Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Poets of the classical and medieval era imagined Achilles to be a giant. He was born different from others. Statius describes him as a baby lapping not milk but “the entrails of lions and the marrow of half-dead wolves.” Pindar, who lived in Athens a generation before Alcibiades, imagined the six-year-old Achilles outrunning deer, fighting with lions, and dragging the vast corpses of slaughtered boars back to Chiron’s cave. In fiction and myth, exorbitant size and prodigious strength were the tokens of the hero, the human being of superhuman attributes. In the real world Alcibiades, marked out from others by his aristocratic origins, his striking beauty, his intimidating capacity for violence, and his inordinate self-confidence, was received by his contemporaries as though he were another such prodigy, a being innately and intrinsically greater than his fellows.

  Such a person is not easily assimilable within any community; in a democracy his very existence is a form of sedition. The dizzying reversals of Alcibiades’ career reflect the constant interplay between his fellow citizens’ adulation of him and their ineradicable distrust of the magic whereby he was able temporarily, but never for long enough, to dominate them. They ascribed to him the potential to be alternately their savior or their oppressor. They “were convinced,” wrote Nepos, “that it was to him that all their disasters and their successes were due.” They imagined superhuman power for him: they adored him for it, and they found it unforgivable. Like Achilles he was as terrifying as a god, or a beast. “Better not bring up a lion inside your city / but if you must then humour all his moods,” wrote Aristophanes, referring to Alcibiades. “Most people became frightened at a quality in him that was beyond the normal,” wrote Thucydides. That supranormal quality posed a temptation as alluring as it was insidious. Perhaps what the Athenians feared most in Alcibiades was not any ambition of his to seize absolute power but their own longing to hand it to him, to abase themselves before him as a superman capable not only of rescuing them from their enemies but also of freeing them from the burden of being free.

  III

  CATO

  London 1713: the first night of Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato, which was to enjoy such a triumph that Alexander Pope, who wrote the prologue, declared that “Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days as he is of Britain in ours.” The curtain rises on the last act. The hero is discovered “Solus, sitting in a thoughtful posture: in his hand Plato’s book on the Immortality of the Soul. A drawn sword on the table by him.” The tableau—the sword, the book, the pensive hero—was repeated exactly in numerous neoclassical paintings. Its drama lies not in what is represented, but in what is still to come, the horror to which (as most male members of Addison’s classically educated eighteenth-century audience would have known) this tranquil scene is prelude. Before the night is out Cato will read the book through three times, and then, still serene, still “thoughtful,” drive the sword into his belly. When that first attempt to free himself from tyranny fails he will submit calmly while his friends bind up the dreadful wound and remove the weapon. Alone once more, he will tear open his body with his bare hands and resolutely disembowel himself.

  Cato, true until death. Cato, so inflexible in his righteousness that he was ready to kill himself not once, but twice. Cato, who had no self-pity, but grieved only for Rome and its venerable institutions. Cato, who on the night of his death read of the death of Socrates and who, like the Athenian philosopher, chose not to save himself from a death made inevitable by the mismatch between his own integrity and the imperfection of the world he inhabited. This Cato was venerated alike by pagan Rome and Christian Europe. Addison describes him as “godlike,” an epithet first applied to him by Lucan nearly seventeen hundred years earlier. Of his contemporaries only Julius Caesar, whose most inveterate opponent he was, denied his virtue. Cicero and Brutus both eulogized him. Horace praised his “fierce heart.” Virgil imagined for him an illustrious afterlife as lawgiver to the virtuous dead. To later generations of Romans, especially to the Stoics who formed the opposition to Nero’s tyranny, he was an exemplar, a philosopher (though he left no philosophical writings), and the embodiment of their ideal. The Christian Fathers saw him as the paragon of pagan virtue. To Lactantius he was “the prince of Roman wisdom.” To Jerome he had a glory “which could neither be increased by praise nor diminished by censure.” Dante placed Brutus, who was Cato’s son-in-law and political heir, in the lowest circle of hell with Judas Iscariot, in the very mouth of Satan, to be eaten alive ceaselessly through all eternity, and he condemned others who had, like Cato, committed the sin of self-murder to an afterlife of unremitting mute agony in the form of trees whose twigs ooze blood. But Cato is exempt. Despite being a suicide and a pagan he is the custodian of Dante’s Purgatory and is destined eventually for a place in Paradise. In Il convivio Dante goes even further. Cato divorced his wife Marcia so that she could be married to his political ally Hortensius. After Hortensius’s death he remarried her. The story has proved troubling to most Christian moralists, but Dante treats the couple’s reunion as an allegory of the noble soul’s return to God: “And what man on earth is more worthy to signify God than Cato? Surely no one.”

  It was his intransigence which rendered Cato all but divine. Sophocles, Alcibiades’ contemporary and fellow Athenian, had described the tragic hero as one who refuses to compromise or conform but remains, however beset by trouble, as immovable as a rock pounded by stormy seas, or as the one tree which, when all the others preserve themselves by bending before a river in flood, stays rigidly upright and is therefore destroyed root and branch. Cato was as steadfast as that rock, as self-destructively stubborn as that tree. An Achilles, not an Odysseus, he was the antithesis of Alcibiades, the infinitely adaptable, infinitely persuasive charmer. Cato never charmed, never changed.

  He has been revered as a hero, but he put all his energies into thwarting the aspirations of the heroic great men among his contemporaries, and into attempting to save his fellow Romans from the folly of the hero worship he so passionately denounced. The defining drama of his life was his unshakable opposition to Julius Caesar. Friedrich Nietzsche considered Caesar to be one of the few people in human history to have rivaled Alcibiades’ particular claims to supermanhood, the two of them being Nietzsche’s prime examples of “those marvellously incomprehensible and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and the seduction of others.” Cato was their opposite. Obstinately tenacious of a lost cause, he was predestined for defeat and temperamentally incapable of seduction.

  Caesar—adroit and charismatic politician, promiscuous lover, ruthless, brilliant conqueror—was a hero of an instantly recognizable type. Cato’s claim to heroic status is of quite a different nature. He is the willing sacrifice, the patiently enduring victim. His glory is that not of the brilliant winner but of the loser doggedly pursuing a course which leads inevitably to his own downfall. Small wonder that Christian theologians found his character so admirable, his story so inspiring. He embodied the values of asceticism and self-denial which Jesus Christ and his followers borrowed from pagan philosophers, and, like Christ’s, his life can be seen with hindsight as a steady progress towards a martyr’s death.

  That death retrospectively invested his career and character with a melancholy grandeur which compensated for the glamour which, alive, he notably lacked. Curmudgeonly in manner, awkward and disobliging in his political dealings and his private relationships alike, he sought neither his contemporaries’ affection nor posterity’s admiration. Yet he received both. Cicero, who knew him well, wrote that he “alone outweighs a hundred thousand in my eyes.” “I crawl in earthly slime,” wrote Michel de Montaigne, some sixteen hundred years after Cato’s death, “but I do not fail to note way up in the clouds the matchless heights of certain heroic souls,” the loftiest of them all being Cato, “that great man who was truly a model which Nature chose to show how far human virtue and fortitude can reach.”

  He had a personality of tremendous force. His contemporaries
were awed and intimidated by him, not as the Athenians had feared the capricious bully Alcibiades, more nearly as the moneylenders in the temple feared the righteous and indignant Christ. His mind was precise and vigorous and he was an orator of furious talent. He was deferred to by the soldiers he commanded, by the crowds he stirred or subdued, by those of his peers who recognized and admired his selflessness and integrity. But he was also a troublemaker and an oddity. He was a well-known figure in Rome, but one who inspired irritation and ridicule as well as respect.

  He was a nuisance. He embarrassed and annoyed his peers by loudly denouncing corrupt practices which everyone else had come to accept as normal. He had no discretion, no urbanity. He looked peculiar. He habitually appeared in the Forum with bare feet and wearing no tunic beneath his toga, an outfit which seemed to his contemporaries at best indecorous, at worst indecent. When challenged about it he pointed to the statue of Romulus (represented similarly underdressed) and said that what was good enough for the founder of Rome was good enough for him, an answer typical of his willful insistence on ignoring the political realities as well as the sartorial conventions of his own time. When he became praetor (a senior magistrate) his judgments were acknowledged to be scrupulously correct, but there were those who muttered that he disgraced the office by hearing cases—even those solemn ones in which important men stood to incur the death penalty—looking so raffish, so uncouth.

  He never laughed, seldom smiled, and had no small talk. He stayed up late, all night sometimes, drinking heavily, but his nightlife was not of the gracious and hospitable kind that his fellow aristocrats found congenial. Rather he would engage in vehement debate with philosophers who tended to encourage him in his eccentricities. Rigorously ascetic, he disdained to think of his own comfort, and had a way of undermining other people’s. He never rode if he could walk. When he traveled with friends he would stalk along beside their horses on his bare and callused feet, his head uncovered, talking indefatigably in the harsh, powerful voice that was his most effective political weapon. Few people felt easy in his company; he was too judgmental and too much inclined to speak his mind. To his posthumous admirers his disturbing ability to search out others’ imperfections was among his godlike attributes. Montaigne called him one “in whose sight the very madmen would hide their faults.” But his contemporaries shunned him for it. He was his community’s self-appointed conscience, and the voice of conscience is one to which most people prefer not to listen. His incorruptibility dismayed his rivals because “the more clearly they saw the rectitude of his practice,” writes Plutarch, “the more distressed were they at the difficulty of imitating it.” All the great men of Rome “were hostile to Cato, feeling that they were put to shame by him.” Even the great Pompey was said to have been unnerved by him: “Pompey admired him when he was present but… as if he must render account of his command while Cato was there, he was glad to send him away.”

  His life (95–46 BC) coincided with the last half century of the Roman Republic, a time of chronic political instability and convulsive change. It was a time when the institutions of the state had ceased to reflect the real distribution of power within it. Rome and all its provinces were nominally ruled by the Senate and the people of Rome, but by the end of Cato’s life Rome’s dominions extended from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the North Sea. The constitution, evolved within a city-state, provided none of the machinery required to subdue, police, and administer an international empire. The prosecution of foreign wars and the exploitation of the conquered provinces required great armies and teams of officials—none of which Rome’s institutions could provide. The provinces were effectively autonomous states, far larger and frequently richer than the metropolis, with their own separate administrations. The proconsuls who conquered and governed them at their own expense and to their own profit were often absent from Rome for years on end, acting as effectively independent rulers in their allotted territories. When they returned at last, enormously wealthy and to the adulation of the people, they had, in reality, infinitely more clout than the institutions they were supposed to serve. When Pompey celebrated his triumph on returning from Asia in 61 BC, his chariot was preceded by the captive families of three conquered kings. He boasted of having killed or subjected over twelve million people and of increasing Rome’s public revenues by 70 percent. There was no room in the republic for such a man, no legitimate channel for his influence or proper way in which he could exert his power. The Athenians had been afraid when Alcibiades demonstrated his prowess, his wealth, and his international connections at Olympia. Just so were the Roman republicans apprehensive as first Pompey and subsequently Crassus and Caesar grew so great they loomed over the state like unstable colossi.

  Cato was the little man who dared oppose these giants, the Prometheus nobly defying the ruthless gods (one of whom Caesar would soon become) for the sake of oppressed humanity. Armed only with his voice, his knowledge of the law, and his unshakable certainty of his own rectitude, he resolutely obstructed their every attempt to have their actual power acknowledged. Whether he was wise to do so is open to question. Theodor Mommsen, the great nineteenth-century German historian, called Cato an “unbending dogmatical fool.” Even Cicero, who thought so highly of him and whose political ally he was throughout most of their contemporaneous careers, found him exasperating at times. Cicero was a pragmatist, a sophisticated political operator, and a practitioner of the art of the possible. Cato, by contrast, loudly and dogmatically insisting on the letter of ancient and anachronistic laws, repeatedly damaged his own cause, exposing his allies’ misdemeanors and defending his opponents’ rights. To many commentators, ancient and modern alike, it has appeared that had it not been for Cato’s dogged refusal to compromise his political principles, or to allow anyone else to do so without being publicly shamed, the Senate might have been able to come to terms with Julius Caesar in 49 BC, that Caesar need never have led his troops across the Rubicon, that thousands of lives might have been saved.

  But Cato’s failings are identical with his claims to heroic status. What in the man was awkward was transmuted by time and changing political circumstance to become, in the context of the legend that grew up around him, evidence of his superhuman fortitude. His obstinate refusal to take note of historical change or political expediency is a manifestation of his magnificent staunchness. His tactlessness and naïveté are the tokens of his integrity. His unpopularity proves his resolution. Even his downfall is a measure of his selfless nobility. He opposes Julius Caesar—by common consent one of Western history’s great men—and is inevitably defeated by him, but his defeat makes him even greater than that great opponent. He dies as a flawed and vulnerable person, and rises again as a marmoreal ideal. Seneca, writing in the next century, imagined the king of the gods coming down among men in search of instances of human grandeur. “I do not know what nobler sight Jupiter could find on earth,” he wrote, “than the spectacle of Cato … standing erect amid the ruins of the commonwealth.”

  Cato’s life began and ended in times of civil war. When he was seven years old the Roman general Sulla marched on Rome at the head of his legions, demanding the leadership of the campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus. The Senate capitulated. Sulla then departed for the east, leaving his followers to be killed by his political enemies. Five years later, after having subdued all Asia Minor, he returned to Italy and fought his way to Rome, confronting and defeating the armies of the consuls. Once he had taken the city the people granted him absolute power. He set about putting to death anyone who had opposed him. His proscriptions, the terrible lists of those outlawed with a price on their heads that served as an incitement to mass murder, were posted in the Forum. Forty senators and at least sixteen hundred others (nine thousand according to one source) were named. Some were formally executed, some murdered by Sulla’s paid killers, some torn part by the mob. Cato was thirteen at the time. His father, by then dead, had been favored by Sulla. Plutarch, who wrote
his Life of Cato a century and a half after Cato’s death but whose sources included accounts (subsequently lost) written by Cato’s contemporaries, relates that the boy’s tutor took him to pay court to the dictator. Sulla’s house was an “Inferno,” where his opponents were tortured and on whose walls their severed heads were displayed. Eyeing the ghastly trophies, hearing the groans of the crowd around the gate, the boy asked why no one acted to stop the killing. The tutor replied that they were all afraid. Early in his life Cato witnessed at first hand what befalls a state whose constitution has been overturned by a military dictator.

  He bore an illustrious name. He was the great-grandson of Cato the Censor, a man who was remembered as an embodiment of the stern virtues ascribed by posterity to the Roman Republic in its prime. The Censor was a byword for his asceticism and his moral rigor. He traveled everywhere on foot, even when he came to hold high office. At home he worked alongside his farm laborers, bare-chested in summer and in winter wearing only a sleeveless smock, and was content with a cold breakfast, a frugal dinner, and a humble cottage to live in. Wastage was abhorrent to him. To his rigorous avoidance of it he sacrificed both beauty and kindness. He disliked gardens: land was for tilling and grazing. When his slaves became too old to work he sold them rather than feed useless mouths. In office he was as harsh on others as he was on himself. When he discovered that one of his subordinates had been buying prisoners of war as slaves (a form of insider trading which was improper but not illegal), the man hanged himself rather than suffer the Censor’s rebuke. Grim, graceless, and incorruptible, the elder Cato was unpopular but generally revered. The younger Cato, or so several of his contemporaries believed, took him as a model.