A moment in which a man feels the gods as close as his own breath. He reclaims that part of himself which he had earlier set aside. He hears his name called and comes forward to take his ticket. “Then this man returns, alive, out of the slaughter. He had fought in more than two score battles, since he was twenty wounds as ancient as thirty years stood forth, lurid upon his shoulders and calves, on his neck and across his steel-colored beard. Leonidas at that time was fifty-five years old. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.” The men listened, silent and solemn.
He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself.
“That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind. That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed. “When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his ‘ticket,’ in two parts.
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