Holding Out for a Hero

From Achilles to Anakin Skywalker, the messiah myth has evolved from religious prophecy to cautionary tale.

Jim Caviezel as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ (2004), Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005), and Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides in Dune (2021).

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).