This ties them neatly to the wiliest of all ancient heroes, Odysseus. But perhaps my favourite subgroup of superheroes includes Hawkeye and Green Arrow, whose superpower is ‘being especially good with a bow and arrow’.

Wonder Woman, like Hippolyta and Penthesilea before her, is an Amazon, and so also semi-divine.īruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s superpowers are their limitless credit cards, which also explains why Agamemnon – least heroic of all heroes, surely – is so concerned about acquiring more booty than other Greek hero during the Trojan War: money is power. The ancients used a similar narrative device, but with semi-divinity as the explanation, rather than science: Perseus, for example, is a hero because his father is Zeus. Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider, and Bruce Banner was dosed with gamma rays: in other words, they are ordinary human beings with an extra power imposed upon them. Superman is an alien, pre-empted by almost two millennia by the Assyrian satirist Lucian who wrote in his True Stories of extra-terrestrial armies engaged in a war. The rules about what makes a superhero are pretty flexible. And that’s before you think about the ancient Greeks, who boasted a plethora of heroes to match any collection from Marvel or DC. Rama was exiled from Ayodhya in India, while Beowulf slew Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Scandinavia. Fionn mac Cumhaill built the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, and Gilgamesh defeated Humbaba in Mesopotamia. Superheroes have existed for as long as stories, before writing and across every culture from which we can find evidence. The answer to the second question is more brief than the first. So the question this poses is: why are we so drawn to superhero stories? And since when? Studios keep making these films because they know audiences will flock to see them, even if the heroes include a raccoon and a tree.

For every Iron Man, or Avengers, there have been a couple of less-than Fantastic Fours and enough dubious Hulks to smash the sternest spirit. Over the past few years, even the most ardent comic book nerd might have wondered if there were too many superhero movies playing in the local multiplex.

Heroes 3 in the wake of gods