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Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
From the author of ‘The Pike’ – winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction – a compelling story of heroism told through eight famous lives that span from Achilles to Sir Francis Drake.Beginning beneath the walls of Troy, ending in 1930s Europe, ‘Heroes’ is a compelling evocation of heroism through eight famous lives – Achilles, Odysseus, Alcibiades, Cato, El Cid, Francis Drake, Wallenstein and Garibaldi.Not necessarily all good – sometimes quite the reverse – but all great, they possessed a charisma, a strength of will powerful enough to persuade those around them that they alone could do the incredible and unprecedented.It is a story of morality and dictatorship; money and sorcery; seduction and mass hysteria.
HEROES
Saviours, Traitors and Supermen
LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT
DEDICATION (#ulink_e9e4df59-2783-5af6-b365-2f332dcf2cf1)
For Dan
CONTENTS
COVER (#u6a627130-559f-560d-bed7-8d778d832ced)
TITLE PAGE (#u5b32b299-c9b7-5265-bcfa-df08146c9357)
DEDICATION (#u4ada073d-5723-5e2f-b86d-8009b86030d6)
PROLOGUE (#u0b69959e-f75e-50c2-8dd3-b9fa6b2472aa)
I ACHILLES (#uf0a13dad-8539-5236-b8c1-224519a7b18f)
II ALCIBIADES (#uad64aa14-a4ab-5056-a448-66c7bcae4821)
III CATO (#ucf4f6c19-6381-527f-9aba-9afcba0aa665)
IV EL CID (#litres_trial_promo)
V FRANCIS DRAKE (#litres_trial_promo)
VI WALLENSTEIN (#litres_trial_promo)
VII GARIBALDI (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII ODYSSEUS (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)
REFERENCES (#litres_trial_promo)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES … (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
THE DELIGHT OF WRITING (#litres_trial_promo)
LIFE AT A GLANCE (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS (#litres_trial_promo)
A WRITING LIFE (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE BOOK (#litres_trial_promo)
THE FANTASY OF SUPERMAN (#litres_trial_promo)
READ ON (#litres_trial_promo)
IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE … (#litres_trial_promo)
HAVE YOU READ? (#litres_trial_promo)
FIND OUT MORE (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_db7f11cb-0fbb-5b06-a328-0be60193e37a)
‘RAGE!’ THE FIRST WORD of the Iliad, the word that inaugurates Europe’s literary culture and introduces one of its dominant themes. The rage not of Agamemnon, king and commander, but of Achilles, the semi-divine delinquent, the paradigmatic hero whose terrible choice of glory at the price of an early death has haunted the collective imagination of the West for two and a half millennia.
Heroes are dynamic, seductive people – they wouldn’t be heroes otherwise – and heroic rage is thrilling to contemplate. It is the expression of a superb spirit. It is associated with courage and integrity and a disdain for the cramping compromises by means of which the unheroic majority manage their lives – attributes that are widely considered noble. It is also, and therefore, profoundly disruptive of any civil state. Homer’s Achilles was the ‘the best of the Achaeans’, the pre-eminent Greek warrior, but his rage was directed, not against his people’s enemies, but against Agamemnon, his people’s leader. The Iliad is a celebration of Achilles’ lethal glamour: it is also the story of how he came close to occasioning the defeat of the community of which he was the most brilliant representative.
This book is about Achilles and some of his real-life successors (whether Homer’s hero really lived we are unlikely ever to know for certain). It takes the form of a series of brief lives of people who have been considered by their contemporaries (and in most cases by posterity as well) to be exceptionally, even perhaps supernaturally, gifted and so to be capable of something momentous – the defeat of an enemy, the salvation of a race, the preservation of a political system, the completion of a voyage – which no one else could have accomplished. In 411 BC the people of Athens resolved to recall Alcibiades, whom they had once condemned to death and who had subsequently fought with devastating success for their opponents, because, as one of their commanders told the Assembly, he was ‘the only person living (#litres_trial_promo)’ who could save their state. So the eleventh-century King Alfonso VI of Castile turned to Rodrigo Díaz, known as the Cid – a man he had twice banished – when African invaders poured into Spain, because whatever threat the Cid posed to the stability of the kingdom he was known to have been ‘born in a happy hour (#litres_trial_promo)’ and could therefore never be defeated. And so in 1630 the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, having first nerved himself to dismiss his overweening and intransigent General, Albrecht von Wallenstein, had then to humble himself by imploring Wallenstein to resume his command and save the empire from the onslaught of the invading Swedes, something that, by common consent of all his enemies (he had few friends), Wallenstein alone could hope to do.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. It is in times of emergency that heroes are looked for, and found. Bertolt Brecht wrote, famously, that it is an unhappy land (#litres_trial_promo) that looks for heroes. The dictum is ambiguous, and works both ways. A land without heroes may be fortunate in their absence, for a hero is a menace to any state’s equilibrium. ‘The Argonauts left (#litres_trial_promo) Heracles behind’, noted Aristotle, for the same reason that the Athenians took to ostracizing and sending into exile outstanding citizens, ‘so the Argos would not have on board one so vastly bigger than the rest of the crew.’ But only a fortunate land is confident enough to dispense with heroes. At the time of writing it is fashionable to lament the littleness of those accorded celebrity within our culture – so many footballers and rock stars and models, so few great spirits – but such collective frivolity should be cherished as one of the privileges of peace. It is desperation that prompts people to crave a champion, a protector, or a redeemer and, having identified one, to offer him their worship.
Virtue is not a necessary qualification for heroic status: a hero is not a role model. On the contrary, it is of the essence of a hero to be unique, and therefore inimitable. Some of the people whose stories are told in this book were irreproachable, others were scoundrels. Cato had the highest moral standards and adhered to them as nearly as could possibly be expected. Garibaldi was a man of signal sincerity, although he was not quite so transparently simple as his admirers imagined. (Alfred Lord Tennyson, meeting him in 1864, was delighted to recognize in him the ‘divine stupidity (#litres_trial_promo) of a hero’. In fact Garibaldi was far from dumb: he just didn’t speak English.) Others among my subjects were more morally questionable. Alcibiades was an arrogant libertine and a turncoat several times over. The Cid was a predatory warlord, Drake was a pirate and a terrorist, and Wallenstein was a profiteer prone to apparently psychotic rages whose contemporaries believed him to be in league with the devil. But heroes are not required to be altruistic, or honest, or even competent. They are required only to inspire confidence and to appear, not good necessarily, but great.
This book is rooted in ambivalence. Thomas Carlyle, who wrote one on the same subject a century and a half ago, declared that there was ‘no nobler feeling’ than hero-worship. ‘Heartfelt prostrate admiration (#litres_trial_promo), submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man … it is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in a man’s life.’ I disagree. An exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. It allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfilment that they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves. Carlyle approvingly called it ‘the germ … of all religion hitherto known’, but to make a fellow human the object of religious devotion is unwise. Hero-worshippers, as the stories in this book repeatedly demonstrate, are frequently disappointed in, and lay themselves open to abuse by, the heroes of their choice.
The notion of the hero – that some men are born special – is radically inegalitarian. It can open the way for tyranny. ‘Beware the pursuit of the Superhuman,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw. ‘It leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.’ True. Carlyle’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote ‘Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in great men’, saw the prime function of the great man as that of rendering ‘indemnification for populations (#litres_trial_promo) of pigmies’, while humanity en masse seemed to him ‘disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or fleas.’ Such a revulsion from the majority of one’s fellow beings, combined with an exaggerated admiration for the exceptional few, makes a politically poisonous mix.
But a wariness of the potentially pernicious effects of hero-worship hasn’t made me immune to the intoxicating allure of the hero. The people I have written about here are all compelling personalities whose life stories – tragic, inspirational, or shocking – have been told and retold over centuries, in some cases millennia, because they are so dramatic, so full of complex resonance, and so profoundly moving. The idea of the hero would not be so emotionally disturbing or so politically dangerous were it not so potent.
I am not a debunker, more a collector and analyst of bunk. I shall repeatedly be pointing to discrepancies between the ascertainable facts about heroes and the legends that grew up around them. I do so not as an iconoclast but because the process whereby heroes’ characters and curricula vitae are adjusted to suit the moral values and emotional needs of those who adore them is a fascinating one. That most idols have feet of clay is a banality: what is interesting is the question why, knowing it, we are still enthralled by them. Cato was an inept politician who repeatedly handed advantages to his opponents, but his contemporaries thought him a man in ten thousand, and his admirers in the next generation revered him as a god. Francis Drake turned aside from the pursuit of the Spanish Armada to grab a disabled ship as his own prize, imperilling the entire English fleet by doing so, but his popularity was undiminished by the action: on the contrary, when the news reached London bonfires were lit in celebration. Byron and Keats had both read their Plutarch: they knew all about Alcibiades’ treachery. Yet Byron wrote ‘no name comes down (#litres_trial_promo) from antiquity with a more general charm than that of Alcibiades’, while to Keats ‘Alcibiades, leaning (#litres_trial_promo) on his crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea’ was the embodiment of the abstract idea of the heroic, ‘large, prominent, round and coloured with magnificence’.
Heroes are insubordinate: that is part of their glamour. Several of the people I have written about followed Achilles in defying their political masters: in doing so they were acting within a well-established heroic tradition. There are men, wrote Aristotle, so godlike, so exceptional, that they naturally, by right of their extraordinary gifts, transcend all moral judgement or constitutional control: ‘There is no law (#litres_trial_promo) which embraces men of that calibre: they are themselves law.’ Such men inevitably clash with the established powers that their inordinate personal prestige subverts. The legendary Persian hero Rustum quarrelled with his king and refused his services. Horatio Nelson is at his most heroic with his telescope clamped to his blind eye. George Custer was court-martialled barely a week after he graduated from West Point and afterwards he so frequently annoyed his superiors that he would have been excluded from the Little Big Horn campaign had not a storm of public protest obliged President Grant to restore him to his command.
One who has become the object of hero-worship is hard to accommodate in a well-ordered state. Established authority has often been highly (and justifiably) suspicious of the heroes that served it. The Cid and Wallenstein were both dismissed by the royal masters who feared and envied them. Garibaldi was and is revered as the valiant creator of a united Italy, but he was repeatedly imprisoned or blockaded on his tiny island home by the state he had brought into being.
Most heroes are rebels. A startling number are actually traitors. Achilles, having quarrelled with Agamemnon, prayed that his fellow Greeks might be defeated. Lancelot was the most complete knight at Arthur’s Round Table, but he brought about the collapse of the civilization of which he was paragon. Of my six historical heroes, five fought at some point against their compatriots (a fact that did not prevent their passing into legend as national heroes). Drake is the exception: but though he never had political power enough to precipitate a confrontation with his queen, he frequently disobeyed her.
Hero-worship is the cult of the individual, and the hero is always imagined standing alone. The heroes of classical mythology were homeless wanderers, and so are those of modern legend, be they cowboys or police officers, vigilantes or secret agents. They are brilliant mavericks, outsiders coming in from elsewhere to handle an emergency before riding off into the sunset. The wanderer seems to the settled majority to be free and invulnerable. As Herodotus wrote of the nomadic Scythians: ‘This people has no cities (#litres_trial_promo) or settled forts: they carry their houses with them and shoot with bows from horseback: they live off herds of cattle, not from tillage, and their dwellings are on their wagons. How then can they fail to be invincible?’ Much more can be expected of a stranger, whose unfamiliarity makes him a blank screen for the projection of fantasies, than could ever be asked of someone familiar. Historical heroes, whose status depends at least in part on the public’s identification of them with legendary counterparts, have frequently been people with no fixed position in the society that expected such great things of them. Wallenstein, the protector of the Austro-Hungarian-German empire, was a Czech. Garibaldi, the maker of Italy, was born in France, wore the costume of a South American gaucho, and until the end of his life still needed a dictionary by him when writing in Italian.
The responsibilities of government do not combine well with the individualism expected of the hero. Achilles, wrote Aristotle, was that rare, not quite human creature, a non-political man, ‘a non-cooperator (#litres_trial_promo) like an isolated piece in a game of draughts’. None of my subjects was a head of state (although the Cid, at the end of his life, created a new state for himself). They are the successors, not of Agamemnon but of Achilles, not of Arthur but of Lancelot, not of Jehovah but of Jesus Christ. In the 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche defined the state – any state – as ‘a fearful tyranny (#litres_trial_promo), a remorseless machine of oppression’ against which he opposed the heroic figure of the ‘superman’. Nietzsche’s superman is ‘like a star (#litres_trial_promo) thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude’. He has no community within which to hide, no religion, legal system, or moral code as guide, no group or institution to share the responsibility for his choices. He is terrifyingly exposed. ‘Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law?’ asks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ‘Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law?’ Achilles took it upon himself to do so, repudiating his allegiance to Agamemnon, denying any obligation to his fellow Greeks, choosing to answer to no human authority save his own, and insisting on his right to determine when and on whose behalf he would exercise his devastating skills. And although some of my subjects – Cato, with his embarrassing clothes and pernickety accountancy; tubby, venal Drake – are scarcely the kind of resplendent figures Nietzsche had in mind, the same proud rejection of a communal identity has been the mark of the hero throughout the millennia covered by this book.
My subjects are all Europeans. There are many correspondences between the Western heroic tradition and those of some Asian and African cultures, but I have not attempted to trace them, partly for practical reasons – this book is plenty long enough as it is – and partly because the tradition I describe is a continuous and self-referential one. Achilles in his tent sang of the exploits of heroes dead and gone, tales that shaped his concept of himself and his role just as his own story was to condition posterity’s idea of what a hero might be. Cato prepared himself for his own suicide by reading Plato’s account of the death of Socrates. Even when heroes were not themselves aware of the parallels between their careers and those of their celebrated antecedents, the people who told and modified their stories frequently were, so that those stories, as they have come down to us, are full of echoes and presentiments: Drake is a latter-day Jason, Wallenstein a Mars; Cato (despite having died half a century before the Christian era began) is an avatar of Christ, and to Alexander Herzen Garibaldi seemed ‘a hero of antiquity (#litres_trial_promo), a figure out of the Aeneid’. As heroes are shaped by the past, so in turn they shape the future. In the 1930s, when Europe was once more in crisis, my heroes (except for Alcibiades, whose offences against his birthplace were anathema to the age of nationalism) were resurrected and put to political use.
They are all white Westerners and, for different reasons, they are all male. Heroes’ stories resemble women’s stories in that the hero is simultaneously adored and marginalized, being more often an object of veneration than a holder of power; but the vast majority of the people accorded hero status in Western history have been men. Of course there are women I might have included, but to have done so would have been to obscure the lamentable fact that people of my sex have, throughout most of recorded time, been considered incapable of running a country, let alone saving one. To have chosen a female subject would be to imply that one sixth of historical heroes were women. That kind of emollient falsification, in my opinion, does women no service. When Agamemnon sent out a call for all the men of Greece to join him in attacking Troy, Achilles’ father, anxious to save his wonderful boy from conscription, dressed him as a girl and hid him in the women’s quarters. Odysseus heard of it and came visiting, bringing with him magnificent gifts. The women of the court crowded round, exclaiming over the embroidered cloths and golden cups, the robes and the jewels; but Achilles, unable to suppress his true nature, seized upon a sword. At once Odysseus knew him. Achilles abandoned his pretence, acknowledged his manhood, and accepted his heroic destiny. So Odysseus himself, in Homer’s account of his journey home, has to extricate himself from Calypso’s island, the tempting domain of the feminine where he enjoys every comfort and every pleasure, before the tale of his adventures can begin. Alcibiades dreamed shortly before he was murdered that he was wearing his mistress’s clothes and that she was making up his face with pigments and white lead like a woman’s. Plutarch recounts the dream as though it should be read as a premonition of the hero’s death: to lose one’s masculinity is tantamount, for a traditional hero, to losing life itself.
The definition of that masculinity has fluctuated. Homer’s heroes fume and weep, indulging their emotions in ways commentators from Plato onwards have found disgracefully unmanly, and they are immensely proud and careful of their magnificent bodies, shamelessly displaying a physical vanity later ages would consider contemptibly effeminate. Charles Baudelaire identified Alcibiades as being among the first of the dandies: the tradition of heroic self-adornment is ancient. Achilles’ shield was the most marvellous piece of armoury the world had yet seen. The warriors of ancient Sparta decorated their clothes and weapons with ornaments: they wore their hair long and plaited it intricately before going into battle wreathed with flowers. Beauty breeds valour. The troops who travelled on the Armada’s ships in 1588 were not required to wear uniform, explained a Spanish military expert in 1610, because their morale was much enhanced by the gorgeousness of their own clothes: ‘It is the finery (#litres_trial_promo), the plumes and bright colours which give spirit and strength to a soldier so that he can with furious resolution overcome any difficulty or accomplish any valorous exploit.’ Napoleon’s Marshal Murat was as noted for his red boots and extravagant epaulettes as he was for his fearlessness. But although the heroic tradition encompasses areas of human experience identified for most of the recent past as feminine, it is nonetheless sexually exclusive. Even Joan of Arc, the most obvious female candidate for inclusion in this book, renounced her sex and its perceived limitations by cross-dressing, tacitly acknowledging that the pantheon of heroes admits men only.
So what makes a hero? And what are heroes for? In narrating the lives of a handful of heroes, in attempting to recreate their contemporaries’ expectations of them and tracing the way posterity responded to and reshaped their stories, I hope to give a kaleidoscopic answer to each question. Simple, single ones would be impossible. The hero’s nature and function have repeatedly shifted along with the mentality of the culture that produced them, and so have the attributes ascribed to the hero, the exploits expected of him, and his place within political structures and society at large.
Each era has a different theory as to how some men come to be, or seem to be, extraordinary. Often ideas about the hero are religious: the hero is the son of a god, or a saint, or a hubristic challenger of divine authority, or a god himself. Or his superhuman talents may be less legitimately supernatural: he may be a witch. Class is important, though not always in predictable ways. Many heroes’ social status is indeterminate and wavering, like that of the English folk hero Robin Hood, who is now the dispossessed lord of Locksley Hall, now the comrade of common criminals. The majority of heroes throughout history have been, or pretended to be, or aspired to become, aristocrats. But heroes, especially dead ones, are usefully malleable: their images have been pressed into service as often by revolutionaries as by defenders of authoritarianism. There is a vigorous counter-tradition celebrating the popular hero, the man of the people who challenges elitist power and privilege, the plucky little fellow who slays the giant with nothing but a pebble in a sling, the common sailor or the carpenter’s son who lays low principalities and powers.
There is an erotic dimension to hero-worship. Beauty, charm, and sex appeal are useful assets for a hero: in their absence, a dashing style or a commanding presence will do. People were dazzled by Alcibiades, besotted with Garibaldi, terrified by Wallenstein. A hero must be able either to seduce or intimidate: either way he needs an outsize personality and a talent for projecting it. Heroism is theatrical. Heroes must look, and act, the part. They must swagger and preen, or, if their public’s taste inclines the other way, they must make a show of their humility, as Cato did, going indecently under-dressed to the Forum. Heroic gestures are frequently histrionic, which is not to say they are frivolous: a symbolic gesture can have substantial consequences. When it was suggested to General Gordon that his brightly illuminated headquarters in Khartoum provided too easy a target for the Mahdi’s guns he called for an immense candelabrum, lit its twenty-four candles with his own hands, and stationed himself beside it at a great arched window saying, ‘Go tell the people (#litres_trial_promo) of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing.’ He died anyway, but he had made a stirring spectacle of his own defeat. The capacity to stage a splendid tableau is a more important qualification for admission to the gallery of heroes than either survival or success.
Appearances matter, and not only because ‘defeat in battle (#litres_trial_promo)’, as Tacitus wrote, ‘always begins with the eye’. ‘What is he (#litres_trial_promo) [Achilles] more than another?’ asks Ajax in Shakespeare’s bitterly anti-heroic version of the Troy story, Troilus and Cressida. ‘No more than what he thinks he is,’ replies Agamemnon. Heroic status depends on the hero’s self-confidence and often also on the confidence trick he (or his sponsors and advocates) pulls on others in persuading them of his superhuman potency. Some heroes’ reputations are manufactured or enlarged by others: Drake’s power and ferocity were magnified by Spaniards motivated by anger at the humiliations to which he had subjected them. Garibaldi was surprised, on returning to Europe in 1848, to find that Mazzini had made him an international celebrity. Others are self-created: Alcibiades’ most audacious and ingenious publicist was himself. But whether by his own or others’ will, a hero inevitably acquires an artificial public persona. Shakespeare’s Achilles is addressed as ‘thou picture of what (#litres_trial_promo) thou seemest’, a doubled image of inauthenticity. But an image is what a hero inevitably becomes. In 1961, Anthony Mann, with General Franco’s enthusiastic support (the Spanish army was placed at his disposal for the battle scenes), made a stirring film of El Cid. At the end of it the Cid is killed fighting but his grieving wife and followers, knowing that without the inspiration his presence provides their armies will never succeed in beating off the hordes of the enemy, keep his death secret. His corpse is dressed and armed and strapped upright in the saddle of his great white charger. The trusty horse gallops out at the head of the Cid’s army. Believing that their great leader is still with them, his men win a marvellous victory before the horse, with its lifeless but still invincible burden, disappears over the horizon.
The story was made up on purpose for the film – there is no medieval legend, let alone chronicle, in which it appears in that form – but the thinking behind it is sound. A hero’s appearance is sometimes all that is required of him. He can win a battle, or quell a riot, or raise a revolution simply by being seen. He doesn’t have to be active, he doesn’t even have to be alive. Indeed it isn’t necessary that he be actually present: it is enough that he should be so apparently. Achilles sent Patroclus out to fight disguised in his armour, knowing that the mere simulacrum of himself would be terrifying enough to send the Trojans hurtling back towards their walls. Julius Caesar used to wear a cloak of a striking and unusual colour into battle to advertise his presence; and at Thapsus, when he himself was overtaken by an attack of ‘his usual sickness (#litres_trial_promo)’ (probably epilepsy), he sent a surrogate onto the field in that cloak. Nobody noticed: victory came quickly. A hero, once his fame reaches a certain pitch, becomes a totem, an object of magical potency that need take no action in order to achieve results. Garibaldi, serving France when he was old and crippled by arthritis, was carried around the battlefield on a stretcher: his presence was all the same reckoned to have been invaluable.
It follows that a hero is not always, even in his lifetime, and certainly not thereafter, responsible for the uses to which his image is put. Frequently, as the stories I have to tell demonstrate, a hero is – consciously or unconsciously – the chief actor in a spectacle scripted and directed by others. As Elizabeth and Walsingham used Drake, so Victor Emmanuel and Cavour used Garibaldi. And once dead a hero becomes an infinitely adaptable symbol. Cato’s repeated metamorphoses – from conservative oligarch to Christian saint to martyr in the cause of liberty to Whig parliamentarian – have parallels in most heroes’ afterlives. Every retelling of a heroic story is coloured by the politics and predilections of the teller, whether that teller’s intentions are deliberately propagandist or ostensibly innocent. Looking at heroes, we find what we seek.
What that is exactly depends on the time and place from which we are looking. In telling my heroes’ stories I demonstrate how various are the ways in which heroes appeal to us. Heroes may challenge or comfort, they may offer the elation of victory or the infantilizing luxury of being taken care of by a superhuman protector. They may constitute models of courage or integrity, or they may set enticing examples of transgression and licence. But one thing is constant: they all provide ways of thinking about mortality.
‘Madam,’ so Francis Drake purportedly told Queen Elizabeth, ‘the wings (#litres_trial_promo) of opportunity are fledged with the feathers of death.’ Heroes expose themselves to mortal danger in pursuit of immortality. Sophocles, writing while Alcibiades was a boy, has the heroically intransigent Antigone tell her sister, Ismene: ‘You chose life (#litres_trial_promo), but I chose death.’ Ismene is preparing to compromise her principles, bowing to the powers that be in order to secure herself a safe place in the world; but Antigone would rather die than do so, and so her name will long outlive them both. ‘Many men (#litres_trial_promo),’ wrote Sallust, ‘being slaves to appetite and sleep, have passed through life like mere way-farers … The lives and deaths of such men is about alike, since no record is made of either.’ But a few rise above the sordid limitations of physical existence, the repetitive and futile cycle of consumption and excretion and slow decay. Sallust considered Cato, who was his contemporary, to be one of those exceptional beings whose greatness lifts them above the common ruck, who transcend their pitifully ephemeral physical nature, thus holding out the profoundly consoling vision of an existence in which oblivion can be averted and a mortal may escape time’s scythe.
A hero may sacrifice himself so that others might live, or so that he himself may live for ever in others’ memories. But even when his exploits are undertaken for purely selfish and temporal motives of ambition or greed, the very fact of his enduring fame is a token of immortality. Since the prospect of death is something with which we all have to come to terms, the stories of heroes will never lose their fascination. Dead heroes escape the degeneration that awaits the rest of us. ‘They shall not (#litres_trial_promo) grow old as we that are left grow old’, and it seems to those who survive them that they have evaded death. ‘Being dead (#litres_trial_promo) they have not died,’ wrote Simonides of the Spartans who died at Thermopylae. ‘Their excellence raised them gloriously out of the house of Hades.’
Hero-worship still plays a vital part in our political lives. It inspires both terrorists and those who combat them. It shapes the rhetoric of our election campaigns. It helps determine the choices made by democratic voters and it eases dictators’ ascent to power. I have chosen not to play the game of spot-the-hero among the people whose names now fill our screens and newspapers but I hope that, while reading this book, others will. The stories I have to tell are legendary or historical, but each one of them is to be read as a parable about the way we live now.
There is an odd kind of inverted vanity that persuades people to imagine that some of our collective follies are brand new, peculiar to the age of mass media. Wrong. As the stories I have told here demonstrate, there is nothing new about the cult of personality, about the calculated manipulation of news for political ends, about the ways in which celebrity and sexual charisma can be translated into power, about the suggestibility of a populace who, in a time of fear or over-excited enthusiasm, can be tempted to hand over their political rights to a glorious Superman. On 12 September 2001 a group of people were photographed near the ruins of the World Trade Center holding up a banner reading ‘WE NEED HEROES NOW’. This book is, first and foremost, a collection of extraordinary stories; but it is also an attempt to examine that need, to acknowledge its urgency, and to warn against it.
I ACHILLES (#ulink_5a92c6b4-92a5-55fb-9242-8af551c0ddfc)
HOMER’S TROY. Achilles, paragon of warriors, consents to enter the fight. Ready for battle in the armour made for him by the smith-god Hephaestus, he glitters like the sun. His teeth grind, his eyes flash fire. With a voice as plangent as a trumpet’s he calls out to his immortal horses, which no other man can master, and one of them replies. Yes, says the beast (#litres_trial_promo), this time the team will bring their master safely back to the Greek camp, but the day of his death already hovers near and when it comes, even were they to have the speed and power of the west wind, they would not be able to save him. ‘You are doomed to die violently, Achilles.’ Achilles’ reply is impatient: ‘Don’t waste your breath, I know, well I know.’ With a terrifying yell he sends his chariot hurtling into the front line.
Of all the warriors who fight at Troy Achilles is the only one who is bound to die there. He is not courting risk: he is confronting certainty, and he himself must take responsibility for his own end. His mother, the goddess Thetis, has told him of the two destinies between which he must choose. He can stay peaceably in his father’s house, and if he does so his life will be long and fruitful. He can marry and have children. He can use his wealth and amass more. He can exploit his strength and exercise his intellect. He can inherit and rule his father’s kingdom, enjoying the satisfactions of power and, in due time, the respect accorded to an elder. Or he can fight. If he chooses the latter he will be killed before the war’s end, but first he will win such glory that his name will live in song for ever more.
He chooses death, buying immortality at the cost of his life. And so he becomes the paradigmatic hero, one whose traits and actions are echoed, with infinite variations, in the life stories of subsequent heroes both legendary and actual. His beauty, his swiftness and ferocity, his unrivalled talent for killing his fellow men, his uncompromising commitment both to honesty and to honour, and, above all, the pathos of his freely accepted death, all combine to invest him with an ineffable glamour.
His choice is not easy. There is an alternative. There is another Homeric epic and another hero, Odysseus, who chooses life, and who is so determined to hang on to all that Achilles has renounced that he will lie, cheat, and steal for it. Odysseus is an intriguer, a shape-shifter, a warrior like Achilles but one noted primarily not for his actions but for his words. Achilles’ foil, he repeatedly calls into question the values Achilles represents both tacitly, by his very existence as one who has taken the opposite path, and explicitly on the several occasions when the two confront each other. In the stories of the heroes who come after them the characteristics of Odysseus and Achilles combine and alternate, but for Achilles himself there can be no half-measures, no partial sacrifice. His choice is absolute and tragic. The brilliance with which his prowess and his physical splendour invest him is simultaneously shadowed and intensified by his inconsolable grief at the prospect of his own end, by his pity for his father and mother in the anguish his death must bring them, and by his mourning for all that he might have been. Throughout the Iliad Homer imagines him questioning the bargain he has made (and which he can at any moment revoke – three days’ sailing would take him home), asking at each setback ‘Was it for this?’ that he decided to forgo so much. He neither despises life nor belittles death. The former he knows to be worth more than all the wealth in the world. The prospect of the latter is dreadful to him. He describes the underworld habitations of the dead as ‘dank mouldering horrors (#litres_trial_promo)/That fill the deathless gods themselves with loathing’, and he dwells obsessively on the ignominies to which dead flesh is subject.
If Achilles ever lived (something unlikely ever to be proven) he inhabited a culture separated from us by over three millennia, by tremendous changes in belief, in accepted morality, in technology, in human knowledge. Yet his story, as told by Homer, addresses questions as troubling now as they were when Agamemnon’s host laid siege to Troy. ‘Like the generations (#litres_trial_promo) of leaves, the lives of mortal men’, so a Trojan warrior tells a Greek, as they prepare to fight to the death. The Greek has asked to know his antagonist’s identity. The Trojan’s point is that the question is otiose. If each individual is as expendable and replaceable as this year’s leaves, it scarcely matters who anyone might be. Before the fact of mortality any achievement seems futile, any quarrel petty. Death would make nihilists of us all, were it not for the passion with which humans struggle against its reductive, equalizing influence. Achilles will give anything, including life itself, to assert his own uniqueness, to endow his particular life with significance, and to escape oblivion.
A non-Homeric legend tells how Achilles’ divine mother sought to make her baby invulnerable by dipping him in the waters of the Styx, the river over which the souls of the dead were ferried to the Underworld. The attempt was unsuccessful. The heel by which Thetis held Achilles remained dry, and it was in that heel that he eventually received his fatal wound. Thetis could not keep her son alive, but he was to find his own way to life eternal, a way closely analogous to the one she tried. Just as she had sought to save him from dying by immersing him in the waters of death’s river, so he cheated death by embracing it, voluntarily dying in his quest for everlasting life.
The Iliad begins with a quarrel over a girl. By the consent of the full Greek army, two female prisoners have been awarded, one to Agamemnon, king and commander-in-chief, and one to the supreme warrior Achilles, as part of the prize due to each for their exploits in the war. The girl given to Agamemnon is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. The angry god retaliates by sending down a plague. An assembly is called. Reluctantly, Agamemnon agrees to return the girl to her father, but demands compensation. If he cannot keep his own prize he will take someone else’s. Achilles, who is not only the paragon of warriors but also the scrupulous guardian of the warriors’ code of honour, protests that to do so would be disgraceful. Agamemnon is defiant. He is the overlord and will have his way regardless of another’s opinion: ‘Let that man (#litres_trial_promo) I go visit choke with rage.’ Achilles, beside himself, declares that he will sail for home if Agamemnon perpetrates such an outrage against the code of conduct they all observe. Agamemnon rounds on him and declares his intention of taking Achilles’ own prize, the girl Briseis. For a moment Achilles is ready to kill him, but he is restrained by the voice of wisdom, Pallas Athena. Instead, he swears a great oath that he will not fight again in the quarrels of the house of Atreus. Leaving the assembly he withdraws to his tent at the end of the Greek lines, and there he stays. The rage of Achilles, the passion that is at once so disastrous and so magnificent, and which has earned his immortality, is not the savage blood-thirst that drives him on the battlefield, but the principled fury that keeps him off it.
This argument is far more than a squabble over possession of a slave. It is a dispute over the nature of superiority. Agamemnon tells Achilles he will take his girl ‘so you can learn (#litres_trial_promo) just how much greater I am than you’. But is a man’s worth dependent on his rank, or on his talent? Is it a function of his social and political relationships, or can an individual possess a value independent of his place in the community? Is Agamemnon, as old Nestor says, the more to be honoured ‘because he rules (#litres_trial_promo) more men’? Or might Achilles, whose claim to supremacy lies entirely in himself, in his own particular, unsurpassed brilliance, be the greater man? These questions are fundamental. Their answers must affect the conduct both of individuals and of states, determining the relationship between political institutions and the people of whom they are constituted.
Achilles is an exceptional being. The son of a goddess and repeatedly described by Homer as being himself ‘godlike’, he is innately superior to his fellows. His beauty, his size, and his speed are all prodigious. He is a divinely created aristocrat, a living demonstration that men are not born equal. Pindar, the fifth-century poet who was classical Athens’ most eloquent upholder of the class system, celebrated his prowess, his ‘hands like Ares’ (#litres_trial_promo), his feet like lightning’. In the Iliad he is physically magnificent. When he loses his armour he cannot borrow more from any of his fellow Greeks, for none of them, with the possible exception of Ajax, is as tall as he. The perfection of his body is sublime, the loveliness of his features flawless. His beauty, potently erotic, marks him, like Helen, as a superhuman being. He is ‘brilliant’, literally: in armour he shines like the sun. He is faster than any of his peers and therefore more deadly in battle. When he chases Hector three times round the walls of Troy, hunting him as a hawk hunts a terrified dove, it is his speed as much as his courage and his strength that makes him invincible. Destined never to grow old, he has a young man’s splendour and a young man’s energy. His emotions are extreme, his responses passionate, his actions devastating. For all these reasons he is unique among the Homeric warriors. Nestor may be wiser, Odysseus more astute and articulate, Ajax stronger in a hand-to-hand fight; but Achilles is, by common consent, the ‘best of the Achaeans’. Only Agamemnon disputes his right to that title, and he does so on political grounds. He doesn’t claim that he is a greater individual than Achilles. He bases his challenge on the assumption that no individual can count for as much as a community, and that therefore the ruler of that community is, by definition and regardless of his or anybody’s else’s personal qualities, the greatest person in it. Extraordinary as Achilles’ gifts may be, they do not procure him especial status. Agamemnon tells him, ‘You are nothing (#litres_trial_promo) to me!’
That would be enough to enrage Achilles, but there is more. Beyond the competition between Agamemnon the king and Achilles the hero lies the question of the legitimacy or otherwise of the war in which they are engaged. The disputed women are prizes, not booty. (They are also of course human beings whose rights, judged by modern standards, are being grossly violated – but let that be.) They have been awarded to the two men as marks of honour. They are not mere chattels to be passed from tent to tent, any more than a medal awarded for valour is only a coin on a ribbon, or an athlete’s gold cup just an expensive drinking vessel. A prize awarded to one person cannot be appropriated by another without its meaning being erased and the symbolic code within which it existed being called into question. In demanding Briseis, Agamemnon is acting, not like a warrior eager for glory, but like a bandit greedy for loot. In doing so, he shames not only himself, but the whole Greek army. In the gruesome setting of the battlefield, a situation where men are all too easily reduced to the level of beasts of prey, or to carrion, it is essential to hold fast to the elusive concept of honour as a talisman against horror and despair. Achilles came to Troy to avenge the insult done to Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus when the Trojan prince Paris abducted Helen, Menelaus’ wife – to protect their honour. But if Agamemnon seizes Briseis, then he is a rapist and an abductor, just as Paris is. The Greeks’ invasion of Priam’s kingdom is revealed to be no more than a predatory attack on a wealthy victim, and Achilles no longer a warrior in a noble cause but the underling of an unprincipled looter. If he dies he will do so ignominiously, in the prosecution of a stupid, brutal war, and the eternal fame for which he hoped will be denied him. As he later tells those who come to implore him to return to the field, there is no point in doing so once Agamemnon has robbed fighting of its meaning. The King’s rapacity has levelled all value, trivialized all achievement. In a world in which the distinction between the noble warrior and the thug has been erased, ‘The same honour (#litres_trial_promo) waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to death.’
When it becomes clear that the Greeks will continue to obey Agamemnon, Achilles turns his back on them, becoming, like so many subsequent heroes, a voluntary outcast from a society he despises. Self-exiled, he is isolated. His only companion is Patroclus, the beloved friend who has followed him to Troy. Always exceptional, he is now unassimilable. He respects no human jurisdiction. He defers to no one; he fears no one. In Homer’s telling of his story he is the champion of individualism against the compromising demands of the community, the defender of the loner’s purity against the complex imperfections of the group. In that role he is superb, but potentially lethal to any ordered state. When an embassy comes to him from Agamemnon, imploring him to rejoin the fighting, promising him splendid gifts and the restoration of his honour, he rejects the offer: ‘I say my honour (#litres_trial_promo) lies in the great decree of Zeus.’ He asks nothing of his fellows now, nor does he acknowledge any claim they might make on him. In a ferociously apocalyptic vision he prays that Greeks and Trojans alike may cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but Patroclus and himself, so that the two of them might, alone, bring Troy’s towers toppling down. In his tent, he plays the lyre and sings to himself of ‘the famous deeds (#litres_trial_promo) of fighting heroes’. He acknowledges allegiance now not to any living society, but only to his dead peers, each one exceptional, brilliant mavericks like himself.
While Achilles broods his fellow Greeks fight on. Slowly, inexorably, over several days, the Trojans, led by Hector, force them back across the coastal plain. Their leaders – Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus – are all wounded. They throw up a rampart of rocks and clay to protect their ships. The Trojans breach it. The two armies are fighting hand to hand on and around the ships, the beach is black with blood and the air full of the scorching heat and ferocious crackle of the firebrands when Patroclus comes weeping to Achilles, begging his friend to relent, to save the Greeks from defeat and from the horror of being marooned in a hostile land, their ships burned, to be massacred or enslaved. Achilles is moved, but he has sworn he will not join the battle unless the Trojans menace his own ships, still secure at the furthest end of the Greek lines. He will hold to his vow. He will not fight in person. But he agrees to a compromise. He will lend Patroclus his armour and send him out to battle in his stead.
A hero of the stature of Achilles has only to show himself in order to alter the course of events. Encased in the magnificent star-emblazoned, silver-studded bronze armour, which is immediately identifiable to Greek and Trojan alike as that of the terrible Achilles, with a great crest of horsehair tossing on his helmet’s crest, Patroclus leads out the Myrmidons, ‘hungry as wolves (#litres_trial_promo) that rend and bolt raw flesh,/Hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies’. Seeing him, the Trojans quake, their columns waver. Achilles appears to have returned, bearing with him ‘sudden, plunging death (#litres_trial_promo)’. Shrieking, wild as storm clouds driven by a cyclone, the Trojan army stampedes back and away from the Greek ships, back towards the safety of their own walls.
In the fighting that follows Hector kills Patroclus and strips from his corpse the armour of Achilles. When the news is brought to Achilles he lays aside his quarrel with Agamemnon. In the frenzy of his mourning all scruples about propriety, about honour, about the sanctity of vows, are forgotten. He resolves to fight the next day, but first he displays himself to his enemy. As twilight descends he climbs alone and unarmed onto the rampart before the Greek ships. Pallas Athena, whose favourite he is, crowns him with a diadem of fire that blazes from his head to the sky, and slings around him a shield of flaring storm. Furious with grief for his slaughtered friend, he lets loose three times a war cry so piercing and terrible that the Trojans whirl round in panic. ‘Twelve of their finest (#litres_trial_promo) fighters died then and there, crushed by chariots, impaled on their own spears’, killed by the mere sight and sound of the awful Achilles.
‘The man who is incapable (#litres_trial_promo) of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community,’ wrote Aristotle. Such a man is ‘like an animal or a god’. Achilles, who has divorced himself from the fellowship of the army, who looks to Zeus alone for the validation of his claim to honour, has made himself independent of his fellow men. He re-enters the battle not to save his compatriots, but in pursuit of a private revenge. In the cataclysmic battle that follows he is both subhuman and superhuman, both bestial and divine. He is likened to a forest fire, to a massive ox threshing barley, to a lion (repeatedly), to the Dog Star that rains down pestilence, to the frenzied god of war. He kills and kills and kills until the earth is drenched with blood and the river that flows before the walls of Troy is choked with corpses. His rampage is outrageous, so transgressive in the extremity of its violence that earth and heaven alike are angered by it. The river rises up against the desecration of its waters: a tremendous tidal wave threatens to engulf Achilles and sweep him away. The god Hephaestus, to protect him, hurls a great fireball down from heaven. The blaze races across the plain, blasting trees and corpses and scorching the river banks until the river is all but dried. The conflict is elemental, apocalyptic, and at its centre Homer places Achilles, a figure from a nightmare (#litres_trial_promo), trumpet-tongued, gigantic, shrieking out his rage, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampling on corpses, sending up sprays of blood, blood on his wheels, blood on his chariot’s handrail, ‘bloody filth splattering both his invincible arms’.
In this war the Trojans are at home. At night they retire from the battlefield to well-built halls, to wives and children. They belong to a polity. Even the bravest warrior among them must defer to the civil authority, King Priam. They have temples and priests. The landscape in which they do battle with the Greeks is one they have tamed and made productive. Their horses have grazed the earth that is now slippery with blood. The spring past which Achilles chases Hector has been their washing place. Their babies wave to them as they advance through the Scaean Gates. Their parents and elders line the city walls, watching the fighting from a position of security. Hector is husband, father, son, and brother, as well as being the protector of his home and his fellow citizens. In the frenzy of battle he may become, like Achilles, as fierce as a wild beast, but he is essentially domestic. On the day of his death his wife Andromache sits weaving as she waits for him, within earshot of the fight, and her women have the water heated ready for his bath.
The Greeks, by contrast, are far from home, from family, from women, from the sources of their culture. They may have come from a civilization, but they are no longer part of it. For nine years and more they have been encamped on the windy plain with the grey sea behind them. They are cut off from parents and children, isolated from the continuum of generation. All male, all adult, only a few of them old, they form, as any army does, a pathologically unbalanced community. They are raiders, cattle rustlers: they neither grow nor produce anything. Homeless and predatory, they circle the walls of Troy like hungry wolves.
This existence, the life of a vagrant marauder, of a dangerous and perpetually endangered outsider, is what Achilles chose when he picked the path that would lead to his early and glorious death. The Trojans fight because it is their civic duty to do so, to ‘form a wall (#litres_trial_promo) before our loving parents, wives and sons/To defend Troy’. Achilles fights because he has a lust for ‘the bloody grind (#litres_trial_promo) of war’. Freud would recognize Hector as a devotee of Eros, the creative deity ‘whose purpose is (#litres_trial_promo) to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, in one great unity, the unity of mankind’. In battle he is courageous and terrible, but his fighting is a service performed for the sake of the community. It is a function of the relationships by which he defines himself. Achilles the loner, by contrast, is an agent of Thanatos, the force that divides man from man and which drives its acolytes to seek their own and others’ deaths. He is one of the wild ones, one who has rejected the restrictions as well as the rewards of civilian life, whose readiness to risk his own death has accorded him unlimited licence. At large on the plains outside the Trojan walls he is a terrifying apparition, the personification of cruelty and brute force. But he is also, always, even when crazy-eyed and cloaked in others’ blood, dazzlingly beautiful.
Everything about him is exciting, even when (especially when) he is at his most psychotic. He is the first of the lordly delinquents, the charismatic outcasts by whom law-abiding citizens have always been fascinated as well as scared witless. Off the battlefield, arguing in the assembly or in his tent, he exhilarates by his uncompromising integrity and his emotional extremism. In the thick of the fighting he generates a related but darker response. His titanic energy, his lethal skill, his pitilessness, ring out like another, harsher, kind of truth-telling. ‘Come friend (#litres_trial_promo),’ he says to a Trojan prince who clasps his knees, unarmed, abjectly begging for mercy. ‘You too must die. Why moan about it so?/ … Look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? … Even for me I tell you/Death and the strong force of fate are waiting./There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon/When a man will take my life in battle too.’ This is the truth. The coolness with which Achilles faces it is connected with the deplorable but intoxicating fury with which he slaughters his fellow men.
Such courage and such rage are not human. ‘The salt grey sunless ocean (#litres_trial_promo) gave you birth/And the towering blank rocks’, Patroclus tells him, reproaching him for his indifference to his fellows’ fate. Before their final duel Hector proposes a pact binding the winner to return the loser’s corpse to his own people for decent burial. Hector is dressed in the armour he stripped from Patroclus’ dead body, the armour of Achilles. He looks just like Achilles; he is nearly his equal in arms; he is what Achilles might be if he chose to respect the conventions governing human intercourse and rendering its useful continuance possible. Achilles answers by disowning any connection between his wild self and his civilized double. ‘Don’t talk to me (#litres_trial_promo) of pacts. There are no binding oaths between men and lions.’ He acknowledges no obligation now to anyone or to any power other than his own rage. He is ready to shuffle off his humanity altogether, to become completely bestial. He would like to eat Hector’s flesh. He is unconstrained by any inhibition, any law. He has already consented to his own death, a decision of inhuman bravado which has emancipated him even from what Tacitus called ‘that hindrance (#litres_trial_promo) to all mighty enterprises, the desire for survival’. Death may be immortality’s opposite, but it confers a similar invulnerability. Death-dealing and bent on dying, Achilles has achieved absolute freedom.
Panic-stricken, the Trojans flee before him, racing for the security of the city. At last only Hector is left outside the walls. The two champions confront each other. Achilles is deadly as the Dog Star, brilliant as the blazing sun. Hector, the noble, all but invincible Hector, loses his nerve and runs. Three times the great runner Achilles chases him round the walls of Troy. Hector is humiliated, pathetic, as feeble as a cringing dove. At last he turns to fight and be killed. With his last breath he foretells Achilles’ own death, but Achilles, as impervious to fear as he is to compassion, taunts him: ‘Die, die! (#litres_trial_promo) For my own death, I’ll meet it freely.’ As soon as the Trojan is still the rest of the Greeks run up. In a scene of horrible frenzy each one of them stabs Hector’s corpse, until Achilles calls them off. He, the killer, will also be the prime desecrator of Hector’s body. He pierces the tendons in the Trojan prince’s ankles (the tendons later to be known by his own name) and lashes them to the back of his chariot. As he whips his horses to a gallop and races over the plain back to the Greek camp Hector’s head, so handsome once, is dragged bouncing in the dust behind him. From the walls of Troy the watchers, Hector’s parents among them, scream out their horror and their despair.
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 a 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 and 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 (#litres_trial_promo) by far.’ Even his deference is princely. He is courteous, judicious, munificent, a lord among men.
Disputes about the composition of the Iliad are legion, probably insoluble, and certainly outside the scope of this book. There is a case for considering the funeral games episode to be a later interpolation; but whether or not it always formed part of the Iliad, it certainly did so by the time Homer had come to be ‘the educator of the Greeks’. To the Athenians of the classical era Homer was not only ‘the Poet’, the supreme practitioner of the noblest art; he was also a sage whose works were imagined to contain all wisdom. The Iliad and the Odyssey were recited in their entirety to huge crowds at the great Panathenaic festivals. The citizens of Periclean Athens heard the story of Achilles the frenzied killer who, once the fighting was over, was also a gracious, fine-mannered aristocrat, and saw no inconsistency worth their puzzling over. Patroclus, the man over whom Achilles mourns so frantically, was a fighter almost as savage as his friend, and yet Homer repeatedly describes him as being ‘gentle’. In a warrior culture nobility, even gentleness, coexist 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’ 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.
On the wonderful shield Hephaestus forged for Achilles 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’ 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 counter-killing. As Ajax argues: ‘Any man will accept (#litres_trial_promo) 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 dishonourable, 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 that had made him emotionally inviolable has 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 to do: the need for food being something that 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 behaviour. 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 choose again, he might this time choose 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 centre 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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.
