Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The Stoic thinkers whom Cato studied so assiduously went much further. Aristotle had declared that suicide was an unmanly act, but Diogenes, the first Cynic, formulated the maxim “Either reason or the rope”—if a man could not live a life which reason could approve, then he might as well hang himself. The Stoics, who adapted and developed Diogenes’ ideas, maintained that happiness and wisdom alike depended on one’s readiness to give up anything—life included—without regret. To die, wrote Epictetus, would afford the wise man the same joyful relief as walking out of a smoke-filled room. It was not a great step from that position to the idea, most vigorously expressed by Seneca, Cato’s fervent admirer, that suicide is not only justifiable, it is the most perfectly dignified act a person can perform, the only way a mortal can be free, not only of human tyranny but of the caprices of fate. “Do you ask what is the highway to liberty? Any vein in your body… See you that precipice? Down that is the way to liberty. See you that sea, that river, that well? There sits liberty at the bottom.” Cato, wrote Seneca admiringly, when he held the sword to his midriff, had “the wide road of freedom before him.”

  The Christian Fathers disagreed. Suicide was a form of murder. More subtly, it gave evidence of pride. Those who died rather than bear “the enslavement of their own body or the stupid opinion of the mob,” wrote St. Augustine, betrayed their lack of Christian humility. The high Roman fashion for falling on one’s sword rather than submit to another’s authority implies an overvaluation of one’s own dignity, an aristocratic flinching from degradation incompatible with the Christian imperative that all men should humble themselves before God. To a good Christian there need be no shame in defeat and humiliation. Augustine ascribed Cato’s death “not to self-respect guarding against dishonour, but to weakness unable to bear adversity.”

  Most subsequent Christian thinkers endorsed his judgment, but Western culture is a curious amalgam in which the values of pagan antiquity have coexisted for centuries with those of Christian orthodoxy, however mutually contradictory they may be. Throughout most of the last two thousand years suicide has been condemned in actuality as a sin and a crime, suicides’ bodies have been refused Christian burial and interred in the public highway, while secular authority, unable to punish the dead, has punished their heirs instead by confiscating their property. But meanwhile in poetry, paintings, ballads, and plays (including Seneca’s, which enjoyed a tremendous vogue in the early Renaissance), those courageous and uncompromising enough to take their own lives have been wept over and venerated in blithe defiance of church and state alike.

  Suicide is an eloquent admission of defeat, but defeat can be as heroic as victory. Homer’s Hector hoped that “the men to come” would speak of him admiringly as one who had killed a prodigious number of other people, but Achilles, with a more sophisticated or more prescient understanding of the human psyche, looked for glory on the grounds that he himself was to be killed.

  To most of the Romans of Cato’s generation greatness was something which, like wealth and military preeminence, was accorded to a winner. Pompey and Caesar were, in their respective heydays, splendid successes, superb conquerors who celebrated their achievements with days-long processions and monumental marble buildings and heaps of dead gladiators in massive silver. Cato was a failure, and a foredoomed one, a man whose whole life was dedicated to a cause already lost, yet Lucan could write (inaccurately but fervently), “None of our ancestors, by the slaughter of foreign armies, won such fame as Cato.”

  The inception of the Christian era saw the arrival of a new kind of hero, the loser. Those ancient pagans who had been killed or killed themselves were revered anew as sacrificial victims: their suicides, though overtly condemned, won them the kind of pitying adoration accorded to the Christian martyrs. Cato, whose life’s project had failed and who had died defeated, was all the more readily admired for the grimness of his story’s end. On the frescoed walls of the fifteenth-century Sala dei Giganti in Padua he stands serenely holding the sword with which he ripped himself open, posed as the Christian martyrs are on church walls all over Europe, proudly displaying their mutilations and the instruments of their torment.

  Christ crucified, the tortured martyrs, despairing pagans falling resolutely on their swords—these edifying spectacles of suffering all satisfy an apparently almost universal appetite for others’ pain. The greater the suffering, the nobler the man who endures it: the more gruesome Cato’s end, the brighter his glory. To Seneca it seemed that the gods had deliberately made it necessary for him to tear out his own innards in order that his full heroism might be made manifest; “to seek death needs not so great a soul as to re-seek it.” From Olympus they looked down with “exceeding joy … as he made his escape by so glorious and memorable an end.” Fifteen hundred years later Michel de Montaigne wrote that if he were asked to portray Cato “in his most exalted posture” he would paint him “all covered with blood and ripping out his entrails.” Plenty of artists have done precisely that. In half a dozen Renaissance paintings Cato dies hideously, his torso contorted and bloody, his face gaping in pain. Physical horror is the corollary of spiritual glory. Agony is commuted into ecstasy. Montaigne asserted that “Virtue reaches such a pinnacle that she not only despises pain but delights in it. Witness the Younger Cato.” He endured his death as a Stoic should, but “there was in the virtue of that man too much panache and green sap for it to stop there. I am convinced that he felt voluptuous pleasure in so noble a deed … some unutterable joy in his soul, an access of delight and a manly pleasure.”

  Honorary saint and enraptured martyr, Cato proved as useful an ideological totem in subsequent centuries as he had been in imperial Rome. To Dante he was that rare thing, a “free” man, because he was free of sin—a concept Cato would probably have found acceptably close to the Stoic ideal—but he was posthumously enlisted in the cause of other freedoms which he would surely have found at best alien, at worst deplorable. Lucan had imagined Cato in Egypt refusing to consult the oracle of Jupiter Amon on the grounds that he carried the god in his own heart. In retrospect, the story seems to carry a proto-Protestant message: Cato was accordingly a favorite of reforming sixteenth-century theologians. In his life Cato, a conservative and an oligarch whose first public service had been the suppression of a slave revolt, had struggled to defend the privileges of the ruling class and to prevent the rise of the people’s chosen great men, but after his death he was venerated by those who would give power to the people. As the scourge of a would-be king he was admired by seventeenth-century English revolutionaries, and by the Hapsburgs’ opponents in the Protestant states of Germany and the Netherlands. The English, who liked to congratulate themselves after 1688 on being the guardians of liberty, were especially partial to him: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver converses with the spirit of Brutus, who tells him that his companions in the underworld, who include Cato, are a fellowship “to which all ages of the world cannot add.” In revolutionary France he was one of the idols of the new godless religion: his bust was on display in the Jacobin club, and for the 1797 Prix de Rome contending artists painted a powerfully muscled Cato displaying his gruesome wounds to a traumatized assembly of friends and servants. Paragon of integrity and fortitude, Cato was a hero of such unquestionable virtue that any movement claiming to value liberty—however that word might be defined—wanted him for its own.

  In London in 1713, when Addison’s tragedy was first performed, each of the political parties jostled the other to lay claim to its hero. On the first night the theater was packed with grandees of each persuasion. Addison was a Whig, but the Tory Lord Harley took the box next to him and occupied it ostentatiously; once the play began the applause from the competing factions was so loud the actors could hardly make themselves heard. The War of the Spanish Succession had recently ended after a string of British victories. To the Whigs, Cato was the stalwart defender of liberty, as admirably progressive and aggressive as their own nation. Digby Cotes, in a poem inspired by Addison’s pl
ay, called him a “patriot, obstinately good” and compared him with Britannia, who “when her conquering sword she draws / Resolves to perish, or defend her cause.” To a Tory, his story’s significance lay elsewhere, in the fact that he did his utmost to obstruct Caesar’s rise. The Tory Viscount Bolingbroke presented fifty guineas to the actor playing Cato, congratulating him on “defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator,” a transparent reference to eighteenth-century England’s new Caesar, the victorious Duke of Marlborough, whose ambitions the Tories were determined to thwart.

  The play was a prodigious success. “The town is so fond of it,” wrote Pope, “that the orange wenches and fruit women in the park offer the books at the side of coaches.” Even Plato benefited: the Phaedo was republished as “the work mentioned in the tragedy of Cato.” The play’s first run was only ended by the pregnancy of the leading lady (who played Cato’s daughter, a character inserted for love interest). The manager insisted she continue appearing for as long as was humanly possible: during the last few performances a midwife was waiting backstage. Numerous revivals and parodies followed. The play, and its protagonist, enjoyed an international vogue. Addison’s Cato is “stern and awful as a god.” He has no human weaknesses. “His towering soul / Midst all the shock and injuries of fortune / Rises superior.” He is impervious to love and grief alike. He weeps for Rome, but hearing that his son, “obstinately brave and bent on death,” has died in battle he says only, “I am satisfied.” Voltaire thought him “one of the most beautiful characters the theatre can show.” He dies serenely, illumined by a beam of heavenly light. “There fled the greatest soul that ever warm’d / A Roman breast.”

  “One’s way of dying,” wrote the samurai Daidōji Shigesuke in seventeenth-century Japan, “can validate one’s whole life.” Cato’s botched and appalling suicide (which accidentally resembled the samurai death rite of hara-kiri) confirmed his heroic status. The Japanese veneration for the “nobility of failure”—for the uncompromised warrior who, defeated by overwhelming odds, is killed, or kills himself, by taking a sword to his own belly, as Cato did—is paralleled by the Western predilection for tragedy. As Alcibiades, the dazzling, arrogant darling of fortune, boarded his ship to sail to Sicily the effigy of the Adonis, the beloved victim whose myth is centered solely on his death and whose worship is all mourning, was being carried through the streets of Athens. Pathos has a glamour as potent as triumph’s. Adonis is one of a long line of dying heroes and gods (Christ among them) whose legends transparently mirror the natural cycle of decay and renewal, while also appealing powerfully to a widespread sense that stories of downfall and death are more serious, more truthful, than those of victory and splendor. It was from the rites of another such divine victim, Dionysus, that tragedy evolved, and Cato’s willingness to die for his principles elevated him to the status of tragic hero. Alexander Pope encapsulated his character in terms which exactly meet Aristotle’s requirements for the form: “A brave man struggling in the storms of fate / And greatly falling with a falling state.”

  “You choose to cringe and fawn,” Sophocles’ Electra, whose resolve was as inexorable as Cato’s, tells those who urge her to compromise her principles for her own safety. “Those are not my ways … You choose to live but I to die.” Life is a process of ceaseless adaptation and change, but, choosing death, Cato achieved fixity, ensuring that he need never alter or dwindle. “His resolution defeated Mother Nature,” wrote Lucan. He escaped the flux of life, attaining instead a glorious rigor mortis. Freed from his mortal flesh, transformed into an idea as unalterable as Plato’s gods, or as the Stoics’ ideal wise man, he escapes the decay which is the inevitable end of all physical creation.

  More, he offers his admirers a kind of immortality by association. In his lifetime Cato had proposed handing Caesar over to the Germans to be killed in order that the pollution of his war crimes might not fall upon Rome: he understood the function of the scapegoat. After his death the related concept of the immaculate sacrifice became attached to his own story. In Pharsalia Lucan gives him an “oracular” speech in which he declares his longing to be “a national sin-offering,” another Decius dying that his people might be saved. The story goes that Decius, who commanded the Romans in the Samnite wars of the fourth century BC, was told by the gods in a dream that in the next day’s battle one army must lose its commander; the other would lose its entire force. He resolved to die that his country might be victorious. Ordering his men to remain in their places, he rode out all alone, charging into the enemy’s ranks, where he was hacked to pieces. Lucan’s Cato sees his own self-sacrifice in even grander terms. He will ensure not just his compatriots’ victory but their redemption. “My blood would purge all the nations in our empire of the guilt incurred by this civil war. Let them strike at no one but myself, so be it only that my sacrificial blood may redeem all Italians.” He aspires, in other words, to be a heroic victim like Jesus Christ, whose followers’ souls are washed clean by his most precious blood.

  Achilles died in pursuit of eternal glory for himself. Christ died, so his followers believe, to achieve everlasting life for all humanity. Cato had no such high hope. He killed himself simply because his probable future life seemed to him not worth living. But in the eyes of his posthumous admirers he achieved both glory and a transcendental victory akin to Christ’s. Unaffected by cold or heat, by sexual passion or a greed for power, unsmiling, unafraid of despot or mob, godlike Cato is a paragon of freedom and fearlessness. And when he proves himself uncowed even by the inexorable sentence of mortality, he embodies the most poignant and intoxicating fantasy there is, that death has no call to be proud, that a mortal can conquer mortality. “The dying Roman,” wrote Addison, “shames the pomp of death.”

  IV

  EL CID

  When Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as the Cid, died in 1099 all Christendom, according to a French chronicler, lamented, and the “paynims” of Islamic Spain rejoiced. Rodrigo seemed to all his contemporaries, even those of his enemies who most heartily hated him, like one singled out for greatness. His tremendous successes, the ascendancy he established over his peers, even over the kings he intermittently served, awed those around him. He was a never-defeated warrior who rose by his own efforts from ordinary knight to fabulously wealthy ruler of a great city, the hero in his own lifetime of songs and fantastic tales. What Homer would have explained by ascribing divine ancestry to him, what Plato expressed by his metaphor of an admixture of gold in the clay of which the great man was made, the Cid’s contemporaries put down variously to prodigious luck or to the will of God. To Christians he was fortune’s favorite, the beneficiary of a felicitous astrological accident; the author of the Poema de Mío Cid, the epic poem honoring him which was first written down a century after his death, refers to him throughout as “he who was born in a happy hour.” Muslims, who in eleventh-century Spain were on the whole both more devout and more intellectually sophisticated than the Christians with whom they unwillingly shared the peninsula, saw his genius as being a divine gift. Ibn Bassam, the Arab historian and biographer who was his contemporary and the voice of his enemies, who referred to him routinely as “that tyrant the Campeador—may God tear him to pieces,” paid reluctantly generous tribute to the qualities in him which set him above other mere mortals: “This man was the scourge of his times, yet must he also be accounted, by virtue of his appetite for glory, of the prudent steadfastness of his character, and of his heroic courage, one of the greatest of God’s miracles.”

  His story has been repeatedly rewritten to fit the political agenda of subsequent generations. He has been celebrated as the visionary warrior who initiated the Christian “reconquest” of Spain, as the saintly figurehead of the Counter-Reformation, and as Spain’s national hero. He has been identified as the plainspoken commoner whose dauntless courage put the effete and haughty aristocracy to shame. He has been credited with loyally subduing rebellions on behalf of his royal master, King Alfonso VI, an
d laying the basis of a strong centralizing monarchy. He has been seen as the first patriot of a newly unified nation. Above all he has been revered as a crusader, a red-cross knight, a splendid fighter for the cause of Christ’s church militant here on earth. The truth is somewhat cruder. Achilles fought for eternal glory, Alcibiades for worldly fame, Cato for the republic and his own self-respect. Rodrigo Díaz fought for money.

  As a feudal vassal he served his lord, and subsequently his king, in observance of the contract obtaining between all medieval warriors and their liege lords, and he enriched himself in the process. When midway through his adult life he was banished from Castile, he turned mercenary, and for his service as the hired commander of the armies of the Muslim kings of Zaragoza he was rewarded with a great fortune. Finally, exiled for a second time, he campaigned on his own account, carving out a kingdom for himself in eastern Spain and making himself and all his followers rich on the proceeds of his looting and pillaging, his extortion and ransom taking, his slave trading and cattle rustling, his systematic despoliation of the cities he conquered and his opportunistic robbery of whatever undefended property fell in his way. For all this he was universally and heartily admired. The legendary English hero Robin Hood who lived (if he lived at all) in the next century, was said to rob the rich in order to give to the poor. The Cid was less discriminating. He robbed others, any others, in order to secure the loyalty of his own, and his own loved him for it.

  How well he rewarded each of his vassals!

  He has made his knights rich and his foot-soldiers,

  In all his company you would not find a needy man.

  Who serves a good lord lives always in delight.