When Warriors Come Home
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.
Such, at least, is Tennyson’s poetic distillation of Ulysses’ complaint. Ulysses’ complaint is the classic complaint of a thymotic human being having to submit or resubmit to the apparent constraints of civilian expectation. This is no more than living within civilization; yet, Ulysses denigrates his people as savages. Unlike himself, they have not seen and have not known a multitude of “cities of men / And manners, climates, councils, governments.” They’ve not had his lust for travel—or for warfare on the epic scale. For Ulysses and his ilk, it seems (to use the later words of Benjamin Constant) that the “unarmed class” will forever appear “vulgar and ignoble.” For them, “laws are superfluous subtleties, [and] the forms of social life just so many insupportable delays.”
Nevertheless, the “unarmed class” might view Ulysses himself as the savage in the equation. This possibility Ulysses seems not to have contemplated. Ulysses, not civilians, forces the distancing here: He neither communicates to his people the knowledge he’s gained, nor shows any interest in learning from them their needs, hopes, or fears. He is isolated, but this isolation is entirely self-imposed.
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/when-warriors-come-home/
