Who defines a man?
The Greeks attempted to define what being a man is about through myths and stories, just as we do through television, plays, academic ramblings et al. But they were hampered by an early and barely glowing form of consciousness about the ‘self’. They didn’t have the range of ‘languages’ and ‘jargon’ that we have. Thank goodness. The messages were clearer even if quite incomplete. The wholeness and completeness of a man’s life journey was only slowly dawning on them and they had a peculiarly Asiatic tone. They looked East far more than west. There were many stories about men as it was difficult to pin down his many aspects in just one tale. It wasn’t helped by Homer who struggled with integrating a whole person. His heroes had arms and legs which seemed to act independently of the man, and Gods seemed to have far too great a sway in a chap’s decisions and fate. And oddly these heroic men were all ‘stageless’. Achilles was the same man when he was a boy. He was a ‘complete’, very much one
