and persecute our fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have
clearly settled in our own minds what a word means, it will do for
fighting with, but not for working with. Socrates of old used to
tell the young Athenians that the ground of all sound knowledge
was--to understand the true meaning of the words which were in
their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser man than we
shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration in praise of
heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism is.

Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by
getting at its etymology--that is, at what it meant at first. And
if heroism means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems
to me, not merely what a hero may happen to mean just now, but
what it meant in the earliest human speech in which we find it.

A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a
man or woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness,
stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and
men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we
meet more than once or twice. Those grand old Greeks felt deeply
the truth of the poet's saying -


Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man.


But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or
other, partakers of a divine nature; akin to the gods; usually,
either they, or some ancestor of theirs, descended from a god or