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The Heroic Outlook and the Greek World |
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The essence of the heroic
outlook is the pursuit of honour through action. The great man is he who,
being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to the
utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort
and shirks no risk in his desire to make the most of his gifts and to
surpass other men in his exercise of them. His honour is the centre of his
being, and any affront to it calls for immediate amends. He courts danger
gladly because it gives him the best opportunity of showing of what stuff
he is made. Such a conviction and its system of behaviour are built on a
man’s conception of himself and of what he owes to it, and if it has any
further sanctions, they are to be found in what other men like himself
think of him. By prowess and renown he gains an enlarged sense of
personality and well-being; through them he has a second existence on the
lips of men, which assures him that he has not failed in what matters
most. Fame is the reward of honour, and the hero seeks it before
everything else. This outlook runs through Greek history from Homer’s
Achilles to the historical Alexander. It is countered and modified and
altered, but it persists and even extends its field from an individual to
a national outlook. It is a creed suited to men of action, and through it
the Greeks justified their passionate desire to vary the pattern of their
lives by resourceful and unflagging enterprise. Though in its early
stages, as we see it in Homer, it has much in common with similar ideals
in other heroic societies, it is more resilient in Greece than elsewhere
and endures with unexpected vitality when the city-state is established
with all its demands and obligations on its members, and when the new
conception of the citizen might seem to exclude an ideal which sets so
high a value on the single man and his notion of what is due to him.
The heroic outlook, which the Greeks inherited from a distant past, shaped much of their thinking and their action. They fitted it into the frame of the city-state and its demands, and, when occasion called, into the larger pattern of Hellenism, of which they were never quite oblivious. When they claimed that they were superior to barbarians because they pursued a higher type of virtue, they were not wrong. In comparison with the herded multitudes of Egypt and Asia, or with the more primitive peoples on their own frontiers, the Greeks had found a principle which gave meaning to life and inspired them to astonishing achievements. Because they felt that they were different from other men, that they must always excel and surpass them, that a man wins his manhood through unflagging effort and unflinching risk, they broke away from the static patterns of society which elsewhere dominated their age, and inaugurated a way of life in which the prizes went to the eager and the bold, and action in all its forms was sought and honoured as the natural end of man. [Source: C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, (New York: Praeger, 1957), pp.20-21, 40-41.] | The History Guide | | copyright © 2001 Steven Kreis |