The Soul as Wilderness: Dio Chrysostom’s Heracles
Dio Chrysostom imagined the unexamined soul as a trackless country filled with wild beasts. Heracles’ true achievement, he argued, was not merely to civilize the earth but to make his own heart gentle.
There is a certain kind of person who decides to reform his life on a Sunday evening.
By Monday morning, he has reorganized a drawer, written a list, purchased something with the word “planner” in its title, and perhaps thrown away a biscuit. This is promising. It is not yet civilization.
Dio Chrysostom, the Greek orator and moral essayist of the Roman imperial age, understood the problem. The human soul, he suggested, is not a tidy little chamber waiting for a few encouraging quotations. It is a trackless wilderness, “teeming with savage beasts.” Most people clear a little patch, cut down a few visible desires, and congratulate themselves. Then the remaining beasts multiply in the brush and make a meal of the reformer.
Heracles is different. He completes the work.
A wilderness with teeth
In Oration 5, Dio describes one of Heracles’ mythic campaigns against monstrous creatures and then pauses. Perhaps, he says, the story is an allegory. Most human beings try to clear the wild region of their souls by destroying the brood of lusts. But because they do not do so thoroughly, they are later overwhelmed by what remains.
Heracles, Dio writes, carries the work through to completion. He makes his own heart “pure and gentle,” or tame. His civilization of the earth is therefore also the civilization of himself.[8]
This is one of the finest ancient statements of the moral meaning of Heracles. It has none of the modern self-help industry’s reassuring vagueness. Dio’s point is not that everyone has a little inner lion. His point is that partial reform is precarious.
A vice left unexamined does not necessarily retire out of gratitude. It changes jobs.
The desire for praise becomes moral superiority. The desire for control becomes “high standards.” Laziness becomes “protecting one’s peace.” Cowardice becomes prudence, and sometimes brings references.
Taming is not flattening
Dio’s Greek word carries the sense of making tame, gentle, civilized, or habitable. This is not the same as becoming weak. A civilized landscape still has power: rivers move, trees grow, weather arrives without consultation. But it is no longer a place in which every traveler is immediately eaten.
The same is true of character. The object is not to erase intensity from the self. It is to prevent intensity from becoming destructive.
This distinction matters because Heracles himself is a dangerous hero. He is mighty, impulsive, capable of dreadful violence, and subject in myth to madness and catastrophe. The story does not offer a picture of someone who began perfect. It offers a picture of strength that must be trained, expiated, directed, and made useful.
That is more credible. A spotless hero is an advertisement. Heracles is a problem.
Inner clearing and public service
Dio’s allegory also refuses the pleasant modern fiction that inner work is purely private. Heracles’ clearing of beasts and tyrants improves the world beyond himself. To tame the soul is not simply to feel more serene in a room with candles. It is to become less dangerous to other people.
This is a major ancient theme. Virtue proves itself in service. The person who governs anger does not merely enjoy better blood pressure; he becomes less cruel. The person who disciplines appetite becomes less exploitable and less likely to exploit others. The person who learns courage becomes available for duties that fear once made impossible.
The wilderness of the soul has public consequences. If it is not cleared, other people eventually have to live there.
The Middle Chamber connection
For the Masonic reader, Dio’s wilderness can sit fruitfully beside the journey toward the Middle Chamber. The comparison should be made with restraint. There is no need to manufacture a secret historical bridge between Dio Chrysostom and later Masonry. The philosophical kinship is enough.
Both images describe progress as labor. One does not receive understanding merely by standing near a staircase. One ascends. One does not gain the wages of knowledge by admiring the chamber from a distance. One works toward it.
Dio’s point adds a warning: the journey inward is not automatically pleasant. The interior country contains beasts. A man may discover that the obstacle to his improvement is not the world’s refusal to recognize his genius. It may be his own refusal to do the next difficult thing.
That discovery is less glamorous than slaying a lion. It is also, in most cases, more useful.
Endnotes
Dio Chrysostom, Oration 5, especially sections 22–23. The passage explicitly interprets Heracles’ clearing of wild beasts as an allegory of clearing lusts from the wilderness of the soul and making the heart “pure and gentle or tame.”[8]
Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, trans. J. W. Cohoon, Loeb Classical Library, vols. 1–5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
For Heracles as a literary and philosophical figure in Dio, Lucian, and Philostratus, see recent research on the rhetorical afterlife of Xenophon’s Heracles tradition.[9]
On the Choice of Heracles and moral formation, see Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.21–34; see also Article 3 in this series.
