In fact, all the heroes in Homer's works have the pure and warm atmosphere of ancient Greece. Both Achilles, who was born at one time, and hector, who took care of the overall situation and abandoned his wife and children, were doomed to death. Their fate blooms like Homer's flowers, simple but rich, warm and peaceful. Holderlin once said that Achilles is an ideal hero and belongs to nature, while hector is a hero out of duty and pure conscience and belongs to morality. Their final confrontation constitutes the most beautiful and tragic contrast in the Iliad. (Holderlin, Collected Works of Holderlin, translated by Dai Hui, Commercial Press 1999)

No matter how brilliant a hero is, he is a mortal, not an immortal god. In the Iliad, Glaucus, a young hero of Troy, sang, "As leaves wither, so do generations of mankind. /Autumn wind blows leaves all over the ground, and spring is coming. /The forest will sprout again and grow new green leaves. /human beings are born one generation, and one generation is declining. " (Luo Niansheng Wang Huansheng translated the Iliad People's Literature 1994 Edition) The Greeks realized that the ultimate tragic fate of mankind is death and destruction, which is the most natural thing. Nevertheless, they still want to be "the bravest and most outstanding people in the world"

The tragic fate interpreted by the Greeks is difficult for modern people who advocate free will to understand: the hero's life is so precious, but it is so easily thrown under the will of the gods. The Greeks faced an established existence, not an optional existence, whether ideologically or emotionally. Achilles chose to die in battle instead of enjoying life, and Odysseus chose to return to China instead of living with the myth of the goddess Calypso mythology. All these are not free choices that we modern people understand, but to realize our destiny.

The Greek concept of fate is related to God. Fate is the goddess of fate. If the will of other gods is contrary to the established fate, even they have to obey it. Zeus didn't want his son Salpeidon to die on the battlefield in Troy, but his fate could not be changed by Zeus. As a result, the gods who succumbed to fate themselves became the embodiment of fate. Otherwise, it is hard to understand why the Iliad begins by saying that the Trojan War with corpses "realized Zeus' will".

The will of God is far greater than that of man. However, the fate of the hero in the epic has not been eclipsed by this. Homer skillfully depicts the existence endowed by gods to mortals. So we can see that when the fragile material life collides with the absolute will of the gods, it is the hero who dies, not the immortal god. Greek heroes are even more impressive and admirable. Homer doesn't want people to be sad for heroes at all. Even if they all die at the hands of other heroes, they are not as gloomy and sad as we modern people are familiar with.

Compared with the natural health of the Greeks, the morbidity of modern people is amazing. If nothing else, just think about the famous Byronic Hero written by the poet Byron. Byronic hero is a model of modern individual hero. His struggle is full of loneliness, despair, world-weariness and loneliness. The helplessness of modern heroes makes people feel heavy. The change of hero image or concept essentially corresponds to the difference between ancient and modern worlds. The world faced by modern people is becoming more and more complex and impure. They are getting old, divorced and sophisticated.

When talking about the ancient and modern factors in Shakespeare's plays, Goethe once made such a distinction: "The disharmony between fate and completion is dominant in ancient poetry, and the disharmony between desire and completion is in modern poetry." (Goethe's Unspeakable Shakespeare, Selected Works of Shakespeare, China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1979) The ancient Greeks attached great importance to fate, and even if they highlighted their personal values and honors, the heroes could not resist the mysterious fate. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the whole ideological system of the ancients has long been subverted, the sanctity of all parties has been pulled down, the individual has become the core of the universe, and the realization of personal wishes has immediately become the mainstream of human will and thought. Otherwise, how can we explain that since modern literature, works full of personal confidence have emerged one after another-the ancient universe of heaven and earth has gradually shrunk into a small universe of individuals. The heroic world in Greece is pregnant with the tragic frustration between "fate" and completion (or struggle). In the modern world, this eternal fate has given way to impermanent "opportunities". Therefore, the slogan "seize all opportunities" is bred in the inner world of today's people, either helpless or arrogant (opportunities are impermanent accidents, let alone grasping them).

Regardless of ancient and modern times, the accident of life and the tragedy of fate, as always. When the slightly vicissitudes of modern people look back and see the Greeks who are good at rowing and throwing guns in the blue Aegean Sea, and the Trojans who are good at raising horses and archery in the towering Troy, are the differences between ancient and modern worlds vivid?

"The Greeks are lucky to have Homer, and it is their wisdom to use Homer like them." (Kito, The Greek, translated by Xu Weixiang Huang Tao, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1998) As a symbol of modern people's thinking, the imaginary world constructed by Hollywood shows the stupidity of modern people in using Homer. Sadly, we have moved away from the world of Homer and ancient Greece.