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Since the 1958 crisis, lā ghāleb, lā maghlūb ("no victor, no vanquished") has been the mantra under which Lebanon's elites have turned from violence to other means (Hermez 5–8). Any resemblance to Gustave Flaubert's definition of "bataille" is presumably coincidental; Prime Minister Saeb Salam did not intend to cap "Il y a toujours deux vainqueurs, le battant et le battu" ("There are always two winners: the victors and the vanquished"; Flaubert 9). The politician's formula and the novelist's paradox could each serve in a pinch as definitions of chivalric tragicomedy, the genre that makes a pretty puzzle of epic's sorting of winners and losers. Within epic, the work of Mars may indeed threaten to confuse or erase distinctions:
Iam gravis aequabat luctus et mutua Mavors
funera; caedebant pariter pariterque ruebant
victores victique, neque his fuga nota neque illis.
(Aeneid 10.755–57)
Now the heavy hand of Mars was dealing out equal woe and mutual death.
Alike they slew and alike they fell—victors and vanquished, and neither
these nor those knew flight.
(Fairclough 225)
But this is a temporary problem of perspective: whom to denote victores and whom victi remains temporarily unsettled, but the symmetries ("pariter pariterque") will give way to hierarchies ("victores victique"). The defeated Turnus concedes in these terms: "vicisti et victum tendere palmas / Ausonii videre" ("You are the victor; and the Ausonians have seen me stretch forth my hand as the vanquished"; 12.936–37; Fairclough 367). Aeneas wins, the loser acknowledges it publicly and in his next (and next to last) breath concedes the princess bride. But Aeneas proves a sore winner: the sight of Pallas's baldric, worn by Turnus as a trophy, enrages him, and he murders the victus with the pretext that Turnus is a sacrificial victima on his lips (cf. "immolat," 12.949). The collocation is also prominent in Lucan's De bello civili, but a shift is under way. Pompey, enjoying a loser's prophetic privilege, articulates the divided spoliation even in advance of the war he prosecutes: "Omne malum victi, quod sors feret ultima rerum, / Omne nefas victoris erit" ("every woe that utter ruin brings will the vanquished suffer, and every horror will the conqueror commit"; 7.122–23; 379). Pompey cannot divine which side will suffer every ill ("omne malum")...