>>>If one hoplite drops his shield and runs away then the whole phalanx is endangered.
Let's add another literary cabochon, Brecht's short story, "Socrates Wounded." Here, Socrates gets hung up in a thicket, and rather than perish as he is overrun by the enemy, uses all his rhetorical power to rally his troops to come back and fight.
The point seems to be that Socrates' military honor is spurious, that he was just a coward who used a loud mouth to save his own skin. This topos is in contrast to the prose and films that portray "heroes" as self-abnegating -- as stating that those who died were the real heroes, or that their acts of heroism were simply performed to save their pals.
Odd that this short story would come from East German Brecht, citizen by choice of a militaristic police state. Perhaps its only Western "honor" that he sought to disparage. Or perhaps it was the "Resistance is Futile" propaganda that Cold War Commies and sci-fi Space Aliens routinely employed.
Pro Patria, Morrie Amsterdam ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
