Look,
your people dying around the city, the steep walls,
dying in arms – and all for you, the battle cries
and the fighting flaring up around the citadel.
You’d be the first to lash out at another – anywhere –
you saw hanging back from this, this hateful war.
– Homer
The Iliad, Book 6, lines 386-391. Hector scolds his brother Paris because he has been missing from the battlefield. Using metaphorical language he talks of fighting flaring all over the city as though it were a fire, and people dying everywhere. Yet Paris is nowhere to be seen, instead Hector finds him at home with Helen and her handmaidens.