Thursday, November 20, 2014
An Unheroic Death
M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 65:
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Having praised his patron in life, and having in many cases, no doubt, become bound to him by real ties of affection, the poet would lament him also in death. Jordanes (Getica 257) gives a Latin paraphrase of the praise-song performed at Attila’s funeral. It recalled his achievements, and dealt diplomatically with the fact that he died ignobly of a nosebleed while slumbering in a drunken stupor. It was easier if the man died heroically in battle.
