Individual and Community in Greek Thought II

Epic

It is no accident therefore that our earliest acquaintance with Greek culture is in the middle of war, the Iliad.  It might be argued that Homer presents heroic individuality and societal recognition as virtually indistinguishable. Typically, as Dodds pointed out, the Homeric hero acts in hope of τιμη [timé] or honour: the greatest form of failure is represented by Αιδώς [Aidos], an alteration in public opinion or shame. The sense of heroic selfhood is thus based upon the willingness of the community to recognize it as being such. The hero's actions are self-regarding inasmuch as they place the pursuit of honour and public esteem above the safety of the army or the people. Achilles' refusal to fight in the war on account of his worth being slighted and his imperviousness to the persuasion of his countrymen may be thought rash or unwise, but rarely selfish in a narrow sense. The reason lies in the sense of superiority that Achilles naturally assumes: it is not just his valuation of himself, but something that is presented as an objective fact (2.768-9).  Both honour and shame take on unique features for him.  At a critical juncture in the war, Achilles is visited by an embassy of his comrades who try to persuade him to return to the battlefield. He refuses, and reiterates his resolve to leave Troy and return home.  The options before him are clear, he says: either he can remain in Troy and face certain death, but with imperishable glory κλεος αφθιτον [kleos aphthithon], or he can return to his home and a long life. It is clear, however, that his nature and his fate predispose him to the former. This after all is the lot of the true hero, and Achilles is the greatest of his kind. His uncooperative sullenness at this point may lead him to consider what may seem an unheroic option: but here too Achilles reveals his difference from others. His teacher Phoinix reminds of the honour that he stands to gain if he accepts the gifts that Agamemnon is urging upon him and returns to battle. His wounded honour should be assuaged by the act of reparation: `come for the gifts; the Achaians shall honour thee even as a god'. Achilles says that he has no need of this kind of αιδώς, for his glory lies is granted by Zeus himself and will remain with him as long as there is life in him and his limbs are strong. Aias reproaches him for caring nothing for the honour of his fellows, and spurning the customary and approved acts of reparation. He is called cruel and remorseless and Agamemnon accepts the fact that he will fight only when he wishes and the gods prompt him to do so.

Achilles' notion of honour thus is one seeks to delink itself from the communal valuation, αιδώς. It is moments such as these that we view  a kind of singularity of being that seems almost unique in Greek thought: the honour thought to be granted by Zeus could be understood both as fame among generations to come (as opposed to the heroic community to which he actually belongs) as much as an irreducible form of self-hood. The customary exchanges that prop the notions of shame and honour as social values have ceased to matter for him. The gifts that the Achaians offer are wholly inadequate because they do not address the uniqueness of Achilles' being. Here, as at other points in the epic, we find the justification for danger, death and destruction in a form of self-regard as opposed to the material tokens of wealth, position and honour. Archaic Greek culture, writes Vernant is 'one in which everyone lives in terms of others, under the eyes of the and in the esteem of others, where the basis of personality is confirmed by the extent to which it reputation is known: in such a context, real death lies in amnesia, silence, demeaning obscurity, the absence of fame. By contrast, real existence - for the living or the dead - comes from being recognized, valued, honored (:) ... the hero ... by the fame that he has acquired in pledging his life, inscribes his reality as an individual subject on the collective memory of the group...' (MI 57)

But this `real existence' is always a matter of heroic effort, existing in potentiality rather than something which can be found here and now: in the attenuated world of fifth century tragedy, as Vidal-Naquet observed, the hero is always an anomaly, a throwback to a uncomfortable heroic past, always out of tune with the present.
  
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References: J-P Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, 1991: "A Beautiful Death"
 
Amlan Das Gupta