Rajiv later connects the warrior's honor culture of the classical world to modern military honor codes. But it is important to note the slow historic shift from ancient Greek honor culture, through Roman virtus and pietas, on through the comparitively progressive Christian values of otherworldly, pacifist distinction (and in the ideal of the "Christian soldier," an ongoing tension of such virtue with knightly or aristocratic concepts of honor).

Journalist, editor and scholar James Bowman traces this distinction in his Honor: A History (2006), where he notes that 20th century classicist "Werner Jaeger remark[ed] that 'Homer and the aristocracy of his time believed that the denial of honour due was the greatest of human tragedies. The heroes treat one another with constant respect, since their whole social system depends on such respect. They have all an insatiable thirst for honour, a thirst which is itself a moral quality of individual heroes.' But honor is to them, as to Greek philosophers in rationalizing it, emphatically public...[thus setting] the Greeks apart from more strictly functional honor cultures that ruthlessly subordinated the individual to the larger society."