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Proud Humility and the Best-of-Breed Syndrome
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11861 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1987 |
4,385 Words |
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Henry A. Myers
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THE FRENZY OF RENOWN
Fame and Its History
Leo Braudy
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986
600 pp., $27.50
Probably any of us with an interest in the past has been struck by the way people avidly and openly pursued fame in former ages and pursue it perhaps even more avidly - but certainly less openly - in our own time. We all know that public relations men are hard at work giving public, or would-be public, figures enough of an image to make them memorable. Looking back at history, it appears that the desire to be famous is as old as civilization, when pharaohs memorialized themselves with pyramids and the heroes of the Iliad shouted their name at the enemies they were fighting in order to get credit for their deeds. Credit for achievement makes a person feel important. Since feeling important is a common variety of feeling good, at least among more energetic people, pursuit of such credit can be admitted as a fairly natural urge.
Sometimes the connection between fame and success is clear. Fame for the right reason can make politicians more electable and give performers more box office appeal. We find fame emerging as a goal rather than a means, however, when people reveal themselves to inquiring reporters in ways that will indeed make them better known but not particularly electable or marketable. In fact, interviewees regularly give interesting material destructive to their own careers to the media. The suicidal element of fame-seeking is, of course, not new: We recall that Homer's Odysseus insisted, as he was sailing away, on shouting his full identity to the murderous Cyclops he had blinded and nearly got himself and his men killed with a boulder the giant threw in the direction of his voice.
Still, in the twentieth century, we would find it surprising if a candidate for public office, or even an aspiring country and western singer, stated publicly that he desired fame. Some otherwise undistinguished murderers, to be sure, have asked with no hesitation after their arrests to see newspaper accounts of their killings, expressing satisfaction at the columns of coverage they are given and regret or outrage at space denied them. But of course for us, their motivations must be as abnormal as the rest of their mental makeup. Most of us confirm our normalcy by admitting only to friends and family that we do like to see our names and pictures in print. Yet the self-avowed pursuit of fame seemed quite normal in the time of Xerxes, as described by Herodotus, or even the relatively recent era of Frederick the Great, as portrayed by Thomas Carlyle.
Forces shaping fame in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds
In the Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy offers a systematic study of the nature of fame as it developed over the last twenty-five hundred years in the West. While he sticks throughout to his lean definition of fame - "made up of four elements: a person and an accomplishment, their immediate publicity, and what posterity has thought about them ever since" - he documents not only remarkably intricate differences but also recurring similarities in his subject matter.
While briefly exploring the nature of fame from Homer's through
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