The perennial Bette Midler song "Wind Beneath my Wings," for example, suggests that one can be a hero just by standing in the shadows and doing those little things that "might have appeared to go unnoticed." However, the idea of the hero is actually much larger than that. One may be a very good person just for being a kind and giving soul, but the cultural hero such as Batman or Gilgamesh is defined by being larger than life and struggling with the archetypal issues of their day. .

             Heroes are not only larger than life, in many ways they are larger than traditional morality as well. Hercules, whose cultic worship across the ancient world really shows him to be one of the greatest classical heroes, was also know for brutally murdering his first wife and children in a mad fit. The great Jason betrays Medea and hides behind her skirts when he convinces her to kill her own child brother and later his own king. The biblical hero David not only slays giants, but also commits heinous murders and adulterous affairs so bad that God himself has to intervene. .

             In context with many of the other classical heroes, Gilgamesh seems like a paragon of moral virtue! Even he is a dark figure by modern standards, however, with his rabid pride and his obsession with death. Gilgamesh's overweening desire for immortality leads him to kill the sacred guardian of the Cedar Woods, to reject the advances of the Goddess and then to kill her sacred bull; his pride and wrath likewise lead to misadventures on his quest to find Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh pride and violence both stem from a desire to overcome death - at first he seeks to do this by deeds that will live on forever in song, and later by physically becoming immortal.

             Though in modern times we see such arrogance and mercilessness as dark, it is debatable whether the ancient world had the same perception. Gilgamesh's activities may have seemed not only heroic but justifiable in his own time; one might argue that a hero is partly defined as living at the farthest edge of what society finds morally necessary for the survival of the people.