Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen
Lucy Hughes-Hallett

From the author of ‘The Pike’ – winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction – a compelling story of heroism told through eight famous lives that span from Achilles to Sir Francis Drake.Beginning beneath the walls of Troy, ending in 1930s Europe, ‘Heroes’ is a compelling evocation of heroism through eight famous lives – Achilles, Odysseus, Alcibiades, Cato, El Cid, Francis Drake, Wallenstein and Garibaldi.Not necessarily all good – sometimes quite the reverse – but all great, they possessed a charisma, a strength of will powerful enough to persuade those around them that they alone could do the incredible and unprecedented.It is a story of morality and dictatorship; money and sorcery; seduction and mass hysteria.

HEROES

Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

DEDICATION (#ulink_e9e4df59-2783-5af6-b365-2f332dcf2cf1)

For Dan

CONTENTS

COVER (#u6a627130-559f-560d-bed7-8d778d832ced)

TITLE PAGE (#u5b32b299-c9b7-5265-bcfa-df08146c9357)

DEDICATION (#u4ada073d-5723-5e2f-b86d-8009b86030d6)

PROLOGUE (#u0b69959e-f75e-50c2-8dd3-b9fa6b2472aa)

I ACHILLES (#uf0a13dad-8539-5236-b8c1-224519a7b18f)

II ALCIBIADES (#uad64aa14-a4ab-5056-a448-66c7bcae4821)

III CATO (#ucf4f6c19-6381-527f-9aba-9afcba0aa665)

IV EL CID (#litres_trial_promo)

V FRANCIS DRAKE (#litres_trial_promo)

VI WALLENSTEIN (#litres_trial_promo)

VII GARIBALDI (#litres_trial_promo)

VIII ODYSSEUS (#litres_trial_promo)

AUTHOR’S NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)

REFERENCES (#litres_trial_promo)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES … (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

THE DELIGHT OF WRITING (#litres_trial_promo)

LIFE AT A GLANCE (#litres_trial_promo)

TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS (#litres_trial_promo)

A WRITING LIFE (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE BOOK (#litres_trial_promo)

THE FANTASY OF SUPERMAN (#litres_trial_promo)

READ ON (#litres_trial_promo)

IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE … (#litres_trial_promo)

HAVE YOU READ? (#litres_trial_promo)

FIND OUT MORE (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_db7f11cb-0fbb-5b06-a328-0be60193e37a)

‘RAGE!’ THE FIRST WORD of the Iliad, the word that inaugurates Europe’s literary culture and introduces one of its dominant themes. The rage not of Agamemnon, king and commander, but of Achilles, the semi-divine delinquent, the paradigmatic hero whose terrible choice of glory at the price of an early death has haunted the collective imagination of the West for two and a half millennia.

Heroes are dynamic, seductive people – they wouldn’t be heroes otherwise – and heroic rage is thrilling to contemplate. It is the expression of a superb spirit. It is associated with courage and integrity and a disdain for the cramping compromises by means of which the unheroic majority manage their lives – attributes that are widely considered noble. It is also, and therefore, profoundly disruptive of any civil state. Homer’s Achilles was the ‘the best of the Achaeans’, the pre-eminent Greek warrior, but his rage was directed, not against his people’s enemies, but against Agamemnon, his people’s leader. The Iliad is a celebration of Achilles’ lethal glamour: it is also the story of how he came close to occasioning the defeat of the community of which he was the most brilliant representative.

This book is about Achilles and some of his real-life successors (whether Homer’s hero really lived we are unlikely ever to know for certain). It takes the form of a series of brief lives of people who have been considered by their contemporaries (and in most cases by posterity as well) to be exceptionally, even perhaps supernaturally, gifted and so to be capable of something momentous – the defeat of an enemy, the salvation of a race, the preservation of a political system, the completion of a voyage – which no one else could have accomplished. In 411 BC the people of Athens resolved to recall Alcibiades, whom they had once condemned to death and who had subsequently fought with devastating success for their opponents, because, as one of their commanders told the Assembly, he was ‘the only person living (#litres_trial_promo)’ who could save their state. So the eleventh-century King Alfonso VI of Castile turned to Rodrigo Díaz, known as the Cid – a man he had twice banished – when African invaders poured into Spain, because whatever threat the Cid posed to the stability of the kingdom he was known to have been ‘born in a happy hour (#litres_trial_promo)’ and could therefore never be defeated. And so in 1630 the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, having first nerved himself to dismiss his overweening and intransigent General, Albrecht von Wallenstein, had then to humble himself by imploring Wallenstein to resume his command and save the empire from the onslaught of the invading Swedes, something that, by common consent of all his enemies (he had few friends), Wallenstein alone could hope to do.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. It is in times of emergency that heroes are looked for, and found. Bertolt Brecht wrote, famously, that it is an unhappy land (#litres_trial_promo) that looks for heroes. The dictum is ambiguous, and works both ways. A land without heroes may be fortunate in their absence, for a hero is a menace to any state’s equilibrium. ‘The Argonauts left (#litres_trial_promo) Heracles behind’, noted Aristotle, for the same reason that the Athenians took to ostracizing and sending into exile outstanding citizens, ‘so the Argos would not have on board one so vastly bigger than the rest of the crew.’ But only a fortunate land is confident enough to dispense with heroes. At the time of writing it is fashionable to lament the littleness of those accorded celebrity within our culture – so many footballers and rock stars and models, so few great spirits – but such collective frivolity should be cherished as one of the privileges of peace. It is desperation that prompts people to crave a champion, a protector, or a redeemer and, having identified one, to offer him their worship.

Virtue is not a necessary qualification for heroic status: a hero is not a role model. On the contrary, it is of the essence of a hero to be unique, and therefore inimitable. Some of the people whose stories are told in this book were irreproachable, others were scoundrels. Cato had the highest moral standards and adhered to them as nearly as could possibly be expected. Garibaldi was a man of signal sincerity, although he was not quite so transparently simple as his admirers imagined. (Alfred Lord Tennyson, meeting him in 1864, was delighted to recognize in him the ‘divine stupidity (#litres_trial_promo) of a hero’. In fact Garibaldi was far from dumb: he just didn’t speak English.) Others among my subjects were more morally questionable. Alcibiades was an arrogant libertine and a turncoat several times over. The Cid was a predatory warlord, Drake was a pirate and a terrorist, and Wallenstein was a profiteer prone to apparently psychotic rages whose contemporaries believed him to be in league with the devil. But heroes are not required to be altruistic, or honest, or even competent. They are required only to inspire confidence and to appear, not good necessarily, but great.

This book is rooted in ambivalence. Thomas Carlyle, who wrote one on the same subject a century and a half ago, declared that there was ‘no nobler feeling’ than hero-worship. ‘Heartfelt prostrate admiration (#litres_trial_promo), submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man … it is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in a man’s life.’ I disagree. An exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. It allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfilment that they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves. Carlyle approvingly called it ‘the germ … of all religion hitherto known’, but to make a fellow human the object of religious devotion is unwise. Hero-worshippers, as the stories in this book repeatedly demonstrate, are frequently disappointed in, and lay themselves open to abuse by, the heroes of their choice.

The notion of the hero – that some men are born special – is radically inegalitarian. It can open the way for tyranny. ‘Beware the pursuit of the Superhuman,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw. ‘It leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.’ True. Carlyle’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote ‘Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in great men’, saw the prime function of the great man as that of rendering ‘indemnification for populations (#litres_trial_promo) of pigmies’, while humanity en masse seemed to him ‘disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or fleas.’ Such a revulsion from the majority of one’s fellow beings, combined with an exaggerated admiration for the exceptional few, makes a politically poisonous mix.

But a wariness of the potentially pernicious effects of hero-worship hasn’t made me immune to the intoxicating allure of the hero. The people I have written about here are all compelling personalities whose life stories – tragic, inspirational, or shocking – have been told and retold over centuries, in some cases millennia, because they are so dramatic, so full of complex resonance, and so profoundly moving. The idea of the hero would not be so emotionally disturbing or so politically dangerous were it not so potent.