Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero

BERNARDETE, Seth. Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. Ronna Burger, editor. Preface by Michael Davis. South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2005. xxi + 140 pp. Cloth, $17.00. Paper, $10.00At the age of twenty-five Seth Benardete presented his Ph.D. dissertation on Homer's Riad to his committee at the University of Chicago. That dissertation has now been published posthumously as a book under its original title Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. This is only fitting, since the work exceeds in a startling way all measures established for the assessment of the performance of doctoral candidates. It is, in fact, the first fruit of a mind of extraordinary power, capable of producing, at an age when most are idle or halting, an indispensable guide to Homer's craft and thought. In the broad field of Homer scholarship it finds its match only in the study of the Odyssey that the same author completed in the last years of his life.

According to the young Benardete, Homer's work is structured around two central themes: the true character of heroic virtue and the nature of the difference between the virtue of the hero or "real man" (aner) and that of a human being (anthropos) in the proper or "absolute" sense (pp. 16-17). Homer uncovers the former through displaying the identity of Achilles and Hector and the latter through articulating the difference between Achilles and Odysseus.

As Benardete shows, the heroes of the Iliad live in the light of the distinction between andres and anthropoi (pp. 11-17). This distinction is dependent upon the intimacy which the heroes enjoy with the gods. They are their off-spring and special care: the gods' providence extends really only to the hero and only to the hero at war; mere human beings are left to the vicissitudes of chance (pp. 15, 77-84). This providence, however, is the ground of what Benardete calls "the paradox of heroic virtue" (p. 77): on the one had, the providence of the gods supports heroic virtue through the beautification of their deaths and the moral limits they set on...