The Heroic Heart. Tod Lindberg

Socrates for never having made love to him.

      Yet the second element of Socrates’s project, the taming of the ambition of Alcibiades, we must judge a rather comprehensive failure. Alcibiades came to fame during the Peloponnesian War for advocating bold attacks on Sparta. Unfortunately, the expedition to Sicily that he proposed Athens undertake ended in disaster. Thereafter, Alcibiades fell into political disfavor.

      No longer in possession of a position of political prominence in the city of his birth, Alcibiades, like Coriolanus, simply switched sides. He went to war against Athens on the side of Sparta and won several important victories for his former enemies. But possibly as a result of an affair with the wife of Agis, the Spartan king, Alcibiades soon found himself unwelcome in Sparta—at which point he defected yet again, this time to the Persian satrap Tissaphernes. Alcibiades encouraged Persia to allow the Athenians and the Spartans to wear themselves down in war, then to invade Attica and drive the Greeks out; all the while, however, he was conniving successfully with a faction in Athens to get himself recalled from exile and installed as military commander. He was assassinated, probably on the orders of the victorious Spartan general Lysander, in 404, but not before demonstrating that Athens, Sparta, and the Persian Empire combined were too small to contain his ambition. One must give credit to Socrates for his insight into the problematic nature of the character of Alcibiades, even if Socrates was unable to do anything about it.

      Was there a real Achilles? If not exactly the hero Homer depicts, perhaps one whose exploits in a long-ago war lived on and were further embellished in stories passed orally from generation to generation before Homer codified them in the Iliad? No one knows. Likewise Lucretia and Coriolanus. Of course insofar as the latter two served as subject matter for Shakespeare and are much better known to us through his renderings than through the sources on which he relied, one must acknowledge the possibility that Shakespeare’s accounts reflect the disposition and prejudices of the fifteenth century more than they do authentic insight into the heroism of the characters he depicts.

      But having acknowledged the possibility, I now propose to dismiss it as irrelevant to the purpose of this exercise, which is an exploration of heroism in the ancient and modern world and the ways in which the heroic type shapes politics and the political world shapes heroism. Homer has achieved a near-perfect rendition of the highest heroic type of his age, a single character who brings into focus both the inner-directed greatness of that type and the mortal peril such greatness poses to the legitimacy and authority of political order. The achievement of Shakespeare is on a comparable scale. Homer’s and Shakespeare’s characters are literary gifts for the ages, and Plato’s dialogues, meanwhile, offer a profound account of the difficult problem posed by the heroic ambition of an Alcibiades. If these characters are in some sense idealized, so be it; the real-world political issues they pose remain.

      The ancient world offers no better illustration of this than the far better-documented case of a certain Gaius Julius Caesar. He was, quite simply, the most ambitious Roman of all among a polity in which ambition on a grand scale was a familiar sight. Here’s Plutarch:

      Caesar’s many successes . . . did not divert his natural spirit of enterprise and ambition to the enjoyment of what he had laboriously achieved, but served as fuel and incentive for future achievements, and begat in him plans for greater deeds and a passion for fresh glory, as though he had used up what he already had. What he felt was therefore nothing else than emulation of himself, as if he had been another man, and a sort of rivalry between what he had done and what he purposed to do. (58)