This chapter argues that Plato wrote the Phaedo so that we would see Socrates as a philosophical hero, a replacement for traditional heroes such as Theseus or Heracles. The dialogue tells a new sort of story of how a hero faces death, providing an alternative to tragedy, as Plato thought that tragedy was actually practiced. I discuss the topic here because the opening of the dialogue plays an important role in setting up the Phaedo as an alternative to tragedy. But my case’s strength comes from cumulative evidence drawn from across the dialogue, and so this chapter provides an overall reading of the dialogue as an alternative to tragedy. After arguing for this, I turn to two other ways in which storytelling arises in the opening of the dialogue: in Socrates’ Aesop fable and in his dream that tells him to compose poetry.

This chapter presents the first detailed study of afterlife heroic power in the Oresteia. Aeschylus only uses the word “hero” (hērōs) once in his plays, for the anonymous powerful ancestors who send and receive the expedition to Troy in the Agamemnon. But in the Choephoroi, Agamemnon is prayed to as powerful at his tomb, and in the Eumenides, Orestes predicts his own heroic power from beyond the grave. The Oresteia famously relocates these two mythical heroes to Argos to associate them with that city’s treaty with Athens. This chapter demonstrates that the representation of father and son after death reverses expectations not only from the world external to the play, but also from their living actions within the trilogy. Agamemnon becomes an ethically whitewashed ancestor figure; conversely, Orestes, who killed his mother, becomes a political hero. These radical afterlife transformations are a major part of the Oresteia’s “poetics of the beyond.”

This chapter uses as a case study of the French National Railways (SNCF) and its multiple identities in German occupied France during World War II. During the war and the eight decades that followed, the SNCF has been storied multiple ways. The company perceived itself as a victim during the occupation, but for the first fifty years after the war was storied as a national hero because of the role some railway workers played in the resistance. Then, in the 1990s, the company found itself storied as a perpetrator for its role in transporting over 75,000 deportees crammed in merchandise cars towards concentration camps. Which identity is true? All of these positions can be argued without contorting history. Rather than trying to find the true story, this study considers these identity transformations as reflective of societal power shifts. Until we make the narrative framework behind the role ascription visible, we remain bound to cycles of intolerance and violence. The efforts of peacebuilding then involve increasing our comfort with overlapping roles.

The word ‘hero’ in ancient terminology does not refer to the ’hero’ of a poem or play, and ancient epics do not require a central hero to unify the action. This understanding of the role of the leading figures in epic is still current for John Milton in Paradise Lost.

The portrayal of Hercules in Virgil’s Aeneid is heavily indebted to his portrayal in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. As a demi-god, he is a complex and ambivalent figure in both poems, not exactly a man and not exactly a god. The depiction of Aeneas is indebted to the Apollonian Heracles in his immense force and his loneliness.

Altieri’s chapter defines four basic modes of thinking in Wallace Stevens’s poetry. Harmonium (1923) reconceives what poetic thinking can be—from an ideal of cogent masculine argument to the possibility of thinking against generalization. Such thinking offers allegories that fascinate without resolving. And it shifts the sensuality of poetry from an emphasis on referring to sensuous detail to a lyric sensuality that is basic to the forms of concreteness established by the workings of the medium. Second, Stevens turns in Ideas of Order (1936) from valuing the eccentric to imagining how poetic thinking can become central to ordinary life. Third, by the final poems of Transport to Summer (1947), Stevens seems to become embarrassed by his own rhetoric of the hero and major man. He becomes increasingly concerned with blending the unreal of fiction with the work of realization, a concept strikingly parallel to Paul Cézanne’s idea of how art brings force and vitality to nature. Finally, that theoretical concern for blending fictionality with realization generates in The Rock (1954) a mode of poetic thinking inseparable from a sense of self-conscious dwelling that enables us to value the artifice present in even the most elemental of experiences.

This introduction distinguishes angelification (becoming an angel) from angelomorphism (becoming like an angel), although it acknowledges ambiguity. After briefly discussing angelification in modern literature and film, it defines both angels and daimones in the ancient sense, discusses the analogous concept of a hero, and distinguishes angelification and daimonification from the broader concept of deification in the ancient world.

According to many Vietnam veterans’ memoirs, John Wayne set the standard for what it meant to be a man. Yet for many young adults in Cold War America, there were other models for masculinity far from Hollywood, and among the most popular were men’s adventure magazines. Throughout the 1950s and into the mid 1960s, these magazines proved a popular cultural venue for war stories illustrating the exploits of courageous soldiers, fighting against the “savage” other in foreign lands, and defending democracy in a harsh world where the threat from evil actors always seemed lurking. Sex underscored nearly all of these tales, with pulp heroes rewarded with beautiful, seductive women as a kind of payoff for the combat victories. The magazines offered a masculine ideal to their readers, warrior heroes who were physically fit, mentally strong, and resolutely heterosexual. They also targeted a working-class white readership, the same communities that disproportionately sent their young men off to fight a long and bloody war in South Vietnam. Pulp Vietnam argues that men’s adventure magazines from the post-World War II era crafted a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish and then normalize GIs’ expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam.

Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the one sustained in the popular imagination and perpetuated by the majority of its reception history: a militaristic or Napoleonic Heldenleben. By combining analytic perspectives from schema theory and topic theory with key passages from Beethoven’s epistolary life and Tagebuch, this chapter illustrates that the Eroica’s narrative is akin to religious drama, conveying the same theme of abnegation found in the contemporary oratorio Christus am Ölberge and the Heiligenstadt Testament, the Eroica’s ‘literary prototype’. Unlike some middle-period works which communicate a ‘tragic-to-triumphant’ expressive genre, the Eroica is cast in the ‘tragic-to-transcendent’ type, which became characteristic of Beethoven’s late style. A central component of this spiritual genre is the strategic positioning of structural and semantic oppositions in an unresolved state of suspension. The Eroica manifests this most overtly through a governing opposition between death ‘ombra’ and pastoral ‘Ländler, contredanse’ music, and the association of this stylistic opposition with the tonalities of G minor and E flat major, respectively. Rather than a programmatic narrative about a hero who overcomes, the Eroica is a conceptually ‘late’ work that meditates on suffering as a spiritual necessity and its implications for transcendence.

Warrior graves or “burials with weapons” are a persistent feature of funerary archaeology in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, typically associated with the burials of prestigious men. However, their relationship with the heroic burials of epic is more complex, as these men are rarely buried with their weapons.