He has a distant memory or experience
of capture, dislocation, enslavement.
Or he does not know what happened to his family.

In slave-served Athenian homes
or in Helot-served Sparta,
criticism of the use of captive women
as prizes of war,
is not a safe subject,
so he places it in a larger story of battle
and the heroes of the land where he lives.

[ weaving in the details of his own life]