Читать книгу The Heroic Heart - Tod Lindberg - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe inevitable collision of heroic types with politics. The instability of political order in the age of classical heroism.
What most distinguishes the politics of the ancient world from the politics of the modern world is that political failure in the ancient world was routinely a matter of life and death. The rewards for success in politics were and are great, now as then: acclaim, riches, the freedom to associate with the similarly high and mighty. The penalty for failure, however, is now much diminished. If you lose an election or make a bad decision these days, you do not typically lose your head.
Consider the case of the Greek city-state of Melos in the fifth century BCE. As Thucydides describes it in the History of the Peloponnesian War, all the Melians wanted was to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. But that wasn’t good enough for the Athenians, who demanded Melos’s allegiance as well as annual tribute. A delegation of blunt-speaking Athenian generals visited Melos and met with some of its leading citizens, explaining in no uncertain terms that in case of non-compliance, Athens would destroy Melos. The Melians, for centuries a proud and independent people, refused to bend to the Athenian demands. They voiced their conviction that because Melos was a colony of Sparta, if Athens attacked the Spartans would come to their aid. In any case, the Melians said, they believed they would prevail because the gods knew their cause was just. The Athenians scoffed at Melian naïveté.
The Athenians turned out to be right: The Spartans didn’t come to the Melians’ rescue. Nor did the gods. So to punish the Melian defiance, after defeating them in battle, the Athenians killed every last one of the men of Melos and sold all the women and children into slavery. Now there was a political decision with consequences.
Or consider the problem of the danger of politics from the point of view not of a weak city-state but of a powerful tyrant: Many and various are the people who might like to kill you and become tyrant themselves. In a wry dialogue composed by Plato’s contemporary Xenophon, Hiero or Tyrannicus, Hiero the tyrant paints an elaborate portrait of himself and his fellow tyrants as the most miserable of all human beings, each a de facto prisoner of his absolute power. True, he gets the most pleasing spectacles, the best food, the sweetest words of praise, sex with the loveliest boy. But these are only sources of misery to him, since a common man can travel freely to see a variety of spectacles in a way that no tyrant can; and since the best food, eaten every day, becomes a bore; and since the praise he receives all comes from flatterers; and since the boy will never really love him. Hiero laments that though tyrants “are acquainted with the decent, the wise, and the just,” they “fear rather than admire them. They fear the brave because they might dare something for the sake of their freedom; the wise, because they might contrive something; and the just, because the multitude might desire to be ruled by them. When, because of their fear, they do away secretly with such men, who is left for them to use save the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish?” (5:1–2). It takes a certain sense of self to kill off all the best people around you and then complain that there is no one left worth your time.
Why, then, go into politics at all? Or why not try get out of it? Why not seek a quiet private life instead? Perhaps the questions are anachronistic—in the sense that we modern types have drunk deeply of the primal human desire Hobbes described, that for a quiet life. Hiero clearly believes he has no choice but to continue as tyrant, because he has made so many enemies who would be only too happy to do him in if ever he did give up the power he wields. This concern seems just as applicable to modern-day tyrants, even if tyranny is less prevalent these days.
But missing from Hiero’s account of himself, and deliberately so, is any kind of acknowledgment of the chief benefit, indeed joy, of being tyrant. It’s that nobody, but nobody, can tell you what to do. You are free in the most basic sense of the term, free of the compulsory authority of all others. Nature still constrains you, of course; you remain mortal. But your fellow human beings do not constrain you. There may be other nearby tyrants who would like to add to what they have everything you have, and you may have to fight them—to conquer or be conquered. You may have to take special measures to protect yourself. But within the sphere of your authority, it is absolute.
Hiero seems to understand the utterly arbitrary nature of the power he wields: He makes no claim to deserve to rule beyond the indisputable political fact that he does rule. He might well readily grant that if someone managed to successfully challenge his power, then that person would deserve to rule no less (and no more) than he himself does. The Athenian generals visiting Melos captured this sentiment rather ably: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” The operative word is “can.” Not, “wherever they want to,” implying discretionary latitude about whether to rule; but “wherever they can,” a pure test of strength. This is a vision of politics bereft of all considerations of justice or morality: absolute power creating absolute rule, which entails absolute discretion on all questions but one: whether to exercise the absolute power.
But not all rulers are tyrants. Some who possess power that may verge on the absolute also possess something else, namely legitimacy in one form or another. This is the point at which a ruler becomes not a tyrant but a king. In the next chapter, we will have a chance to look at heroic kings and heroes who go on to set themselves up as kings, by founding either a state or something equally noteworthy, or by taking one over. For now, however, we need to examine what happens when a king or other ruler whose legitimacy is widely accepted runs into someone of the heroic type who thinks differently.
Of Agamemnon’s greatness, there can be no doubt. The Homeric epithet most commonly associated with him is “lord of men”—the greatest ruler among the mortals. He is the leader of the expedition against Troy, the outcome of which, everyone understands, will decisively shape the world. At one particularly dark moment in the battle, Agamemnon broods on the consequences of defeat: “Our memory blotted out a world away from Argos!” (XIV 84–85). Oblivion: It’s a terrible prospect for a fellow as accustomed to glory as Agamemnon.
But though Agamemnon is the greatest ruler, he is not the greatest warrior. That distinction belongs to Achilles, “best of the Achaeans.” Both facts are known to both men, and to the Achaean and Trojan ranks alike. To understand how the inner greatness of a hero expresses itself, we have looked at the second phase of Achilles’s rage in the Iliad, that over the death of Patroclus. To see just how great a threat such a hero can be to even the greatest king, we can look at the first phase of the rage of Achilles, his row with Agamemnon.
Like the Trojan War itself, which began with the Trojan prince Paris stealing the fabulously beautiful Helen away from the Spartan King Menelaeus, the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon also starts out over a woman. As the Iliad opens, the Achaeans have been besieging Troy for nine years. They are frustrated and tired, and what’s more, a plague has now broken out in their ranks. The obvious conclusion is that the gods are angry. But why?
In addition to laying siege to Troy, Agamemnon’s forces, often led by Achilles, have been sacking Troy’s allies in the neighborhood. In the course of one such venture (before the action of the Iliad begins), Agamemnon has taken the beautiful Chryseis, daughter of a priest of the temple of Apollo, for his concubine as a battle prize.
So that explains to the satisfaction of pretty much everyone, except Agamemnon, who among the gods is punishing them—Apollo—and why. At a tense assembly of the leading Achaeans, Achilles warns that defeat at Troy is imminent unless Agamemnon does the right thing and gives Chryseis back.
The “lord of men” doesn’t like this a bit. But he soon assents, with the proviso that if he must give up Chryseis, he will take another prize in her stead, lest he “alone of the Argives go without my honor.” We note here that Agamemnon’s sense of self, his own greatness, is (so to say) other-directed. It requires validation: glory and prizes. A world in which all the “men” of the “lord of men” get prizes and the lord himself does not get a prize is a world turned upside-down. The legitimacy of the king requires constant acknowledgment by those who owe him their allegiance.
Achilles tries to appeal to a sense of honor in Agamemnon higher than the demand for a trophy fit for a king. Achilles points out that all the booty has already been distributed among the fighters: “collect it, call it back from the rank and file? That would be the disgrace” (I 147–148). It would be conduct unbefitting the “lord of men.” Achilles tries to direct Agamemnon’s sense of honor inward. He also suggests that after Apollo has been appeased with the return of Chryseis, and the Achaeans defeat the Trojans, Agamemnon will have prizes aplenty.
Achilles’s comments only escalate Agamemnon’s sense of indignity. The king says that in the absence of other compensation for giving Chryseis back, he will take a different captive for his concubine—perhaps, come to think of it, Achilles’s own Briseis.
Agamemnon’s response infuriates Achilles, whose appeal to an inner sense of honor instantly vanishes. Instead, he gives voice directly to an exceedingly delicate albeit largely unspoken subject: the tension between the greatest king and the greatest warrior. Achilles essentially claims that he has been doing Agamemnon a favor by fighting on his side. He points out that he and his Myrmidons never had a quarrel of their own with Priam. They came “to fight for you, to win your honor back from the Trojans” (I 187–188). Achilles feels that Agamemnon has now slighted him, disgraced him. He, Achilles, is the best warrior. His comment here indicates he may think Agamemnon on his own might not be up to the task of winning against the Trojans. Achilles is, moreover, a Myrmidon king, not an Argive subject of Agamemnon’s. He owes Agamemnon no allegiance—except, perhaps, in the sense that he has previously agreed to join with Agamemnon in the war with Troy.
Yet in the view of the greatest warrior, the rewards in prizes and glory have not been at all commensurate with his deeds:
“[ . . . ] My honors never equal yours,
whenever we sack some wealthy Trojan stronghold—
my arms bear the brunt of the raw, savage fighting,
true, but when it comes to dividing up the plunder
the lion’s share is yours, and back I go to my ships,
clutching some scrap, some pittance I love,
when I have fought to exhaustion.” (I 193–199)
Here, then, the relationship of the greatest warrior to the greatest king dissolves into a one-sided exercise in resentment. In the heat of the moment, Achilles loses touch with the inner sense of greatness that has been largely responsible for his heroic deeds, instead focusing on the insufficiency of the prizes he has won in compensation for them. He is right that the prizes have been inadequate to his achievements, but he is wrong, of course, in thinking that better prizes would have somehow satisfied him. Unlike Agamemnon, for whom the prizes are an essential acknowledgment of his authority as “lord of men,” the greatest warrior in his heart knows he needs no such acknowledgment, that he alone is master and judge of himself. This becomes burningly clear once Patroclus dies, as we have seen in the previous chapter. Now, however, Achilles threatens to walk out on Agamemnon, to quit the war and go home to Phthia.
Achilles’s complaint enrages Agamemnon further. With Achilles both denying the authority of Agamemnon over him and calling into question the fairness of his treatment at the hand of the lord of men, the confrontation between the two is getting into very dangerous territory. Agamemnon now chooses to belittle Achilles’s martial prowess as something for which Achilles himself deserves no credit: It is “just a gift of god” (I 211). He then paints Achilles as a deserter. The king warns him:
“[. . . ] I will be there in person at your tents
to take Briseis in all her beauty, your own prize—
so you can learn just how much greater I am than you
and the next man up may shrink from matching words with me,
from hoping to rival Agamemnon strength for strength.” (I 217–221)
At this, Achilles considers drawing his sword on Agamemnon. Homer describes the timely arrival of the goddess Athena, whom only Achilles can see. She urges him on behalf of herself and the goddess Hera to restrain himself: “Obey us both” (I 251). The appeal sways Achilles. He sheaths his sword and rounds once again verbally on Agamemnon, calling him a drunk and a coward, and admonishing him that the day will come when the Achaeans beg Achilles to return to fight for them.
Agamemnon is in turn unrelenting, berating Achilles:
. . . “this soldier wants to tower over the armies,
he wants to rule over all, to lord it over all,
give out orders to every man in sight.” (I 336–338)
Achilles replies that he himself would be a coward if he were willing to submit to any order Agamemnon chose to give: “Never again, I trust, will Achilles yield to you” (I 347). He says contemptuously that he won’t fight over Briseis, since the Achaeans, having been the ones who gave her to him in the first place, could have her back if they want. But he informs Agamemnon in the bloodiest of language that he will kill him if he attempts to take anything else “against my will” (I 353).
The two part ways. Agamemnon arranges for the return of Chryseis. Achilles, for his part, is now so enraged that he importunes the gods to come to the aid of his erstwhile enemy, the Trojans, in battle. The weeping Achilles tells his goddess-mother Thetis that he wants to see the Achaeans driven from their siege of Troy back to their ships, there to be trapped and killed:
“So all can reap the benefits of their king—
so even mighty Atrides [Agamemnon] can see how mad he was
to disgrace Achilles, the best of the Achaeans.” (I 488–490)
Thus is the stage set for the action of the first third of the Iliad: The beleaguered Agamemnon and the Achaeans suffer the full weight of a Trojan onslaught as Achilles sulks in his tent.
First, Agamemnon defies Apollo, courting disaster. Second, Agamemnon proposes a course of action that Achilles must oppose as disgraceful. Finally, Agamemnon proposes to disgrace none other than Achilles himself. The bond between Agamemnon and Achilles is broken, seemingly irreparably.
Agamemnon and Achilles have different ideas about what honor entails. Agamemnon, the lord of men, sees his due as the greatest prize. Under favorable circumstances, Achilles would perhaps not object. In peacetime, each could repair to his own kingdom, there to receive as king top honors in the sense Agamemnon means. Even during wartime, when the war is going well for the Achaeans—when they are sacking the cities of Trojan allies and hauling off booty in surpassing quantity—the difference between receiving Chryseis or Briseis as a concubine is maybe not worth an argument. Yet the circumstances at the beginning of the Iliad are anything but favorable: nine long years into the siege of Troy, and a plague sweeping through the Achaean ranks.
Moreover, it is only wartime that allows for the disclosure of the distinction that exists between the greatest king and the greatest warrior. It is abundantly clear from the exchange between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book I that Achilles’s martial superiority has long been a sore subject for Agamemnon, and Agamemnon’s kingly superiority a sore subject for Achilles. The greatest warrior and the greatest king are not united in one person. Once their row is well under way and tempers are flaring, Agamemnon voices what seems like a long-harbored suspicion: that Achilles would like to displace Agamemnon as “lord of men.” Although Achilles overcomes his impulse to try to kill Agamemnon, which might achieve the unity of greatest king and greatest warrior in the person of Achilles, he nevertheless does nothing to dispel Agamemnon’s suspicion of his loyalty. Achilles says that only a coward would obey Agamemnon unquestioningly, promises to kill anyone who tries to take anything from him against his will, quits the fight, and beseeches higher powers for Agamemnon’s defeat.
As a matter of first impression, Homer’s presentation of the row between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book I is highly unfavorable to Agamemnon. The “lord of men” looks frankly petty, and we know from the first line that the Iliad is Achilles’s story, meaning it is not Agamemnon’s. But we should not leave matters at first impression. Homer has provided a more nuanced account.
We must begin with the observation, to which I have gestured above, that in the course of their argument before the assembly, Agamemnon is in fact in the process of backtracking—conceding all of Achilles’s points. Agamemnon is angry with the seer who told him about Apollo’s anger and how to dispel it, but he gets the message: He will return Chryseis. And he quickly abandons the idea of demanding loot back from his fighters. Moreover, it is entirely unclear that he is actually intending to enforce his musings about taking for himself somebody else’s concubine. “Enough. We’ll deal with all this later, in due time” (I 165), Agamemnon says, just before he begins giving instructions for Chryseis’s return. There is a distinct possibility that “later” means “forget it.” At a minimum, the problem requires more kingly thought. Yet Achilles chooses to interpret Agamemnon’s clearly off-the-cuff comments as a premeditated assault on his honor and stature, adopting Agamemnon’s view of honor and stature as requiring prizes and glory.
What Agamemnon has that Achilles lacks, and what Agamemnon above all must keep, is legitimacy as “lord of men”—king of Argos and top king among the Achaeans. But Agamemnon has not become king by fighting his way to the top; he is the son of King Atreus and is thus rightful heir to the throne of Argos. He needs the people around him to respect his authority as a matter of course, lest seeds of rebellion sprout and the political order constructed around the king become unstable. Yet respecting Agamemnon’s authority is precisely what Achilles has boxed himself into the position of being unable to do. Agamemnon does not need Briseis and may not even want Briseis—until and unless someone tells Agamemnon he can’t have Briseis. At that moment, the issue is no longer who gets which concubine, but the authority of the “lord of men.” Agamemnon must put down challenges to his authority, by force if necessary. And the routine maintenance of that authority is intimately bound to the proposition that the king in principle deserves the biggest prize. With the unique responsibilities of the crown come the greatest rewards. Moreover, it is ultimately the king who has final say on who gets which prize. Perhaps he would choose to honor an especially valiant warrior with a uniquely valuable prize that he might otherwise keep for himself. But the decision is the king’s, not the warrior’s.
When Agamemnon’s men show up at Achilles’s tent for Briseis, Achilles turns her over voluntarily, as he said he would. If he did not, we would perforce go on to read a very different book: It would be the story of a struggle to the death for supreme political power between Agamemnon and Achilles. Such a book, in Homer’s hands, would no doubt have been interesting—but not as interesting as the Iliad. What makes the Iliad more interesting is that it is not a struggle for political power, which is of no apparent interest to Achilles. There is no indication Achilles is afraid of fighting Agamemnon. Achilles has asserted that he will fight anyone who tries to take something from him against his will. Agamemnon, for his part, has expressed his willingness to fight for Briseis if he must, as a warning to others about the danger of defying the “lord of men.” But the two headstrong wills do not collide. Agamemnon’s primary purpose is the defense of his kingly authority, and Achilles is not interested in challenging him on the point. He demonstrates as much by his willingness to yield Briseis.
Achilles’s position in the row with Agamemnon is to reject Agamemnon’s authority over himself. Achilles answers only to the gods. At the heart of the Iliad is the self-struggle of Achilles to assert his greatness—not to prove it to others, not to win the acclaim of others, not to rule over others, but to do his greatness justice by his own inner light. He is Agamemnon’s biggest problem. And when you are the biggest problem of the “lord of men,” you are a mighty big problem indeed.
In the end, the resolution of the conflict between the greatest warrior and the greatest king comes only with the foretold death, freely chosen, of the greatest warrior. Nevertheless, at the end of the penultimate book of the Iliad, Homer offers a subtle but poignant illustration of the relative stature of the two men. In tribute to Patroclus, Achilles has convened funeral games and put up lavish prizes for the fastest charioteer, best wrestler, best archer, and so forth. The last contest is throwing a spear, a task at which Agamemnon himself excels. As the lord of men is about to take on his challenger, Achilles calls it off:
“Atrides [i.e., Agamemnon]—well we know how far you excel us all:
no one can match your strength at throwing spears,
You are the best by far!
Take first prize [an ornate cauldron] and return to your hollow ships
while we award this spear [the one that was to have been thrown in the contest]
to the fighter Meriones,
if that would please your heart. That’s what I propose.”
And Agamemnon the lord of men could not resist. (XXIII, 986–992)
We recall the outbreak of the row between Agamemnon and Achilles, a dispute over a battle prize Agamemnon has bestowed upon himself, the concubine Chryseis. The row escalates into a challenge from Achilles to the very legitimacy and authority of Agamemnon as “lord of men.” Its practical consequence is Achilles’s withdrawal from battle and his prayer for the Achaeans’ defeat, a prayer on the verge of being granted until the death of Patroclus brings Achilles decisively back into the fight.
Now Agamemnon gets a prize again, and a fine one it is indeed. Achilles also heaps lavish praise on Agamemnon, open acknowledgment of the primacy of “the lord of men.” But this time it is not Agamemnon granting himself honors appropriate to his primacy, but Achilles who is doing the bestowing. Achilles repudiates his challenge to Agamemnon’s authority, having realized that the accoutrements of greatness in the form of prizes and glory and even supreme political power are no measure of greatness within. The scene of the final encounter between the two in the Iliad, fewer than 20 lines in all, is almost chilling in its depiction of Achilles’s self-assured, god-like superiority over the “lord of men,” who cannot resist.
Although it is true that the majority of heroes from ancient times were men, the ability and at times the willingness to risk or give up one’s life is not unique to men, nor is the danger such a willingness can pose to the established political order under the right circumstances. For one such female paragon, consider the (possibly legendary) case of Lucretia, a figure from the Rome of the sixth century BCE described by the later authors Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Titus Livy and the subject of a dramatic poem by Shakespeare.
Lucretia was the wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus (anglicized as “Collatine”), a grand nephew of the king of Rome. Her husband was governor of Collatia, a town in Central Italy not far from Rome.
In Livy’s version of the story, which became the basis of Shakespeare’s retelling, Collatine was at a drinking party in Ardea with a number of royal princes, including Sextus Tarquinius (anglicized as Tarquin), son of the king and heir apparent. As the alcohol flowed, the men took to debating the question of whose wife was the most virtuous. Collatine declared that they could settle the matter at once by riding out at that very moment to see what their wives were up to. “What we see of the behaviour of each on the unexpected arrival of her husband, let that be the surest test,” Collatine said (57). And so they did, riding first to Rome and then on to Collatia, where they discovered, first, all the king’s daughters-in-law “passing their time in feasting and luxury” (57) and then Lucretia in Collatia late at night spinning her loom in the company of her handmaids. The princes all agreed that Lucretia deserved the palm in this competition.
But there was a dark side to the men’s revelry. Tarquin became “inflamed by the beauty and exemplary purity of Lucretia” (57). In the Dionysius of H. version, there is no drinking party, but the king has dispatched Tarquin to Collatia on a military mission, and Lucretia has received him there with great hospitality (64). Whether, as in Livy, Tarquin traveled to Collatia for the purpose of having his way with Lucretia, or whether he conceived his plan on the spot, late the night of his arrival he stole into Lucretia’s room. Brandishing a sword, Tarquin told Lucretia that she must submit willingly to him sexually, or he would kill her.
But even as Tarquin continued to entreat and threaten her, Lucretia would not submit. Livy says that Lucretia “was inflexible and not moved even by the fear of death” (58). So Tarquin escalated, seizing upon a threat to Lucretia that he sensed she would deem even worse than death: submit willingly to him sexually, or die and be dishonored. Tarquin told her that after he killed her, he would kill one of the household slaves, whose naked corpse he would position alongside her, claiming he found the two lovers in flagrante delicto.
The thought of this lasting dishonor, the desecration of her reputation for all time, was too much for Lucretia to bear. She chose to submit. In the Dionysius account, Tarquin accompanied his threat with a blandishment as well: If Lucretia willingly complied, he would marry her, and she would rule the Roman kingdom alongside him (65). But Dionysius portrays the offer of marriage as of no weight in Lucretia’s decision to submit. Both paint portraits of a strong and virtuous woman who prided her virtue above all. When at last she gave in, it was to avoid the dishonor Tarquin had promised would accompany her death.
After Tarquin finally took his leave, Lucretia was beside herself with mortification. In Livy’s account, she sent for her father to come from Rome and for her husband to come from Ardea, telling them each to bring a loyal friend along (58). In Dionysius’s, which is rather more theatrical, Lucretia rode to her father’s house in Rome, where she threw herself in tears at his feet and asked him to summon the leading figures of the city (66). The point is that Lucretia has chosen a public setting, with witnesses, for what will ensue.
The assembly completed, Lucretia unburdened herself of everything that had happened the previous night, and asked of those present that they avenge the wrong Tarquin did to her. Those assembled were shocked by the news, but what happened next was more shocking still. Immediately upon completion of her revelation, accusation, and demand for justice, she took out a dagger concealed in her dress and stabbed herself mortally in the heart.
As Dionysius describes what happened next: “This dreadful scene struck the Romans who were present with so much horror and compassion that they all cried out with one voice that they would rather die a thousand deaths in defence of their liberty than suffer such outrages to be committed by the tyrants” (67). In Livy’s account, which has a little more going in the way of rhetorical flourish, Lucius Junius Brutus, whom Collatine brought with him from Ardea, withdrew the bloody knife from Lucretia’s breast and solemnly declared, “By this blood—most pure before the outrage wrought by the king’s son—I swear, and you, O gods, I call to witness that I will drive hence Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, together with his cursed wife and his whole brood, with fire and sword and every means in my power, and I will not suffer them or any one else to reign in Rome” (59).
And that’s what happened. Brutus took charge of the rebellion, marching to Rome. As Livy writes: “The terrible occurrence created no less excitement in Rome than it had done in Collatia; there was a rush from all quarters of the City to the Forum” (59). There, Brutus retold the story of the rape of Lucretia by the son of the king, and other abuses by the ruler of Rome. Livy: “By enumerating these and, I believe, other still more atrocious incidents which his keen sense of the present injustice suggested, but which it is not easy to give in detail, he goaded on the incensed multitude to strip the king of his sovereignty and pronounce a sentence of banishment against Tarquin with his wife and children” (59). The revolution ended with the royal family in exile, Tarquin himself soon to be murdered “in revenge for the old feuds he had kindled by his rapine and murders” (60), and Brutus and Collatine named the first consuls of the new Roman Republic.
Why did Lucretia take her life? Consider her own explanation. Her last words in Livy before stabbing herself are blood-chilling: “It is for you . . . to see that [Tarquin] gets his deserts; although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty; no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example” (58). She cannot really prove that she is blameless, and therefore that she deserves to live, except by taking her own life. In the absence of the deed, she is just a teller of tales. In her case, the tale is true. But of others to come, who knows? She will not provide a model for those who would behave unchastely and tell tales to escape just punishment.
Taking her own life is the ultimate proof of her accusation against Tarquin. He is, after all, the son of the king and heir to the throne: the second most important Roman of all after his father. Had she merely accused him, he could have denied everything; at worst, he could have portrayed the sexual initiative as her own. There were, after all, no signs of physical abuse. He said/she said. It seems reasonably safe to say that the legal procedures of sixth century BCE Rome probably didn’t favor a woman making an accusation against a powerful man. But for what conceivable reason would a woman who had not been treated as Lucretia said Tarquin treated her come forward entirely of her own volition, make such an accusation, and then kill herself?
But it is not, finally, a desire for revenge against Tarquin that motivates her: Rather, her motivation is to establish by deed her rectitude in her own light—even though the only deed sufficient to do so will cost her life.
Here is Shakespeare giving voice to Lucretia as she is pondering what to do:
“O, that is gone for which I sought to live,
And therefore now I need not fear to die. (151)
* * *
For me, I am the mistress of my fate,
And with my trespass never will dispense,
Till life to death acquit my forced offence.” (153)
Here, honor is all: but honor is not “honors” bestowed by others. As in the case of Achilles in his rage over Patroclus, it is inner greatness expressing itself. Lucretia’s honor is a god-like perfection beyond the capacity of death to erase—and indeed, may require her death, as it does here, to express itself fully. Here’s more of Shakespeare’s presentation of her interior monologue:
“My honour I’ll bequeath unto the knife
That wounds my body so dishonoured.
’Tis honour to deprive dishonour’d life;
The one will live, the other being dead:
So of shame’s ashes shall my fame be bred;
For in my death I murder shameful scorn:
My shame so dead, mine honour is newborn.” (170)
Lucretia’s suicide is a deed for the ages because of the perfection of honor her fearlessness achieves. Oh yes, and it brought to an end the 25-year reign of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and the 224-year-old kingdom of Rome. The heroic type, facing death without fear in fulfillment of a sense of inner greatness, can indeed be a menace to society.
The fall of the kingdom of Rome was not something Lucretia appeared to have sought, but rather a consequence of a chain of events she set in motion. It seems likely that she would not have been displeased by the news of the exiled Tarquin’s murder, nor of the demise of a dynasty whose corruption her rape made plain. But it seems equally unlikely that she would have felt in any way triumphant. Such an emotion would have been entirely extraneous to her purpose and resolve. She achieved perfect justice to herself and her honor in her final act, her suicide. Nothing was missing. When she said, “It is for you to see that he gets his deserts,” her point was not to demand that her witnesses seek justice for her sake, but rather to suggest that they do so for their own—because all those hearing her story and witnessing her emphatic demonstration of its truth ought properly to be compelled for reasons of their own honor to act against Tarquin. That her witnesses rose to the occasion speaks well of them. The historic consequences of their willingness to take up arms to see that Tarquin gets his deserts commend her heroism to us. But they add nothing to the perfection of her honor, which she achieved solely on her own account.
I suppose it would be possible to take the side of the Roman dynasty in its dispute with the avengers of Lucretia, perhaps on the grounds that although Tarquin was reprehensible and deserved his ignominy and death, his crime did not warrant overthrowing the king. But I know of no one who has made that case, in literary or other terms. Lucretia is purely heroic, first in her willingness to give up her own life out of obligation to her inner perfection, second in the universal post facto acclaim of others for her action and for the outcome of the ensuing chain of events.
The latter element, the acclaim after the fact, is by no means a certain by-product of the heroic willingness to risk death. Others who have put their lives on the line out of a sense of inner greatness, and who have posed a mortal threat to existing political order, have been more ambiguous figures in terms of the conclusions people have reached about the rectitude of their actions.
Coriolanus, a possibly mythical figure, was a great warrior who won glorious victories for Rome in the first years of the Republic. Plutarch describes his character from his first foray into battle, where he won a laurel for saving the life of another Roman soldier:
It would seem that when a young man’s ambition is no integral part of his nature, it is apt to be quenched by an honourable distinction which is attained too early in life; his thirst and fastidious appetite are speedily satisfied. But serious and firm spirits are stimulated by the honours they receive, and glow brightly, as if roused by a mighty wind to achieve the manifest good. They do not feel that they are receiving a reward for what they have done, but rather that they are giving pledges of what they will do, and they are ashamed to fall behind their reputation instead of surpassing it by their actual exploits. It was in this spirit that Marcius [dubbed “Coriolanus” after his victory over the Volsci at Corioli] vied with himself in manly valour, and being ever desirous of fresh achievement, he followed one exploit with another, and heaped spoils upon spoils, so that his later commanders were always striving with their predecessors in their efforts to do him honour, and to surpass in their testimonials to his prowess. (IV)
Pressed to seek political office, as was the custom for successful generals, Coriolanus expected no less from the people of Rome than that they spontaneously acknowledge his worthiness to lead them. He was reluctant to pander to them in order to obtain their approval—to show them the scars from the wounds he suffered fighting for Rome, per custom. In Shakespeare’s version, Coriolanus is consulting with his counselor Menenius Agrippa and two tribunes of the people, Junius Brutus and Sicinius Velutus, who are hostile to his aristocratic bearing:
MENENIUS
The senate, Coriolanus, are well pleased
To make thee consul.
CORIOLANUS
I do owe them still
My life and services.
MENENIUS
It then remains
That you do speak to the people.
CORIOLANUS
I do beseech you,
Let me o’erleap that custom, for I cannot
Put on the gown, stand naked and entreat them,
For my wounds’ sake, to give their suffrage: please you
That I may pass this doing.
SICINIUS
Sir, the people
Must have their voices; neither will they bate
One jot of ceremony.
MENENIUS
Put them not to’t:
Pray you, go fit you to the custom and
Take to you, as your predecessors have,
Your honour with your form.
CORIOLANUS
It is a part
That I shall blush in acting, and might well
Be taken from the people.
BRUTUS
Mark you that?
CORIOLANUS
To brag unto them, thus I did, and thus;
Show them the unaching scars which I should hide,
As if I had received them for the hire
Of their breath only! (Act II, scene 2, 134–155)
Coriolanus finally decided to go through with the required ritual of baring his wounds in the Forum and asking the people for their support. But he seems to have hated himself for doing so, musing halfway through the ordeal:
Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear,
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to’t:
What custom wills, in all things should we do’t,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heapt
For truth to o’er-peer. Rather than fool it so,
Let the high office and the honour go
To one that would do thus. I am half through;
The one part suffer’d, the other will I do. (Act II, scene 3, 121–132)
He did indeed win the support of the people, and he withdrew from the Forum in expectation of his consulship. But the conniving tribunes, in Shakespeare’s telling, saw an opportunity to step forward and turn the people against Coriolanus by revealing his contempt for them. When the people subsequently switched sides and spurned Coriolanus as arrogant, he denounced popular rule as mere appeal to a rabble. His political enemies had him banished from Rome.
Whereupon Coriolanus himself switched sides. He joined his old battlefield enemy, Tullus Aufidius, the king of the Volsci, and led the Volscian army into battle against Rome, the unworthy city of his birth. Only the intervention of his mother at the eleventh hour, with the Volscian army on the verge of overrunning Rome, dissuaded Coriolanus from destroying the city he might have led as consul, had he only been willing to do what he was manifestly incapable of doing: appealing for the support of those he regarded as unworthy to judge him. Coriolanus instead brokered a peace between Rome and the Volsci. But the deal infuriated Aufidius, who was reveling in the prospect of his imminent conquest (though he was at best ambivalent about his reliance on Coriolanus for the chance). In the end, the bitter Aufidius induced a mob to set upon Coriolanus and kill him.
Plutarch remarks that “whereas other men found in glory the chief end of valour, he found the chief end of glory in his mother’s gladness”: Coriolanus saved Rome for mom’s sake. In Shakespeare’s telling, as Coriolanus saw his mother, wife, and son approaching camp, he reflects
My wife comes foremost; then the honour’d mould
Wherein this trunk was framed [Coriolanus’s mother], and in her hand
The grandchild to her blood. But, out, affection!
All bond and privilege of nature, break!
Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.
What is that curt’sy worth? or those doves’ eyes,
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows;
As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod: and my young boy
Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great nature cries ‘Deny not.’ Let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy: I’ll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand,
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin. (Act V, scene 3, 22–38)
Coriolanus’s resolve to “be obstinate” in the face of his family’s entreaties did not hold up, nor was he able to “stand” as “author of himself,” his heroic effort to do so notwithstanding. Perhaps there is a type of being that stands as “author of” itself, but a human who seeks to do so is a self-contradiction, desiring to be something a human is not. Had Coriolanus been able to withstand the entreaties of his family, had he proceeded to destroy Rome and his family along with it, he would still not have been “author of himself” insofar as he sought to make of himself something a human cannot be.
The heroism of Achilles and Lucretia is not tragic. Their willingness to face death is not a rebellion against their humanity but an embrace of it. They are each “great in their greatness” and completely human at one and the same time. Coriolanus is a tragic hero. He wanted to be something no human can be. The death he encountered as a result was no affirmation of his heroic heart or sense of his own greatness, but rather a rebuke to a sense of greatness seeking to extend itself beyond the human. Death has a way of reminding one of one’s humanity in the event one has forgotten it, and it was coming for Coriolanus whether or not he destroyed Rome. But for Rome, destruction or survival was a pretty close call. Deluded or undeluded, the heroic type can pose grave danger.
Alcibiades burst on the scene of fifth century BCE Athens like a supernova. He was a beautiful, brilliant, well-born young man, rumored to have been the lover of his teacher Socrates. Alcibiades figures prominently in two dialogues of Plato, one of which bears his name, both of which ostensibly treat the subject of love but also address his spectacular political ambition and the attempt of Socrates to place some checks on it for Alcibiades’s own good.
This Socrates sought to do by transforming the traditional erotic desire of an older Athenian man for a boy into the desire of the boy for the older man. The reversed attraction would then make the boy receptive to the advice of the older man—in the case of Alcibiades, to come to a better understanding of the world and himself before throwing himself headlong into politics.
In Plato’s telling, Socrates turned the erotic trick neatly. In the Symposium, Plato depicts an older Alcibiades turning up drunk at a dinner and drinking party where Socrates and others have devoted themselves to praise of Eros, or erotic love. Alcibiades delivers an impassioned speech in which he rebukes Socrates for never having made love to him.
Yet the second element of Socrates’s project, the taming of the ambition of Alcibiades, we must judge a rather comprehensive failure. Alcibiades came to fame during the Peloponnesian War for advocating bold attacks on Sparta. Unfortunately, the expedition to Sicily that he proposed Athens undertake ended in disaster. Thereafter, Alcibiades fell into political disfavor.
No longer in possession of a position of political prominence in the city of his birth, Alcibiades, like Coriolanus, simply switched sides. He went to war against Athens on the side of Sparta and won several important victories for his former enemies. But possibly as a result of an affair with the wife of Agis, the Spartan king, Alcibiades soon found himself unwelcome in Sparta—at which point he defected yet again, this time to the Persian satrap Tissaphernes. Alcibiades encouraged Persia to allow the Athenians and the Spartans to wear themselves down in war, then to invade Attica and drive the Greeks out; all the while, however, he was conniving successfully with a faction in Athens to get himself recalled from exile and installed as military commander. He was assassinated, probably on the orders of the victorious Spartan general Lysander, in 404, but not before demonstrating that Athens, Sparta, and the Persian Empire combined were too small to contain his ambition. One must give credit to Socrates for his insight into the problematic nature of the character of Alcibiades, even if Socrates was unable to do anything about it.
Was there a real Achilles? If not exactly the hero Homer depicts, perhaps one whose exploits in a long-ago war lived on and were further embellished in stories passed orally from generation to generation before Homer codified them in the Iliad? No one knows. Likewise Lucretia and Coriolanus. Of course insofar as the latter two served as subject matter for Shakespeare and are much better known to us through his renderings than through the sources on which he relied, one must acknowledge the possibility that Shakespeare’s accounts reflect the disposition and prejudices of the fifteenth century more than they do authentic insight into the heroism of the characters he depicts.
But having acknowledged the possibility, I now propose to dismiss it as irrelevant to the purpose of this exercise, which is an exploration of heroism in the ancient and modern world and the ways in which the heroic type shapes politics and the political world shapes heroism. Homer has achieved a near-perfect rendition of the highest heroic type of his age, a single character who brings into focus both the inner-directed greatness of that type and the mortal peril such greatness poses to the legitimacy and authority of political order. The achievement of Shakespeare is on a comparable scale. Homer’s and Shakespeare’s characters are literary gifts for the ages, and Plato’s dialogues, meanwhile, offer a profound account of the difficult problem posed by the heroic ambition of an Alcibiades. If these characters are in some sense idealized, so be it; the real-world political issues they pose remain.
The ancient world offers no better illustration of this than the far better-documented case of a certain Gaius Julius Caesar. He was, quite simply, the most ambitious Roman of all among a polity in which ambition on a grand scale was a familiar sight. Here’s Plutarch:
Caesar’s many successes . . . did not divert his natural spirit of enterprise and ambition to the enjoyment of what he had laboriously achieved, but served as fuel and incentive for future achievements, and begat in him plans for greater deeds and a passion for fresh glory, as though he had used up what he already had. What he felt was therefore nothing else than emulation of himself, as if he had been another man, and a sort of rivalry between what he had done and what he purposed to do. (58)
