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The Suffering Hero and the Enigmatic Singer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2022
Homer first presents as a model of human excellence the hero Achilles, who lives a life of political and military virtue to the fullest, who becomes painfully aware of the limits of that way of life, and whose example as a tragic, suffering, questioning hero points to the contemplative singer Homer as the true model of human excellence in the Homeric poems. Through his explicit, skeptical judgments concerning gods and heroes; his scientific but compassionate accounts of death; and his similes, Homer points to himself as a philosophic thinker, but he deliberately hides his philosophic life in the poems to avoid incurring popular hostility and to encourage the most thoughtful members of his audience to discover the independent-minded life of philosophy on their own and for themselves.
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