Modern Use
"Vae victis" is the motto of the 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment (United States Army), B company, and was on a patch worn during deployment in Iraq '07-'08.
In popular culture, it is the battle cry of Kain, the anti-hero of the Legacy of Kain videogame series. The expression featured prominently in the 2009 movie Open Graves as a synonym for "game over" in a deadly board game, where a character quips that it is Latin for "losers weepers".
Read more about this topic: Vae Victis
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)