Hero

This is an accepted version of this page A hero (feminine: heroine) is a real person or fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or strength.

Post-classical and modern heroes, on the other hand, perform great deeds or selfless acts for the common good instead of the classical goal of wealth, pride, and fame.

In classical literature, the hero is the main or revered character in heroic epic poetry celebrated through ancient legends of a people, often striving for military conquest and living by a continually flawed personal honor code.

[4] While these heroes are incredibly resourceful and skilled, they are often foolhardy, court disaster, risk their followers' lives for trivial matters, and behave arrogantly in a childlike manner.

[4] During classical times, people regarded heroes with the highest esteem and utmost importance, explaining their prominence within epic literature.

[10] Hector is ultimately betrayed by the deities when Athena appears disguised as his ally Deiphobus and convinces him to challenge Achilles, leading to his death at the hands of a superior warrior.

[13] Achilles was a Greek hero who was considered the most formidable military fighter in the entire Trojan War and the central character of the Iliad.

Achilles famously refused to fight after his dishonoring at the hands of Agamemnon, and only returned to the war due to unadulterated rage after Hector killed his beloved companion Patroclus.

Achilles plays a tragic role in the Iliad brought about by constant de-humanization throughout the epic, having his menis (wrath) overpower his philos (love).

In classical antiquity, cults that venerated deified heroes such as Heracles, Perseus, and Achilles played an important role in Ancient Greek religion.

Within these stages, there are several archetypes that the hero of either gender may follow, including the call to adventure (which they may initially refuse), supernatural aid, proceeding down a road of trials, achieving a realization about themselves (or an apotheosis), and attaining the freedom to live through their quest or journey.

"[18] In his 1968 book, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, Campbell writes, "It is clear that, whether accurate or not as to biographical detail, the moving legend of the Crucified and Risen Christ was fit to bring a new warmth, immediacy, and humanity, to the old motifs of the beloved Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris cycles.

[20]: 36 The philosopher Hegel gave a central role to the "hero", personalized by Napoleon, as the incarnation of a particular culture's Volksgeist and thus of the general Zeitgeist.

"[24] Michel Foucault argued in his analysis of societal communication and debate that history was mainly the "science of the sovereign", until its inversion by the "historical and political popular discourse".

The Annales school, led by Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and Fernand Braudel, would contest the exaggeration of the role of individual subjects in history.

[27] In the second half of the twentieth century such male-focused theory has been contested, among others by feminists writers such as Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader (1977)[28] and literary theorist Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782.

[31] The word "hero" (or "heroine" in modern times), is sometimes used to describe the protagonist or the romantic interest of a story, a usage which may conflict with the superhuman expectations of heroism.

In 1848, for example, William Makepeace Thackeray gave Vanity Fair the subtitle, A Novel without a Hero, and imagined a world in which no sympathetic character was to be found.

Elaine Kinsella and her colleagues[38] have identified 12 central traits of heroism, which consist of brave, moral integrity, conviction, courageous, self-sacrifice, protecting, honest, selfless, determined, saves others, inspiring, and helpful.

Scott Allison and George Goethals[39] uncovered evidence for "the great eight traits" of heroes consisting of wise, strong, resilient, reliable, charismatic, caring, selfless, and inspiring.

By successfully living under the terms of the immortality project, people feel they can become heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die as compared to their physical body.

Science attempts to serve as an immortality project, something that Becker believes it can never do, because it is unable to provide agreeable, absolute meanings to human life.

Examining the success of resistance fighters on Crete during the Nazi occupation in WWII, author and endurance researcher C. McDougall drew connections to the Ancient Greek heroes and a culture of integrated physical self-mastery, training, and mental conditioning that fostered confidence to take action, and made it possible for individuals to accomplish feats of great prowess, even under the harshest of conditions.

"[44] McDougall cites examples of heroic acts, including a scholium to Pindar's Fifth Nemean Ode: "Much weaker in strength than the Minotaur, Theseus fought with it and won using pankration, as he had no knife."

Pankration, a martial art that featured in the ancient Olympic Games, means "total power and knowledge", one "associated with gods and heroes ... who conquer by tapping every talent".