The Spartans valued their honour over their lives.
When the Spartan men went to make war, the Spartan women, the wives and the mothers, would see them off. These were women who knew this could be the last chance to look on the faces of their beloved children and cherished spouses, and these women would look those men in the eyes, and then they would point at the shields the men held. They did not beg the men not to go, they did not plead with them to stay, to think of the children, to let somebody else deal with it; instead they would intone the famous words “with this, or upon it”.
With this, or upon it. You see the great bronze shields of the Spartans were far too heavy to flee from a pursuing enemy with; you could of course drop the shield and run away, but if you dropped it to save your life, you could never return to Sparta, on pain of death. You either came back victorious, or your body came back carried aloft on your shield by your brothers in arms. With this, or upon it.
To put it simply, the women of that city were saying to their men, that it was better to die with their honour intact than to live a long life without it.
“Go, tell the Spartans, passerby
That here, obedient to her laws, we lie.”
– Epitaph on the Cenotaph of Thermopylae, recorded by Herodotus.
We who are the descendants of better men, those better men who bequeathed us so great an inheritance as True freedom, should not be so eager to throw it down just to live a while longer. Indeed, we may live for a time, but we will find ourselves exiled from our real home. We who are the descendants of better men should try to learn again what it takes in spirit and in faith to leave an epitaph. We must love what is left of our culture; we who will quite possibly be her last generation, we must be obedient to her True laws, even when those laws mean nothing to almost anyone else.
Of that other great honour culture of antiquity Chesterton said the following, and it has stuck with me, perhaps it will with you as well, “men did not love Rome because she was great. Rome was great because men loved her.”