I’m not a big fan of historic mini-series and probably won’t watch this one, so I’m grateful for your detailed and sensitive review here.
Of course, most of the complexity that you describe in the mini-series is latent (or manifest) in the Iliad and the Odyssey, e.g. Agamemnon’s misogynist remarks to Odysseus in Odyssey XI, or the pathos of Hector’s accidental frightening of his infant son in Iliad VI. The vision of military heroism was not contemporary with whoever sang the two Homeric poems, and these works can (without imposing a contemporary filter) be seen as critical of the glorification of war or the establishment of glory (kleos) as a justification for sacrificing one’s life in battle.
In Odyssey XI, Odysseus encounters Achilles in the afterworld and congratulates him on his eternal glory; Achilles replies that he would rather be an unknown live farmer back on earth than a famous dead hero.
Of course, the Iliad is more of a war poem, but even there the poet suggests that Achilles’ most noble moment isn’t re-entering the battle in order to kill Hector (which Achilles knows will entail his own death in battle), but his return of Hector’s body to Priam, the king of his enemies.
Simone Weil’s “The Iliad or The Poem of Force” shows how Homer depicts force / violence as destructive / tragic for both sides in the Trojan War; seen this way, the Iliad is a covert anti-war argument for peace, along the lines of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” or Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed.”
Of course, Euripedes subverted the patriarchal destructiveness of the heroic code even further in The Trojan Women, or Medea, or most of his other tragedies.
An even more complex treatment of the tragedy of war is Virgil’s Aeneid. For Virgil, all of history is tragic, and the rewards of the Elysian Fields are never compensation enough; still, we must persevere, even though neither we nor our descendants will ever attain a final peace on earth.
And of course, Cervantes goes still further in undermining military glorification by creating a protagonist who is not only out of step with the times, but whose chivalric ideals never existed, even in the past. Still, Don Quixote shows, living in a pragmatic world void of ideals is no solution either.
We may not need another hero, but we still need the profound and complex and troubling insights into ourselves that these timeless works provide.
