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 a load of 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 pretense, 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 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 indulging a level of physical vanity that latter 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. 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 valor. The troops who traveled on the Armada’s ships in 1588 were not required to wear uniforms, explained a Spanish military expert in 1610, because their morale was much enhanced by the gorgeousness of their own clothes: “It is the finery, 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, perhaps 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 re-create 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 which 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 to seem, superhuman. 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 extraordinary 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 countertradition 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 underdressed 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 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,” as Tacitus wrote, “always begins with the eye.” “What is he [Achilles] more than another?” asks Ajax in Shakespeare’s bitterly antiheroic 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 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 marvelous 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 really present: it is enough that he should be so apparently. Achilles sent Patroclus out to fight disguised in his armor, 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 color into battle to advertise his presence and at Thapsus, when he himself was overtaken by an attack of “his usual sickness” (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 which 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. And where the actual hero, active or inert, is unavailable, an effigy, an understudy, or a corpse will do as well.
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 II 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 colored 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 license. But one thing is constant: they all provide ways of thinking about mortality.
“Madam,” Francis Drake purportedly told Queen Elizabeth, “the wings 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, 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,” wrote Sallust, “being slaves to appetite and sleep, have passed through life like mere wayfarers … 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 forever in other’s 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 grow old as we that are left grow old,” and it seems to those who survive them that they can even evade death. “Being dead 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. Garibaldi, the most recent of my subjects, died in 1882: I have traced the alterations in his and the others’ reputations only up to the outbreak of the Second World War. But although the stories I have to tell are legendary or historical, 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 which 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 overexcited enthusiasm can be tempted to hand over their political rights to a glorious superman. On September 12, 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
Homer’s Troy. Achilles, paragon of warriors, consents to enter the fight. Ready for battle in the armor 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, 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 forevermore.
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 unrivaled talent for killing his fellow men, his uncompromising commitment both to honesty and to honor and, above all, the pathos of his freely accepted death 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 shapeshifter, 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 splendor 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 his mourning for all that he might have been. Throughout the Iliad Homer imagines hi
m 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 moldering horrors / 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 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.
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