> At the same time, I notice that the current spate of war movies are all
> about stoic, unquestioning self-sacrifice (Blackhawk Down and We Were
> Soldiers). Clearly if we are going to go out and fight the world, this is
> the desired attitude, but I think it's more wishful thinking than reality.
>From Erich Auerbach, _Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature_ (1953), pp. 53 - 56:
...From the end of the first century of the Imperial Age something sultry and oppressive appears, a darkening of the atmosphere of life. It is umistakable in Seneca, and the somber tone of Tactitus' historical writing has often been noted. But here in Ammianus we find that the process has reached the stage of a magical and sensory dehumanization. That the sensory vividness of the events should profit from this paralysis of the human is indeed notable... the characteristics of Ammianus' style...are to be found all through his work. Everywhere human emotion and rationality yield to the magically and somberly sensory, to the graphic and gestural... And the background of it all is this: the persons treated live between a frenzy of bloodshed and mortal terror. Grotesque and sadistic, spectral and superstitious, lusting for power yet constantly trying to conceal the chattering of their teeth--so do we see the men of Ammianus' ruling class and their world. His strange sense of humor might also be mentioned... In this humor there is always an element of bitterness, of the grotesque, very often of something grotesquely gruesome and inhumanly convulsive. Ammianus' world is somber: it is full of superstition, blood frenzy, exhaustion, fear of death, and grim and magically rigid gestures; and to counterbalance all this there is nothing but the equally somber and pathetic determination to accomplish an ever more difficult, ever more desperate task: to protect the Empire, threatened from without and crumbling from within. This determination gives the strongest among the actors on Ammianus' stage a rigid, convulsive superhumanity with no possibility of relaxation...
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Jacob C.