Of the Most Excellent Men

It is a game, and I confess it is a game, but it is a game that forces a kind of discipline upon the mind. If you are required to name the three most extraordinary human beings who have ever lived — not the most powerful, not the most fortunate, but the most genuinely, inherently excellent — you must first decide what excellence is, which is to say you must decide what in human nature most deserves admiration. The game is a philosophy in miniature.

I have made my choices, and I will defend them. The first is Homer. Not because I can verify the historicity of a man about whom nothing is known with certainty — but because the poems attributed to him are, taken together, the most astonishing concentration of human perception and human speech that I know. Whoever wrote them understood everything: war and its horror, love and its absurdity, the sea, the hall, the grief of old men and the confidence of young ones. To have produced that, out of the materials available to the ancient world, seems to me the most extraordinary intellectual achievement in the record.

“Homer invented the inner life of the West. Everything we mean when we say a person has depth — all of it begins in those poems. That is not the accomplishment of a craftsman; it is the accomplishment of someone who perceived what had not been perceived before.”

The second is Alexander. I am aware of the objections — the rages, the paranoia, the murder of friends in his cups, the grandiosity that finally exceeded human proportion. I do not offer him as a moral example. But as an instance of human capacity — the combination of courage, intellect, physical endurance, and the quality I can only call force of being — he seems to me without equal in the military record. He was genuinely extraordinary, not merely extremely lucky or extremely ruthless, which is the explanation history usually offers for conquerors.

The third is Epaminondas. This is the choice that requires the most defense, because he is the least known, and what he accomplished looks, at this distance, like a footnote to the Athenian story. But I think he was the most complete man of the three. He was a general of genius; he was also a man of profound philosophical cultivation, personal austerity, and political honesty in an age when political honesty was suicidal. He was offered everything and took nothing for himself. He changed the entire balance of Greek power and died in the moment of his victory. For the combination of active greatness and genuine virtue, I know no better example.