breathless dead” is apparently completely cut off from the world of living humans, except under such extraordinary circumstances as those of Odysseus (and Heracles, another great hero, one of whose challenges was to descend to the underworld and bring back Cerberus, its three-headed guard dog). So Achilles then asks Odysseus for news of his son, Neoptolemus, and his old father. When I think about it, it’s exactly the question I would put to a visitor from the world of the living if I had made an untimely exit eighteen years ago to an underworld resembling that of the Greeks: How’s my family, how are my children? There is nothing at all heroic about Achilles’s inquiry. Indeed, it is a perfect expression of his journey in death to the realm of the ordinary. Death is an equalizer, visiting the heroic and the ordinary alike.
Odysseus tells Achilles that Neoptolemus is thriving, a fearless terror in battle and unscathed from it.
“So I said and
off he [Achilles] went, the ghost of the great runner, Aecus’ grandson
loping with long strides across the fields of asphodel
triumphant in all I had told him about his son,
his gallant, glorious son.” (X 612–616)
Achilles is at last happy in death, because he is thinking not about himself and the condition to which his greatness has been reduced, but of his son doing well in the world of the living.
So a funny thing happened around the time of the birth of metaphysics in the cave clan. Mortal human beings tried to postulate a kind of being, immortal being, superior to their mortal being in being relieved of the necessity to die. And they succeeded, only to reveal that a certain human type, the hero willing to risk death, in so doing reaches a higher place than an immortal could in all eternity.
The inevitable collision of heroic types with politics. The instability of political order in the age of classical heroism.
What most distinguishes the politics of the ancient world from the politics of the modern world is that political failure in the ancient world was routinely a matter of life and death. The rewards for success in politics were and are great, now as then: acclaim, riches, the freedom to associate with the similarly high and mighty. The penalty for failure, however, is now much diminished. If you lose an election or make a bad decision these days, you do not typically lose your head.
Consider the case of the Greek city-state of Melos in the fifth century BCE. As Thucydides describes it in the History of the Peloponnesian War, all the Melians wanted was to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. But that wasn’t good enough for the Athenians, who demanded Melos’s allegiance as well as annual tribute. A delegation of blunt-speaking Athenian generals visited Melos and met with some of its leading citizens, explaining in no uncertain terms that in case of non-compliance, Athens would destroy Melos. The Melians, for centuries a proud and independent people, refused to bend to the Athenian demands. They voiced their conviction that because Melos was a colony of Sparta, if Athens attacked the Spartans would come to their aid. In any case, the Melians said, they believed they would prevail because the gods knew their cause was just. The Athenians scoffed at Melian naïveté.
The Athenians turned out to be right: The Spartans didn’t come to the Melians’ rescue. Nor did the gods. So to punish the Melian defiance, after defeating them in battle, the Athenians killed every last one of the men of Melos and sold all the women and children into slavery. Now there was a political decision with consequences.
Or consider the problem of the danger of politics from the point of view not of a weak city-state but of a powerful tyrant: Many and various are the people who might like to kill you and become tyrant themselves. In a wry dialogue composed by Plato’s contemporary Xenophon, Hiero or Tyrannicus, Hiero the tyrant paints an elaborate portrait of himself and his fellow tyrants as the most miserable of all human beings, each a de facto prisoner of his absolute power. True, he gets the most pleasing spectacles, the best food, the sweetest words of praise, sex with the loveliest boy. But these are only sources of misery to him, since a common man can travel freely to see a variety of spectacles in a way that no tyrant can; and since the best food, eaten every day, becomes a bore; and since the praise he receives all comes from flatterers; and since the boy will never really love him. Hiero laments that though tyrants “are acquainted with the decent, the wise, and the just,” they “fear rather than admire them. They fear the brave because they might dare something for the sake of their freedom; the wise, because they might contrive something; and the just, because the multitude might desire to be ruled by them. When, because of their fear, they do away secretly with such men, who is left for them to use save the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish?” (5:1–2). It takes a certain sense of self to kill off all the best people around you and then complain that there is no one left worth your time.
Why, then, go into politics at all? Or why not try get out of it? Why not seek a quiet private life instead? Perhaps the questions are anachronistic—in the sense that we modern types have drunk deeply of the primal human desire Hobbes described, that for a quiet life. Hiero clearly believes he has no choice but to continue as tyrant, because he has made so many enemies who would be only too happy to do him in if ever he did give up the power he wields. This concern seems just as applicable to modern-day tyrants, even if tyranny is less prevalent these days.
But missing from Hiero’s account of himself, and deliberately so, is any kind of acknowledgment of the chief benefit, indeed joy, of being tyrant. It’s that nobody, but nobody, can tell you what to do. You are free in the most basic sense of the term, free of the compulsory authority of all others. Nature still constrains you, of course; you remain mortal. But your fellow human beings do not constrain you. There may be other nearby tyrants who would like to add to what they have everything you have, and you may have to fight them—to conquer or be conquered. You may have to take special measures to protect yourself. But within the sphere of your authority, it is absolute.
Hiero seems to understand the utterly arbitrary nature of the power he wields: He makes no claim to deserve to rule beyond the indisputable political fact that he does rule. He might well readily grant that if someone managed to successfully challenge his power, then that person would deserve to rule no less (and no more) than he himself does. The Athenian generals visiting Melos captured this sentiment rather ably: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” The operative word is “can.” Not, “wherever they want to,” implying discretionary latitude about whether to rule; but “wherever they can,” a pure test of strength. This is a vision of politics bereft of all considerations of justice or morality: absolute power creating absolute rule, which entails absolute discretion on all questions but one: whether to exercise the absolute power.
But not all rulers are tyrants. Some who possess power that may verge on the absolute also possess something else, namely legitimacy in one form or another. This is the point at which a ruler becomes not a tyrant but a king. In the next chapter, we will have a chance to look at heroic kings and heroes who go on to set themselves up as kings, by founding either a state or something equally noteworthy, or by taking one over. For now, however, we need to examine what happens when a king or other ruler whose legitimacy is widely accepted runs into someone of the heroic type who thinks differently.
Of Agamemnon’s greatness, there can be no doubt. The Homeric epithet most commonly associated with him is “lord of men”—the greatest ruler among the mortals. He is the leader of the expedition against Troy, the outcome of which, everyone understands, will decisively
