11.3 — Greek II: The Heroes

A Greek hero is not a good person.

The word heros means something closer to a powerful dead figure who receives cult at a tomb — a being of enormous capability, usually with one divine parent, whose story generally involves great deeds and a great deal of collateral damage.

And the pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming: exceptional ability, a terrible act, an ordeal that pays for it, and an unhappy end.

Heracles

The strongest, and the most instructive.

Son of Zeus and a mortal woman, and hated by Hera from birth for that reason — she sends snakes to his cradle, which he strangles.

And then the thing that sets up everything else: Hera drives him mad, and in the madness he kills his own wife and children.

The labours are the punishment.

Twelve tasks, set by a king he must serve, and the list is worth having because each is a different kind of problem.

The Nemean lion, whose hide cannot be pierced — so he strangles it and wears the skin.

The Hydra, which grows two heads for each one cut off — solved by cauterising each stump, and it is the original image for a problem that multiplies when attacked. He needed help for this one, and it was disallowed on that ground.

The Ceryneian hind, sacred to Artemis, which had to be captured alive — a year of pursuit, and the problem was not strength.

The Erymanthian boar, brought back alive.

The Augean stables, thirty years of filth, cleaned in a day by diverting two rivers through them. Not strength — engineering. And this one was also disallowed, because he asked for payment.

The Stymphalian birds, the Cretan bull, the man-eating mares, the belt of the Amazon queen, the cattle of Geryon, the apples of the Hesperides, and finally Cerberus, brought up out of the underworld alive.

And his death: a shirt smeared with what he was told was a love charm and which was poison, causing agony he could not end, so he built his own pyre.

What Heracles is for

The strongest man alive spends his life doing forced labour to pay for something he did while not in his right mind.

And the labours are not glorious. They are cleaning out stables, chasing a deer for a year, and killing pests. The Greeks made their greatest hero into a labourer.

The transferable observation: strength solves about half of them. The Hydra needs a method. The stables need engineering. The hind needs patience. A person whose only tool is force will fail six of twelve, and the story is careful to show him learning that.

Perseus

The cleanest of the heroes and the one who does it correctly.

He has to bring back the head of Medusa (11.4), whose gaze turns people to stone.

And he does not fight her.

He gathers equipment: winged sandals, a cap of invisibility, a curved blade, a bag to hold the head, and — the crucial item — a polished bronze shield.

He approaches while she sleeps, looks only at her reflection in the shield, and cuts.

He never looks at her directly.

What it teaches

Some things cannot be confronted directly and can be dealt with indirectly.

Which sounds like a platitude and is a real technique. A problem you cannot look at straight — a fear, a grief, a subject that shuts you down when approached head-on — can frequently be approached through a reflection: writing it rather than saying it, discussing the general case rather than yours, or working on it sideways.

And the second thing: he prepared. Perseus is the only hero in this chapter who assembles the right equipment before starting, and he is the only one whose story ends well.

Theseus

The founder-hero of Athens, and his story is two stories that do not fit together.

The Minotaur. Athens sends fourteen young people to Crete every nine years as tribute, to be put into the labyrinth and killed by the bull-headed creature at its centre. Theseus volunteers.

And Ariadne, the Cretan king's daughter, gives him a thread so he can find the way back out.

He kills the Minotaur and escapes, and the thread is why.

And then he abandons Ariadne on an island on the way home.

And then he forgets to change his black sail for a white one, as arranged to signal success — and his father, seeing black, throws himself into the sea.

What it teaches

The thread is the entire lesson. The monster is not the problem; the labyrinth is. Anybody can kill the thing at the centre. Getting out is the difficulty, and it requires having marked the way in.

Which applies to any deep problem: the descent is easy, and what you need is a line back to where you started.

And the two failures are worth keeping. He abandons the person whose help made it possible. And he forgets one small operational detail and it kills his father. The Greeks put both in on purpose — the hero succeeds, behaves badly, and is careless, and pays for the carelessness rather than for the betrayal.

Jason

The worst of them, and the story knows it.

Sent for the Golden Fleece with a crew of heroes. He succeeds entirely because of Medea, a foreign princess and sorceress, who falls in love with him, gives him what he needs to survive the tasks, drugs the serpent guarding the fleece, and — to delay pursuit — kills her own brother.

She betrays her father, her country and her family for him.

They marry, have children, and settle in Corinth.

And then Jason decides to marry the king's daughter instead, because it is a better match.

His defence, in Euripides' play, is worth quoting in substance because it is so exactly the defence such a man makes: he says she got a great deal out of the arrangement, that she now lives in a civilised country instead of a barbarian one, that she has fame, and that his new marriage is for the good of their children.

Medea kills the new bride, kills her own two children, and escapes.

Euripides gives her the argument and does not let Jason answer it. She says that of all creatures that live and think, women are the most wretched — that they must buy a husband with a dowry and take a master for their body, that a man can leave when he is tired of the house and a woman cannot, and that she would rather stand three times in battle than give birth once.

In 431 BCE, in Athens.

What it is for

Medea is the most frightening figure in Greek myth and Euripides made her sympathetic, which is a remarkable thing to have done.

The play is about what happens when somebody gives up everything for a person and that person treats the arrangement as terminable. Jason's crime is not the new marriage; it is that he cannot see that anything was owed.

The pattern

Assemble the four.

Heracles: the strongest man, punished for something he did while mad, doing menial labour for a lesser man, dead of a poisoned shirt.

Perseus: prepared, indirect, and the only one who ends well.

Theseus: succeeded, abandoned his helper, and killed his father through carelessness.

Jason: succeeded entirely through somebody else's sacrifice, discarded her, and lost everything.

Three of four are destroyed, and in two cases the mechanism is the treatment of the person who made it possible.

Which is 2.3's Urmila and 3.16's Ghatotkacha and 4.2's exchanged child, arriving from a different tradition. Somebody pays for the hero's success and is not in the story's title, and the Greeks were unusually direct about the consequences.

What to carry from this page

The Hydra grows two heads when you cut one. Some problems multiply when attacked directly and need a different method entirely.

Perseus prepared and looked at the reflection. He is the only one who ends well and the two facts are connected.

The monster is not the problem — the labyrinth is. Mark the way in before you go deep.

And the person whose help made it possible is owed something permanent. Three of these four heroes are destroyed, and in two cases that is precisely why.

Next: 11.4 — the five figures everybody knows, and what each one is actually about, starting with a woman who was punished for what was done to her.