Owen’s rejection of Horace’s dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as ‘the old lie’ prompts for me two questions: 1) Who exactly does Owen think lied? And is he justified in thinking this? 2) To what extent does Owen’s rejection of Horace’s words also amount to a critique of the classical tradition more generally, on the grounds that classical conceptions of war and heroism have proved utterly inadequate to the task of articulating the horrors of twentieth-century trench warfare? I argue that Owen’s main target is a number of poets, including Jessie Pope and Henry Newbolt, who recruited sanitized receptions of the classics to exhort young men to lay down their lives for their country. However, it is not clear that any of these, or Horace himself, is actually lying. Owen as a keen student of Roman and Greek culture employed classical themes in various poems. Although classical literature offered rich and nuanced conceptions of warfare, its emphasis on the supererogatory and named individual heroes meant that new conceptions of heroism needed to be developed in World War I to cope with the conditions of often anonymous industrialized trench warfare, in which even doing one’s duty could seem heroic.

中文翻译：

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谁说谎了？古典英雄主义与第一次世界大战

Owen 拒绝 Horace 的 dulce etdecorum est pro patria mori 作为“老谎言”向我提出了两个问题：1）Owen 到底认为谁在撒谎？他这样想有道理吗？2）欧文对贺拉斯的话的拒绝在多大程度上也相当于对古典传统的更普遍的批判，理由是古典战争和英雄主义概念已证明完全不足以阐明二十世纪堑壕战的恐怖? 我认为欧文的主要目标是一些诗人，包括杰西·波普和亨利·纽博特，他们招募了经过消毒的经典招待会，以劝告年轻人为国家献出生命。然而，尚不清楚这些人中的任何一个，或贺拉斯本人，是否真的在撒谎。欧文热衷于研究罗马和希腊文化，他在各种诗歌中运用了古典主题。尽管古典文学提供了丰富而细致入微的战争概念，但它对超名和具名英雄的强调意味着需要在第一次世界大战中发展新的英雄主义概念，以应对经常匿名的工业化堑壕战的条件，其中甚至一个人的职责可能看起来很英勇。