More than meaningless etiquette

Among the Germanic Goths, a man married a woman from within his own community. When women were in short supply, he captured his bride-to-be from a neighboring village. The future bridegroom, accompanied by a male companion, seized any young girl who had strayed from the safety of her parental home. Our custom of a best man is a relic of that two-man, strong-armed tactic; for such an important task, only the best man would do. From this practice of abduction, which literally swept a bride off her feet, also sprang the later symbolic act of carrying the bride over the threshold of her new home.

A best man around A.D. 200 carried more than a ring. Since there remained the real threat of the bride's family attempting to forcibly gain her return, the best man stayed by the groom's side throughout the marriage ceremony, alert and armed. He also might serve as a sentry outside the newlywed's home. Of course, much of this is German folklore, but it is not without written documentation and physical artifacts. For instance, the threat of recapture by the bride's family was perceived as so genuine that beneath the church altars of many early peoples - including the Huns, the Goths, the Visigoths, and the Vandals - lay an arsenal of clubs, knives, and spears.

The tradition that the bride stand to the left of the groom was also more than meaningless etiquette. Among the Northern European barbarians (so named by the Romans), a groom placed his captured bride on his left to protect her, freeing his right hand, the sword hand, against sudden attack.

from Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things by Charles Panati, 1987

For diplomatic reasons of his own

The historians still argue about the exact whereabouts of the ensuing massacre, and over the last several hundred years they have deployed the meager literary and archeological remains - old manuscripts, gold and silver coins found buried in peat moss, shards of Roman armor, the local place names of Knochenbahn (Bone Lange) and Mordkessel (The Kettle of Death) - to suggest as many as 700 theories about the likely point of attack. Some historians place Varus's column among the upper tributaries of the Ems River, others place it nearer the rivers Lippe or Weser, but all the authorities agree that the Romans died like penned cattle. ...

Varus committed suicide. So did every other officer who knew it was the practice of the Cherusci to nail their vanquished but still living enemies to the trunks of sacred oak trees.

Arminius sent Varus's head to Maroboduus, a barbarian king in Bohemia on whom he wished to make a favorable impression, and Maroboduus, for diplomatic reasons of his own, forwarded the head to Rome. Dio Cassius reports the effect as memorable, Augustus so shocked by the utter destruction that he "rent his garments and was in great affliction," and Gibbon remarks on the emperor's consternation with his familiar irony, "...Augusts did not receive the melancholy news with all the temper and firmness that might have been expected from his character."

...

The Treaty of Versailles returned the administration of Illyricum to the incompetence of the Balkan tribes, and I can imagine both Gibbon and Augustus comparing the foolishness of Woodrow Wilson to the stupidity of Publius Quictilius Varus. ... Confronted with the chaos of unregulated capital markets - also with rogue states and renegade ideologies, with war in Africa, civil unrest in Judea, tyrants in Parthia and Leptis Minor, too much cocaine crossing the frontier near Chalcedon, too many poisons in the Mediterranean sea - the would-be makers of a postmodern peace dream of Gibbon's "supreme magistrate, who by the progress of knowledge and flattery was gradually invested with the sublime perfections of an Eternal Parent and an Omnipotent Monarch." Augustus would have been pleased to grant them an audience.

- from "Furor Teutonicus: the Teutoburg Forest, AD 9" by Lewis Lapham

His only escape

Until now repairing old accordions and playing them had been his only escape.

- from Switch, William Bayer, 1984, pg. 81

Even in the endless stories about college professors or advertising writers or housewives

In comedy, heroes go through all the terrible things that we fear or face in our own lives - but they teach us to look at disaster with enough distance that we can laugh at it. In non-comic fiction, the hero shows us what matters, what has value, what has meaning among the random and meaningless events of life. In all stories, the hero is our teacher-by-example, and if we are to be that hero's disciple for the duration of the tale, we must have awe: We must know that the hero has some insight, some knowledge that we ourselves do not understand, some value or power that we do not yet have.

This is true even in that great bastion of extreme realism, the academic/literary genre (those who refer to their genre as "serious literature" - as if the rest of us are just kidding). One reason why the academic/literary genre usually reaches such a small fragment of the reading public is because in their pursuit of seriousness, they have beaten down the Romantic impulse wherever it rears its head. But the Romantic impulse is still there. Even in the endless stories about college professors or advertising writers or housewives entering midlife crises and trying to make sense of their senseless lives, the heroes always seem to face some uncommon problems, always seem to be extraordinarily contemplative and perceptive, always seem to reach a moment of epiphany in which they pass along a key insight to the reader. Despite their seeming ordinariness, these heroes always turn out to be extraordinary, once we truly understand them. ...

What really makes Loman [from Death of a Salesman] a figure of awe is that he expected himself and his sons to be great, that he measured himself against such high standards that, by trying to meet them, he became exactly the Romantic hero that Arthur Miller was trying to avoid. He was one of the knights of the round table who failed to find the Holy Grail - but he was nobly searching for it nonetheless.

- from Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card, 1988, pg. 96

The rest of the time the "heroes" just talk about their feelings!

In the United States, the TV series Survivor is often credited (or blamed) for turning reality shows into a craze. ... Audiences in Homeric Greece, in the Roman Empire or in medieval Europe would have found the idea familiar and highly attractive. Twenty challengers go in - only one hero comes out. "Wonderful!"a Homeric prince, a Roman patrician or a crusader knight would have thought to himself as he sat down to watch. "Surely we are about to see amazing adventures, life-and-death battles and incomparable acts of heroism and betrayal. The warriors will probably stab each other in the back, or spill their entrails for all to see."

What a disappointment! The back-stabbing and entrails-spilling remains a mere metaphor. Each episode lasts about an hour. Out of that, fifteen minutes are taken up by commercials for toothpaste, shampoo and cereals. Five minutes are dedicated to incredibly childish challenges, such as who can throw the most coconuts into a hoop, or who can eat the largest number of bugs in one minute. The rest of the time the "heroes" just talk about their feelings! He said she said, and I felt this and I felt that. If a crusader knight had actually been able to sit down and watch Survivor, he would probably have grabbed his battleaxe and smashed the TV out of boredom and frustration.

- from Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, pg. 242 (2017).