Heroism and honour
What makes a hero and what it costs.
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Homer defines the term and immediately questions it. Achilles is the best of the Greeks, and the Iliad is about the day he refuses to be, and about what his return to the fighting does to Hector, to Patroclus and to himself. Odysseus is the other kind, the hero who survives by lying, and the Odyssey asks whether cunning is heroic at all. Virgil’s Aeneas is heroic by giving things up: a woman, a city, his own wishes, for a duty he did not choose.
Plutarch supplied the tradition with its models. His parallel lives of Greeks and Romans were what young men read for eighteen centuries to learn what greatness looked like, and Shakespeare took his Romans from them entire. Beowulf and the Song of Roland are the northern heroes, and the Gawain poet the first to ask whether a knight could be perfect and honest at once.
Then Cervantes: a man who has read so much of this that he sets out to be it, and is beaten, laughed at, and somehow right. After him every hero is a little quixotic. Milton’s Samson pulls the temple down blind. Melville’s Ahab is heroism turned into a disease. Carlyle wrote a book on hero-worship and Tolstoy wrote War and Peace to prove that Napoleon changed nothing. The shelf ends with Walcott’s fisherman named Achille, and the epic given back to the people who row.
