serve. They have other goals on their minds: prosperity, security,
a family. There are still true warriors in our culture, still men and
women who would emulate Hector or Achilles, but there are not
many of them, and there are probably fewer all the time.
It is not that contemporary culture is willing to surrender con-
tact with the heroic ideal. Contemporary individuals seek such
contact all the time, but they do so through violent movies, action-
fi lled TV shows, and shoot- em-up video games. Current culture is
ambivalent about ideals; we cannot embrace them (that’s far too dan-
gerous), but we cannot quite abandon them either. So we live in an
entertainment culture that counterfeits ideals. We can all be simu-
lation warriors with no risk to our safety and our middle- class
aspirations.
Homer does not fl inch at showing the hardships and grief that
come with being a warrior. But the lives of the Homeric heroes are
full of meaning: they live in danger, yes, but they live with a full-
ness and intensity of purpose that it is not possi ble to match in the
everyday world. In action, they are united within themselves and,
at least in their own minds, united with the natu ral world, which
(they believe) values what they embody: strength, courage, and
beauty. Though the lives of the Homeric heroes are often short—
Hector and Achilles both die young— they are replete with meaning.
There is no danger that the true warrior will die feeling that he has
never lived. The middle- class man, it’s been said, is the man who
desires to live as long as possi ble. But is what he experiences in that
quest really life—at least when you compare it to what Hector and
Achilles enjoyed?
The second great Western ideal emerges as an ambivalent attack
on Homer and Homeric values. Plato repeatedly expresses his ad-
miration for the Homeric poems; he seems to admire Homer above
all literary artists. But to Plato there is a fundamental fl aw at the core
of Homer’s work: Homer values the warrior above all others. For
4 Polemical Introduction