When should you accept defeat?

Sport is often merciless when it comes to imposing defeat on the loser. A boxer who has gone to the mat and has not gotten up after ten seconds has no choice but to admit defeat. He can always denounce the cheating or the injustice he suffered, but the fight will not resume. George Foreman, for example, claimed to have been drugged before facing Mohamed Ali in Congo, Meldrick Taylor criticized the referee for unfairly stopping his fight two seconds from the end and Jack Dempsey accused the referee of having counted the ten seconds very slowly for his opponent Tunney.

In football, let's not talk about it. As soon as the final whistle blows, the chips are down, but that doesn't stop the losers from finding excuses for the gap on the scoreboard: “There was a penalty”, “There was no offside”, “The red was not deserved”, “The added time was way too long”, etc.

On the real battlefield, the rules are not the same as in sport. The two belligerents do not always box in the same category – David can face Goliath. There is also no time limit, and in the event of a draw, no penalty session to decide between the two camps – hence the fact that some wars sometimes last more than a hundred years.

Take the Battle of Marathon as an example. In a few hours, the Athenians defeated the Persian army, which had twelve times as many soldiers. The Persians fled to look for a second landing place, but, faced with the failure of this maneuver, they preferred to give up on invading Athens and turned back. For lovers of freedom, this battle is a great triumph, but did not the Persians leave a bitter taste when they returned home? That of defeat too easily accepted?

This painful return home was recounted by the playwright Aeschylus, while historians have sought to explain the Persians' decision.

Defeat