Asked about the monarchy, Prince Harry said his aim was to ‘modernise’ it. Not that any royal wanted to be king or queen, he said, but they would ‘carry out [their] duties at the right time. We are not doing this for ourselves but for the greater good of the people.’ It sounds as if he thinks he is doing us a favour.
The question of one’s communal obligations was first raised in the West in Homer’s Iliad (8th century bc). In a dangerous assault on the Greek camp, King Sarpedon, an ally of the Trojans from Lycia (S.E. Turkey), explained to his cousin Glaucus the reason for risking their lives in this way. He began by asking the crucial question: why in Lycia were they looked up to as gods, and given the best of everything? As a quid pro quo, he went on, for confronting the inferno of battle, which the Lycians agreed made them worth their privileges and concomitant glory.
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