Charlton Heston, as the hero of Anthony Mann’s 1961 film El Cid, rides out to battle. In the film’s climactic sequence the corpse of the Cid, strapped into the war-horse’s saddle, leads his troops to a posthumous victory.
General Franco, hailed by his propagandists as the second Cid, gave every help to the film’s makers. Here his waxwork image, as inert as Rodrigo Díaz’s corpse, is moved by employees at Madame Tussaud’s—the manipulator manipulated.
Adolf Hitler, a great admirer of Wallenstein’s, photographed in 1925 by Heinrich Hoffman. Hitler, like Cato, took pains to perfect his oratorical style. This picture, preserved against his orders, shows him rehearsing gestures to a gramophone record of his own speeches.
The song the Sirens sing is of the exhilaration and glory of warfare. This Roman mosaic from the 3rd century AD shows Odysseus strapped to the mast, his ears stopped with wax, intent on resisting temptation and reaching home.
In his end is his beginning. In Giorgio di Chirico’s The Return of Ulysses it seems that, for all the hero’s adventures, his protracted wanderings, he has never really left his own front room.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 2006
Copyright © 2004 by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London, in 2004, and subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy, [date].
Heroes / by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
p. cm.
1. Heroes—Biography. 2. Heroes—Mythology. 3. Courage. I. Title.
CT105.H785 2005
920.02—dc22
2004061557[B]
eISBN: 978-0-307-48590-8
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.0
Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship Page 67