period before Dune Messiah. Analysis According to novelist Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son and biographer, House Atreides was based on the heroic but ill-fated Greek mythological House Atreus. Noting that the characters in Dune fit mythological archetypes, Brian Herbert wrote that "Paul is the hero prince on a quest who weds the daughter of a 'king'". A primary theme of Dune and its sequels is Frank Herbert's warning about society's tendencies to "give over every decision-making capacity" to a charismatic leader. He said in 1979, "The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes." He wrote in 1985, "Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader's name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question." In a 1970 interview, Herbert noted that the character of Paul was constructed to express "the conflict between absolutes and the necessity of the moment". Brian Herbert wrote: The similarity to T.E. Lawrence was reinforced within the novel Dune Messiah, in which a chapter heading-quotation is taken from a post-conquest work of Paul's, with the title The Seven Pillars of the Universe. This appears to have been inspired by Lawrence's account of his war-time activities in the desert, titled Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Throughout Paul's rise to superhuman status, he follows a plotline common to many stories describing the birth of a hero. He has unfortunate circumstances forced onto him, and after a long period of hardship and exile, he confronts and defeats the source of evil in his tale. As such, Dune is representative of a general trend beginning in 1960s American science fiction in that it features a character who attains godlike status through scientific means. Paul's riding and controlling a giant sandworm cements him as a Fremen leader, and he eventually gains a level of omniscience which leads to his accession to the Imperial throne and causes the Fremen to worship him like a god. Juan A. Prieto-Pablos says Herbert achieves a new typology with Paul's superpowers, differentiating the heroes of Dune from earlier heroes such as Superman, A. E. van Vogt's Gilbert Gosseyn, and Henry Kuttner's telepaths. Unlike previous superheroes who acquire their powers suddenly and accidentally, Paul's are the result of "painful and slow personal progress".