Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
piece in a game of draughts’. None of my subjects was a head of state (although the Cid, at the end of his life, created a new state for himself). 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 is ‘like a star thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude’. He has no community within which to hide, no religion, legal system, or moral code as guide, no group or institution to share the responsibility for his choices. 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. ‘Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law?’ Achilles took it upon himself to do so, repudiating his allegiance to Agamemnon, denying any obligation to his fellow Greeks, choosing to answer to no human authority save his own, and insisting on his right to determine when and on whose behalf he would exercise his devastating skills. And although some of my subjects – Cato, with his embarrassing clothes and pernickety accountancy; tubby, venal Drake – are scarcely the kind of resplendent figures Nietzsche had in mind, the same proud rejection of a communal identity has been the mark of the hero throughout the millennia covered by this book.
My subjects are all Europeans. There are many correspondences between the Western heroic tradition and those of some Asian and African cultures, but I have not attempted to trace them, partly for practical reasons – this book is plenty long enough as it is – and partly because the tradition I describe is a continuous and self-referential one. Achilles in his tent sang of the exploits of heroes dead and gone, tales that shaped his concept of himself and his role just as his own story was to condition posterity’s idea of what a hero might be. Cato prepared himself for his own suicide by reading Plato’s account of the death of Socrates. Even when heroes were not themselves aware of the parallels between their careers and those of their celebrated antecedents, the people who told and modified their stories frequently were, so that those stories, as they have come down to us, are full of echoes and presentiments: Drake is a latter-day Jason, Wallenstein a Mars; Cato (despite having died half a century before the Christian era began) is an avatar of Christ, and to Alexander Herzen Garibaldi seemed ‘a hero of antiquity, a figure out of the Aeneid’. As heroes are shaped by the past, so in turn they shape the future. In the 1930s, when Europe was once more in crisis, my heroes (except for Alcibiades, whose offences against his birthplace were anathema to the age of nationalism) were resurrected and put to political use.
They are all white Westerners and, for different reasons, they are all male. Heroes’ stories resemble women’s stories in that the hero is simultaneously adored and marginalized, being more often an object of veneration than a holder of power; but the vast majority of the people accorded hero status in Western history have been men. Of course there are women I might have included, but to have done so would have been to obscure the lamentable fact that people of my sex have, throughout most of recorded time, been considered incapable of running a country, let alone saving one. To have chosen a female subject would be to imply that one sixth of historical heroes were women. That kind of emollient falsification, in my opinion, does women no service. When Agamemnon sent out a call for all the men of Greece to join him in attacking Troy, Achilles’ father, anxious to save his wonderful boy from conscription, dressed him as a girl and hid him in the women’s quarters. Odysseus heard of it and came visiting, bringing with him magnificent gifts. The women of the court crowded round, exclaiming over the embroidered cloths and golden cups, the robes and the jewels; but Achilles, unable to suppress his true nature, seized upon a sword. At once Odysseus knew him. Achilles abandoned his pretence, acknowledged his manhood, and accepted his heroic destiny. So Odysseus himself, in Homer’s account of his journey home, has to extricate himself from Calypso’s island, the tempting domain of the feminine where he enjoys every comfort and every pleasure, before the tale of his adventures can begin. Alcibiades dreamed shortly before he was murdered that he was wearing his mistress’s clothes and that she was making up his face with pigments and white lead like a woman’s. Plutarch recounts the dream as though it should be read as a premonition of the hero’s death: to lose one’s masculinity is tantamount, for a traditional hero, to losing life itself.
The definition of that masculinity has fluctuated. Homer’s heroes fume and weep, indulging their emotions in ways commentators from Plato onwards have found disgracefully unmanly, and they are immensely proud and careful of their magnificent bodies, shamelessly displaying a physical vanity later ages would consider contemptibly effeminate. Charles Baudelaire identified Alcibiades as being among the first of the dandies: the tradition of heroic self-adornment is ancient. Achilles’ shield was the most marvellous piece of armoury the world had yet seen. The warriors of ancient Sparta decorated their clothes and weapons with ornaments: they wore their hair long and plaited it intricately before going into battle wreathed with flowers. Beauty breeds valour. The troops who travelled on the Armada’s ships in 1588 were not required to wear uniform, explained a Spanish military expert in 1610, because their morale was much enhanced by the gorgeousness of their own clothes: ‘It is the finery, the plumes and bright colours which give spirit and strength to a soldier so that he can with furious resolution overcome any difficulty or accomplish any valorous exploit.’ Napoleon’s Marshal Murat was as noted for his red boots and extravagant epaulettes as he was for his fearlessness. But although the heroic tradition encompasses areas of human experience identified for most of the recent past as feminine, it is nonetheless sexually exclusive. Even Joan of Arc, the most obvious female candidate for inclusion in this book, renounced her sex and its perceived limitations by cross-dressing, tacitly acknowledging that the pantheon of heroes admits men only.
So what makes a hero? And what are heroes for? In narrating the lives of a handful of heroes, in attempting to recreate their contemporaries’ expectations of them and tracing the way posterity responded to and reshaped their stories, I hope to give a kaleidoscopic answer to each question. Simple, single ones would be impossible. The hero’s nature and function have repeatedly shifted along with the mentality of the culture that produced them, and so have the attributes ascribed to the hero, the exploits expected of him, and his place within political structures and society at large.
Each era has a different theory as to how some men come to be, or seem to be, 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. Or his superhuman talents may be less legitimately supernatural: he may be a witch. Class is important, though not always in predictable ways. Many heroes’ social status is indeterminate and wavering, like that of the English folk hero Robin Hood, who is now the dispossessed lord of Locksley Hall, now the comrade of common criminals. The majority of heroes throughout history have been, or pretended to be, or aspired to become, aristocrats. But heroes, especially dead ones, are usefully malleable: their images have been pressed into service as often by revolutionaries as by defenders of authoritarianism. There is a vigorous counter-tradition celebrating the popular hero, the man of the people who challenges elitist power and privilege, the plucky little fellow who slays the giant with nothing but a pebble in a sling, the common sailor or the carpenter’s son who lays low principalities and powers.
There is an erotic dimension to hero-worship. Beauty, charm, and sex appeal are useful assets for a hero: in their absence, a dashing style or a commanding presence will do. People were dazzled by Alcibiades, besotted with Garibaldi, terrified by Wallenstein. A hero must be able either to seduce or intimidate: either way he needs an outsize personality and a talent for projecting it. Heroism is theatrical. Heroes must look, and act, the part. They must swagger and preen, or, if their public’s taste inclines the other way, they must make a show of their humility, as Cato did, going indecently under-dressed to the Forum. Heroic gestures are frequently histrionic, which is not to say they are frivolous: a symbolic gesture can have substantial consequences. 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