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HOMERIC HEROES: Power and Tragedy
Some years ago a British sailor overturned his yacht and an Australian naval ship put to sea to rescue him. When the sailors returned to port, the newspapers hailed them as ‘Our Heroes’. There is something touching in the way heroes are applauded for their deeds even if today the deeds are not so great. If heroism entails a striving after something appallingly hard to obtain, then many of today’s heroes do not deserve the label or the exaggerated applause. This is merely to acknowledge that the meaning of the terms ‘hero’ and ‘heroism’ have changed over the centuries and since this chapter is concerned with ancient heroism, the anaemic, modern meanings have to be set aside. If, for example, we believe that we are on this earth mainly to be happy, we deny to ourselves heroic status. If we think that the world is wonderful and adopt the posture of the optimist, we are far removed from the views of ancient heroes for whom life was nasty, brutish and short. For the ancients heroism was a way of life and was not confined to occasional praiseworthy acts. If we prefer to concern ourselves with improving our ‘quality of life’ by placing pleasure at the top of our hierarchy of desires, we are not heroic. The heroic life was one of hardship, struggle and warlike achievement. We, as non-heroes, prefer to be sentimentally committed to the modern obsession with rights, rather than responsibilities, with pleasure rather than power, with sentimentalism rather than tragedy. We have to wonder whether it is possible to give a coherent meaning to heroism as a way of life. There are, thankfully, some philosophers who think that it is possible.
Ancient heroes lived and died for power and glory and thereby brought prosperity and honour to their families. If we prefer to live in a soft, hedonistic way, we cannot live heroically. In ancient times, heroism was a worldview which dominated the lives of everybody; today it is sporadic and confined to specific situations. Ancient heroism was embedded in a results-culture where poor performance was not tolerated. Today’s ‘heroes’ are often excused for poor performance and even attract sympathy when they fail. Ancient heroes expected to live short and glorious lives – if they achieved fame they were content even if they had a short time on Earth. Today’s heroes wish for long lives as celebrities.
For Homer’s noble warriors in the Iliad, to live heroically is to live honourably. The great warrior Aias tells his men to think of their honour and fear nothing in the field but dishonour in each other’s eyes. Neither honour nor salvation is to be found in flight. And the heroic Nestor advises his warrior friends to think of their reputation and remember their children, wives and parents, whether they are alive or dead, and for their sake they should stand tall and fight. The noble Trojan warrior Hector admits that if he hid himself like a coward and refused to fight he could never face the Trojan ladies. Besides, it would go against the grain, for he has trained himself to take his place in the front line and win glory. And so it is for Sarpendon who says that if after living through the war he could be sure of ageless immortality, he would desist from fighting. But that is not the way the world is. No one can cheat death, so he fights on, whether he yields the glory to some other man or wins it for himself.
A hero is a man of distinguished courage and performance, admired for his noble qualities. He is to be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s great epic poem, Iliad, the Viking societies, the Irish, Celtic and Icelandic sagas, and Japanese Bushido of the Edo period. Heroes in these societies are warrior chieftains of special strength, courage and nobility. They share a worldview based on power, glory and a keen appreciation of the tragedy of human existence. Those inheritors of the earth – the meek and the mild – are yet to make their appearance on the world stage. And when they arrive, the heroic worldview will receive its greatest challenge. Notions of nobility, courage and honour will be re-defined and combined with ideas about compassion, humility, truth and happiness, which are more familiar and comforting to the modern mind.
We need, therefore, to understand what it means to live heroically and to see how the philosophy of heroism was transformed in the classical age of Greece by philosophers and dramatists. Heroism will always be with us even if its philosophy is today less consistent and coherent than it once was. When in the 1880s Nietzsche tried to effect another inversion of values, it was to Homer that he turned. But, inevitably, he returned to Homer through the lens of his time and so foisted on ancient heroism a modern face which emphasised the importance of the powerful, alienated individualist. Thus was created a modern view – heroic individualism – much favoured by Hollywood, where noble, strong individualists pit themselves against malevolent authorities. This makes for inspiring storytelling but it has little to do with ancient heroes who would have regarded individualists as dangerous aliens.
The first reference to heroism in Western literature is to be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh (about 2300 BC), a story about the legendary king in Mesopotamia, a hero of the Kingdom of Uruk. The Gilgamesh poem is a rollicking adventure story about heroic deeds in the face of great adversity. Underlying it is an obsession with struggle and death and the search for the secret of immortality.
The hero of the poem is Gilgamesh, part god and part man, and the tension between these parts constitutes the tragedy of the story. He is beautiful, strong, courageous, arrogant and lusty but he is, alas, human, all too human as he confronts at the end of his life lost opportunities and his pointless struggle with the inevitability of death. Gilgamesh searches for an Earthly immortality, for a God-like glory on Earth. But he eventually realises that he is searching for the impossible. He must come to accept the futility of struggling for what he cannot have. In that acceptance is a hero who has learned to stare death in the face and, if not laugh, smile.
A close friend, Enkidu, tells Gilgamesh that the gods have given him kingship but not everlasting life. He pleads with Gilgamesh not be sad at heart since he has been given power to perform good or evil deeds. As he has been given supremacy over people, Enkidu implores his friend not to abuse this power.
If one cannot be a god one can at least be a hero and be talked about through the ages. So Gilgamesh shakes off his melancholy and announces that he will set up his name in the hall of famous men. Because of the evil that is in the land, he intends to go to the forest and destroy the evil beings lurking there. In the forest he faces a ferocious giant, Humbaba, causing his friend to suffer doubts about the adventure. But Gilgamesh utters words reminiscent of later heroic poems when he acknowledges that only the gods live forever and we, mere mortals, are living on borrowed time. Determined to win glory for himself he will fight and if he falls he will leave behind him a name that endures and he will be remembered as a noble warrior.
To be a hero, then, is to be the main subject of noble tales handed down to children and passed on to students. For more than two millennia educated people in the West studied the adventures of the great warriors. Epic tales of heroism provide a table of values against which we can judge ourselves for in them we find the challenges and dilemmas of human existence: courage and cowardice, love and loss, success and failure, honesty and betrayal, life and death, mortality and immortality. These dilemmas are not debated, they are embedded in the characters and we mere mortals can evaluate them by what they do and say. Values in heroic society are not laid up in a God-created heaven. Rather, human values are judged by what humans do. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are the sum of their actions and they are judged by their actions alone. This is especially true of the relationship between the sexes, then and now.
The Epic of Gilgamesh offers humorous insights into love and the relations between the sexes. When Ishtar, goddess of love, fertility and war proposes marriage to Gilgamesh, he replies that if he marries her he has no gifts to give in return. He would gladly give her ointments, food fit for a god and wine fit for a queen. But he will not marry her. He tells her bluntly that her lovers have found her like a stove which smoulders in the cold, a castle which crushes the garrison, and a battering-ram turned back from the enemy. Ishtar is not pleased and tearfully runs to her father and begs permission to destroy Gilgamesh. The poor father points out that the citizens of Uruk will suffer if Gilgamesh dies. Ishtar, the woman scorned, is unmoved and plots her revenge. Foiled by Enkidu, Ishtar is determined that he must die. Enkidu is thus struck down by a fatal illness and after 12 days of pain realises he will not die heroically in battle, but shamefully in his sick-bed. He dies in agony and Gilgamesh is devastated.
Gilgamesh weeps bitterly for his dead friend and because Enkidu’s death reminds him of his own fear of death, he begins his search for everlasting life. On his travels he meets the divine wine-maker, Siduri, who tells him to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow he may die. But Gilgamesh is not placated and ponders how he can be at peace when Enkidu is, as he will be, lying under the earth.
Clearly, knowledge of the inevitability of death can liberate or enslave us. In The Epic of Gilgamesh it encourages bold adventures, but it can also lead to despair. As he approaches his own death Gilgamesh is told that, while death cannot be cheated and everlasting life is not the destiny of poor mortals, he should be proud that he has lived nobly and will be remembered as a hero. For despite its travails life can be more than an ignoble struggle in the dark. It was Gilgamesh’s fate to die a tragic hero, because human existence is an encounter with tragedy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh teaches the higher truth that heroism entails tragedy – without tragedy there is no heroism. There is nothing especially heroic about a man who fights bravely and hopes to die so that he may travel to a heavenly paradise. While we can admire the power of these warriors, they are not heroic unless they face the heroic paradox – the more they fight the quicker they die. As heroes they must continue to fight because they cannot trade on past glories. So they repeatedly expose themselves to an unwanted and excruciating death. To fight in the knowledge that one is thereby guaranteed a gruesome death and an eternity of misery is only possible if one defers to a table of values that renders one God-like on Earth. And so Gilgamesh, noble and tragic hero, dies. To be remembered as a man of beauty, power and heroic deeds, who used his authority to fight evil, should be enough to fill a man’s heart.
Until the discovery of the Gilgamesh epic, Western literature began around 750 BC with Homer’s great heroic themes which echo those of Gilgamesh, but also include withdrawal of the hero from battle, fights to the death between great warriors, feudal loyalty and disobedience, revenge and its bloody realisation.
The central theme in heroic societies is power expressed through action. Although the Bible says that in the beginning was the word, heroic societies emphasise the deed. People in heroic society are what they do; they are the sum of their actions. What people do is defined by social roles, rules and rewards. In heroic society people know who and what they are by knowing their role and the rules which bind roles. When they know their role – their place – they know almost everything they have to know. They know what they are owed and what they owe others. They know what to do in the face of the enemy and how to relate to warriors and camp-followers. There is a clear understanding of standards and orders of rank. Without a role people would not know who they are. In short, people in heroic society are what they do and what they do is largely influenced by their social roles.
To say that people are what they do sounds banal to modern ears. But in our day, most people disagree with the heroic view, believing instead that there lurks in humans a hidden source of actions – a puppeteer pulling the strings of action. We have diverse names for this actor – I, soul, mind, self, psyche, ego, character, personality. Yet, for Homer, there are no hidden depths, there is no puppeteer. Homer makes no distinction between actor and action in the same way in which we should make no distinction between the flash and the lightning (since the lightning is the flash). And so there is, for Homer, no I, soul, mind, self or psyche and so no psychology. Achilles is obviously different from Hector, and is so described, but neither is described in terms of an underlying personality, i.e. a quasi-mechanical force which compels them to act in their different ways. Homer’s heroes are fated to live a long life of security and mediocrity, or a short career of danger and glory, and there is no possibility of escaping from their fate by appeal to an immortal soul or mind which exercises free will.
Clearly, Homer’s characters choose and decide courses of action even if Homer lacks a language of reflective choice. If heroes are deprived of their just rewards, for example, they are faced with the need to choose an appropriate course of action. This dilemma sets in motion the plot of the Iliad and gives it its dramatic tension. But this dilemma assumes that Achilles, deprived of his just rewards by his commander-inchief, Agamemnon, had a choice in the matter. Modern readers imagine Achilles struggling with his possibilities, overwhelmed by various alternatives which he must finally resolve by private, critical deliberation. But reading the Iliad it is clear that Achilles does not choose; he does what he must. The heroic code has been violated, he acts accordingly. Achilles is fated to fight and kill Hector after which he will himself die heroically. The heroes of the Iliad accept their destiny and are ennobled by that acceptance.
Heroic life was a constant pursuit of virtue, excellence, power, courage, nobility. Young men were expected to be impetuous and fiery; old men to be prudent and visionary; warriors to be courageous and self-reliant; women to be chaste and useful. Women, however, represented a ‘problem’ for warriors.
In the poignant scene with Hector, Andromache and their son, the dilemma of the warrior woman is beautifully and tragically outlined. Since a woman’s status depends on her warrior husband, the possibility of his death looms large in her thinking, especially when battle approaches. Andromache wants to hold Hector back from as many battles as possible and keep him in her world of comfort and security. It is clear, however, that Homer believes that warrior women really want their men to resist them and ‘go out among the flying spears’. As Hector says, he would not be able to face his people if he refused to fight and seek glory. His social status (and that of Andromache’s) depends on his status as a successful warrior. Andromache upsets Hector when she begs him to desist from fighting and stay with her and their child, but she does not really provide him with a moral dilemma. He will do what he must do, or as they say in Hollywood: ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.’
Hollywood did, in fact, make a movie based on the confrontation between Andromache and Hector and transferred it to the Wild West. Starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, High Noon begins with Gary (a lawman) and Grace leaving their wedding ceremony. Word arrives that villains are on their way to settle accounts with the townsfolk and its lawman. Gary straps on his guns to the chagrin of his bride who attempts to dissuade him from his potentially fatal course of action. She tells him in no uncertain terms that he has new responsibilities to her and so he should leave the townsfolk to their fate. This, of course, he cannot do. He cannot run from danger, abandon his fellow citizens and spend his life looking over his shoulder. He must stay and face his enemies because his reputation is founded on the moral code he lives by. His bride is unimpressed and gives him a choice: either leave with her or face the villains alone. He stays, she leaves. And we can leave the movie at this point because Hollywood takes over and the movie ends happily with the villains dead, the newly-weds united, travelling into the sunset.
After an auspicious start, High Noon leaves Homer behind in his tent pondering the dilemma of the hero’s loved ones who live with the fear that the heroic code, which gives them their status and wealth, will lead to their early deaths. Because heroes strive to excel and cannot accept loss of face, they stubbornly risk their lives and the lives of their families to achieve glory. There is an inexorable tension between the necessities of battle and the welfare of the family because all parties know that this heroic determination to excel may do damage to friends and community. Heroic self-assertion is thus set against the well-being of society and it represents one of the main tragic themes in epic poetry. Heroes do not intend their loved ones to perish but they know that this can only be avoided by success in war. It is not intentions that count, but successful performance in battle.
Since Homeric heroes must be strong and successful, intentions are irrelevant. Results count more than effort so that Homeric heroes are always under pressure to perform. They cannot trade on past successes; they must continue to fight successfully so that they are forever in a state of preparedness for battle. They are judged by others and are, accordingly, concerned about what others think of them. Since they can only please others by competitive excellence, they set the judgements of peers against estimations of themselves – what they do is, in the final analysis, what counts. In such a worldview it is pointless to distinguish between a moral error and a mistake because both lead to failure. And failure will be met with disapproval whatever the cause.
Homer compares his warrior heroes to lions, wild boars, storms, rivers in flood, raging fires. Their eyes flash, fire beats in their breasts, they are filled with fury as they leap at the enemy with terrifying cries. He describes dying in the most gruesome terms. One warrior lies in the dust with hands stretched out to friends, shrieking, another bellows with pain, clutching the bloody earth or biting the cold bronze which has severed his tongue, another has his brains spread over the face of a friend, another writhes like a roped bull about the spear, and another has his liver thrust out and watches his lap fill with blood. Life and death are contrasted in stark terms: alive a hero is full of vitality; dead there is nothing but torment.
Homer does not glorify war. When a hero dies it is agonising and he travels to Hades. Unlike a Christian heaven or Islamic paradise, Hades is not a place to look forward to. Faced with the knowledge that the more they fight the quicker they die, and knowing that their deaths will be painful and that Hades is their eternal place of torment, the obvious question is: why do warriors continue to fight?
For Homer’s heroes it was obvious that whether hero or coward, noble person or base, death awaits all. Life is therefore the standard of value and the way one acts in life is the standard against which one is judged. To understand that death lies ahead, that defeat not victory is the final outcome, is a virtue. The Homeric gods have so planned life that all people must suffer. Heroes accept the tragedy of life and subordinate it to the prospect of a noble death and the hope that they too may become a god.
The Iliad is complicated by the presence of 55 gods who enter and leave the action unpredictably. But the gods serve many purposes. Warriors occasionally act wildly and defy the roles and rules which govern them. These aberrations have to be explained and Homer resorts to external explanations: the gods intervene directly into human bodies. When we say that a friend has a job but his ‘heart’ is not in it, and he lacks the ‘brains’ to succeed and the ‘guts’ to resign, we are following Homer’s practice of explaining human action by reference to bodily organs.
Homer’s belief that human action is initiated through the body by the gods was to suffer a serious setback when, about 200 years later, 54 of his 55 gods were retrenched. The ancient Greeks then needed a different way of explaining human action, particularly those actions that violated the heroic code. If a warrior expresses fear in the face of the enemy, contrary to the dictates of his role and training, Homer assumes that he lacks menos which can be corrected by the intervention of a god. But if the gods are subtracted from Homer’s psychology, he is left with roles, rules and rewards as explanations of internal experiences, and these concepts cannot carry the burden placed upon them.
Rules, roles and rewards are useful explanatory concepts but they cannot help us understand feelings and actions that stand in opposition to them. When the gods were removed from Mt. Olympus Homeric psychology had to change radically. The obvious solution to the problem was to reverse causes: human action is not externally caused, it is internally caused. This has led, in our time, to the popular view that human behaviour is caused by personality traits which reside in us. Whereas Homer might have said that Achilles was bothered by the (external) angers, many people today believe that individuals are angry because of their angry personalities. A moment’s reflection reveals the circular reasoning involved in attributing angry behaviour to an angry personality. Some people are angry because of an angry personality; they have an angry personality because they are angry. We might say that Homer’s gods have been removed from the mountain and have taken up residence inside human beings as personality traits.
Reading the Iliad it is obvious that Homer’s heroes are subject to violent changes in mood which would nowadays be called mental instability. The fiercest warriors weep openly before their colleagues, sometimes in rage, other times in sadness. They are quick to acknowledge their fears, worries and wishes. They live and fight intensely, the very opposite of modern movie heroes who stare unblinkingly at the danger that confronts them and have the emotional life of a machine. Living was an intense, emotional affair and those who failed to express appropriate emotion were regarded as incomplete human beings. It was to be several centuries before Plato would argue that Homer’s characters were child-like because emotions overpowered their rational faculties. But Homer does not have a language for rationality. His characters argue and debate but they do not think in terms of an overarching, standard of rationality. Their actions are judged pragmatically rather than rationally and their debates are conducted against the background of practical necessity. The forceful expression of emotions is an important aspect of this background because, in a world dominated by power, it is often necessary to intimidate enemies and colleagues alike.
Of course, this begs the question: where do emotions come from? As Homer does not use a language of psychological causes, his machinery of gods vividly portrays the surging emotions of his heroes. While it is true that he is not innocent of ascribing behaviour to bodily organs, he nonetheless avoids a language of mental events. He interprets the ‘irrational’ elements in human nature as an interference with human life by human-like gods who put something into warriors and thereby influence their conduct and thinking.
Homer’s men, women and gods ‘know’ things and knowledge reveals character which is not an internal possession but the total of what they have been and probably will be. If knowledge is character, what is not knowledge is not part of character but comes to heroes from outside. So when they act in a manner contrary to the character which they know, their actions are not their own but have been imposed upon them. What we should call irrational impulses are, therefore, not theirs but emanate from alien sources. Above all, Homer’s characters know that they cannot escape their fate. After listening to Lycaon beg for his life, Achilles tells him that he must die, like his friend Patroclus who was a better man by far than Lycaon. Achilles knows that he too must die. A day is coming when somebody is going to kill him in battle with a spear or an arrow.
Homer’s psychology is a form of behaviourism since there is no psyche to study. His psyche is composed of material (like breath) that resides in the body while people are alive, and at death flies down to Hades through a bodily orifice. From there it may be summoned to address the living. Psyche has no mental function in the living person; it is simply that whose existence ensures that the person is alive: it is the breath of life.
Today ‘I’ is used to designate that which takes decisions. But in Homer there is much less emphasis on ‘I’. The closest word to ‘I’ is thymos which is used as a source of power. Homeric characters act as their thymos directs them. The thymos of warriors tells them to eat, slay the enemy, or take an appropriate course of action. Lacking the linguistic framework to distinguish between a psychological function and a bodily organ meant that thymos was felt as a hot sensation in the chest, a surge from within. Thymos is also associated with consciousness: it feels emotions and is conscious of that feeling. It is the thymos in which internal debates occur: it is the dialogue within.
As he prepares to face Achilles in mortal combat Hector groans at his plight and takes counsel with his thymos. In short, he debates with himself. He tells himself that if he retires behind the wall, Polydamas will be the first to remind him that when Achilles returned to the battle, he, Hector, did not take his advice and order a withdrawal into the city. Having sacrificed the army to his own perversity, Hector tells himself that he cannot face his countrymen and the Trojan ladies in their trailing gowns. He contemplates putting down his shield and helmet, propping his spear against the wall, and on his own authority making overtures to Achilles. But he berates himself for considering this course of action because he has every reason to fear that when he approaches Achilles he will be killed like a woman, naked and unarmed. So he firmly rejects flight or compromise and decides to waste no time and come to grips with his situation. Then he will know to whom the Olympian gods intend to hand the victory. Here, in this poignant inward debate, we have the main heroic themes: courage, doubt, shame, virility, power, glory and fate.
Judged by today’s standards, Homer’s language is very different; some would say primitive. Yet there is a beautiful simplicity in employing an action language stripped of dubious abstractions and the circular reasoning involving abstract nouns which claims that people act aggressively because they have aggressive personalities. Homer describes the world in human terms; he does not concern himself with a mysterious inner world of mental events or personality traits. This was soon to change, however.
In his dramas, Aeschylus suggests that when people act some psychological process is involved. Philologist Bruno Snell, in The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, notes that Aeschylus emphasises human choice, by which he means a deliberate act of decision. Homer does not speak of such a dilemma; his warriors merely know that it is their fate either to die as young men in a blaze of glory, or to live long and mediocre lives. Aeschylus is less interested than Homer in what his characters do because he believes that the essence of human action is to be discovered in the act of decision. Action involves a commitment to the future: it is more than a mere reaction to events. So when people are about to act, they weigh alternatives and assume the responsibility for their decisions, and this is what gives the dramatic tension to Aeschylus’ plays.
Aeschylus composes tales of what happens to people when they make crucial choices. When Homer makes the meaning of human events depend upon the actions of gods, these deeds are unalterable facts in the face of which human choices are impotent. In the world of Aeschylus, the power of gods has been replaced by personal power. But these powers are also a burden which many people find onerous. In Aeschylus’ plays they wear people down and isolate them from the support of gods. This inexorable path to isolation continues in the plays of Sophocles whose characters are already lonelier than those of Aeschylus.
In Sophocles psyche is ‘I’ which has taken over the functions of Homer’s thymos. Psyche now means ‘life’ or ‘person’ as contrasted with soma or body. Psyche is the psychological correlate of soma which together make a human being complete. By the fifth century BC psyche is used to refer more to the emotional than the rational, self: it is the seat of courage, passion and anxiety.
Like Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides attempts to understand the quintessential nature of human beings, their motives and their capacity for choice. In Euripides’ world, individuals are alone with their passions and their passions are not easily tamed by reason. Indeed, Euripides thought that reason was relatively impotent in the face of strong passion and wondered whether any rational purpose is to be found in the world of human affairs. Good and evil are not God-given qualities assailing reason from without. Rather, they are part of the defining characteristics of human beings.
Euripides places the responsibility for good and evil actions inside individuals. Passion and knowledge are the two great determining factors; external factors are devalued as deceptive devices used to avoid confronting the sad fact that human beings are individually responsible, through the power of passion and inadequate powers of reasoning, for the good and evil they create. It is therefore important to study the workings of ‘I’ if we are to discover the personal powers which inspire good and evil deeds.
In Euripides’ play, Medea, two themes which loom large in the centuries ahead dominate: the qualities of women and the importance of human motives. In her attempt to win back Jason from another woman, Medea threatens and then proceeds to kill her children. While audiences, ancient and modern, are appalled by her actions, they strive to understand her motives. Medea, for all her crimes, is more human (if not humane) than Homer’s characters because she defies her biological and social conditioning. She rises above everyday feelings to achieve her goals and even though we find her behaviour despicable, we try to understand why she acted as she did.
Medea knows that she is at war with her irrational self. Her tragedy is that she chooses to surrender to the power of her passion, knowing that she can do otherwise. She says that she understands the horror of what she is going to do, but anger masters her resolve. Referring indirectly to the Homeric sense of heroism, she says that a woman is weak and timid in most matters: the noise of war makes her a coward. But touch her right to marriage and there is no bloodier spirit. Women may be useless for heroic purposes but they are skilled practitioners in all kinds of evil. She refuses to allow anyone to think of her as weak or passive: she is dangerous to her enemies and loyal to her friends. To such a life glory belongs.
If we are defined by our ability to transcend our biological and social conditioning, we are very dangerous indeed. We are saved from this danger if we master the power of passion. But Euripides is not sanguine about this; he is convinced that humans can be relied upon to allow their passions to control and guide them on the important matters of living. So long as ‘I’ as psyche is granted the status of the emotional self and the cause of important actions, there seems to be little room for the ‘rational individuals’ who can, with education and intellectual discipline, tame their passions. These individuals were soon to appear on the world stage with the Greek Rationalists, who took the crucial step of identifying psyche or ‘I’ with rational thinking, whose virtue is knowledge. Through the exercise of rational thinking Medea’s problems can be re-defined and managed and the tragic element in human affairs eliminated. This grandiose worldview, based on a new intellectual optimism, was to wage war on Homeric heroism and consign it to an ignoble history.
In the Iliad heroism does not produce happiness: its reward is fame. Yet there is no self-pity in Homer’s heroes. They confront a brutal and dangerous world courageously and without any sense of being depressed by a future which will end in pain and misery. They teach how to live nobly in the face of adversity and death. If we cannot be immortal, we can at least live nobly and die well. Homeric folk resist the impulse to invent a perfect, spiritual world to house its heroes. Homer’s is a realistic philosophy of life in which ‘what you see is what you get’ and nobility means confronting a harsh world without illusion. To confront and accept the tragic element in human life demands a worldview which does not excuse poor performance, or tolerate hand-wringing complainers.
Homer’s men are hardy folk with strong bodies of classical beauty. Their philosophy emphasises all the finer human emotions – love, chivalry, courage, virtue, excellence and justice. The warriors are lusty in company, fearless in a fight and steadfast in friendship. They applaud excellence in battle and in oratory. Faced with a cruel and short life, Homer portrays human existence as more than an insignificant struggle, even though human life is governed by conflict. A philosophy of glorious power is, therefore, an understandable consequence of the need to transform their intolerable, battle-bound lives into a spectacle. We cannot help but wonder how these high-spirited men and women could have found life so enjoyable. To be able to confront a brutal life without self-pity suggests a philosophical worldview which we would do well to study.
Social commentators have noted that we live in a narcissistic culture which screams for freedom without responsibility and happiness without pain. If true, we must seriously question whether we can begin to understand the ancient idea of the heroic. If we pursue ‘happiness’ and ‘quality of life’ we distance ourselves from the heroic life. If we submit to political correctness and the demands of paranoid minority groups, we vote for a dubious democracy which has lost touch with the great aristocratic standards by which greatness is achieved. If we, in our self-pitying haste, seek out counsellors for our minor ills, we deny the virtues of courage and nobility. It is Homer’s genius that he was able to describe the heroic worldview in a way that combined an emphasis on heroic self-assertion with a deep sense of the tragedy of human existence. Homer’s heroes are alive today and deserve respect because they looked squarely at the world and stood firm in the face of its terrors. They have never left Western consciousness and they stride across the stage of history as giants who bow their heads only to their mortality.
