The Greeks Never Said Heroes Were Good. That Was Us.

Before I trained as a psychologist, I read classical history. And there's a translation problem at the heart of how we talk about leadership that I've been itching to write about.

The word is "hero".

Today we use it to mean someone selfless. Brave. Morally admirable. The nurse who works the double shift, the stranger who runs into the burning building. Goodness is baked into the definition.

The ancient Greeks, who gave us the word, meant nothing of the sort.

A Greek hērōs was defined by impact, not virtue. Extraordinary deeds, larger-than-life presence, glory that outlived them. That was the whole job description. Character didn't come into it.

Look at the actual CVs. Achilles sulked in his tent and let his comrades die over a workplace grievance. Heracles killed his own family in a rage. Odysseus, currently enjoying a cultural moment courtesy of Hollywood, was a liar, a manipulator and a strategist who came home from a ten-year voyage having lost every single one of his men. He was fine, by the way.

The Greeks knew all this. They told these stories in unflinching detail. And they honoured these men anyway, with actual religious worship at their tombs. Hero cults were a formal practice. You could be a hero and a menace simultaneously, and nobody felt the need to resolve the contradiction.

Our modern definition, the one where heroes must also be good, is a later invention. It arrived through Christian ideals of martyrdom and Victorian notions of character, and it quietly rewrote the word.

Here's why this matters to anyone who works in or around leadership.

As a business psychologist, I spend a lot of time with the Dark Triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. The research is consistent and uncomfortable. These traits are overrepresented in senior leadership. Charisma, boldness, strategic manipulation and immunity to self-doubt are extremely effective at getting people to the top, and extremely effective at keeping them there.

And when one of these leaders is finally exposed, the reaction is always the same. Shock. How could someone so visionary behave like that? We had no idea.

The Greeks would have had every idea. They would have recognised the type in about four seconds, because their entire heroic literature is a study of it. Odysseus is arguably the first Machiavellian protagonist in Western storytelling. His defining trait, mētis, is usually translated as cunning intelligence. Athena, goddess of wisdom, adored him for it. The Greeks didn't pretend his brilliance and his ruthlessness were separate things. They understood they were the same thing, pointed in different directions depending on the day.

We, on the other hand, have fused heroism and virtue so completely that we can't see one without assuming the other. A leader delivers extraordinary results, so we assume they must be extraordinary people. The halo effect does the rest. Impact gets read as integrity. Confidence gets read as competence. And by the time the behaviour becomes undeniable, the shrine is already built, the board is invested, and the enablers are everywhere.

In other words, we never stopped worshipping Greek heroes. We just renamed them founders and CEOs. Kleos, the glory that was the whole point of Greek heroism, is alive and well. We call it personal brand.

So what do we do with this?

Not cynicism. The answer is not to assume every impressive leader is secretly a monster. Most aren't. The answer is to do what the Greeks did: hold both truths at once. Someone can be genuinely brilliant, genuinely valuable, and genuinely dangerous, and admiring the first two should never blind us to the third.

Practically, that means separating the questions we ask about leaders. Is this person effective? is one question. Is this person safe to give power to? is a different question, and it deserves its own evidence. Boards, investors and hiring committees routinely answer the first and assume it covers the second. It doesn't. It never has.

The Greeks built shrines to their heroes and kept a wary eye on them at the same time. I don't see this as a contradiction but psychological maturity, and it's roughly three thousand years old.

We'd do well to relearn it.