WHEREFORE THE HERO; THE STANDARD OF THE HEROIC IN THE ILLIAD

Christopher Bates

Mythology Honors Professor Frame

Bates 2 25 October 2011 Wherefore the Hero; The Standard of the Heroic in The Illiad Despites several libraries' worth of scholarship, no one is sure when the events of the Illiad and the famous battle between the Greeks and the Trojans occurred. Likewise, no researcher can say with and concrete assurance who Homer was, if he actually created The Illiad (or simply edited together preexisting oral traditions into a cohesive whole), and the best classicists in the world today can only guess at when the vague figure lived and worked (although there is some consensus on the mid to late seventh century BCE). Nevertheless, The Illiad describes two remarkable figures that have remained a constant in Western civilization whose actions have taught humanity what it means to be a hero: Hector and Achilles. It would be simple to gloss over the achievement: after all, the idea of what a "hero" is and does has become a mainstay in modern culture. We watch films about superheroes. Local newsanchors speak of a young man doing well in high school in the midst of unfortunate circumstances, calling the student "heroic." Mariah Carey sings of the great love of her life and calls him a "hero" and the recording sells a million copies in a few short weeks. This watering -down of the concept of the hero has led to an interesting development: modern people have a hard time describing who or what a hero really is, as James Ottavio Castangnera wrote about eloquently in his article "What is a Hero?" He invited students in his research class to define a hero and discovered that: ...half the class subscribed to what I'll call the subjective view: A hero is anyone that I personally look up to as a role model. The other half took an objective approach: A hero must be someone who has acted courageously, perhaps in the face of great personal suffering, sacrifice, or risk....[the experiment with] my

Bates 3 small sample of American college students of the new century suggests that our campuses share no clear consensus about who our heroes are or ought to be. (Castagnera) This inability to identify personal characteristics worthy of aspiration is not a new problem. Some literary historians such as Timothy B Shutt believe that the type of literature known as "the epic" was designed by their respective authors to do this very thing: to give the community for whom they were written a sense of identity. The successful epic is powerful and lasting because it gives the reader a picture of that which is great. Shutt goes on to say that: ...from the very outset in the Westfrom the time of Homer himself in about 750 BCEthe epic has been the most highly regarded of literary genres... the most respected, the most influential, the most prestigious mode of addressing the human condition in literary terms. The major epics are the big boys... the works that had the most profound and most enduring cultural influence. (Shutt) The basic structure of The Illiad is straight forward: at the beginning of the text the war has been raging for nine years. It being fought between an allied Greek force against the Trojans in a mission aimed at restoring the honor or the Greek people, achieved when they can successfully return the wife of Agammemnon's brother Menelaus. The tale opens with the boycotting of the war by the great warrior Achilles. The Greeks have demanded that Agamemnon return his war-prize mistress Chryseis to her father, a priest of Apollo, in order to bring an end to a pestilence that was decimating the army. Agamemnon does so but only after Achilles agrees to give him his war prize, the beautiful Briseis, as a replacement. Furious at being so shamed, Achilles takes himself and his followers out of the war. ("Illiad")

Bates 4 All the great acts of the players stems from this simple motif: Achilles feels slighted by the loss of honor and refuses to fight. The opening words of the epic play light on the narratives meaning: "The wrath of Achilles brought numerous troubles upon the long-haired Greeks and sent down to Hades the shades of many brave warriors, while dogs and birds feasted upon their flesh" (Rosenburg 128). There he remained until the death of his friend Patroclos at the hand of Hector. The development ofr Achilles from the beginning of the epic to the last phrase is explained as a growth of the knowledge of responsibility and the understanding of the use of power, as Roland Champagne explains in his article The Force of Achilles in The Illiad. Whereas Achilles is first introduced as the epitome of destructive might, it is through self-imprisonment in his tent that he realizes that his true strength is much more than simple martial dominance over another. While Achilles is absent from the battlefield... there is an absence of leadership among the Greeks and a [corresponding] dominance of the Trojans. Meanwhile... heroism takes on a moral dimension with friendship at stake in the war - with the combined losses of Patroclos to Hector and Briseis to Agamemnon. The reaction of Achilles to these losses lead him to abandon his self-imprisonment and to return to the community of the Greeks. (Champagne 65) The sin of Achilles (if it can be thought of as a sin) was not his anger - which to the Greek mindset was warranted - but rather the way he abandoned his fellow warriors, allowing them by his absence to be slaughtered and their corpses to remain unburied. While explaining the significance of the burial rite to soldiers killed in battle, the eminent classicist H.A. Shapiro wrote that

Bates 5 Achilles goes beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior...the classical institution of anairesis, whereby after a battle a truce was granted by the victors to enable the defeated to recover the bodies of their dead for burial. The classic case of the disastrous consequences of failing to bury ones own dead is the events of 405, when the Athenians won a naval battle at Arginusae but neglected to collect the bodies of some of their men. The generals in charge were put on trial and executed. (Shapiro 120) It was not his anger at Agamemnon for withholding his trophy-girlfriend Briseis that laid upon Achilles the charge of hubris - unwarranted pride - but rather the abandonment of the Greek soldiers to an ignominious death. Though Achilles was portrayed as a great warrior, many of his choices in the Illiad seemed to stem from a place of self-serving arrogance. Despite that pride, Achilles soon became a figure looked up to and even worshipped in pre-Socratic Greece in the blossoming group of hero cults. Homer treats his heroes as nobles and fighting men, but many Homeric heroes, such as Achilles, later became objects of worship. Hero cults were distinctly different from the attendance to the dead.... rituals were performed at night, black animals were sacrificed, and blood and other liquid offerings were poured beside the hero's tomb. ("Hero") Which of course begs the question: why then was a warrior such as Achilles revered? To answer this perplexing problem, consider again the definition of the hero in literature. John Berger, the British painter and author of A Few Useful Definitions is famously quoted as saying that:

Bates 6 The function of the hero in art is to inspire the reader or spectator to continue in the same spirit from where he, the hero, leaves off. He must release the spectator's potentiality, for potentiality is the historic force behind nobility. And to do this the hero must be typical of the characters and class who at that time only need to be made aware of their heroic potentiality in order to be able to make their society juster and nobler. ("The function of the hero") Shutt believes that Homer gave the character of Achilles the very real human weakness of hubris - even allowing his choice to disengage from the conflict to lead to the death of his friend and the despoiling of Greek corpses - so that the reader could identify with his struggle. Donna Rosenberg agrees with that assessment, and goes on to say that: ...Homer was a psychologist and was far more interested in creating heroes who thought and acted like real people in time of crisis than in repeating the multitude of factual details that traditionally described the events in the Trojan War....simply good men who find themselves in circumstances beyond their control, find themselves called upon to fight and kill other good men in battle.... and fight with courage strength and skill and win honor and glory and lasting fame. (Rosenberg 112) It is in placing his wounded pride and selfish interests behind the greater good of seeking vengeance for Patroclos death and the insults of the Trojans that Achilles emerges as heroic. It is within the context of self-sacrifice for the people that he achieves fame. Achilles' eventual death, caused by an arrow shot into the one unprotected area of his body, brings to mind Nietzsche's line describing the hero: "Here is a hero who did nothing but shake the tree as soon as the fruit

Bates 7 was ripe. Does this seem to be too small a thing to you? Then take a good look at the tree he shook" ("Here is"). While Rosenberg may believe that Homer was primarily interested in the psychology of his characters, modern psychologist and literary theorists believe that Homer didn't get it quite right. THey contend that the human mind is made up of inconsistent motivations and warring priorities and that the simplistic description of humanity in The Illiad is inaccurate. In Homer's poetry, every hero has a trait. Achilles is angry. Odysseus is cunning. And so was born one picture of character and conduct. In this view, what you might call the philosopher's view, each of us has certain ingrained character traits. An honest person will be honest most of the time. A compassionate person will be compassionate. These traits, as they say, go all the way down. They shape who we are, what we choose to do and whom we befriend. Our job is to find out what traits of character we need to become virtuous. (Brooks) Modern scholarship finds such an idea terribly reductionist. "Character," such thinkers explain, "is not a rock-hard entity, but rather changes with context and with time." Paul Bloom wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that we are not single traits but rather a community of competing selves. These different selves ''are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control -- bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another" (Brooks). Regardless of whether Homer achieved a deep look into the psychology of the human mind or missed the boat entirely, his legacy had an undeniable effect upon the Greek people, resulting in the definition of what it means to be a hero and laying down the world's first "great" epic. We have seen that the wrath of Achilles is certainly the driving

Bates 8 force of The Illiad, but that the trait is not quite the negative it might seem. Achilles anger at being humiliated and losing face did indeed cause him to abandon the Greek army to its fate, but his real disgrace was in allowing his best friend to be killed and the Greek soldiers to go unburied. That disgrace, however, serves to give Achilles the opportunity to become a hero by grounding him alongside fallible humanity. It is when he rises above that state by putting aside his hurt pride on behalf of the greater good and returning to the battle that Achilles becomes the hero of the tale, and of history.

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Works Cited Brooks, David. "Where the Wild Things Are." New York Times 20 Oct. 2009: 31. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Oct. 2011. Castangnera, James Ottavio. "What is a Hero?." AAHE Bulletin (April 2003). American Association of Higher Education and Accreditation. Web. 22 Oct. 2011. Champagne, Roland A. "The Force of Achilles in the Illiad." Orbis Litterarum 58.1 (2003): 65. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Oct. 2011. "The function of the hero in art is." Columbia World of Quotations. Columbia University Press, 1996. 25 Oct. 2011. "Iliad." The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Ed. David Leeming. Oxford UP, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 24 October 2011. "Here is a hero who did nothing but." Columbia World of Quotations. Columbia University Press, 1996. Web. 24 Oct. 2011. "Hero, in Greek religion." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition (2011): 1. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Oct. 2011. Rosenburg, Donna. World Mythology: An Anthology of the Great Myths and Epics. 3rd ed. Chicago: NTC. 1999. Print. Shapiro, H. A. "The Wrath of Creon: Withholding Burial in Homer and Sophocles." Helios 33. (2006): 119-134. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Oct. 2011 Shutt, Timothy B. Monsters, Gods and Heroes: Approaching the Epic in Literature. The Modern Scholar (2008). Recorded Lecture.