[UA] Hero archetype

[Greg Stolze]

>> I recently read John Keegan's "The Masks of Command" and it discussed
>Alexander the Great as a prototypical "Greek Hero
>> Hero?  To the Macedonians, hell yes.  To the Persians, the guy was the
>devil made flesh.
>
>my problem with archetypes like this is that they seem to be "after the
>fact". alexander now seems like the obvious choice for an avatar but that's
>only with the benefit of hindsight.

That has happened, certainly, but I have to respectfully disagree in the
particular case of Alexander.  His culture's image of the hero as the guy
who gets up in the front of the battle and stabs the other fellow in the
face until the line breaks goes back to the Illiad -- a story which
(according to Keegan) Alexander loved.  Alexander embodied that image in
pretty much every particular, to the point that in one campaign he was,
literally, the first over the wall.  He got cut off, in fact, and had to be
rescued by his buddies.

-G.

If the reinstatement of capital punishment was clearly doing nothing to
reduce the number of murders in those states permitting it, it certainly
appeared to be cutting down on the number of confessions.
        -Dr. Douglas Ubelaker

www.waylay.com
www.thehungersite.com



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