The essay opens with a scene from an old English play by Beaumont and Fletcher. Sophocles, a captive, kneels with his back to the Roman Martius to take the stroke. His wife Dorigen ties up her sight so that she will not see her lord bleed, and sends him off to teach the Romans how to die. Sophocles calls death the start of a better life, and Martius stays his hand. The prisoner's scorn of fortune and death has taken the victor captive in turn, and Martius says he walks now in captivity. Emerson says he cannot recall any recent poem, play, sermon or novel that goes to the same tune. We have many flutes and flageolets, he says, but not often the sound of a fife. What we need are books of this tart, cathartic virtue, such as Plutarch's Lives, more than books of political economy, because seen from the chimney-side of prudence life wears a ragged and dangerous front.
Culture, he argues, must arm the man. Let him hear in good time that he is born into a state of war, and let him dare the gibbet and the mob by the plain truth of his speech. Toward all this evil the man within the breast takes a warlike attitude, and that attitude is Heroism. It is a self-trust that slights the restraints of prudence, and it works against the voice of mankind and, for a time, against the voice of the great and good. Just and wise men take offence at the act until time passes and they see it matched their own. The hero is hospitable. The Arabian geographer Ibn Hankal saw a great house in Sogd whose gates had stood open, night and day, for a hundred years. The hero is temperate for elegance, not austerity. When Brutus fell on his sword he is said to have cried that virtue was only a shade, and Emerson doubts the report, since the essence of greatness is the sense that virtue is enough.
What takes his fancy most is the heroes' good humour. Scipio, charged with taking public money, would not wait for justification and tore up his accounts before the tribunes. Socrates, condemned, proposed to be kept in honour at the Prytaneum. Sir Thomas More joked on the scaffold. In another play, Juletta tells her captives that it is in her power to hang them, and the master answers that it is in their power to be hanged, and to scorn her. These stories hold us because the same energy is ours, and the first step is to be rid of our superstitions about places and times. Emerson also admits what usually happens. Many extraordinary young men never ripen, and the forming Colossus shrinks to common size when they put their horses of the sun to plough in the tough world's furrow. A real hero holds his course and does not take back his words when prudent people hold back their praise. Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob for free speech, and the trial of persecution always goes on. The way to peace, he says, is to take counsel of your own bosom and go home much. The essay closes by envying Washington, who is safe in his shroud with the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him, and the file moves on to the first lines of Manners.
