Key word for Dialogue 01b: Hēraklēs 'he who has the kleos of Hēra'
Related key words: hōra, Hēra, hērōs (singular) / hērōes (plural)
The ancient Greek word for natural time, natural life, natural life-cycle, was hōra. See also the other definitions in the Glossary in the Sourcebook: 'season, seasonality; time; timeliness'. The English word hour is derived from ancient Greek hōra.
The goddess of hōra (plural hōrai) was Hēra (the two forms hōra and Hēra are related to each other). She was the goddess of seasons, in charge of making everything happen on time, happen in season, happen in a timely way, etc.
Related to these two words hōra and Hēra is hērōs (singular) / hērōes (plural), meaning 'hero'.
As we noted in the previous dialogue, the precise moment when everything comes together for the hero is the moment of death. The hero is "on time" at the hōra or 'time' of death.
In passage (A) of Dialogue 01a, we saw Achilles in the process of "scripting" his death.
{Compare the film clip "Like tears in rain. Time to die," where the character of Roy "scripts" his own death.} The film clips, with commentaries that accompany most of them, are to be found under "Multimedia" on the Heroes website.
A perfect example of a hero (as I have just defined the word) is Herakles = Hēraklēs 'he who has the kleos of Hēra'. (The Romanized name is "Hercules"). With Herakles in mind, I now review Passage C = Iliad XIX 85-133, which was introduced in Dialogue 01a. This passage shows a micro-narrative (by way of compression) about Herakles.
What we see in this passage is how the macro-Narrative of the Narrator of the Iliad sets up the micro-narrative of Herakles as a model for Achilles. And here is a basic formula to keep in mind as you read this passage: the king Eurystheus is to the king Agamemnon as the warrior Herakles is to the warrior Achilles.
Passage (C) from last time, Iliad XIX 85-133:
Then Agamemnon spoke, rising in his place, and not going into the middle of the assembly. "Danaan heroes," said he, "attendants [therapontes] of Ares, it is well to listen when a man stands up to speak, and it is not seemly to interrupt him, or it will go hard even with a practiced speaker. Who can either hear or speak in an uproar? Even the finest orator will be disconcerted by it. I will expound to the son of Peleus, and do you other Achaeans heed me and mark me well. Often have the Achaeans spoken to me of this matter and upbraided me, but it was not I who was responsible [aitios]: Zeus, and Fate, and the Erinys that walks in darkness afflicted me with derangement [atē] when we were assembled on the day that I took from Achilles the prize that had been awarded to him. What could I do? All things are in the hand of heaven, and Atē, eldest of Zeus' daughters, shuts men's eyes to their destruction. She walks delicately, not on the solid earth, but hovers over the heads of men to make them stumble or to ensnare them.
"Time was when she deceived Zeus himself, who they say is greatest whether of gods or men; for Hera {see note 1 below}, woman {note 2 below} though she was, beguiled him on the day when Alkmene was to bring forth mighty Herakles {note 3} in the fair city of Thebes. He told it out among the gods saying, 'Hear me all gods and goddesses, that I may speak even as I am minded; this day shall an Eileithuia, helper of women who are in labor, bring a man child into the world who shall be lord over all that dwell about him who are of my blood and lineage.' Then said Hera all crafty and full of guile, 'You will play false, and will not hold to your word. Swear me, O Olympian, swear me a great oath, that he who shall this day fall between the feet of a woman, shall be lord over all that dwell about him who are of your blood and lineage.'
"Thus she spoke, and Zeus suspected her not, but swore the great oath, to his much ruing thereafter. For Hera darted down from the high summit of Olympus, and went in haste to Achaean Argos where she knew that the noble wife of Sthenelos son of Perseus then was. She being with child and in her seventh month, Hera brought the child to birth though there was a month still wanting, but she stayed the offspring of Alkmene, and kept back the Eileithuiai. Then she went to tell Zeus the son of Kronos, and said, 'Father Zeus, lord of the lightning—I have a word for your ear. There is a fine child born this day, Eurystheus, son to Sthenelos the son of Perseus; he is of your lineage; it is well, therefore, that he should reign over the Argives.'
"At this Zeus felt grief [akhos] to the very quick, and in his rage he caught Atē by the hair, and swore a great oath that never should she again invade starry heaven and Olympus, for she was the bane of all. Then he whirled her round with a twist of his hand, and flung her down from heaven so that she fell on to the fields of mortal men; and he was ever angry with her when he saw his son groaning under the cruel labors [athloi] {note 4} that Eurystheus laid upon him. Even so did I grieve when mighty Hektor was killing the Argives at their ships, and all the time I kept thinking of Atē who had so harmed me. I was blind, and Zeus robbed me of my reason; I will now make atonement, and will add much treasure by way of amends. Go, therefore, into battle, you and your people with you. I will give you all that Odysseus offered you yesterday in your tents: or if it so please you, wait, though you want to fight at once, and my attendants [therapontes] shall bring the gifts from my ship, that you may see whether what I give you is enough."
{note 1... Keep in mind the information I already gave you about the key words involved. To repeat, the goddess of hōra (plural hōrai) was Hēra (the two forms hōra and Hēra are related to each other). Hēra was the goddess of seasons, in charge of making everything happen on time, happen in season, happen in a timely way, etc. Related to these two words hōra and Hēra is hērōs (singular) / hērōes (plural), meaning 'hero'.
{note 2... Note the "anthropomorphic" attitude!}
{note 3... Herakles = Hēraklēs 'he who has the kleos of Hēra'.}
{note 4... The Greek word for the hero's labor and for the athlete's competition is the same: athlos. Our English word "athlete" is derived from this Greek word. More on this later on in the dialogue.}
Let us compare this micro-narrative in the Homeric Iliad with the macro-narrative about Herakles as retold by Diodorus of Sicily 4.8-39 [we will not otherwise be reading this 1st-century author in our course]. I give here an epitome of this overall narrative:
The supreme god and king of gods, Zeus, impregnates a mortal woman. The wife of Zeus, Hera, is jealous; she decides to intervene in the life of the hero who is about to be born, Herakles. If this hero had been born on time, on schedule, in time, he would have been the supreme king of his time. But Hera makes sure that Herakles is born not on time, not in time. Herakles' inferior cousin, Eurystheus, is born ahead of him and thus is fated to become king instead of Herakles. During all of Herakles' lifetime, Eurystheus persecutes him directly; Hera persecutes him indirectly. The superior hero has to spend his entire lifespan obeying the orders of the inferior king. The orders add up to the Labors of Herakles (in the Classical version, there are twelve: the Nemean Lion, the Lernaean Hydra, the Hind of Ceryneia, the Erymanthian Boar, the Stymphalian Birds, the Augean Stables, the Horses of Diomedes, the Cretan Bull, the Amazon's Girdle, the Cattle of Geryon, the Apples of the Hesperides, and the Hound of Hades). Herakles' heroic exploits in performing these Labors (and many others) are the contents of the heroic song, kleos, that is sung about him. Thus Herakles owes his kleos to Hera. Hence his name: 'he who has the kleos of Hera'. The goddess of being on time makes sure that the hero should start off his lifespan by being not on time and that he should go through life by trying to catch up and never quite managing to do so until the very end. Herakles gets all caught up only at the final moment of his life, at the moment of death.
At the final moment of Herakles' heroic lifespan, he experiences the most painful death imaginable, climaxed by burning to death. This form of death is an ultimate test of the nervous system, by ancient Greek heroic standards. Here is how it happens. Fatally poisoned by making contact with the semen of a dying Centaur (his ex-wife Deianeira gave it to him in a phial as a "wedding present" on the occasion of the hero's re-marriage to the girl Iole: the ex-wife had mistakenly thought it was a love-drug that could win back the love of her ex-husband). Burning up on the inside with the excruciatingly painful poison that is consuming his body, Herakles climbs up on top of his funeral pyre, on the peak of Mount Oita, ready to be burned up on the outside. He yearns to be put out of his misery. He calls on his best friend Philoktetes to light his pyre.
[[Some may wish to compare the words of Jim Morrison: "try to set the night on fire."]]
At that precise moment of agonizing death, a flaming thunderbolt from his father Zeus strikes him. He goes up in flames, in a spectacular explosion of fire (the technical Greek term is ecpyrosis). In the aftermath, his friends find no physical trace of him, not even bones. At that same moment, Herakles regains consciousness and finds himself on the top of Mount Olympus, in the company of the gods. He has awakened to find himself immortalized. He is then adopted by the theoi 'gods' on Mount Olympus as one of their own (the technical Greek term is apotheosis). Hera now changes identities: from Herakles' stepmother to Herakles' mother. I translate from Diodorus of Sicily 4.39: "Hera got into her bed and drew Herakles close to her body. She let him fall through her garments to the ground, re-enacting [= making mimesis of] the genuine birth." (More in dialogues to come about the concept of mimesis as 're-enactment'.)
Addenda: two interesting details from Herakles myths.
- Hera finds an abandoned baby, who happens to be Herakles. She takes a fancy to the baby and breast-feeds it, but the baby bites her. The cosmic explosion of milk results in galaxy (Greek galakt- means 'milk') - or the Milky Way {Hyginus Astronomica 2.43; Eratosthenes Catasterismi 44; "Achilles" introduction to Aratus 24.}.
- Herakles' mortal mother, Alkmene, conceives another son by her mortal husband, Amphitryon, on the same night that she conceives her son Herakles by her immortal paramour, Zeus. This twin, Iphikles, is 100% mortal. The other twin, Herakles, is mortal only on his mother's side. (I do not say 50%. More in dialogues to come on the question of immortal vs. mortal "genes" of heroes.)
According to tradition (Diodorus of Sicily 4.14.1-2), Herakles was the founder of the Olympics, and he competed in every athletic event on the mythical occasion of the first Olympics. On that occasion, he won first prize in every Olympic event. This tradition about Herakles is the perfect illustration of a fundamental connection between the labor of a hero and the competition of an athlete at athletic events like the Olympics. As we will see later in the course, the hero's labor and the athlete's competition are the "same thing," from the standpoint of ancient Greek religious concepts of the hero. The Greek word for the hero's labor and for the athlete's competition is the same: athlos. Our English word "athlete" is derived from this Greek word.
In the ancient Olympics, the program of events in athletic competition (called agōn or athlos) was organically linked with concepts of the hero as a sacred being who is worshipped by the local community for his or her powers of blessing the community with fertility and prosperity (when the people are just) and harming it (when the people are unjust). Next to Herakles, the most important hero of the Olympics was Pelops, accepted by all Greeks (regardless of politics) as the ancestor of the three main royal houses of the Peloponnese (meaning "Island of Pelops"). The Peloponnese is the part of "mainland Greece" (as we know it) that contains the once all-important population centers of Argos, Sparta, and Messene. The Peloponnese was accepted by all Greeks (regardless of politics) as the epicenter of Greek civilization. The site of the ancient Olympics, called Olympia, was located in the NW Peloponnese. The Festival of the Olympics, held on a seasonally recurring basis every four years, was accepted by all Greeks (regardless of politics) as the most ancient, most prestigious, and generally most important athletic festival of them all (there were hundreds of other seasonally recurring athletic festivals, spread all over the Greek-speaking world). During the season of the Olympics, the participating city-states suspended all warfare with each other (note that warfare between Greek city-states was considered a ritual activity, like athletics). The first event in the program of athletic events at the Olympics was the stadion. This word was borrowed into Latin and then into English as stadium. The length of a stadion run was the length of the Olympic stadium; in earlier times there was no building per se called a "stadium," and the concept of the length of a stadion preceded the concept of a building that we call "stadium."
In the earliest times of the Olympics, the length of the stadion was defined in purely heroic terms. It was the distance between two sacred points, one called the "Pit [bothros] of Pelops" and the other, the Altar [bōmos] of Zeus. On the night before the morning of the first set of athletic events at the Olympics, a black ram was slaughtered in sacrifice, and its blood was ritually poured [the technical term for such pouring is "libation"] into the Pit of Pelops. Also, the meat of a selected herd of ritually slaughtered rams (rams / ewes were the premier sacrificial animals for male / female heroes) was cut up and thrown into huge caldrons filled with water, located at the Altar of Zeus with the firewood underneath all prepared for lighting. On the morning after the night of the sacrifice of the black ram at the Pit of Pelops, these caldrons, filled with the meat of rams, were waiting at the Altar of Zeus for the fire of the first athletic victor. Here we see a fundamental difference between the ancient Greek Olympics and the reinvention that we know as the modern Olympics. The lighting of the fire of the ancient Olympics happened not before the first athletic event but after it and in fact because of it. The idea of the stadion footrace was that the runner who wins that prototypical race had the honor of lighting the sacrificial fires at the Altar of Zeus (this fire would cook the rams' meat into mutton stew for the subsequent banqueting of the athletes).
The fire that lit the Altar of Zeus was thought to be the fire of victory, generated and fueled by the physical and mental effort (or ordeal: in Greek, athlos) of the athlete who had the honor of winning the stadion footrace. This fire of victory in the ritual of athletics was thought to be equivalent to the fire of victory in the myth of Pelops. According to this myth, the hero Pelops was once upon a time killed, dismembered, and boiled in a caldron, much like a sacrificial ram - only to be reassembled by the gods and brought back to life. The fire that boiled the meat of Pelops was a sacred fire that brought him back to life after death. The fire that boiled the meat of the sacrificial rams at the Olympics of historical times was thought to be that same fire, regenerated in every recurring Olympic Festival by the victory of the athlete who won the stadion footrace that started from the Pit of Pelops, the sacred point of the sacrifice, blood-libation, and dismemberment of the black ram. The ancient Olympics, then, the athlete's victory in the ritual of athletic competition is symbolically the same as the hero's victory over death in myth. The athlete's physical and mental struggle - both with others and within himself - is the ordeal or athlos that re-enacts the hero's prototypical athlos.
"The Olympic flame of victory over death."
With this background in mind, there is one special thing I would like for you to look for as you view this video: consider the symbolism of the burning torch headed for the altar of Zeus. This symbolic act, a centerpiece of the ancient Greek Olympics, is re-enacted in the modern Olympics when a chosen athlete lights the fires of the festival with his burning torch; the place of the fires, from the ancient Greek point of view, is the Altar of Zeus: in order to reach the Altar of Zeus, the chosen athlete has to perform his own "heroic labor," his own athlos.
With this background in place, let us turn to the three characteristics of a hero, as I already outlined them in Dialogue 01a. These three characteristics are formulated from the standpoint of ancient Greek hero cults (on the concept of hero-cults, I refer to the article I cited earlier: Nagy, "The Epic Hero"):
A) unseasonal
B) extreme, positively (for example, "best" in whatever category) or negatively; in the negative sense, it is easy to see how this is a function of #A. Compare the Celtic notion of warp spasm in Old Irish sagas
C) antagonistic toward the god who seems to be most like the hero; antagonism does not rule out an element of attraction (compare our notion of "fatal attraction"), which is played out in a variety of ways.
A perfect example of these three characteristics is is the hero Herakles. His name, as we will see, is relevant: it marks both the medium and the message of the ancient Greek hero.
Herakles is the ideal hero to start with in this course, though he is, as we will see, unique (by becoming a theos 'god' after death). Just as we may think of him as our first example, so also characters in epic think of him as a model. More on that later.
Let's go back to his name: 'he who has the glory [kleos] of Hera'. Our first impression: it seems to us strange that Herakles should be named after Hera, that his kleos should depend on Hera, since he is persecuted by her throughout his heroic lifespan.
But without the unseasonality, without the disequilibrium brought about by the persecution of Hera, Herakles would never have achieved the kleos that makes his achievements live forever in song.
Let us consider the three heroic characteristics of Herakles:
A) He is made unseasonal by Hera.
B) His unseasonality makes it possible for him to perform his extraordinary Labors. He also commits some deeds that are morally questionable (to say the least): for example, he destroys the city of Iole and kills her brothers in order to capture her as his bride - even though he is already married to Deianeira (Diodorus of Sicily 4.37.5). {It is essential to keep in mind that whenever heroes commit deeds that violate moral codes, such deeds are definitely not condoned by the heroic narrative.}
C) He is antagonistic with Hera throughout his lifespan, but he becomes reconciled with her through death, becoming her "son." As the hero's name makes clear, he owes his heroic identity to his kleos and, ultimately, to Hera.
[[There is a detailed write-up in ¤¤105-110 of Introduction #3, "The Epic Hero," which is available on the Heroes website, under "Texts." In these paragraphs, Achilles is compared to Herakles.]]
We also come back to where we started in Dialogue 01a: the hero Achilles. He chooses kleos over life itself, and he owes his heroic identity to this kleos. He achieves the major goal of the hero: to have his identity put on record through kleos. For us, a common way to express this goal is to say: "you'll go down in history." (That is what the song is saying to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.) For the earliest periods of ancient Greece, the equivalent of this kind of "history" is kleos.
From J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye.
Holden Caulfield is given a quotation by the teacher: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."
(My guess is that Achilles would answer: in that case, I would rather be immature than mature. Still, as we will see, he will achieve a maturity, a seasonality, at the moment in the Iliad when he comes to terms with his own impending heroic death.)
The teacher continues speaking in Salinger's narrative: "Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them...if you want to. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry." - emphasis mine.