Changes in the Ideal of Heroic Citizenship

Donna Smolenski

0526860

908-432-1133

dsmolenski4003@gmail.com

TESC, May 2013

HUM-101-OL

Changes in the Ideal of Heroic Citizenship

Simply stated, the hero, at its conception, was a being, either human or god, who aspired to be the best he could be. As Professor Ambrosio explained, the hero must have courage, they must overcome adversity and achieve greatness and by doing so, the hero fulfills his own fate; to know that all is done that can be done. In this original ideal of the hero, it was a very personal and solitary struggle. As the metropolis of Greece flourished, a new definition of the “hero” emerged in the form of the popular Greek tragic drama. In this forum, the hero or main character was brought to ruin, suffering extreme sorrow due to moral weakness and an inability to cope with disagreeable circumstances.

However, once the Greek polis or city-state approach was introduced the ideal or perception of the hero gradually changed yet again. The focus was no longer on the hero as it had been portrayed in the past. There was a shift in how an individual achieved greatness, not so much through suffering and “struggle” but with an emphasis on doing heroic civic deeds for all of the polis. This new ideal was geared towards leadership and Plato is widely recognized as thetruth-seeker, who coined the phrase “citizen hero” in his depiction of the great philosopher and orator Socrates.

The emergence of Roman Stoicism, a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens in the early 3rd century B.C., changed the landscape of the ideal of the Greek citizenship dramatically. Stoicism de-emphasized the cosmological, speculative and meta-physical priorities that had