Valuing life in antiquity

From the comments to a PhDiva post on post-traumatic stress disorder in antiquity:

I sometimes wonder if modern scholars think that ancient people just didn't value their lives as much as we do since they did not shrink from casualties as high as 50,000 in a single military engagement or investment of an enemy city. But if you've ever looked at some of the poignant grave goods found in ancient burials or studied the reliefs on ancient funerary monuments I think you will conclude that we are only separated by time not by our shared human nature.

I think this is spot-on. I'm reminded of one of my favorite classical essays, Simone Weil's The Iliad or the Poem of Force:

The bitterness of [violent death] is offered us absolutely undiluted [in the Iliad]. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero's head no washed-out halo of patriotism descends….
Still more poignant -- so painful is the contrast -- is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the far-away, precarious, touching world of peace … [4]

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