Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  VIII

  ODYSSEUS

  Achilles was killed beneath the walls of Troy. The nine Muses sang his dirge. A host of nereids dressed his corpse in robes of supernatural beauty. For seventeen days the Greeks desisted from battle to mourn him and on the eighteenth they burned his body along with those of droves of sheep and cattle. They paraded in full battle armor around the pyre. They gathered up his charred bones, preserved them in wine and aromatic oils, and placed them in a golden urn and then they buried them beneath a splendid tomb on a high headland

  a landmark glimpsed from far out to sea

  by men of our day and men of days to come.

  That was Achilles’ end—solemn, public and conclusive, the end to which he had freely consented.

  Achilles chooses death; Odysseus, his opposite, longs to go home and reclaim his life. But before he can regain Ithaca Odysseus must undergo the temporary death customarily imposed on semidivine men and incarnated gods. He goes down into the underworld where the “burnt-out wraiths” shrill and flitter like bats, the place of nonbeing which Homer evokes with such pathos and horror that Plato would have liked to ban the reading of his description for fear that it might prove demoralizing to fighting men. There Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles and compliments him on the godlike qualities which won him so much honor in his lifetime and which entitle him now to “lord it over the dead.” Achilles’ response is grim: “No winning words about death to me shining Odysseus!” The pact he made (irrevocable now) has proved more terrible than he could have imagined. The immortal fame he won was a piffling satisfaction, no compensation for the loss of precious life. These are the sentiments Plato wanted to keep from those “on whom freedom places the obligation to fear servitude more than death.” They would be wrong to do so, says Achilles. He would prefer to be slave to a landless peasant, if he could only be alive again, than rule over all the “breathless dead.” He paid for glory with his life, and glory wasn’t worth the price. Paragon of heroes, he announces that the heroic code is founded on a misestimation.

  In 1867 when Garibaldi—the dauntless warrior who held out the prospect of violent death as though it were a privilege, the diplomatic dunderhead who repeatedly alienated his allies because he couldn’t tell a lie, the man as beautiful as a god, the nineteenth-century Achilles—had returned defeated from Mentana, Alexander Herzen apostrophized him: “Garibaldi, last of the Saints, last of the Mohicans, fold your hands and take your rest…. You have done your part. Make room now for madness, for the frenzy of blood … Now there will be lakes of blood, seas of blood, mountains of corpses.” Herzen could not have foreseen the forms that madness would take, but he was right about the blood, and he was right to connect its spilling with the cult of a conquering hero. Achilles has always had critics alive to the terrible aspect of his glory. Homer’s Agamemnon calls him “the most violent man alive.” Euripides and Flavius Philostratus both represented him as a vengeful ghost. Plato found him contemptibly self-indulgent and disgracefully arrogant. To Cicero his rage seemed like a mental illness. Horace wrote of his anger and the damage he did to his own people. To Virgil and Catullus he appeared criminally destructive, a mass murderer and an agent of social collapse. Shakespeare characterized him as a preening bullyboy, a vain, unscrupulous thug.

  Just to the northwest of London’s Hyde Park Corner stands a monumental piece of sculpture erected in 1822 in honor of the Duke of Wellington, a man who, because he lived to a great old age and involved himself in the compromising business of government, is not now remembered with the degree of romantic adoration accorded Nelson (whom Wellington, at their only meeting, found “so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me”) but who was in his lifetime venerated as his nation’s savior and champion. It is a statue of Achilles. It shows a sword-wielding warrior with furrowed brow, sneering lip, and stupendous musculature. Cast from the metal of captured Napoleonic cannon, it is a piece of hard lines and slabby masses, product of the exaggeratedly virile aesthetic tradition from which fascist and socialist-realist art would eventually evolve. One of Oscar Wilde’s sophisticated young ladies, on receiving an unwelcome marriage proposal in front of it, exclaims, “Really … that dreadful Achilles!” The goings-on for which he has been the inspiration, in her opinion, “are quite appalling.”

  On May 5, 1915, eight months after the outbreak of the First World War and fifty-five years after Garibaldi and his Thousand scrambled aboard their clapped-out hijacked steamers and set off to make Italy, those few of the expeditionaries who were still living returned to Quarto. A monument commemorating their marvelous adventure was to be unveiled. Peppino Garibaldi, the great man’s grandson, was there. And so were thousands upon thousands of other Italians, from all but the highest (the king himself stayed away for diplomatic reasons—Garibaldi’s political legacy was as embarrassing to the monarchy he had served as the man himself had been) to the lowest. They had come to pay their respects to a dead hero whom time had all but deified. And they had come as well to applaud a living idol, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s foremost poet and most flamboyant celebrity. A swindler and a spendthrift who seldom honored a contract or paid a debt, a fastidious aesthete who refused to occupy a hotel room until his servants had checked the linen and cluttered the place up with the silk damask cushions and precious knickknacks with which he always traveled, a seductive conversationalist and the author of reams of elaborately decadent verse—D’Annunzio was an incongruous disciple for the taciturn and frugal Garibaldi. But the two men had some traits in common. D’Annunzio was, as Garibaldi had been in his time, an energetic and prodigiously successful lover and the object of popular adulation approaching the intensity of worship. He had fought only in private duels (after one of which an overenthusiastic and injudicious second had dressed his head wound with an ointment which left him completely bald), but, like Garibaldi, he had an Achillean thirst for death and glory. He was also, like Garibaldi, an ardent nationalist who detested Austria and its allies.

  Five years earlier, in flight from his creditors and in pursuit of a statuesque beauty who had modeled for Rodin, D’Annunzio had moved precipitately to France. Now, with German guns already audible in Paris, he had returned, in response to pleas from the French government and the urgent invitations of the Italian interventionist party, to inaugurate a campaign designed to persuade Italy’s leaders to enter the war on the side of the Allies. Invited to give an address on the occasion of the unveiling of a monument at Quarto, he had accepted eagerly. Here was an occasion which would allow him to return home haloed with associations perfectly adjudged to flatter his sense of himself as Italy’s new champion. He would stand where Garibaldi had stood and speak where Garibaldi had spoken. He too would have his legion: he was to be escorted by Peppino Garibaldi’s Italian volunteers, who had been fighting for France. And like the dead hero he would urge his countrymen to kill and die for him and for glory. He pawned, not for the first time, the emerald ring the great actress Eleonora Duse had given him. He prevailed upon the couturier Paquin to donate a load of fine new red shirts for the Italian legion (the Garibaldini’s outlaw style appealed to him as a romantic fantasy: in reality he preferred his own and his attendants’ clothes well cut). He disposed of his dogs—he adored greyhounds—giving two of them to Marshal Pétain. He wrote his speech. Abandoning his mistresses and creditors and his rented home (whose contents, when he finally reclaimed them, made up eight truckloads), he turned his back on France as insouciantly as he had previously abandoned Italy and set off for Quarto to assume the glory of association with Garibaldi’s great name.

  Garibaldi had changed since the time of his death. Like Cato, who had died a human-size defender of tradition and political propriety only to rise again as a titanic advocate of liberty, so Garibaldi, in his grave, had both swelled and altered. The new nation of Italy had been energetic in generating its own foundation myth and that myth’s hero was Garibaldi. In 1895 a colossal equestrian statue of him was erected on the Janicu
lum looking down, sorrowful and sublime, on the city he had failed to save. And as his image brooded in fact over Italy’s capital, so the idea of him loomed enormous in Italians’ imagination. The frustrations and trials of his later life had ensured the preservation of his reputed purity. Excluded from power, he had been exempted from guilt by association with a succession of increasingly corrupt and unpopular governments. He was Italy’s creator, its patron saint, its conscience and its redeemer. His name was on street signs all over the peninsula. In Vienna in 1896 Sigmund Freud thought that his own father on his deathbed looked like Garibaldi. Afterwards he dreamed he saw his father alive again and leading a popular uprising and in his dream he was deeply gratified that his parent was showing himself worthy of his resemblance to such a marvelous man.

  D’Annunzio had played his part in Garibaldi’s posthumous inflation, composing a thousand-line poem recounting the adventure of the Thousand which he read aloud to a packed theater in 1901. The poem conjures up an image of Garibaldi as grand and marmoreal as Seneca’s vision of Cato. He sits his white horse, his fair hair streaming, his white cloak billowing like the white wings of the Victory of Samothrace. On Caprera the wind howls around him, as once in Palermo the intoxicated population howled out their adoration of him, but neither the raging elements nor the storms of human emotion perturb him. He is silent and impassive, a “Lord of Fate” not to be cowed or elated by anything the world can show him.

  D’Annunzio’s younger English contemporary Alfred Noyes worshipfully described Francis Drake in similar terms as

  A Titan that had stood

  Thundering commands against the thundering heavens,

  On lightning-shattered, storm-swept decks, and quaffed

  Great draughts of glory from the untameable seas

  These tremendous heroes riding out the tempests unmoved are recognizably descended from the stoic wise man, but they are descendants grown so colossal as to dwarf the rest of their race. In the millennium after the Iliad was first written down poets tried to account for Achilles’ extraordinary prowess by making him monstrously large. Virgil called him the “huge Achilles.” Quintus of Smyrna, writing in the fourth century AD, compared him to a Titan, and wrote of the vast bones, like those of a giant, lying in the ashes of his funeral pyre. So Noyes’s Drake and D’Annunzio’s Garibaldi had grown. They were not just great humans. They were supermen.

  The superman had ancient antecedents, but in D’Annunzio’s lifetime he was reborn from the head of Friedrich Nietzsche. The brilliant son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche was elected to a prestigious professorship when only twenty-four and succumbed to madness twenty years later, having first produced a sequence of visionary texts which read more like prophetic books than philosophical treatises and which were to prove influential in ways more dreadful than even their author—whose lucid pessimism cost him his sanity—could ever have imagined. Twenty-five hundred years earlier Aristotle had imagined a godlike man so exceptional he would naturally, by right of his extraordinary gifts, transcend all moral judgment or constitutional control. Nietzsche went further. In 1883, the year after Garibaldi’s death, he began writing Thus Spake Zarathustra, the work in which he prophesied the evolution of the superman, a being whose will and courage would be sufficient to transcend the “dirt and miserable ease” of mundane existence, who would be to humans as humans are to the apes, a hero compounded of lightning and madness, “to whom nothing is forbidden except weakness, whether that weakness be called vice or virtue.”

  Nietzsche poured contempt on the ideals of democracy and the cherishing of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. “Mankind in the mass sacrificed to the prosperity of a single stronger species of man—that would be an advance,” he wrote. “I teach that there are higher and lower men, and that a single individual can under certain circumstances justify the existence of entire millennia.” Such a “higher being” was worth a countless number of mere ordinary humans. The emergence of Napoleon seemed to him adequate compensation for the all the bloodshed attendant on the French Revolution (which he otherwise deplored). “For the sake of a similar prize one would have to desire the anarchic collapse of our entire civilisation.”

  To D’Annunzio—who unhesitatingly identified himself as one of Nietzsche’s higher beings—these were entirely congenial ideas. Nietzsche’s superman cared nothing for received opinion or conventional morality. One of the mottoes D’Annunzio had printed on his writing paper was “Me ne frego” (a obscene expression of indifference—fregarsi means to masturbate). He read Nietzsche in French translations during the 1890s and in his fiction thereafter he repeatedly describes a hero who is too exceptional to be constrained by any moral or legal code and too intent on realizing his own greatness to have any consideration for others.

  Garibaldi was not the Christian saint he has sometimes been taken for, but he was not a Nietzschean superman either. At Quarto his name was used to lend credence to a cause with whose aims he would certainly have been sympathetic, but whose Nietzschean overtones might have repelled him. He was an avowed pacifist (admittedly rather incongruously, given that fighting had been most of his life’s work). “It is a crime for men to be forced to butcher one another in order to come to an understanding,” he wrote. Nietzsche celebrated “the desire to destroy, to change, to create something new … an exuberant force, pregnant with Future.” That force was increasingly palpable in Italy’s cultural and political life in the early years of the twentieth century. The most vocal of the younger generation were greedy for novelty, for violent transformation, for a holocaust. “So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers!” wrote Federico Marinetti, spokesman of the Futurists. The past was to be swept away, and if some gold was lost along with the dross—well, so be it. D’Annunzio, urging his countrymen to go to war, was bringing a message many of them were more than ready to hear. Marinetti called war “the world’s only hygiene.” As Nietzsche had declared, “One has renounced the grand life when one renounces war.”

  D’Annunzio was, by common consent even of those who detested him, a mesmerizing orator. His speech at Quarto was incoherent but intoxicating. He paid tribute to the heroism of the Thousand. He quoted Garibaldi’s most famous line, “Here we make Italy, or we die.” He spoke of the noble aspirations of Rome’s ancient heroes. He flattered his audience and challenged them, daring them to be worthy of their great antecedents. He wrapped his provocative politics and his own perverse appetite for bloodshed in the gorgeous grandeur of liturgical rhythms. He was vatic, inspirational. His audience adored him and he adored their adoration. Crowds gathered outside his hotel in Genoa. His carefully prepared oration was rapidly followed by others, delivered extempore. The city was full of fervent nationalists who had assembled there in the hope of patriotic adventure and violent action and who were all calling upon D’Annunzio to give them a lead. Again and again he addressed them: in four days he spoke seven times.

  A week later he moved on to Rome. Contemporary photographs show the streets and squares around the railway station packed solid with people who had turned out to welcome him. He narrowly escaped being trampled to death by his admirers before he was hustled to safety through a hotel kitchen. Repeatedly, over the next few days, he addressed the increasingly hysterical crowds. He spoke from his balcony. He interrupted a performance at the Constanzi Theatre to speak from the stage. He spoke on the Capitol.

  D’Annunzio’s rhetoric was profoundly subversive of both the new institutions of Italian democracy and the old aristocratic politics. “The command passes to the people,” he announced, and he proclaimed himself, the “armed poet,” the people’s mouthpiece. His language was increasingly violent, his sentiments increasingly seditious. He attacked the government, still intent on appeasement, in vitriolic terms. They had betrayed their country. The very air of Rome stank of their treachery. Those who still hung back from war were traitors, assassins of the patria, Italy’s executioners. He was openly challenging established authori
ty: “If it is considered a crime to incite citizens to violence then I boast of committing that crime.” He called upon the Roman mob to take the law into their own hands, urging them not just to reject their unworthy leaders but to hunt them down. “Proscribe them. Form squads. Lie in wait to take them, to capture them … Be pitiless. You have the right.” An observer reports that the applause when he paused was like a storm. When he resumed, “the storm was transformed into a cyclone.”

  For days on end Rome was in a state of riot. Urged on by D’Annunzio the mob attempted to storm the parliament building. They attacked the prime minister’s house using a fire engine as a tank. They rang all the church bells, by ancient tradition a general summons to arms in the case of grave emergency. Hundreds of people were arrested. D’Annunzio was beside himself, beyond himself. His notebooks describe the delirium, his own and the mob’s: “There is nothing of myself left in me. I am like the demon of the tumult, I am like the genius of the free people … I am no longer intoxicated with myself alone, but with all my race.” On May 13 the prime minister resigned, and eleven days later the new government declared war on Austria and Germany.

  Among the rioters that month was the ex-soldier and journalist Benito Mussolini. Formerly the editor of the Socialist newspaper Avanti! Mussolini had been expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for calling on his country to enter the war. In his new paper, Il Popolo d’ltalia, he inveighed furiously against “dead” neutralists and appeasers, urging his readers to shoot members of parliament in the back and recommending the ennobling and purifying effects of killing foreigners. A latter-day Clodius, he encouraged the formation of fasti, groups which, like Clodius’s collegia, were ostensibly designed for the protection and benefit of the community but which were dedicated in fact to violence and to the aggrandizement of their leader. He welcomed D’Annunzio’s intervention. A decade later he described the events of May 1915 as a “revolution” and boasted that in that glorious month the Italian people had risen up against their corrupt and lily-livered rulers, clamoring for the right to prove their honor and the collective heroism of their race.