The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours

by Gregory Nagy

Overview

The ancient Greeks’ concept of “the hero” was very different from what we understand by the term today, Gregory Nagy argues—and it is only through analyzing their historical contexts that we can truly understand Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, and Herakles.

In Greek tradition, a hero was a human, male or female, of the remote past, who was endowed with superhuman abilities by virtue of being descended from an immortal god. Despite their mortality, heroes, like the gods, were objects of cult worship. Nagy examines this distinctively religious notion of the hero in its many dimensions, in texts spanning the eighth to fourth centuries bce: the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey; tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; songs of Sappho and Pindar; and dialogues of Plato. All works are presented in English translation, with attention to the subtleties of the original Greek, and are often further illuminated by illustrations taken from Athenian vase paintings.

The fifth-century bce historian Herodotus said that to read Homer is to be a civilized person. In twenty-four installments, based on the Harvard University course Nagy has taught and refined since the late 1970s, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours offers an exploration of civilization’s roots in the Homeric epics and other Classical literature, a lineage that continues to challenge and inspire us today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674075443
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	752
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

Read an Excerpt

Hour 5.

When Mortals Become ‘Equal’ to Immortals: Death of a Hero, Death of a Bridegroom

The Meaning of Daimon

The key word for this hour is daimon (plural daimones), which I translate for the moment simply as ‘superhuman force’. This word is used to refer to an unspecified god or hero intervening in human life. The word daimon is to be contrasted with theos ‘god’, which is used to refer to a specified god.

In this connection, we may compare the words polytheism and monotheism. Also henotheism. The term henotheism refers to the worshipping of one divinity at a time. I think of the one-at-a-time mentality of henotheism as serial monotheism.

On the ritual occasion of a wedding in ancient Greek society, what happens at the climactic moment of the wedding is the equating of mortal humans with the immortal gods. That is what we saw in Hour 4 when we were reading Song 44 of Sappho, about the Wedding of Hector and Andromache. In that song, the bridegroom and the bride are said to be theoeikeloi ‘looking just like the gods [theoi]’ (line 34). Now, as we will see here in Hour 5, the climactic moment of the ritual occasion of fighting in war is likewise signaled by the equating of mortal humans with immortal gods.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: Heroes in Epic and Lyric Poetry Hour 1. The Homeric Iliad and the Glory of the Unseasonal Hero Hour 2. Achilles as Epic Hero and the Idea of Total Recall in Song Hour 3. Achilles and the Poetics of Lament Hour 4. Achilles as Lyric Hero in the Songs of Sappho and Pindar Hour 5. When Mortals Become ‘Equal’ to Immortals: Death of a Hero, Death of a Bridegroom Hour 6. Patroklos as the Other Self of Achilles Hour 7. The Sign of the Hero in Visual and Verbal Art Hour 8. The Psychology of the Hero’s Sign In the Homeric Illiad Hour 9. The Return of Odysseus In the Homeric Odyssey Hour 10. The Mind of Odysseus In the Homeric Odyssey Hour 11. Blessed are the Heroes: the Cult Hero In Homeric Poetry and Beyond Hour 12. The Cult Hero as an Exponent of Justice In Homeric Poetry and Beyond Part Two: Heroes in Prose Media Hour 13. A Crisis in Reading the World of Heroes Hour 14. Longing for a Hero: A Retrospective Hour 15. What the Hero ‘Means’ Part Three: Heroes in Tragedy Hour 16. Heroic Aberration In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus Hour 17. Looking Beyond the Cult Hero In the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides of Aeschylus Hour 18. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and the Power of the Cult Hero in Death Hour 19. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Heroic Pollution Hour 20. The Hero as Mirror of Men’s and Women’s Experiences In the Hippolytus of Euripides Hour 21. The Hero’s Agony In the Bacchae of Euripides Part Four: Heroes In Two Dialogues of Plato Hour 22. The Living Word I: Socrates In Plato’s Apology of Socrates Hour 23: The Living Word II: More On Plato’s Socrates In the Phaedo Part Five: Heroes Transcended Hour 24. The Hero as Savior Core Vocabulary of Key Greek Words Abbreviations References Index Locorum

Editorial Reviews

Backed by formidable learning and a vast ecumenical sweep embellished with details—yet written in a winningly readable informal style—The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours offers to us penetrating considerations of the ways in which Greek classics continue to make themselves felt in our lives even today.

The Hindu - M. S. Nagarajan

There’s a vital subject at the heart of the book—more vital perhaps now than ever, since the concept of the ‘hero’ has been so overused and distorted in the 21st century that it scarcely has any meaning anymore, applying equally to Armed Services employees working in an accounting office in Qatar and elementary school teachers doing what they’d be fired if they didn’t do. Nagy exuberantly reminds his readers that heroes—mortal strivers against fate, against monsters, and, as we’ll see, against death itself—form the heart of Greek literature, the vital counterweight to the gaudy gods and goddesses who so often steal the limelight. He surveys the incredible feast of Greek literature from Homer and Hesiod to the tragedians (his extended analysis of Euripides’ Hippolytus, for instance, is a wondrous highlight of the book’s final marches) and overlays on top of that feast a neat but thin conceit of ‘hours’ characterized by certain ancient Greek concepts like Kleos, Memnemai, Akhos, Penthos, and Aphthito. The comprehensiveness of his coverage allows him to bring in every variation on the Greek hero, from the wily Theseus to the brawny Hercules to the ‘monolithic’ Achilles to the valiantly conflicted Oedipus, and that same sweep puts him in a perfect position to spot the linking factors and expound on them.

Open Letters Monthly - Steve Donoghue

[Nagy’s] analysis is fascinating, often ingenious… This book is a valuable synthesis of research finessed over thirty years… Complemented by a free online sourcebook, edited by Nagy, containing translations of all the ancient texts discussed, like an ancient hero it will provide a lasting legacy beyond the hora of its publication.

Times Literary Supplement - Francesca Wade

By force of its prestige, the Iliad sets the standard for the definition of the word epic: an expansive poem of enormous scope, composed in an old-fashioned and superbly elevated style of language, concerning the wondrous deeds of heroes. That these deeds were meant to arouse a sense of wonder or marvel is difficult for the modern mind to comprehend, especially in a time when even such words as wonderful or marvelous have lost much of their evocative power. Nor is it any easier to grasp the ancient Greek concept of hero (the English word is descended from the Greek), going beyond the word's ordinary levels of meaning in casual contemporary usage.

Who, then, were these heroes? In ancient Greek traditions, heroes were humans, male or female, of the remote past, endowed with superhuman abilities and descended from the immortal gods themselves. A prime example is Achilles. The greatest hero of the Iliad, Achilles was the son of Thetis, a sea-goddess known for her far-reaching cosmic powers.

It is clear in the epic, however, that the father of Achilles is mortal, and that this greatest of heroes must therefore be mortal as well. So, too, with all the ancient Greek heroes: even though they are all descended in some way or another from the gods, however many generations removed, heroes are mortals, subject to death. No matter how many immortals you find in a family tree, the intrusion of even a single mortal will make all successive descendants mortal. Mortality, not immortality, is the dominant gene.

From the book

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours is Gregory Nagy’s MOOC book. The massive open online course is one of the most significant developments in higher education in years and Nagy is one of the foremost Homerists of his generation, so the book deserves attention both as an academic publication and as a pedagogical experiment. Scholars already familiar with Nagy’s work will not find radically new insights here. What they will appreciate is a systematic and exceptionally lucid statement of the research he has carried out over the past four decades… One of the greatest achievements of Nagy’s research is that it powerfully illuminates the relationship between myth and cult.

Times Higher Education - Barbara Graziosi

[Nagy] has managed to become an éminence grise without ever quite ceasing to be an enfant terrible… Nagy is a passionate close reader… Like the Iliad, Nagy’s book is an ambitious work in twenty-four installments, developed over a long period of oral performance, alluding to and reworking earlier versions (themselves fluid), before finally taking on a more lasting form.

New York Review of Books - Gregory Hays

This volume is a summation of the insights of a scholar who has devoted his life to these materials, and who has a deep, learned, and personal vision of the ancient Greek psyche, its values, and its manifestations in song and prose. The result is a stimulating tour of ancient Greek literature.

Choice - P. Nieto

Nagy’s zest for Homeric texts is boundless.

New Yorker - Nathan Heller