Vengeance: The Forgotten Virtue

The idea of the virtuous warrior, or heroic virtues, is sustained by the use of narrative histories in both the Eastern and Western traditions, yet it cannot be true that the narrative creates the virtues or the person who exemplifies the ideals of the hero. The virtues displayed by heroic actions are possessed by the people about whom the tales are told for consumption by an audience hundreds, even thousand of years after the fact (MacIntyre, 1984, p.120). The premium that all societies place on the virtues of the warrior have endured for so long that it is impossible to imagine a society where courage, cunning, physical excellence, and intelligence is not revered . Yet the virtue that is often the antecedent of the others often goes unmentioned, vengeance (French, 2001). The fixing of the desire to emulate the virtues in the narratives could almost certainly be accomplished within communities, homes, state sponsored educational settings, or religious activities, yet the narratives are an invaluable tool to focus those citizens into actions useful for the society. The hero narrative is a useful device for society to highlight to its members those qualities needed from the group most likely to defend and stabilize the community: soldiers. The premium placed on courage, cunning, physical excellence and especially vengeance for those whose purpose it is to protect king, clan, nation, or race runs through all societies from the tales of Achilles at Troy, to the Shakespearian soldier, Titus Andronicus, to Star Wars, the Chronicles of Riddick and is not dependent upon discernable or consciously identifiable social roles. Social roles are immutable even if they are obscured by the language of modern individualism. The social roles in modern society are bound as fast to the members its society as they were fixed to those in the heroic societies of the Iliad, the difference being people in the time of Homer's sagas were fully aware of the roles they were to play (Mauss, 1911).