Michel de Montaigne: Since we find ourselves gathered here along this path - which, like so many other paths that the dead trod is not a conduit to any other place but a destination in itself, I propose that we should take up the issue of how the individual - when still alive - should best serve the state. I spent my own last years fighting to keep my native Bordeaux loyal to the French king for I believe that the greatest loyalty that any man - or woman I should say too, in observance of the present company - has is to king as the representative of God here on earth and as the protector. So I ask each one of you, how may we best be loyal?
Gilgamesh (a hero) speaks: I think that this question is easily answered: The greatest service that the individual may give to the state is that he face death willingly and bravely. To fight on the field of honor is the greatest expression of loyalty to our society, to our king. There is nothing that may compare with the willingness of a person to die for another - and not even to die for friend or family, but to die for strangers, to die in the name of a king that he will never even meet (http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM).
Penelope (a virtuous wife): I think that it is true that when our king, our nation, calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, we must do so. But such a sacrifice should be in many ways incidental to our relationship to the state, for you cannot build any great civilization upon the deaths of the greatest members of that society. Loyalty to the state is important, but Monsieur de Montaigne errs when he suggests that this is the only kind of loyalty. If we look to the story of the Odyssey, a tale that many people consider me to be the heroine of, we see that Odysseus is not a hero because he dies in glory on the field of battle. Rather he is a hero because he returns home. In my time we had a special term for such a story and the lessons that it contained about the responsibili...