(
cross-posted at never in our names)
"It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one's homeland." - Horace, Ode 3.2
The Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus wrote those words around 23 B.C. to celebrate the flourishing of the Empire under emperor Augustus, against whom he had originally fought. It's been used as a rallying cry, as the noblest formulation of the patriotic spirit, as famous last words, and as rousing military mottos
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" has a long history, and like any cultural artifact with staying power, it's accumulated a lot of extra meaning over time. Charting its use over the last two centuries, we can see how the concepts of homeland, sacrifice, and glory in war have changed with the times:
In the 19th century, the phrase was still well known enough to be used by Irish poet
Thomas Moore (1779-1852), who took Horace's sentiments into increasingly Romantic territory:
O! blest are the lovers and friends who shall live
The days of thy glory to see;
But the next dearest blessing that Heaven can give
Is the pride of thus dying for thee.
But the 20th century saw a sharp change in the way we view war and warfare. Disillusionment has always accompanied battle (even Achilles was bitter) but our writers could always be counted on to find some transcendent value to give meaning to the bloodshed.
World War I ended that. What had begun as the "Great War" and "The War to End All Wars" dragged endlessly in brutal trenches. And from that war, we get our most famous re-application of Horace, through the poet-conscience of that war, Wilfred Owen:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Owen isn't just angry about war: he's angry about the way that we on the home front trivialize war and reduce soliders to concepts instead of living, suffering human beings. The poem is graphic and intense, and that last line stands as an indictment not only of war itself, but of the concept of war. Owen was killed shortly after.
That may the best known revision of Horace, but there's one that I like even better. Written just two years before Owen's poem, Edgar Lee Masters' masterpiece The Spoon River Anthology finds similar territory in the last words of a dead soldier.
To give you some context: Spoon River takes place in a cemetary, as the dead are allowed to speak their minds to the living. What each talks about is just as significant as what each chooses not to talk about, and the overlapping storylines sometimes create painful ironies. Case in point, Knowlt Hoheimer tells us:
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the county jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, "Pro Patria."
What do they mean, anyway?
That ending is deceptively simple. There are at least three possible ways we can read it:
1. Horace's concept of patriotism doesn't relate to the modern world: what does it even mean anymore?
2. From the character's perspective, what does it mean to die for your country when you entered the army for completely non-patriotic reasons?
3. Knowlt may not even know the English translation.
Any of those is enough to expose the stupidity of war, and the double stupidity of cheering it, but the juxtaposition of the three is as powerful as a hammer.
Not content with that, Masters ups the ante in the next poem, Lydia Puckett:
Knowlt Hoheimer ran away to the war
The day before Curl Trenary
Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett
For stealing hogs.
But that's not the reason he turned a soldier.
He caught me running with Lucius Atherton.
We quarreled and I told him never again
To cross my path.
Then he stole the hogs and went to the war -
Back of every soldier is a woman.
We're not required to believe Puckett's account any more than we're required to believe Hoheimer's, but the two stand side-by-side to present us with the frustrating ambiguity of life, and the empty words "Pro Patria" dissolve into something even more arbitrary.
(sidenote: If you haven't read Masters, go out and read him now!)
We can learn a lot from Masters: honor our troops for giving the absolute most anyone has to give, but smack down anyone who presumes to speak for them or to divest them from reality. They are our friends and family but also people we don't like, they are neighbors and people we don't know, they are patriots and non-patriots, they are selfless and selfish, they care deeply about our place in the world and they don't care about anything other than coming home... in short, they are a lot of different people with a lot of different agendas, all bound together by harsh conditions.
When I see someone on the Right arguing that we don't honor our troops, my reaction is the same as our friend Knowlt:
What do they mean, anyway?
Horace's phrase is still with us, but it's accumulated centuries of thoughts and perspectives like so many barnacles. And it's still the old Lie.