Honoured

Sometimes we cannot know what a man is until after his death but then the honours come too late. Sometimes we honour the man whilst living but on his death those honours die with him. Sometimes we honour the man, whilst alive, mistakenly, not seeing his true hidden character until death has occurred. Sometimes the man is honoured towards the end of his life when it is though welcomed too late for him to reap the benefits. Sometimes the man is overlooked until years and years after his demise, only then is his worth recognised. Sometimes the man honoured, deceased or alive, has honours removed from him, as if the marriage between the subject and the loyalty of the public has been annulled. Sometimes the man honoured is accused and found guilty of heinous crimes; sometimes honours are removed due to the honoured man's views which the public or the times no longer chime with. The honoured man is publicly disgraced, stripped of any honour awarded him, living or dead. The man once honoured ruined, and his words denied a voice of their own, for they can't possibly stand apart, alone, from this once honoured man. Sometimes honours (and the man and the works awarded them) stand the test of time; sometimes they do not.
Death is the Judge. And the public are his Jury.
That honoured has a time: a time that fades and then returns, a time that goes away and doesn't come back, a time that lasts...and lasts...and lasts.
The man revived for good and bad. The man praised and criticised. The man brought back to life. Eternal life found through death.
This task - of revival, of endurance – often falls to historians, as well as any biographers who have a regard for the deceased, for they can give their subject a fair account, a fair hearing. They can balance the scales: this is the good, this is the ill. This is what this honoured man was like as a man; this is what he was like as a leader, or a Caesar. This is his history – family and civil and military career; these are some of his quotes. These are his deeds, and this is what the people thought. And here are some of the honours conferred upon him, during and after, followed perhaps by a description of his private life, his character and his domestic fortunes, from his youth down to his last day, in the manner, and set formula, of Suetonius, the Roman historian who wrote during the early imperial era of the Roman Empire, and whose most important surviving work is The Twelve Caesars. The man who, I presume, was honoured to be the secretary to Hadrian, who perhaps (I do not know) like the Caesars before him had inconsistent behaviours, and who in the giving of punishments could be mild or brutal, and who was also troubled more by his marriage and adopted children than by the governing of his wide empire.
But an honoured man is Father of His Country.
Though that country may not be a land, not in the sense it can be geographically placed, but a land of art in some form. A country each honoured man has made for himself and peopled with followers. In that land, he is honoured.

Picture credit: Victory, a Knight Being Crowned with a Laurel Wreath, Frank Dicksee (source: WikiArt).

Adapted from a journal entry, March 2021.