what makes someone great/ a hero?

Question

like for example: alexander the great..

Answer 1

what makes someone a great hero is the ability to inspire change within people, and between cultures.

Alexander the great can't really do that anymore, so he's not really a great hero, but he was, and to some he still is.

Gandhi still inspires millions towards peace and pacifism, so he's still a hero.

Answer 2

William Manchester, writing on Winston Churchill says it better than I ever could:

He speaks about the miracle of pulling 300,000 English and French troops out of the jaws of the encircling German Army
at Dunkirk, using civilian yachts to get the troops off the beach. He then goes on:

"Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge.
These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich.

Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven.

It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost.

England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolf Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces. Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked. A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury.

An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become.

Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people — a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was “equally good to live or to die” — who could if necessary be just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve.

Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.

In London there was such a man.

Answer 3

alexander isn't great to me.anyway the true hero is every man who fights for he's country.not he's leader but i mean the people in the military who get killed for there own country.

Answer 4

hmmm hitler. im no nazi but if you think about it when he was small he was bullied and made fun of. and he said that he would one day become great and he did in a bad way.