A man in heroic society is what he does. Hermann Fränkel wrote of Homeric man that ‘a man and his actions become identical, and he makes himself completely and adequately comprehended in them; he has no hidden depths.… In [the epics] factual report of what men do and say, everything that men are, is expressed, because they are no more than what they do and say and suffer’ (Fränkel 1975, p. 79).
