Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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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 a more important qualification for admission to the gallery of heroes than either survival or success.
Appearances matter, and not only because ‘defeat in battle’, as Tacitus wrote, ‘always begins with the eye’. ‘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 or enlarged by others: Drake’s power and ferocity were magnified by Spaniards motivated by anger at 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. But whether by his own or others’ will, a hero inevitably acquires an artificial public persona. Shakespeare’s Achilles is addressed as ‘thou picture of what thou seemest’, a doubled image of inauthenticity. But an image is what a hero inevitably becomes. 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 of it the Cid is killed fighting but his grieving wife and followers, knowing that without the inspiration his presence provides their armies will never succeed in beating 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. The trusty horse gallops out at the head of the Cid’s army. 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 on purpose for the film – there is no medieval legend, let alone chronicle, in which it appears in that form – but the thinking behind it is sound. A hero’s appearance is sometimes all that is required of him. He can win a battle, or quell a riot, or raise a revolution simply by being seen. He doesn’t have to be active, he doesn’t even have to be alive. Indeed it isn’t necessary that he be actually present: it is enough that he should be so apparently. Achilles sent Patroclus out to fight disguised in his armour, knowing that the mere simulacrum of himself would be terrifying enough to send the Trojans hurtling back towards their walls. 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 onto the field in that cloak. Nobody noticed: victory came quickly. A hero, once his fame reaches a certain pitch, becomes a totem, an object of magical potency that need take no action in order to achieve results. Garibaldi, serving France when he was old and crippled by arthritis, was carried around the battlefield on a stretcher: his presence was all the same reckoned to have been invaluable.
It follows that a hero is not always, even in his lifetime, and certainly not thereafter, responsible for the uses to which his image is put. Frequently, as the stories I have to tell demonstrate, a hero is – consciously or unconsciously – the chief actor in a spectacle scripted and directed by others. As Elizabeth and Walsingham used Drake, so Victor Emmanuel and Cavour used Garibaldi. And once dead a hero becomes an infinitely adaptable symbol. Cato’s repeated metamorphoses – from conservative oligarch to Christian saint to martyr in the cause of liberty to Whig parliamentarian – have parallels in most heroes’ afterlives. 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. In telling my heroes’ stories I demonstrate how various are the ways in which heroes appeal to us. Heroes may challenge or comfort, they may offer the elation of victory or the infantilizing luxury of being taken care of by a superhuman protector. They may constitute models of courage or integrity, or they may set enticing examples of transgression and licence. 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.’ Ismene is preparing to compromise her principles, bowing to the powers that be in order to secure herself a safe place in the world; but Antigone would rather die than do so, and so her name will long outlive them both. ‘Many men,’ wrote Sallust, ‘being slaves to appetite and sleep, have passed through life like mere way-farers … The lives and deaths of such men is about alike, since no record is made of either.’ But a few rise above the sordid limitations of physical existence, the repetitive and futile cycle of consumption and excretion and slow decay. Sallust considered Cato, who was his contemporary, to be one of those exceptional beings whose greatness lifts them above the common ruck, who transcend their pitifully ephemeral physical nature, thus holding out the profoundly consoling vision of an existence in which oblivion can be averted and a mortal may escape time’s scythe.
A hero may sacrifice himself so that others might live, or so that he himself may live for ever in others’ memories. 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 token of immortality. Since the prospect of death is something with which we all have to come to terms, the stories of heroes will never lose their fascination. Dead heroes escape the degeneration that awaits the rest of us. ‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old’, and it seems to those who survive them that they have evaded death. ‘Being dead they have not died,’ wrote Simonides of the Spartans who died at Thermopylae. ‘Their excellence raised them gloriously out of the house of Hades.’
Hero-worship still plays a vital part in our political lives. It inspires both terrorists and those who combat them. It shapes the rhetoric of our election campaigns. It helps determine the choices made by democratic voters and it eases dictators’ ascent to power. I have chosen not to play the game of spot-the-hero among the people whose names now fill our screens and newspapers but I hope that, while reading this book, others will. The stories I have to tell are legendary or historical, but each one of them is to be read as a parable about the way we live now.
There is an odd kind of inverted vanity that persuades people to imagine that some of our collective follies are brand new, peculiar to the age of mass media. Wrong. As the stories I have told here demonstrate, there is nothing new about the cult of personality, about the calculated manipulation of news for political ends, about the ways in which celebrity and sexual charisma can be translated into power, about the suggestibility of a populace who, in a time of fear or over-excited enthusiasm, can be tempted to hand over their political rights to a glorious Superman. On 12 September 2001 a group of people were photographed near the ruins of the World Trade Center holding up a banner reading ‘WE NEED HEROES NOW’. This book is, first and foremost, a collection of extraordinary stories; but it is also an attempt to examine that need, to acknowledge its urgency, and to warn against it.
HOMER’S TROY. Achilles, paragon of warriors, consents to enter the fight. Ready for battle in the armour