From Greek Heroes to Flawed Messiahs: Evolution of a Myth

A child is born, so the story goes. His parentage (he is almost always male) is unconventional. Prophecies attend him. From an early age, he shows signs of being a prodigy. So far, so Greek. This could be the tale of Achilles or Hercules. Except that this child is different. He was born to save the world, to restore balance to a universe gone awry and usher in an eternity of peace. He is not a Greek hero after all, but Jesus of Nazareth, Dune’s Paul Atreides, or Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. For while the Messiah may have started out as the religious belief of a particular people, he has become a story we all seem to need to tell. 

Achilles is the son of the sea nymph Thetis, who was married off to a mortal because of a prophecy stating that her son would far exceed his father and that his destiny is to either live a long life in obscurity, or a short life that will bring him immortal renown. Achilles is also a standard Greek hero. He has a mission to achieve. But once that mission is complete, the world continues as before. Troy is sacked, the Golden Fleece is snatched, Andromeda is rescued, the Chimaera is defeated—but for the ordinary people, people like “the meanest swineherd in Greece” (whose slave the posthumous Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather have been) nothing has changed, nor would it have been expected to.

The Greek myths emerged in the aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse, which wrought destruction across the eastern Mediterranean. The flourishing palace cities of the region were abandoned and their inhabitants’ descendants were reduced to centuries of hardscrabble subsistence. The myths were stories of the before-times, when life was better. The Mycenaeans had been literate—but by the time Homer was composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, the skill had been lost for centuries. He talks of writing just once,  describing it in terms that suggest that he was not able to read and write himself – King Proetus gives Bellerophon “baleful signs scratched on a folded tablet” (Iliad VI.168f—my translation).

Just as the Anglo-Saxon refounders of London, confronted by Roman ruins so beyond their own abilities that they called them enta geweorc—the works of giants—so too the Greeks decided that the dimly remembered past had been populated by a different people. Homer’s cast was not Homer’s audience. History, the Greeks believed, took the form of a series of ages, each progressively worse than its predecessor. Golden Age humans never aged, “their hands and feet were ever the same,” their Silver Age successors spent 100 years as children (Works and Days. 114f—my translation). The Heroic Age was a brief interlude but by the time of Hesiod, who was roughly contemporary with Homer, the Iron Age had been firmly established, offering only “toil and misery.” Eventually, the gods would completely forsake humanity—for whom (isolated examples aside) they had never shown much care.

A few centuries later, another people suffered a similarly disorientating collapse but they interpreted it in a radically different way. For, by contrast with the Greeks, the Jews believed that their god cared for them. As Deuteronomy 7:6 puts it, “He has chosen you to be his treasured possession out of all the people on the face of the Earth.” And yet, despite this love, he allowed various catastrophes to befall them.

While not shrinking from acknowledging that their own misdeeds might be responsible for some of their suffering, the Jews of the time of the Babylonian exile developed a sophisticated eschatology. Their prophets related that God would release his people from their exile and return them to Israel where the temple would be rebuilt and the line of David would be restored. Nor would the future be simply a return to the status quo ante: a regent would be appointed from the kingly house, a messiah who would usher in an age of peace and justice. The dead would rise from the grave and God would create a new Heaven and Earth.

In the aftermath of the return from exile, discussion about the anointed one grew quiet until the brutal reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 BC), who sacked Jerusalem, slaughtered innocent civilians, and desecrated the Temple by sacrificing a pig on the altar. These hardships led people to resurrect their hopes of a Messiah, reflected in the apocalyptic prophesies detailed in the Book of Daniel. Once again, hard times created fervent hopes. For whereas the Greeks thought of themselves as the playthings of indifferent immortals and could only lament the Heroic Age that had passed forever, the Jews, confident in God’s love, believed that a Golden Age was coming at some point in the future.