34 Ancient Ideals
for the family. The pure hero often sees family as an impediment
and is always suspicious of it, if not hostile. As the critic George
Steiner puts it, “Homer knows and proclaims that there is that in
men which loves war, which is less afraid of the terrors of combat
than of the long boredom of the hearth” (180).
Those who have quested after ideals have frequently understood
that family is the terrain of the Self. It is where one functions as a
biological being, sending one’s genes into the future, attempting to
assure the safety and success of one’s children. So strong though is
the ideology of Self that all must claim to put family fi rst at all times.
The soldier in the fi eld may well feel that life is at its best when
he is with his comrades even in the midst of danger. But publicly he
cannot say as much. Family comes fi rst. When fi ghters come home
from war, and are clearly in a state of distress, we assume that they
have been scarred by what they have experienced, and often this is
so. But is it also possi ble that they are dispirited precisely because
they miss their proper ele ment, war? Are they perhaps, sometimes
without knowing it, longing for the life they had under arms? When
Achilles makes his choice for a short glorious life, what he is rejecting
is the life of home— and this on some level is what every pure war-
rior must do.
Hector is an extremely admirable man—to many he is more ad-
mirable than Achilles. But he does not concentrate the heroic es-
sence, which is single- minded devotion to the ideal. He cannot
achieve unity of being, though this is so for the most persuasive of
reasons: he was not really born to be a warrior. He fi ghts for his city
and for his family, but not ultimately for the reason that the true
Homeric hero fi ghts, to be the best of his kind. The true hero wants
to be someone who will be sung about forever and whose name will
never disappear from the lips of men. Hector may want fame, but
he wants life for himself, his family, and his people more. He would
surely sign away any claim he might have for glory in exchange for