Give Her Back
Homer's Iliad · Priam, king of Troy, ten years into a siege fought over Helen, who lives under his roof
The war is ten years old. The fields outside the walls have been fought over so long that nothing grows on them, the city is living on what it can bring in past a blockade, and men who were boys when this started are dying now.
All of it is about one woman, who is inside these walls, and who came here with his son.
He could hand her back tomorrow. The elders on the wall say it out loud when they think he cannot hear, that no one should suffer this long for one face. The Greeks have said, more than once, that they came for her and would leave with her.
She is also a guest under his roof, which in his world is not a courtesy but a sacred obligation, and she did not ask to be brought here. When she stands beside him on the wall he tells her plainly that he does not blame her at all, that the gods did this, and asks her kindly to name the enemy captains for him.
His sons are dying in front of the gate. She is upstairs.
Keep her under your roof
Hand her back and end itOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Priam never gave her back, and Troy burned. He is the one character in the Iliad who refuses to be angry at the obvious target (in Book 3 he tells Helen to her face that he holds the gods responsible and not her), and that refusal is inseparable from the decision that killed everyone he had. He lost most of his fifty sons to it, including Hector. On the last night, Achilles' son killed another of them in front of him at the household altar and then cut his throat on the altar itself, and his body was left headless on the shore. The kindness on the wall and the ruin are the same act, and Homer never separates them.
The philosophers weigh in
Keep her"He is the only person in that poem who looks at her and sees a person rather than a cause of things. That is the rarest act there is, and it is not made less rare by what it cost."
Give her back"Count them. Ten years, a city, fifty sons, and on the other side of the ledger one guest's dignity, which she herself never asked him to defend at that price."