War accounts are often about the action of war, the campaigns and courageous moments when will and might quiet doubt and conflict. Commendations in war are about such moments; and heroism, like that of the great Greek war heroes, marks deed and merit. Archaic Greek honor, timê, is a conspicuous good, what Agamemnon struts and fears he may have lost when his war bride is snatched at the opening of the Iliad and he demands back a comparable “prize of honor” from Achilles. War, for us moderns too, is often external, writ in decorations and stripes that are every bit as conspicuous as the Greek honor they imitate. Even “the face of battle,” as the historian John Keegan details it, is largely about the public military theater, its decorum, its rituals, its weaponry.

And yet, of course, war is also interior. There is the battlefield of the mind, the war within (see Sherman in press; for an account of the stoic