hero

From the Greek cognate ἣρως, in mythology and folklore, a hero (male) or heroine (female). A hero usually fulfills the definitions of what is considered good and noble in the originating culture. However, in literature, particularly in tragedy, the hero may also have serious flaws which lead to a downfall, e.g. Hamlet. Such heroes are often called tragic heroes.

Sometimes a person might achieve a high enough status to become courageous in people's minds. This often leads to a rapid growth of myths around the person in question, often attributing him or her with extraordinary powers.

Some social commentators prescribe the need for heroes in times of social upheaval or national self-doubt, seeing a requirement for virtuous role models, especially for the young ^{cite this quote]}. Such myth-making may have worked better in the past: current trends may confuse heroes and their hero-worship with the cult of mere celebrity.

The Greek "hero"

Homer applies the Greek word ἣρως to all free men who were fighting in the Trojan War. Another epic poet, Hesiod, uses it in the context of the Fourth Age of Men. The most common mythological meaning comes from the Greek poet Pindar, who presents them as the offspring of mortals and the gods or those who had done a great service to mankind.[1]

Nature of hero cult

Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. Greek hero-cults were distinct from ancestor worship: they were usually a civic rather than familial affair, and in many cases none of the worshippers traced their descent back to the hero.

They were distinct on the other hand from the Roman cult of dead emperors, because the hero was not thought of as having ascended to Olympus or become a god: he was beneath the earth, and his power purely local. For this reason hero cults were chthonic in nature, and their rituals more closely resembled those for Hecate and Persephone than those for Zeus and Apollo.

The two exceptions to the above were Heracles and Asclepius, who might be honored as either gods or heroes.

Heroes in cult behaved very differently from heroes in myth. They might appear indifferently as men or as snakes, and they seldom appeared unless angered. A Pythagorean saying advises not to eat food that has fallen on the floor, because "it belongs to the heroes". In a fragmentary play by Aristophanes, a chorus of anonymous heroes describe themselves as senders of lice, fever and boils.

Types of hero cult

Hero cults were offered predominantly to men, but also to women and even children. Cult status was given to many classes of people, a few of them being the following:

• Famous men of the mythical past (heroes in the modern English sense), like Oedipus at Athens or Pelops at Olympia.
• Founders of cities, like Battus of Cyrene

Most reasons involved violent or unusual deaths, as in the following cases:

• Those killed in war. This was usually collective rather than individual, so as not to upset the delicate balance of the Greek polis, as in the case of the dead from the Battle of Marathon.
• Those struck by lightning, as in several attested cases in Southern Italy.
• Those who disappeared into the ground, as in the cases of Oedipus and Amphiaraus.

Heroes, politics, and gods

Hero cults could be of the utmost political importance. When Cleisthenes divided the Athenians into new demes for voting, he consulted Delphi on what heroes he should name each division after. According to Herodotus, the Spartans attributed their conquest of Arcadia to their theft of the bones of Orestes from the Arcadian town of Tegea.

Heroes in myth often had close but conflicted relationships with the gods. Thus Heracles's name means "the glory of Hera", even though he was tormented all his life by the queen of the gods. This was even truer in their cult appearances. Perhaps the most striking example is the Athenian king Erechtheus, whom Poseidon killed for choosing Athena over him as the city's patron god. When the Athenians worshiped Erechtheus on the Acropolis, they invoked him as Poseidon Erechtheus.

In the Hellenistic Greek East, dynastic leaders such as the Ptolemies or Seleucids were also heroized. This was an influence on the later, Roman apotheosis of their emperors.

Later European history

The classic hero often came with what Lord Raglan (a descendant of the FitzRoy Somerset, Lord Raglan) termed a "potted biography" made up of some two dozen common traditions that ignored the line between historical fact and mythology. For example, the circumstances of the hero's conception are unusual; an attempt is made by a powerful male at his birth to kill him; he is spirited away; reared by foster-parents in a far country. Routinely the hero meets with a mysterious death, often at the top of a hill; his body is not buried; he leaves no successors; he has one or more holy sepulchres.

Most European indigenous religions feature heroes in some form. Germanic, Hellene and Roman heroes, along with their attributes and forms of worship have been largely absorbed by the Orthodox and Catholic denominations of Christianity, forming the basis of modern day revering of Saints.

The validity of the "hero" in historical studies

Further information: Philosophy of history and Great man theory

Philosopher Hegel gave a central role to the "hero", personalized by Napoleon, as the incarnation of a particular culture's Volksgeist, and thus of the general Zeitgeist. Thomas Carlyle's 1841 On Heroes And Hero Worship And The Heroic In History also accorded a key function to heroes and great men in history. Carlyle centered history on the biography of a few central individuals such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great. His heroes were political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states. His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil, sought to organize change in the advent of greatness.

Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position were rare in the second part of the 20th century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. For example, Karl Marx argued that history was determined by the massive social forces at play in "class struggles", not by the individuals by whom these forces are played out. After Marx, Herbert Spencer wrote at the end of the 19th century: "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown....Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."

Thus, as Foucault pointed out in his analysis of the historical and political discourse, history was mainly the science of the sovereign, until its reversion by the "historical and political popular discourse".

The Annales School, led by Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel would contest the exaggeration of the role of individual subjects in history. Indeed, Braudel distinguished various time-scales, one accorded to the life of an individual, another accorded to the life of a few human generations, and the last one to civilizations, by which geography, economics and demography play a role considerably more decisive than that of individual subjects. Foucault's conception of an "archeology" or Althusser's work were attempts at thinking together these various heterogeneous layers composing history.

Operatic hero

In opera and musical theatre, the hero/ heroine is often played by a tenor/soprano (more vulnerable characters are played by lyric voices while stronger characters are portrayed by spinto or dramatic voices.)

The modern fictional hero

"Hero" or "heroine" is sometimes used to simply describe the protagonist of a story, or the love interest, a usage which can conflict with the more-than-human expectations of heroism. William Makepeace Thackeray gave Vanity Fair the subtitle A Novel without a Hero.

In modern movies, the hero is often simply an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, who, despite the odds being stacked against him or her, typically prevails in the end. In some movies (especially action movies), the hero may exhibit characteristics such as superhuman strength and endurance that sometimes makes him nearly invincible. Often a hero in these situations has a foil, the villain, typically a charismatic evildoer who represents, leads, or himself embodies the struggle the hero is up against.

See also

• List of fictional heroes
• Anti-hero
• Villain
• Tragic hero
• Culture hero
• Superhero
• Xia (philosophy)
• Byronic hero
• Hero of the Soviet Union

Further reading

External links

• Exploring the Function of Heroes and Heroines in Children's Literature from around the World
• The British Hero - online exhibition from screenonline, a website of the British Film Institute, looking at British heroes of film and television.
• Example of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey
• Heroes Forum Message Board for Heroes