Today I am in Troy looking at another fallen city that sparked a literature that created a culture. Troy fell to the men of Greece, became a legend, inspired Homer, and classical Greek culture was born.
Brave men fought for their city and even though they failed, their failure was more glorious than some men’s successes. Thousands of years later they are still remembered, because they did what they thought right at great personal cost. As I stand far from home on a wonderful trip, I am thankful for men like Nathan Tourtellotte and Colin Anderson who are far from home and those they love in service to others.
The women they love are lonely, because they are living for a cause great than self. Human life does not change with time, including the costs of defending a way of life. The great poet Homer had deep insight into the pain of war and the price that some men would be willing to pay for their city.
In Book VI of the Iliad the great Trojan hero Hector says good-bye to his wife. His wisdom is profound:
Then spake to her great Hector of the flashing helm: Woman, I too take thought of all this, but wondrously have I shame of the Trojans, and the Trojans’ wives, with trailing robes, if like a coward I skulk apart from the battle. Nor doth mine own heart suffer it, seeing I have learnt to be valiant [445] always and to fight amid the foremost Trojans, striving to win my father’s great glory and mine own. For of a surety know I this in heart and soul: the day shall come when sacred Ilios shall be laid low, and Priam, and the people of Priam with goodly spear of ash. [450] Yet not so much doth the grief of the Trojans that shall be in the aftertime move me, neither Hecabe’s own, nor king Priam’s, nor my brethren’s, many and brave, who then shall fall in the dust beneath the hands of their foemen, as doth thy grief, when some brazen-coated Achaean [455] shall lead thee away weeping and rob thee of thy day of freedom. Then haply in Argos shalt thou ply the loom at another s bidding, or bear water from Messeis or Hypereia, sorely against thy will, and strong necessity shall be laid upon thee. And some man shall say as he beholdeth thee weeping: [460] Lo, the wife of Hector, that was pre-eminent in war above all the horse-taming Trojans, in the day when men fought about Ilios. So shall one say; and to thee shall come fresh grief in thy lack of a man like me to ward off the day of bondage. But let me be dead, and let the heaped-up earth cover me, [465] ere I hear thy cries as they hale thee into captivity.
Hector understood that he could not save Andromache. Troy would fall and she would go into slavery. All Hector could do for her and for his city was do his duty and die gloriously. Her pain could have some meaning since as the wife of Hector her status would be higher than many a free woman. Better to be the wife of a faithful Hector than the wife of the victorious, but odious Agamemnon.
This week there are brave men, like Colin Anderson, far from their wives and home defending this nation. He is not in a hopeless war like Hector, but like him is doing his duty. War is not glorious, but some of the men who fight it are. As I stand at Troy Hector’s lesson is being incarnated around the world in brave men fighting for their nation and their families so far from home.