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In the twelfth book of the Iliad, the Trojan hero Hector, dismissing the fears of Polydamas that inauspicious omens may presage a bad result in the impending battle, robustly assures him: “One omen is best, to fight for one’s country.”1 Hector was mistaken about the omen, since he himself was killed and Troy was doomed, but the duty to fight was not affected. Centuries later, the Roman poet Horace, in his Odes, goes a step further and asserts that “it is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country.”2 The Greek patris and the Latin patria, translated as country in the foregoing citations, are obviously related, and both derive from words meaning father. Both convey the meaning of paternal and ancestral home. In ancient Greek and Roman civilization, this usually meant a city-the normal unit of political identity, loyalty, and authority. A Greek or Roman was not merely a city-dweller; he was a citizen, in Greek polites, in Latin civis, with the right to share in the formation and conduct of the government of his city and a corresponding duty to fight and, if necessary, to die in its cause. In the Roman Empire, the unit of identity became larger and could extend from a city to a whole province or even to what we would nowadays call a country.
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