Hi friends,
I started the week thinking about folk heroes, the way that people who commit crimes might nontheless capture the popular imagination and be valorized as heroes. There's been a bit of hand-wringing in the discourse about how that's bad and a murderer is no hero. So I started thinking, yeah, about that--in the stories we tell, what is a hero?
What's a hero?
In her introduction to the The Odyssey, translator Emily Wilson examines Odysseus' status as a hero. In the narrative, one of his interlocutors ask Odysseus if he's a pirate, which he denies although he doesn't deny the violent and treacherous acts attributed to him. What it meant to be a hero was rather different in Homer's Greece than in our time. Read more...
Thanks for reading and see you on the internet!
AK