Heroes Among Heroes: Aristotle, Homer,

Heroes Among Heroes: Aristotle, Homer, And Hector of the Iliad

Heroes among Heroes in War and the Everyday Life':

Homer the Author and Hector of the Iliad: A "Certeaulean" Viewpoint

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) the French historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau introduces the terms 'strategies' and 'tactics' as a point of departure for explaining his theory of the tension and interplay between overt (i.e., strategic) and covert (i.e., tactical) cultural and other practices of everyday life. Stepping back two millennia into the ancient monarchical and martial milieu of Hellenic Greece, land of Homeric legend, one may see within (as a Certeaulean high-born 'strategist' who becomes a war-wounded, ultimately defeated tactician) Homer's Hector of Troy, a deeply virtuous albeit imperfect hero: Homer's Trojan warrior Prince: a mortal who fights and dies while straddling (always uneasily) the worlds of military heroism and domestic devotion; public bravery and private despair; the reluctantly exceptional (a dutiful Hector dressed imposingly for battle in full military armor) and the yearningly commonplace (wistful Hector drinking in a last poignant view of his baby son weeping, scared, at the sight of the father he no longer recognizes, and that the very sight of now terrifies.) Hector is Homer's hero, and, by (Homer's design) a most reluctant and wistful one: a high-born princely military strategist by birthright and right past battlefield achievement and genius; a brave; poignant; and broken-hearted tactician by circumstance and fate.

Within his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau further suggests, that the exercise of 'strategies' falls within the narrow purview of the (for example) corporate; military; managerial; or cultural elite among a civilization; society, group or e.g., the bosses in charge. As Homer's Iliad begins, Hector is clearly a leader and strategist by birthright; by past military achievement; and by current station in life as he departs from his royal visit to Menelaus and Sparta with Paris (and, as it turns out, Helen) for home.

Hector is Priam's first-born son; the embodiment of gravitas and duty; a military (i.e., strategic) genius; the handsome, brave, and much beloved heir to Troy: hardly an ordinary man. Yet Hector the man, off the battlefield and in private domestic life with Andromache and their baby son, is somehow touchingly human; movingly and humanly ordinary in ways most distinct from his arch-rival and his younger brother alike. Hector's, by contrast, is a gentle and unassuming manner; a clear and objective viewpoint, and a deep concern for the common good: his people's.

So Hector is at first shocked, and then deeply troubled, at his initial realization of his brother Paris's reckless impetuousness at having actually stowed Menopause's runaway bride Helen aboard en route back to Troy. This is a move that cannot be afforded, but Paris's practically-minded brother knows this too late. Hector thinks immediately, though, of the inevitable costly and painful ramifications of this intra-island abduction: for his father's vulnerable Kingdom, in particular while Paris continues staring into Helen's eyes.

In all of these ways, then, and also by virtue of the inherent and exquisitely sensitive selfhood that Hector's creator Homer gives to him in particular and no one else within the Iliad or elsewhere, on and off the battlefield, Hector is perhaps Homer's very own hand-created hero: like the author of the Iliad himself, by reputation, plain spoken; direct; forthright. Hector, like his author with no sight, intuits with sensitive accuracy long before he needs, physically, to see on the Trojan battlefield itself.

Yet from the start of Homer's Iliad, circumstances ever beyond Hector's control; that lead tragically (or at least partly so from an Aristotlean perspective), to the inevitable start of the bloody and devastating Trojan war; the superior military strength, ultimately, of the Greeks, mark Hector for brave but inevitable death, as surely as Hector's arch-enemy Achilles is also destined for death on the battlefield. Hector's own human vulnerabilities that account for our sympathy for him as a character (and likely his creator Homer's special authorial sympathy for him as well) also contain within them the early seeds of the conditions of possibility for his later tactical failures: including Hector's defeat in battle at the hands of his Greek enemy and (arguably) alter-ego, Achilles, and his brave, sacrificial, and premature death at Achilles' hands.

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Certeau, in his explanation and definition of human 'tactics' in operation, describes defensive "tricks" and "ruses" (pp. xix) employed by everyday human beings "making do" (Certeau, pp. 29-42) against societal and/or other strategists (politicians; bosses) that set the agendas of private and public life others then must follow. Further, Certeau dedicates The Practice of Everyday Life: "To the ordinary man... To the common hero... [n.p.] This and is not Hector; reluctant strategist eventually and inevitable turned dying tactician; public prince-patriot who yearns, more than anything, to quit the battlefield and again be a private parent, and Andromache's loving, loyal, and devoted husband within a settled and peaceful royal household, in the calm of peacetime.

Certeau's so-called 'strategies' and 'tactics' of everyday life, are in fact military references, thereby implicitly underscoring, even further, the importance of hierarchy, and the metaphorical slipping between the hierarchal cracks that occurs in every tactical maneuvers of the less-than-powerful., rather than typical cultural or sociological ones. Within that mutually exclusive yet stiffly entwined worlds inhabited by strategists and tacticians, respectively and (in an inherently tense and uncomfortable way trans-hierarchically The domino-fall of decisions that eventually create the conditions of possibility for Hector's brutal; fatal, and inevitable clash with Achilles is the gods' (that is, the super-strategists' of the Greek universe) decision of Hector's fate, and to that he submits.

As the article "Further Greek Literature II: Aristotle's Poetics" also observes, of Hector:

In book 6, Andromache asks him to stay with her on the city wall... he refuses, as he must - it is his duty to fight. In book 14 Polydamas advises against an assault on the Greek camp; Hector overrules him. In book 18