored his great forerunner. Stripped naked, and anointed with oil, he ran with his companions to lay a garland on the mound believed to be Achilles’ tomb.

  That a young Hellenic king,
ambitious of military conquest in Asia and intent on creating for himself the reputation of a warrior to compare with those of the legendary past, should choose Achilles as model and patron is perhaps predictable. But two generations earlier a great man of a very different stamp had also invoked his name. In 399 BC the seventy-year-old philosopher Socrates was put on trial in Athens, accused of refusing to recognize the city’s gods, introducing new deities, and corrupting the young. He was summoned before a court consisting of five hundred of his peers, and invited to make his defense. He proceeded not to answer the charges against him but to mock them. Then, midway through his defense (as it was written down by Plato some years after the event), his tone altered. For a while his famous irony and his provocative sangfroid alike were laid aside. He was unpopular, he said, he realized that, and he had known for some time that he risked incurring a capital charge. But to one who might ask him why, in that case, he persisted in a course which was so evidently irritating to the authorities he said that he would answer, “You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is whether he is acting justly or unjustly.” If he were offered acquittal—and with it his life—on the condition that he would refrain in the future from the kind of philosophical inquiry he was accustomed to practice, he would refuse the offer. “I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.”

  There was an uproar in the court. Unabashed, Socrates reiterated his defiance, alluding to the passage in the Iliad when Thetis tells Achilles that if he reenters the fighting he will die soon, for he is doomed to fall shortly after Hector. “‘Let me die forthwith,’ said [Achilles], ‘… rather than remain here by the beaked ships to be mocked, a burden on the ground.’ Do you suppose that he gave a thought to death and danger?” The quotation was inaccurate but the sentiment is authentically Homeric. Achilles, like Socrates after him, refused to be a “burden on the earth,” a mere lump of animated matter, obedient to the stupid or immoral decrees of others. Wherever he went, Socrates told his judges, established authority would persecute him if he continued to question it, and he would never cease to do so. A life in which he was not free to think and speak as he pleased was “not worth living.” To die was preferable.