True Honor

I'm writing this because it's an assignment and cause I am going to be graded on it, not because I am passionate about the subject or have any interest in it outside of an A. I wonder how many soldiers/fighters/warriors (whatever they were called) felt the same way. "I have to go fight in this war because it is what my king/the gods want me to do. Because it is what is expected of me, not because I love to kill people and take all that they have; not because I really, really want to get Menelaus his girl back." How many of them actually cared if Helen and Menelaus ended up together? How many of the men there were really wishing, every minute of every day for the past nine years, to be back with their family, with their true wives? They didn't choose for Helen to run off with Paris, why should they be passionate about someone else's problem? Why should they have to lose their lives for Menelaus? I don't just mean lose their alive-ness/beating heart, I mean them seeing their children play in the mud (or whatever kids did back then with out video games) or their wives give birth to a kid she was pregnant with when they left. We talked in class about the men wanting to be remembered and honored, and one way they gain that honor is to do something "great" in battle. To me, dying in a war or killing some big shot in a war, for pride's sake, isn't honorable. If Menelaus went alone and fought and died, whilst declaring his love for Helen and trying to win her back - now that would be honorable. But to take his entire people with him to be slaughtered for the sake of his own selfish desires, is totally dishonorable. And to be a puppet to go along with it, to me, is also dishonorable. If those "puppets" were ordered to fight (I'm still not really sure how it works; ya know, who orders who.) obviously they could have prayed to some god who would listen and gotten their way, right? I mean, hasn't every other character in the book done so?

I commented on Mallory's.