In Our Time - Heroism

Episode Date: May 6, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what defines a hero and what place they had in classical society. On the fields of Troy a fallen soldier pleaded with Achilles, the great hero of the Greeks, to spare his life. According to Homer, Achilles replied, “Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid.And born of a great father and the mother who bore me immortal?Yet even I have also my death and strong destiny, And there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime,When some man in the fighting will take the life from me alsoEither with a spear cast or an arrow flown from the bow string”.With that, he killed him. Heroes have special attributes, but not necessarily humility or compassion. How did the Greeks define their heroes? What place did the hero have in classical society and what do modern ideas of heroism owe to the heroes of the golden age?With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick and author of Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good; Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on the fields of Troy, a fallen soldier pleaded with Achilles, the great hero of all the Greeks, to spare his life. According to Homer, Achilles replied, Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid,

and born of a great father and the mother who bore me immortal? Yet even I have also my death and strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontide, when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also, either with a spear cast or an arrow flown from the bowstring. With that, Achilles killed him. Heroes have special attributes, but not necessarily humility or compassion. How did the Greeks define their heroes? What place did the hero have in classical society, in Renaissance and in romantic times? and what do the modern ideas of heroism

owe to the heroes of the Golden Age? With me, to discuss heroism in Western culture is Angie Hobbes, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick, an author of Plato and the Hero, A.C. Grayling, reader in philosophy at Bergbeck College, University of London,

and Paul Cartlidge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge. Angie Hobbes, nearly missed my first question there. Where does the word hero come from, and when does the notion of the hero first appear? Well, we first see it in Homer where the word heros applies to, usually applies to warriors of great abilities which are used to their community.

So they are usually men of extraordinary courage and strength and skill at fighting. It can also be applied to more generally to other characters such as bards and messengers even. Now, after Homer, we start to see other layers of meaning accruing to this general word heros. In Hesiod, for instance, heroes refer to a specific age, the age which comes after gods and diamonds and before mortals. It's a specific type of being in a chronological order of being. When we get to the lyric poet Pinder in the 5th century BC, Heros seems to take on a quasi-technical meaning that you have one mortal parent and one divine parent. and then this notion of the hero as an object of worship takes on the notion of a local deity,

perhaps even the patron of a local tribe. Well, you've gone through several centuries in three excellent, brilliant paragraphs, but if we can just go back to one or two things. So a hero has to have courage, but it's courage in a public sense in a great cause to do with something far larger than himself. So courage isn't a sufficient thing for a hero to have. No, courage is a virtue.

And we're talking about hymns for a long time now, aren't we, until we get deep into the present? Yes, courage is a virtue, and heroism isn't necessarily a virtue. In the Greek text we're talking about, heroism almost always involves this notion of courage, but it's more than just that. You have got to be regarded as a hero by your community, or at least a subsection of your community.

you have to be of value to your community. Now, that doesn't mean to say that your motivation has to be particularly altruistic. The hero in Homer, for instance, is often motivated by a lust for glory, a desire for revenge and so on. That doesn't seem to matter for the ancient Greeks what the motivation was.

It's whether you were of use to the community. Although Homer has described one poet as hero, we're still, the whole thing at this stage is still deeply grounded in war, in performance, individual performance on the battlefield. Is that right? Largely, yes, that's true, yes. And as you said, Achilles is the warrior hero par excellence.

Well, can you tell us something about Achilles? Yes, well, he's a fascinating hero. He's a good example of somebody who has one divine and one mortal parent. His mother is that is a sea goddess, and he has a mortal father. He was... Does there any historical basis whatsoever, Achilles? Well, that I'm sure Paul can tell you more about later. I mean, I like to think so.

I mean, the ancient Greeks like to think so. Alexander the Great worshipped Achilles as a real person as well as a mythical figure. It would be nice to think that there was a warrior at Troy who had some resemblance to Achilles. But of course, no, the whole legend is embellished. Now, why he's so fascinating is that Achilles symbolizes a lot of the tensions that exist within the hero figure. in Homer and in ancient Greece generally. He, yes, he's an extraordinarily brave, a skillful fighter, very fast, of course, but also his aggression can sometimes tip over into acts of savagery,

which are criticised even in the Iliad itself, and he can be dangerous even within the context of the Iliad, and of course his own life is rather isolated and lonely. And also he's fascinating because he's more aware than any of the other heroes of what it means to be a hero, what the heroic life entails. That speech implies that, doesn't it? That's right, and his goddess mother tells him

that he has two choices which have been given him by the gods. Either he can be a hero, win glory and die young, or he can return to his native land of fear and live to a ripe old age, but without glory. And he absolutely chooses glory, and he knows it's going to mean his early death. and he knows that when his great friend Patroclus is killed partly through Achilles' own fault and Achilles goes back into the battle to avenge Petroclos,

he knows quite consciously that this means that he is going to die soon. So we can, at this stage, as a beginning point for the Sproar, we say Achilles is a useful archetype of one sort of hero. He's a fantastic warrior, quite extraordinary, he's very individual. He's also a bit of a threat to his own side because of his sulks and his temperament. and his temper and his own inner violence. And so he's a clouded romantic figure as well. Yes, yeah.

So there's that going on. The other great Greek hero comes out of Homer, Anthony Grayley, is Odysseus, the cunning, the wily. Can you do Odysseus for us? Yes, he was an admired figure because he was so good at being deceitful and sly and finding ways of manipulating people in situations. He wasn't swift to foot as Achilles was, he wasn't a great fighter as Hector was, but he had this kind of practical wisdom which enabled him to deal with difficult situations

and make suggestions that got people out of tight corners. And that was tremendously... Putting his soldiers under sheep, for instance. That's exactly right, yes. In fact, because his story comes a little bit later. When you look at the Odyssey, you see him having to cope with all sorts of perils and difficulties by being very smart and second-guessing them, having himself strapped to the mast

after plugging his sailors' ears with wax so that he could hear the song of the sirens and so on. And ignore the songs, the English was to not just to hear it, it was to ignore it, that was the point. Well, try to, yes. So he represents a kind of intellectual heroism which was also admired too.

Can you just bring the heroism out of that? You've described a cunning man, a wily man, a clever man, a sophisticated man, in his dealings and escapes and evasions, but what would the Greeks say was heroic about that? I suppose the fact that he was able to confront with the courage of intellect, if one could put it that way.

Did they put it that way? Did they regard him as a hero in the same breath as Achilles, for instance? By strong implication, yes. I mean, not the same kind of hero. That's very, very important. No, in the same bracket, though. They could bracket them as hero. In the same bracket, yes,

because he faced difficulties like huge one-eyed monsters who were, you know, threatening to eat him and his followers, or women who wanted to keep him forever and steal his manhood and his soul away from him, or he went down into the underworld and had to confront all the difficulties there. And the weapons that he used were the weapons of cunning and thought and forethought. And that was very, very much admired. So it's an interesting alternative view of what it is to be somebody of heroic proportions. He's certainly a hero of the heroic age in that sense.

There's a sense in which, going from there, from Homer to Pericles' great oration during the Peloponnesian War, Athens and Sparta, where he makes heroes of the whole of Athens, of the whole force. It is not an individual, it's a force and it's even a city force. Can you describe that, he democratizes heroism in a way, I suppose you could say, could you? He does indeed, yes. It seems to me a tremendously important turning point, this, because at the end of the first year of the Periponnesian War, so Thucydides tells us, Pericles made what was a traditional oration over the dead. Now, if you look at Homer, again, Homer would have thought that characters like Dolon and Thurstetes and other low-born unpleasant characters could never retain heroic stature because they didn't have the right kind of pedigree, they didn't have the right sort of origins. I mean, Odysseus might not have been in Achilles, but at least he was very high-born. But Pericles makes everybody, any Athenian who had died in the cause of Athens, a hero. He doesn't name any of

There's not one named person in that oration, but he talks about all the fallen. And he even talks about their relatives at home bearing the grief and the difficulty that resulted from it. And so he has, as you say, democratized terrorism. And what this means is that a switch away from warrior virtues to civic virtues is in process of happening. And that report by Thucydides seems to capture that moment as a very important one. But it isn't a switch that is a defining switch in a sense that the Achillean idea of terrorism dies, it becomes a parallel notion, doesn't it, rather than a displacing notion? It does, although I think in the end it displaces, because if you look at what else is happening

in the culture of the time, too, if you look at Eeschylus, talking about the trial of Arestes at the end of the Aristair, the furies, the old gods, whose task it was to avenge, had been displaced by Athene, calling a jury of the citizens of Athens together, and this is a big switch, too, towards the civil. You look at Sophocles and his attitude towards war and how terrible war is, how little glory really attaches to it. You get a sense that there's a really big shift in attitude away from the idea that it's egregious, I mean the literal sense of that term,

individuals who really count as heroes and who are really important in the hierarchy of virtue to something which is demotic and civic. Paul Codlet, can you distinguish you in Spartan ideas of heroism around this time the Pelhamnesian war and the Athenian ideas of herism. It's a very good question because precisely Pericles in his funeral speech, as reported by Thucydides, draws attention to Sparta. And he, in fact, contrasts what he takes to be Athenian democratic heroism with Sparta. And he accuses the Spartan's courage of being merely manufactured,

we might say, brainwashed. And it's something like the old Cold War ideology in the 20th century, where what they do over there behind the iron curtain, well, that's just terrible, and what we do is somehow admirable. And it's something like that sort of spirit. And the problem is with Sparta, therefore, that we don't actually get a Spartan's own point of view.

We have to infer what the Spartans thought about themselves. But we know what the Spartans did from their actions. We know about Thermopy, for instance, which was a defeat but seen by historians as emblematic, of what would be a great victory. If only you should mention Themoply, I think you've already had a little program on that because it was, of course, the signal, decisive contribution

that the Spartans made in a way to the Western tradition of heroism because they agreed to die collectively, though heroically in a sense of futilely in the short term, but for the longer term, they established that sort of notion that you don't give in, and there is something greater than your own life, and that is your corporate life, and there's something even greater than your communal life,

and that's Greece, some sort of high notion, which involves freedom in a way that being Greek is being free, in a way that other countries just can't do it. Just to clear this up for a lot of our listeners, we're talking exclusively about men still, aren't we? Is the idea of a woman being a hero in these times conceivable? It is conceivable, but it is literally paradoxical for a Greek, because the Greek word for courage is manliness.

In other words, by definition, there is something gendered about being courageous. And this goes back to what Anthony was saying really about how, on the one hand, bravery is the defining character of the hero initially. but that gets modulated into more quieter virtues, more civic virtues. Well, a woman, because of her gender, unfortunately, can never fight and therefore can never demonstrate that kind of courage. But on the other hand, the sort of courage that's required to put up with the loss of a child or in some other way make a civic contribution through religion, for example,

that sort of courage is possible, but it's not valued in the same way. Just one last point that in Herodotus, who is, of course, the main source for our knowledge of Thermopylae, there is one woman to whom he attributes the abstract virtue of manliness in a paradoxical way, and she just happens to be from his own hometown. Her name is Artemisia, and she was, I suppose, in a sense, a queen, generate a sole ruler, and like Budica, she took over from her late husband as queen, and Herodotus gives her a good write-up. So in some sense, she was heroic, partly because she actually fought at a sea battle, the Battle of Salamis.

Can I ask Paul, Melvin, about the Amazons and what the Greeks thought of them? Did they think they were fierce rather than brave? That's a very good distinction, but of course they had other problems. Were they women or men, because they were sort of between the two? They used men rather than men used them. They were set somewhere in the east, which of course is problematic, and they produced children as and when they wanted and not when men wanted them. And, of course, they were by definition warriors.

So in all these ways they are an anti-type. And actually it's a very good example of the way the Greeks thought. That's to say the way in which they envisaged their own values was in a crucial way by opposing and polarizing other sorts of groups, and the Amazons are one of them. Did Plato redefine heroism? Would you pick him out as someone who extended and developed a Homeric idea? Yes, absolutely, in a very radical way.

Plato certainly recognises that societies are still going to need martial valour, and that kind of heroism. Even the ideally just state is always going to be open to the possibility of war. So that model of heroism continues in Plato. However, he wants to extend it. He wants to say that you don't have to fight. on a battlefield to be heroic. You can endure hard, laborious thought.

You can endure the risk of ridicule contempt, even being put to death, as Socrates was. You can be a philosopher and a hero. And he absolutely consciously writes up Socrates throughout his dialogues as an alternative model of the hero. Was this taken up at the time? I mean, of course we have a philosopher here at Grayling, but I mean, and this philosopher's citizen

since then embraced this notion. In society as a whole, it was taken up to time. Absolutely, it was taken up the time, and as you might imagine, it was particularly taken up by philosophers. Aristotle's interesting here. Now, Aristotle, he continues the technical term hero as meaning of half divine, half mortal, but he also has a notion called megalopsyukia,

meaning greatness of soul, which is very similar to the kind of human heroism that we've been discussing. And Aristotle makes a distinction. He says there are two basic types, of megaloposukea. One is a refusal to submit to dishonorable treatment, and he cites Achilles as an example of that, also Alcibiades. The other, he says, is a calm, strong endurance of misfortune, of whatever life throws at you, and he cites Socrates there. He could easily have cited

Odysseus. He clearly has Odysseus in mind. So in terms of what we were saying earlier, in terms of Achilles and Odysseus being set up in the Odyssey, in the Iliad as two prototype heroes, Plato takes that notion on, allows the Odysseyan type to be extended to philosophers, and that does get taken up. One moment, Paul. As we, Anthony Grohling,

as we crawl near our own times and get from the Romans to the Greeks, can you distinguish between Roman idea of heroism and the Greek idea? I think I can, yes, although there is a continuity in an important one, just before I mention it, I should point out that

the contemporary philosophers conception of heroism is that discretion is the better part of that. Now, the direct continuity between the conception that Angie's just been describing and the Roman view, especially the early, the Republican, austere, self-contained, self-mastered Roman view, is, of course, to be found in the Stoic tradition, which has captured this idea that Angie's been talking about of the intellectual fortitude, the preparedness to endure,

the preparedness to stand up for you, your view and to be indifferent to what you can't control, to things that happen to you from outside and which are the choices of others. Roman virtues which came back in the imperial times of the 19th century England, Britain, for instance. Indeed, they did. That's leaving far too far forward. It is. But in the case of the Republican Romans, atenuate, this idea of being a strong individual in all these senses,

not merely in the warrior's sense, but being somebody who has this self-mastery that makes you capable of putting up with all sorts of difficulties, standing up for what's right, putting your hand into the fire to show your enemies that you're never going to be likely to give away secrets about how to get into. That was a literal example, wasn't it? Yes, Skyvela, is it.

I'm Horatius on the bridge. I mean, all these are examples of how the warrior and the civic virtues get mixed together into the idea of a hero of the republic, of somebody who puts the interests of the city and of his fellow citizens first and who will suffer anything in their cause. But to an outside, you wanted to come in earlier. Well, I was just going to come back on now, Angie.

And then really this is going back. And I was going to ask how far she thought Socrates was a new kind of specifically intellectual hero, which might therefore provide some sort of ancestry for Carlisle's notion of an intellectual hero. But, Angie. Oh, well, absolutely. We'll come to that later. I completely take that point. Can I ask you, Paul, about the Roman triumph,

which seemed to celebrate the hero, but at the same time, from what one knows, someone whispering is here in the ear of the, you are mortal, you will die. So I know he's coming in in triumph into Rome with all the acclamations and the rewards of these great battles. Can you say, how is the hero figuring that? It wasn't just any old someone whispering in the triumphator's ear.

It was a slave. And, of course, if you're made a slave, very often this is in war. And one of the functions of the triumph was to demonstrate Roman imperialism. It wasn't just the power of the individual triumfer, but of the whole Roman state and the Roman raised publica. And your triumphator, to be granted a triumph, had to have killed, to have certified death. of more than 5,000 of the enemy. Very Roman, a sort of clinical, precise cut-off figure below. So if it's 499, I'm sorry.

Anyway, if you get this award, you're entitled to ride on a four-horse chariot. Your cheeks are painted, bright red. You are as near to Jupiter for this moment, this one day in your life as it's possible ever to be. So you are almost a god. And of course the whole point about being a god is that you're immortal, and that explains why remember you are actually not a god. You may be looking like one, you may be thinking you are, but you're not.

And then you parade up to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitline, and then I'm afraid to say you slaughter a select number of the more distinguished prisoners, ideally, of course, the commanding officer of the other people. And then you are received into the temple, bed decked with all sorts of regalia, to use the word that the Romans would not have used, because they didn't like kings very much. And that was, of course, Julius Caesar's problem. We might perhaps come back to him.

So this was a quite extraordinary event, but it was as near as one could get to being a god, a hero in that very precise sense. So that's still celebrating the idea of the mortal and immortal that we started with, really. but something else comes in during the time of the Roman Empire, the death of Christ, the idea of... Somehow the idea of the hero has to be, because Christianity is taken over by the Roman Empire, has to be grafted on the idea,

the extant Greek and Roman classical idea. Now, how do you do it with a man who says, turn the other cheek, forgive everyone, how do they go about that? Yes, what's interesting here is that we know that the early Christian writer were very conscious of how could they portray Jesus. Paul writes to the Corinthians, we preach Christ crucified,

and he knows that that idea of the passivity of suffering, the ideal of passive suffering is going to be a problem. And he says that this ideal of Christ crucified, I think he says it's going to seem like foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. It's going to be very difficult to accept this notion that you shouldn't stand up for yourself and fight and in a physical way. There's also evidence, and I think, I think, origin against Kelsus as an example,

there's also evidence that there was debate at this period, and shortly afterwards, between Christians and non-Christian scholars, about whether Jesus could be portrayed as a hero. And I think a non-Christian writes to origin and says, well, surely your Jesus is a hero in the sense of that, hierarchy of being, we talked about earlier. A hero is a being who comes after gods and diamonds, but is greater than a mortal human. And he says, isn't your Jesus a hero in this scheme of things? And origin replies, no, you've not understood. Jesus is not just a hero. He really is God.

So there is this debate. Can this model of Jesus be grafted on to the old Greek concepts? And the idea, the answer seems to be, no. It actually can't. But isn't Anthony Gehrling, isn't there a rather a tentative taken over from when Angie said, isn't there a sense in which suffering becomes heroic through the crucifixion? Yes, this is the important point. I was going to ask Angie about that. Whereas the classical conception had been of the hero is something active, that action is integral to it, passion becomes an heroic virtue.

And in fact, that's to some extent prefigured in the Socratic idea of somebody who's prepared to be put to death rather than, escape because he believes what he does and wants to stick by his belief. So in that sense, passion becomes an erratic virtue. And that's one tremendously important thing. The second important thing, however, is not so much question of the figure of Jesus himself, but people who have faith in him and who therefore can suffer something that the heroes of classical times got as a reward for their heroism, and that's apotheosis, that if you stick with the faith

and you allow yourself to be martyred for it, you too become something of a god, an angel, You get to heaven. Paul. I'm just going to add in a little sort of qualification about suffering not to being part of an ancient Greek notion of heroism. Tragic heroes, in some sense, Greek tragedy's function was education, as it was, at turn in a rate developed at Athens under the democracy. There's a famous two-word saying, pathymathos. You learn, learning, literally, through suffering. And of course, knowledge is a form of heroism.

if you can look upon the most awful things and not flinch. That's one notion which, for example, Nietzsche picked up on from tragedy. So there is some sense in which it's possible to be passive and yet heroic in classical Greek. Can I offer a bit of a bit of casinetry there? You're absolutely right about that. Although another way of putting the point, I suppose, is to say that the tragic hero is, you know, like Arrestes himself, for example, is that the person who acts out the tragic fate that the gods have ineluctibly placed upon him. So, I mean, you could argue that he still, in some sense, has to do something in order for the tragedy to play itself out,

whereas in the case of, say, a Jesus figure, there he is helpless on the cross, nailed to it, can't do anything, and yet that is an heroic moment. You could say by his death he achieved. I mean, the Christian would say that was an act. It wasn't merely a passive suffering. It wasn't merely victimhood. Well, in the West, can we move past the sort of Saxons, old heroics, the Vikings, their own kind of strip-back heroic, and the Norman French even to the Renaissance, you're shaking your head, you don't want to go that far that fast. I've still got quite a lot to get through here, but we'll pause for your sort.

Well, no, I've always found it interesting that when Christianity wants to portray an image of an active martial Christian, it tends not to put Jesus. in armour. It tends later on, and we're getting nearer the Middle Ages here, it tends to put certain saints in armour. There's St Michael, St George, Joan of Arc and so on. So if you want this, the Achelean model of heroism and Christianity, it tends not to be through Jesus, but through certain of the saints. How's the Renaissance here, if we can keep using that term,

which I think we can, Anthony Grayling. How's the Renaissance here, the Prince of Duke Dupino and all that? Have they absorbed the Christian, as well as reaching back to the classical notion of here, Is there an attempt at fusion there? Well, this is a difficult one. The view that I take of it is that it's much more a mixed, as it were, precious alloy of classical conceptions, both the pre-periclian and post-Peraclian ones. If you take an example of somebody who's regarded as a Renaissance hero,

Federigo de Montefeltre, Duke of Urbino, whom you mentioned. Now, the thing about him was he was a soldier, and he hired out his little army to whoever was paying most, at the time. But he also had Aristotle read to him at breakfast. And he really wanted to reach that ideal of being a complete person, completely well-rounded, and having this, you know, the Latin version of Megalopsychos... Was there a question back to Alexander? Was there a conscious reaching back to Alexander? To some extent there was, yes, but much more in a way, I think, to Aristotle, because

Angie was talking earlier about the Megalop Psychos, that's Magna Anima, the magnanimous man, the great-souled individual. Therefore, the person who's... sensibilities have been refined and educated all the way around. Not only is he skilled at the martial arts, but he's also accomplished in other ways. He can appreciate painting. He likes music. He reads philosophy.

He's the Renaissance man. Is there, in this Renaissance period, Paul, as well, are we getting a revival of the tragic hero? Is he being remodeled? Well, I was going to get at this through Plutarch, and of course, North's Plutarch, and thereby to Shakespeare. So, I mean, one does get back to the end. ancient Greek tragic hero from the Renaissance through, in particular, Plutarch,

and I was also going to pick up on your mention of Alexander, that he certainly was throughout the Middle Ages rated up there, despite this being a predominantly Christian era in the West, and of course he was also a hero in Muslim East. So it was an action hero, a slayer of monsters and a spreader of, in some sense, his culture and what have you. But in the Renaissance, for sure, Sure, there was a desire to get back to the sort of active virtue that was particularly exemplified in the histories of Livy and in the biographies of the great men that Plutarch wrote. On the other hand, others will be much more expert at this than I. Shakespeare's take on Julius Caesar is, I think, relatively unheroic. In other words, it's deflationary. It concentrates on his murder and the motives, the thoughts, the feelings. of the people involved in that,

and indeed Julius, Caesar's own feelings faced with it, and Anthony's reaction to it. So it's in a way a very clever, diffracted notion of what being a hero might have been. And in a sense, Caesar's great conquest,

his great achievements, are set at naught, simply because look how he ended. And that, by the way, is a very ancient Greek notion. Whatever you've done in your life, if you end badly, it's all for not.

not. That's a rather extreme view, but the ancient Greeks were quite extreme. Are you inter say something, I was just wondering if Henry V, Shakespeare's Henry V might blend Roman and Christian notions of heroism, be more of an example. You know, what seems to happen is the psychologising of heroism. You find out a bit what it's like to be in that situation of either being a hero or having heroism demanded of you and what you think about it. I mean, the great thing about, Shakespeare is that you are admitted to the private thoughts of the people who are central to the drama in the form of soliloquy and dialogue.

In the case of Achilles, it's true that we can spectate their thoughts a bit through what they say to others, let's say. But in this case, we get a much fuller and richer insight into what's going on in their minds. And when that happens, it means that you can get a very nuanced, the much subtler and more complex, ambiguous kind of hero. Did they spin on the hero, the tragic, coming, becoming the tragic hero, a tragic hero, as Paul was saying, did that spin, was something that the romantics fed on as their definition, their ideal of what a hero was, and it was they themselves, the artists who became the hero? Yeah, I mean, one rather interesting thing about the romantic conception of the poet, the creator, is that whereas in antiquity you might think, how the heck did that chap down the road there watering his cabbages, Homer? I mean, how did he write that poem? How did he do it? And the answer was, well, he was inspired. I mean, the gods were the muses or something happened to whisper in his ear,

and he, as it were, took dictation from something greater and beyond himself. Whereas the romantic hero, I mean, beautifully summed up by Swinburne, you know, I am that which began, out of me the year's role, out of me, God and Man, is the ultimate source, the ultimate author of these things. The more time spent changing, amending, revising what you've done, the more you have possession of it, the more the owner of it you are. And so you are. You live a life of sensation to prove that you're at the extreme of the situation you're describing.

Absolutely. You've got to be in your garret and starving, and, you know, the lock of hair has got to be over your brow and so on. And this proves all these are the external signatures of the fact that it's all coming from you and you are there. But let's keep it focused on heroism. Where does the heroism in that? Where does that stop being a sort of a pose and affectation, a fashion, and continue the track of heroism? Well, in the case of Dramatics, of course, it's rather difficult to distinguish the pose and the affectation. from the reality.

Perhaps the reality is the pose. But certainly the idea of the poet dying in his garret for his art is conceived by the poet himself and by his admiring public as an act of heroism. I was going to say rather aphoristically it dies on the field at Misalongi. I mean, Byron, for all that he was in all the ways you've mentioned a romantic hero,

he also was pretty well up on his ancient history. And he chose eventually to die. He apparently had a special helmet and armor made for him which he thought was something like what perhaps Achilles would have worn. And he turns up, and of course, well, I don't know if tragically is the right word, but he comes with money, which is what the Greek revolutionaries needed, rather than his fighting skill. He then catches a fever.

It's an extremely unhealthy place in central Greece and dies before he can fight at all. But the very notion of wanting to be there, as part of this action, which is a rebellion, of course, for freedom. This seems to me to go back to an ancient Greek notion. And then his mate Shelley, of course, thought Prometheus was the sort of hero to look back to. Man who stole fire from the gods. And Shelley was extremely well-educated. He too, yeah.

Shelley actually translated Plato's Symposium, which was very daring because it included homosexual as well as heterosexual love. was not published in his lifetime. His wife wouldn't allow that. But Shelley saw in Prometheus a fighter for freedom, and there the model is, I think, from a play that we now think is not Iskilis, but the Iskulean, Prometheus, bound. And he responded with Prometheus unbound.

Before I make one of the final jumps, we're talking about Garrets, we're talking about the romantics thinking of themselves a series, but yet a lot of them are admiring of a man who could be seen as a traditional, hero figure Napoleon, whether it's Beethoven or whether it's the Young Wordsworth or boom,

and so on. Napoleon, apparently, it's Napoleon as the man. So that is still consistent, isn't it? The man on the field of battle, the man either figuratively or really leading the charge and so on. So that's still present, aren't you? Oh, yes, and I think

Thomas Clark... And Wellington, of course, as well. Absolutely, but we've got this age, at the same time as the romantic heroes. We have the Napoleonic Wars, which both fact and the folklore throw up three characters who are certainly perceived as heroes for many, many years to come, Napoleon, Wellington and Nelson. And Carlisle, who we mentioned earlier, he excellently combines these notions of the continuation

of the martial hero plus the romantic hero. Because in his book, which pulls no punches on heroes, hero worship and the heroic in history, in which he says that history basically is the acts of great men. It is the history of great men, no mention of women there. He lists six types of heroes in his six lectures. Three are basically religious. We have the hero as god and priest and prophet. We also have hero as poet.

Shakespeare and Dante he mentions. Hero is man of letters, Dr. Johnson. and Hero is King. He doesn't actually say Hero is commander. He says Hero is king, and Napoleon is the character he picks out, not surprisingly the British Nelson or Wellington, but Napoleon. And for Carlisle, what runs throughout all these character types is this notion of the strong leader.

So he somehow combines the romantic hero with the Marshall Hero into the notion of this innovative leader of men. So it would seem that when we're in, In 19th century Britain, we're back to an imperial idea of heroism, which has moved on not at all from certain imperial ideas of the Greek at their time and the Roman at that time. Is that right? No, I think there is something extra there. The reason my cardinal chooses Napoleon rather than the merely or purely military heroes,

Wellington and Nelson, is because he did some other things too. He liberated the Jews in Europe. He got rid of traditional monarchies. He stood for or represented a movement of the rights of man. And the more discerning people, Hazlitt, among them, for example, recognize that as the reason why he was the hero. It wasn't his battles that they admired. It was what he did to change the face of Europe that they liked.

I was just going to add that he was in a sense politically incorrect in that he included Muhammad amongst his heroes. And so that wouldn't have gone down terribly well in some quarters. Langer, you want to come back. Yes, but this notion of the sort of the imperial hero, and I guess Gordon of cartoon would be the classic example there, but it goes hand in hand with an extension of the hero into other fields, which seems to me to go along with imperial expansion.

This is the age when you start to get the notion that an explorer can be a hero. And later on you get Scott and Shackleton and so on. So it seems to me that we're getting this notion that this sort of conquest of the world, which doesn't have to be a conquest of other humans, it can be a conquest of inanimate objects in places too. That seems to be coming into it.

And that might, well, I suppose it might hark back to Alexander the Great. Is it possible, Anthony Groening, to tell us, to just briefly say, when Nietzsche came in bending this at the end of the century, and how the idea of heroism, and all three of it, crashed into the First World War? Yes, it's very interesting there, because, I mean, Angie's dead, right, that the conquest of nature and of ignorance and so on, but became heroic acts, and very importantly so.

Nietzsche, however, concentrated on the question of his conception, in a rate of moral heroism, the idea of overcoming the self and becoming a Superman. He thought this was only possible for some. I mean, it wasn't a demotic. possibility of this, but if you could really strive and aspire to be the maker of your own laws, then you were to that extent heroic. That I don't think is, you know, it was certainly paraded in the wrong direction by people who came after it, people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain

and the Nazis in the 20th century, into thinking that there was an heroic destiny for a race or a people, and that they had to overcome. They had to be the ones who collectively were the supermen. That's not what Nietzsche meant. at all. And it's very surprising in a way that that reading of him should ever have been admitted, because after the Second World War, when Nietzsche's manuscripts, original manuscripts were discovered and looked at and compared with the printed versions of his works early on, it was seen that he despised that sort of conception, he despised anti-Semitism and the rest. This was a purely individual matter, that the individual is moral hero,

striving to be the very best and the greatest thing that you could be. Paul, is there a sense that in the First World War, let's just take the British perspective, and what we know from the poets, they went in still feeling Dulcette decorumas, pro patro-Mori, to die for your country is a sweet and honorable thing. I am a hero in the sense of the Romans, the Greeks were, and that hit the wall of the First World War. Did heroism, was that its biggest testing point in the history of Western heroes?

Yes, it hit the wall in that, of course, Wilfredone was a poor man, a humble man, whereas the officers who explicitly likened their behavior to those of the great Homeric and other ancient heroes were, of course, well-educated from the top drawer. So it hit the wall in the sense that the slaughter was just unimaginable. And I think it was a French general who said that it was a bunch of donkeys who were leading lions, i.e. the ordinary soldiers were the lion. So there's a sort of reverse heroism, interestingly.

There's a kind of... It does hit the wall. but on the other hand there's a sort of demoticisation of heroism through the First World War. Angie? Well, there's that very moving line from Sassoon, isn't there, when he talks about the officers, cosily back at base camps, speeding glum heroes on the line to death. They still are heroes, but they're not too happy about it

because they've seen what heroism involves. Yes, heroism has become something that doesn't involve glory any longer. It was once central to heroism, that it would be that the achievement. of glory. But here is inglorious heroism. Well, you've still got the Victoria Cross and I mean, you've still got great admiration for for certain acts of Harrison.

And the motivation now. I mean, heroic deeds are recognised today. Absolutely. The old sense is still held even though he'd hit the war. True, yes, but we have to go. We have to go, sorry. Next week we're talking about the total history of zero. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy. at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.