honor, no? And while their reward may be the doing of what they did and the respect of those able able to appreciate it, they deserve that respect, even though what they did is largely a matter of luck over which they had no control, a gift of the gods. The gifts of the gods are to be revered and not lightly last away.
[WS:] Agreed, but did not the Greeks also spoke of proportion and balance? It is one thing to give credit where the credit is due, but quite another to turn credit-giving into a worship cult. Our culture seems to suffer from the latter, when individual celebrities - be it artistes, athletes, or corporate executives - are commonly viewed as demi-gods, and singularly given credits for all collective accomplishments from which they benefit. No wonder that a natural counter-reaction to such excesses is a critique of any unearned advantage. If we lived in a more balanced society, the act of rewarding merits would not evoke such extreme reactions.
Wojtek