Like the ancient myths of Achilles, much of the Gilgamesh tradition promotes this ethos of the warrior, with its accompanying ideal of an individual, heroic, tragic death (cf. the death of Patroclus in the Iliad). Near the end of the Twelve Tablet version, Gilgamesh asks: Have you seen the one who fell in battle? Enkidu responds: I have seen him. His father and his mother hold him in high honor (ru na, lit. lift up his head), and his wife mourns his death. To this scene one may compare the death of Enkidu as a consequence of his battle with Huwawa. Gilgamesh commands not only the artisans to construct a monument but also the inhabitants of Uruk, together with all nature, to mourn his death and sing sweet songs in his honor. The various Sumerian versions of The Death of Gilgamesh contain many such praises and laments for the fallen hero and were probably used to bewail the deaths of other warriors. Such glorification of individual heroic death has, to be sure, a long legacy. Within Europe, it is found in the Greco-Roman warrior tradition. Thus, in addition to Homer, the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus (c. 625 bce) expressed the Code of the Citizen-Soldier who dies for the immortal glory awarded him by his polis, his parents and his posterity:

And he who so falls among the champions and loses his sweet life, so blessing with honor his polis, his father, and all his people, [] why, such a man is lamented alike by the young and the elders, and all his polis goes into mourning and grieves for his loss. His tomb is pointed out with pride, and so are his children, and his childrens children, and afterward all the race that is his. His shining glory is never forgotten, his name is remembered, and he becomes an immortal, though he lies under the ground

(trans. R. Lattimore) In The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux shows how the death of the individual citizen-soldier became in Athens an occasion to praise the city, and thereby to articulate a collective identity and values to which citizens should aspire. The epitaphios logos of the fifth and fourth centuries is a funeral oration delivered by an elected orator to celebrate the war-dead of that year. The best-known exemplar is attributed to Pericles after the first year of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides, Hist. 2.34-46). Pericles oration is an extended glorification of Athens as the city for which these citizens died, and it urges the living to keep up the good fight:

So died these men as became Athenians. You, their survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue For this offering of their lives made in common by them all they each of them individually received that renown which never grows old, and for a sepulchre, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall fall for its commemoration. (trans. R. Crawley)

This glorification of fallen warriors is a common feature of public cult and culture in most societies. Commemoration of the war dead occupies such a central place in public ritual and space (cemeteries and monuments) that it may be said that the glorification of sacrifice on the battlefieldof the willingness of men to die, and women to send their men to die, on the behalf of the stateis one of the chief expressions of statehood throughout history. Inasmuch as states must demand of their subjects a readiness to die, it is not surprising that bravery and courage are often elevated to the highest civic virtues. In periods when the fighting was performed by an elite few or aristocracy, courage and manliness was seen as the mark of nobility. As participation in battle broadenedand, in some places, as citizen-armies emergedcourage and manliness were democratized to a virtue to which all should aspire. The glorification of martial valor and the cult of the war-dead have provoked dissent and antipathy not only in modern society, but also in antiquity. Thus, Pericles funeral oration appears to be satirized in Platos Menexenus. For Egypt, the Parody of the Professions from Papyrus Lansing (dating probably back to the Middle Kingdom but widely transmitted as a school text thereafter) describes the woes of the soldier and contrasts them to the advantages of scribal life. On a campaign in the god-forsaken Levant, the officer exhorts his soldiers in the heat of battle: Quick, forward, valiant soldier! Win for yourself a good name! In the end, however, the commanders promise is empty: The soldier dies on the edge of the desert, and there is none to perpetuate his name. In contrast, the scribal profession, like a university career in former days, promises a more secure path to a good name. This text is distinctive because it demonstrates that scribes, when writing for themselves, could take issue with the practices of the state, such as the way the military promised a good name as an incentive to soldiers to risk their lives in battle. For Mesopotamia, various streams of the Gilgamesh tradition challenge the ethos of the hero seeking to make an enduring name for himself through martial valor. An Old Babylonian text depicting the encounter between Gilgamesh, who is still mourning for his fallen warrior-companion Enkidu, and the divine tavern-keeper Siduri, allows the latter to respond to Gilgamesh and the ethos he represents. As an alternative to the restlessness of the warriorwhose desire for an enduring name is matched by his non-reproductive sexual exploitsSiduri sets forth the enjoyment of a non-heroic life, one that seeks pleasure in food, wife, and child:

Gilgamesh, whither do you rove? The life you pursue you shall not find. When the gods created mankind, Mortality they appointed for mankind. Immortality in their own hands they held.

You Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full.

Day and night keep on being festive. Daily make a festival. Day and night dance and play.

Let your clothes be clean, Let your head be washed, in water you may bathe. Look down at the little one who holds your hand, Let a wife ever be festive in your lap. This is the lot (of humans).

(Meissner-Millard Tablet, iii.1-13) Tzvi Abusch offers a compelling interpretation of this text: The sexual act is [now]also a procreative act which brings into being the posterity and future signaled by the child. Progeny implies death But a child is also a form of immortality, and in our passage, this is the only kind of immortality that Gilgamesh can hope for. An enduring name is to be made not in the death of the warrior but rather in the birth of a namesake. This text may not be an explicit critique of the glorification of death on behalf of the state, as in the Egyptian Parody of Professions discussed above, yet rulers who depended on the willingness of their subjects to fight to the death and who promised them an immortal name in return for such sacrifice would certainly have been reluctant to embrace its sentiments.