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The History Podcast
The Fort: Introducing Rory Stewart: The Long History of Heroism
00:27:46
Rory Stewart explores ideas of what it means to be a hero.
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BBC Announcer
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This is the story of the One. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger, because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs, and next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com or just stop by for the ones who get it done.
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Asma Khalid
America is changing, and so is the world.
- [00:40]
Tristan Redman
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [00:48]
Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, dc.
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Tristan Redman
I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
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Asma Khalid
Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
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Tristan Redman
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:08]
Asma Khalid
You're about to hear the first part of the series, Rory the Long History of Heroism. If you'd like to hear more episodes, you can search Rory Stewart, the Long History of On BBC Sounds this is.
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Rory Stewart
Going to be embarrassing. As a child, I grew up wanting to be Alexander the Great. I wanted to match myself against dead heroes to achieve magnificent things, and I told myself I even wanted to die sacrificing my life for a noble cause before I was 30. It was only later experiences in the Middle east and in politics that finally began to weaken my fantasy of heroes. I'm Rory Stewart and in this series I want to go back to these ideas of heroes and hero worship, ideas which have been the fixation, particularly, but not exclusively, of young men throughout time. I want to ask what a hero is.
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Silvia Montiglio
Courage is definitely a heroic quality, whether you fight or not. Just the idea of stepping forward.
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Rory Stewart
Why people want to be heroes they.
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BBC Announcer
Didn'T care what other people thought of.
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Rory Stewart
Them, but boy did they care what history thought of them. Why our idea of the hero changed and began to seem impossible that was blown to pieces during the First World War, and why even in our much more fragmented, cynical, disenchanted age, heroes continue to matter.
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Silvia Montiglio
The arc of heroism has bent towards taking a stand for justice and truth.
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Rory Stewart
In this episode, we're going to begin right at the beginning of Western literature with Achilles, the hero of the Trojan wars, and we're going to see how that type of hero was challenged by other types of hero, by the idea of the states, the Saint, even the knight. And how ultimately, all these types of heroes were undermined by a new modern world. The Long history of heroism from Achilles.
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Asma Khalid
To Zelensky.
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Rory Stewart
Episode 1 the Classical Hero Western literature begins with Achilles. Why is Achilles a hero? Well, in a sense, you'd have to read the whole of the Iliad to come up with an answer. My view is that it's about everything. It's the way he fights, the way he feels, the way he speaks. It's his heart, his hand, his head, his mind, his body and soul. I think Achilles shows five qualities that define a hero. He takes on an existential risk. He risks his life. He does so for a noble cause. He achieves something of transcendent benefit. He expands the horizons of human possibility. And after his death, he leaves a permanent example, something to inspire and be imitated by all generations to come. But right from the beginning, all these heroic qualities are questioned. Being a hero is never a settled or comfortable thing, particularly perhaps for the hero himself. As the poet and literary critic Patrick.
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Tristan Redman
Mackey observes, it's extraordinary drama of extreme action, of human expansion, of transcendent radiance. But there's also an extraordinary song of mourning and lament that courses through the poem.
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Rory Stewart
Being a hero means bearing the burden of other people's expectations and their disappointments and their doubts over every one of your heroic qualities that goes even to the first fundamental quality, your choice of a heroic death.
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Asma Khalid
My mother divine silver footed Thetis spoke the alternative. Fates open to me on my way to death. Remain here and fight at the siege of Troy. Forego all homecoming, yet win endless renown or sail home to my native land. Lose fame and glory, but live a long life and be spared an early end.
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Rory Stewart
Achilles is a hero because he chooses to reject a comfortable, prosperous, but obscure long life and instead chooses to die young and far from home, to be the best, the best amongst the best, now and in perpetuity. He knows that only mortals can be truly great, greater in fact, than the gods, because only mortals can lose everything, as the classic scholar Silvia Montiglio explains.
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Silvia Montiglio
What is typical of Homeric heroism, which is embodied in Achilles, is this idea of mortality that goes along with being heroes. If we were immortal, there would be no need to do anything heroic. So glory and mortality are tied together, and I think Achilles embodies that to an extreme.
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Rory Stewart
Today we might be tempted to view someone who actively wants to die in their 20s as unhinged. We might ask, what is the line between courage and foolhardiness, between heroic action and recklessness and this leads to the second problem for Achilles. What is actually the value of his cause?
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Tristan Redman
It's not just about getting your own way. That's not courage. That's just egoism.
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Rory Stewart
The philosopher Edward Skidelsky.
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Tristan Redman
So Aristotle says, you know, a man who undergoes a lot of risk to see his mistress is not courageous. Yeah, he's just acting in obedience to a strong appetite, which causes him to overcome his fears. But that's not courage. It has to be principled in some way.
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Rory Stewart
Modern audiences might be tempted to deny that Achilles has a moral cause at all. Here's the historian Paul Cartlidge.
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Paul Cartlidge
Achilles was a brute, and he murdered many, many in the name of a cause. But it wasn't the cause of anything social. His particular cause was to avenge the death of his best mate, Patroclus. So it was deeply personal.
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Rory Stewart
And I suppose we could ask, does Achilles even actually achieve anything magnificent? Sure, he kills the great Trojan hero Hector, which in turn leads to victory for the Greeks and the fall of Troy. But do we really care? Why should the Greeks win the Trojan Wars? And what actually is Achilles doing here more than a physical feat?
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Paul Cartlidge
What distinguished him apart from the desire not to live a long life, was the ability to translate his ambition and his rage. The very first word of the Iliad is rage, into productive combat efficiency. And so even Hector, recognized as the greatest individual warrior of the Trojans, was not a match for Achilles.
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Rory Stewart
I still believe, however, that Achilles is a hero, and that's because of qualities which we find quite difficult to acknowledge in the 21st century. It's not only that he is, as Paul Cartlidge points out, very powerful, very skillful, but he also shows extraordinary personal autonomy and dignity when he confronts the king Agamemnon, for example, or disregards death. And he also has a heroic emotional range from rage through mourning to pity. And these capacities, I think, are things that actually expand our sense of what it's possible for a warrior to do, choose, or feel. And yet, when saying this, I'm aware that these are aspects of heroism which are quite difficult to pin down.
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Tristan Redman
So you get someone like Achilles who's at once showing how grand, spacious, expansive the human sphere is and also showing how fragile, bizarre, and tumultuous the sphere itself is.
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Rory Stewart
Finally, Achilles is a hero because he chooses death and fame in order to inspire countless generations that will follow him.
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Asma Khalid
Fate has two urns. I choose the short life, everlasting glory.
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Rory Stewart
The deeper problem, though, perhaps with Achilles is not whether he's a hero. It's whether it's Actually possible for any of us to really emulate him, imitate him or live up to him. That's obviously true today, but it was an anxiety that people felt even in the ancient world. As the historian Tom Holland explains.
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BBC Announcer
Well, heroes are figures who are essentially midway between the mortal and the divine. They are worshipped as figures who move to rhythms that lie beyond that of the conventional human being. And this makes them focuses of worship, but it also makes them terrifying. Achilles, I suppose, is terrifying and is glorious and charismatic. But you have people who are worshipped as heroes who go mad and pull down schools and wipe out entire schools worth of children. These are figures who are very, very frightening.
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Rory Stewart
Achilles then, like all heroes, is questioned from the start. On the one hand he is the archetypal warrior. On the other hand, he can also appear to us as a narcissistic, self obsessed, half divine killing machine obsessed with honor and fame. And much of Greek classical culture is simply a response to Achilles. He appears on vases and on tombstones and school books and in philosophy texts and all his complexity never stops scholars, politicians and even athletes from trying to be Achilles. None more so perhaps than that other archetypal hero, Alexander the Great, who learnt about Achilles from his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle.
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Paul Cartlidge
Aristotle who was an expert on the Iliad and who indeed allegedly annotated the copy of the Iliad that Alexander took with him on campaign. For all those reasons, it was not entirely surprising that Alexander should take Achilles as his role model.
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Rory Stewart
Alexander slept with a copy of the Iliad under his head. And the young king didn't simply admire Achilles, he wanted to be him.
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Paul Cartlidge
He was in a position to emulate the sorts of things that Achilles did, that is lead a force against non Greeks to some degree self sacrificing in the sense that he was prepared to die in every combat situation. Whereas a modern commander will perhaps be miles from the front line and directing the war by drones. Alexander was wounded innumerable times, once within an inch of his death. And he proudly displayed the wounds on his body, all on the front of his body, none of them on the back.
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Rory Stewart
Alexander, however, wants to be Achilles. Not simply because he's a quick runner and good at fighting, but because these are symptoms of something much more important. He wants to be more beautiful, more noble, more courageous than any living being.
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Silvia Montiglio
As Silvia Montiglio observes, he was also very handsome. The way he's portrayed, you see his hair drawn back, recalls also how Achilles is described. He also died young by coincidence. So in a way, the same pattern, you know, of the beautiful young Hero also, this idea of dying young is also aesthetically pleasing because the idea is that there's no decay of the body.
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Rory Stewart
As I said, I worshiped Alexander the Great and my fascination with him continued right into my 20s. I walked across what's now Iran, retracing his footsteps. An 18 month walk over 6000 miles and I ended up where he finished on the edge of India. I stood at the place where he's supposed to have wept because he had no more lands to conquer. The thing I loved about him wasn't really these conquests, it was the tiny details of his character. For example, one of my favorite moments is the letter that Alexander receives from the Persian king at the moment where Alexander has conquered much of what's now Turkey, the Middle east and Egypt. And the Persian king, who has an enormous empire and has about a million men waiting outside Babylon, writes to Alexander and says, you've been lucky, but let's call it quits. I'll give you my daughter in marriage. We'll divide our land. And Alexander takes this letter and he hands it to Parmenion, who's his veteran general. And Parmenion reads it and says, if I were Alexander, I would accept. And Alexander says, if I were Parmenion, so would I. And marches off with a tiny force right across the desert, challenges the Persian king outside Babylon, where the Persian king has literally prepared the desert like a golf course for his chariots and against odds of something like 20 to 1, defeats the Persian king and goes on to create this extraordinary new blend of, of Persian and Greek civilization. But of course, again, this story and Alexander himself is vulnerable to many of the criticisms that people level at Achilles.
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Mary Beard
I'm afraid strutting narcissist is work very, very many of the leading political and.
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Rory Stewart
Military figures of the ancient world were Mary Beard.
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Mary Beard
I think the idea of your personal visible self worth is absolutely crucial. You know, you cannot be a hero without being seen to be. We've got in the ancient world a culture of me which is much more external, much more visible. When you go to these mega narcissists at the top of the Roman or Greek trees, that is what's at stake.
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Rory Stewart
Mary, of course has got a point, but I think we also need to remember what people admired about these heroes at the time. Alexander, for example, wasn't just a strutting narcissist. He built extraordinary cities. He brought Greek sculpture, Greek architecture, Greek ideas of beauty into contact with India. He created a whole new hybrid civilization.
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Paul Cartlidge
Now there are one or two individuals and Alexander's one who are event making heroes. PAUL CARTLIDGE and the point is that they shape the world around them, they don't just receive it. And in the case of Alexander, it is arguable that he actually, by his deeds, changed the entire course of the ancient world's history, so that we divide in periodic terms between a classical era and a Hellenistic era. He literally is the hinge between two great eras of ancient world life.
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Rory Stewart
But I find Alexander the Great's heroism most intensely in the quieter scenes. There's a lovely moment, for example, when he's sick and his friend, who's a doctor, is giving him some medicine. And at the same time he receives a letter from a messenger warning him that there is a plot and that the doctor has been paid to poison him. Alexander hands the letter to the doctor and drinks the medicine before the doctors had a chance to read it, showing his absolute trust in his friend. I suppose what I'm saying is that Alexander's heroism is about not just his courage, but the way in which those things are bound in with his personality. These glimpses of friendship, of trust, of generosity, a sense of beauty, a sense of culture. An extraordinary human being who's perpetually risking his life and his reputation, but for an idea, a bigger idea of what it means to be a man. But as I've said, heroes are always contested and questioned. And even in classical Greece, there were many people who were deeply suspicious, particularly of the politics of these heroes. Nowhere more so than in republican Athens.
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BBC Announcer
Alexander is heroic in and of himself. He achieves extraordinary things, he performs remarkable feats. But there's also a very strong sense in which he is cosplaying. TOM HOLLAND and he's able to do that because he is living in a society that can integrate someone who wants to play at Achilles. It would be impossible for an Alexander to be integrated into the fabric of the Athenian democracy. There would just be no place for him. And that's why throughout the third and second centuries, the Hellenistic Age, as it's called, the period where Greek culture is essentially dominated by monarchies, all the monarchs who are ruling the successor states of Alexander's empire make great play with the kind of heroic traditions, because their monarchical status and the glamour, the terror, the swagger, the arrogance of the ancient heroes is something that they, as monarchs, can absolutely appropriate for themselves. But this, of course, is not something that you can make play with in a democracy.
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Rory Stewart
Three hundred years after Alexander's death, the Roman Republic was even more worried by heroes like Achilles and Alexander, and in particular by their contemporary version of this, which was Julius Caesar.
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Mary Beard
What's Caesar doing? Well, he's breaking the bounds of what.
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Rory Stewart
Is normal for people, Mary Beard.
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Mary Beard
He's going outside the usual constraints of humanity, symbolized by quasi divine worship, symbolized by having his living head on the Roman coins. And what does he do? He has to pay the price.
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Rory Stewart
When I was very young, I was very attracted by the idea of Julius Caesar. A kind of wonderful vision of a young man who'd won his oak leaf crown jumping into a fortress alone, man who'd come from quite a poor background, who made his name against the odds. But later, and I suppose this is particularly when I became a politician, I became more and more troubled by Caesar. I began to see that sense of that really he felt that the end justified the means. I became very conscious of his lies, his corruption, his appalling personal morality, and the way in which he was undermining the dignity of Rome, its freedoms, wrecking the Roman constitution. And I became much more interested in a very different type of hero, and that is the hero, not as the great strutting warrior, but instead an idea of the statesman, an idea of somebody who's putting the republic, the constitution first. And I suppose the most dramatic example of this at the time of Caesar is a man called Cato the Younger. And Cato is completely different. He's not a great warrior. In fact, he's quite physically awkward and scrawny. There's nothing really magnificent about him. He dresses in pretty shabby clothes. He's extremely humorless. But he absolutely dedicates his awkward, geeky life to standing up for principles, eventually taking it to the extreme of challenging Caesar on the battlefield. And when he's defeated, Cato the Younger kills himself to say, I cannot continue living in a Rome that's prepared to accept a man like Caesar.
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Mary Beard
Cato takes his own life, he, in the most dramatically repulsive way by pulling out his own bowels. There's something about heroism which means going beyond. It is verging on the superhuman.
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Rory Stewart
Cato the Young is largely forgotten today, but he was a hero for a very, very long time. Great plays were written about him. He appears in an enormous number of books because he represented a terrifying vision of somebody taking dignity, courage, commitment to a republic to the absolute extreme. But again, and this is the theme we keep returning to, his heroism too, can be massively questioned. I mean, what after all, did he actually achieve?
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Mary Beard
Do we think, as some people did in ancient Rome, that Cato's suicide, fighting on behalf of, of the Republic was the most noble thing that you could ever possibly do in the face of defeat. Or was this a lost cause, an appallingly destructive, self destructive bit of histrionics?
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Rory Stewart
He may not be Julius Caesar or Achilles, he may be focusing more on the republic, but in the end, he's still really bound up with ideas of honor, dignity, glory. And so not very long after his death, a third, very surprising idea of heroism begins to be introduced, which turns all of those old concepts on their head.
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BBC Announcer
Christianity is radically, deliberately subversive of those notions. Tom Holland the way that Paul in his letters describes Christ often reads as a parody of how the worshipers of Augustus see their hero. Christ famously, is not an earthly king. His kingdom is not of this world. And when he is confronted with people come to arrest him, he does not fight and he submits to death. And not just any old death, but the most shameful and horrifying death imaginable, the death that is appropriate to a slave. And of course, that means that the worship of such a God is profoundly subversive. It ranks, in my opinion, as the most revolutionary transformation in the history of the Mediterranean and perhaps of the world beyond.
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Rory Stewart
Christ's death on the cross is a moment that suddenly turns defeat into victory, weakness into strength, and creates a totally different vision of heroism which is based on suffering.
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BBC Announcer
It is human nature to admire winners, to admire the strong, the powerful, the handsome, the glorious, whatever. But Christianity makes a very radical discovery, which is that victims also can have power and that someone who is tortured to death can in the long run, attain a posthumous victory over those who have tortured them to death. Christ exemplifies in his life and death that the wealthy and the powerful have a moral responsibility towards those who are thirsting or hungry or have no shelter or have no clothing, and they are commanded to look after them.
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Rory Stewart
And Christianity, of course, has no place for the idea that someone like Achilles or Alexander could be half godlike.
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BBC Announcer
There is the divine and there is the mortal, and there is no midway point between that, except, of course, with the, the obvious figure of Christ. And so therefore, the cult practices that had sustained the worship of heroes in the Greek world in particular for a thousand years and more with Christianization start to fade.
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Rory Stewart
The offerings made to these heroes cease. The ancient sites of their tombs are abandoned. New cults start to emerge. And these cults are focused on saints. These are heroes who've particularly demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to God.
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BBC Announcer
And the way that you most profoundly demonstrate your faithfulness to God is by being martyred and martyrs do not fight, they do not rage, they do not attack monsters or slay multitudes of the enemy. They submit to death with a kind of aggressive passivity. And you can see how the enshrining of figures such as those at the heart of a culture, would very radically recalibrate people's understanding of what heroism is and what greatness is. There's no place for Achilles in that world.
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Rory Stewart
The martyr and the saint, of course, are almost impossible models for a functioning society, and particularly for the kind of society that follows the collapse of the Roman Empire, which is a society dominated by warlords, by Europe fracturing into many states. But, of course, the saint's influence is permanent through Christianity. And that raises the question, what would it mean to be a Christian Achilles? What kind of warrior hero can you be in a Christian world? And that generates this very odd blend of violence and Christian moral code, embodied in the figure of the knight in shining armor.
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Tristan Redman
And the knight becomes a figure who's fundamentally about violence, Patrick Mackie, but about violence in a way that pulls towards peace, that pulls towards service, that pulls towards humility.
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Rory Stewart
But, of course, the knight, like all these other heroes, is contested and argued about and is full of contradictions. For me, the epitome of the medieval hero is a knight called William Marshal. He sums up almost everything that we've seen in the great classical ideas of heroes. William Marshal is, first of all, a warrior like Achilles, extraordinary champion in the tournaments. He challenges Richard the Lionheart and unhorses him in a battle. Like Cato the Younger, he's somebody who cares about political principles. He's one of the principal champions of Magna Carta. And he's also somebody who embraces Christianity. William Marshal is famous for his truthfulness, for his honour, for his mercy. He takes on the robes of a Knight Templar. You can see him buried today in the Temple Church in London. So he is a warrior saint, a Christian Achilles, but he's still operating in a very traditional society in which there is a strong deference towards popes, kings and warriors. A society which is much more like the traditional world of Achilles than it is like the world that is about to be unleashed. Gunpowder, printing, the Renaissance, the Reformation, all these things that destroy feudal society, driving us into new worlds. Suddenly, knights like William Marshal begin to seem a little bit more like Don Quixote, shambling around on an old nag with a barber's basin on your head, tilting at windmills. In the next episode, we enter the age of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution and see how figures like Napoleon or the eminent Victorians are taking attempt to forge an idea of heroism that can survive the modern world. The Long History of Heroism is written and presented by me, Rory Stewart and produced by Dan Tierney. It is a BBC Audio north production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
- [28:47]
Asma Khalid
To listen to more episodes from this series, search Rory Stewart the Long History of On BBC Sounds America is changing and so is the world.
- [29:00]
Tristan Redman
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [29:08]
Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [29:11]
Tristan Redman
Tristan Redmond in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [29:15]
Asma Khalid
Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [29:20]
Tristan Redman
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.