The Horror, Glorification and Human Impact of War

Admiring courage while revealing suffering

War poetry can make fighting seem magnificent and terrible at the same time. Glorification presents warfare as noble or admirable; the horror of warfare includes injury, cruelty, fear and the destruction of ordinary lives. These are not necessarily separate messages. An audience may admire a warrior’s courage while recognising how much his actions cost his family and his enemies.

Homer’s Iliad presents fighting between Greeks and Trojans around Troy. Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 2, has the Trojan Aeneas recount the city’s destruction and his escape. Tyrtaeus’s ‘fallen warrior’ poem and Horace’s Odes 3.2 urge their audiences towards military endurance and courage. Comparing them means asking not simply whether they describe suffering, but what they encourage the audience to think about that suffering.

Homer: magnificent warriors, vulnerable bodies

In Iliad Book 5, Diomedes’s attack is compared to a ‘raging winter torrent’. The extended simile makes his strength seem irresistible: the Trojans cannot withstand him any more than embankments can withstand a flood. Yet the torrent also destroys vineyards and ‘the proud works of men’. The image conveys devastation as well as power.

Homer then makes the injuries unmistakably physical. Diomedes’s spear shatters Pandarus’s teeth, cuts his tongue at its root and passes through his chin. His attack on Aeneas crushes bone and tears skin. These details prevent military success from becoming a clean, bloodless achievement. The victor’s impressive strength is also the victim’s bodily destruction.

The casualties are not merely a list of defeated enemies. Diomedes kills Xanthus and Thoön, the sons of the ageing Phaenops, leaving their father grieving and without sons to inherit. Naming their father and explaining his loss takes the audience beyond the battlefield. A warrior’s death destroys hopes within a household as well as removing a fighter from an army.

Hector: fear does not erase courage

Hector’s encounter with Achilles in Iliad Book 22 shows that a courageous warrior can experience overwhelming fear. Before Achilles arrives, Hector resolves to face him. But the sight of Achilles’s blazing armour makes him tremble and run. Homer compares Achilles to a hawk pursuing a frightened dove: the contrast makes Hector appear vulnerable rather than evenly matched.

The chase passes the washing places where Trojan women once cleaned clothes in peacetime. This brief reminder of ordinary life sets the struggle against what war has interrupted. Homer also insists that the race is not for an athletic prize: it is for Hector’s life.

Athena, disguised as Hector’s brother Deiphobus, persuades him to stand and fight by promising support. When Hector discovers that no brother is there, he recognises the deception and his approaching death. Nevertheless, he draws his sword, determined not to die ‘without a fight’ or ‘without true glory’. His final courage is therefore not the absence of fear. It is resistance despite fear and the knowledge that he cannot escape.

Achilles celebrates the victory as ‘great glory’, but the Greeks wound Hector’s corpse and Achilles drags it behind his chariot. Homer follows this triumph with Hecabe’s cry, Priam’s anguish and the city’s grief. Juxtaposing victory with mutilation and mourning makes the audience confront the human cost of the achievement.

Family and ancestors: duties that pull in different directions

In Iliad Book 6, Andromache asks Hector to remain on the battlements rather than return to exposed fighting. Achilles has already killed her father and seven brothers, and her mother is also dead. Hector is therefore ‘parent, brother, husband’ to her. Her appeal is not simply an objection to bravery: she fears losing the person on whom her remaining family depends.

Hector understands her anxiety. He imagines a Greek carrying her away into slavery, forcing her to weave or fetch water. Yet he also feels obliged to defend Troy and win glory for his father and himself. Protecting his family and fighting for his community seem connected, but his decision also risks making his wife a widow and his son an orphan.

Their baby Astyanax shrinks from Hector’s bronze helmet and horsehair crest. Hector removes it, kisses him and prays that the boy will become an even greater warrior, returning with blood-stained enemy armour. The scene places affectionate fatherhood beside the expectation of future killing. Family love does not simply oppose the warrior ideal: it can help pass that ideal to the next generation.

Ancestors also shape behaviour. Glaucus explains that his father sent him to Troy to be the best and bravest and not shame his ancestors. Yet inherited obligations can restrain violence too. When Diomedes discovers that their grandfathers were guest-friends, the two agree not to fight each other. Family history can demand military distinction, but it can also create a bond stronger than immediate hostility.

Tyrtaeus and Horace: using danger to encourage fighting

Tyrtaeus tells young men to stand together, resist panic and avoid abandoning older fighters. His account of an old man dying is graphic: the man gasps his spirit into the dust and clutches his bloody genitals. Grey hair, exposed skin and helplessness make the sight shocking. The purpose is to urge the young to take responsibility rather than leave the old to face the front line.

He then calls a fallen young warrior ‘beautiful’. This sharp contrast glorifies youthful sacrifice while presenting the old man’s death as an outrage. Tyrtaeus does not hide the horror of injury; he uses it to strengthen his demand that young men fight steadfastly.

His opening also describes a defeated wanderer travelling with his mother, elderly father, children and wife, suffering poverty and hostility. Fighting is presented as a way to prevent this family disaster. The poem’s claim is that death in defence of the homeland is preferable to disgrace and displacement, not that war leaves families unharmed.

Horace similarly declares, ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.’ Military hardship is supposed to toughen the young soldier. However, death also pursues the man who flees and strikes his back or hamstrings. Horace undermines the hope that cowardice will guarantee survival.

The same soldier looks different from the enemy’s walls. A ruler’s wife and daughter fear him as a dangerous lion, driven through slaughter by ‘blood-stained anger’. What appears admirable to those encouraging him is terrifying to the people threatened by him.

Virgil: Troy’s fall destroys people, homes and sacred protection

In Aeneas’s dream, Hector appears tearful and mutilated, with blood-matted hair and feet pierced by the thongs used to drag him. Aeneas contrasts this figure with the successful warrior he remembers. Even Troy’s greatest defender has been damaged beyond recognition. Hector’s statement that he would have saved Troy if anyone could reinforces the hopelessness of further resistance.

Aeneas nevertheless seizes weapons and thinks it ‘beautiful to die fighting’. Virgil surrounds that thought with ‘madness and anger’. The attraction of a glorious death is real to Aeneas, but it may prevent him from recognising the need to save those still alive.

Priam’s death makes the horror intensely personal. Pyrrhus pursues the wounded Polites, who dies before his parents. Priam protests and throws a spear, but it is ‘ineffectual’ and hangs ‘uselessly’ from Pyrrhus’s shield. These words contrast the old king’s determination with his physical helplessness.

Pyrrhus then drags Priam through his son’s blood and kills him at the altar. The murder violates a sacred place that should offer protection. Priam’s reminder that Achilles once respected him as a suppliant and returned Hector’s body makes Pyrrhus’s cruelty especially striking. Strength has become a means of humiliating the vulnerable, not merely overcoming an armed opponent.

Other victims show how widely the violence spreads. Cassandra is dragged from Minerva’s sanctuary with her hands bound. Aeneas sees mothers and children gathered among the captured spoils. Death, captivity and the destruction of sacred spaces reach people who are not fighting.

Aeneas: courage becomes responsibility for survivors

Seeing Priam die makes Aeneas think of his own elderly father Anchises, his wife Creusa and his child. Venus redirects him from revenge towards their protection. His duty now requires leaving the doomed city rather than dying in another attack.

The escape brings three generations together: Aeneas carries Anchises on his shoulders and leads Iulus, also called Ascanius, by the hand. Anchises carries Troy’s sacred objects and household gods. Saving them preserves family and religious continuity after the destruction of their home.

Aeneas admits that he now fears every breeze and noise, although enemy weapons had not frightened him before. Responsibility for vulnerable people changes the experience of danger. His fear expresses concern for others rather than a simple failure of courage.

The escape is still marked by loss. Creusa disappears, and Aeneas returns through the dangerous city to search for her. When her ghost appears, he tries three times to embrace her, but cannot hold her. Her promise of his future does not remove the pain of their separation.

Finally, women and men gather around Aeneas as a ‘wretched throng’ preparing for exile. War’s impact continues after the immediate fighting: survivors have lost their homes and must face an uncertain journey.

Homer offers a different moment of recognition when Priam asks Achilles to remember his own father. Both men weep, and Achilles returns Hector’s body. Their shared grief briefly crosses the division between enemies. It does not end the war or undo the deaths, but it shows that compassion can interrupt brutality. Across these poems, courage may be admired without making suffering unimportant.