However much he longed to go home after ten years of warfare in Asia, Ulysses the warrior-hero never much wanted to be home. More than the regular warfighter, kings, when home, must submit to certain niceties of social convention. But how dull it is to pause, to make an end. Home is, by nature, too fixed, too ordinary; staid. As tho’ to breathe were life! Not for the wily wanderer is the slow civilizational process, of “thro’ soft degrees” subduing a “rugged people” that “hoard, and sleep, and feed,” to “the useful and the good.” Warriors who’ve “drunk delight of battle” with their peers on exotic foreign fields, striving against gods, only uneasily submit to “this labour”—the frequently thankless work of fulfilling “common duties,” and so taming into peace a savage people.
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