Holding out for a hero

Only a fortunate land is confident enough to dispense with heroes. It is fashionable to lament the littleness of those accorded celebrity within our culture — so many footballers, rock stars and models, so few great spirits — but such collective frivolity should be cherished as one of the privileges of peace. It is desperation that prompts people to crave a champion, a protector or a redeemer and, having identified a plausible candidate for the role, to offer him their worship.

How do we identify heroes? “Rage!” — the first word of the Iliad, the word that inaugurates Europe’s literary culture — introduces the furious Achilles, the semi-divine delinquent whose terrible choice of glory at the price of an early death makes him the paradigmatic hero.

Heroes are dynamic, seductive people, and heroic rage is thrilling to contemplate. It is the expression of a superb spirit. It is associated with the noble attributes of courage, integrity and a disdain for the cramping compromises of the majority. It also profoundly disrupts any civil state. Homer’s Achilles was the pre-eminent Greek warrior. The Iliad is a celebration of his lethal glamour; it is also the story of how he came close to occasioning the defeat of the community of which he was the brilliant representative.

Heroes are people considered by their contemporaries to be so exceptionally gifted as to be capable of something momentous — the defeat of an enemy, the salvation of a race, the completion of a voyage — that no one else could have accomplished. In 411BC the people of Athens recalled Alcibiades, the wayward aristocrat whom they had once condemned to death for blasphemy and who had subsequently fought, with devastating success, for their opponents. As one of their commanders told the assembly, Alcibiades, for all his faults, was “the only person living” who could save their state.

A hero is not a role model. On the contrary, it is the essence of a hero to be unique and therefore inimitable. Alcibiades was an arrogant libertine and a turncoat several times over. El Cid, Spain’s national hero, was a predatory warlord. Francis Drake of England was a pirate and a terrorist. Albrecht von Wallenstein — the commander of the imperial forces during the Thirty Years War who was greatly admired by latter-day German nationalists, Adolf Hitler among them — was a profiteer prone to apparently psychotic rages whose contemporaries believed him to be in league with the Devil. Virtue is not a necessary qualification for heroic status: heroes are not required to be altruistic or honest or even competent. They are required only to inspire confidence and to appear, not good necessarily, but great.

Drake turned aside from the pursuit of the Spanish Armada to grab a disabled ship as his own prize, imperilling the entire English fleet by doing so, but his popularity was undiminished by the action: on the contrary, when the news reached London bonfires were lit in celebration. Cato, the stalwart defender of Roman republicanism, was an inept politician who repeatedly handed advantages to his opponents, but his contemporaries thought him a man in 10,000 and the next generation revered him as a god.

Thomas Carlyle declared that there was “no nobler feeling” than hero-worship. “Heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man . . . is the vivifying influence in a man’s life.” I disagree. An exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. Carlyle approvingly called it “the germ . . . of all religion hitherto known” but to make a fellow human the object of religious devotion is unwise. Hero-worshippers are frequently disappointed in, and lay themselves open to abuse by, the heroes of their choice.

The notion of the hero — that some men are born special — is radically inegalitarian. It can open the way for tyranny. “Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman,” wrote George Bernard Shaw. “It leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.” To Carlyle’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote that “life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in great men”, humanity en masse seemed “disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants”. Revulsion from the majority of one’s fellow beings, combined with an exaggerated admiration for the exceptional few, makes a politically poisonous mix.

Hero-worship is the cult of the individual, and the hero is always imagined standing alone. The heroes of classical mythology were homeless wanderers, and so are those of modern legend, be they cowboys or secret agents. They are brilliant mavericks coming in from elsewhere to handle an emergency before riding off into the sunset. The wanderer seems to the settled majority to be free and invulnerable. As Herodotus wrote of the nomadic Scythians: “This people has no cities or settled forts: they carry their houses with them and shoot with bows from horseback . . . How then can they fail to be invincible?” Much more can be expected of a stranger, whose unfamiliarity makes him a blank screen for the projection of fantasies, than could ever be asked of someone familiar. Historical heroes have frequently been people with no fixed position in the society that expected such great things of them. Wallenstein, the protector of the Austro-Hungarian-German Empire, was a Czech. Garibaldi, the maker of Italy, was born in France, wore the costume of a South American gaucho and needed a dictionary when writing in Italian.

The responsibilities of government do not combine well with the individualism expected of the hero. Achilles, wrote Aristotle, was that rare, not-quite-human creature, a non-political man, “a non-cooperator like an isolated piece in a game of draughts”. Heroes are rarely heads of states. They are the successors, not of Agamemnon but of Achilles, not of Arthur but of Lancelot, not of Jehovah but of Jesus Christ. In the 1880s Friedrich Nietzsche defined the state — any state — as “a fearful tyranny, a remorseless machine of oppression” against which he opposed the heroic figure of the “superman”. Nietzsche’s superman has no community; he is terrifyingly exposed. “Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law?” asks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Achilles took it upon himself to do so, repudiating his allegiance to Agamemnon and choosing to answer to no human authority save his own.

Most heroes are rebels. A startling number are actually traitors. Achilles prayed that his fellow Greeks might be defeated. Lancelot was the most complete knight at Arthur’s Round Table but brought about the collapse of the civilisation of which he was paragon. El Cid was twice banished from Castile under suspicion of attempting to usurp his king’s authority. Wallenstein’s emperor eventually became so afraid of him that he had him murdered.

Each era has a different theory as to how some men come to be, or to seem, extraordinary. 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. Class is important, though not always in predictable ways. Many heroes’ social status is wavering: Robin Hood is now the dispossessed lord of Locksley Hall, now the comrade of common criminals. The majority of heroes have been aristocrats. But heroes, especially dead ones, are usefully malleable. Their characters can be adjusted to suit the political values and emotional needs of those who come after them. Heroes’ images have been pressed into service as often by revolutionaries as by defenders of authoritarianism.

Heroism is theatrical. Heroes must look and act the part. 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 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 more important for admission to the gallery of heroes than either survival or success.

Appearances matter, and not only because “defeat in battle always begins with the eye”, as Tacitus wrote. “What is he (Achilles) more than another?” asks Ajax in Shakespeare’s bitterly anti-heroic 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: Drake’s power and ferocity were magnified by Spaniards to mitigate 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. A hero inevitably acquires an artificial public persona. 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 the Cid is killed fighting but his grieving wife and followers, knowing that without the inspiration his presence provides their armies will fail to beat 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. Believing that their great leader is still with them, his men win a marvellous victory before the horse, with its lifeless but still invincible burden, disappears over the horizon.

The story was made up for the film — no legend has it in that form — but the thinking is sound. A hero’s appearance is sometimes all that is required of him. Julius Caesar used to wear a cloak of a striking and unusual colour 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 on to the field in that cloak. Nobody noticed: victory came quickly.

It follows that a hero is not always responsible for the uses to which his image is put. Every retelling of a heroic story is coloured 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. But one thing is constant: they all provide ways of thinking about mortality. “Madam,” so 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.” Choosing death, a hero may sacrifice himself, like Christ, so that others might live or, like Achilles, so that he himself may live for ever. 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 suggestion that death can be defeated.

In times of desperation, when people fear for their lives, the craving for heroes becomes greater than ever. We need to acknowledge the urgency of that desire, but also to be wary of it. History warns that a hero, invoked as a protector, may prove a menace.

Edited extracts from Heroes, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, to be published by HarperCollins on Sept 6 at £25 (offer £20 plus £2.25 p&p)