The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

anachronistic courage in the bourgeoisie 213represented as I have noted an archaic, physically courageous, wholly aristocraticvirtue. For the Greeks it was Homer and for the Romans it wastranslations and then imitations of Homer such as Ennius and Virgil. Cicerowas a lawyer, not a soldier. Yet he told his brother that his “childhooddream” was expressed in the lines from The Iliad, Glaucus telling what hisfather had said to him in sending him off to Troy, “Always be the best [aristeuein,compare “aristocratic”], my boy, the bravest.” 1Which is to say that our cultural vocabulary for the chief pagan virtue inthe West isn’t fresh news from the front, any front. The vocabulary of courageousheroism is sociologically inauthentic, reworked over centuries, belated,secondary, not based, as historians say, on primary sources. Homerwas imagining a warrior society long gone, about five centuries gone. Hehimself lived in an eastern Aegean culture radically less knightly and moreworkaday than the one he imagined. “The resulting picture,” writes Hanson,“is an amalgam-mosaic spanning five hundred years ...;it may not reflectan actual historical society at all.” 2So usually. A little after Homer wrote, in the sixth century BC, a redactorin the style of Deuteronomy looked back on Joshua the berserk nomadmarching up to the walls of Jericho back, far, far back, in the thirteenth centuryBC, a little before Troy fell. The mythical Aeneas, counting from theactual date of the fall of Troy, would have died more than a thousand yearsbefore he was imagined by Virgil as a model of archaic piety. Beowulf of theSpear-Danes lived if he did centuries before his literate cousins in far-offSaxon England set down a version of his tale. Geoffrey of Monmouth in thetwelfth century crafted the knightly stories, and in the fifteenth ThomasMalory perfected them, about a King Arthur who flourished, if ever, perhapsin Wales around AD 540.The Icelandic sagas prove the rule, at its edges. The historical Gunnar waskilled in a siege of his house about (perhaps exactly) AD 990 and his allyNjal burned in a similar siege about 1011 (the site can be visited still). But thesaga writer, though he creates in the Hemingwayesque restraint of sagaprose an impression of reporting from the scene, was looking back on theevents from 1275 or so, from an Iceland thoroughly Christianized and commercial.The Icelandic sagas “must be thought of as historical novels ratherthan histories,” R. I. Page warns. “Their authenticity must be continuallyquestioned. The Viking historian must feed on more austere fare.” 3 Somethink that the sagas can be fed on, still, as documents of an oral tradition