"Humans also start wars because of what Hobbes called ‘trifles’: ‘a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name’. Honour and glory are abstract concepts yet they can matter more than life itself. Alexander the Great, it is said, modelled himself on the great warrior Achilles, who would not suffer insults, and slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. Louis XIV, the Sun King, beggared France and inflicted years of war on Europe in a search for glory, not for his country but for himself. ‘I shall not attempt to justify myself,’ he said after starting a war with the Dutch. ‘Ambition and [the pursuit of] glory are always pardonable in a prince …’ Victory in battle, the acquisition of territory, the quest to put the king’s relatives on other European thrones, even if the wars that followed did not benefit France, were for Louis’s glory. Napoleon, who seems to have admired Louis’s great antagonist the Duke of Marl-borough more than the king, shared the hunger."