Ancient heroes lived and died for power and glory and thereby brought prosperity and honour to their families. If we prefer to live in a soft, hedonistic way, we cannot live heroically. In ancient times, heroism was a worldview which dominated the lives of everybody; today it is sporadic and confined to specific situations. Ancient heroism was embedded in a results-culture where poor performance was not tolerated. Today’s ‘heroes’ are often excused for poor performance and even attract sympathy when they fail. Ancient heroes expected to live short and glorious lives – if they achieved fame they were content even if they had a short time on Earth. Today’s heroes wish for long lives as celebrities.
For Homer’s noble warriors in the Iliad, to live heroically is to live honourably. The great warrior Aias tells his men to think of their honour and fear nothing in the field but dishonour in each other’s eyes. Neither honour nor salvation is to be found in flight. And the heroic Nestor advises his warrior friends to think of their reputation and remember their children, wives and parents, whether they are alive or dead, and for their sake they should stand tall and fight. The noble Trojan warrior Hector admits that if he hid himself like a coward and refused to fight he could never face the Trojan ladies. Besides, it would go against the grain, for he has trained himself to take his place in the front line and win glory. And so it is for Sarpendon who says that if after living through the war he could be sure of ageless immortality, he would desist from fighting. But that is not the way the world is. No one can cheat death, so he fights on, whether he yields the glory to some other man or wins it for himself.
A hero is a man of distinguished courage and performance, admired for his noble qualities. He is to be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s great epic poem, Iliad, the Viking societies, the Irish, Celtic and Icelandic sagas, and Japanese Bushido of the Edo period. Heroes in these societies are warrior chieftains of special strength, courage and nobility. They share a worldview based on power, glory and a keen appreciation of the tragedy of human existence. Those inheritors of the earth – the meek and the mild – are yet to make their appearance on the world stage. And when they arrive, the heroic worldview will receive its greatest challenge. Notions of nobility, courage and honour will be re-defined and combined with ideas about compassion, humility, truth and happiness, which are more familiar and comforting to the modern mind.
We need, therefore, to understand what it means to live heroically and to see how the philosophy of heroism was transformed in the classical age of Greece by philosophers and dramatists. Heroism will always be with us even if its philosophy is today less consistent and coherent than it once was. When in the 1880s Nietzsche tried to effect another inversion of values, it was to Homer that he turned. But, inevitably, he returned to Homer through the lens of his time and so foisted on ancient heroism a modern face which emphasised the importance of the powerful, alienated individualist. Thus was created a modern view – heroic individualism – much favoured by Hollywood, where noble, strong individualists pit themselves against malevolent authorities. This makes for inspiring storytelling but it has little to do with ancient heroes who would have regarded individualists as dangerous aliens.
The first reference to heroism in Western literature is to be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh (about 2300 BC), a story about the legendary king in Mesopotamia, a hero of the Kingdom of Uruk. The Gilgamesh poem is a rollicking adventure story about heroic deeds in the face of great adversity. Underlying it is an obsession with struggle and death and the search for the secret of immortality.
The hero of the poem is Gilgamesh, part god and part man, and the tension between these parts constitutes the tragedy of the story. He is beautiful, strong, courageous, arrogant and lusty but he is, alas, human, all too human as he confronts at the end of his life lost opportunities and his pointless struggle with the inevitability of death. Gilgamesh searches for an Earthly immortality, for a God-like glory on Earth. But he eventually realises that he is searching for the impossible. He must come to accept the futility of struggling for what he cannot have. In that acceptance is a hero who has learned to stare death in the face and, if not laugh, smile.
A close friend, Enkidu, tells Gilgamesh that the gods have given him kingship but not everlasting life. He pleads with Gilgamesh not be sad at heart since he has been given power to perform good or evil deeds. As he has been given supremacy over people, Enkidu implores his friend not to abuse this power.
If one cannot be a god one can at least be a hero and be talked about through the ages. So Gilgamesh shakes off his melancholy and announces that he will set up his name in the hall of famous men. Because of the evil that is in the land, he intends to go to the forest and destroy the evil beings lurking there. In the forest he faces a ferocious giant, Humbaba, causing his friend to suffer doubts about the adventure. But Gilgamesh utters words reminiscent of later heroic poems when he acknowledges that only the gods live forever and we, mere mortals, are living on borrowed time. Determined to win glory for himself he will fight and if he falls he will leave behind him a name that endures and he will be remembered as a noble warrior.
To be a hero, then, is to be the main subject of noble tales handed down to children and passed on to students. For more than two millennia educated people in the West studied the adventures of the great warriors. Epic tales of heroism provide a table of values against which we can judge ourselves for in them we find the challenges and dilemmas of human existence: courage and cowardice, love and loss, success and failure, honesty and betrayal, life and death, mortality and immortality. These dilemmas are not debated, they are embedded in the characters and we mere mortals can evaluate them by what they do and say. Values in heroic society are not laid up in a God-created heaven. Rather, human values are judged by what humans do. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are the sum of their actions and they are judged by their actions alone. This is especially true of the relationship between the sexes, then and now.
The Epic of Gilgamesh offers humorous insights into love and the relations between the sexes. When Ishtar, goddess of love, fertility and war proposes marriage to Gilgamesh, he replies that if he marries her he has no gifts to give in return. He would gladly give her ointments, food fit for a god and wine fit for a queen. But he will not marry her. He tells her bluntly that her lovers have found her like a stove which smoulders in the cold, a castle which crushes the garrison, and a battering-ram turned back from the enemy. Ishtar is not pleased and tearfully runs to her father and begs permission to destroy Gilgamesh. The poor father points out that the citizens of Uruk will suffer if Gilgamesh dies. Ishtar, the woman scorned, is unmoved and plots her revenge. Foiled by Enkidu, Ishtar is determined that he must die. Enkidu is thus struck down by a fatal illness and after 12 days of pain realises he will not die heroically in battle, but shamefully in his sick-bed. He dies in agony and Gilgamesh is devastated.
Gilgamesh weeps bitterly for his dead friend and because Enkidu’s death reminds him of his own fear of death, he begins his search for everlasting life. On his travels he meets the divine wine-maker, Siduri, who tells him to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow he may die. But Gilgamesh is not placated and ponders how he can be at peace when Enkidu is, as he will be, lying under the earth.
Clearly, knowledge of the inevitability of death can liberate or enslave us. In The Epic of Gilgamesh it encourages bold adventures, but it can also lead to despair. As he approaches his own death Gilgamesh is told that, while death cannot be cheated and everlasting life is not the destiny of poor mortals, he should be proud that he has lived nobly and will be remembered as a hero. For despite its travails life can be more than an ignoble struggle in the dark. It was Gilgamesh’s fate to die a tragic hero, because human existence is an encounter with tragedy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh teaches the higher truth that heroism entails tragedy – without tragedy there is no heroism. There is nothing especially heroic about a man who fights bravely and hopes to die so that he may travel to a heavenly paradise. While we can admire the power of these warriors, they are not heroic unless they face the heroic paradox – the more they