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When people speak of a ‘tragic hero’, they are usually influenced by Aristotle’s seminal analysis of tragedy in his Poetics. According to Aristotle, a tragedy should centre on a great individual, someone significant and of noble birth, and should demonstrate his fall, a reversal of fortune which Aristotle calls peripeteia. Aristotle acknowledges that not all tragedies fit this pattern (for example, in some of Euripides’ escape tragedies, the movement is from ruin to salvation rather than the other way around), but this is what he feels makes for the best type of play. He also has firm views on the type of person who makes a suitable tragic hero (Poetics 1452b–53a):
To begin with, it is clear that decent men should not be shown falling from prosperity to adversity, since this causes neither fear nor pity, but is repugnant … Nor should it show a very wicked man falling from prosperity to adversity, since this structure might be satisfying but would not arouse pity or fear … What is left, then, is the person in between. This is the type of man who is not exceptional in virtue or justice, and falls into misfortune not through wickedness or depravity but through an error (hamartia).
In other words, Aristotle rules out the possibility that the tragic hero should be particularly virtuous or particularly wicked. It is important to his theory that tragedy elicits certain emotions (pity and fear), and he thinks these are best achieved when the hero is good enough that we feel pity for his suffering, but not so perfect that his downfall is undeserved. The need for pity and fear also lies behind his concept of hamartia, since a hero must suffer for the right reasons.
This analysis of tragedy has been powerful in shaping modern responses, but we should not accept Aristotle’s views uncritically. The first part of this chapter will therefore discuss the Aristotelian view of tragedy, and particularly the concept of hamartia. Aristotle’s interest in the hero’s character is the first of many attempts to define what is typical about the tragic hero. This chapter will explore whether it is right to seek a single model for tragic heroism, and what distinctive features we do find in the surviving plays. Finally, we will investigate the role of hero-cult in offering a bridge from the heroic age to that of the audience, and examine how cult is used to compensate tragic heroes for what they have suffered. Studies of the hero from Aristotle onwards have been dominated by the plays of Sophocles, and he will therefore play a leading role in this chapter, though, as we shall see, his characters share important similarities with the heroes of Aeschylus and Euripides.
Aristotle and hamartia
The Greek word hamartia means a mistake, and scholars have disputed exactly what Aristotle means by this, and how it applies to tragedy. One approach has been to take hamartia as referring to a character flaw, such as anger, greed, impulsiveness. In this case, tragedy’s power would come from watching how someone causes his own downfall by succumbing to the ‘fatal flaw’ in his nature. Alternatively, hamartia could mean an intellectual flaw (not realizing that a course of action is a terrible idea, for example), in which case we would derive pity and fear from observing someone’s blind spots, and reflecting on the limitations of human understanding. It seems most likely that Aristotle meant hamartia in the broadest possible sense, incorporating any kind of mistake. It is certainly true that tragic heroes are not passive bystanders and their ruin results from their own behaviour. For instance, in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Eteocles insists on going to face his brother in battle, against the chorus’ advice, and they are both killed as a result. Sophocles’ Ajax is driven mad because of his arrogance, and decides to kill himself because he cannot bear the humiliation, while Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae refuses to recognize Dionysus’ divinity, despite the warnings of his grandfather, the prophet Tiresias, and the god himself. Seeing someone make mistakes that bring them to destruction is more powerful than watching bad luck happen to an innocent victim, and Aristotle’s theory highlights this. However, the risk of trying to isolate a single hamartia in any given play is that it can distract us from the essential issues at stake, and we must not let it become a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to interpreting tragedy.
A clear example is Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, where Oedipus committed an error (he killed his father and married his mother), but his ignorance of his true identity can hardly be considered a moral flaw. Oedipus does have character flaws, notably his angry temper, and this is relevant to his killing of his father. But it would be hard to claim that anger was the single factor that caused his downfall, since one could equally well attribute it to his intelligence, which allowed him to defeat the Sphinx and so marry his mother. Taking hamartia to mean ‘mistake’ more broadly would allow us to say that Oedipus’ mistake was one of ignorance rather than of character, in that he did not realize who his true parents were. However, Oedipus’ original mistakes are in the past, and the focus of the play is not on what he did wrong, but on his discovery of his identity and his reaction to it. Moreover, Sophocles leaves it deliberately vague why the gods should burden Oedipus with the fate of killing his father and marrying his mother. Much of the play’s power derives from the terrifying inscrutability of divine will, and this refutes any simple answer to what Oedipus did wrong and why.
While Aristotle was much closer in time to the tragedians than we are (writing only 100 years later), he is not offering us omniscient insight into their minds, and we should remember that the poets did not sit down to write a play with his guidance in front of them. Part of Aristotle’s appeal no doubt arises from the fact that he offers us a model to interpret tragedy, but it seems inherently unlikely that every tragedian should compose his plays to fit a single pattern (and disappointing if it did turn out to be the case). Aristotle, as a great scientist and logician, has a tendency to systematize and categorize, and this is not necessarily helpful when it comes to complex literary genres. Moreover, he offers us his personal beliefs on what makes a tragedy successful, influenced by his wider philosophy, and while his views may often be insightful, they are not an objective description and have no greater inherent authority than those of any other literary critic.
Figure 4.1 Oedipus answers the Sphinx’s riddle (fifth-century BC drinking cup). (Photo by Apic/Getty Images.)
The diversity of heroes
Another influential analysis of what defines a tragic hero is that of the classicist Bernard Knox, who applies Aristotle’s ideas to the plays of Sophocles and tries to come up with a comprehensive model in his book The Heroic Temper. He argues that Sophocles (rather than Aeschylus and Euripides) gives us characters who embody Aristotle’s ideal, and defines the tragic hero as someone who makes a decision rooted in his personal nature (physis), and maintains it to the point of self-destruction. Knox sees the crucial feature of the hero as his inability to yield or compromise: he is faced with opposition and criticism, but ‘remains true to himself’. Thus Electra refuses to let go her grief for Agamemnon, Antigone insists on her right to bury her brother, and Ajax kills himself despite the effect it will have on his family and comrades. Like Aristotle’s theory, Knox’s is tantalizingly straightforward, but this apparent simplicity is suspicious. It is important to bear the vagaries of ancient transmission in mind before making sweeping judgements about tragedy, and Knox himself admits that his theory can be made to work in only six out of seven of the surviving plays (Women of Trachis does not fit his model), and that it also fits some non-Sophoclean tragedies such as Euripides’ Medea.
Knox’s model, like Aristotle’s, overlooks the diversity of heroism within Greek tragedy, and even in Sophocles, heroes come in different forms. In two of Sophocles’ plays, Ajax and Philoctetes, we encounter rival views on what makes a good hero. In Ajax, Ajax’s uncompromising perspective is contrasted with the more flexible Odysseus. At the start of the play, Athena espouses the view, also held by Ajax, that mocking one’s enemies is part of heroic ethics, and brings out the maddened Ajax so that she and Odysseus can gloat over him. Odysseus, however, finds it distasteful to see Ajax in such a state; he tries to persuade Athena to leave Ajax be, and rather than rejoicing in his downfall, sees it as revealing the frailty of all human beings (121–6). His magnanimity is striking, since Ajax believes himself to be torturing Odysseus, and speaks in triumphant terms of the pain he will inflict. The second half of the play is taken up with dispute among the Greeks over what to do with Ajax’s corpse, and here too, we see a conflict between an uncompromising and vengeful attitude (espoused by Agamemnon) and the more flexible one offered by Odysseus. Odysseus criticizes Agamemnon for having a ‘rigid mind’ (1361) and his view of heroism is pragmatic: friends and enemies do not stay the same over time, and it is foolish to reject the possibility of changing one’s mind. The play offers us two very different views on how a hero should behave. We can respect the single-mindedness of Ajax, and the admiration it wins him from his followers, but ironically it is the flexibility of Odysseus that secures Ajax’s honour and proper burial. Odysseus is also used in Philoctetes to present an alternative model to a rigid form of heroism. In this case, the young Neoptolemus is torn between the stark world-view of Philoctetes, who refuses to let his grudge against the Greeks go, even if it means Troy will never be taken, and Odysseus, who advocates lying in order to get the desired result. Here Odysseus’ pragmatism is more ambiguous than in Ajax, and the play invites us to consider whether the ends justify the means, and whether there are situations where deceit is morally acceptable.
Diversity within heroism can be traced back to the foundational texts of Greek literature, the Iliad and Odyssey. While the Iliad depicts the uncompromising Achilles, who is in many ways the prototype for the tragic hero, it also portrays (among others) a cunning Odysseus, a down-to-earth Ajax and a moderate Diomedes, and Homer uses all of these figures to explore what it means to be a hero. The Odyssey takes this further, since Odysseus achieves success through intelligence, patience and deceit as well as courage and action. Variety is found throughout the plays of Euripides, and when Aristophanes in Frogs mocks him for bringing his heroes on in rags, he is referring to the fact that Euripides’ characters can leave the world of heroic grandeur behind and behave much more like real people. In his Helen, Menelaus is not the great hero of the Trojan War but a confused and bedraggled man who needs the help of his clever wife to extricate himself from a tricky situation. The ordinariness of Euripidean heroes can make them charming (like the youthful Ion, who appears on stage singing along as he sweeps Apollo’s temple with a broom) or disappointing (as in Orestes, where Orestes and Electra seem unhinged rather than heroic).
Heroes: positive and negative
The fact that there is no simple model for the tragic hero does not mean that we cannot identify typical features in how they are presented, and as long as we avoid the tendency to oversimplify, Aristotle and Knox both offer good starting points. Knox’s view of the tragic hero presents the hero’s inflexibility in a positive light, and his refusal to yield becomes a badge of honour. Knox is right that we find heroes attractive. Aristotle may claim that a hero must not be preeminent for virtue, but heroes in tragedy are often preeminent in their capacity for particular virtues, in particular bravery, strength, tenacity and loyalty, and it is because we admire them that we care about their fate. It is hard not to be impressed by Oedipus’ dedication to finding out the truth about what happened to Laius, Antigone’s loyalty to her brother or Electra’s devotion to her dead father. However, the hero’s faults are as significant as his admirable qualities, and here Aristotle’s focus on the imperfections of the hero becomes relevant. It is important to be careful about the connotations carried by the English word ‘hero’, which tend to be strongly positive. Today we call someone a ‘hero’ when they carry out an exceptionally good and selfless deed (a soldier who risks his life to save a comrade, for example, or a passer-by who pulls a child out of a river). Even in the world of literature this positive association carries over, and if we speak of the ‘hero’ of a novel or film, we imply not only that this is the main character but that our sympathies lie with him, and have coined the term ‘anti-hero’ to cover situations where this is not the case. In the Greek world, however, heroes are not necessarily good as much as larger than life, and the traits that they embody are held to excess. Heroes are proud, egotistical, violent and cruel as well as powerful and charismatic, and these qualities have negative consequences for the heroes themselves and for those that surround them.
The hero’s tendency to excess gives the poet scope to explore the benefits and drawbacks of particular character traits. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, the young hero takes his dedication to Artemis to such an extreme that it becomes a hatred of any form of sexuality. Hippolytus is principled and pious, and his horror at being told his stepmother wishes to have an affair with him is understandable. However, his response to this revelation is vicious. He speaks with loathing about women and wishes for a world without them (616–68), and then threatens to break his oath of silence to tell Theseus about Phaedra’s feelings (610–12). Just as his refusal to honour Aphrodite makes the goddess decide to punish him, so too his threat to harm Phaedra makes her decide to take matters into her own hands and accuse him of rape. Pentheus in Bacchae is a similar character, whose obsession with the idea that the Bacchants are indulging in promiscuity under the guise of religious rituals brings about his death because of his prurient desire to spy on them. The heroes’ character traits are not inherently bad, but become problematic when pushed to an extreme. For example, Oedipus’ persistence is admirable, and his wish to discover the truth springs from good motivations, but his single-mindedness turns him into an unpleasant bully as he threatens Tiresias (336–446) and Creon (532–630), and suggests torturing the old shepherd (1152–4). However, in some cases the hero’s negative qualities are very apparent. In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, for example, one might expect the great hero Heracles to be presented as a saviour. Instead we find a selfish man who rapes and enslaves a girl he desires and destroys her city, and who refuses to accept that his actions play any role in his downfall. The audience of Ajax might be familiar with Homer’s portrayal of the hero as a blunt soldier aware of his duty to the army, but Sophocles depicts him as someone who would kill his own comrades out of pique and takes delight in the idea of torturing his enemies.
Heroes bring about their downfall through their excessive nature, but they also cause difficulties to those around them, and it is here that we see most clearly the negative side of heroic behaviour. This may take the form of damage to their own loved ones: for example, Euripides’ Medea kills her own children because she cannot let go of her obsession with ensuring that she gets vengeance against those who have wronged her, and Sophocles’ Ajax ignores the impact that his suicide will have on his family in order to preserve his sense of honour. The heroes’ self-centeredness also has an effect on the society in which they live, and one of the central concerns of tragedy is how we can reconcile individual will with civic responsibility. Heroes are often at odds with their community, as in Philoctetes, where the abandoned hero has become savage and rejects all attempts to reintegrate him. Here Philoctetes’ resentment flies in the face of his own self-interest, since by refusing to go to Troy he denies himself the chance to be healed and to win glory. While we may be suspicious of Odysseus’ justification of deceit, at the end of the play we discover it is Zeus’ will that Philoctetes should put his anger aside and go to Troy. Alternatively, the hero’s lack of respect for others may lead him to become tyrannical. In Antigone, for example, Creon begins the play by speaking of his concern for the polis and his desire to put the common good above all else, but he ignores popular opinion, and when challenged by his son, reveals his autocratic nature in an angry outburst: ‘Is the city not thought to belong to its ruler?’ (738).
Heroes in fifth-century Athens
The question of how to reconcile a powerful individual with the needs of his community was not new to Greek tragedy. Homer’s Iliad explores similar ideas, as it depicts how the greatest Greek hero, Achilles, pushes his desire for honour and his resentment too far, and so becomes alienated from his companions and causes them to suffer. However, these questions took on a particular resonance in democratic Athens, a society which emphasized that one should act for the common good. Yet aristocratic families remained powerful in the democracy: they formed the majority of generals and speakers in the assembly, and it was they who paid for public benefits, for example, funding tragedy (a system known as chorêgia, with the benefactors given the title chorêgos). The role of aristocrats was therefore a continual source of tension, and Athenian writers often allude to the anxiety that an individual would become too powerful and attempt to bring down the system. This was not mere paranoia. According to Thucydides, there were several occasions during the fifth century when there were rumours of a plot to overthrow the democracy, and one temporarily succeeded in 411 BC. Nevertheless, the sway of aristocrats remained strong, and Aristophanes’ comedies are filled with mockery of the politician Cleon for his non-aristocratic background, which suggests that many Athenians expected their leaders to be blue-blooded.
Heroes therefore appeal to an Athenian audience because they embody these tensions and represent the aristocrats of their own day, but are safely enclosed in a mythological world distanced from that of the audience (see Chapter 3). This also lies behind tragedy’s preference for depicting the crises in the heroes’ lives, when their power proves to be their downfall. The touchiness of the heroes also makes excellent food for drama, which is fundamentally driven by conflict. It is no coincidence, therefore, that tragedy repeatedly shows the dangerous excessiveness of heroes in their lifetimes. However it also presents them as beneficial to the polis after their death and does so by alluding to the role that heroes played in Greek religion.
Heroes were not just figures from poetry and drama; rather, the Greeks believed that they really did live once upon a time, and that after their death they continued to hold power in the world. Aristocratic families might trace their own heritage back to a hero, and the ten tribes of Athens all claimed descent from one. Ajax, for example, was one of these eponymous heroes, and so a tenth of the Athenian audience watching Sophocles’ play could perceive themselves to have a special relationship with its main character. Heroes were worshipped at their tombs (a practice known as hero-cult), and the Greeks believed that they could become involved in human affairs, for good or for ill. The historian Herodotus tells the story that the Spartans’ dominance in the Peloponnese came about as a result of their taking possession of the bones of Orestes, which had previously helped the Tegeans to remain unconquered (1.67–8). He also reports beliefs that heroes took part in the battles of the Persian Wars. In heroic myth and tragedy, heroes are frequently offered the consolation of cult in recognition of their greatness and in compensation for what they have endured. This idea of compensation for suffering is essential to the audience’s understanding of the heroes’ lives and we find it throughout tragedy, ranging from Orestes’ release from religious pollution at the end of Aeschylus’ Kindly Ones to Philoctetes’ cure and victory at Troy in Sophocles’ play.
This pattern is well illustrated in Ajax, a play where, as we have seen, many of the audience would have had a particular connection with the cult of the dead hero. As one of the ten eponymous heroes of Athens, Ajax had a statue in the agora and a hero-cult (with shrine and festival) on the island of Salamis, which had been part of Athens’ power-base since the sixth century BC. Though Ajax’s self-centered obsession with his reputation leads to his downfall, Sophocles plays up his admirable qualities in the second part of the play, after his death, where his friends mourn his loss and even his enemy Odysseus speaks warmly of his greatness. Ajax’s body is treated as a sacred object, and it offers sanctuary to his wife and child. The play ends with Ajax’s burial, and so looks forward to his incipient hero-cult and role as protector of Athens. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus depicts the process of heroization particularly vividly, as Oedipus is transformed from a blind beggar to a figure with supernatural powers. Oedipus’ anger with his disloyal sons and his resentment at Creon’s treatment of him means that he becomes alienated from Thebes. Instead he will reward the Athenians for defending him against Thebes by offering them future protection from Theban attacks (616–23).
Hero-cult features as a form of consolation in many of Euripides’ plays, which often end with a reference to future cult. At the end of Medea, Medea refuses to allow Jason to bury their children, and instead announces that the Corinthians will honour them with cult and a festival for all time in compensation for their murder (1378–83). In Heracles the Athenian king Theseus offers the stricken Heracles cult as redemption for his terrible deeds (he has killed his children in a fit of madness), and reassures him that he can be cleansed from his crimes (1322–33). Yet cult is not just a consolation prize but represents a way of containing the terrifying power of the heroes and turning it to the social good. This is made explicit in Hippolytus, where the goddess Artemis tries to console the dying youth by prophesying his future role in cult (1423–7):
Poor man, to you I will grant the greatest honours in the city of Troezen, in compensation for these misfortunes. Unmarried girls shall cut their hair for you before their marriage, and through the ages you will reap the deep mourning of their tears.
From a modern perspective Artemis’ offer may appear cold comfort to someone on their deathbed, but what she is offering Hippolytus is eternal honour, the greatest aim of any hero. Artemis presents this as compensation because Hippolytus has suffered so greatly, but it is striking that this takes the form of integration into marriage ritual. Through his cult, Hippolytus will facilitate the marriage of young girls and their passage into sexual maturity, a transition that he was unable to accept while alive, when he insisted on remaining a virgin. In life, Hippolytus’ resistance to sexuality was problematic, since in Greek eyes marriage and procreation were part of the duties of any adult man (see Chapter 6). In death, Hippolytus becomes reconciled to sexuality, and is able to participate in it in a way that benefits the community. Hippolytus’ cult thus highlights and resolves the reason for his suffering as well as compensating him for it.
Heroes, then, are central to tragedy not just because they are important figures in myth, but because for fifth-century Greeks, they form vital links to the heroic past. The Greeks expected their poetry to be morally instructive, and heroes can act as moral paradigms, illustrating the best and worst aspects of human nature. Yet the heroes are rooted in the aristocratic world of myth, and they embody a different set of values to those held by contemporary Athenians. While we sympathize with their suffering, and admire their power and dynamism, we also fear their excess and are perhaps relieved that such people no longer exist. The glamour of the heroes coupled with their terrible suffering makes them irresistible fodder to the tragedians, and part of the success of Greek tragedy is its ability to depict the different aspects of the heroes on stage, their admirable strength and intellect, combined with their disastrous errors.