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PARTISAN REVIEW
comparably Dauntless One," "Bright-faced Smasher of Skulls,"
"Great-hear.ted Attacker," "He Whose Heart Does not Slumber,"
"Battle-Worthy at the Sight of Doom," "Most Gracious Lord of the
Primed Nerves," "Cordial Conqueror," "Broadener of Boundaries,"
"Guardian of the Depths," and "God's One and Only."
The Babylonian epic,
The Story oj Gilgamesh,
whose origin, yet
more ancient, is actually Sumerian, describes its hero as "... part
god and part man with a peerless body, who has hazarded all, visited
all the ends of the earth, revealed all her secrets, peered behind the
universal envelope of wisdom, beheld the hidden with his own eyes,
laid bare the concealed, and told of what came before the Deluge."
And although Gilgamesh is in the last analysis a tragic figure, since
his ambition to win immortality is condemned to failure, during his
life he possesses a perfect mind and body, having been graced by the
gods with beauty, strength, courage, charm, seductive powers, wis–
dom, and knowledge of the mysteries of creation.
The Acheans of
The Iliad
are a folk of heroes, but the epic's chief
hero, Achilles, possesses all the possible virtues: he is the mightiest
and the fastest of warriors and, at the same time, the most handsome.
He has a divine sense of honor, is eloquent, generous to friends and
cruel to foes, a wise counsellor, master over both himself and his sub–
ordinates, and loved by men, women, and gods. As it does through
Homer's Achilles, "divine blood also streams through the veins" of
Virgil's Aeneas, hero of a national epic whose announced theme is
struggle, bravery, the spirit of surmounting hardship, and the noble
virtues in man. By virtue of these, the hero's adventure-strewn road
leads him from Troy to Latium, and he founds the preeminent city
of Rome, the emblem of everything ideal in the future Roman Em–
pire. Thus, at the end of the work, Emperor Augustus is the hero to
be praised, exalted in gifts and excellence over all of his subjects.
Against this, it is most striking and extraordinary and decisive
with respect to the artistic qualities of narrative (in still another re–
spect, as forming the spirit of a people or, inversely, as resulting
from it) that there is not one ideally perfect hero in all the stories of
the Bible.
It
is possible to go still further and say that except on rare
occasions (principally in the Psalms), not even the Hebrew God is
endowed with the heroic epithets of the human heroes of other epics.
The Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are in no respect
perfect heroes (and their wives, in contrast to women in the other
epics, are not distinguished for their beauty; description of them in
the Bible is limited, sparse, and sometimes restricted to no more
than a laconic epithet such as "comely to behold" or "lovely-eyed").
