Whatever happened to?
If only Achilles had got himself an agent and a mansion in Malibu. Mark Simpson laments the disappearance of heroes.

Independent on Sunday, 19 September 2004

Who is the greater man, Achilles or Brad Pitt? Which is the bigger hero? The swift-footed, brilliant brooding Achilles, flame-capped and awful, slayer of Hector, who refused the comforts of society and chose a youthful death and immortal glory over domestic dotage? Or Brad Pitt, model, actor, mumbling six-pack and trophy husband of Jennifer Aniston, who played Achilles in the blockbuster Troy that recently laid siege to our patience at the multiplex as if he were, well, a spoilt mediocre film star?

There can be no doubt about the answer. Brad is the real hero of our times. After all, Brad has a more powerful agent than Achilles, a bigger house in Malibu and is much more admired around the world today. In a mediatised age, Brad is a hero because he is famous, rather than the other, more ancient way around.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett evades that question in her otherwise compendious and stupendous book. Her chapter list of heroes starts with the "semi-divine delinquent" Achilles, the "paradigmatic hero" of the Ancient World and ends in the 19th century. It includes ravishing, bullying Alcibiades, Athens' greatest and most prodigal son, whose shield depicted Eros holding a thunderbolt, and whom Nietzsche regarded as most closely resembling his notion of the Superman; the divinely stubborn Cato, who tore his intestines out with his own hands rather than allow himself to be compromised by tyranny - or reality; Francis Drake, sailor and adventurer, scourge of the Spanish, and epic thief; and it finishes with Garibaldi, another "flame-capped" man "with the aspect of a god" who united Italy in the 19th century (but who is probably most famous today for having a biscuit named after him).

While Hughes-Hallett's eloquent account of their derring deeds in appropriately muscular prose will leave you quite flushed and breathless, wondering what kind of world produced such men and how to justify your own barely lived life of miserable compromise and cowardly calculation, you probably won't doubt for a minute that Brad - or Becks - is more "heroic" in modern terms than any of these titans.

Perhaps it is a sign of how our language and our lives have become debased that so many millions think of celebs like Brad or Becks as "heroes", or perhaps it's just a sign of change. Hughes-Hallett dismisses the "fashionable" complaints about the frivolity of modern celebs, claiming it is something that should be treasured as a luxurious "privilege of peace". Which may be true, even if it might incline one to favour the privations of war. She goes on, however, to assert that it is an "odd kind of inverted vanity that persuades people to imagine that some of our collective foibles are brand new, peculiar to the age of mass media. Wrong."

Ahem. Allow me to suggest it is a "verted" vanity peculiar to some historians that there is nothing new under the sun, particularly to historians who deal in the dead-and-buried past. Alas, the age of mass media has very definitely produced new and hardly inspiring phenomena, which is perhaps why Hughes-Hallett for the most part avoids engaging with it.

What is a hero anyway? Thomas Carlyle was tremblingly clear: "Heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of a Man... it is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in a man's life." Hughes-Hallett however is prosaically suspicious that "an exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. It allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great men for salvation or for fulfilment that they should more properly be working for themselves." Well, yes, but this also sounds to me like a rationalisation of our middle-class, mass-democratic times in which people must not be distracted from their gardening by following great men.

The yen for heroes, whether it is a good or a bad thing, has not been extinguished altogether, but it has been eviscerated. In the smoky wake of 9/11, the US presidential race in the world's leading democracy is being fought over which candidate appears the most heroic. Kerry is - or was 30 years ago - the more authentic, and has the medals and the record to prove it, but we live in an age rendered inauthentic by the multiplication of media. The mumbling President who has led the US and the UK into an unnecessary war, whose daddy garnered him a cushy posting during the last one (which he failed to turn up for), looks better in his 1960s service snaps and is better at saluting than reporting-for-duty Kerry. He is the kind of simulacrum of a hero that our age favours. Or rather, the only kind of hero that our age permits.

© Marksimpson.com 2004

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