earthmoss

• 12: The Tray Game of What is Not – The Via Negativa – The Ring of Gyges
• 13: The Arms Race Begins War in Reality – Not as a Story of Glory
• 14: How to Hold Power with or without Gods authority
• 15: Back to Reality – The Three Pigeons meet the Three Muses
• 16: The Back-Ground to the Peloponnesian War and its Players
• 17: My Enemies Enemy is My Friend – The Persian War necessitates – The Delian League
• 18: Karma – Self-Interest versus state-interest, the Pupil of Socrates Goes to Persia
• 19: Bad-Faith
• 20: Spartan bad-faith

Note: When displayed, this icon indicates ‘Writer’s Voice’ style in text.

01: Who is the Fairest of One of All?

The Race of Gold, the Race of Silver, the Race of Bronze: Zeus made them, then despaired of them. The Race of Iron was no different. Their crops drained the goodness from the land, their fishing plundered the sea, and their cities weighed heavy on the Earth’s surface. They cut down tress for firewood, and they made more noise than a pack of apes in a bucket.

So Zeus resolved to reduce the number of mortals on the Earth. All it would take would be a single golden apple and the help of the Immortals- though he told them nothing of what he was planning. He gave the  golden apple to Eris, god of strife, and Eris took it to a wedding.

All the gods and goddesses were there, the naiads and nereids, the dryads, the satyrs, and the centaurs. Dionysus had brought the wine, and no one begrudged the bride and groom an eternity of happiness. They had left at home their petty rivalries, and brought instead their sweetest smiles to the wedding.

No one saw Eris take out the apple and drop it casually to the ground. But everyone saw the apple.

For the fairest, said the inscription.

“How kind”, said Hera, smiling round her in a queenly way.

“Oh, but surely- it’s meant for me”, said Aphrodite, goddess of love, brushing her hair back coyly. “I mean, I presume…”

“You presume too much. You always did”, said Athena, putting her foot on the apple so that Aphrodite should not pick it up.

“I claim the apple.”

The wedding guests murmured their own opinions. Then they all began to quarrel about who was fairest.

“Zeus the Shining shall decide!” declared Hera, already thinking how best to make up her husband’s mind for him.

But Zeus refused. “Judge between my wife and my daughters?

Impossible! Ask a mortal to choose. He’ll be impartial. And let the most handsome decide the most fair. Which is the handsomest youth on Earth, would you say?”

On that no one disagreed. In every alcove and bower, goddesses, nymphs and mermaids- even the bride- sighed the name “Paris!”

Paris was the Prince of Troy – an alarmingly good-looking boy who had not yet fallen in love. Hermes, messenger of the gods, was sent to fetch him. One moment he was alone, fishing on the seashore, the next he was blinking at the brightness of the Cloudy Citadel. Before him sat the three most powerful goddesses in the word, carefully arranging the drapery of their gowns. “Look, don’t touch,” Hermes whispered in his ear. “And above all, Paris, listen. It may be to your advantage.”

As Paris passed in front of Hera’s throne with its golden eagles, she bared her teeth in a smile and whispered, “Decide in my favour and I shall make you the ruler of empires.”

“Thank you”, said Paris. “How kind.”

As he passed in front of Athena, she struck the pavement of Heaven with the butt of her spear so loudly that Paris started. “I see it now”, she whispered, glaring at him with her solemn grey eyes. “I, goddess of battle, whispered, glaring at him with her solemn eyes. “I, goddess of battle, see the crown of a dozen glorious victories round your brow! What battles won’t I win for the man who proclaims me fairest of all!”

“Thank you”, said Paris, and gave her such a dazzling smile that she dropped her helmet.

By the time Paris reached Aphrodite, goddess of love, he was learning the rules of the game. “What will you give me if I award the apple to you?” he said.

“What every mortal man wants most”, she murmured, puckering her fulsome lips. “The love of the loveliest woman on Earth.”

Paris did not hesitate. He laid the apple in Aphrodite’s lap… then ran for his life as sandals and spears came flying after him.

So Aphrodite won the apple, and she was true to her word. She gave Paris the love of the most lovely woman on Earth: Helen. There was something she failed to mention, however: Helen was already married.

But then, that was Zeus’s plan. When fair Helen laid eyes on Paris, she fell in over instantly and completely. Her husband was forgotten: all questions of right and wrong dissolved as she fled across the sea to the home of her handsome prince. As she fled to Troy.

In his rage and grief, her husband called on the King of Greece for help. The King called on his friends and allies to join forces with him and go after Helen- to make Paris and Troy pay for stealing her away. An army of thousands mustered their fleets of fast black ships, and prayed to the gods for success.

Now the gods, too, took sides.

“Oh yes,” said vengeful Hera, “I’ll help defeat Paris.”

“No”, said Aphrodite, “Paris must have his Helen. I’m for Troy.”

“So am I!” said Apollo. “There’s a princess in Troy I’m particularly fond of.”

“Well, I shan’t rest till Troy is in ruins and the Trojans face down in the sea”, said surly Poseidon. “I asked them for wages for building their precious walls. They told me they had a war to pay for, no money to spare. I’ll make them pay for that.”

For Athena the choice was harder. Troy, like Athens, was dedicated to her- its greatest treasure was a statue of her which the Trojans called the Luck of Troy. And yet Paris must pay …

All the mortal world took sides in the Wars of Troy. And above them the gods, too, ranged themselves for or against the Trojans or the Greeks.

Zeus looked down from his seat of power and watched the Earth bristle with columns of marching men. The nights twinkled with the fires of blacksmiths forging weapons. Shiploads of horses rode on the high seas.

It was his chessboard, all set up for the Great Game. With the unwitting help of the gods, the Wars of Troy would go on for years, killing men by the hundred, by the tens of hundreds- and women and children too. The Earth would be eased of weight of human feet, the fields and woodlands left fallow. Everywhere would be washed clean in a tide of blood.

It was the perfect plan.”  (McCaughrean:2005:86-91)

“A third, suddenly re-orientating view of these relationships appears in of all places, the Old Testament. Just at the moment the Greek King Attarissiya was raiding Anatolia and Cyprus, in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, and establishing settlements which archaeologists have been uncovering in the last few decades, the cities around Gaza in southern Canaan were taken and occupied by people whom the Jews called the ‘Philistines’. They had been drawn to the markets and the grassy downland of southern Palestine, where beautiful pear and almond orchards surround the mudbrick villages and where cattle and horses can graze on the clover and young barley of the open plains. Their lands- Philistia- are now the gentle, hilly farmland of south-western Israel. ‘Philistine’ in Hebrew means ‘the invader’ or ‘the roller-in’, and from the style of their rock-cut chamber tombs, the pottery they made once they had arrived in Canaan and from the form of their own names, it looks as if these Philistines, arriving from out of the west, were Mycenaean Greeks, cruising the Mediterranean seas, searching out new lands, ready to fight whoever they found there.

The war in Canaan between Greek and Hebrew was long and grievous, but at its symbolic climax, as depicted in the First Book of the Prophet Samuel, the readers are treated to one of the most hostile depictions of Homeric warrior culture ever written. The Philistines had taken up position on a hillside at Socoh in the rolling agricultural country of the Judean foothills, a few miles west of Bethlehem. A champion come out of the Philistine camp, a man called Goliath, to challenge the Israelites drawn upon the opposite hillside.

Goliath is a huge, clumsy, half-ludicrous, threatening and contemptible figure

David fights Goliath.

He is, even in the earliest and least exaggerated manuscripts, six feet nine inches tall, wearing the full equipment of the Homeric hero: a bronze helmet on his head, bronze armour on his chest, bronze greaves on his legs and carrying a sword and dagger of bronze…..

Massively over-equipped, a cross between Ajax and Desperate Dan, Goliath stands there shouting across the valley at his enemies:

‘Why do you come out to do battle, you slaves of Saul? I am the Philistine champion; choose your man to meet me. If he can kill me in fair fight, we will become your slaves; but if I prove too strong for him and kill him, you shall be our slaves and serve us. Here and now I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man’, said the Philistine ‘and we will fight it out’.

The front row stolidity of the Greek, his philistinism, his need to spell everything out, to put his own self-aggrandisement into endlessly self-elevating words- all of that comes out of Goliath like the self-proclaiming spout of a whale. But this is exactly what in the Iliad one Greek warrior after another liked and needed to do. Shouted aggression, the Homeric haka, was the first act of any Greek battle.

‘When Saul and the Israelites heard what the Philistine said, they were shaken and dismayed.’ It was not in them to make the symmetrical response- you shout at me, I’ll shout at you- which is one of the foundations of the Homeric system. …

When Saul, the king of the Jews, finally accepts that David might respond to the challenge of the Greek giant … it is a version of the Homeric arming of the hero and the single-combat meeting of warriors, the monomachia between Paris and Menelaus, Hector and Ajax, Achilles and Hector, which anchors the whole of the Homeric experience. But this is more like a parody of it than a borrowing. The unprotected boy, with his shepherd’s bag and stick, crouches down in the brook running between the two embattled hillsides, and with his fingers in the water, picks out the plain smoothness of five good stones. No love affair with bronze, no sharpness, no self-enlargement. In everything David does, and in every lack he suffers, there is one implied and overwhelming fact: the god of the Israelites. …

This is the view of the Greek heroism given us by the Hebrew scriptures: weak and bombastic compared to the clarity and strength of the pious mind.” (Nicolson:2014:223-27)

“Poetry itself supports that idea. Across the whole of the Indo-European world, echoes and repetitions of shared attitudes and phrases continually resurface. Scholars have pursued Homeric phrases through an entire continent of poetry and have come up with a set of attributes which seem to stem from those early beginnings.

02: Homer’s idea that poetry brings ‘undying fame’ to the hero is not his at all

It appears in exactly that formula in Iranian and northern Indian epics. Heroes with kleos or klutos, the words for fame or glory, built into their names are known in Greek (Herakles means ‘the fame of Hera’,..) but also in Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Norse, Frankish and Celtic. …

Poetry and war are joined in this: both are fame businesses. The same epithets are attached to these fame-seeking heroes across the whole enormous continent: he was ‘man-slaying’ in Ireland and Iran, and ‘of the famous spear’ in Greece and India. He stood as firm and immovable in battle as a mighty tree in Homer, Russian and Welsh. Like the Greeks, Irish heroes raged like a fire. In Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Vedic and Irish, that rage could emerge as a flaming flaring from the hero’s head. Proto-Indo-Europeans saw the great man as a torch. Across the whole of Eurasia his weapons longed for blood, even while this bloodseeking vengeance-wreaker was to his own family and clan, wherever they might be, the ‘herdsman of his people’ and their protective enclosure. There were no city walls in this world; the hero himself was their protection and their strength.” (Nicolson:2014:170)

“Whether it is Victorian India, Tenochtitlan, medieval Bohemia, shogun Japan, the world of The Leopard or Bronze Age Anatolia, this is the air breathed in any court, dense with rank, title, glamour, precedence, and surely a hint, here and there, of what is called, even now in palaces, Red Carpet Fever: excitement at being connected with the royal.

That self-importance surfaces in Homer in the overbrimming superciliousness of the Phaeacians, condescendingly welcoming the ship-wrecked seafarer Odysseus to Alcinous’s regal halls. The Phaeacians ‘never suffer strangers gladly’. They don’t like him much, nor he them. Even here, as he is accepting their hospitality, Homer gives him the traditional epithet he shares with Achilles and Ares the god of war: ptoloporthos Odysseus- city-ravaging Odysseus.

They guess he might be captain of a ship full of men who are prēktēres- an interesting word, with its origins in the verb for ‘to do’, meaning that Odysseus comes over to the Phaeacians not as a nobleman who can play athletic games but as the leader of a band of practical, pragmatic practisers of things, merchants in other words, dealers, or as Robert Fagles translated it ‘profiteers’, freebooters who blurred the boundary between trader and pirate.

Nothing irks Odysseus more powerfully than the suggestion that he is merely a sea-robber or tradesman. Is he not a hero? Has he not fought at Troy? Has he not suffered at sea? But the suspicion won’t go away. When he and his crew find themselves facing Polyphemus the Cyclops, the same idea recurs. ‘Strangers, who are you?’ the Cyclops asks them. ‘Where do you come from, sailing over the sea-ways? Are you trading? Or are you roaming wherever luck takes you over the sea? Like pirates?’

Perhaps this is a reflection in Homer of a reality which the poems do their best to conceal. Odysseus and the other Greek chieftains might think of themselves as noble kings, the fit subjects for epic. Homer does its best to portray them as that. The civilized states of the Mediterranean saw them as anything but. What were they but the ‘much-wandering pirates’ Odysseus sometimes talks about, taking what they could from the wealth of the world around them, hugely status-rich in their own eyes, virtually status-less in the eyes of those they were coming to rob? It is exactly how Odysseus himself describes his behaviour as he leaves Troy. ‘From Ilium the wind carried me’, he tells the Phaeacians, ‘and brought me to Cicones.’ This was a tribe, allied to the Trojans, who lived at Ismarus on the shore of the Aegean, somewhere north of Samothrace. ‘There I destroyed the city’, he goes on quite straightforwardly, using a term to mean that nothing was left. ‘and killed the men. And from the city took their wives and many possessions, and divided it among us, so that as far as I could manage, no man would be cheated of an equal share.’ It is one of the moments in which Homer coolly reveals the limitation of Odysseus’s mind. Our hero thinks he is telling his hosts how excellently he behaved, ensuring that unlike Agamemnon he did not mistreat his men. But he is blind to the significance of the actions preceding this exemplary fairness, the piratical destruction of an entire city and the enslaving of its women.

Extract from Apocalypse Now, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979.

The same uncertain status of the pirate-king lies behind one of Odysseus’s most famous sleights of hand. He and his men are suffering at the hands of the Cyclops. The Cyclops wants to know who Odysseus is. In his answers, he says that his name is ‘Nobody’.

The Greek for that is either outis, which sounds a little like Odysseus if spoken by a drunk or slack-jawed giant; or mētis, which also sounds like the Greek word for cleverness, craftiness, skill or a plot. When Polyphemus calls for help, the other Cyclopes ask who has hurt and blinded him. ‘Nobody!’ he answers, or ‘Cleverness!’ and so his friends- and the audience- can only laugh.” (Nicolson:2014:217-9)

The Cyclops is a one eyed creature who can see the nature of his own death as revelation, when being seen by Odysseus it is the Gorgon eye of prophecy that shows Odysseus his own death through this way of life, but Odysseus uses his cunning to cheat this fate, and that is what the capitalist market does as it watches the seeds of war being nourished in the wake of its piratical plunder that it likes to believe is trade but in fact is war in sheeps clothing, the wolf at the door.

Odysseus’ men go on to be trapped by luxury and desire and are turned into pigs by Calypso, who promises Odysseus perpetual youth and immortality. Calypso means the hidden one, and of course that hidden one is the ego within who believes in its own immortality, the denial of death, that allows its plundering perpetual youthful infantile desires to become the reality by which it lives, as a pig.

03: Greece

“Cretan religion was centred on a female deity, the ‘Lady of the Beasts’ (Potnia Theron), shown as a goddess standing between two rampant lions, and possibly also connected with an elaborate statuette of a woman in the act of grasping two snakes. We have evidence of rites of consecration and sacred symbols of sovereignty, horn-shaped objects and the sign of the two-headed axe, from which the name of labyrinth (from ‘labyrs’ axe) was given by the Greeks to the Cretan palace. …

At the head of the Cretan empire was the Minos, who ruled from Cnosses after establishing himself as the leader of the old tribal organisations and other local dynasties. The names and titles of the Minos, his priestly offices and divine attributes reveal the sacred character of the monarchy. Greek tradition, referring to the Minotaur, seems to imply an identification of the King with the bull-God, and we might infer from this a time when the Minos was believed to be an immanent god, like the Pharaoh. However, more precise and complete evidence than the confused Greek legends has made it clear that the bull-God was an anthropomorphic manifestation of a celestial being, the Zeus of the classical world, and the Minos was thought of as his chosen protégé, delegate and friend.

So it is clear that the Minoan monarchy had characteristics in common with those of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, rather than with the Pharaonic system. This is made more clear by the fact that the King held in his office not for life, but for nine years only, a term which could be renewed if the pact between the Minos and God were renewed in a complex form of mystical communication between them which took place on a mountain-top. This periodic investiture emphasized the subordinate position of the Cretan monarchy to the will of an aristocracy of priests and army officers.” (Levi:1955:28-9)

“So clearly, legitimacy, in Crete, had a religious foundation in the sense that it was by God’s will that the King held power, and man’s duty was to obey the laws because they conformed with the will of God. But the monarch was always a man, and his position as the elect of God set him above other men without changing his nature. His inferiors in dignity and power received their authority from him, and with it part of his dignity: if the King wore three necklaces as a sign of his sovereignty, the commander of the armed forces wore one.

The power of Crete crumbled very soon after it reached its greatest splendour, because the Greeks who settled in the islands off the Aegean shores learnt navigation from the Cretans and added to this skill the vigour of their tactics in war. This was the Mycenean-Achaean civilisation, until recently known only through excavations, chiefly in the Peloponnese, while Homeric tradition, which had influenced the whole of classical Greek culture, was concentrated on a single episode: the Trojan wars.” (Levi:1955:30)

“In centres of population they built palaces, unlike the Cretan in being fortified, so that perhaps they should be called castles, with elaborate monuments and tombs. Their political organisation was based on the populated centres, villages or cities, over which there ruled a local overlord, the ‘Basileus’, who held authority from the ‘Anax’ or supreme overlord, whose position was like that of Agamemnon in Homer: Lord of the heights of Mycanae. Land was distributed on a graded system of ownership depending on social class. At the top was the warrior class, who were the aristocrats, followed by the local administrators, then the priests, the foot-soldiers, and finally the manual workers.” (Levi:1955:31)

“The Achaeans imitated the Cretans in the building of fleets; they drove Cretan influence out of the mainland and then, around 1450 BC, they occupied Crete. The Indo-European type of military order had its period of ascendancy; in about 1270 BC, after a long war, the Achaeans captured and destroyed Troy, and after twenty years occupied Cyprus, taking over the copper mines on the island. … About twelve years later a new race, the Dorians, fell on the Peloponnese from the north, destroyed Mycenae, and superseded the Achaeans as rulers of the Greek peninsula.” (Levi:1955:32)

“The civilisation of the new Greek invaders was founded on the pre-eminence of the warrior caste; their leaders wear their arms even in the grave. They lie enclosed in breastplates, shields as tall as themselves lie beside them, and of their life apart from war they have left only records of hunting, the fighting man’s amusement in times of peace. In such a society, as in Persia, the leader’s position above the rest depended on his superiority in war, and religion itself could only mark a military leader as one whom the gods considered their friend and worthy of their aid.” (Levi:1955:33)

“Only the belief that they needed the aid of the gods to gain victory linked the political life of a society like the Mycenaean with religion: the warrior-king of the Mycanaean era based his claim to power on his might and success as a fighter. He ruled not because the gods wanted him as their delegate, high priest and supreme judge, speaking with divinely inspired truth and justice, but because he was the most valiant and successful of the warriors, whom the gods assisted by allowing him the military supremacy which was the origin of his power.

This, then, was a world of ethical, political and religious concepts quite different from those of Babylon and Assyria, and although the same fundamental characteristics had existed in the Hittite and Persian monarchies, the pressure of tradition and the influence of the Asiatic environment had led these to lose their original Indo-European characters, and to assume a fideistic and theocratic form.” (Levi:1955:34-5)

“The fall of Crete, in whose empire naval and commercial activities had been the most important, the return of piracy, and lack of security and the end of political unity all put the towns and villages of Greece at the mercy of the army, which defended and at the same time subjugated them. … The ordinary people continued to live in the world bequeathed to them by Crete, clinging to such religious beliefs as the divinity of the creative power of nature, venerated in the cult of the Minoan and Mediterranean mother-goddess, the Great Mother or Potnia.

The cult of physical perfection was, however, something new, arising from the ideals and aims of the military Mycenaean state. The Homeric poems reflect the life of the Achaean overlords of that time: the mighty warrior caste, now securely dominant, aspiring to a nobler state, struggling to secure for itself the position that had belonged to the Minoan monarchy….

The Achaean form of unity of fighting groups was the factor that determined Greece’s position in the eastern Mediterranean

The Trojan expedition, and the colonising journeys of the Homeric heroes who returned from Troy, remained afterwards in men’s minds as a nostalgic memory of a happy and glorious time, and proof of what the Greeks could have done if they had succeeded in co-ordinating their forces and had not dissipated them in brawls and raids on one another. In the Mycenaean-Homeric period the Greeks gained complete control of the Aegean and a firm foothold on the Ionian coast, strengthened by the Trojan victory.

As a result of the prosperity brought by their succession to the Minoan naval empire, the population of Greece began to find the supremacy of the warrior groups intolerable. The Achaean king was the prisoner of his army, and could only put forward policies which cited their interests as well as his own; he could not reform or extend the basis of his position.

In the richer, more civilized communities with greater resources, the groups which were just rising in the social scale were quicker to supplant the military upper class, and at the same time caused the downfall of the Mycenaean-Homeric type of monarchy, whose decline was due to the almost total disappearance of the fleets and of trade between the cities of Greece.

The aristocratic caste in its decline preferred to live on its stores of booty, and came to lack adventurers and active soldiers, while the naval power of the Phoenicians and the Greeks of the Ionian colonies created such competition that the mainland Greeks could no longer hold the command of the sea. At the beginning of the historical era in Greece, navigation was considered an occupation far inferior to the life of a small-scale farmer.

The development of this new rural capitalism completely transformed a society of semi-nomadic fighters into a state ordered in the interests of the landowners, who became the sole, or most important, means of production wealth for the community.

Following the social transformation, whose effectiveness varied from city to city, came a varied, but less rapid transformation of political life; centuries separated the evolution of power from the military to the landowning aristocracy in the different regions of Greece.

Whereas the old military aristocracy had enjoyed collecting gold and treasure, hunting, owning fine armour, the new land-owning class left to others the job of looking after their lands, and preferred to live in the city, imitating the wealthy classes of Asia Minor in their passion for the arts and for the cultured life; at one time military success and the booty of war were a man’s title to honour; now the new upper classes, with a different idea of human perfection, preferred athletic and intellectual prowess.

But the political situation remained in some ways unchanged. Military strategy still depended on the warriors in their chariots, cavalry and heavy-armed infantry. All demanded a great deal of capital, for armour and for buying and stabling the horses, and so only the rich could provide the army that the state needed….

So their wealth gave the rich not merely control over essential products, but also the burden and privilege of military duty, the only way of safeguarding the community. Political and social power gradually came into the hands of those on whom the state depended for survival, and the closer the connection between the two, the more efficient was the state organisation….

Added to this was the bloodtie, which created a community with a tribal leader, ancestors, religion, and which, for reasons inherent in the religion, imposed duties and social relationships which cut across economic barriers. His place in the tribe determined a man’s rights and status, imposed obligations, created ties and bonds of solidarity according to religious custom.

So the laws of religion and consanguinity limited the social domination of the richest, and the political and military domination of the strongest. Public life remained based on the Indo-European principle of entrusting the government to the assembly of arms-bearers, and in transforming the military into the aristocratic government, leaving unchanged the powers of the council of elders. The arms-bearers believed, and wished it to be generally believed, that the gods had bestowed on them the right to supremacy. The landed aristocracy, however, had the authority to govern and make laws only when it was sure of a divine will guiding its decisions, and felt that the community was equally sure of the existence of divine laws to which its own legislation conformed.

This was the only justification of the privileges of the few. The masses saw the rich and aristocratic as superior human beings

The Greeks were used to the idea of heroes; human beings whose especial virtues made them closer to the gods than other men were, beings whose beauty, power, influence and cultivation made even their physical appearance different from that of other men. The aristocrats had curled and perfumed hair, elegantly trimmed beards, wore trinkets of gold, embroidered and quilted robes, armour which was more the work of the goldsmith than of the blacksmith. They lived in luxurious houses, competed in horse-races and athletic contests, accompanied their singing on musical instruments, and seemed to be so favoured by the gods that they need only concern themselves with being agreeable and living glorious and happy lives. The petty tradesman or farmer, who shivered with cold beneath a cloak that barely covered him, who lived on a few figs or olives and coarse bread, burdened with debts, without education or any of the comforts of life- how could he have failed to imagine that the aristocracy was a race nearer to the gods than to himself, a race which was divinely predestined to organise the state and everything in it to suit itself?

Thus religion became an instrument of power for the aristocrats, as it had been for the Homeric kings. But it also limited their power, for they were bound by it to observe the traditional principles of rights and obligations which could not be transgressed without arousing feelings of sacrilege. …

To make sure that in decision of general importance the Greeks should be guided by the will of the gods to act according to the universal principles of right and justice, Greek society had its characteristic institution, the oracle.

In Egypt the manifestation of the will of God was the word of the Pharaoh-God; in Mesopotamia the word of the delegate of the gods. In the Indo-European world there was no such direct way of discovering God’s will, and men had to use divination to understand the signs sent by God. Such practices were already known to the Hittites, and by various paths had reached the Etruscans.” (Levi:1955:35-41)

“Oracles were a constant feature of Greek life and religion, in common with other Indo-European races. A typical oracular institution was the one at Delphi, whose cult of Apollo had deep Dionysiac roots. The influence of the Asiatic Sun-God was felt in the Greek mysteries and oracles from the earliest times, and this determined the origin of the divinity of Dionysus, who was the Thracian and Greek manifestation of the Sun-God. …

While formal symbols of sovereignty still survived in order that their duties as priests should not be interrupted, oracles were arising in many places. Cities and states would consult them as much as individuals, wishing to know the gods’ will in order to conform to it. The Delphic oracle stood out from the others because of its universal character, as the union of two concepts of the same Sun-God, so that it was better able than any other oracle to correspond to the religious ideals of all the Greeks as well as the races who shared their civilisation.” (Levi:1955:41-2)

“The development of Athens, however, owed nothing to her military power, but was simply the domination by the greater settlement, with convenient access to the sea, of the smaller agricultural settlements….

The demand for sea trading also arose because of the development of agriculture in Greece; increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few landed families led to the downfall of the small-scale farmer, and so to increasing reserves of labour for industry, shipping and trade, and for agricultural labour.” (Levi:1955:49)

“In the same way the pan-Hellenic movement centred on the Olympic shrine was essentially a unifying movement even though at one period it lost ground by comparison with the other great pan-Hellenic movement, centred on Delphi. But all these attempts at unification, even those which never became anything more than regional in their influence, held the seeds of a true pan-Hellenism, and failed to achieve it only because the people of that particular area lacked the force, or will, or self-interest to impose themselves on the rest of the country.

The efforts towards expansion by the Anthelian League were an attempt to impose an aristocratic and military supremacy on the Greek world. If it had succeeded, Greece would have been organised by these aristocratic clans, strengthened by a claim to legitimacy based on the will of Demeter of Anthele. The Peloponnesian supremacy of Corinth and Sparta was a joint effort of a military and agrarian aristocracy, and an economic aristocracy of sailors and merchants. Around the Peloponnesian powers and their shrine a compact, enduring group was formed, whose cohesion is showed by the importance of the Olympic Games in Greek life, by the high level of culture reached in the Pelopponnese, and by the powerful position held by Sparta and Corinth at the beginning of the Persian wars.

In the period before the Persian wars, Greek unity was founded on the influence and prestige of the two sanctuaries, Olympia and Delphi, which balanced one another in authority. They were the source of legitimacy, the one derived from the God of Heaven, the other from the God of the Sun. …

To understand this era it is important to see its political system as something quite different from medieval or modern schemes; it is comprehensible only as the synthesis of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Persian concepts of the theocratic monarchy with the customs and way of life of an Indo-European dominant caste from the north. The intervention of oracles in human activities, the sovereignty of a supreme God of Gods and men, were the solutions of a civilisation which had no idea of legitimacy apart from that deriving from the gods.

These considerations have very important results for the evaluation of the Greek Polis, a development which has aroused much interest and speculation among modern historians. Modern nationalist theory, and even the more precise ideas of recent federalist doctrine, has spread the idea that the Polis was the limit of Greek political concepts, and that by being unable to grow beyond it, they had not achieved the power that comes with unity until the Macedonian threat forced them to combine their resources.

The ineffectiveness, perceived by Thucydides, which was a feature of this period of Greek history, was thus the result of circumstances which did not have their origin in the Polis. The autonomy of the Greek states did not prevent their functioning as a unity in the oracular period, that is, from the end of the Mycenaean era to the Macedonian conquest; it was rather the deep divisions and differences, the parties, which were the reason for the tension and conflicts that disrupted Greece, for in similar circumstances even in a united state, even in those whose pattern of organisation we are most familiar with, men have struggled to impose the supremacy of a philosophy, a political ideal, the interests of one region or one class.

For a long time, the Polis and the unity of Greece existed side by side, for legitimacy was founded on the transcendence of certain deities who communicated with men through the oracles. Within this system the Polis was guided in the interests of the dominant class in it. When a particular class was predominant, like the aristocrats of the Peloponnese, the whole of Greek life was regulated by its particular bias. Opposition survived, but everywhere a homogeneous ruling class was to be found, guiding the individual cantons along common lines, taking its authority from the oracles, which gave utterances conforming with the policies of the ruling classes.” (Levi:1955:51-3)

“If the landowners were in power in a particular city, they would obviously not want the industrialists to obtain control, nor the sailors and traders whose aim was increased trade and who would, on an open market, have forced lower prices and therefore lower profits for the landowners. Similar elementary cases easily explain why certain cantons clung to their autonomy, but the situation could be much more complex. If a city governed by a landowning aristocracy found itself face to face with a trading and naval community, the interests of the two cities- economic as well as political- not only differed but conflicted, since every advantage to the one was a disadvantage to the other….

Greece was a country of such varying social and economic conditions that it was possible for the interests of one class to prevail in one centre, and of their opponents in another

What is more, certain communities, although quite outside the sphere of interests of these dominant groups, came to find themselves drawn into the quarrels of the most important cities, and forced into paths of development quite unrelated to their own interests.

The groups with different interests in Greek politics were similar to the factions of any period of history; their fierce competitiveness expressed the lack of common ground for co-operation between the various parties in Greece. In such a situation disagreement led to open conflict, and the local autonomy of the states was not adequately controlled by the pan-Hellenic ‘oracular state’, which lacked the authority to prevent differences of political interests and aspirations leading to and supporting civil war.

The idea, expressed by Thucydides, that the Greeks should have conserved their strength, and instead of quarrelling amongst themselves should have united in foreign expeditions, like the Trojan wars or the foundation of colonies, which brought profit to all, seemed to his contemporaries to be the expression of only one point of view: that of Athens, whose interests were in trading and the sea. For the Athenians the advantages of the conquest of new bases, and of territorial and commercial expansion, were obvious. They were not so obvious to the peasants and landowners of Attica, and non-existent for the areas where the economy was basically agricultural and self-supporting, where there was neither the need nor the opportunity for trade, and little industry or manufacturing. The broils between neighbouring cities, which modern historians, under the influence of nationalist theories, claim to have arisen sometimes, or even in every case, from the desire for ‘independence’, were in fact struggles for life, or at least for the survival of their own way of life.

‘Independence’ meant the need to prevent the price of cereals, the farmer’s meagre revenue, collapsing under an influx of foreign grain. So it was also the desire to avoid changing the way of life that was hallowed by tradition. A city’s mean jealousy of another might, instead, be seen as the defence of customary privileges, of the power of the ruling class and of the city’s own religious cult; it might be the desire for that particular god’s sanctuary to become the centre of a general Greek festival, and its oracle to make laws for the whole country for the benefit of all….

This meant that the Greek cities could develop so far as they were able along their own lines, and that each political growth could blossom for a while. But while one group or region was not likely to be able to impose its attitudes and interests of the strong, and allowed each community to find the form of government that best suited its own needs.” (Levi:1955:54-6)

“The long and complex task of expansion and conquest, the building of an empire ruled not by a king but by a nation, was transforming Greek life and opening up new political, social and economic prospects throughout the Mediterranean.

We have already discussed the origins of this development. The days of the warriors with their armour and their chariots had passed centuries ago and now the age of cavalry too was coming to an end. The hoplite infantry and the warships had become more and more important, with cavalry as a small subsidiary, so that the manufacturing and merchant class became more and more wealthy.

The aristocracy had made Greece great and prosperous, and a result of this had been to free a great part of the citizen population from its state of economic and social inferiority: its new importance in the army and in manufacturing correspondingly increased its political influence and responsibilities.

The first stage in the decline of the oligarchic aristocracy resembled that of the theocratic kings. Written laws had limited the kings’ powers to the administration of justice: new laws limited the legal privileges that the aristocracy had assumed not simply because of its powerful position, but because of the popular vision of the nobleman as someone superior to ordinary mortals, closer to the gods and under their protection.

As the conditions of the poorer classes improved, the theoretical gap between the two classes began to close, and the almost hero-like superiority of the rich was no longer accepted. Men began to challenge the traditional laws based on the idea that the rich and the poor were almost different species. They demanded written laws, justice by arbitration, and powers of legislation.

The causes of this crisis were complex, springing from the new social situation which developed from the new expansion in shipping, trade, industry, and the new contacts throughout the Mediterranean world made by Greeks as the dominant sea power.

The capital for shipbuilding and cargoes was probably put forward in the first place by landowning aristocracy itself, but the lower classes profited by it to improve their conditions, not only because they became better off, but because they acquired a greater importance in the life of the community; the labour of each man working as a sailor, trader or artisan was now an essential and irreplaceable element in the welfare of the whole society.

Together with new social doctrines came new methods of warfare, and therefore new systems of levying troops for defence and conquest. Ancient tactics made each warrior into a tower of metal moving cumbrously over the battlefield, fighting individually in a duel which was not much more than the collision of two lumps of matter. Now the Greeks had to adapt their fighting methods to accommodate enemies who used methods of attack and defence outside the scope of Greek tradition, to deal with both hand-to-hand fighting and the disposition of bodies of troops over large distances.

The larger contingents now levied precluded the use of the ‘heroic’ warrior with his burden of armour; the shield became small, the breastplate lighter, with leather used in place of metal in the less exposed parts. The soldier warded off attack with a long lance, and the individual weakness of the new arms was balanced by a new system of fighting which made the troops dependent upon each other, placing them shoulder to shoulder so that every man was partly covered by his neighbour’s shield, and the front rank presented to the enemy a continuous metal fence of shields, bristling with lance-points. Under this new system, the job of the richer citizens was no longer to provide themselves with heavy, and now obsolete, armour, but to maintain and train cavalry troops to support the infantry attack on its flanks. The effect of the new tactics was to make the infantry the decisive element in battle, while the importance of the aristocracy’s contribution diminished.

In the same period technical progress resulted in innovations in shipbuilding too, which had their political and social repercussions

The perfecting of a technique of navigation by sail allowed the cargo ships greater economy and independence, while the warships, which could not rely on sail, were built for greater speed. The hull was elongated and streamlined, the decks covered throughout their length, the number of rowers increased and set in ranks one above the other to create the classic Greek of man-of-war, the trireme. The whole ship was better adapted for long voyages and greater speed and momentum. These innovations, and the greater number of ships that Greek military policy now demanded, increased the importance of the poorer citizens who provided the labour, and assisted the rise of the middle class which the new Greek economy and policies were creating.

These groups, which for the first time were gaining a place in public life, could not be satisfied with a system of government still founded exclusively on an aristocracy that no longer contained within it all the essential elements of society.

But the political consequences of the new situation could never be the same throughout a land where local autonomy and profound differences of economy, environmental and social relationships prevented any sort of political uniformity. In some places the aristocracy defended its institutions and privileges, legal and religious, even using violence to oppose the middle and lower classes, who in their turn did not shrink from using revolutionary methods to assert their rights against the ancient legal codes. In such circumstances the only hope of a peaceful and legal settlement was the setting up of a new social order, using someone trusted by both sides as arbitrator, or giving him the more complex task of creating a new legislative foundation for the state, as the heroic founders of the colonies had done.

The arbitrator or legislator had to find a language which the local population would accept as expressing not merely the product of individual initiative, but truth of an absolute validity. This meant that he had to link legislation with religion, with the gods who were the source of authority; his method depended on the religious customs of the locality.

The legislator could himself assume semi-divine, heroic powers, or could simply be appointed to his job by an oracle, or else his actions and decisions could be held to be inspired by the oracle. But the developments of Greek religious thought could lead to yet other solutions: not only the soothsayer, but the wise man, the poet and the artist too could be divinely inspired, and their words could have the value of insights into the absolute truth of the mind of God.

Where the peaceful solution was possible, it was based on class relationships within the oracular state which were fluid enough to permit agreement without violence. In other regions the struggle was fiercer, and the privileged classes were attacked with a greater concentration of forces, under the guidance of a popular leader. Such conflicts were resolved not by peaceful agreement, but by the domination of the community by the middle and lower classes. Their leader did not hold the position of legislator or arbiter, but of executor of the revolutionary will of the people.

The power of a faction-leader who imposed himself on a community by force seemed to the Greeks to be an offence against the principle of the divine origins of authority. These leaders were called ‘turannoi’, a name which linked them with the military governors who commanded the garrisons in Asia Minor, marking their headquarters inside the fortifications and surrounding themselves with armed men. The image of the ‘tyrant’ was that of the usurper, holding power without legitimacy based on the laws and the will of the gods, but simply as a result of intimidation by force. This was an open attack on the Greek concept of the state as an organisation under the guidance of the gods, through the oracles. The tyrant did not act in the name of all, under divine guidance, nor by virtue of his transcendent gift of the knowledge of truth and justice. He imposed himself by the use of force, and substituted the will of an individual for the supremacy of an absolute truth, or as it has recently been defined as ‘the event’ for ‘the form’.

The tyrant in Greek history, however, appears as someone rather different from the governors, government officials and local commandants of Asia Minor.

 There power was held by delegation, from God to the King, from the King to the official, and so conformed to the local idea of legality. But in Greece the name of tyrant marks the first example of power without divine authority to occur in the ancient Mediterranean world, as far as our limited evidence shows.

It cannot be said that the abnormal character of tyranny consisted in its denial of equality between members of the community. Such equality was continually being denied to men, and in a much more serious way. Any man’s pre-eminence over others, or comparison of himself to the gods, is a negation of human equality. The legislator, the hero, the colonial leader, were human beings who distinguished themselves from their equals by being chosen by the gods and divinely inspired. But according to the theory of the oracular state, in which all power must derive from the gods, this superiority was legitimiate, but that of the tyrant was not…. Authority belonged to God alone, and had done everywhere for thousands of years. To think that it could belong to any group of men, large or small, would be to imagine that the mass created by the union of a number of men could assume the nature of a transcendent being.

The tyrannies spread throughout the seventh and sixth centuries BC. It would seem as if the new crisis in class relationships in Greece had two possible solutions: that of the legislators and arbiters, within the bounds of oracular legality, and that of the tyrants, which was utterly beyond the pale.” (Levi:1955:61-5)

“The new class demanded as its first concession secure legislation on the matters that chiefly concerned it, and it is important to notice that this legislation contained no constitutional reforms for the community or the canto, that is, for the Polis. It is clear, therefore, that the new class was not interested in its political position, but only in its private, family, economic situation. So the ruling aristocracy was able to maintain its political supremacy, making concessions on matters concerning the individual. Where aristocratic resistance was more bitter and tenacious, one finds that the new classes had begun to have political aspirations; on other occasions they very resistance of the aristocracy provoked revolt, which they had to put down by using force, which led inevitably to tyranny. …

A notable feature of the history of the tyrants, and one that often appears at revolutionary periods in history, is that the men who come to power in the struggle with the aristocracies nearly all come from the same class themselves. When the political situation has been settled for a long time, the men who hold effective power and public office in the state belong to the privileged and dominant group which is, therefore, synonymous with the governing caste. But at times of crisis and revolution a new class which is rising, or hoping to rise, to power is unlikely to have at its disposal men with the ability to govern in its name and interest. So it happens that the governing caste can to some extent detach itself from the dominant class, since the old dominant class, like the new, finally has to use the same men to fill public offices.

In fact, the tyrants accomplished nothing more revolutionary than did the legislators…. Their instinct in legal matters was always to avoid open recognition of the fact that a revolution had occurred in the very sources of law and authority, and to display the trappings of traditional legitimacy in an effort to show that their own power did not contradict it.

In the interests of the classes that had raised them to power, they allowed them financial concessions and certain legal guarantees in matters affecting the individual and the family. In politics they managed to reduce the resistance of the aristocrats by dispersing or silencing the most active members of the governing caste. In economic affairs the tyrants to some extent preyed on the richest class either by heavy taxation or by legal actions followed by sequestration. With the money gained in this way the tyrants began public works which were a sort of aid to the poorest classes. Thus the policy of the tyrants at least in some places about which we have some information, succeeded in making life easier for the poor, giving them greater security and opportunities for work and production. …

Even Thucydides reproached the tyrants for the excessive chauvinism of their policies. The effect they had was to make their supporters rich, themselves more secure, and to commit their cities to ambitious public works which emphasised their independence of pan-Hellenic unity and encouraged enthusiasm for the success of the one particular Polis even at the expense of the others. On the whole the policies of the tyrants tended to damage the fundamental unity of the Greek people which aristocratic solidarity had supported with the help of the oracles. …

By the end of the sixth century BC the age of the tyrants was over in mainland Greece

But the disappearance of the regime, which had been the product of political crisis, did not leave all the various Greek communities in the same condition or do away with the differences that had made independence necessary. The cities were left more active and less inclined to any co-ordination of policies; they had every encouragement to grow apart.” (Levi:1955:66-9)

“In particular, the Lacedaemonian situation was different from any other, Sparta was not a local community ruled by an aristocracy, but a survival of the ancient system which had grown up after the Achaean conquest. The Spartans could never merge with the landowning aristocracies of the other Hellenic states. Their system of landowning, which was linked with the governmental organisation of the Homeric-Mycenaean conquerors of the peninsula, gave total possession of the land to the conquerors, reserving a part for the kings and their households and a part for the gods; the rest was divided among the conquering warriors, who cultivated it with the labour of the Helots, the expropriated inhabitants, and lived on the produce.

The situation in the colonies was no different: the leader reserved a part of the land for the gods and for himself, and divided the rest into equal shares for the colonists. This continuation of the methods of the Achaean conquerors in Greece created a political order identical with the one which the Spartans had preserved unchanged for many centuries.

Thus the Spartan ‘cosmos’, whose claim to political wisdom was the limitation of the citizen body to a small proportion of the inhabitants, was not the product of exceptional political wisdom and deep thought, but the fossilisation of a very ancient system, which had been developed to deal with the conflict of power and right at the time of the conquest of the Peloponnese.

Sparta preserved her original position while the rest of Greece moved on by cultivating a deliberate isolation. In particular family and business relations between Spartans and non-Spartans were forbidden. They did not want to concern themselves with industry or trade, and indeed the use of iron coins only when everyone else used silver impeded any sort of trade and made necessary a rigidly self-sufficient economy. …

So Sparta, in her artificial isolation, had undergone her own evolution, only in part in line with the rest of Greece: even in Sparta, in spite of the original, ancient equality amongst the Spartiates, there were differences between richest and the Spartiates, there were differences between richest and poorest, more and less powerful; the kingship had first been reduced to an office held by two magistrates, then abased to become an instrument of the assembly of the privileged.” (Levi:1955:69-70)

“In the seventh century BC Attica was not yet organised into cantons under the Athenian aegis. The city was completing its transformation from an ancient monarchy dominated by the landowning aristocracy to a state in which the aristocrats succeeded in retaining their political position at the expense of their economic and legal privileges. The result of the reforms in Athens was a substantial change in the conditions of life of the poorer classes. …

The aristocratic ‘Eupatridai’ of Athens survived the long parenthesis of tyranny, and by yielding to the economic pressures of the lower classes became a typical example of a governing body functioning without any attachment to the class from which its men came, or even conflict with it.

It was in fact men of the highest birth who destroyed the privileges of the great families, when this was necessary for the preservation and furtherance of the classes to whose prosperity the whole Athenian economy was now linked. The profits of the great as well as the small investors were at stake, and the aristocracy continued to rule only by putting into effect laws directed to the destruction of its own predominance and privileges. They were aristocrats who brought about the legal and economic reforms which gave protection to the lower classes, support for their financial enterprises, more humane debtor’s laws, and, little by little, concession by concession, full legal parity of all members of the citizen community, with no distinctions made for wealth or birth.

All the states during the classical era preserved the system of dividing the citizens into clans based on common descent, an arrangement which survived in even the most advanced social organization, as a means of determining and dividing amongst the citizens their duties and debts to the community as a whole, in such matters as military service, public offices and tribute. The rights of the citizen were proportionate to the value of his services; those who served in the army, or contributed more than usual to its upkeeping or effectiveness, or paid larger tributes, had rights denied to the rest. The changing conditions, which allowed the poorer class greater participation in the life of the community, made it necessary to cancel the clan-divisions based on birth or wealth, in order to put all citizens on an equal footing. New divisions were made, based on place of birth or residence.” (Levi:1955:70-72)

Writer’s Voice: It’s the first godless magical womb theory of rights to not be culled and considered a human being because of a world of pure imagination or ideology with no legitimacy other than it benefits the sponsor to self-justify it.

“During the sixth century BC Sparta became the leading light of the Greek world, because of her domination of the Peloponnese and her alliance with Corinth. Her influence extended to the Delphic oracle, and so she had a means of imposing her will on the rest of Greece through the mouth of the god, and so giving her domination the aura of legitimacy. The Spartiates had become the fighting arm of all the well-born and wealthy groups which dominated most of the Greek cities.

The arts in all their forms helped to create an atmosphere favourable to the oligarchies of birth and prestige

It was not only the ancient heroic ideals, which failed to create a favourable impression in the modern context, but useful and effective new concepts that served the purposes of the oligarchs.

Poetry had developed into one of the most important influences on popular ideas. The vitality of Homer’s verse and its place as the foundation of the Greek system of education impressed its ideals of heroic virtue, physical excellence and valour, and its code of manners on generations of Greeks. Nor did the poems of Hesiod, who wrote in Boeotia at the end of the eighth century BC, in any way conflict with the vitality of the Homeric tradition: Homer created the image of the heroic and in every war superior warrior nobility; Hesiod described the world of the poor, men without any other concept of their destiny, content with what little good came their way, resigned to the many miseries and hardships which made up their lives on earth.

Hesiod’s world was not at odds with the world of Homer. It does not have the boldness of a new people claiming a great position in the state, but describes the life of the humble, seen by a man who has observed it at close quarters, understood it and taken part in it, with the simple conviction that in the world men cannot be equal, and the destiny of the humble is as necessary as that of the strong and powerful. If anything can assure the poor and insignificant that they are not debased to the level of slaves or animals, it is the dignity of labour and the awareness of a task honestly performed according to the will of the gods….

In the cities of Asia Minor and the islands especially, the heights and depths of men’s experience were expressed in poetry that exalted the individuality of man, whether it was Archilocus’ pride in the valour of the soldier and lover, or Hipponax’s contentment with the lazy, graceless, greedy life of  a beggar.

It was still a world where men accepted wealth or poverty as something as inevitable and unchangeable as beauty or ugliness, physical perfection or deformity.  … Mimnermus celebrated youth and love in poems which hold echoes of a society without cares or duties in the army or government, wanting only to enjoy a life made simple by wealth. Sappho too expressed in her love songs the feelings of this new spiritual aristocracy, which felt itself linked by its perception and discrimination, and found in arts a new way, apart from the traditional pre-eminence of the warrior or athlete, of rising above common mortals and approaching the gods.

In the social order of this society, in these centuries, nothing changed. Men preserved their fundamentally aristocratic idea of the natural domination of ordinary people by ‘their betters’, and their betters were, inevitably, the richest, since only they could excel in war, train for success in athletics, and get the education needed for distinction in science or poetry.

But when the political conflict reached the point of questioning the values of the aristocratic view of society, the voice of poetry reflected the change. When the upper classes, content with the privileges they felt to be eternal, just and divinely ordained, began to feel the pressure of the lower classes and the persecution of the tyrants, and saw the transformation of the world which had been organised to suit them, poetry became a cry from the heart, expressing passions and anxieties, rancour and hatred in a way that would not have been conceivable some decades before.

One poet, Solon, spoke with ancient wisdom and almost divine inspiration to invoke order and justice in a city torn apart by civil war. All men, he said, must be treated as humans, and their fury and desperation appeased. Unlike Hesiod, he recognised that the wretched man does not have to resign himself to his misery, and that the rich man does not have to accept his privileges, as if they were just and due recognition of his natural superiority.

A revolution was proclaimed in this poem of the sixth century BC, a revolution which the oligarchs tried to avoid by means of legislators and arbiters, but which often, when it was under armed leadership, they could not escape….

As long as the existence of a class of demi-gods was generally admitted, men born to be heroes and leaders, entrusted with the task of guiding and defending, succouring and caring for their flock like shepherds, it was easier to keep that flock content with its destiny and convince of its inferiority to the king and his peers. But when the differences between men were seen to be wealth and intelligence, it became clear that although success was due to divine will and inspiration, it was still open to anyone to be given that inspiration, and in any case there was no justification for oppression, injustice and exploitation. …

Although they no longer had kings, the Greeks did not feel that they were abandoned without guidance. The gods were present among them, living in the house-temple that derived from Mycenaean constructions, and were described in verse as intervening in human affairs. Their passions and emotions made them more like men than solemn idols. As the gods were invested with the appearance of human beings, the human form became idealised and minutely studied in an effort to re-create it worthily of its divine associations. So the archaic ‘kouroi’ and ‘korai’ were created. …With the passage of the centuries, the Greeks learnt the holy truth that an aristocracy like this was open to all who were worthy of it.

Athens learnt this secret and so assumed the historic mission which distinguished her from all the other Greek cities. Dominated by its aristocracies, Greece had a unity and uniformity, but Athens, for reasons inherent in her history and environment, detached herself from it to find her own solution to problems common to the whole of Greece. 

In spite of Spartan domination and vigilance, the Athenians affirmed the full equality of all men in their relations with the Polis, and limited the powers of the old aristocracy until it was left in control only of the Areopagus, an organ of judicial and political character made up of those who had held the highest offices of state. Athens was becoming the ideal of the motherland to all who could not tolerate the rule of aristocratic oligarchies, and the natural enemy of all those who could not renounce the privileges of centuries. Within the Greek community the rise of a new vision of human society brought with it the beginning of a greater, graver disunion.” (Levi:1955:72-6)

“Persian sovereignty was based on religious principles which were utterly alien to the Greeks, and considered all those who were not Persians or Medes to be merely subjects without political rights, outside the community of free men. But the result of this was, as has been shown, absolute tolerance of the religious, social and economic activities of the subjects, so long as the king’s dominion was acknowledged and the tributes regularly paid.

Persia gave to the Greek oligarchies and landowning classes a surer guarantee of security to enjoy their way of life than did the new movements in Greek public life. Upper-class Greeks had already taken many habits and customs from the lands now ruled by Persia, and life in some parts of Asia Minor was now something worthy of imitation.” (Levi:1955:79-80)

America and the Cold War i.e. Marcos and Hussein, etc, etc

“When Greece declared war on Persia, two streams within the Greek community were fighting for control of the country. This conflict had been going on for many centuries, and followed a pattern found in every state; the conservative aristocrats, the class which in the past had held absolute power because its existence had been essential to survival of the community, versus a reforming movement of classes with less wealth than the aristocrats, but an increasing importance, led by men who claimed that only their policies had any real relevance to the state’s political and social needs.

So the war against Persia was more in the interests of the new middle classes than of the old upper class… The reform movements and the new classes themselves took credit for the Greek success, and this gave them a greater confidence and enterprise in the political battle.

After the victory, the aristocrats who had opposed resistance to the Persian invasion thought that once Persia had retreated across the Aegean they could come to an understanding which would guarantee peace, a new political regime, and the re-establishment of their own supremacy. Like some modern political parties, they could see no reason against forming an alliance with any foreign state that would help their own cause to victory.

Meanwhile the political conflict between the cities was becoming no less bitter than that already being fought out within the individual Polis. War had forced the two groups to declare themselves. Athens had witnessed the victory of a party that was gradually bringing about reforms in favour of a section of the population without privileges to preserve, but dependent on increasing its trade, its wealth and its political and economic opportunities.

The Greeks were victorious against Persia because they were fighting an army which had no vital interest in winning.” (Levi:1955:81-82)

Writer’s Voice: The Liberals vs the conservatives or the liberal/conservatives versus the communists after this battle for power had been won by disenfranchising the poor and the Cold War begins

“There were also technical reasons for the Greek military success: the distance of the battlefields and occupied areas from Persian bases, the difficulties of communication, the doubtful valour under attack of some of the Persian contingents, Greek tactical superiority and understanding of the value of surprise, and above all the naval supremacy that she gained the course of the war.

No other factor in the Greek victory was as important as this last. Nor was it a new situation. For more than a thousand years ships and fleets from the Aegean had controlled the Mediterranean. Centuries of tradition accustomed the Greeks to looking on the sea as the road to power, independence and prosperity, and at the same time made of them experts in the arts of navigation and shipbuilding.

The Greeks and Phoenicians were the only nations which could dispute the supremacy of the Mediterranean, and the Persians had neither the fleets nor the tradition to make it even remotely possible for them to acquire naval power; moreover their religion forbad them to sail. So Persia was dependent for her requirements as an imperial power on her subjects’ fleets: after the Ionian revolt and the punitive destruction of Miletus she could not rely on the Phoenicians.

The growth and technical improvement of Greek naval power was the decisive factor of the Persian wars: especially as the creation of a great Athenian fleet, built up hastily during the two phase of the war, with a hundred ships under construction at a time, shifted the balance of naval power in favour of Greece: also the new Athenian fleet was a centre of attraction for all the Greeks whose interests coincided with those of Athens in matters of trade, expansion and the development of shipping.

Thus the war did not introduce new factors into the political situation, but was an opportunity for a rearrangement of the balance of power. The conservative, agrarian interests which had dominated Greece in the sixth century BC were still strong, for Sparta and her army were on their side, but now the opposition was also strong, for Athens and her fleet was behind it. …

At the end of the Persian wars Athens found herself at the head of an organisation of cantons which included all the greatest naval powers in Greece; she could have satisfied herself with an alliance leading to a pan-Hellenic hegemony.

The centre of the Greek state was always an oracle, the religious focus and source of political authority. There were many attempts to make Athene, the Goddess of the Acropolis, an oracular deity. The legend so commonly shown on Attic vases, of Heracles becoming angry with the oracle at Delphi and stealing the tripod, was a transparent allusion to the desire to make Athens the centre of the Greek oracles.

The most conspicuous result of the Persian wars was the Delian League. Not only was it the most important movement towards Greek unity in historical times, but it was also the basis of Athens’ claim to succeed Sparta as commander and guide- as ‘hegemon’- of all Greece. The choice of Delos as centre of the confederacy underlined the Athenian ambitions, for the island which was the birthplace of the sons of Latona was perhaps the only place in the Greek world that could possibly compete with the authority of the Pythian oracle.

So this was not a secession, but an imperialist, aggressive bid to strengthen a movement towards the conquest of the state” (Levi:1955:82-4)

“The Persian wars had scarcely ended before voices were heard denigrating the men who had contributed most to the victory; accusing them of disloyalty and greed for money; personal polemics backed up by accusations of secret agreements with the King of Persia, of thefts, personal ambitions, and duplicity rampant amongst the leaders of the two chief political movements. It cannot be denied that both sides hoped to find support from the King of Persia, now safely back in Asia Minor, which would help them to victory in Greece, since whether the movement favoured a conservative policy based on an agricultural society, or an expansionist trading policy in the Mediterranean, it was useful and logical to provide for a compromise with Persia, for neither policy was likely to harm her empire, and it would be to her advantage to be able to rely on a friendly Greece, without ambitions against Persian territory.” (Levi:1955:85)

“In Athens, in fact, some members of the old aristocracy had been forced, in order to retain their position in the governing body of the state, to act as the representatives of middle-class interests and aspirations, and to ally themselves with the groups which had recently become wealthy, landowners and industrialists, to defend themselves from the pressures put upon them all by the poor, to whom the naval policy had given an importance out of all proportion to the attention paid to their needs in the economic policies of the city.

The classes which equipped warships for the city now knew that their importance to the state was no greater than that of the classes from which the hoplites were enlisted. Equally, all the makers of cloth or pottery or metal goods or any other merchandise providing the city with trade knew that for economic reasons the city had to take them into account. But this was not what happened. The politicians paid little or no attention to these developments, and this political inadequacy to deal with social conditions created the situation from which, inevitably, revolutions spring.

In foreign politics, the poorer classes of the population wanted the greatest possible commercial and naval expansion, and this could only be achieved by breaking down Persian control of the Levant and driving the Phoenician fleet from the eastern Mediterranean, even perhaps from Carthage. Only this policy could provide work for all, a ready market, and cheap imports. But it was precisely this which the upper-and middle-class landowners were anxious to avoid, for they were afraid that the success of the lower classes would lower their own standard of living.

So the political conflict flared up all over Greece, for internal and foreign politics were inextricably interwoven. In Athens the struggle between reform and conservatism was kept within the bounds of party politics, but in the Peloponnese it led in the end to civil war. The resistance put up by the Arcadians forced Sparta to seek help from Athens. It was the speed and enthusiasm with which the conservative politicians in Athens embraced the Spartan cause, as well as the discourtesy with which Sparta treated the auxiliaries she had solicited, which created a tense atmosphere in Athens and started the democratic revolution there. …

The Athenian democrats and their supporters were bound to see the Athenian expedition to help Sparta as an act of hostility and oppression towards themselves by the conservatives aristocrats who governed them. To use the state’s armed forces in an enterprise against the interests and principles of a class that in any case thought itself undervalued by its rulers could only strain the situation to breaking-point. …

The Athenian expedition to the Peloponnese mobilised several thousand hoplites, that is, it removed from Athens several thousand citizens with safe incomes who were able to offer themselves for military service in the fully-armed infantry. This was a large proportion of the landowning middle class, which had been on the side of the conservatives ever since the Persian wars. This was the chance for the popular party to be successful in the public elections.

The chance was not lost, and the elections marked the end of the Areopagus as a political power, and the downfall of the conservative oligarchy. It was the beginning of a new experience, unique in the history of the ancient world, of a government body deriving its authority from the most numerous but poorest group of the population, the basis of the city’s wealth through trade and industry.” (Levi:1955:87-89)

Writer’s Voice: In America this was them helping the Russians to defeat the Japanese and the contempt shown by Russia for their assistance and results in Roosevelt being elected, but the merchants of trade and industry abrogate it for their own interests. In British politics it is the House of Lords and the setting up of the welfare system to retain power with a stipend that the public paid for and they took positions of power with-in for their own benefit, especially in drug companies.

“In Athens’ relations with other cities, and especially in her relations with the Delian League, the effects of the revolution were very marked. The democracy suspected every conservation regime, needed more money than ever before, and more than ever wanted to lead Greece, to impose her regime and her attitudes to foreign policy, expansion with Persia and with the west….

            One of these was the pressure exerted by Athens on the members of the Delian League; fiscal pressure, to exact tribute in cash in place of the ships and crews covenanted for the common fleet; and political pressure to hold the League together at all costs, and to prevent the conservative elements from gaining control. In this way the naval power of the League became a police force under Athenian control.

Athens’ relation with the Delphic oracle were equally complicated

 Spartan influence there and the conservative tradition meant that the law-making activities of the oracle were inevitably in favour of the oligarchies and opposed to the new Athenian regime. The pan-Hellenic authority of Delphi was one of the great strengths of the opposition to Athens, since it forced the democrats to make an unwelcome display of rebellion against religious authority.” (Levi:1955:92-3)

“Athens had won the praises of poets and philosophers, especially those closest to the aristocrats, when at the end of the Persian wars she returned to an aristocratic government and followed this with new victories against Persia. Simonides too gloried in the humiliation of Asia and the power of the Greek fleet led by Athens, it was at this time that the idea took root, to the disadvantage of Sparta and her army, that the greatest responsibility for the Persian defeat belonged to Athens. At this time Athens succeeded in using the admiration and gratitude felt by all Greeks for the conquerors of Persia to give an emotional support to her supremacy over a large part of Greece and her hopes of gaining the position of ‘Hegemon’….

Aeschylus expressed the religious and spiritual problems and anxieties existing behind the Athenian façade. … In religious matters Aeschylus was the exponent of aristocratic ideals, and so too on the greatest political questions. …

Aeschylus’ world had its problems, but was still linked to the aristocratic tradition of relations between gods and men, a tradition still unthreatened and unbroken. In Sophocles’ work, however, it is impossible to escape his preoccupation with human arrogance and pride in relations with the gods and their intentions expressed by the oracles. Aeschylus debated the problem of reason as a limit set on the gods themselves; but for Sophocles reason was a cause of pride, ‘hubris’, and thus a stumbling block to mankind. In the greatest moment of Sophocles’ poetry, in the ‘Oedipus Rex’, the tragedy of insensate rebellion against the oracles is drawn with all the anguish of a man who had lived through a time of such human defiance.

The exaltation of man’s intellectual and physical gifts had changed its emphasis, from the admiration of the qualities in man which brought him closest to the gods, to the conviction that man had within himself the elements of his own perfection, and that he was worthy of praise in his own right, not merely for the virtues which linked him with the gods. In art there was a movement away from god-like, impersonal perfection of form toward the expression of emotion and personal characteristics; the individual no longer subordinate to a pattern but portrayed as himself in all his human greatness. …

The people of Athens had found masters, teachers, orators, who taught them things never before heard of: that they should pay no attention to the oracles, that there was no superhuman quality in men that could give them the right to pose as gods. Inevitably the nation rebelled against the exhortations of an oracle which formed the focus of this hostile tradition.

The new Athenian regime, directed by members of the same ruling class that had provided the leaders of the old oligarchy, had only one chance of winning its battle against tradition, the opposition, and religion itself. The democracy must make a success of its foreign policy, gain control of the eastern Mediterranean, and so dominate the whole Mediterranean world. Once the Greek thalassocracy was re-established, Athens could be sure of her hegemony, and the democracy of retaining control and of making great changes, political, social and economic, throughout Greece.

However, Spartan opposition forced the democratic movement to fight in Greece at the same time as it was leading a decisive attack on the Persian armies in Egypt, hoping to seize control of the country and of the seas bounding it. It was not an easy situation for Athens, and became even more difficult when the Egyptian expedition was abandoned and the attempt against Persia ended in failure. This was not simply the failure of one particular expedition, but a crisis for the regime, which had to recognize its lack of resources and agree to the return to power of conservative politicians whose military prestige and experience had proved indispensable. There was no possibility of reopening the Egyptian affair, and the Athenian government had to be content with a peace treaty with Persia which might have pleased the conservatives, but which brought little honour to the new regime or the class which supported it. The democrats had been gravely deluded by their own government of the external expansion and internal consolidation they hoped for.

A peace treaty which established with Persia, after thirty years of war, the very relationship which had been the aim of the conservative aristocracy, represented failure for the democrats. They needed to find markets, bases, trading posts,  secure shipping routes, freedom from rivals or competition with their products. They had the Aegean, but it was too small a sea for the most powerful navy of the classical world of that century, and they saw the chance of a peaceful pan-Hellenic hegemony slip from their hands.

The Persian treaty which threatened the Athenian alliance encouraged the opposition. The Delian League, whose members had been humiliated by the removal of the federal treasury to Athens, was now a mere formula. The Athenians made a desperate effort to institute a common Greek fund to reconstruct the sacred buildings destroyed in the Persian wars, and in fulfilment of vows made in the course of the wars. At the same time they proposed the formulation of a common policy for the suppression of piracy. With the first of these proposals, Athens was trying to impose on the whole of Greece the tributes and controls which already existed for the Delian League. With the second, she was hoping to gain for herself the right to patrol the Mediterranean and all the Greek ports. There was no possibility of such proposals being accepted; but Sparta, by taking on herself the job of opposing them, ruined her reputation as spotless guardian of tradition and laid herself open to accusations of supporting the smaller Greek maritime cities which, having no other resources, lived by piracy.

The Athenian proposals had all the characteristics of diplomacy put to the service of propaganda

Such a move could be defended by the plea that Athens was herself the victim of intense, hostile propaganda spread by her adversaries, their allies, her exiles; propaganda based particularly on the intangible questions of the cultural inferiority of her governing class, the heresy of her attitude to the gods; and on the financial questions of the tribute she imposed on her allies for a war no longer being waged, and the damage caused to agriculture by her thalassocratic policies.” (Levi:1955:93-97)

“The opposition found its opportunity in matters of religion and culture. Thanks to the opposition, although Phocis was now under Athenian control the Delphic oracle still expressed conservative views, and those who disobeyed it were branded as illegitimate powers. Criticism, satire, polemic, vituperation, insinuation flourished everywhere at Athens’ expense. All literature derided the Polis governed by workmen, and condemned the revolution as being against nature, common sense and the divine will.

The authority of tradition, and the weighty opinions of the country’s spokesmen, writers and politicians, were united in denying recognition to the revolutionary regime, and refusing to adjust the formal, theocratic idea of legitimacy to the realities of a political system in which the importance of the various social classes was to some extent represented in the governing body.

Athens therefore had to defend her political principles with force alone. The Delian League had lost its political and military justification, and found no way of substituting other aims. In order not to submit to the forces of disintegration, Athens was compelled to use her fleet to impose fidelity to their obligations on her allies. As well as transferring the treasury to her own vaults, Athens tried to safeguard her control over the federation by abolishing the Assembly, sending out inspectors and controllers to exact the tribute, and establishing colonies to populate and garrison the territory of federal states. This meant that the League was no longer a group of cantons hoping to create a pan-Hellenic unity. It became a new political form, which the ancient world called an ‘Arche’, in which Athens became the ruler of a sort of broad territorial dominion whose citizens did not have the same political rights as her own.

Throughout the Greek world, as well as in Athens, this policy opened the way to the possibility of completely new political doctrines. As an autonomous Polis, Athens was part of a community of cities of equal rights, even if they acknowledged, according to circumstances, that one city or another held the position of Hegemon. Indeed, the Athenian revolution had tended to secure the hegemony of Sparta over the other cities, free and equal amongst themselves. The difficulty of overcoming the resistance and opposition provoked by the situation in Athens, as well as the problems of the conservative resistance and the Delphic oracle, led the Athenians to adopt solutions which permitted them to defend themselves against the opponents of the revolution, and the Arche became a state in itself within the Greek community, but a state founded exclusively on force, a police state. The absence of a recorded foundation for authority transforms any political organisation into a police state, since force alone can replace legitimacy. The Athenian revolution was in fact founded on the presupposition of the use of force or the threat of it to gain political ends.

The great public works which adorned and glorified Athens were carried out in order to raise her so high above other cities that her supremacy would be, at least to the eye, generally perceptible and comprehensible. They were also needed to give employment to her people and to enable them to share in the city’s wealth; this was also a way of gaining a greater following amongst the lower classes, that is, of increasing the effectiveness of the revolutionary regime within the city.

More important was the effect of the ‘force’ principle on relations between Athens and the members of the League, between Athens and Sparta, and those cities which wanted only to stay outside national politics. Force alone enabled Athens to gain acceptance or submission as both Hegemon and overlord, and to consolidate her new regime…       As there were no sacred laws requiring the acceptance of Athenian rule, only the power of might could compel submission to her.

The use of force by a political body without oracular sanction was not permitted by the code of relations between Greek cities. They could use force to impose oracular law; but to found a hegemony which detached a part of the population from the Greek community, and with it to build a dominion, an Arche, was to create a new relationship which Greece had never seen before.

The democracy, as well as the Arche, was a new feature of Greek political development. Since the source of legitimacy was a religious tradition with which both the new developments were in conflict, it seemed to the Greeks that just as Athens had become the tyrant of Greece, the democracy was the tyrant of Athens; all power without legitimate foundation was in Greek political theory defined as tyranny.” (Levi:1955:97-99)

These great public works for America were getting a man on the moon and technology, led of course firstly by military technology and the nuclear bomb.

“The Athenian democracy stood for the principle that every human being (every free citizen, that is) must be allowed equal rights and that the needs of each must be equated with his value to the community. However, this equitable principle was bounded by the concept of the Polis, as a social group something between the family and the oracular state. Just as an individual would not admit strangers into the blessings of family life, so neither did the Polis share its blessings with strangers, or the members of one Polis with the members of another. …

Athens claimed dominion over what had been a League in order to secure its fidelity to her, but she could never imagine that she was building a Polis, a united canton, out of all the territories she controlled, and use this as an argument for their obedience to her. The idea of forming a single Polis, with a single citizenship, which would be the logical thing in the modern terms, was never suggested or proposed. At that time it would have seemed an absurd innovation. The struggle to impose Athenian hegemony and revolutionary policies on the whole of Greece seemed more likely to be successful, even if it meant the end of all the oligarchies, Athenian instead of Spartan leadership, and, in order meanwhile for the struggle to be successful, the subjugation of a part of Greece in a new form of state, the ‘state empire’ which the Greeks themselves aptly defined as a ‘state tyranny’.

There is plenty of contemporary evidence of the character and vicissitudes of the Athenian revolution….

The short polemical tract on the Athenian constitution underlines the defects, the deviations from tradition, and the illegitimate character of the revolution, founded on force and the power of the majority. The writer expresses many of the current objections to the democracy; he protests against a state of things which seem to be unchangeable because it is based on force and is therefore alterable only by equal force. He objects, on behalf of the aristocracy, to the city’s total commitment to foreign trade, implying ever-increasing demands for labour and crews for the fleet, endlessly reinforcing the status of the lower classes and increasing their social importance. The pamphlet also echoes the complaints of hostile groups outside Athens; allies oppressed and deprived of the greater part of their autonomy, drained of their resources and economically at Athens’ mercy: Greeks outside the League who could not tolerate either Athens’ aspirations to a naval empire or the rule of the lower classes. …

What the conservatives did not consider- could not consider, for the time was not ripe- was that the new doctrine specifically refused to accept the basis of their principles, by affirming the dignity of mankind, which was capable of making its own standards of measurement, relevant to the actual occurrence and the individual case.

The democratic revolution seemed invulnerable to its critics precisely because of this appearance of realistic lack of prejudice. But in this too they lacked insight, for they ignored the fact that although Athens denied transcendent origins for its moral principles, it did not deny the axiomatic truths of the normal, human, moral and religious perceptions….

The position of the democratic leaders was unassailable as long as the people were united, but this unity could be threatened by the very idealism that swayed the state at the expense of practical considerations. The only effective weapon the opposition had was the use of law-suits and scandals involving the political and moral leaders of the new regime.

Accusations of administrative dishonesty, impiety, and private immorality made against leading Athenian figures were the first onslaught of opposition to the revolution. Athens lost prestige in these scandals, and embarked on the inevitable civil war with Sparta with a smaller chance of victory than she would otherwise have had. The Peloponnesian war was a conservative insurrection against democracy, which had begun to lose ground with the failure of its Persian policy. This failure, coming as it did at a time when the revolutionaries believed that they had established a firmer position for themselves by refusing the offered help of members of the old regime, was the cause of the democracy’s downfall. New and inexperienced military commanders and politicians could not cope with their responsibilities, the failures multiplied, and members of the old ruling caste had to be called in to deal with the crisis. …

The fall of the Athenian democracy, the return of the oligarchy and the restoration of Spartan hegemony could not destroy the record of that experience. Men had learnt that not even the gods can be allowed to support injustice. It had been proclaimed just for each man to have in proportion to what he gave. It had been possible to hope- even if that hope was not fulfilled- that birth and wealth should not by themselves be qualifications for ruling the state. Even more important steps had been taken: men had shown that it was possible to build up a code of law not by revelation, but by discussion among the people, the fruit of their reasoning and their need.

Before this it had been impossible to imagine any form of state or kingdom not of divine origin. Law, to be universal and binding, had to be in some way an expression of the divine will. The Athenian revolution was the unique attempt to base a state and its authority on human reason, and not on fear of the transcendent and unknown, respecting the individual and his rights, and acknowledging that each man had a soul and a conscience, and the right to express his ideas of rights and justice. It cannot be said that Athens chose, or wanted, to follow this path; the development was forced on it by the course of events, by conflict with the opposition and the struggle for survival. It was a product of the Athenian character and the revolutionary struggle. It was this which would survive the failure of the revolution.” (Levi:1955:100—4)

“After the fall of the Athenian democracy and the bitter experiences of the Peloponnesian war, the problems confronting Greece changed. Greek thought was concentrated on elaborations of ideas which are unfamiliar to us simply because we take them for granted, evaluations of the importance of human reason as a political instrument. The Athenians of the fifth century BC had the audacity to maintain that human reason is itself the source of legitimacy and therefore of the right to govern and command, in a world in which the only recognised source of legitimacy was the gods….

The importance given to a man as the measure of things, and to his intellectual and speculative abilities to discern the nature of his existence and to make laws for his guidance, was based on his powers of understanding and thus of argument, searching for a way of knowing truth and justice as before men had searched for a way of expressing the divine will. Thus the intellectual search was a way of affirming the existence of a law-making principle, and was the essential feature of the Athenian revolution. …

The loudest critical voice was that of Isocrates. For him the greatest problem, both in education in the strict sense of the word, and in evaluating a political system, was the question of oratory. If the state’s concepts of liberty and justice were to be built up by discussion and deliberation amongst the citizens, then men must know how to discuss and argue in valid terms, and must not see the art of persuasion as the height of wisdom, even where it was being used to unjust and unworthy ends….

This transformed the whole ideological nature of the revolution, since it meant that each man could affirm the validity of reason, and the old Athenian hegemony became the supremacy of human reason over the theocratic system of revealed law. As a result, the traditional ideas of the importance of ancestors, the ‘Politeia’, and the rules governing the co-existence of city and city, based on divine will, were challenged by rules of human existence which justified themselves, because they conformed with the concept of right based on human reason.

This spiritual development affected every class of Athenian society with a deep sense of humanity and reason. Athens became the symbol of this idea of mankind, of life and of the world, an object of pride, respect and veneration to the rest of Greece.

So the moral ascendancy of Athens was once again affirmed in Greece. At the same time, men began to recall the benefits of the thalassocracy, and also the purity of the Attic lineage, the purest of any in Greece. This entitled the Athenians to greater divine favour. Such ideas had a certain importance, as relics of the old beliefs which had limited the development of the Athenian revolution. The survival of rather archaic concepts, such as that of the particular bonds created by common descent, had grown into a social grouping somewhere between family and state; the Polis, ruled by a ‘Politeia’, and accepted divine intervention in human affairs as part of the natural order of things. Like other traces of past ideas, these beliefs influenced later Greek development by combining with the philosophical doctrines of the revolution to create arguments of primacy, or primogeniture, in Athens’ favour.

To some extent this new philosophical and spiritual dominion compensated Athens for the disillusion of the democracy

Athens had given food to the hungry, law and order to the scattered, lawless tribes, beaten down the tyrannies and created an open market for the whole country. All Greece was her pupil in every branch of the arts, and her pattern of civilisation was a bond uniting all her citizens as closely as their commercial racial origins.

Even the contrast of Greek with ‘barbarian’ had now taken on a new significance. The ‘barbarian’ was no longer, like the Persians for many of the lands they conquered, the bringer of a civilisation basically similar to the Greek, and in some ways superior to it. Now the ‘barbarian’ was one who stood outside the concept of man which had become the hallmark of the new Greek civilisation, so that now the Greeks was the man who shared this vision, the barbarian, he who did not.

Isocrates gained great influence, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, by expressing views like this which suggested a new way of looking at human relations, and at political theory in general. His philosophy was the precursor of the development to which we give the broad title of ‘Hellenism’, for it taught reasons for Athenian superiority which had nothing in common with the reasons put forward in the century before.

The historians of the fourth century BC, far from the passions and polemics of the preceding century, tried to pinpoint the reasons for Athenian superiority by idealising both the events and the men concerned. The leaders of the revolution became almost mythical figures, who served Greece without false pride, ruled without tyranny, leaders and not masters saviours not despots, who won the friendship of Greece for the benefits they brought, not by the threat of force. Readers of the contemporary anti-Athenian polemics could observe the course of the transformation. Even the rivalry between Athens and Sparta had become not enmity but emulation; both fought with Persia for the common good, with no trace of reluctance to collaborate or to resist the invader.

The new political doctrine led to a review of political loyalties. Greek superiority meant that once again Greece was bound to conquer the barbarian. The struggle with Persia took a new significance. In the past the gods had willed that there should be war, and that the Greeks should win, and the Greeks had fought and won because they were a stronger and more effective army; now according to Isocrates’ view, war and victory must be the natural result of a spiritual and moral superiority. The Greek was a man, which meant a free man, whereas the Persian was a slave; the Greek was autonomous, since he made just laws by the light of his own reason, whereas the Persian had to submit to the arbitrary rule of a king who based his authority on false gods.

Athens had, therefore, the obvious claim to direct and lead the war against the barbarian, since she was already the supreme exponent of the new philosophy. Even in the ancient polemics about the ‘scandal’ of the Athenian attack on Melos, Thucydides’ opinion that it was the victory of brute force was refuted by men who affirmed the right of Athens to further the good of the Greek people, even by an act of oppression, since Athens did not act like a tyrant. …

Athenian democracy, especially after its military defeats, was severely criticised for its imperialist and aggressive foreign policy, and for the power left in the untrained and inexperienced hands of the masses. The problem of the fourth century BC, as expressed by Isocrates, was the problem of how to give Athenian supremacy the cultural and artistic character it owed to the world, and how to create a directly representative democracy, even if limited to the classes with the means of acquiring a complete education. Thus education and culture became the qualifications needed both to govern the city and to control Greece. This led to a new development in Greek politics, which transformed the order of society from a ruling aristocracy of landowners to an intellectual aristocracy, and education, based on oratory, rapidly became the distinguishing factor in the new social order.” (Levi:1955:105-10)

Writer’s Voice:America with its presidents it’s wars and its history and the noble prize winning lie that no democracy has gone to war against another..

“Why war changes the world and is itself transformed by the changes it promotes (Heraclitus of Ephesus C.540-480 BC).

‘War is father of all: some it has shown as gods, some as men; some it has made slaves, some free. (B.53)

“’The fact is that when great prosperity comes suddenly and unexpected to a state, it usually breeds arrogance; in most cases it is safer for people to enjoy an average amount of success rather than something which is out of all proportion; and it is easier, I should say, to ward off hardship than to maintain happiness.” (Thucydides:1962:183)

In the last chapter we looked at the creation of the first pyramid of civilization- Babylon and how the internal structure of this pyramid was formed by its polis and also by the existence of other pyramids, other civilizations, that existed to threaten the power of their own

Now in the beginning of civilization there are not that many places which are able to support a large group of peoples. Egypt had the Nile to continually create new fertile soil, but Babylon required irrigation to take the place of this river, which required manpower, and created desertification, as we saw by making the soil saline as it still is today, 5,500 years later.

In this chapter we are transported 3,000 years into the future, by which time Babylon has died, but has continued in a new form and in new lands in the form of the Persians, who continue the useage of the architecture, art, and laws and monarchical patrilineal, family-blood line, inheritance of Kings, that have been laid down by the Babylonian tradition. In fact there respect towards the Babylonians as the founder of their beliefs and way of life is so great that for the first few hundred years of Persia’s rule, Babylon is waived of the need of tribute, and even defended by the Persian kings. A bit today like America supporting the Europeans after World War II due to its history, and the Marshall Plan (as we will see).

Over these 3,000 years however, the struggle of settling has become a universal situation for most of the people on the planet, as we saw previously, and so there are many other little powerful states that wish to threaten the power of Persia or Egypt and so in order to do so they obviously needed to create a signal story of their own, that would compete with these vast empires.

Over that 3,000 years many pyramids, their names, their gods, and their religions, came and went, and this we saw, through the example of the Jews, effect the story of these peoples as they are defeated to transpose their idea of heaven, which should have been a part of their earthly life, into a conceptual heaven where their version of killing the right others did not change their destination, and in fact helped towards gaining it, and where their collective desires as a religious group under one priest/king were in harmony with this goal by power of authority from the possessor of this heaven, God, therefore condoning this necessary killing of others, by which the constitutive problems of over-population, increase, and desertification are overcome as if by magic, like some-kind of rain-dance performed by pigeons in bad-faith.

Heaven could no longer exist on Earth by these behaviours and so instead of changing the behaviour it was necessary that heaven changed location in space and time. If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain then the mountain better come to Mohammed. In other words, if the holy mountain ‘heaven’ cannot exist on Earth any longer, if we can no longer walk in that Garden of Eden, then we had better build, manifest, our own mountain- a pyramid, in which the God of Civilisation, King Daksha, can rest on this Earth in the physical form of the Priest/King as a symbol of our collective spirit and our sacrifice to it, our new God, the state of desire for-itself.

A religious story was all well very then in order to create a pyramid civilization but it did not raise the power of a small group of people over that of a large group of people who had their own religion. The power created within each individual is the same, but in a group it becomes a super-state, and in a still larger group an exponentially spiralling super-state. Today we might term this, a mob mentality, because the sacred individual is being overrun by it, and so it is perceived as taboo and not totem.

What was needed then was a shift in perspective, still further away from God and justice and closer to the true constitutive power of the group, that of self-gain. A new story that did not deny the power of God or of religion but perceived the natures of these gods as no different than their own nature as a being-for-itself and hence their own possessions in harmony with the Nature. This story would unleash far more power from each individual, as we shall see, and see three hundred such men take on an army of hundreds of thousands and win.

In other words new techniques, stories of awe, were required in order to perceive Nature in human-nature, rather than human-nature in Nature, to see being-in-Being twisted into Being-in-being (-for-itself), to turn religion into philosophy, to turn technique into an art, to turn our life purpose into His life purpose, to turn the being-for-itself into a great power through this magic.

This story that we are about to witness, and its techniques and repercussions upon the mind of mankind, is the story that has become the founding story of all western civilization. It is the story of the Greeks:

 “Another way of appreciating the uniqueness of Greek civilization and its enduring importance is to recall some of the words that come to us from the civilization: politics, democracy, philosophy, metaphysics, history, tragedy. These are all ways of thinking and acting that have helped enrich human life immeasurably but that had hardly been known to humanity before the Greeks invented them. To a startling degree the very concept of “humanity” itself- the exalted role within nature of the human race in general and the individual human in particular- comes to us from the Greeks. For them the aim of existence was the fullest development of one’s human potential: the work of becoming a person, called in Greek paideia, meant that everyone was supposed to be the sculptor of his or her own statue. When the Roman civilizations later took up this ideal from the Greeks, the Romans called it Humanitas, from which we gain our word “humanity”. The Romans admitted the fact when they said that “Greece was where humanity was invented”, and it is hard to doubt that they were right.” (Lerner et al:1993:132-3)

04: The Emergence of the City States

“The Greek city has always been special in western philosophy because it has been taken to be the birthplace of the political as we understand the term today. We can take one of the first cities, Jericho, which also happens to have the oldest massive fortifications in the world- stone walls that are twelve feet high and six feet thick. But Jericho wasn’t a city as Aristotle would have understood the term- an entity which begins from need and continues for the sake of the good life. Jericho was a nomadic settlement behind walls. Its walls surrounded a central oasis around which two thousand people congregated for security who had no concept of citizenship, and conducted no political debates; they did not even share the concept of the ‘political’. City life offered no opportunity ‘to change what it was possible to do; it simply made doing it safer’ (Allen, 2004, p.230).” (Coker:2010:58)

“About 800 B.C. the village communities, which rested mainly on tribal or clan organization, started growing into larger units centred on towns. Most often the towns were built on hills, and were little more than fortifications with marketplaces. As time went on they gained more and more permanent residents and came to look more and more like cities. Thus emerged the polis, or city-state, consisting usually of a single city, and all its surrounding territory. This was the unit that not only was to become the standard form of Hellenic political organization but created the modern notion of political life. (Our word political comes from polis). In the years after 800 B.C. city-states emerged throughout the Greek world: Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth on the mainland; Miletus on the shore of Asia Minor; Naxos and Samos on the islands of the Aegean. The city-states varied greatly in area and population. Sparta with more than 3,000 square miles and Athens with 1,060 had the greatest territorial extent; the others averaged less than 100 square miles. Athens and Sparta, each with populations of 300,000 to 350,000 inhabitants at the peak of their power, had approximately three times the numbers of most of their neighbours.” (Lerner et al:1993:103)

City-states were small affairs in comparison to Babylon and Egypt, but they are a brilliant microcosm of relationships between pyramids by which to see the way such states will interact with each other. They are a petri dish of belief bacterium, all constituted on ‘need’ and a desire ‘for the good life’. As we see above Athens and Sparta were the largest of these city-states, the winners who managed to find the greatest power through the least amount of men, and so we will be looking closely at how they achieved this through their story, their behaviour subsequently, and their hypocrisy, lies, and bad-faith commensurately with the truth of history. As we shall see, they were both brought down to size ultimately by the Persians, but not without a struggle or two. From there we will end the chapter looking at the story that combined that of the Persians with that we are about to see crafted by the Greeks, and how this great story took the world, and changed it globally for ever.

It is this struggle for a new powerful story, for supremacy, for security, for fear, for lack, etc, etcetera, that we are about to witness in this chapter

Now the interaction of states to each other has its own field of study, known as International Relation theory, a school of study that you may not have heard of, and after this chapter you will probably understand that the reason you haven’t heard of it is because its truths are not the kind of truths that a state wishes to share with its polis, when trying to cohere them to its story and breed a good amount of hate and store it up for times of war, as national pride. International Relations looks at nation-states from an above perspective, a super-state outside of these states, and attempts to look at the invisible and visible forces that drive their relationship. What constitutive super-state does international relations perceive when it looks at the history that we are about to journey through in the rest of the first half of this book. When added up what universal constitutive dances must they all perform no matter the regulative tale they place over the top of them:

“The idea that power is an attribute of states is a very familiar notion in traditional accounts of international relations. Most old textbooks, and many new ones, offer a list of the components of national power- the features of a country that entitle it to be regarded as a ‘great’ power, or a ‘middle’ power, or, more recently a ‘superpower’. These lists generally identify a number of different kinds of attributes that a state might possess in order to entitle it to claim its position in the world power rankings.  These might include: the size and quality of its armed forces; its resource base, measured in terms of raw materials ; its geographical position and extent; its productive base and infrastructure; the size and skills of its population; the efficiency of its governmental institutions; and the quality of its leadership.” (Brown&Ainley:2009:92)

“In any event, while power-as-influence is not based directly on the resources a state has at it disposal, indirectly these resources remain crucial. Influence rests on the ability to make threats in the event of non-compliance, and/or offer rewards for compliance- that is, on positive and negative sanctions, or ‘sticks and carrots’ as the vernacular has it- and this ability is clearly related to the attributes of power possessed by a state. States that attempt to exert influence in the world, to alter the international environment in their favour, solely on the basis of reasoned argument or by relying on the skills of their representatives, are likely to be disappointed.” (Brown&Ainley:2009:96)

“One of the defining features of realist accounts of international relations- of state-centric accounts in general- is an emphasis on the inherently dangerous nature of international relations. A level of watchfulness, if not fearfulness, which would be regarded as paranoid in other circumstances, seems a necessary feature of international relations…

First, it is a premise of state-centric accounts of international relations that states determine their own aims and objectives in the international system, and that primary among these aims and objectives will be a concern for survival, both in the physical sense of a concern to preserve the territorial integrity of the state, and, more intangibly, in terms of a concern to preserve the capacity of the state to determine its own destiny, its way of life. This premise emerges from the notion that the state is sovereign and wishes to remain so, and the assumption holds independently of the nature of the state- thus, Machstaat or Rechstaat, absolutist monarchy or liberal democracy, it makes no difference, states wish to preserve their sovereignty, come what may. Second it is a premise of state-centric views of international relations that, given the absence of world government- that is, of a mechanism whereby interests can be pursued in the hope of achieving authoritative decision- the pursuit of interests is conducted by attempting to exercise power in the world; and power, in this sense, means the ability to make threats and offer rewards….

Taken together, these two premises- each of which is no more than an elaboration of the implications of a system of sovereign states– ensure that insecurity and fear are permanent features of international relations..…

The traditional realist account of state-centric international relations clearly makes life even more dangerous than the basic situation would suggest, because it adds to the pot the assumption that human beings have naturally aggressive tendencies that can only be constrained by the coercive force of government. The aims and objective of states will include a desire to dominate, not simply because this is a systemic imperative, but because human beings are like that. Domination is what they do. It may be that, as Carl Schmitt suggests, as between states the visceral hatreds of a ‘friend-foe’ relationship, and the impersonal quality of this relationship may mitigate some of the worst features of our primordial aggressiveness (Schmitt 1932/1996)” (Brown&Ainley:2009:102)

“There are certain kinds of ‘settled norms’ in international relations which regulate conduct. Such norms are settled not in the sense that every state will pay allegiance to them; that is, they will attempt to show that they are not really breaking them, or that they are doing so for wholly exceptional reasons.” (Frost 1996: 105).

For example security dilemmas: “However, the capacity to defend oneself is also, most of the time, a capacity to act offensively. Following the same chain of reasoning that leads the first, peaceful, state to preserve and occasionally enhance the effectiveness of its armed forces, a second state may see this as a potentially hostile act. The defensive intentions- which cannot easily be demonstrated, much less proven- will be less important than the offensive capabilities. If the second state reacts to these capabilities by expanding its own coercive capacity this is likely to be perceived as potentially hostile, and so the spiral sets in. The US debate over National Missile Defense offers an interesting illustration of the reasoning here; a partial missile defence for the USA would be purely defensive in intent, designed to deter attacks from ‘rogue’ states, but, if effective, such a system would render Russian and Chinese deterrent forces less credible and probably stimulate them to upgrade their systems, in turn increasing US anxiety, and so on. There are things the USA can do to try to prevent this vicious circle from emerging, such as offering to share the technology with rivals, but the history of recent years suggest that such strategies do not, in fact, allay fears, but may actually increase them by demonstrating an effortless superiority that is, in itself, threatening.

This is a security dilemma rather than, for example, a simple mistake, because no one is behaving unreasonably or making unreasonable assumptions. It might, in fact, be a mistake to perceive hostility where there is none, but it is a reasonable mistake; better safe than sorry.” (Brown&Ainley:2009:104)

“The state-centric view of the world, especially in its realist variant, paints a picture of great insecurity and fear. Concerned for their own security, possibly desiring to dominate others, states are obliged to keep a watchful eye open for ways of enhancing their own power, and reducing that of others. Unrestrained and unprotected by any international government, states must look after their own security, even though they cannot but be aware that their attempts to do so may induce insecurity in others. Thus, the scene seems set for a wretched world, in which the idea of an international ‘order’ would be preposterous. Yet there is a degree of order in the world; international relations may be anarchic in the formal sense of lacking government, but they are not anarchic in the sense of being lawless and disorderly- or at least not entirely so. How can this be?

According to realist International Relations theory, order of a kind and to a degree is preserved by two key institutions- the balance of power and war.

The idea that the balance of power generates order is plausible enough, but to suggest that war is a source of order seems counter-intuitive, implausible and, indeed, somewhat distasteful. None the less, this thought, however distasteful, must be borne with, because war, seen as a political instrument does indeed play this role….In other words, war both complements and completes the balance of power. Without war, the balance of power could not operate as a functioning institution of an international system or society.” (Brown&Ainley:2009:107)

“The root idea is the notion that only force can counteract the effect of force, and that in an anarchical world stability, predictability and regularity can only occur when the forces that states are able to exert to get their way in the world are in some kind of equilibrium ….

To illustrate these points in more concrete terms, consider a highly simplified account of the international system in Europe after 1871. In 1871, the system was more or less in equilibrium, following Prussia’s victories over Austria-Hungary (1866) and France (1870-1), and, crucially, following Bismarck’s decision not to use these victories to create a Greater Germany by incorporating parts of the Dual Monarchy in the new German Empire. There were tensions in the system, and loose, temporary alliances between states, but, on the whole, the system was in equilibrium. However, on one reading, in the late nineteenth century, German power increased as a result of German industrialism and population growth, to the point that a German superpower began to emerge, contrary to Bismarck’s intentions. This industrial strength transmitted itself into an active German foreign policy via such measures as a larger army, and the growth of a navy virtually from scratch.

The response of the other European powers was, first, to attempt to enhance their own power (by, for example, in France, extending periods of military training, and in Britain, engaging in naval enhancement); and second, to re-align, creating new military alliances. France and Russia ignored ideological differences and signed a formal alliance in 1892; and Britain disregarded imperial rivalries and set aside a long policy of peacetime non-entanglement to become associated effectively with these two countries, in 1904 and 1907, respectively. In short, both the methods identified above to deal with incipient disequilibrium were attempted….that German power was the major disruptive influence rests on a basic force model of power; once we look at influence as revealed in outcomes, things look very different. We find that, in most of the diplomatic crises of the period, the German government was on the losing side, quite unable to convert its undoubted physical strength into favourable results at the conference table. This was why the German political elite in the years up to 1914 has such a strong sense that the rest of the world was against them; they were conscious of their own lack of influence, while others were conscious of their super abundance of power.” (Brown&Ainley:2009:109-110)

“Again, generalizing the point, no state really wants to see a balance of power emerge; balances of power are accepted because there is no better game in town; no alternative source of security anywhere near as effective…One alternative to balancing is ‘bandwagoning’– that is; lining up behind a state that is rising in power- and it has been argued quite cogently both that this is sometimes a rational strategy to follow and that the historical record suggests that states are every bit as likely to bandwagon as to balance (Walt 1987). Arguably, In the post-1989 world, the dominant tendency has been for states to bandwagon behind the USA, though this may now be changing” (Brown&Ainley:2009:111-12)

“hegemony– a difficult and controversial concept, hegemony is often applied to dominance of one country, region or group over others. Greek for leadership, this term was originally applied to the dominance of one Greek city-state over others. In addition to military dominance, the hegemonic power must also have economic and cultural dominance to set and enforce the rules of conduct that it prefers.” (Knox et al:2003:77)

“Critical realism is critical of both positivist and post-positivist approaches to the study of IR, and puts forward instead a method of analysis that is ‘ontologically realist’- arguing that there is one reality and that this reality exists independently of what we think about it; ‘epistemologically relativist’” (Brown&Ainley:2009:69)

In the above quotes we see that the state of hope and fear, unprotectedness, and paranoia have now become the state of existence underlying all states- constitutive urgrund

In Critical realism this is due to the ‘ontological reality’ of beings-for-itself, that must dominate others, in order to curb our ‘naturally aggressive tendencies’, that result from desiring something an-other has got and perceive that as our ontological ‘right’.

Now of course, we have proven that mankind does not have ‘naturally aggressive tendencies’, until such a time as he has unnatural tendencies towards possessions and inequality, but this way of life has now been couched in terms of religion within a pyramid of such people who are really out for themselves- Daksha, and so in order to allow the being-for-itself the authority in order to take and curb the taking of others, domination by the technique of the stick and carrot have come of necessity in order to balance power in a state of anarchy controlled by war, the only game in town..

For the Greeks however, the idea of God or religion as being the right to authority, became a bit of a joke. The Greeks due to the nature of their territory did not emerge as one big pyramid as with Egypt and Persia, they emerged as tens of little city-states, all of whom claimed their own right to power. By necessity therefore The God of wakan, therefore became split up into various gods, such as those concerned with grains who, surprise surprise, actually sent their own sons and daughters, in the forms of demi-gods in order to found the city-state where they ruled and were worshipped as men filled with the spirit of Daksha. Europe itself is named after the woman Europe who Zeus impregnated with his spirit and took to that physical land. The Greek ruled by kings, not priests named it after woman not a God and called it Europe from this perception, later on we will see this landmass renamed by priests and not kings where upon it will be named as God’s land and not mans, it will become called Christendom from that perspective, and then still later as the humanists of the renaissance reclaim the Earth for themselves, through the techniques of the Greeks ‘humanitas’, once again, it will be renamed Europe, by which we still see it and hence name it and dwell in it today.

05: Oh, MY, God!

What therefore was the great change in story, that could change our perception and language of the world, to see it more as mans world that Gods world? How did the Greeks view their gods?

“…the gods of Hellas behaved much like humans. Thus individual believers could not rely on the gods’ benevolence; rather they had to take divine jealousies and anger for granted…

Because the modern understanding of religion is so closely tied to hopes for the afterlife it may come as a surprise that the Greeks were largely indifferent to their fate after death. They did assume that shades or ghosts survived for a while after bodily death, yet all went to the same abode, a murky realm called Hades…situated beneath the earth. This was neither a paradise nor a hell; no one was rewarded for good deeds, no one punished for sins. Since the shades in Hades gradually faded away, the only true immortality one might attain was earthly remembrance for one’s earthly accomplishments.

Indeed, the theme of human accomplishments bulks the largest in early Greek thought. The Greeks were convinced that life was worth living for its own sake and that glory resided not in self-abasement but in practicing human virtues such as bravery, wisdom (in the sense of cunning), and service to one’s family and community. The Greeks also loved human beauty (according to the Iliad, the entire Trojan War was fought for the beautiful Helen) and sang songs in praise of great men and women. Whereas other early civilizations considered humanity contemptible in comparison to the omnipotent gods, the Greeks were well aware of forces beyond their control but did what they could to strike a balance between awe of their gods and pride in themselves. This confidence in human greatness was to characterize Hellenic civilization for centuries to come.” (Lerner et al:1993:102-3)

 In other words the gods of Greek thought, religion, and their right to authority become politico-religious, as Graves told us in a previous chapter

No longer were the gods seen as a higher nature of existence that invisibly formed man and his nature, but instead they became closer to man’s nature. We see that instead of the concept of heaven making God distant and the Earth our own, the Greeks remained with the idea of returning to the earth and of no negative cult of sin, by which to control desertification. In place of this technique they chose to bring the gods down from Mount Olympus and make them more human and more individual, by giving them human traits such as jealousy and anger by which Hubris and Nemesis were brought about in order to embody harmony through beauty, from civilization and the pursuit of the self and symbolised signally in the Greek Statue and resulting in the embodiment of war, as a necessary way of life to be valued, to be valourous to be virtuous, in the eyes of the gods.

 We are familiar with the idea of transmuting man into a god in order to rule himself, but it is the Greeks that transmute the gods into man himself in order to rule. The name attributed to this set of human-natures is philosophy meaning a ‘love of wisdom’- philo meaning love of and Sophia, meaning, ‘a goddess of wisdom’ through which philosophers could gain their beloved desire- wisdom.

To understand this more fully we must see Sophia not as a word but as a goddess, and more specifically as ‘The Muse’, from whence all arts are born through their inspiration. Inspired, meaning ‘to be breathed into’, by the Muse, by that nature of God from whence creativity and imagination are given. A part of the breathe that animates one of the seven types of earth that make up our bodies.

For the Greeks, the muses were originally three mountain-goddesses who later on became the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, they were called, Melete (meditation), Mneme (remembrance), and Aeode (song), in other words a trinitarian way of describing God’s universe- meaning one song or Aeode, a rememberance meaning a return to the unified perspective of being-in-Being- re-member-ing or Mneme, to be attained through meditation and prayer or Melete. “Zeus’s claim to be their father is a late one” (Graves:1992:55).  This trinity of the aspects of God then are the invisible forces that lead us up the mountain upon which God sits, through the techniques of meditation, remembrance, and prayer throughout all religions throughout all time. In Buddhism they are called Dakinis, in metaphysical philosophy they are called intuition, meaning immediate knowledge, such as the term revelation, by which all laws rest upon apparently.

Unlike in religion, where the nature of these forces can be told through the character of their nature, the Greek philosopher detaches these aspects from innate existence and attaches them specifically to man in order to look at man and his place in the World without God, i.e. not theologically, but as ontologically separate from himself, as it is himself that is the medium of perfection and his worlding of the world and not the Worlds any longer.

This is why Buddhism is not seen as a religion but as a philosophy because it denies the existence of God in its path to becoming a part of the alimental communion with wakan- the great spirit- who it is difficult to commune with when you name this wakan as a character- God. In Buddhist philosophy the path is easier when one does not block the way with such a concept and so it is not meditated upon or prayed too, the man who achieved the goal of communion is. In like manner in Islam and Protestant Christianity, the depiction of God is seen as a concept that blocks the way and so it is not allowed in this negative cult. Wakan does not care which way you take to aletheia.

The birth of philosophy of art of politics of democracy of war that result from this new story was not done in an instant as we saw with the nature of changes from hunter-gatherer to settler, it took much time. The Greek philosopher Socrates who we met in the last chapter himself stated that he attained his immediate knowledge from a dӕmon, that is to say a spirit, who told him his wisdom. Dӕmon is the word from where we derive the word demon, but originally it meant a genius spirit or god. In ‘The Symposium’ by Plato we actually witness Socrates learning about love from an ethereal female named Diotima, who is wiser than he in this matter. This invisible spirit of wisdom then was first of all a god, but then became a love of that god, as philosophy. Many Greek philosophers then in fact dropped the ‘love of’ aspect of the word, and became ‘Sophists’ that is to say not lovers of wisdom but wisdom itself, denying any power outside of themselves at all in its appropriation or on its resultant level of truth- aletheia, showing the result of bringing the gods down to the level of man, they eventually became man who denied there were gods but claimed they possessed wisdom.

06: Greek Philosophy

The Greeks invented philosophy. The word itself comes from the Greek, meaning, “love of wisdom”. It is a mystery why the Greeks, beginning around the sixth century B.C. were the first to pursue sustained philosophical inquiry. But since they lacked palace bureaucracies or professional priests, no vested interests stood opposed to free speculation and observation. In addition, because literacy was widespread- owing to the simplified Greek alphabet- and because new military tactics and governmental institutions gradually strengthened their ideals of equality, the Greeks came to believe that they were different from others, especially their Persian neighbours, and began ever more to speculate on the reasons for the differences. Finally, their relative indifference to material needs and the availability of leisure time offered the Greeks unprecedented opportunities for reflection.

From the sixth century B.C. until the fourth century B.C. Greek thinkers throughout the Hellenic world started addressing a wide range of questions about the nature of the universe and the meaning of life. The earliest Greek philosophers were the “Pre-Socratics” (so called because they preceded Socrates), all of whom lived during the sixth century in the city of Miletus in Asia Minor. Like their contemporaries, the New Babylonians, the Pre-Socratics studied the course of the stars as a way to observe the predictable regularities of nature. Thus the earliest of the Pre-Socratics, Thales (exact dates unknown), predicted a solar eclipse in 585 B.C. But whereas the New Babylonians interrelated their astronomy with supernatural doctrines about occult forces inherent in the stars, the Pre-Socratics excluded occult explanations for natural events and extended their strictly nonreligious inquiries into the workings of the entire physical universe. They believed that all things could be reduced to some primary substance and differed only about what it was. Thales, perceiving that all things contained moisture, believed that the basic substance was water, but one of his students insisted that it was primal, indestructible matter. Although the various conclusions of the Pre-Socratics would not stand up to later questioning and testing, their insistence on looking for natural laws and rational explanations was pathfinding and would remain characteristic of the Greeks.

After the Persians conquered Asia Minor some of the Pre-Socratics became silent and others fled to distant Sicily in order to retain their personal independence. Philosophical speculation thus continued in the Greek “Far West”, but it was now tinged with a pessimism and religious coloration that reflected Greek distress at seeing their freedoms crushed and a diminished trust in the strength of human rationality. Typifying this reaction was the system of Pythagoras, a thinker who migrated around 530 B.C. from the island of Samos near Asia Minor to southern Italy, where he founded a sect- half-philosophical, half-mystical– in the city of Croton. Pythagoras and his followers held the speculative life to be the highest good, but they believed that in order to pursue it, the individual must be purified of evil fleshly desires. They also believed that the essence of things is not a material but an abstract principle, number. Accordingly they concentrated on the study of mathematics, dividing numbers up into various categories such as odd and even, and devising the famous “Pythagorean theorem”- that the square of the hypotenuse of any right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Thus even though the Pythagoreans turned away from the material word, they still exhibited the characteristic Greek quest for regularities and predictabilities in the abstract world.

Victory in the Persian War enabled the Greeks to overcome the failure of nerve exemplified by the Pythagoreans

Above all in Athens, a state that became exuberantly optimistic after the victory over the Persians and the creation of a Greek naval empire, the increasing power of the individual citizen motivated inquiry into how the individual might best act in the here and now [for themselves- authors note]. Roughly around 450 B.C., to fulfil the demand to cultivate such worldly wisdom, teachers emerged who were called Sophists, a term simply meaning “those who are wise” or perhaps “those who know things.” Unlike the Pre-Socratics or the Pythagoreans, the Sophists were professional teachers, the first in the history of the West who made a living from selling their knowledge. Because they were later opposed bitterly by Socrates and Plato, the term “Sophist” became one of abuse, meaning someone who deviously employs false reasoning, and their entire movement acquired a poor reputation. But modern research has shown that the Sophists were often impressive thinkers and educators.” (Lerner et al: 1993:117-18)

By taking this perspective and living through it, the Greeks began to see themselves as the custodians of ‘equality, liberty, and fraternity’, and the Nature of these words became twisted from their nature as I have previously used it.

No longer were these rights Gods to give but were instead the possessions of the state, they were the possession of the people, they were power politics:

“The liberty, whereof there is so frequent and honourable mention, in the histories, and philosophy of the ancient Greeks, and Romans, and in the writings, and discourse of those that from them have received all their learning in the politics, is not the liberty of particular men; but the liberty of the commonwealth: which is the same with that which every man then should have, if there were no civil laws, nor commonwealth at all. And the effects of it also be the same. For as amongst masterless men, there is perpetual war, of every man against his neighbour; no inheritance, to transmit to the son, nor to expect from the father; no propriety of goods, or lands; no security; but a full and absolute liberty in every particular man: so in states, and commonwealths not dependent on one another, every commonwealth, not every man, has an absolute liberty, to do what it shall judge, that is to say, what that man, or assembly that representeth it, shall judge most concluding to their benefit. But withal, they live in the condition of a perpetual war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed, and cannons planted against their neighbours round about. The Athenians, and Romans were free; that is, free commonwealths: not that any particular men had the liberty to resist their own representative; but that their representative had the liberty to resist, or invade other people…. Whether a commonwealth be monarchical, or popular, the freedom is still the same.

But it is an easy thing, for men to be deceived, by the specious name of liberty; and for want of judgement to distinguish, mistake that for their private inheritance, and birth-right, which is the right of the public only….

For in the act of our submission, consisteth both our obligation, and our liberty; which must therefore be inferred by arguments taken from thence; there being no obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some act of his own; for all men equally, are by nature free.” (Hobbes:1651:140-41)

The natural possession of equalitie, fraternitie, and libertie especially by which  each human-being on Earth had lived and wanted to live in, become, no longer the goal of a being-for-itself, but instead become the goal of the State to which the being-is-subject. It is bad-faith (it is an easy thing, for men to be deceived) to think that you are free, when a politician says you are free. What he means is that the state is ‘at liberty’ in an ‘equal’ balance of power  amongst ‘fraternal’ pyramids that preserve this state through reciprocation- trade or tribute, and taking- war.

The fact that we have the power to go to war against another state is the actual power of this freedom, equality, and fraternity

It is called peace, but it is an easy thing, for men to be deceived, and think that means the opposite of war, rather than an aspect of desire, the spectrum of which is diametrically opposed by the singular term, war and peace. The commonwealth, is not the possession of each of the individuals who make up the pyramid, it is the pyramids possession, and you are subject to it. In like manner so is your freedom, equality, and liberty subject to this authority, that is your ‘right’ to freedom, your ‘right’ to being born equal, and your ‘right’ to increase in happiness and create inequality. In consequence they are no longer a natural right eternal to the individual but instead a right conferred by the state who then demands an obligation of its polis to enforce this right through its collective power and its singular possession. Nietzsche tells us of what this means in regards to the meaning of the word power now it has been removed from God’s domain, and of its subsequent meaning in regards to justice and morality.

“Power gives the first right, and there is no right, which at bottom is not presumption, usurpation, violence.” (Cameron&Dombowsky:2008:42)

“Origin of justice- Justice (fairness) originates among approximately equal powers, as Thucydides (in the horrifying conversation between the Athenian and Melian envoys) rightly understood. When there is no clearly recognisable supreme power and a battle would lead to fruitless and mutual injury, one begins to think of reaching an understanding and negotiating the claims on both sides: the initial character of justice is exchange. Each satisfies the other in that each gets what he values more than the other. Each man gives the other what he wants, to keep henceforth, and receives in turn that which he wishes. Thus, justice is requital and exchange on the assumption of approximately equal positions of strength.” (Cameron & Dombowsky:2008:76-7)

This definition of justice, as merely the power to decide what is right, and not the eternal laws of God, is that given by a Greek, Thucydides and we have already seen its wisdom as exposed by Socrates, a truthful man, against Thrasymachus’ like view. Thucydides is a famous Athenian General who wrote a history of the Greek peoples when they were at war with each other, and it is this book that was translated by Hobbes in his first work, and which later formed the basis of his book, ‘The Leviathan’, snippets of which we have been perusing occasionally in this book. We will therefore look at Thucydides’ experiences from his own words in order to understand how they formed those of Hobbes whose work sought to give the monarchy the right to rule in the 17^th century, as we shall see, and not a democracy or republic, in which Thucydides lived in the first one- Athens, whilst Hobbes lived in a republic.    

Thucydides’ work is the seminal work of a political perspective called realism, and as we have seen above in critical realism used in International Relations, it is the centre point, around which all theories of politics and international relations are born and spiral from. In politics this realism is given the various names of conservatism (the right wing mostly)  or Republicanism (the right wing mostly). They are forms of government whose central state is one of hope, fear, and paranoia, seen as the reasonable place by which to view the polis that they must by necessity control by force before any regulative dance of liberty, equality and fraternity, can be performed by the individual, in order to maintain the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the state, because in a state of anarchy and war (the true state of international relations throughout history) without the state having these in their possession how can the individual be really given them as a right, a right that they protect by keeping us under their ‘right’ wing. A wing that many see as a tautology of war, a self-fulfilling prophecy of reasonable, realist, war, due to the real nature of man being-for-itself, as first described by Thucydides- their bible.

We must therefore look in great depth at this period of time described by Thucydides’ and at the words of Thucydides’ themselves in order to elucidate the reasons for such a predominant mindset in our modern age.

Hobbes, as we have seen was wrong about the original nature of man, and he got this idea from Thucydides, but Thucydides is still the sine qua non of politics today as it was in Hobbes’ time. Rousseau’s Noble Savage, was in fact right, but in politics it does not hold water, because the Noble Savage was a hunter-gatherer whilst the ‘Nature of Man’ as told us by Thucydides and these political parties is one of domination and violence, i.e. the world of the settler, of Cain and Ham. Rousseau’s attempt at returning us to Nature was therefore laughable in the courts of power that we shall visit and was suppressed. Rousseau himself was forcibly ostracised from his country, spied on by his country, and then when he had escaped in flight until his health and power left him, ended his days dwelling as a grasshopper amongst nature in a walled enclosure owned by a Lord in hypocrisy but not in bad-faith.

Before we look at these words and this historical moment in which Thucydides’ lived and fought as a General in the Athenian army, let us see how the Greeks formed a new type of story that would be violent enough to compete against the world of the Persians who still proclaimed that their authority came from God himself in the person of its ruler.

What is interesting about this story is not only that it could be used by all of the subsequent city-states in order to constitute them, but also that it could be built upon to create different regulatory stories and laws, in order to create better models of production. In other words it was a basic story through which the drama triangle that is the constitutive rule of any state, could be placed, in order to produce greater power. It is the story that we still use today.

How efficient this basic story actually is in producing progress from this power, we will find, throughout the course of this book, is- not very efficient at all, no matter your idea of progress. But in reality, that is to say in the minds of realists, it need only be as efficient as is necessary in order to beat the other pyramids, and their story, surrounding it in space and time in the present. That ‘reality’ is the constitutive rule, survival of the state, before any regulative rules that can be afforded afterwards, such as rights of the polis. History is littered with states that did not adhere to this concept and so were taken over in war by those that paid attention to this first rule of the state, as every good political student is taught today through reading Thucydides. The fact that history is filled with the continual lineage of the Aborigines 30,000 years (possibly much longer in fact) that do not embody this because they do not have desire of possessions or see themselves as having the right to possess, and that their way of life is consequently peaceable, equable, fraternal and sacred and has existed tens of times longer than any empire or civilization in the 5,000 years that the rest of this book is concerned with, and consequently their political, artistic, literate, education does not waylay the western realist for an instant. Nor the other civilizations that we will see arise and fall without this ‘necessary’, ‘real’ paradigm.

A being-for-itself seeking to possess knowledge in order to gain power in the worlding of the World by his work and through wealth accumulation by his payment as subject to this perspective as Object of freedom, does not want to possess the knowledge that none of his education is true, merely a perspective that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of these subsequent truths that are paraded before him as such- it is his belief system- that becomes real, and proves itself.

International Relations does not tell us that its own self is born from the ontological perspective of being-for-itself, and that this ontology is a self-fulfilling prophecy that produces International Relations, just as Art, Literature, Religion and Politics, do not promulgate this truth, but merely start in their thrownness from this unspoken untruth of tradition. They all start from this ‘episteme of truth’, defined by the Greeks, where it is man that is the possessor of these muses, and not the muses that are the possessor of man. It is man that has the fire by which to produce these higher natures, these super-states in which we believe, and not God from his Golden Mountain from whence they came. It is the pyramid that possesses these invisible forces and their wisdom. It is man that is above nature and not Nature that contains man. The pyramid frames it all.

07: History in the Making

What then was this meta-narrative, this story, that replaced myth by being more powerful than it for the being-for-itself? What is river bed of each civilization in this present day that guides its generations of peoples in its progress towards its venture? What killed the river-bed of myth and replaced it with a means to power without invoking God?

Well, as we saw the story of authority in pre-history began with a myth, that is to say a story based around the perspective of God as the possessor of power and right. This was then linked to an individual whose nature manifested this Nature. By the time of Babylon this right to authority had become tradition and had been subsumed and usurped by the ontological story of individualism known as ‘familism’ (creating more power than any individual, but not a universally cohered group, i.e. beings-in-Being) through the blood-line of the ruler, but under the façade of Divinity, as the ruler moved out of the temple and into his own palace of luxury and decadence (the sex-drugs and rock-and-roll lifestyle of the powerful being-for-itself).

The nature of the story itself therefore had to change in order to represent the traditional perspective of the right to power that these blood-lines represented and wielded, and this was done by the necessity of awe as a magical invisible force that pervades this super-state. Myth now becomes legend. The right to power becomes the story of a great ruler who takes power from the Gods by fighting with them, by using his nature against their Natures, in order to reach perfection as a ruler, and therefore deserve his status and all that it rightfully conveys. It is not the nature of Nature, manifest in the ruler that bequeaths him his/her force as the authority to rule, but instead the Nature won from Nature by the force of his/her self-will. It is the will of the ruler that is the right to authority, displayed in his use of force against the gods, gods who, just like him are now changed necessarily in juxtapose- darpan- to the nature of the ruler, as being jealous, vengeful, lazy, desirous of worship and of the sacrifice of the power of those beneath them.

The Babylonians had already taken myth and turned it into legend, as with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first ever recorded oral story. The story is based on a king believed to have actually existed in Babylon, and who is reputed to have been a Great King. Consequently when the literate priests, that is to say the possessors of knowledge and consequent power, wrote down this myth they were now under the power of kings dwelling in their own walled of palace, not themselves as priest/kings (whose right to authority was from God). So in order to gain the right to write out this myth they had to do so under the perspective of this king, who wished to still be aligned to the Nature of God, but no longer wished to be defined by it. The story-telling technique of Legend was therefore necessarily invented by the milieu of power structures within the pyramid of Babylon. Palace comes from Pales, a goddess who protected the flock, her name means ‘protector’ and here we see the separation of the sacred His- and the profane- Mine, as the role of the King/Priest become separated respectively by this magical force of reason forged from religious authority.

By the time we get to the Greeks, such as Thucydides and Herodotus (500 B.C.- 3,000 years later) they did not write Legends they wrote history. In other words, His-story (myth) had become his-story, as the story of man and the ‘state’ he lived in. No longer have the gods a foot in the door of cause and effect of history, that would chain the imagination of its story-tellers to physical objects of reality and claim this anchor and its chain of links as the truth. It is the story of man as Object driven by other Objects. Thucydides wrote from the perspective of an object of the Athenian state not as a being-in the state of-Being.

In other words Thucydides is not writing a story about all people, the race of Adam, but about his pyramid of individual people. Legend is the story of God and of His people by whom His conduit rules, but history is the story of ‘a’ people ruled by another person who has the natural right to rule by the nature of being an individual (being-for-itself) who is seen as great enough to do so by the people.

Now this transition of the right to power being taken over by the people themselves as a right, and the transition of story from myth to legend to history is perfectly shown by the nature of the Athenians, Spartans and Persians at the time of history that Thucydides writes, and we shall expand upon this presently.

Before we do this however I wish to describe history in a different word in order to elucidate this change from myth to legend to history by the techniques of religion and law, as discussed in the previous chapter.

History is not history until it has been lived, but its perspective, upon which history is written always exist in order to produce the perspective that produces the story type known as history.

The word for this invisible force then when experienced in the present is not history, which it will produce, but culture

Culture has an interesting etymology that elucidates this point. Culture comes from the word colony meaning ‘to till’ and this is where we derive the word agriculture, meaning to till the land, but a colony is a collection of beings-for-itself and it from this meaning that we derive the word culture. ‘Collection’ comes from the word Legend, meaning a marvellous story, and Legend comes from the word legere meaning to collect or to bind, as does the word religion. Just therefore as the being-for-itself was bound to the land they tilled, so was their culture bound to them by their marvellous story, their legend, their story that bound them.

Another word derived from collection and more constitutively aligned to culture is that of cull, meaning to collect or to pick, and so we can imagine a culling of the grain when in the fields and in like manner we can therefore imagine a culling of the collection of peoples that make up the culture of beings-for-itself, i.e. the state of war, of hope, fear and paranoia that is their lot. Before settlers came along, culture would have meant a collection of beings-in-Being who gathered what they picked in a world of abundance, where individual totemic heroes had not yet created the problems that they were going to, and the awe they would collect by doing so.

Culture then is the his-story that replaced legend that itself had replaced myth, as mankind tells the ontological story of his existence and of the reality that this existence gives birth to, and then proceeds from. The truth of each of these perspectives, as we have seen is the same, but their value system, their culture, what they choose to ontologically perceive, in order to be able to pick it as a reality, is the only difference.

As we therefore leave the last five chapters behind we leave behind the myths of the hunter-gatherer, the legends of the Babylonians and we enter the seed perspective of the Greeks that will become the history of western culture.

But this culture as we have now witnessed, has become one where, by necessity, some people must always be culled. In order to survive in equality, fraternity, and liberty, as a state of the ‘State-of-beings-for-itself’ some must be sacrificed, must become abject and enslaved. There is now ample reason by which to prove the realist necessity of throwing babies into the Leviathan.  Myth had to die because the banks of the river had now been created by settling, agri-culture. These banks were the banks of individual totemism and desire. Legend was then born from this perspective in order to reflect this new worlding where force as might gained the permission to wield the stick of necessity against these settlers who killed myth  in the name of protection, and finally culture was born, by the necessity of taking power as a right for ourselves individually in order to cohere enough people to defeat the power of the story of Legend as Divinity, by killing those that said they possessed this right to power and not you- justified hate.

A will to kill, to cull, had to come into existence within in the collective Greek mindset in order to regulate the constitutive reality of over-population and limited resources, of too much demand and too little supply and most importantly to cull those weak powers that surrounded them in order to gain for themselves as was their ‘necessary’ culture.

To cull, means to pick or gather, but in terms of value it also means to pick out as substandard, e.g. an old or weak animal or crop. In regards to culture therefore, to cull means to gather the power of a weak or substandard pyramid through the technique of war. Culture is the modern day story technique that tells a collection of peoples of its ‘right to cull’. Culture tells its people what it values and then tells its people of another culture who are inferior in those things that our culture values in order to engender feelings of hate and superiority and consequently of ‘our collective right’ to act and of our collective ‘wrongness’ by continuing to not act by killing those hated others. As if by magic this causes an increase for the victorious culture, who then (famously) write the history through the perspective of their phylogenic right. Their dance of morality, and right, resulted in a magical decrease of supply and demand, by decreasing the demand through the technique of killing and being killed, hence lowering the demand, and increasing the supply by the magical dance of pillage. The regulative reason allowed a greater increase in the power to achieve this constitutive necessity. The play of morality, turned its members towards the collective right of their pyramid against the collective wrong of the Other, an exponential power of hate, justice, and action.

The fact that these ‘inferior peoples’ do not value what we do because they have a different culture does not seem to matter. What matters is that they are not right, because they do not have ‘our’ ‘superior’ values. Of course this is not therefore a truth but an opinion based on no metaphysical authority but solely upon the culture of authority as told by the ruler to his subjects and the traditions of his-story by which they are subjected. Now that God has been removed from the dwelling of authority when it comes to the right to rule, the social contract of protection, becomes the reason for authority, and hence authorities reason. To look out for me, what is mine, and what will be mine, versus what is not mine (what they believe is theirs), in zero-sum game called civilization, experienced as war and peace, fear and hope, pleasure and pain as a right, a necessity, a rightful, justified hate of the wrong,- paranoia.

In a world without God or even gods it is therefore only the reality and morality of the ruler that decides upon the ‘reason’ (from now on one can say opinion) by which to value another pyramid and discern a weakness in it, in order for the story of their ‘substandard’ culture to be told to his pyramid. Firstly, in the great song and dance called, ‘our greatness’, our ‘national pride’ and then in the reflective ‘truth’ of their inferiority by this same reflective (darpan) ‘reason’. These other people however are not be converted to our culture and collected when they refuse to pay tribute but instead are to be culled and upon so doing, it must therefore be our right by this same reasoning to own the lands and power and rights that they possessed. Further still, because, as we saw, your possessions are also you because they represent the power you possess in the world, so the victor pyramid believes that it has the right to possess the possessors themselves who have lost their power to possessing any rights by losing their rightful possessions. In short the culture of enslaving them and harnessing their subject power solely through the stick. Progress is war. An increase in power is progress. Progress towards a venture perceived from the perspective of the being-for-itself. I love, to hate you.

We have seen therefore that ‘history’ is the technique used by the Greeks right up to modern man in order to justify his right to power as an individual and as a ruler, but what we have not seen is the actual story by which this transmutation took place. That is where we are now going to progress towards in our venture of understanding our thrownness and discovering the traditions and culture that are the currents of the river made by this river-bed. From there we will look at the two states of Sparta and Athens in order to see these same roots and their fruits respectively from this story in order to see this same emergence from Legend out of Myth. From there we will see if either of these states used this story in order to glean a morality that they stuck to in their lifestyle or instead simply used it in order to glean more wealth for themselves and create abject scape-goats all around them, as we saw with Babylon and its story.

What therefore is the Name of the actual story that is behind history of the human-race, this nation of peoples being-for-itself in a universal flight?

I Need a Hero! – and he’s gotta be strong, and he’s gotta be good, and he’s gotta be tough for the fight

“Before 1870 no one guessed that great civilizations flourished in the Greek archipelago many hundreds of years before the rise of Athens. Students of the Greek epic, Homer’s Iliad, of course knew that a mighty Greek king, Agamemnon, was supposed to have led all the Greeks to victory in the “Trojan War” long before the eighth century B.C., when the Iliad was first set down in writing. But it was simply assumed that Homer’s entire plot was fictional. Today, however, scholars are certain that Greek history- and thus European history- began well over one thousand years before Socrates started discussing the nature of truth in the Athenian marketplace.” (Lerner et al:1993:84)

In the above quote we see that scholars of history (modern academic man) could believe that the person in the legend was real but that the legend itself wasn’t, whilst for the myth-makers the story was true without an individual person being in it. As we saw Adam, all the way up to Abraham, meant a nation of peoples, not an individual person. This is the perspective that the Greeks began and why we view the past today with such realist, fundamentalist, eyes, and why we the ‘common sense’ view, perceives Adam and Eve as two people, which from this perspective reasonably reflects the story of science and states, from this super-state, the ‘law’ of genetics, that two people cannot father a nation because of imbreeding and a lack of urgrund of genetic variance- therefore the bible must be rubbish and hence so must the whole God thing. This is why one needs a reasonable lack of reason in order to be open to the existence of God, and hence have any chance of experiencing any reasonable proof. The irrational ‘leap of faith’, which might be called, the rational ‘opening to aletheia’.

The Iliad, written in 750 B.C., from the Greek Iliados, ‘of Ilium’ i.e. ‘of Troy’, is a legend of heroes told in a song or poem by the muse Aoede to Homer, its author. Therefore its source is from the gods, they are the true author, they are the authority. But what stands out about the story of the Iliad is that these gods have bothered to tell a story to Homer through revelation that has nothing to do with these Gods themselves. The story of the Iliad is a story of a siege of Troy, a Greek State, by other Greek States under the aegis of King Menelaus, king of the Spartans, and how the gods perceived the behaviour of individuals in that story. Not a race of people acting together as one, but as individuals by whose power and force of will, protect that group, increase its power through culling, and how the gods look down with approval of these actions, because of the ‘right’ reason that begins this behaviour of war between these two pyramids of Troy versus Sparta and its reciprocator allies.

What is it therefore that the Trojans (the people of Troy) have taken from Menelaus that is of such value to him and to them, and indeed to all of the Greek peoples, that deserves the attention of the gods, the revelation of the muse and the manifestation of these Holy words- this logos- by Homer? Well they had taken Menelaus’ wife Helen, a woman who was the spirit of the age, a beauty beyond all compare, beyond reflection- darpan. The Greeks themselves are not called Greeks as a consequent of this truth, for it is this story that begins the formation of the Greeks into a peoples. They are named Hellenes, the race of Helen, it was the Romans that called them Greeks (Grecia). There are also Hellenists who are the Jews that used the Greek language and it is these Jews that translated the Bible, using the language, the gestalt frame-work, of the Hellenes, produced from The Iliad (and the subject matter of the previous five chapters of this book, that formed the Iliad itself).

This then is a story spoken ‘of’ by the gods, but not ‘told’, ‘enacted and worlded’ by them as with the flood or Daksha. It is the humans that worlded this story by their will, and the gods merely give their opinion upon this behaviour through their individual perspectives- or natures. What therefore are the nature of the Greek gods. The telling of the Iliad by the muse, and the raising of the heroes of the story above those of the collective, is achieved by recounting the perspective of these gods as they watch these individuals and talk of them.  By reflection therefore the Iliad tells us ontologically, that the gods are not looking at the collective of people, in order to weigh them, but at the individuals that make up this collective culture. Therefore, a culture is a collection of individuals with separate names, not one Name, any longer. The spirit must be perceived individually and become termed, ‘the soul’. The nature of the words used to describe why some individuals are named heroes by the gods by reflection tells the reader what the nature of each of these gods is, and unsurprisingly, the gods have individual desires, judgements, values, hatreds, favourites, etc. In other words the gods tells us about their individual character in order to reveal to us our ‘right’ behaviour.

How they praise and assist, disavow and curse, each of the individual people of the story places them as ‘The Third’, as the judge of humanity by which we judge ourselves, just as the religious negative God does, but in the Iliad the gods themselves have been imagined as human, they have been made in our image. These gods of the Iliad praise violence for gain because they understand the Nature of the ‘right to perfection’ that each individual carries within them They recognize the beauty of Hellenic civilization that will arise from this story through the perfection of the individual totem, that makes this civilization possible. They weigh the reality of desire against the reality of truth, and find beauty as its embodiment of harmony, as the transcendent nature of civilization that can turn the state into a super-state of desire, guided by beauty towards aletheia. The gods therefore recognise that human-nature, is now separate from their Nature- since Prometheus gave them the fire by which to transmute it- and now has human-rights, of which the gods are not excluded but are no longer the main players of worlding, they are not the shakers and movers of history, as they were in myth and less so in legend. The Gods have the same rights as us because they like us have this Holy Desire to attain beauty and perfection themselves, and consequently we read that they have the same problems, they are envious, jealous, vengeful, loving, mischievous, deceitful, etc, etcetera.

But in order for the story to be one that is still transcendent of this state of both man and now the gods also, i.e. to suggest a project by which our nature can be perfected; or our ontological lack can be fulfilled; in order for our statue to be without wax- imperfection, one must name a transcendent Object or Nature. When these terms are combined we call them a phenomena meaning an object whose nature exists within the garment of matter, the physical world. This phenomena is Helen, the Object of the Nature of the Greeks. It is an Object of Awe incarnate as a woman who is married to the ruler of Sparta but which is understandably stolen, as we are told by the gods themselves in The Iliad, by the prince of Troy, Paris, who wishes to bestow such a nature on his own peoples of Troy, as indeed do all of the Hellenes. As, indeed, did the prince with the magic horse and the iron fish wish to do to their peoples.

What is this aspect of Nature to be held in such awe and to be valued by all peoples?

It is two things, the first one is the ‘Truth’ or the Noble Lie (we are yet to weigh this with facts) and the second one is the method for achieving that Truth.

This new version of the Truth is Helen herself, she is beauty and it is this beauty that is aligned by the words of the gods and by the fact that they were spoken by the gods through Homer that they are seen as Truth. From now on it will be beauty that is the mark of truth in the eyes of the Hellenes. But Helen does not just mean beauty. In order to link her to the gods fully we must understand what this name really means, for Helen literally means ‘Moon-goddess’. It is the reflected light of the moon, the reflected sight of the gods themselves upon us and our actions as ‘The Third’ that is the truth of the moons beauty, and of their watchful eye in the sky.

In other words it was no longer the Nature of the moon that is Holy- as it was for the Queen of the matrilineal age, and it was no longer the light of the Sun (Helios) that was Holy as it struck the moon and gave her its power to grow the grain- as it was for the legendary sun-kings of Babylon and Egypt. It is now the reflective words of the gods that illumine the nature of man and his rights subsequently. It is the logos (as muse- revelation given in the form of words) itself as witness to the actions of man that are beautiful and true, as are those actions taken by the characters of The Iliad as the gods dictate (literally to Homer), because the gods do not punish the Trojans or Menelaus for their actions, they simply witness and understand and even praise these actions, taken for the sake of beauty and truth. Therefore the urgrund of being-for-itself becomes the ‘unconcealed nature of this Being’. This usurps the Truth of the being-in-Being completely. The individual’s right to perfection as totem, beauty and truth by the means taken by those heroes of Troy as depicted in the Iliad is a spoken right to all. Desire is good! Beauty is truth, and I therefore if I am beautiful and so are my possessions, then I must possess truth, I must be truth. As the individual author of this truth I must therefore have rightful authority, a conduit to desire for-itself.

What better story to cohere people is there than, ‘the gods are on your side and greed is good?’ We ourselves will see it told once again by a story character of our age, ‘Gordon Gecko’, in this book. Why fight for a king who is the conduit of God, when it is right to fight for your own self, in order to perfect ones-self, in the eyes of the gods themselves? Why fight for another unless it empowers oneself therefore.

What the Greeks had invented was a way of disavowing the necessity of the  negative cult that came with Religion, whilst maintaining the façade of religion. It had curbed the power of the very ‘invisible force’ (the negative God) designed to curb the very nature they now saw as sacred- the nature of desire for ones-self, the Ego.* They had justified war and increase. They had turned universal love into a universal love of beauty, and of course, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. A perspective of the individual, a totem of individuality, a worlding towards a harmony judged by-itself.

What therefore were the characters of the Iliad like and what is the fruit of their venture of being-for-itself?

*A major innovation that also achieved this came from the philosophers after Homer who invented the language of metaphysics, that we learnt above. This unfortunately cannot be dealt with in this book, but will be dealt with in my next work.

In The Iliad, “the characters are seldom reflective; they are intent on avoiding shame and live entirely for their public reputation, showing no conscience, self-discovery, or psychological growth.” (Lerner et al:1993:125)

The Sacrifice (1986) dir. Andrey Tarkovsky

So these new ‘heroes’ (not legends) found esteem in life by being-for-Others, but not being-subject-to-others, an experience they call shame, but which relates to the God Daksha, and not to the God- Nature. Heroes act, not for God, but for human-beauty to be witnessed by the gods, to be coveted and praised by the gods, in an alimental communion of desire to self-perfection for-itself, through the sacrifice of the Other. It is not yet the perspective of ‘survival of the fittest’, but it is no longer the embodiment of harmony or ‘My will be done’ either. It is a hazy middle ground, of ‘my will be done is Your will be done’, of  an ‘embodiment of harmony’ seen through the eyes of the individual who must survive in this world of war and hence be ‘fit’, because that is how one fits in to the worlding of this world. Take a look at Nature, as it dwells, now separate from man, and see how each of its individual creations must fight in order to increase through procreation, and just look at the beauty of Nature that is created through this perceived technique- this is same ‘reason’ that creates our ‘reasonable’ behaviour and global warming and war.

The entire Iliad is based upon the taking, or the sacrifice, of a human-life, taken for the greater cause of the spirit of beauty (Helen) that would re-incarnate the form of the world in its own image, through us, as it does through the gods themselves. In other words, to live for the appreciation of what man held in awe through the perspective of the ego- Brahmanda, not to live for the appreciation of what God held in awe through the perspective of being-in-Being*.

*Watch Tarkovsky’s, ‘The Sacrifice’ in order to elucidate this difference through the eyes of someone attempting to become a being-in-Being and succeeding, and how it changes the worlding of the World.

It is a good regulative story for a pyramid because it not only gives one the right to lead and to cull by tradition, i.e., without the first stage of authority- being a conduit of God’s nature- but also transplants the hierarchy of esteem into the judgement of the egoic perceptions of value for-itself. The fact that, the gods told this story through the revelation of the muse to Homer, shows that they also value this same perspective. Therefore the esteem one has is one’s own, relative, not only to another’s, but also to that of the gods. Yes they may send you the wrath of their jealousy, in hubris and nemesis, but that is their nature, as it is ours, and so it is natural, and in like manner so we are being naturally right and hence obeying natural law when we act in a like manner. The gods, like us, take and give and reciprocate according to self-motivated reason, not a higher reason, but the same reason- perfection of the self. Defined by the embodiment of harmony, that is perceived through the experience of beauty for-itself. It is a definition that is as undefinable as God was in the KaBa or Tabernacle, or the linga-stone. But it is a God that now necessitates a willed-garment in order to seem to exist in reality, in order to fit in to the world. In order to reveal is true state. It is a God that evokes individual harmony and collective disharmony, that divides and conquers, that becomes the rightful power of opinion, that will be the moral justification for war- the ‘moral aesthetic of value’.

So now the gods themselves are no longer involved in the Being-in-Being, but are themselves Beings-of-being, because they are egoically driven. A belief which is not for us to question, because they are the gods, and we must surely act in the same way, without question, through their revelation of ‘The Iliad’.  It is Muse-ic to the ears of the being-for-itself, as it was beauty to the eye of the beholder. The ontological language of the senses becomes twisted into dwelling from this perspective, as reflected by the experiences of the world- it feels true by the common sense of the community in a commonwealth of commodities subject to a common law.

Therefore our esteem of ourselves can become a sacred thing in-itself, and so by living a life of human-beauty it can also become the sacred-value of our centre. The price, is to die for that beauty to be lived, rather than to live for that beauty to die. To sacrifice ones-self for honour in order to keep sacred Helen within the possession of the State and therefore also ones-self as a subject of honour being-this-state.  By doing so, others would esteem thee, for your valour in the fight for such a sacred right that was superior to you alone, -humanity beatified, and the gods beatified as an effect.

08: Survival of the Fittest – The Dance of Artifice

We have a word for this new face (from where we derive the word façade) by which our senses look out upon the world of God as the embodiment of Beauty-in-Being, not the embodiment of harmony-in-Being. Harmony means concord ad derives from the Aryan word Ar meaning to fit.  But there is another word related to fit, that suggests to us beauty over harmony, it is – Art. Art literally means, skill and fit. The first type of art, in a pyramid is the art of living and this requires two things. The first is that you have a skill valued by that pyramid’s organisational structure- (The Machine, The Man). The second is that one sacrifices individual morality for the mass cultural morality of the pyramid in order to fit. ‘Oh the things I sacrificed for my art!’ Not such a light thing to say now perhaps.

What therefore is the Art form of the Greeks, witnessed and approved of by the gods, by which they attained Helen the beautiful Moon-Goddess? Well the answer lies in the words language born from the word Art itself. The Art of the Homeric poem gives birth to artillery, meaning the skilful technology of war, from artillery- to equip- meaning to make machines and artillator, a maker of machines. It also gives birth to artifice meaning a trade, handicraft- hence skill, and artificer- a skilled workman. The imposition of a three dimensional form on to a natural object- artificial.

The Art of the Greeks was therefore artifice and artillery. Do not artists compose myths by which to render people under the power of their skill, their artifice, and thereby author the state of authority- and do they not create legends to render them under the power of tradition, to fit into the right to authority the portraits of those blood-line conduits of God- to render these very kings into the annals of worldly glory and the praise of his people as heroic deeds of artillery?  Does not the artist take nature and manufacture it into beauty or some other emotive-perspective of the self and then give it a higher value due to his self-willed work over the Gods, through the imposition of a three dimensional form on to a natural object’?

This value of truth as art has another word in Greek and it is Aesthetic, meaning tasteful, perceptive by the senses, from aΐσθομaι, meaning I perceive. An-aesthetic means relieving pain, dulling sensation, ‘An’ meaning not. Therefore it is the perception of pleasure and pain.

From these two words we can see that, ‘how I perceive the World is through changing it to my worlding in order to perfect that which I value, myself, which we experience as pleasure. When the World appears distasteful then I am in pain, my powers have been dulled and my esteem is low, but when I perceive beauty in the World it is always in accord with my worlding, and so my worlding must be true. It is in harmony-with-my-self.

This perception of the nature of art, not just as words or paint or music, but as a guiding light and way of forming a society has just been recognised by sociology and aesthetics has changed from the study of art to the study, as Lash puts it of, ‘aesthetic signifiers in the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life’, where the ‘political nature of the aesthetic’ is increasingly affirmed and there is a refusal to see art as a separate order of life. This has the effect of making aesthetics more central to the sociology of Mass Culture. In philosophy the word means ‘the perception of the beautiful as distinguished from the moral’, and in psychology it means ‘the sensations and emotions evoked by beauty itself’.

“Art is not merely an external ornament with which the cult has adorned itself in order to dissimulate certain of its features which may be too austere and too rude; but rather, in itself, the cult is something aesthetic. Owing to the well-known connection which mythology has with poetry, some have wished to exclude the former from religion; the truth is that there is a poetry inherent in all religion. The representative rites which have just been studied make this aspect of the religious life manifest; but there are scarcely any rites which do not present it to some degree….

Even when the cult aims at producing no physical effects, but limits itself to acting on the mind, its action is in quite a different way from that of a pure work of art. The representations which it seeks to awaken and maintain in our minds are not vain images which correspond to nothing in reality, and which we call up aimlessly for the mere satisfaction of seeing them appear and combine before our eyes. They are as necessary for the well working of our moral life as our food is for the maintenance of our physical life, for it is through them that the group affirms and maintains itself, and we know the point to which this is indispensable itself, and we know the point to which this is indispensable for the individual.” (Durkheim:1982:382)

A King could therefore, now organise each sacrifice into a competition of pyramid power and reward with esteem through artifice, those who fought for him, through the artillery, that he had equipped them with. The Iliad, became the regulative code of the warrior-king replacing the priest-king, and its subsequent moral beliefs. The Legend of the individual totem has been worked from the myth, the egoic force of the individual totem worked from the Legend and now placed paramount on the pyramid to denote the direction of the state itself, its teleology, as a current in the river that empowered culling for-itself. This is the hero. In other words the king could create a city-state story of social cohesion, whether having been born into a family-line descended from the nature of Being, or not. What need for the priest-queen, when the warrior-king who ‘won his right’ as natural law authorised, was now needed in such a violent World of paranoia, and what need for a Being now that the ego was the draft of a good-life, and what need for awe-thority when the awe was now art and artifice as physical possessions of power?

Artifice means, ‘cunning, ingenuity, skill in contriving’, traits we saw listed above in regards to those held by the Greeks. Artificial means ‘man-made’ yet also, when held against the perspective of a being-in-Being, it means ‘made to imitate a product Naturally made. That made in our image not His.

Art, then is a man-made product that authors the right to power to the being-for-itself-in-itself

The right to power is to be won, and this in-itself, gives the right to power. Might be-comes right.

From this artifice then lies the story of who is weak and requires culling, of cul-ture. Culture means- the training and development of the mind- the refinement of taste and manners acquired by such training- the social and religious structures and intellectual and artistic manifestations, etc, that characterize a society. But as we saw above the characters of the Iliad were not very cultured, they were more like a gang of Egoic individuals out for themselves alone, rather than anything useful as a story to cohere individuals together in a state. How could a pyramid of such peoples ever be formed?

These people fought only for ‘their public reputation, showing no conscience, self-discovery, or psychological growth’.  These characters are fit (art) for worship as a warrior-ruler yes, but not very good for be-coming subjects. That is to say subjects that are aesthetically becoming- that fit into the Object of the Pyramid. How does one worship the nature of the Ego, but not allow each of these ego’s to become more powerful than the ruler with the most powerful ego?

“And as to rebellion in particular against monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the reading of the books of policy, and histories of the ancient Greeks, Romans; from which, young men, and all others that are unprovided of the antidote of solid reason, receiving a strong, and delightful impression, of the great exploits of war, achieved by the conductors of their armies, receive withal a pleasing idea, of all they have done besides; and imagine their great prosperity, not to have proceeded from the emulation of particular men, but from the virtue of their popular form of government: not considering the frequent seditions, and civil wars, produced by the imperfection of their policy. From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their kings, because the Greek and Latin writers, in their books, and discourses of policy, make it lawful, and laudable, for any man so to do; provided, before he do it, he call him tyrant. For they say not regicide, that is, killing a king, but tyrannicide , that is, killing of a tyrant is lawful….In sum, I cannot imagine, how any thing can be more prejudicial to a monarchy, than the allowing of such books to be publicly read, without present applying such correctives of discreet masters, as are fit to take away their venom: which venom I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad dog, which is a disease the physicians call hydrophobia, or fear of water.” (Hobbes:1651:214)

Well, just as we saw above in relation to liberty, equality, and fraternity, the object of desire becomes the Object possessed by the state. It becomes the states Objective over the individuals Objective and so the individual becomes Subject to his own tastefully perceived state of desire- by the State-itself. In other words the State becomes the in-itself that the being-for-itself is looking for in order to fulfil his lack of urgrund in being-for-itself. If one sacrifices ones-self for the State then, as an Object of the State you have this urgrund, you fit in. You are the subject of this Object who can now be-for-itself without any contradistinction between your egoically driven actions and the laws and morality of the State as they are in harmony- which is of course beautiful and therefore must be true. As long as one now acts for ones-self but does not disempower the state at the same time, then you are good. Mmm Mmm bring it on, moral justice with a cherry on top for the heroic culture of the mad dogs of war.

“By the sixth-century post-Homeric world, the Greek cities were aware that they had tamed the heroes of the Iliad. The wars which they unleashed were not for the personal glory of the warrior but the collective fame of the city- not that this made the Greek world any more peaceful. It is nice, writes Frederick Raphael, to read high-minded lamentations about violence, especially in the great tragedies at the heart of the western literary canon….But in practice violence was rarely renounced, still less tempered by chivalry (Raphael, 2003, p.205). War is not distinguished by warfare in terms of its humanity, but the funnelling of lethal values into a contest with a distinct set of rules. The trick once everything is disputed and individuals are antagonistic to each other is to translate conflict into agon (or competition). And it is only in the city that conflict with others as well as conflict with other cities can take the form of a contest, just as lawlessness can only be tamed by law.

This is why, Plato tells us in The Laws, the city-states were in an almost permanent state of war against each other

In the words of Hans van Vees, they fought one another ‘to demonstrate their “excellence” (arête)’which entitled them to a place at the top of the tree. At the same time they fought to stop inferiors from acting like superiors, and superiors from demanding more deference than they deserved (Lebow, 2009, p.187)” (Coker:2010:17)

“…what Homer himself reminded them time and time again in his poem: men can turn into beasts soon enough. Achilles’ clansmen, the Myrmidons, are described as wolves who eat raw flesh as they are unleashed into battle. Men and beasts are not that different. Indeed, writes Jonathan Gottschall, Homeric man is an unrealized ideal, a work in progress (Gottschall, 2008, p.163). Even the noblest warriors who haunt the pages of The Iliad are ‘killer apes’ who have applied the superior intelligence of human beings to robbing their fellow men of all they hold dear: their wealth, their women and ultimately their lives. With Plato the philosophers set out to ‘domesticate’ the warrior- or to tame him by specifically linking his existential being to instrumental ends….

Indeed, by the time of Plato, the animal imagery which Homer had employed to describe his warrior-heroes had largely disappeared. The use of the word animal now excluded one from the moral community (i.e. to behave like an animal was to behave badly.)…

It is our animal nature that we cannot escape; any more than we can emancipate ourselves from our evolved biology (Gottschall, 2008, p.160). Evolutionary psychologists are pessimistic about the human condition for that reason- they recognize that we are what we are and there may be limits to how much we can change. There may be a limit in other words to what we might yet ‘become’.” (Coker:2010:19-20)

“For Plato the philosopher’s task was to demystify, to invoke reason (not revelation), to be mundane (conceptual, not poetic). In the rational world of war (and he tells us in The Laws that every city-state is at war with each other (The Laws, 626a) the poetic has no place. If war were ever allowed to become poetic the state would lose control. War should be discussed in a cold, dispassionate light without the enthusiasms and passions which animate it. His objection to Homer was that of a ‘responsible’ artist towards a fellow artist who had no concern for what the power of his own language might lead to. The Iliad, he claimed, had locked the Greeks into a carmen perpetuum – a perpetual song (the term is Ovid’s) from which they could not break free. They had been seduced into fighting war by the wish to imitate the exploits of Achilles and Hector. Even now we are seduced by the power of his artistry to admire a man like Achilles who is no way admirable, a man whom we would be ashamed to resemble in real life.” (Coker:2010:91)

The Carmen perpetuum- the perpetual song of civilization, has replaced the eternal one song of the uni-verse- and it was ‘good’ and ‘right’ and beautiful. A work in progress of heroic civilized man seduced into war as a tame state of existence- paranoia, by which to control this song.

Remember how hunter-gatherer man had fear of Nature as well as awe previously. Now civilized man has tamed this fear and awe into subjects for-itself, in an artifice of revelation, that brought them more power than the fear of Nature and need for protection, because art and beauty allow a state to transcend its constitutional truth and add a regulative dance of justice, and right, good heroic deeds, and consequent belief in the right to gain and increase at the price of the Other and the artifice of hatred.

09: The Father of Everything- Natural Warfare becomes Unnatural War

To the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, this reasonable reality (realist perspective) was seen not therefore as a happy state of peoples in awe of these honoured warriors but instead as a state of peoples who, were suffering from a lack, an anaesthetic, that would forever cause further wars ad infinitum.

Heraclitus (in whom, in Hegel’s vivid phrase, the history of philosophy struck dry land) was called the ‘weeping philosopher’ because of the sadness induced in him by the follies of the human race.” (Coker:2010:47)

“Heraclitus was the first of the pre-Socratic philosophers (as far as we know) to ask the question: why war? And hence what was its beginning? The question begged an answer: it never assumed, of course, an end either to war let alone the enquiry. How could it? The contemporary Slovenian philosopher Slovoj Zizek claims that melancholy is in fact the beginning of philosophy- the interrogation into the human condition and its discontents.(Coker:2010:47)

“Now let us remember that the metaphor Heraclitus uses is war- do not confuse it for warfare, or elide the two. War fathers change- it generates it (it is generative- like a father it gives birth). Warfare doesn’t; there is no change in the state of nature where people find themselves stuck in a permanent present where there is no flux, only chaos. It is the ordering principle of change that he wants to get us to confront; war is ordered, and change is possible only because it takes place within an ordered world.

Heraclitus was referring back to a myth shared by most civilizations- the primal night from which we have all emerged. Every civilization has such myths, including their own.” (Coker:2010:51)

“In claiming that war, not warfare, is the father of everything, Heraclitus drew upon a theogony that was handed to the Greeks by Hesiod writing in the seventh century. In his book Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths? Paul Veyne tells us that Hesiod knows that we will take him at his word: we will believe the myths he spins, and he treats himself as he expected to be treated: he believes everything that entered his head (Lane-Fox, 2008, p.360). The reason why Hesiod believed this mythic revelation of the distant past to be true was that he believed he had been inspired to write it down by the Muses….

Hesiod considered that the Muses were the authors of his whole work, so awed was he by the mystery of his own creative process. The Muses, he tells us, get us to remember what is buried away in our minds- though memory is valuable, of course, only if inferences can be drawn from what is remembered. And the inference the Muses want us to draw from remembering the primal night is that we have escaped from the state of warfare, not into a world at peace but into a world of war (if we want peace we will have to fight for it, but the fact that war has ‘rules’ allows us, at least, to strive for it for the first time).” (Coker:2010:52)

“It is also at this point in the story that we begin to ask, what is the nature of war. Heraclitus was the first philosopher we know to ask that question and the first to proffer an answer: it promotes change. We must recognise that for the Greeks change itself was the problem. We must always remember how much we differ from them, they are sufficiently alike that we can understand them is worth meeting. And the Greeks found change disturbing because it can happen without warning. They called it metabole: abrupt change (Gardner, 2001, p.39). We think we know what peace is, but it can give rise to war very quickly. Peace, in other words, cannot be understood without war, or vice versa. But on another, deeper level of meaning, change is problematic too- to Heraclitus change is of no value in itself (as it is for us). On the contrary it is a symptom of the world’s lack of perfection. A perfect world would be a changeless world. Things change because through movement they are always seeking repose, hence movement is both the consequence of imperfection and the means to overcome it are the same time. Heraclitus, in that respect, can be seen as the father of complexity theory. For we escape the state of nature into a world of change; we move from pre-history where change is painfully slow, and life relatively un-complex, into history where change begins to accelerate and complexity is the rule. In many cases war brings about those changes. Indeed, before the industrial revolution war was the primary engine of change….It just so happens that the context of life for much of history gave competitive societies an edge, or a margin of error that less bellicose societies did not always enjoy….

Nor is history the story of rapid, accumulating change which we call Progress

‘Progress’ itself is something of a cultural construction, in its present form an Enlightenment concept which over the last two centuries has been translated into an ideology of life. It found particularly strong expression in Kant’s ‘hidden plan’ and even Adam Smith’s championship of the middle class as the vanguard of a superior economic and moral order.” (Coker:2010:54-5)

“One of the best and most recent elaborations of this view is to be found in Philip Bobbitt’s magisterial work, Terror and Consent, (2008), which offers a sweeping tour d’horizon of the history of war, one similar in scope and ambition to his earlier work, The Shield of Achilles. Stated rather reductively, his argument is that war and the state order exist in a mutually affecting relationship. Not only do fundamental innovations in war bring about fundamental transformations in the constitutional order they also bring about fundamental changes in the conduct of war (Bobbitt, 2008). In other words, it is in the nature of war that war itself is in constant flux. The very changes in social complexity that it engineers feed back into the way it is conducted. The Hoplite war of the Greek city-states gave way to the mass armies of the Hellenistic age; cavalry gave the feudal levies of Europe a decisive advantage; the gunpowder armies of Europe and western Asia trounced the nomads once and for all; the mass conscript armies of the last century mimicked the assembly line production of late capitalism, and in so doing produced the industrial battlefields of the Western Front. The state of nature/warfare, by contrast, is unchanging….

And, of course, as war changes so does our view of Heraclitus too- all metaphors lend themselves to interpretation as new challenges continue to arise. In the twentieth century the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas reformulated the phrase ‘War is the father of everything’ in terms that appealed to an age of ‘Total War: Being reveals itself as war’ (Hillsman, 2004, p.28). Social Darwinism was one of the age’s prevailing myths and it presented mankind with a world in which hope was a lottery. There was no God, and no recourse to prayer. Blind evolution determined the survival of the species, and those fortunate enough to survive lorded it over others. Life was a permanent state of nature, or warfare. Nazism preached a peculiar twentieth-century world view that war was peace. War became a metaphor for peace, and peace a metaphor for war. What was the Nazi will to power but in Freudian terms the satisfaction of the ego; indeed, all the ego-transcending conventions and taboos (including rules or laws of war) that made war so complex were repudiated or renounced.” (Coker:2010:56-7)

“Humanity is the most murderous species on the planet when it comes to violence within the same species group; especially when we avenge ourselves for wrongs (real or imagined) (Midgley, 2006, p.27).

The point is that it is culture (in the case of intra-species conflict) that helped us to turn murderous warfare into controlled war. Konrad Lorenz is not as popular a writer today as he was in the 1950s, but his speculations about our cultural evolution still resonate. Every species, he contends, (but especially predators) are equipped with inhibiting mechanisms which make it difficult to kill members of the same group: think of the submissive postures in pack animals, such as wolves, which involve exposing that part of the body which demands the greatest protection. Even when contending for mating rights, alpha males rarely kill each other- the loser usually backs off and adopts a posture of submission. Usually he is not even forced to leave the pack.

There is a certain ritual in such contests which is a product not of culture (social conditioning) but nature; it is a biological mechanism that enables the game to end while the losers are still ahead. When we domesticate animals we do not breed out these savage instincts, we merely control them. We separate them from their families, breed them selectively over generations, and provide them with food so that they do not have to forage for it themselves.

Our own evolutionary history, Lorenz contends, follows much the same pattern. But we also have culture. Its purpose is not to domesticate us, it is to limit the damages done to us through domestication by channelling instincts into a collective good. The defence of family becomes the defence of the state- sacrifice for the larger community; killing is sanctioned usually by the state. Culture provides us with a moral code and social norms that are intended not to emasculate us but to replace our instincts with collective desires. Culture, writes Leszek Kolakowski, should not be regarded as Freud did in one of his last books, Civilisation and its Discontents, as a tool which replaces instinctual abilities and channels aggression into more useful social ends (Kolakowski, 1989, p.115). Our moral sensibilities which we hold so dear may be the way by which we limit the degenerative effects of domestication. This is why our moral heroes still include warriors, and why the sacrifices we value most highly are often those incurred in battle.

This is why Aristotle tells us that the ends we set ourselves can only be successfully attained if we are trained to understand what the collective holds to be good for its own survival….

The willingness to engage in collective violence may be instinctive too but we must be taught what courage means for the rest of us, and what sacrifices make sense for the community as a whole. The courageous person, Aristotle writes, must feel and act ‘according to the merits of the case and in whatever ways reason directs’. But it is society that determines the ‘merit’ of a particular case (or cause) and reason can only be developed through education.

The only merit of war, adds Aristotle, is to yield a political result. It must advance the goals of the state in whose name the warrior is fighting. This can only be achieved through education too- through statecraft. Good practice must be taught; and the object of all teaching is to help us to detect and diagnose failure in the attempt to reach our goals (McIntyre, 1998, p.73). It is politics- a dialogue conducted within the city and only within the city- which makes this possible. When Aristotle writes of the polis he was writing not just of a city, or even a city-state, but a place in which history happens, out of which history is made, and for which history exists to be narrated by historians and interpreted by philosophers like himself.” (Coker:2010:109-11)

10: Awe- Sacrifice Becomes Value-in-Exchange- as Honour

We have seen the nature of the word sacrifice change from meaning a communion with God by the individual in a ‘Garden of Eden’, to a disempowering of the individual due to the sin of self by sacrificing at first a King, then a bull, and finally a goat, in order to return this valued power to God in the village life of the matrilineal age, and we have seen this sacrifice of a goat become a scape-goat in order to disempower each individual of the pyramid and stop desertification. In other words sacrifice has become a technique of the state by which to empower itself and cohere its power (people). In reality, and not just ritual dance, these scape-goats, as we saw, were also human in form and were called slaves- the abject, thrown into the Leviathan of desire by other people who believed they possessed them as Objects, and therefore they had no rights, or more simply as ‘the enemy’ that one is educated through statecraft- art- to be hated.

With the Greeks changing warfare into war, sacrifice also gains a new name- Honour. To sacrifice oneself for ones own country is the highest honest of the warrior-king. For the Priest/King sacrifice was linked to God, as was his right to power. For the warrior-king sacrifice is linked to one’s own life (and death) as subject of the State. The Domesticated warrior of desire, becomes docile in his domicile. Docile comes from the latin, docere, meaning to teach, and as we saw above this is the statecraft of necessary domestication. Domicile means a mansion or household, or habitation, and in this regard we must think of the mansions of God in heaven as well as that of dwelling. For by dwelling (Ich bin, I am) in the individual for-itself within this household of for-itselfs one is setting up a habit, a karmic force, that necessitates war as its prime mover, and not the regulative flotsam of culture that rides upon it.

The root of Domicile is from the latin domus meaning house and celare meaning a cell meaning, to hide. In this regard we must understand the word cell, as denoting those animal spirits that have become hidden by this teaching (docility) of the state and its artifice. But we may also release this being-in-a-cell from his imprisonment, once he has curbed his desires to fit in with those of the state. At this point the Other as object becomes one of us as subject, and so his cell becomes a cell in the great machine of war known as the state. Hobbes’ Leviathan describes the state as a man as well as a river-bed. Its arms are the warriors and administrators, its head is the ruler, its heart is desire, its legs are the progress we make together, etc. Therefore the docile warrior becomes housed within this body as a cell that lives not only within it, but is also intricately unfree to live without it, and intricately unfree to try and become a different type of cell, other than that prescribed for it. The word prison comes from the word prehensile, meaning ‘adapted for grasping’. It is this grasping for that one desires that leads to this prison cell.

The experience of this cell of desire, is perceived as a natural state from whence we all came, a primal night of constant warfare without cultural progress, that war escapes from. It is a common sense conclusion, that we have seen is absolutely wrong.

“Hector is an Aristotelian before his time: all value, at least, in politics is to be determined by the value attached to the prize. Troilus memorably retorts that we cannot judge the correctness of an act by only thinking of its consequences. Hector rebuts this with what Nuttall calls ‘magnificent ethical objectivism’. If every value were free-standing there would be no point debating it. We argue about the rights and wrongs of any war because of the consequences- intended or unintended, foreseen or unforeseen, because of the ‘worth’ of the particular enterprise. ‘To make the service greater than the god’ is pure idolatry- we expect it in a state of nature; when we escape it we enter a world of politics where value must be a goal and the goal must be the common good (Nuttall, 2007, p.215). Troilus will have none of this- honour is more important (in this case the high opinion others have of Troy and its leaders)….

Hector’s original argument, I suspect, Shakespeare wants us to know is the correct one- for it is political in aspiration. The language he employs is very different, of course, from Aristotle’s. William Elton treats the discussion between Priam’s son (Paris) as an expression of a change in the idea of value- a change of mindset from the medieval scholastics (who were indebted to Aristotle) to the world of Hobbes- the transition from a fixed, divinely sanctioned concept of political value, to one that we associate with the market-place in which (to quote Hobbes) ‘the value or worth of a man is, as with all of other things, his price’ (Arden Shakespeare). Hobbes himself meant by this that a man’s value is determined by ‘as much as would be given for the use of his power’. When we fight for honour, we are actually fighting to gain power: to be respected is to have it. Hobbes again: ‘honourable is whatever possession, action or quality is an argument and sign of power… Dominion and victory is honourable because acquired by power’.” (Coker:2010:112-3)

In the above quote then we see that warfare, the natural state of all animals, and the state of the characters in The Iliad has been taken by Paris (Priam’s son) above and turned into war. The difference between fighting for individual esteem and the esteem of the state is defined by the word ‘honour’ for the individual and ‘power as right’ for the state, and, ‘progress’ for humankind. Note that, ‘the right to power’, a journey that we have followed since around 8,000 B.C., that’s 7,500 years, has now become, ‘power as right’, and individualism over this same journey has become the actual state that requires perfection, not at the price of the State but as its sole purpose. This is the distance between the Truth and the Noble Lie, and it depends upon your belief in God or not that defines this distance of right and wrong, moral and necessary, good and evil, etc, etcetera. If you do not believe in God as truth, then do you believe in the state as truth, or in yourself as truth, or in tradition as truth, or in family as truth? Or something else I haven’t named…. I don’t know but you do presumably?

Today if an entrepreneur uses the poverty of another State to make profit from them, for himself, then the state in which he lives will honour him for doing so, by knighting him, and calling him Sir, because his selfish actions have also empowered the state, as long as he pays his taxes. The esteem he receives from this dance is the invisible force that the ruler is using to keep this entrepreneur in his State of possession, and not in anothers, because if a person like that left his State, he is the type of person that would take money from the State he has just left, because he has no morality, only artifice and the ruler of State knows this, because he is named an entrepreneur to describe this very nature. The justice of using the abject for gain is a far removed wind in the court of Solomon, and the mosquito winged whirring of the sowing machines that make the knight of the realms garment of honour is all that can be heard in that court.

War is therefore seen to be born by the necessity of warfare which came before it

It is a necessity which is born by the necessity of desertification through settling, which was not born by necessity but by a trap of a small insurance policy in planting grain in a world of abundance. But this has been forgotten, and only the experience of warfare has remained as an understandable common sense and experience.

By the time of the Greeks then, warfare was the way of the World, and in order to survive they reasoned that they must fight to survive, as was their right. It was therefore reasonable to use the most skilled, the most artful of its polis in order to do this, and these artists of artillery inspired the awe, the esteemed honour of the state by their honour in battle, known as courage and art. Warfare therefore became the ‘Art of War’, and the Iliad became their version of the Bible, and history became their version of the truth as ‘a reasonable myth’ upon which to build.

11: Trade versus Honour

In the modern world, it is impossible to imagine a world without trade for the simple reason that being an entrepreneur means to gain honour by this behaviour. When the Prime Minister of Great Britain told the nation that it needed more entrepreneurs, I’m sure all of the takers in the pyramid smiled with esteem at their honoured position of power and status.

Trade is what makes a nation more efficient in acquiring what it needs for a greater power of production without risking a loss of power in acquiring it. It is a means of competition between states that can establish a road of peace as both sides can gain through it, rather than through war, where only one can. What then becomes of the art of trade when honour is bound to warrior heroes and not entrepreneurs? When the art of the world is war, and hence the warrior is valued for his art?

“Along with war, trade has been a feature of ‘international’ relations for millennia- indeed, among the classical and pre-classical Greeks the distinction between war and trade was only loosely drawn. Flotillas of ships would cruise the coast, trading if they met strength, engaging in piracy if they found weakness– the Vikings seem to have adopted a similar practice. However, the mere existence of the exchange of goods does not create an economy, much less a world economy. Here, it may be helpful to introduce some distinctions made by Immanuel Wallerstein in his monumental study of the origins of the modern world system (Wallerstein 1974/1980/1989). Wallerstein begins by defining a ‘world’ in social rather than geographical terms. A world consists of those who are in regular contact with each other and in some extended sense form a social system- the maximum size of a world being determined by the effectiveness of the technology of transportation currently available; it is only in the twentieth century that the social and geographical worlds are effectively the same.

“The Greeks flourished by trade and by technological development, but then they did an odd thing: they largely abandoned them. Consider the social status of merchants. Once it was high but, only two centuries after men like Thales of Miletus were being lauded, fashionable Greeks were openly despising the banausoi, the men who, as bankers, traders, or doctors, actually earned their living.  In his Politics Aristotle maintained that it was poor taste even to discuss the banausic professions, and the classic expression of contempt for the banausoi was made by Xenophon, the Athenian-born general and writer who commanded the 10,000 Greek soldiers in Persia who had once been a pupil of Socrates:

“The banausic trades spoil the bodies of workmen and foremen who are forced to sit still and work indoors. They often spend the whole day at the fire. The debilitation of the body is often accompanied by a serious weakening of the mind. Moreover, the banausic professions leave no spare time for service to one’s friends or the city. Thus the banausoi are considered unreliable friends and poor defenders of their country.” Oeconomicus, IV, 2-3, Harvard University Press, 1923

Why were Aristotle, Xenophon and their upper-class friends so snobbish about the trade and the technology it had spawned that had enriched Greece?

The answer is that Aristotle, Xenophon et alia had learned that warfare, not commerce, were emerging as surer routes to personal wealth. They were learning the lesson of empire: that in a politically insecure world, in which farmers are tied to the soil and artisans to their workshops, the predator can out-earn the merchant. The market may have provided the Greeks with a technical fillip, but war subsequently enriched them more, and war substituted aristocratic values for banausic ones.” (Kealey:2008:91-2)

“Whether the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians their notions about trade, like so many others, I cannot say for certain. I have remarked that the Thracians, the Scyths, the Persians, the Lydians, and almost all other barbarians, hold the citizens who practise trades, and their children, in less repute than the rest, while they esteem as noble those who keep aloof from handicrafts, and especially honour such as are given wholly to war. These ideas prevail throughout the whole of Greece, particularly among the Lacedaemonians. Corinth is the place where mechanics are least despised.” (Herodotus:1996:188)

So the father of everything- war, is also the father of our history, and history from this point on up until very recently- some may say it still rules- will be ruled by the perspective of the aristocrats and not the traders. That is why history is written about the movers and shakers, the Kings and the Queens, the Popes and the Warlords, etc. Those who gained power by fighting and gained their right to authority by the same action. This will be challenged by the banausoi throughout this history, but as we have seen, the aristocracy merely offers the banausoi some of its status language (such as The Right Honourable Sir-banausoi) and the banausic values of the individual suddenly change to aristocratic ones, as if by magic. Wealth can only buy so much esteem and power, whilst status brings the power of the whole state and its wealth in its train. Train means ‘a great man’s retinue’ and is a part of a garment worn by the ruler. It is also worn by brides when in the presence of God in the architecture of state priests.

12: The Tray Game of What is Not – The Via Negativa – The Ring of Gyges

Honour derives from the Latin honor, meaning Honest. It is this definition that requires us to return to the beginning of the Greek city-states in the legend of Gyges and the king who gave birth to the foundation of the Hellenistic states and of his progeny whose subsequent generations it is that are described in The Iliad.

In the previous chapter, the Ring of Gyges, was briefly mentioned by Socrates in relation to justice but what is the Ring of Gyges?

The beginning of the Greek legend is cited by Herodotus and revolves around the hubris of a king- Candaules- and his desire to be esteemed- and resolves in a nemesis being born that not only brings his own death but also bears the sons who will unite all of Greece under King Croesus in the mid-sixth century B.C., and hence to march Athens towards the hubris of Empire as we shall see, by the power of the one ring that binds them all. (Lord of the Rings fans can regale in Tolkien’s wisdom as they read this). “Croesus (pronounced Creesus), was so rich that the simile “rich as Croesus” remains embedded in our language.” (Lerner et al:1993:137)

“Now it happened that this Candaules was in love with his own wife; and not only so, but thought her the fairest woman in the whole world. This fancy had strange consequences. There was in his body-guard a man whom he specially favoured, Gyges, the son of Dascylus. All affairs of greatest moment were entrusted by Candaules to this person, and to him he was wont to extol the surpassing beauty of his wife. So matters went for a while. At length, one day, Candaules, who was fated to end ill, thus addressed his follower: ‘I see thou dost not credit what I tell thee of my lady’s loveliness; but come now, since men’s ears are less credulous than their eyes, contrive some means whereby thou mayst behold her naked.’ At this the other loudly exclaimed, saying, ‘What most unwise speech is this, master, which thou hast uttered? Wouldst thou have me behold my mistress when she is naked? Bethink thee that a woman, with her clothes, puts off her bashfulness. Our fathers, in time past, distinguished right and wrong plainly enough, and it is our wisdom to submit to be taught by them. There is an old saying, “Let each look on his own”. I hold thy wife for the fairest of all womankind. Only, I beseech thee, ask me not to do wickedly.’

Gyges thus endeavoured to decline the king’s proposal, trembling lest some dreadful evil should befall him through it

 But the king replied to him, ‘Courage, friend; suspect me not of the design to prove thee by this discourse; nor dread thy mistress, lest mischief befall thee at her hands. Be sure I will so manage that she shall not even know that thou hast looked upon her. I will place thee behind the open door of the chamber in which we sleep. When I enter to go to rest she will follow me. There stands a chair close to the entrance on which she will lay her clothes one by one as she takes them off. Thou wilt be able thus at thy leisure to peruse her person. Then, when she is moving from the chair toward the bed, and her back is turned on thee, be it thy care that she see thee not as thou passest through the doorway.’

Gyges, unable to escape, could but declare his readiness. Then Candaules, when bedtime came, led Gyges into his sleeping-chamber, and a moment after the queen followed. She entered, and laid her garments on the chair, and Gyges gazed on her. After a while she moved toward the bed, and her back being then turned, he glided stealthily from the apartment. As he was passing out, however, she saw him, and instantly divining what had happened, she neither screamed as her shame impelled her, nor even appeared to have noticed aught, purposing to take vengeance upon the husband who had so affronted her. …

No sound or sign of intelligence escaped her at the time. But in the morning, as soon as day broke, she hastened to choose from among her retinue, such as she knew to be most faithful to her, and preparing them for what was to ensue, summoned Gyges into her presence. Now it had often happened before that the queen had desired to confer with him, and he was accustomed to come to her at her call. He therefore obeyed the summons, not suspecting that she knew aught of what had occurred. Then she addressed these words to him: ‘Take thy choice Gyges, of two courses which are open to thee. Slay Candaules, and thereby become my lord, and obtain the Lydian throne, or die this moment in his room. So wilt thou not again, obeying all behests thy master, behold what is not lawful for thee. It must needs be, that either he perish by whose counsel this thing was done, or thou, who sawest me naked, and so didst break our usages.’ At these words Gyges stood awhile in mute astonishment; recovering after a time, he earnestly besought the queen that she would not compel him to so hard a choice. But finding he implored in vain, and that necessity was indeed laid on him to kill or be killed, he made choice of life for himself, and replied by this inquiry: ‘If it must be so, and thou compellest me against my will to put my lord to death, come, let me hear how thou wilt have me set on him.’ ‘Let him be attacked,’ she answered, ‘on the spot where I was by him shown naked to you, and let the assault be made when he is asleep.’

All was then prepared for the attack, and when night fell, Gyges, seeing that he had no retreat or escape, but must absolutely either slay Candaules, or himself be slain, followed his mistress into the sleeping-room. She placed a dagger in his hand, and hid him carefully behind the self-same door. Then Gyges, when the king was fallen asleep, entered privily into the chamber and struck him dead. Thus did the wife and kingdom of Candaules pass into the possession of Gyges” (Herodotus:1996:6-8)

This story can be taken literally as a legend, but if we return it to its myth and see Candaules queen as the ‘beauty’ that Helen will come to embody. Then we can see that the garment and the nakedness as ‘the right to authority’ and ‘the truth of their urgrund’ respectively. Now that Gyges has seen ‘the Noble lie’ it is impossible to remain tamed by this law, as he has seen that which is unlawful revealed beneath it. Beauty must therefore use artifice, through fear of loss and hope of gain- paranoia, by which to imprison Gyges once again, by forcing him to choose over himself or the state. This decision, to choose ones-self over the state is the ignoble truth (the not-well-known truth) of the aristocracy, the naked truth hidden behind the garment of the law and the authority of the ruler. Behind the artifice, the artful face of cunning and guile, lies the naked truth. 

The ring of Gyges:

“Herbert slipped the ring of Gyges on to his finger and was immediately startled by what he saw: nothing. He had become invisible.

For the first few hours, he wandered around testing his new invisibility. Once, he accidentally coughed and found that in the ears of the world, he was silent too. But he had physical bulk, and would leave an impression on a soft cushion or create an unexplained obstacle for those seeking to walk through him.

Once he became used to what it was like to live invisibly, Herbert started to think about what he could do next. To his shame, the ideas that popped into his head first were not entirely savoury. He could, for instance, loiter in the women’s showers or changing rooms. He could quite easily steal. He could also trip up the obnoxious suits who shouted into their mobile phones.

But he wanted to resist such base temptations and so tried to think of what good deeds he could do. The opportunities here, however, were less obvious. And for how long could he resist the temptation to take advantage of his invisibility in less edifying ways? All it would take would be one moment of weakness and there he’d be: peeking at naked women or stealing money. Did he have the strength to resist?

-Source: Book Two of The Republic by Plato (360 BCE)

“It is tempting to see the ring of Gyges as a test of moral fibre: how you would act under the cloak of invisibility reveals your true moral nature. But how fair is it to judge someone by how they would act when confronted by more temptation than most people could resist? If we are honest, imagining ourselves with the ring may reveal that we are disappointingly corruptible, but that is not the same as saying we are actually corrupt.

Perhaps what the mythical ring enables us to do is have sympathy with the devil, or at least some of his minor cohorts. Celebrities behaving badly, for example, attract our disapproval. But how can we imagine what it is like to have enormous wealth, endless opportunities for indulgence and sycophantic hangers-on ready to pander to our every whim? Can we be so sure that we too wouldn’t end up disgracing ourselves?

Some insight into our current moral condition may be provided by considering how we would act with the ring at our disposal for a limited period. It is one thing to confess that, given time, we might give in to the allure of clandestine voyeurism; it is quite another to think that the first thing we’d do is head off down to the nearest gym’s changing rooms. Someone who would follow that path is separated from actual peeping Toms only by fear or lack of opportunity.

The ring thus helps us to distinguish the difference between things we genuinely believe are wrong and those that only convention, reputation or timidity stop us from doing. It strips down our personal morality to its essence, removing the veneer of values we only pretend to hold. What we are left with might be distressingly thin. We probably wouldn’t engage in random murder, but one or two loathed enemies might not be safe. Many feminists would argue that far too many men would use the opportunity to rape. We may not turn into career thieves, but property rights might suddenly look less violable.

Is that too pessimistic? If you ask people how they think others would behave with the ring and how they themselves would, you will often find a stark contrast. Others would turn into amoralists; we would retain our integrity. When we respond in this way, are we underestimating our fellow human beings, or are we overestimating ourselves?” (Baggini:2005:223-5)

The Legend of King Candaules is an allegorical tale that reveals the naked truth/beauty of his right to power, not truth, not beauty, but instead self-esteem and deceit. But the king cannot bear to rule without revealing to his General, Gyges, the truth of his power in order to raise his esteem still more in the eyes of the General, esteem that is his due to his cunning art. ‘Look’, he says’, ‘I attained the possession of truth, not by reflection (the role of the priest/king) but by deception. Who, upon seeing this naked truth, that the right to power was nothing more than deception of that sacred truth would not then take it for themselves by deception? And more importantly, How is one to attain the power to gain honour by being honest, when there is no truth in the honour attained? How therefore is it attained?

What the ring of Gyges shows us is that there is an impossibility in play in the story of the Iliad that requires the destruction of kingdom after kingdom due to the nature of how that story plays out in a civilization of peoples who have been told by the very gods to be takers in order to perfect themselves, but to only take that which is artful, that which fits in to the state story, to take from others, for-itself but not to take from us, for-itself. To embody our harmony, not harmony-itself, Nature.

If I believe the story of The Iliad, as a guide to my life’s purpose, then my life is empty without honour, and so I must kill to fulfil my purpose, that is my cull-ture. If I don’t believe the story then my life is without power within a society of peoples that do believe and so I must pretend to believe, lie, in order to gain honour by my actions in their eyes, and hence be able to act in the manner that I do believe in, which is being-for-itself, for my purpose is myself. If I believe in equality and giving to others above the self, then I must live under your ‘protection’ i.e. pay the liar or believer, not to kill me and also to do what they want, and live how they want, as I am powerless under my belief system to act in a world of takers, just as the giver pigeon must begin to die out due to the nature of its polis.

The greatness of the story of The Iliad, is that it allows the liar to hide the truth of his ambitions under the veil of honour by which he covers his naked face and attaches himself to the train of the garment of the ruler, by which behaviour, he may now proceed with his ambitions, enacted by killing yes, but now enacted by the ‘right’ to kill, by being ‘licenced to kill’, because killing is the way that both the story of the ruler and of the warrior meet with the greatest success in attaining power (progress), an edge over peaceable cultures, that don’t put enough culling into their story. Through this veil, that covers the truth and twists the perception of the wearer, ‘Being is war.’

In this light we may now understand that the word hero also meant that more familiar Greek term, demi-god

With history the demi-god is half man for-itself and half god-as-subject to the State god- Daksha. In mythology the demi-god Hercules used to his powers to attain immortality amongst the gods. In history, these movers and shakers use their power to attain immortality amongst the objects of the state, by becoming named as an object of the state, through which they derive honour for their sacrifice or docility, but in reality, to gain in power for-itself.

This then is the Ring of Gyges, used by Plato to describe the distance of belief but the similarity of manifest actions, that the liar and the true warrior make, and the fact that from looking at these actions it is not possible to see what truly lies underneath this façade of the Object of state, because the behaviour of the Egoic being is the same as the behaviour of the sacrificed being of honour- the warrior.

The word behaviour formed abnormally from the verb to behave, meaning to control oneself, but behaviour got shortened to haviour, and then became confused with the French word avoir, meaning wealth, ability, havings. This then is the lingual equivalent of Platos conundrum as played out by society even when the French made the behaviour of the word behave twist into ‘to have’ by their experience of these similarity of their actions to these two meanings.

Remember the fate of Socrates? The truthful man is secretly regarded by all as an enemy.

13: The Arms Race Begins War in Reality – Not as a Story of Glory

“Plato called art ‘a waking dream’, and the nature of a dream state lies in mistaking a resemblance for the thing in question. The artist is so absorbed in his subject that he imagines himself among the scenes he describes (Ion 535B). He forgets the wide gap that separates him from reality. Ion admits to Socrates that he is ignorant of war as a field of study but that he can still give a good account of a battle. Why? Because he is inspired by the muse. He is quite literally a man possessed. The eighteenth century would later speak of enthusiasm; we speak of the subconscious. We used to speak (as does Simone Weil commenting on another Platonic dialogue, The Phadeus) of ‘God seeking out man’ (Steiner, 2001, p.45). (Coker:2010:94) In Plato’s world there are no Muses- we are on our own, so we had better see reality for what it is.” (Coker:2010:94)

“Telling though Plato’s critique is, I suspect few today would entertain it. He recognized that we all need to live by myths, but he believed we translate them into very banal aspirations. On the contrary, however, we are often inspired by art because it reaffirms our humanity; and it does this not by getting us to escape our own contingency but to confront it. It is our willingness to be heroic or to sacrifice ourselves for others that makes itself heroic. It reassures us that our individual mortality can be overcome- that the memory of the doer or the deed will live on. Faith in the redemptive power of war is what gives it its universal appeal- should it lose that appeal or should art be incapable of capturing it then war would indeed be in trouble.” (Coker:2010:95)

What happens when war is honoured is therefore that the Aristocracy become the guiding light of civilization

Those who do nothing but take for personal gain through war, become the founding stone in a civilization.

As we have already seen in Chapter Two in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, it is the army that was the death knoll of each civilization, and it is the army that was the birth knoll of each civilization. In other words it was power that required ever greater power until it burns itself out by not having enough fuel to feed the flames. In physics this is simply called the second law of thermodynamics, that all energy is simply diffusing into greater disorder, and so order can only be maintained by adding more energy. In society the word energy simply means power and power simply means stick-wielders. Before all of these definitions of perspective, it use to mean wakan, and produced universal peace.

What the Greeks found was that the stick-wielders of one pyramid found it much more efficient to wait for another pyramids stick-wielders to produce enough carrots and then steal them, than it was to actually produce carrots!

Why? Esteem.

The power of production- the purpose of the pyramid- only carries honour for those who do not produce but only wield power and sacrifice their lives in order to gain it. Therefore no-one wants to produce anything but power because it gives them no honour. Just as the entrepreneur of today only feels successful when he is no longer actually making or selling what he produces- someone else is doing that bit- he then lies back and bathes in the consequent esteem with his Other esteemed peers on a yacht in Monte Carlo to prove his worth to himself, as an Object of power, by proving it to these Other Objects of relational power- Congratulations.

But of course when a larger, more powerful yacht of Objects arrives in Monte Carlo, so does the esteem of the entrepreneur fall accordingly and so he must take the reins/reigns of power once again and sell more finite capital goods than his competitor, whom the entrepreneur calls his friend when wearing the Ring of Gyges. The customers of these competitive strategists are accustomed to this method of honour. Custom comes from the Old French word costume, meaning a garment one wears when pretending to be something one is not, and this word itself comes from the latin, suere, meaing to make one’s own, to have it one’s own way. The taker being-for-itself, pretends that he is behaving for the customer, in order to have his own way, as does the customer, as is our custom, to which we are culturally accustomed, by our traditions of docility.

In Ancient Greece the entrepreneur would simply have been killed for honour, in Great Britain today, the entrepreneur profits for honour, as we shall see in greater detail later on. The warrior takes an-Others life for power, the entrepreneur takes the power from an-Others life. Power is esteem. For 40,000 years he would have been secretly killed but then everything changed, and the only way to stop this change was to fight it by killing more and more and more and more and more people, as more and more and more and more people, became reciprocators of taking, and not of giving.

Why is it that when people are given the story that they have three wishes the first thing that they wish for is world peace, then a fortune, and then three more wishes?

Because each of these wishes is the power of a king. Only he can bring peace, only he can own all the wealth, and only he can decide what happens next. This is the reason for the story of the genie- to elucidate the nature of being-for-itself, to elucidate the natures within Pandora’s or ark. The covenant of the for-itself-in-itself.

            Why is it a magic story of wishes that must be used in order to show this truth about our nature? Because reality makes it an impossibility for you to have it your own way- wealth and peace and power, because they are finite. You may as well, in reality, when the genie comes, wish for war, poverty and powerlessness, for in reality that is what you wish for all Others who are beings-for-itself, when you wish for your-self. It is simple economics combined with the human nature of your egoic desire, that invoked these very wishes, and told the story of your true behaviour. Today this fact is termed ‘behavioural economics’, and is used to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. It is a Noble Lie to believe that peace will remain when you have and they have not. That is why you have to wish for three more wishes in order to control future events that might take from your power.

The State that you live in will tell you that it is good behaviour because it is good for the State. Just as the State will tell you that you have liberty, because it has liberty, so the state will tell you it is Just, so your behaviour is Just. In reality, it is power and war under the lie of peace. It is not warfare because it has been given rules by which each State adheres, not because it believes in the rules, but because the rules turn warfare into war, and this means progress towards ever greater power and ever greater wars consequently in a zero-sum game of desire.

“Warfare presents us only with the present tense (a perpetual bleak and uncompromising presence). War offers us for the first time the promise of a different future. It allows us to strive for peace, or at the very least to imagine it. It is this ‘incommensurate grammatology’ of verb futures, with its subjunctives and operatives, adds, Steiner, that has proved indispensable to the survival of the species. It is the ‘what if’ we have peace and not war (after all it is our choice); or what if by resorting to war we can secure a more long lasting peace? These questions are philosophical. Hope is one of ‘the supreme fictions empowered by syntax’. But hope and fear, of course, are frequently conjoined. You cannot have one without the other, any more than you can have peace without war, or war without peace. For hope is always beset by the fear of not realizing one’s dreams, and fear includes the seed of hope: the possibility of overcoming what makes us fearful (Steiner, 2001, p.5)” (Coker:2010:60)

What then is this imagined heaven on earth now named peace- in ‘place’ of the Garden of Eden (reality)- in which we dwell. It is obviously not ‘peace’ because we are always competing with our neighbour states to increase our power. It is not experienced as hope and fear and paranoia by the conscious mind either, although it is by the subconscious, and is the source of the necessity of psychology consequently due to the stress of this condition. Consciously we call peace, ‘safety’ for our selves, ‘security’ for our possessions, and protection of our ‘rights’. In reality it is an eternal zero-sum competition that constantly threatens these very same things within the pyramid that provides the safety and security to each individual that is trained to compete, by their education.

Social Contract theory rests upon the assumption that people come together in a state and form a ‘contract’ (what would be called a covenant by Noah and Moses) by which each member of the group gives up some of their power in order to receive the rights and subsequent power that are held by that society. The first and foundational right that is received by each individual throughout all social contract theory is- security. Protection from an-Other, setter, like themselves.

Can someone please explain to me how- a polis that constitutively requires an ever greater increase in its powers in order to keep the ‘balance of esteem’ and the ‘balance of power’ between its constituents to behave cohesively as a group- can provide protection and security, when its modus operandi is necessarily- war?

Isn’t this a great paradox that must have been seen by the promulgators of security as they turned their polis into warriors and then sent them out to attack another State? Well it is not a paradox if every one in the State knows that they are attacking for self-gain and not for the State by which they have been sent under a ‘social contract’ to protect its citizens. And this conscious knowledge is especially true for the Greeks, who founded the ideas of our military mind in the West today. For the Greeks these two Objectives are the same side of one true coin- the desire to self-perfection. Just as we saw that trade and piracy were merely the reality of whether the Others were weak or powerful, in which case the trader became a pirate or the pirate a trader respectively (a taker or a recicprocator), so for the Greek warrior, war and peace were the same side of the coin of self-perfection, and the State was merely the medium by which to attain this most efficiently. It is only a paradox when this truth is veiled, as it is today under free-trade and liberal politics. As Aristotle said in order to separate these warriors from the animal natures of the heroes of The Iliad, only the man who is in a polis can rise above his animal nature. Not because the animal nature of man is bad, not at all. The animal nature of desire is good but the nature of the State makes desire transcendent, it turns it into an experience of being a super-state by which to fulfil desire beyond its potential without it.

As we saw above, animals do not desire the death of their fellow animal because he does not want to possess the power of another animal, he merely wishes to possess the power to mate, which is his desire

Civilized man to the Greek is the animal man who has combined his animal nature with an-Others in order to empower it towards the perfection of his ideal of himself. This ideal is of course nothing more than a façade of esteem competent with those Others around him that have given birth to his notion of perfection by their education of him through, The Iliad and their subsequent culture. A cull-ture of desire as our nature, not as Nature as our Nature. How else could he see it? They have been told that war is just because its brings self-perfection- justly through the eyes of the gods of The Iliad.

This paradox of the innate necessity for insecurity in the form of hope, fear and paranoia, stick-wielding and carrot taking in order to promise security is not something at all unknown to every political student who bothers to show up to lessons and by every government and caucus that has ever existed since this time.

How do I know this? Well because this paradox was first noted by Thucydides the very man whom Hobbes, actually translated into English, in which this statement of paradox lies, and it is Hobbes that all political students are made aware of, from the moment that his work, ‘The Leviathan’ was written up unto this present day.

What then does Thucydides’ paradox say about war and peace, security and its paradoxical result, insecurity:

“Paradox 3: Thucydides also tells us of another paradoxical feature of war- the quest for security can result in even greater insecurity. States are often in danger of over-insuring themselves. When it came to deploying a force as far as Sicily the Athenians were operating at a logistic extreme: what strategists call the ‘culminating point of operations’, the point at which a force in the field can no longer be logistically re-supplied. The fact that the Athenians could send an expeditionary force so far was a strategic disaster in itself….

Thucydides actually got Alcibiades to say in the debate that it is not possible to think of imperialism in housekeeping terms- how much empire does Athens want? The mantra ran, ‘we may fall under the power of others unless others are in our power’. This was power for its own sake. In Thucydides power is the object of effort held and retained by those who have it, and envied and hated by those who do not. In itself, however, it is without moral content; it is pretty characterless (Knox, 1989, p.109).

This is what the historian Polybius later intuited about the fall of Carthage in 146 BC, which he witnessed in person. The victorious Roman commander intuited too. The destruction of Carthage did not make Rome feel more secure. It might have been better to have contained Carthage rather than have destroyed it. What transpired instead was that the Romans became not less fearful after the destruction of their rival, but more anxious than ever. In this regard, the ever sensible Montesquieu has some good advice in The Spirit of the Laws (Part 2, Chapter 10): ‘When a neighbouring state is in decline one should take care not to hasten its ruin, because this is the most fortunate situation possible; there is nothing more suitable for peace than to be close to another who receives in his stead all the blows and outrages of fortune. By conquering such a state, one rarely increases as much in real power as one loses in relative power’ (Montesquieu, 2008, p.137). Wise advice indeed, so rarely followed. It is advice that- looking back- the US might have followed in Iraq.

Let me conclude with one other parallel between the Sicilian expedition and the invasion of Iraq that illustrates Socrates’ insistence that wisdom and knowledge are not the same. The Athenians blundered into a situation they simply did not understand. It is not that they were ill-informed about the relative strengths of their allies and enemies in Sicily- they chose to believe what they wanted. The Athenian ambassadors who came back from Sicily fixed the intelligence to get the Assembly to make the decision they wanted (History 6.46 and 6.55). Falsified intelligence has played a similar role in recent wars….

Employing the most tragic analogy any American officer could use, Ridgway later wrote that, like Custer at little Big Horn, MacArthur had neither eyes nor ears for information that might deter him from the swift attainment of his objective- the pacification of the entire Korean peninsular. His staff doctored the intelligence to permit his forces to go where they wanted to go militarily, in the process setting the most dangerous of precedents for those who followed him in office. For the process was to be repeated twice more in the years to come. In 1965 the government of Lyndon Johnson manipulated the rationale for sending combat troops to Vietnam by exaggerating the threat posed to America by Hanoi. Deliberately diminishing any serious intelligence warning of what the consequences of American intervention in Vietnam would be, it committed the US to a hopeless, un-winnable, post-colonial conflict. Then more recently, in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush- improperly reading the situation in the light of 9/11 completely miscalculated the likely response to take down the government of Saddam Hussein, it manipulated Congress, the media, the public and, most dangerously of all, itself, with seriously flawed and doctored intelligence with disastrous results (Halberstam, 2008)….

Yet we are different from the Greeks and we are like them at the same time. But there is one crucial difference which is crucial. As Niklas Luhmann puts it pithily, ‘we no longer belong to the family of tragic heroes who subsequently found that they prepared their own fate. We now know it beforehand’ (Luhmann, 1998, p.156)”  (Coker:2010:73-6)

Is this true that we know it beforehand? Well those who study politics obviously do, but those of us who don’t obviously don’t. How many hours have been spent by people praying for peace, whilst paying their taxes to the State? How was the power of the State accumulated in the first place, how is it held, how will it be defended, and how will it not be depleted? Well it will be depleted, that is the nature of the beings who make the powers of the state come into existence in the first place, and that is the reason that is no ancient empire that still exists today. Imagined stories of Property rights cannot survive in the reality of over-population, and Imagined desires cannot survive in the reality of desertification. The paradox is that it is property rights that produces over-population and desire that produces desertification. In like manner security of ones rights and possessions cannot survive in the insecurity of reality, where all of these secured possessions are finite goods in an ever increasing population of power seekers and are therefore not secure but fundamentally exponentially, insecure. It is this imagined security that produces further real insecurity, not the other way around.

The Arms race of security is a lie between trader/pirates who are judging their role upon the Other’s real power to secure their possessions by carrot or stick, depending solely on which one will produce more power. The dance is called survival, the reality is called gain, the psychological subconscious driver is called the Ego, and the ontological reality of this psyche is a desire/lack that are one side of the same coin of the being-for-itself, as is war/peace. This is why many philosophers suffer from ‘Grand Universal Depression’ because they know our fate beforehand, whilst politicians either lie or live in bad-faith, and state heroes die or live in like-manner. The result of the competition is the same result no matter who ‘wins’.

‘power for its own sake without moral content; characterless. wisdom and knowledge are not the same- they chose to believe what they wanted’ (ibid)

14: How to Hold Power with or without Gods authority

Now that the Greeks had justified their modus operandi- of the right to power won from War, as the base means of how to structure a societies- hierarchy of esteem, the ruler of each State needed to work out how to make this artifice ‘produce’ the most power whilst also making sure that this power was dispersed within the pyramid in such a way that it would increase or at least maintain its position amongst the other pyramids and not decrease it.

How best to do this?

There are three main ways and we owe two of them to the Greeks.

The first technique or necessary artifice is Monarchy and we have seen this method in great detail before the Greeks; The second is Oligarchy meaning ‘rule by the powerful few who share power’, a modern day instance of this is how a big company works with its directors and CEO (once voted in by the shareholders) as the only holders of votes and power; The Third method is Democracy, where the people share the power equally and vote for their ruler. Each has its advantages and dis-advantages and these can be explained by the nature of the drama triangle of the taker, reciprocator and giver. As we have unfortunately seen, due to the nature of over demand and not enough supply, the giver cannot rule. In like manner the reciprocator cannot rule as before he can have any power he must take it in order to spread that power to those who maintain it through reciprocation. Therefore the taker must be the leader.

The king must have secured something of value to exchange with those who are going to reciprocate his power in order for them to reciprocate and so he must have taken something. The second thing that he must have is a successful technique by which to allow the reciprocators to gain some value and hence keep reciprocating, whilst also not allowing them to take this reward of an increase in power and hand it out to other reciprocators who will work for their power and no longer the kings. The king must retain the power to hand-out (manifest) the reward (dropping a seed through a chute) because that is the true key to authority, especially in a ever more God-less world, where the polis cannot use morality as an argument by which to judge their ruler. The problem then, is not that the taker has the power, but that by his nature he must be a taker in a world controlled by other takers, who control their own reciprocators of that power, and will use them to take (secure) the kings power if it will secure him more than reciprocating does. The only way to assure that the king holds his power securely therefore is to keep increasing your own power and the reciprocators but to keep the power spread out amongst the most powerful reciprocators.

This is true both towards other pyramids to which one is allied or receives tribute from, as it is within the pyramid where the same drama plays itself out constantly. 

The most powerful reciprocators will then be caught in a fight for esteem, and so a leader must make sure that he is always playing one power off against another in order to stop any single person from becoming powerful enough to threaten his prime position. It is within the pyramid of each state therefore that the ruler has the power to instigate a technique to maintain this game, and stop the desertification of his power, by curbing that possessed by those beneath him.

A king of Siam once found he had this same problem and in order to alleviate himself of it he came up with his own technique. Whenever a lord (reciprocator) of his realm became too powerful he would send them a taker under the lie of a gift. What he would do was to give this lord a white elephant, a beast sacred to the Siamese. This lord would then find himself not with a gift but with a massive burden. For a white elephant was too sacred to be put to work, or put to death, and so it stood there everyday in the lords realm eating up the crops produced by the lords reciprocator workers. This is where we get the saying, ‘White Elephant’ from.

The Greeks, as we have seen, have begun to tell a story that requires little morality or ‘negative godly instruction’ other than aligning ones desires with the state, a social contract of desire, and so they invented other techniques to solve this problem, these are oligarchy and democracy.

Let us listen to three speeches from the ancient Greek world regarding these three aspects of the government of a peoples in order to elucidate this same truth and see the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques of rule. In these speeches democracy is referred to as isonomy or isocracy. The difference is that in an isocracy everyone has equal powers and equal votes over every decision, this is a true democracy. Today we understand the term democracy as ‘representative’ democracy  where everyone has the power to vote for these representatives but then a government takes most of the decision by representing the people’s will, who have given them the authority to do so. In other words God has left the building and the ontological being-for-itself is running the show. What did the ancient Greeks think of this, in comparison to the other two types of rule?

“A king, besides, is beyond all other men inconsistent with himself. Pay him court in moderation, and he is angry because you do not show him more profound respect- show him profound respect, and he is offended again, because (as he says) you fawn on him. But the worst of all is, that he sets aside the laws of the land, puts men to death without trial, and subjects women to violence. The rule of the many, on the other hand, has, in the first place, the fairest of names, to wit, isonomy; and further it is free from all those outrages which a king is wont to commit. There, places are given by lot, the magistrate is answerable for what he does, and measures rest with the commonalty. I vote, therefore, that we do away with monarchy, and raise the people to power. For the people are all in all.’

Such were the sentiments of Otanes. Megabyzus spoke next, and advised the setting up of an oligarchy: ‘In all that Otanes had said to persuade you to put down monarchy,’ he observed, ‘I fully concur; but his recommendation that we should call the people to power seems to me not the best advice. For there is nothing so void of understanding, nothing so full of wantonness, as the unwieldy rabble. It were folly not to be borne, for men, while seeking to escape the wantonness of a tyrant, to give themselves up to the wantonness of a rude unbridled mob. The tyrant, in all his doings, at least knows what he is about, but a mob is altogether devoid of knowledge; for how should be there any knowledge in a rabble, untaught, and with no natural sense of what is right and fit? It rushes wildly into state affairs with all the fury of a stream swollen in the winter, and confuses everything. Let the enemies of the Persians be ruled by democracies; but let us choose out from the citizens a certain number of the worthiest, and put the government into their hands. For thus both we ourselves shall be among the governors, and power being entrusted to the best men, it is likely that the best counsels will prevail in the state.’

This was the advice which Megabyzus gave, and after him Darius came forward, and spoke as follows: ‘All that Megabyzus said against democracy was well said, I think; but about oligarchy he did not speak advisedly; for take these three forms of government- democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy- and let them each be at their best. I maintain that monarchy far surpasses the other two. What government can possibly be better than that of the very best man in the whole state? The counsels of such a man are like himself, and so he governs the mass of people to their heart’s content; while at the same time his measures against evil-doers are kept more secret than in other states. Contrariwise, in oligarchies, where men vie with each other in the service of the commonwealth, fierce enmities are apt to arise between man and man, each wishing to be leader, and to carry his own measures; whence violent quarrels come, which lead to open strife, often ending in bloodshed. Then monarchy is sure to follow; and this too shows how far that rule surpasses all others.

Again, in a democracy, it is impossible but that there will be malpractices; these malpractices, however, do not lead to enmities, but to close friendships, which are formed among those engaged in them, who must hold well together to carry on their villainies. And so things go on until a man stands forth as champion of the commonalty, and puts down the evil-doers. Straightway the author of so great a service is admired by all, and from being admired soon comes to be appointed king; so that here too it is plain that monarchy is the best government. Lastly, to sum up all in a word, whence, I ask, how is it that we got the freedom which we enjoy?- did democracy give it to us, my sentence is that we keep to the rule of one. Even apart from this, we ought not to change the laws of our forefathers when they work fairly; for to do so is not well.’” (Herodotus:1996:262-3)

You will note from the three above speeches, that not one of them speaks of trust as a given.

They all acknowledge, the villainy of the first situation- the fight for the commonwealth- the pyramidwealth- and how this creates the fight for power by the best, all of whom have their own idea of how to rule. Aristocracy literally means aristo- the best and kratia- to rule.

Trust in such a world is given short thrift when it comes to such matters. In fact, trust is given its due in such matters, for before each of these systems lies the truth, that trust can only be trusted when the answer given to the question of who benefits is the one you are trusting. Those who benefit are those you can trust if you are in power, and those who don’t benefit are those you can also trust- to be untrustworthy when you are in power. However you can never trust the powerful around you when you are in power because the reason you are in power is because those around you can be trusted to never have enough and that is why they exist in your court. Their very strength is also your very weakness.

The only others that you can trust are those that believe in the story of your authority, and to this elegant solution we must look to the naivety of Plato to espouse how, if one could get a polis to believe the story without question, then that pyramid of production would be able to defeat every other pyramid that existed:

“’Now I wonder if we could contrive one of those convenient stories we were talking about a few minutes ago,’ I asked, ‘some magnificent myth that would in itself carry conviction to our whole community, including, if possible, the Guardians themselves?’

‘What sort of a story?’

‘Nothing new- a fairy story like those the poets tell about the sort of thing that often happened “Once upon a time”, but never does now: indeed, if it did, I doubt if people would believe it without a lot of persuasion, though they believed the poets.’” …

‘…I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and Soldiers, and then the rest of the community that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her as if she is attacked, while their fellow-citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth.’…

‘We shall,’  I said, ‘address our citizens as follows:

“You are all of you in this land, brothers. But when God fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be Rulers (which is why their prestige is greatest); he put silver in the Auxillaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and the rest. Now since you are all of the same stock, though children will commonly resemble their parents, occasionally a silver child will be born of golden parents, or a golden child of silver parents, and so on. Therefore the first and most important of God’s commandments to the Rulers is that they must exercise their function as Guardians with particular care in watching the mixture of metals in the characters of the children. If one of their own children has bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agricultural class where it properly belongs: similarly, if a child of this class is born with gold or silver in its nature, they will promote it appropriately to be a Guardian or an Auxiliary. For they know that there is a prophecy that the State will be ruined when it has Guardians of silver or bronze.”

‘That is the story. Do you think there is any way of making them believe it?’

‘Not in the first generation,’ he said,’ but you might succeed with the second and later generations.’

‘Even so it should serve to increase their loyalty to the state and each other. For I think that’s what you mean.’” (Plato:1973:159-61)

“’Well then,’ I said, ‘if that is our object, I suggest that they should live and be housed as follows. First, they shall have no private property beyond the barest essentials. Second, none of them shall possess a dwelling-house or other property to which all have not the right of entry. Next, their food shall be provided by the other citizens in payment for the duties they perform as Guardians… They must be told that they have no need of mortal and material gold and silver, because they have in their hearts the heavenly gold and silver given them by the gods as a permanent possession, and it would be wicked to pollute the heavenly gold in their possession by mixing it with earthly, for theirs is without impurity, while that in currency among men is a common source of wickedness. They alone, therefore, of all the citizens are forbidden to touch or handle silver or gold; they must not come under the same roof as them, nor wear them as ornaments, nor drink from vessels made of them. Upon this their safety and that of the state depends. If they acquire private property in land, houses, or money, they will become farmers and men of business instead of Guardians, and harsh tyrants instead of partners in their dealings with their fellow citizens, with whom they will live on terms of mutual hatred and suspicion; they will be more afraid of internal revolt than external attack, and be heading fast for destruction that will overwhelm the whole community.” (Plato:1973:162-3)

“The central theme of Plato’s Republic is social disharmony and how to alleviate it, and his discussion is perfectly in keeping with the insight of evolutionary psychologists that human nature is not in harmony. The brain areas governing emotion bring into play an inefficient mix of personal survival, reproduction and altruism. Consequently, they tend to tax the conscious mind with ambivalences whenever we encounter stressful situations: love can conjoin quickly with hate; fear can provoke aggression. These blends, writes E.O.Wilson, are designed not to promote happiness, but to favour the maximum transmission of controlling genes. And we have to choose, for emotional conflict is endemic; it cannot be eliminated (Wilson, 1998, p.4).

Plato’s city does not eliminate conflict. It takes emotional conflict to be at the centre of life and tries to forge a ‘life-world’ with conflict at its heart. Its goal is not happiness, but harmony, an efficient mixture of personal survival [taking], reproduction [reciprocating] and altruism [giving]. There is no either/or. Plato had the disadvantage of not knowing about genetics. We know that stress or change can bring out unsuspected tendencies latent in our nature, but played down by our culture….

In The Republic, the citizenry is divided into three groups: the soldiers or the Auxiliaries are a subdivision of the rulers, the Guardians; the former are the first professional warriors we encounter in philosophy. At the bottom of the tree are to be found the people, mostly merchants and farmers, who don’t form a specific class as such (for they include rich and poor alike, and some even are property owners though the great majority are not). At the centre of Plato’s understanding of the nature of war is the idea of a trinity which we are more familiar with from the work of Clausewitz.

Let us take just one class- the Auxiliaries, the soldiers who, as Plato recognized in the passage I have quoted, could pose a threat to the city if they succumbed to their appetites. By his day there were no longer citizen-soldiers but professionals, but they were still ‘warriors’ who practised war (as opposed to warfare which is one-dimensional). In war warriors live a multi-dimensional life.

1. As an instrumental concept, war refers to the ways in which force is applied by the state, the way in which it is used to impose one’s will upon another. War, as such, is a rational instrument employed in a controlled, rational manner, for purposes that are usually political or economic.
2. As an existential concept, the term refers to those who practise it: warriors. As Hegel always insisted, war would only end when warriors no longer needed it to affirm their own humanity.
3. As a metaphysical concept, war translates death into sacrifice- it invests death with a meaning. And it is the metaphysical dimension which is the most important of all, precisely because it persuades societies of the need for sacrifice. It is sacrifice which makes war qualitatively different from warfare, and every other act of violence. We rarely celebrate killing, but we still celebrate dying when it has meaning, not only for the dead, but for those they leave behind. It is the sacred that makes claims on us and demands sacrifices (the etymology of the word is telling: sacrifice is derived from sacred). It is in the presence of the sacred that our lives are ultimately judged….

In the existential sphere, what makes The Republic so distinctive is that it talks of the warrior in a mediating role between intelligence and desire

We are driven by our desires to maximize our possessions, but we must do so within the mean. The unity of the soul requires a distinction to be drawn between spiritedness and desire (Rosen, 2005, p.396). Socrates tells us that spiritedness is by nature more inclined to reason than to desire, which is primarily sexual or involves money making or glory hunting. If spiritedness is not distinguished from desire, it will be infected by it soon enough; if spiritedness is identified with the intellect, we may open the door to the subordination of intelligence to the will.

In the metaphysical sphere, Plato also insists that warriors should have a special relationship to the sacred. Philosophers have been interested in war from the beginning because most thought it grounded in the contingency of life. Death is the great backdrop to life; it is what throws it into vivid relief, for it is only in its absence (whether real or imagined) that life can be fully lived. Take W.B. Yeats’ famous line: ‘man has created death’- knowing you are going to die is one of the essential qualities of our humanity. We are the only species aware of our impending death, the only animals to be distressed by what the theologian Paul Tillich calls ‘ontological anxiety’. We know our days in the world are numbered and that all we will leave behind, perhaps, is just a memory. Some of us seek to lead a better life in this world in preparation for salvation in the next. Others seek to live a better life on the understanding that it is the only life we have. Still others, including warriors, find death in certain circumstances life-affirming. There is a striking line in Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God death.’

Death settles the account for some. For all of us life itself is a debt that eventually has to be repaid….The importance of Plato’s discussion of the warrior (the first that we have in philosophy) is that it shows the warrior is not tamed or emasculated within the state; he appreciates, instead, that war is not the be-all and end-all of life, it is not the highest good, or the highest human calling. In his argument with Protagoras, Plato challenged whether man was the measure of all things. We can apply his argument to the warrior. If one makes the warrior the measure of all things, war will soon become the measure of life, and the warrior will come to regard everything else as a means to one end: his own existence. Instrumentality is not to be understood as subordinating the warrior to reasons of state. It is much more closely related to the object (the ‘what) it is designed to produce. Its human value is restricted to the use made of the warrior by society. In war the warrior serves a larger human purpose; he puts himself at the disposal of his city, to enhance its power or secure its ends.” (Coker:2010:81-4)

In the above myth of men of gold, silver, and bronze, we have the dancing pigeons organised into a story that they all feel good in and all get their seed. It is the belief in the myth that is the ontological reality required by Plato, that belies the uselessness of a system where the rulers have to be persuaded that they deserve no physical gold in order to be esteemed, and the warriors require no egoic power in order to empower their ego, and the workers need nothing in order to give, but to believe in the story of their giving.

Whilst all of this may be true, if indeed everyone did believe in the myth over themselves, as the purpose of their existence, but what we have seen by the above three organisational theories of government, no-one when speaking of reality, even believes that such a situation is possible. This myth then, spun by Plato, of which tradition and education, would play there part in instilling into these servile donkeys, will later be called communism, socialism, nationalism, but all of which refer to the concept of the ‘Social Contract’ of which we will learn more later on as the birth-seeds of these subsequent ideologies. I believe that also scientology otherwise known as Dianetics requires its adherents to believe that everything that they have been told so far about reality is a lie, and then that they are Guardians of the truth, whilst everyone else is in fact mad. Who benefits from that one? However what Plato tells us is that his myth is not a form of ‘Social Contract’ alone, it is also admittedly a Noble Lie that enables the pyramid to kill and to create scapegoats, babies that must be designated and chucked in the river, for the greater sake of all. It is a ‘reciprocal lie’, or bad-faith.

Plato is naïve, because when he tells this story to each individual in his Republic he believes that they will actually behave as if they are constantly possessors of the metals that society will label them with as subjects. But as has been stated above, the Drama Triangle is an inner world, within each of us, where sometimes we take, sometimes we reciprocate and sometimes we give. We are not static objects as his society would see us. Life has the potential to change the quality of these three ‘metals’ because life has a purpose for the individual in relation to God. For Plato God has a purpose in manifesting the ‘metal’ of our birth, but after that an individual is set, and it is societies right to domesticate this person into its power of production in accord with this natural ‘birth-right’, as defined by this man-made, ‘natural law’ of authority. It did not take long for Plato’s students to tell him this truth.

“The main criticism of the experiment was made first by Aristotle namely that in The Republic the three dimensions are not as inter-connected as they should be in real life. Plato’s analogy does not work, as it is elaborated in his dialogue. Courage is not exclusive to the army, any more than spiritedness- you can have a spirited merchant easily enough. And desire is not exclusive to merchants any more than their desires are uncontrollable, for clearly traders can display courage too. It is also hard to say that soldiers have no desires. What Socrates means is that desires can be tamed by what Stephen Rosen calls the ‘instrumentality of spiritedness’.” (Coker:2010:84)

“This brings us to Plato’s views on property and the family. And the provisions he makes under this heading apply only to the two upper classes, the Guardians. The third class, we presume, live under the normal arrangements. But among the Guardians both private property and the family are to be abolished. Plato’s dislike of both has one main cause. He thought that private interests and private affections distracted a man from his duties to the community; and both are centred in the family. As far as the abolition of private property is concerned, we have seen already how deeply he distrusted the desire for wealth as a social motive. He thought that it led to nothing but disunity, that pursuit of riches corrupted government and disrupted society, and that as a criterion of suitability for political power they were worthless. He accordingly proposed to limit the differences of wealth in his Third Class very strictly, and by abolishing property altogether in his Guardian class to eliminate the profit-motive from political influence.” (Plato:1973:39)

“More fatal is the objection that the competition of a philosopher ruler encourages us to look for a degree of knowledge and integrity which are in fact not to be found. The knowledge of all human beings is limited, and for any group of them to think that they have the key to all human problems is presumptuous and absurd. But that is what the philosopher-ruler is supposed to have; and certain types of doctrinaire are liable to a similar illusion. Yet to put the government of human affairs into the hands of any class of supposed experts is to ask from them more than they can possibly give. And quite apart from limitations of knowledge, there is the moral problem. Power is a corrupting influence, a corruption which few can resist; and on the whole political leaders are not men of more than average moral integrity- we are perhaps lucky if they are as good as that. It is better to act on that assumption, and to limit power lest it should be abused, than to look for the perfect ruler who needs no such limitation. The argument against Plato’s system, in fact, is not that it trusts the common man too little but that it trusts his rulers too much.” (Plato:1973:44-45)

“Striking though this example may be, a democrat is still likely to put his faith in Aristotle, not Plato. His main criticism of democracy was that it was based on a flawed, even dangerous relationship between knowledge and the exercise of power. In dispatching a fleet to Syracuse the Athenians had shown bad judgement: they had failed to grasp what was best for the common good. Plato contended that the majority are never in a position to make such judgements: only philosopher-kings can (in the real world, he conceded, such judgements were best left to experts). Aristotle, by contrast, saw that democratic systems have their own strengths:

The many of whom none is individually an excellent man nevertheless can when joined together be better than those [the excellent few], not as individuals but all together….For there being many each person possesses a constituent part of virtue and practical reason and when they have come together, the multitude is like a single-person, yet many-footed and many-handed and possessing many sense-capacities; so it is likewise as regards to its multiplicity of character and its mind. (The Politics, 3.128a40-b10).’

Like Aristotle, we still tend to think that each individual is the best judge of his or her own interests, although we allow a much larger area for experts to debate each other, and for non-experts to decide in the end who to believe. Popular gut instinct is often sound. And besides, we tend to think that democracies wage war better than other political systems; they tend to win their wars. Stakeholders are more likely to fight longer for what they hold dear; those who own their ground do not readily yield it. And citizen-soldiers are more likely to fight for each other (peer pressure requires them to fight on even when all is lost).

But our real objection to Plato touches more generally upon his views on the role of reason

Philosophers still tend to view wars as conflicts of belief that can be easily resolved through debate, through dialogue or the exercise of reason. The philosopher Bernard Williams was always telling us that conflicts of desire are more common and that they are not so easily resolved (see Problems of the Self (1973) and Making Sense of Humanity (1995). Human beings are not always principled, or consistent-they have an emotional life. Many are inconsistent and make up their principles as they go along. As remarkable as Clausewitz’ dictum was that war is an extension of politics, he did not stop there. While war is a political activity he insisted that it cannot be understood simply by focusing on the dialogue between a country’s ruler and its army. War involves a dialectical relationship between the units of a paradoxical trinity: the passions of the people; military thinking (the play of chance ad probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam); and political aims drawn up by the state (Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, Chapter 1, #28, p.101). Each unit of the trinity adds its unique character to war and each is required to complete the puzzle.” (Coker:2010:86-7)

“The point Clausewitz is making, which he emphasizes again and again, is that the passions cannot be ruled out of the political realm. As Williams regretted, unfortunately many philosophers feel conflicts can be resolved by nullifying one of the elements: the human factor. Williams advised us to read Greek tragedy for that reason. It presents us with what he called ‘a tragic dilemma’, in which the heroes are confronted with two conflicting moral requirements, each of which are equally pressing. For Williams the great tragedians did what they set out to do: to tell us that we are creatures of our emotions as well as reason. It is the balance between passion and principle (not the exclusion of passion) that distinguishes war from warfare. And it is the political community that keeps the passions in check, and different principles in balance. And it just so happens that democracies tend to do this better than most other political systems precisely because, instead of suppressing the passions, they channel them in more creative ways.” (Coker:2010:88)

15: Back to Reality – The Three Pigeons meet the Three Muses

In the above quotes regarding these modes of political power we have seen that Democracy is toted by modern day scholars, who live in a democracy that has made them rich, as the best type of rule because democracies win their wars as each member of the polis has its own possessions at heart when fighting. In other words making them rich is the best way to rule, and hence democracy is the best at it. That monarchies and all other instruments where power is held in a few or singular hands, corrupts, and therefore should be limited, as it is in a democracy. We will also hear later on the lie that no democracy has ever gone to war against another democracy, touted by those who love democracy. The truth is that all States are in a state of war, and there is no such thing as peace.

The reason no democracy has gone to war with another is because before World War II their had only ever been a single democracy in place – Athens, or France under the French Revolution, and these were quickly replaced by a tyrannical monarchy as described above. Democracy has only become a multiple form of state since World War II and the reason that these democracies have not attacked each other is because they are the holders of power and are still reciprocating in order to maintain that power because of the threat of nuclear war and ultimately a loss of power both collectively and singularly, with no clear loser.

We will see this truth played out in this book, and its hypocrisy. Before that we will see the first democracy- Athens, go to war against another democracy, at the very birth of democracy, for nothing more than gain and the effect of shame that this causes, due to the hypocrisy that it reveals. Bad-faith believes that no democracy has been to war, yet it serves to give the Nobel peace prize to those who promulgate it.

Let us then begin to reveal the true nature of all of the above systems of rule with the first democracy – Athens, and compare its actions to those of Persia- a monarchy, and to Sparta- an oligarchy, and see: which one of them instigates war; which one chooses war most often; and which one betrays its own State most readily for personal gain. From there we will see the true nature of these techniques of authority, by asking who benefits, and hence we will know what is trustworthy.

As it is the responsibility of the reader to judge everything in these pages, it is my responsibility as the writer to prove what I write. Whilst I implore you to read other sources for yourself I acknowledge that the main burden falls upon me, before it does to you afterwards.

The proceeding history of the Greek city-states will therefore serve to illuminate further the structure of reality, of the ontological truths and consequences that I have espoused above.

We will see the nature of the first democracy- Athens, play out against the oligarchy of Sparta, against the Monarchy of Persia. To be weighed against what you see as the ideologies of honour versus honesty, of esteem versus justice, of truth versus the noble lie, and hence of bad-faith.

Once this has been done, the reader should then have enough factual information by which to judge for themselves whether reality is enough to make philosophers trapped within it weep, or whether the story I have woven is merely another noble lie, that I can only assure you I am unaware of making-up (which should mean absolutely nothing to you- please), and that in some way I hope to benefit by doing so. The test then is to read the book and find out how I benefit over you by making you believe in the story.

Athens and Sparta take up the Iliad. One for Luxurious Carrots and One for Equal Stick Power

Athens, Sparta, and in fact all of the Hellenistic races, emerged from this one story of The Iliad. And in reading of the behaviour of these warrior-kings and their States we must remember that this is the story that underpins western civilization to this day, and it is a story, that meets the constitutive rules of the modern day pyramid-states and its river, the Leviathan. Just as today, if you study politics, you must study Thucydides, so today, if you study English literature then you must study The Iliad. You are not expected to read the mythology that came before this story, in order to understand literature this is its urgrund. In like manner if you are studying art then it is to the Greek statues and art-works that the student is referred to as the urgrund of defining the word ‘Art’, and therefore the starting point for the origin of western civilizations art and aesthetic all from this moment of time defined by the Greeks and this story that produced their civilization, their literature, their art, and continues as our education of docility.

“Nor do we imagine that you can escape these imputations by claiming that you feel superior to your enemies. This feeling of superiority has done much harm before now; indeed, from the number of cases where it has proved disastrous it has come to be known as something quite different- not superiority, but plain stupidity.” (Thucydides:1962:80)

To assist in this contemporisation of Athens and Sparta it may assist to see this as the microcosmic version of the same game played between the main superpowers of the last century, they are the USA and Russia of their day. The game is the same, it is merely the techniques of engineering and science (technology) that allow the game to be played only in the Mediterranean or across the entire World. As we learned above, the term ‘world’ only became synonymous with the actual ‘world’ in modern times due to technology allowing us to possess the whole world in our experience and hence perspective of ‘the world’.

As we will see, Athens is what I would refer to as a Carrot-Empire, that is, its main power is the Noble Lie of democracy and the carrot of money. This is not to say that it does not wield the stick just as readily as the Spartans- in fact they do this more so, but simply that it will first of all try to tempt with the carrot before it wields the stick. In Athens we see money as power and esteem as its value in exchange. On the other side of this coin is the Stick-Empire of Sparta, who have a warrior code of honour. Here it is power as relative power and esteem in the form of relative status, as its value in exchange. Indeed the word ‘Spartan’ denotes the level of esteem that was given to possessions of wealth as power, such as luxurious garments that glimmer with Beauty in the Light to increase the awe and authority of the possessor.

Let us then leave Homer and catch up to the time of Socrates, and his Pupil, Plato, before we move on to his pupil Aristotle and see how the power of the story of The Iliad, and democracy play out in the real world as described by Thucydides- The Father of History and of the critical-realist perspective.

“A story told by the later Greek writer Plutarch evokes the most famous quality of the Spartans, their tenacious militarism. According to Plutarch, when the Spartans met for public festivals the old men would sing: “We once were young, and brave, and strong”; then the young men would sing: “And we’re so now”; and then the children would chime in: “But we’ll be strongest soon enough.” Sparta’s governmental system and culture was heavily conditioned by the fact that the Spartans were originally Dorians who in the twelfth century B.C. had entered the Peloponnesian peninsula of southern Greece as an invading army. Instead of mingling with the local peoples in Laconia, the region they had conquered, the Spartans forced the natives to do all the farming while they remained full-time soldiers. Around 735 B.C. the Spartans’ military superiority enabled them to annex neighbouring Messenia and to force the Messenians into becoming subject agricultural labourers. About 650 B.C., the oppressed Messenians launched a revolt with the aid of the Peloponnesian city-state of Argos, and a bitter struggle ensued for several years before the Spartans achieved total victory. During this fighting and its aftermath the victors forged a repressive governmental and social system meant to ensure that no challenge to their power would occur again.

Seen from the point of view of the Spartan rulers, their government was wonderfully equitable

The Spartan system of checks and balances was probably the first known to human history. The Spartans retained their ancient hereditary kingship as a concession to military necessity, for the thought that a supreme leader, well-experienced in war, was necessary on the battlefield. But rather than having one king they had two, thereby balancing the influence of two great families. When wartime came, an assembly of all Spartan citizens would decide which king would lead the army into battle, and he then would assume full military powers. Otherwise the government depended entirely on the combined workings of three bodies: a council of elders, the citizen assembly, and a panel of magistrates. The elders numbered thirty- the two kings and twenty-eight others chosen for life by the citizen assembly from a pool of Spartans over the age of sixty (through the ancient world the eldest people were presumed to be the wisest). The job of the elders was to propose motions to be voted upon by the assembly, which numbered about 8,000 and so was too large to formulate motions itself. The magistrates, who numbered five and were replaced annually by a vote in the assembly, were the executives who implemented the assembly’s motions, performed all judicial business, and negotiated with outsiders.

With its large assembly and dual kingship, the Spartan political system emphasized equality: indeed the Spartan citizens actually called themselves “the equals”. In fact, had there been no inhabitants in the territories of Laconia and Messenia other than the citizens, the Spartans might have been said to have had a perfect direct democracy. But the roughly 8,000 Spartan citizens were a mere handful in a total population of roughly 400,000, the vast majority of whom were the unfree farm labourers called helots. This circumstance helps account for the shared power among the Spartan elite, for they wished to make certain that no faction among them might feel a lack of power and seek alliance with elements of the oppressed. For the same motive the Spartans saw to it that most of their land was divided equally, and that the helots were attached to the land rather than owned individually. Helot families worked their own plots, from which they could never be moved, giving most of their produce to their masters and saving what was left to feed themselves.

With a certain ironic justice the determination of the Spartan elite to keep the mass of the population in a state of subjugation led to a life bearing some resemblance to slavery even for themselves. Their culture prized toughness and iron discipline above all. Puny infants were immediately put to death [by the hands of their own mothers], and Spartan boys from an early age were taught to endure pain. Once the boys reached the age of twelve they were taken from their families and forced to live together out of doors, covering themselves with the down of thistles in the winter, and sleeping on rushes (thick plant stems) they broke off with their hands since knives would have made the job too easy. Later they moved to barracks where they lived collectively until age thirty. Since wives were selected for them and since they were allowed to visit their wives only at night for a single obvious purpose, it sometimes happened that men became fathers before they ever saw their wives’ faces in daylight. Once they were age thirty they could finally live at home, but they were still obliged to eat together in military messes on rations of the coarsest food…

Intent on never turning “soft”, the Spartans not only shunned tasty food but any sort of outward show. This meant that they were indifferent to elegant crafts and had little need for imported goods. Sparta thus has relatively few artisans and very little foreign commerce. Although one effect was that the Spartan economy remained static, another was that the Spartans avoided overseas political entanglements. Indeed, militaristic Sparta generally managed better than most other Greek states to stay out of war. Contemptuous of foreign customs, and hoping to avoid any occasion upon which the helots might take advantage of their absence or weakness, the members of the Spartan elite struck defensive alliances that allowed them to remain behind their own frontiers.” (Lerner et al:1993:105-107)

Sparta, in other words was a pyramid that knew it was a pyramid and tried not to cover it up, with a noble lie, but instead embraced it’s violent necessity of desire, as defined in The Iliad, and an oppressive structure of 400,000 scapegoats all working hard for it’s progress. I have called Sparta an Oligarchy and not a democracy as cited above, because in reality, it was a group of powerful people sharing power equally and denying the title of farmer or trader to its producers, and any rights that might come with these titles, by calling them slaves. In other words the Spartans were a nation of warriors who by denying that those beneath them in the pyramid were a part of the pyramid were able to see themselves as ‘equals’ and even name themselves so. In like manner, to hide this Noble Lie, the Spartans killed any unequals that they bore themselves, by their own hand, because the perspective of equality was founded upon power and a child born in a form that could not contain this power was no good to the oligarchy and its balancing of this power to create cohesion and increase.

This Oligarchy did however maintain a real curb on its power in regards to increase of its power and therefore the need to increase its possessions, to the point where the oligarchy itself became subject to this true role of leadership. The need for luxury or awe garments was understood to be a source of inequality, a source of desire, a necessity to increase, and hence a cause of war. The male children would be given by their mothers in order to be trained as Objects of the State as warriors under harsh conditions, not luxurious ones. They dwelled together fraternally not familistically in order to manufacture this social contract, and they ate food that required no extra work upon it in order to stimulate the senses with pleasure.

In other words the Spartans produced a society that was trying to achieve harmony, not pleasure

The idea of sacrifice to maintain this harmony whilst assimilating the warrior code of The Iliad in order to justify the enslavement of so many other Hellenes, who it then enslaved itself to by sacrificing their own desires for their individual lives by becoming warriors, in order to maintain a harmony with the gods, with Nature, that would demand no further increase in power, that would protect their citizens, and maintain their pyramid.

This level of honesty about their honourable actions, led to an equality based around the truth that all men are takers when given the opportunity, and so equality was esteemed, as the noble lie, that was in reality a balance of power between the powerful whilst 400,000 people were oppressed beneath them. The constitutive reality however is what made up this lie, that desire leads to increase to war to desertification, and that the Spartans were living in a world of pyramids that would go to war in order to attain them. By honestly and honourably taking the role of protector as warrior-king, the Spartans imposed upon themselves, and their slaves, a system of checks and balances that kept them from war, but also kept them from harm in a realist world. This causal system of regulative authority was invented, by invitation of the Spartans, by one man- Lycurgus, and the Spartans voluntarily enslaved themselves to it because of the effects promised from it, that they themselves desired. It was a system that used sacrifice in life by domesticating the animal spirit of being-for-itself, and that saw death as only to be valued when also sacrificed for this same belief.

The authority for the oppression of Others lay in the necessity of being warriors in a world of being-for-itself, but the equality of Others in the pyramid lay in the maintaining of the oligarchy of a being-for-itself that saw itself as justifiably superior to Others outside of the pyramid by the nature of being equal-with-each-Other inside the pyramid that denied rights to its unequal labourers. What is interesting about the Spartan system of rule is that it still has a queen in power who has two kings representing the two sacrificial kings of winter and summer, that made up the dualistic natures of her universal force as life and death, day and night.

“The tribal Nymph, it seems, chose an annual lover from her entourage of young men, a king to be sacrificed when the year ended; making him a symbol of fertility, rather than the object of her erotic pleasure. His sprinkled blood served to fructify trees, crops, and flocks…Next, in amendment to this practice, the king died as soon as the power of the sun, with which he was identified, began to decline in the summer; and another young man, his twin, or supposed twin… then became the Queen’s lover, to be duly sacrificed at mid-winter, and as a reward, reincarnated in an oracular serpent. These consorts acquired executive power only when permitted to deputize for the Queen by wearing her magical robes. Thus kingship developed, and though the Sun became a symbol of male fertility once the king’s life had been identified with its seasonal course, it still remained under the Moon’s tutelage; as the king remained under the Queen’s tutelage…” (Graves:1992:13-15)

Indeed, in Spartan towns, whilst the men were in barracks, it was the women who ran the towns, who possessed the family lands and who were given the respect of the men. They were not a sub-species fit only for procreation, they themselves were also warriors who would kill the weak child they bore to strengthen their society. The only woman to win the great Athenian chariot races was a Spartan, and all other Hellenes revered Sparta’s women as near equals to men in their power and sensibilities.

It is the equality of the mother-goddess rule of the village that we witnessed 3,000 years earlier that still pervades the Spartan technique of rule when it is permeated by The Iliad, and it is this equality, born from the truth of the universal nature of mankind under God that pervades the culture of the Spartans as they assimilate The Iliad. They allow themselves the right to rule by the right of power, but they keep themselves not only equal but spartan in possessions, and matrilineal in their authority. This is why we use the word Spartan today to describe a lack of possessions and food that is not very tasteful- or aesthetic pleasing. The Spartans are also not known for their Art or their artillery, or their artifice as are the rest of the Greeks, because they did not require artifice in a stick world of equality, because they all fitted in, artfully as warriors. In other words the Spartans accepted the purpose of their rule and its price, the anaesthetic, the dulling of desire against the justice of equality and the necessity of power, and the sacrifice of the self in order to avoid war due to desire not necessity, the most prevalent type of war, as we are told above.

What then is the history of the Athenians?

“While Sparta was becoming a bastion of military repression, Athens was evolving in the direction of true democracy. The very word democracy is a Greek coinage, meaning “people power”, and Athens was the city-state that cultivated democracy to the fullest. One explanation for the political differences between Sparta and Athens is that the district of Attica in which Athens is situated was never the scene of an armed invasion or conflict between opposing peoples. Consequently, no military caste imposed its rule upon a huge number of vanquished natives. In addition, Attica’s natural resources were more varied, with mineral deposits and good harbours. This allowed Athens to develop a prosperous trade and a greater emphasis on urban life as the framework for democratic politics.

Although little is known about the nature of government in Athens from about 750 B.C. until about 600 B.C., it seems clear that throughout this time Athens was ruled by a hereditary aristocracy. Economic trends that gained momentum toward the end of the period, together with the shift from cavalry to infantry, produced strains in that system. In 594 B.C. a grave economic crisis brought matters to a head. The growth of commerce had made the cultivation of grapes and olives more profitable than raising grain, a circumstance that led to the rise of new wealth and the impoverishment of farmers who had been unable to invest in vineyards or olive orchards. With the poor farmers apparently on the verge of revolt because they were being forced into semi-slavery for not paying their debts, the ruling aristocrats attempted to forestall class warfare by granting emergency powers to a merchant named Solon, who was renowned for his wisdom and fairness.

Solon rescued the poor by cancelling all debts, and he mollified the rich by instituting a new governmental system that gave them the greatest political power. By this system wealth rather than hereditary status became the main qualification for ruling privileges: the richest Athenians carried the greatest weight, and they alone could hold office. But Solon also introduced a democratic principle for the first time into Athenian government by allowing even the poor (excluding women, resident foreigners, and slaves) to have some veto power in a general assembly of citizens.

Supposedly Solon, who lived on in legend as the Athenian George Washington, was later asked whether he had given the Athenians the best laws he could give them and replied “the best laws they could observe.” In fact Solon’s system by no means solved all the state’s problems; elements among the old aristocracy were disgruntled about having lost their hereditary privileges, and the poor remained a volatile force. Quarrelling among Athens’ ruling elite created such instability that finally, in 546 B.C., all factions seemed relieved when an Athenian strongman named Pisistratus seized dictatorial power. Ruling until 527, Pisistratus proved to be a benevolent tyrant. He aided poor farmers by granting them lands from confiscated estates and offering them advantageous loans. In addition, he patronized culture, bringing poets and sculptors to his court, and engaging- as dictators will- in ambitious building projects. His son Hippias, however, to whom he bequeathed his powers, was a ruthless oppressor who was overthrown in 510 B.C. by an Athenian faction that was aided by Sparta.

Renewed factional strife then briefly threatened to tear the Athenian state apart once more until a shrewd aristocrat, Clistenes, enlisted enough support from the lower classes in 507 B.C. to eliminate his rivals from the scene and introduce lasting stability. Having promised concessions to the poorer elements as a reward for their help, Clisthenes, as the Greek historian Herodotus put it, “took the people into partnership”. His major innovation was to implement a system for electing magistrates based on geography rather than on leagues of families. By this system, he divided all of Attica into ten regions for the purpose of nominating candidates for the most important offices in the state. Since every free man participated in the regional selection processes, every free man had some role in influencing Athenian affairs.

Clisthenes ruled for only one year, but the effects of his system were so profound that he properly counts as the father of Athenian democracy. After the system was perfected in 487 B.C. it worked as follows. Sovereign power resided in an assembly of all the male citizens: when matters of the greatest magnitude had to be settled, such as going to war, or raising emergency financial levies, the assembly would decide. Since the assembly was extraordinarily large (…about 40,000 men were entitled to participate, and some 5,000 were likely to do so on any given occasion), measures were submitted to it by a council, which had supreme control over executive and administrative activities. Membership in the council was established annually by lot from lists prepared in the regional meetings instituted by Clisthenes, any male citizen over thirty being eligible for service. Since the council itself numbered 500 men, and service was limited to a year, large numbers of Athenian men gained governmental experience….

This uncompromising adherence to the principle of majority rule had advantages and disadvantages

The most obvious advantage was fairness and the most obvious disadvantage the role that unreflective emotionalism might play in decision making. The modern word demagogue comes from the Greek orator who was effective at swaying public opinion insincerely for his own gain; indeed, many Greek philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, considered democracy no different from mob rule. Yet the system worked extremely well for about a century and brought Athens to its greatest triumphs in both foreign affairs and cultural achievement.” (Lerner et al:1993:107-10)

So the Athenians at first was ruled by an oligarchy of aristocrats that used the pyramid to make themselves wealthy and many more poor, so poor that they became no longer protected, but enslaved by their debts (donkeys in a quagmire). So poor that the Noble lie of the Social Contract fell apart because they could see no gain for-itself, and the oligarchy had to give them a semblance of rights as subjects in order to stop them losing the people power (democracy) that gave them their authority when cohered. In other words, its rulers betrayed its own people in order to gain power and enslave them, rather than win power from another peoples as the Spartans did- honourably under the code of the Hellenes- by enslaving the Messenians, and then themselves. The Athenians enslaved themselves through the nature of desire for-itself, and called it art, architecture, philosophy- the possession of ‘right’, and democracy, the right to possess ones desires.

This is a carrot world where the Noble Lie uses desire in order to cohere people before it hands them a stick. Let us see just how desire produced democracy and then see its results. Could it be that democracy is nothing but war and abjection, despite the fact that we have been told that no two democracies have ever gone to war, and that democracies are the most just form of rule, even over God’s natural law? We have seen how sacrifice in the Garden of Eden (to be understood as alimental communion with God), became under-stood, (experienced as the urgrund) to mean renouncement of ones power to God, and then renouncement of ones power to the state, as the scape-goat. With democracy we will now see sacrifice become a source of gain. No wonder it has so many worshippers today who drape their naked for-itself with their garment of luxury and follow in its train.

“From the beginning of human history meat has actually been a prime luxury. For millennia the staple diet has been fruits, cereals, or vegetables. Meat was rare for most people in the past and rarity is the mother of luxury. Ancient Greece was no exception.” Dr. Michael Scott

“The Panathenea was the biggest civic festival in democratic Athens. It lasted more than a week…on the sixth day of activities the procession led up to the Acropolis to take part in the ceremony….[Imagine] 100 sacrificial cows being herded up to the Acropolis. The cows were for sacrificing and for eating….For the Greeks this was the ultimate moment of ritual communication with the divine. But it was also a moment of intense, luxurious, expectation….The priests gave the Gods their portion, usually just the bones, wrapped in fat, which happily, the gods were said to prefer. Then they divided the rest out amongst the crowd, and the eating began. The most important thing about this meal was that it was a civic affair that unified the whole community. … 100 cows, that’s meat enough for 56,000 people, enough for the entire population of Athens and then some. People were coming from miles around. And all of this was at public expense. Meat was a luxury to be sure, but it was a luxury that could be enjoyed by everyone, not just the privileged elite. Athens had taken a luxury and turned it into something that could unify the entire community together.” Dr. Michael Scott

Let us now see this idea of luxury as a cohering quality become the very root of inequality, in a democracy cohered by desire for it. Let us once again meet the prince of the iron fish:

“In the 7^th century B.C. power here in Athens lay with the elite, the rich, the aristocracy. These noble families competed incessantly for power, sometimes violently. The struggle was not only political but cultural, fuelled by the conspicuous public display of private luxury….These aristocrats had little qualm about their wealth or power… and their showing off wasn’t simply a P.R. exercise it was a fundamental part of their armoury of strategies in competing with one another.” Dr. Michael Scott

“In ancient times the graveyard lay outside the main gates of the city…and in those days the funeral of an aristocrat was a showy expensive affair, that celebrated wealth and status, so much so that it was itself a form of luxury… A burial mound was a dramatic way of establishing status. Everyone saw it on their way in and out of the city. Luxury as political propaganda.”  Dr. Michael Scott

“But for the other Athenians, those left out of the competition and out of the luxury, it was a very different story. Large numbers of them were in debt, and in those days the consequences were grim. Some Athenians even found themselves forced into slavery to clear their debts. The situation has parallels today… Feelings back in the 7^th century B.C. were not much different and they were explosive, then as now, there was a serious danger of civil unrest or even revolution, and displays of private luxury at funerals and elsewhere seem to have been fast becoming a dangerous provocation.

In 600 B.C. here in Athens the rich aristocrats were getting richer whilst the poor were increasingly being sold into debt bondage

Debts owed to the very people who were called ‘aristocrats’. Even amongst the aristocrats competition it seems had broken out into murder on the streets. Everyone realised that tension was building possibly to the scale of civil war. In that apprehension the Athenians turned to a man called Solon…What was needed was a new approach to luxury itself.

He believed that worth and happiness were not only to be measured in gold and silver, and now, perhaps for the first time in the political arena we find the appearance of the idea that private luxury can be a dangerous and divisive thing. This was a radical step. Not only did Solon believe in non-material methods of judging happiness, he also believed that every level of society should have its appropriate rights and powers. So he set about reforming Athens particularly in outlawing debt bondage for the poor, but he did something more. Luxurious expenditure had been part of the problem from the beginning in Athens… Solon went about attacking that problem,… particularly banning that association with funeral processions and burials.”

“Solon had attempted to control luxury to create social harmony, but instead the political jockeying got even worse, and it even spilled on to the acropolis itself. Through to the late 6^th century it became a veritable forest of sculpture, as the aristocrats competed with each other by making magnificent and luxurious offerings to the gods. This display was public alright, but it was intended to serve the personal glory of private individuals, nothing seemed to have changed, so crisis loomed again. The climax came towards the end of the 6^th century B.C., and incredibly it led to the birth of democracy and a new role for luxury. Athenian society had once again ignited into complicated violence, and then one faction, led by a man called Clisthenes, invoked the mass of the people to break the power of its enemies…and the eventual result was, for the first time in human history a democratic constitution.” Dr. Michael Scott

“Democracy was established in Athens in 508 B.C. and it had a dramatic impact on Athenian attitudes to luxury. Solon’s reforms had been a compromise between rich and poor, but now the watchword was,… absolute equality and egalitarian rights for every citizen. … But the problem for the Athenians was this, Democracy had come about as a result of the competition between rich aristocratic families and as a result there was this fear that democracy might still be at risk from those same machinations. So if luxury was to be acceptable in a democracy it had to be public not private in origin, and in particular, that had a dramatic impact on dedications and temples…The new public buildings on the Acropolis became the Empire-State building or Eiffel tower of their day. Icons of the city and its new democracy. The project involved some of the great artists of the whole of Greek history….but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t still huge inequality in Athenian society.” Dr. Michael Scott

“What’s to me interesting, because I’m interested in power, is that the masses actually compelled the rich to spend their money not on themselves but on public services.” Prof. Paul Cartledge

 “In the 5^th century it seems that any monument that took more than three workmen ten days to build was banned, but that prohibition didn’t last very long. By the beginning of the 4^th century rich individuals had returned with some of the flashiest monuments to date… As far as luxury went, fine sculpture was just the start of it, attaching real jewellery to these monuments…. Many of the same artists whose skills continued to make Athens a treasure box of public democratic luxury were also working here for private citizens.  This explosion of luxury couldn’t last for ever, and eventually the law clamped down again…From now on, however rich you were a uniform cylinder was all you got… Those who sacrificed themselves for their city were buried in an ultimate show of equality for them there was what the Athenians called the people’s grave, a mass public burial area without any luxurious markings at all…. The mass grave played the same kind of role in our society as ‘the tomb of the unknown warrior’.” Dr. Michael Scott

“Amazingly what caused a lot of difficulty in democratic Athens was something as simple as fish….Fishing was a big industry, everyone knew their rarity and their cost, and that made fish the ultimate vehicle for luxurious consumption…and a whole literature grew up to celebrate that…A class system developed around fish…Fish threw into sharp relief the divisions that still lay at every level of the community. Meat brought people together but fish divided them… Being a fish lover became a political issue, at the highest level. It was like this, for Athenian democrats, the real danger was people with uncontrolled appetites or desires. It didn’t matter what you desired, it could be sex or money, fish or power, but it shouldn’t take over…Fish became political because to Athenians if you showed yourself out of control in one area, you were out of control everywhere… The implication was that if you couldn’t control your desire for fish… then the implication was that you were most probably morally corrupt and indeed even possibly a tyrant in the making….. such a man was full of avarice and greed.” Dr. Michael Scott

Luxury therefore became the unifier of reciprocators of increase, who allowed the aristocracy their luxuries as long as they got theirs, but who then cohered themselves into a relationship of power that attempted, not equality, but instead increase through the spending of private wealth, ‘rightly held’, but only seen as ‘rightly spent’ when it increased their lot as well as the aristocrats.

We will see this become their self-fulfilling doom in greater detail shortly, but let us just briefly look into the future and see the result, firstly through the behaviour of the aristocracy that maintained this Noble Lie of democracy and secondly upon the fate of Athens’ commonwealth.

“Alcibiades was a luxury fiend, yet the Athenians turned to him, to their doom, they ended up with a tyrant.” Dr. Michael Scott

“The Athenians became alarmed by deforestation early in the sixth century B.C. Greek city populations were growing quickly at that time, most of the timber was already cut, and the poor were farming goat-stripped hills with disastrous results. Unlike the Sumerians, who may have been unaware of the destruction caused by their irrigation methods until it was too late, the Greeks understood what was happening and tried to do something. In 590 B.C., the statesman Solon, realizing that rural poverty and land alienation by powerful Athenian nobles lay behind much of the trouble, outlawed debt-serfdom and food exports; he also tried to ban farming on steep slopes. A generation later, Pisistratus, another ruler of Athens, offered grants for olive planting, which would have been an effective reclamation measure, especially if combined with terracing. But as with such efforts in our day, funding and political will were unequal to the task. Some 200 years later, in his unfinished dialogue Critias, Plato wrote a vivid account of the damage, showing a sophisticated knowledge of the connection between water and woods:

‘What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away…Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees… had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth…. Feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.’” (Wright:2006:87-8)

So the result of all that we are now about to witness in the remainder of this chapter is democratic desertification enacted in order to increase the alimental communion of desire and luxury, creating an abject people called the children of Athens, today known as Greece. They still live like this today, as one of the poor men of Europe, relying on the luxury holidays of their rich victors in order to subsidise their indebted existence, as they witness the art and technology of their demise become that art and technology of the western mind, that is today so worshipped.

Mmmmm lovely, Congratulations to the Athenians there then, brilliant system of controlling desertification, by worshipping the for-itself. Mmmmm …. Global warming, I hope that there are Aliens who will come and visit us on their holidays. Holidays means holy days, and this is the analogy par excellence of the change of the word sacrifice. A holiday is for-itself, to escape being-for-others, on a flight in an iron fish to a people subject to your carrot power. It is coherent but unreasonable, immoral and characterless. The priests of Sumeria who sold drugs, whores and gambling rackets are now sold by Thomas Cook Ltd to the wealthy as a luxury, that they deserve for being subject to others desires for luxury. Before it became called a holiday, it was called, ‘The Grand Tour’ and was partaken of by the rich aristocracy of Europe in order to learn the techniques of art that they would use to maintain their oligarchical rule over a democratically cohered people, by telling them that they were citizens of ‘absolute equality and egalitarian rights for every citizen’. The equal ‘right to power’ gave away, ‘the power to right’. Please notice how Solons democracy meant to set up a system where equality manifested equal wealth amongst its citizens and not an unequal pyramid of wealth amongst equal States as today’s democratic States interpret it as, through their aristocracy of representative government, where the wealthy become wealthier through their service to the State.

What exactly then was the greatness of these foreign affairs and cultural achievements that the Athenians have left us, that we are told by the historian were so great if they caused their own destruction?

 For the modern historian Athens’ greatness means its power to achieve what it valued in-itself-for-itself. That is to say, not the result of the system but the desired teleology of the system- namely the invention of the terms humanity, art, philosophy, democracy, tragedy and of course history itself- all things that the modern historian has been educated to believe are great because they are still valued by our society today. The fact that all of these Arts resulted in the death of the State that bore them and the creation of war as a way of life throughout the rest of history does not come into the equation because that is not the reason for writing history, the reason for writing history is to find our place within the World through a story that makes us great, through the constitutive perception of writing it down from the human perspective and naming it truth. If it doesn’t do that then no-one will buy it, and so no-one will publish it, and so no-one can read it, and no-one can teach it. Have you ever wondered at the value system of historians before to use a word such as great when they tell you this ruler was great and this one evil? We will meet Alexander the Great shortly and you can see for yourself the perspective of the docile historian upon the state of humanity.

For our cave-man who we are following from his home in the Last Glacial Maximum, greatness to him means the laws of God, as does power, and so being great or powerful or good are the same thing. Are the actions of the Athenians great then seen from within Gods laws as lived by himself as a being-in-Being? Were they Just or Moral, and would they result in the kind of thing that he would like to do as a being-in-Being coming from a world of equality, liberty, peace, fraternity, and abundance?

Is Art another lauded aristocratic perspective, a new type of ‘violent’ humanity the only invention of the Greeks in a world of desertification and war for all mankind worth the payment of a mankind who for thousands of years lived in abundance, etc? Is this greatness, is this a superior way of living, surrounded by decaying statues, death through war and inequality, and the generational abject in a desert made for them by these ancestors of greatness?

Let us see this superiority or should we by now say stupidity as Thucydides called it 2,300 years ago at the dawn of democracy, play itself out in reality then. First the great rise to power that makes Athens ‘great’ and then the necessity of increase, and then the death knoll of its own ideology and finally the Noble lie coming back to bite itself in a perfect karmic loop from its previous actions. The Hubris and the subsequent Nemesis, the hypocrisy and the subsequent reality, the bad-faith, and the lies.

To end the chapter we will look at the consequences of these great things, born from the taking up the ideology of The Iliad to serve the for-itself, in the actual death of not only Athens and Sparta along with her, but also of all of the Hellenic peoples and on top of that the fall of Persia the greatest power on Earth, and of how the victor that emerges does so by combining the story of The Iliad to contaminates the story of the priest-king and the story of the priest/king to contaminate The Iliad.

16: The Back-Ground to the Peloponnesian War and its Players

Now that we have ascertained the three natures of organisational theory in ruling a pyramid as: monarchy, democracy, and oligarchy; and the three natures of human-nature in the drama triangle as the taker, reciprocator, and giver/scape-goat- who live within each pyramid that makes up the drama triangle of being-for-itself, we can look at what happens when these three pyramids come under the stress of encountering each other, through the history of Persia, Athens, and Sparta respectively, we can see their regulative stories play out, against their constitutive reality of being-for-itself, and see the truth that becomes unconcealed by our looking.

That is to say, when two ruler-takers (they can only be this) come up against each other with their honour and their respective, ever changing, crate of pigeons- all pecking away to get their piece of the birdseed-pie, to do with what they will, but nevertheless to get some birdseed to do with. These three possible natures, therefore produce three possible perspectives of the state that they are in, and they believe it because it empowers their desire for seed:- The taker sees the human world in behavioural terms as competing against each other. The reciprocator sees a ‘social contract’, and the giver sees, ‘living in harmony with others’. All however are constitutively founded upon a foundation of having taken, and having done so as a right, for whatever reason that right may regulatively been told

We will see if the constitutive rule wins out, or if the regulative rules win out. Will the moral code and conduct, trust and loyalty, etc, that are the regulative rules of honour, win out amongst the warrior-kings and their subjects or will the constitutive rules win out, and the façade be dropped when it suits them? Beyond that question is this one, which State survives, the honourable honest one or the Noble Liars? And beyond that question is this one, which State survives today? The answer is of course, by necessity, none of them, because of the constitutive rule of finite goods and ontological desire. It is a pertinent, prophetic answer. ‘We know our fate already, whereas they did not’.

Before we do this however we need to consider one more element in this story

It is, in fact, the most important element, as it underlies, the nature of these States and its peoples and their regulative story.

The reality behind the truth of each pyramid that arises is two-fold. The first of these we have already met, that the being-for-itself is the basic element that necessitates a pyramidical structure. This is true no matter the pyramid in space or time. This is however a lesser nature to that of Nature, that we are about to consider in relation to the regulative dance of authority that a pyramid chooses to adopt, i.e. a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a democracy. The inter-relationship and balance of power between pyramids and their respective cultural traditions of ‘truth’ and ‘right’ are only a secondary consideration to these urgrund realities of Nature, and it is only their techniques that can hope to change this urgrund.

What we are about to outline therefore is a truth greater than the nature of humanity, that forms his nature ultimately. This is of course Nature itself, from which we flee, but from which we can never escape, just as in the story of Monkey who could not fly off of the Buddha’s hand despite being able to reach the very corners of the world through his magical powers, through which he desired to become himself God to the gods.

In other words, what I am saying is that the dance of civilization of history of the human-race is founded upon Natures rhythm and it is bad-faith to see our human nature and its culture as anything other than dictated by it as its first mover and shaker. Just as God turned out to be the reason for the authority for civilization to come into existence, we are about to understand that God as Nature is the actual authority by which each civilization comes into existence. The reasons that we give from a perspective where we are separate from this Nature, where Mohammed is separate from the Mountain, where God is in Heaven, are bad-faith fallacies, are nothing to do with why there is monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, respectively. It is Nature that determines our Nature no matter how fast we may run, or ride, or sail, or fly, or propel ourselves, or jet-off, or try to get-away from the sacred.

The physical world of Sparta, Athens and Persia respectively were very different in their Nature. What therefore were their natural limites to increase their power given by the Nature of their dwelling, that formed their regulative nature of how they dwelled? What was the, geography and geology that gave birth to the reality of the make-up of Sparta, Athens, and Persia and what therefore was their most efficient constitution to effect a resultant power of production technique of Stick or Carrot, of war or trade, of insularism or of empire?

Athens had vast mineral wealth in the form of a silver mine and it had access to the sea, Sparta had limited land in a mountainous country and was landlocked by other city-states, and Persia had a vast plain of agricultural land.

In Athens, therefore equality, did not reign as it did in the stick-world of the Spartans, because the Nature of Desire could be experienced more readily, and the value-in-exchange (silver money) could easily be traded through sea-networks, that are much more efficient to travel over than is land with the technology of their day.  The vote for equality was therefore founded upon the right to luxury, not the equality of a land-locked people with no mineral wealth but only the power of the people as with Sparta, who could not trade easily in a mountainous region in order to maintain a coherence of its peoples through desire- the carrot world. For the Spartans, the stick-world was the only method of cohesion- Naturally.

In Athens, the carrot-world created internal dispute and resulted in a tyranny. The Democracy that regained control after this and caused Athens’ rise to power, resulted not from any moral bases but from the fact that the defeat of the oligarchy was organised by promising the poor a chance of equal power if they reciprocated with Clisthenes and not the aristocracy. As we have seen power is not a single object possessed by a single person, but a relationship of force given by the people in a pyramid to a ruler. Clisthenes, surrounded by silver and the geography to trade this for desires, told a story that appealed to the reason of the being-for-itself, gain for-itself, and so of course the being-for-itself gave away their power to Clisthenes and not the aristocracy who promised inequality. This technique only worked because the rich had created more poor than reciprocators who were relatively wealthy, and so the balance of power had shifted to the poor momentarily.

Due to being beings-for-itself by their nature, they adopted the story that gave them individually the most power to believe in- democracy- people power. For the individual who has totemised himself by the sacred Ego, this makes sense, but in reality it is bad-faith, due to the nature of power. Everyone in a democracy is offered the same power to vote, and so they believe that they have gained some power. In fact power is only powerful in comparison to the powerless, and so there is no real gain in power for the individual, but instead a gain in cohesive power, at no cost, to the representative ruler. It is upon his behaviour that the wisdom of democracy rests, not the people.

If I have 10p and you have nothing then I have power over you, but if we each have 10p then nothing has changed, there has been no progress, by which we mean, in the Hellenistic understanding of the word, no power increase by which to effect the Nature of change. Today when we spend our monetary power we receive our change if we give over too much money. This is how democracy works. We sell our equal power for personal gain to a possessor of greater power, and call it equality. There is no increase in power because the game has not changed, we all have 10p rather than nothing, but relatively we therefore have no increase in power. This is the objective experience of democracy. However, in the infinite inner subjective world, a very different experience and hence perspective has been manufactured by this artifice. We feel like we have individual power, and hence control of change, and hence we feel safer and esteemed, even if we are objectively powerless and abject. It is, ‘the most obvious disadvantage the role that unreflective emotionalism might play in decision making’. As we will see in the modern day, people use their power to vote for taxes for-itself, education for-itselfs progeny, and health for-itself, jobs for-itself, rights for-its-individual-self, and that is all that politicians talk about consequently in order to gain power, as did Clisthenes.

No one questions the fact that there is no vote for the greater constitutional actions of the state, the resultant repercussions upon the world, or of their justice, and no politician talks about them either, and no media outlet comments on them as being a political institution of people-power. What indeed are these things that no-one talks about, and no-one cares to talk about? They are the objective consequences of viewing politics subjectively only in regards to tax for-itself, education for-itself, health for-itself and jobs for-itself. In physical terms as objects they are called arms manufacture in an arms race, training other states to rape their own citizens, using other states as buffer zones of attack that are kept weak deliberately by our rulers so as not to attack us, but armed by us to keep them in a state not so weak as to be attacked by an Other and possessed by ‘them’. We will see these effects and more, in greater detail later as constitutive practices caged within the Noble Lie of the regulative dance of ‘justice’ ‘good’ and ‘right’, etc, through all of the pyramid stories of authority, including modern democracy of course.

So the Athenians not only choose to give their power over to gain power but they can also see that power in their hands in the form of Nature as a bloody great silver mine, and an ocean of desires just waiting for them. The Spartans do not have such a luxury perspective by which to come up with such a regulative story. What did these democratic Athenians do with this new found wealth, how did they use their power to vote? Was it the same as the oligarchical Spartans in choosing not to go to war, or was it the same as the oligarchical Athenians who came before them of choosing the efficient technique of war to gain still more in a land of plenty, in a Garden of Abundance? Well the Athenians only went one year out of their whole existence where they did not collectively vote to go to war. Even though they were already rich in comparison to those states around them, it made them feel more insecure to be so secure, just as we saw above.

In like manner, in Sparta, there is no wealth around you that can be possessed individually, such as silver, and no chance of trading efficiently with the little that you have got, and so the people power of the warrior- the stick-world, is the Natural basis upon which to regulate your behaviour and power relations. One man cannot be more powerful than an army, and so it is better to subject oneself to that army to gain in power. Therefore the individual was the army and the army was the individual, their was no system of reciprocation by which to instigate a pyramid of inequality. The pyramid of Messenians beneath them existed out of sight and mind of the political perspective. It is a capped pyramid, with no point of rule, no capital, because no individual would reciprocate to another with the same amount of physical power to gain their desire by their allegiance to him over the collective. Hence an oligarchy balanced by two kings under a queen, in a council of elders.

In Persia we find a completely different Nature

Here there is a vast plain of agricultural land. The power provided by the Nature of this land can only be harnessed by a technology that can be communicated through this vast land and consequent vast population. What use is democracy when these peoples are so disparate and their powers so unequal depending on their proximity to this land, or mountains or the city, etc, as Hourani documented above. What use is an oligarchy when each oligarch must own their own city in order to tax the people and increase in power? A monarchy allows a series of oligarchs under this one rule, to become lords of a part of this vast land, and each stretch of land requires its own army to control and protect it and its peoples. Therefore each Lord with its army would curb its desires through the arbiter of the monarch in order to stop the pyramid going to war against itself, the most inefficient method of gain there is.

This truth is extremely important to understand because it reveals the truth behind a lovely little Noble Lie that some lefties try to foist on the western world, the white man, etc. The reason that Europe has been the leader in the arms race of the world, since Greek times, is not because of some white mans biology or the western minds greed, it is simply because Europe, out of all of the continents, does not contain the Nature of a vast tract of land by which to control a vast amount of people. It is split and divided by seas and mountain ranges, and by a climactic variance that itself separates Southern Europe from its Northern Climes. It is the acquisition of another continent in order to gain one of these fertile plains by European countries that we will witness from the Romans to the present day, and the poverty of our agricultural land that becomes the poverty of agricultural subsidies in order to maintain the power to feed ourselves. They are the constitutive realities that we regulate by our dancing. It has nothing to do with a manufactured nature of a manufactured peoples, in order to manufacture hate, in order to manufacture power, in order to world a different world, disregarding the Nature of the real world.

17: My Enemies Enemy is My Friend – The Persian War necessitates – The Delian League

“While Sparta and Athens were developing their different forms of government they became engaged in life-or-death wars. In the first of these they were allies, in the second, the bitterest of enemies.

A Spartan Athenian alliance gained a dramatic victory for all the Greek peoples in two campaigns known collectively as the Persian War. …the Persians had replaced the Babylonians in 539 B.C. as the mightiest power in western Asia. One result was that the Persians came to rule all of Asia Minor, including formerly independent Greek city-states on the western coast. After turning their attentions to conquering Egypt, the Persians crossed over to Europe in 512 and occupied the northernmost Greek territory of Thrace. It is unclear whether they had designs on the rest of Greece, but many of the Greek city-states surely felt uncomfortable living under the Persian shadow. Moreover, the Greek-speaking cities in Asia Minor began to chafe under Persian rule and unsuccessfully tried to gain their independence in a revolt that lasted from 499 until 494 B.C.

During this time Athens, for motives both economic and patriotic, dispatched a number of ships and troops to aid the rebels. (The Athenians shared with the Greeks of Asia Minor a common dialect, and thus a special sense of kinship). Once the Persians had put down the revolt, they decided to teach the Athenians a lesson.

The two campaigns of the Persian War followed, one in 490 B.C., and the other extending from 480 to 479. In the first a Persian expeditionary force sent by sea to Attica was defeated by the Athenians in the battle of Marathon. Recognizing that a much greater military enterprise was necessary, the Persian ruler, Xerxes, sent an enormous army by the European land route to bring all Greece under his rule. At first his army was successful, conquering all of northern Greece down to Athens itself. The Athenians withdrew and watched from afar while their city was burned. But Sparta came to Athen’s aid, and heroic resistance by the allies first in the sea battle of Salamis (480) and then in the land battle of Platea (479) sent the Persians off and packing.

The Greek exploits in these campaigns testified to their military resourcefulness and their heroism

Among the many stirring incidents, none is more stirring than the retort of a Spartan general trying to hold off a huge Persian force at the pass at Thermopylae with just 300 men: when a scout warned him that the Persians were so numerous that the mass of their arrows would darken the sun, he replied, “so much the better, we will fight in the shade.” …

Without becoming misty-eyed it is possible to view the Persian War as one of the most significant in the history of the world, for it was a victory for Hellenic ideals of freedom against Persian autocracy, and it allowed the Greek city-states, above all Athens, to preserve these ideals for themselves and for posterity. And yet, for Athens the glorious war led relentlessly to an inglorious one, almost as if plotted by an Athenian tragic playwright. The first step was the creation by Athens in 478 B.C. of a naval confederacy meant to carry on the war against Persia and liberate the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Sparta, a land power, had no interest in joining, but Athens gained the support of many other Greek city-states, each of which was obliged to contribute annually a fixed number of ships or monetary payments. Since the expense was great the island of Naxos asked to withdraw from the confederation in 467, but Athens refused to grant permission and made the point clear by taking punitive military action.

By mid-century the league had lost its original purpose because the Asian Greek cities had all been freed. Just then Athens moved the league’s treasury from the island of Delos to Athens itself, demonstrating that the confederation had been transformed into an empire shaped for Athenian financial and commercial interests. Meanwhile, the Spartans looked on, and, not surprisingly, began strengthening a defensive alliance out of fear that Athenian hegemony might be extended over all of Greece.” (Lerner et al:1993:110-12)

In the preceding text, we see the necessity of Athens and Sparta, former enemies of the Hellenistic World geography by their nature, suddenly becoming friends and forming an alliance not only with each other but with all of the other Hellenic states. This is not a constitutive alliance, but a regulative dance that will increase the power of each state more than it would do alone under the thrownness of being near a super-power- Persia. The constitution of Athens and Sparta is still that they are- by necessity of survival in a world of finite goods and over-population- enemies. In a worlding of hope, fear, and paranoia this constitutive story is therefore revealed in the phrase: My Enemies Enemy is My Friend.

This is the closest definition of friend that a State can hold, and it is the same state that a taker sees the world through. All Others are my enemy, limiting my freedom and power, as I limit theirs, and so we are competitors. I will therefore act this way and create a self-fulfilling prophecy that proves me right and compete against you- war not warfare, profit not fair-trade. Only the reciprocator who is in Bad Faith actually sees ‘a friend’, because he has forgotten that the takers in their reality see him as an enemy who is only a friend because of your joint enemy, which forms a social contract between you in order to regulate the constitutive power they wield of collective desire. As soon as the enemy of your friend has disappeared then the bad faith reciprocator will find themselves amazed to witness their friend become an enemy.

This is the grease in the wheels of political co-operation, nothing else but reciprocation by mutual advantage or a noble lie of regulative friendship that empowers both states to adhere to. Peace is only made with ones enemies, as is war. It serves the rulers of these states to tell a story of friendship, or a special relationship (as Britain has promulgated with America and now with Europe) where the weaker ruler can gain the greater esteem and subsequent advantage of internal cohesion in telling their story in this way, therefore making the polis believe that you their state is still great and esteemed and free to act how it likes in worlding the World. Rather than say that ‘we’ are unwillingly allied with an enemy in order to be safe from a greater enemy, because without this alliance ‘we’ are not safe.

When a lot of small states, such as the city-states of Greece or the nation-states of Europe, have to face a super-power empire, such as Persia then and Asia today, it is better to all become one big alliance, and this alliance today is called the United Nations, before that it was called the League of Nations. For the Hellenes who were close to Persia or who relied on the sea for trade, as did the Athenians, then it made sense to combine against Persia, whilst for the Spartans who were protected from Persia but Athens and these others city-states who would have to be defeated before the Persians got to Sparta it made sense to allow Athens to become a buffer state that would have to spend its resources on defending itself against Persia, whilst they could spend their money on furthering their power against the other Hellenistic states around them.

For Sparta then, it made sense to reason that Persia, whilst its enemy, was its friend as it weakened Athens, and in like manner that Athens, whilst its enemy, was its friend because it weakened Persia. As we saw above, once the League was formed by the Athenians this made the Spartans fear that the buffer state was now becoming an empire in-itself, and so by not joining the League it hoped to slow the pace of this potential for power. As we also saw above and will see in greater detail below, the Democratic Athenians voted to betray the League and all of the Hellenes, once they felt less fear of loss from the Persians, they felt increased hope for gain from their friends, and the friendship, that was always only, the mutual advantage of reciprocal users dancing a regulative dance to power, with desire for-itself as its ‘reason’.

The Delian League then was not an alliance of friends under the great friend of Athens but was instead an alliance of enemies against the greatest enemy- Persia organised under the next greatest enemy- Athens. As soon as Persia was defeated Athens returned to its constitutive necessary dance, voted for democratically by its just citizens of desire, and betrayed the trust of those in bad-faith.

Any ‘friend’ that could not afford their contribution to the league was forced to pay  by sacrificing scape-goats from within their pyramid (the necessary abject) and could not leave, they were imprisoned in an unfree state, a domicile, powerlessly building the power of Athens against their will, and so the regulatory word contribute reverts to its constitutive word, tribute. Con means with and therefore con-tribute means money paid ‘with’ consenting will. A will that, ‘constitutionally’-means ‘with the will of the polis of the state’- only consents when it is to its mutual advantage to do so. 

Athens’ Delian league of United Nations once the enemy had disappeared turned into a political power for the Athenians and they took it. I wonder what we will see happen to the aegis of The United Nations of our modern world that dwells in America once the greater threat of Russia has been defeated? Won’t it too, need a new enemy in order to justify its existence and all of the power that America gains by it in worlding the World, under a story of friendship through the mutual advantage of ‘free trade’ whether the nations so united are willing or not to contribute or pay tribute by being conned.

What was the result then of Athens’ will to increase its power for-itself and not for-others. Did this great vote for a great betrayal result in the gain of security or wealth or pleasure or luxury, that each individual had hoped for? Let us look at a brief outline of this history before allowing Thucydides and Herodotus to give us the constitutional theory, the ‘on the ground reality of the actors’, whose choices freely taken, turned friends back into enemies:

The Carrot –World and the Stick-World Collide

“What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” (Thucydides:1962:25)

“The immediate origins of the Peloponnesian War, fought between Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 B.C., lay in a confrontation between the respective alliance systems. Athens needed desperately to maintain ports on the Gulf of Corinth because that waterway led to Italy, a source of imported grain for the Athenian populace and timber for its shipbuilding. This meant that Athens had to extend alliances to areas near the Peloponnesian peninsula, Sparta’s bastion, bringing tensions to a height. Each time a smaller city under the thumb of either Athens or Sparta tried to revolt, it gained help from the opposing power. Finally a relatively minor incident of this sort became the cause of all-out-war. Athenian strategy, shaped by Pericles, the city’s charismatic political and military leader of the time, was defensive. Pericles feared that the Athenian infantry could never match the well-drilled Spartan one, and thus he ordered that all Athenians living in the country abandon their land to the invading Spartans and take refuge behind newly constructed Athenian walls.

His hope was that the navy would ultimately win the day by coastal campaigns against Sparta. Unfortunately for Athens, however, not only did the Spartans lay waste to Attica, but crowding behind the walls led to an outbreak of plague in 430 B.C. that wiped out a quarter of the population…. As the war progressed Athens became ever more ruthless in its quest for total victory. Pericles, who himself succumbed to the plague in 429 B.C., was succeeded by leaders more unscrupulous than he; they began to balance the military score with Sparta but also embarked on overly ambitious imperialistic ventures and a policy of forcing neutral states to join forces with Athens or face extermination. Having lost its own sense of mission and become weakened by internal divisions, Athens was finally deserted by so many of its allies as the war dragged on that when it lost a naval battle to Sparta in 404 it had to surrender rather than starve.

The terms then imposed by the victorious Spartans were harsh: Athens had to destroy all of its fortifications, surrender all of its foreign possessions, and submit to Sparta as a subject state.

The outcome of the Peloponnesian War led to political trials for all of Greece. At first Sparta assumed supremacy throughout the Greek world, installing dictatorships in cities formerly allied with Athens and governed by democracy. Yet it slowly became clear that Sparta lacked the will or the governmental strength to maintain hegemony beyond its earlier boundaries. The result was civil strife in several Greek cities, anti-Spartan democrats rising against Spartan-backed oligarchs, as well as attempts by Athens and Thebes- cities in which democrats had taken power- to wrest domination over Greece from Sparta. In 371 B.C. Thebes accomplished that goal by a victory over Spartan troops at the battle of Leuctra, but Thebes soon proved no more able to rule Greece firmly. Consequently from 371 until 338 B.C. shifting alliances between cities led to interminable warfare. Although the splendour of Greek culture had hardly dimmed…, all the leading cities of Greece had become militarily and politically exhausted.” (Lerner et al:1993:110-12)

Oh dear! So Athens’ desire spelt; the Plague for its-self, injustice for its previous allies (friends); a democratic story of ruthless extermination as the true story of ‘the first democracy’ and a decrease in hope and an increase in fear and paranoia for the Spartans, as insecurity and therefore the necessity for war. All of this was voted for by a democracy every year for 27 years consecutively. Ultimately it spelt the death knoll of doom for all of the Hellenes. What was is that Darius said about democracies as a system of rule above, ‘Again, in a democracy, it is impossible but that there will be malpractices; these malpractices, however, do not lead to enmities, but to close friendships, which are formed among those engaged in them, who must hold well together to carry on their villainies’.

So if a democracy is a pack of villains out for-itself, then what happens when they form into a league of power- an oligarchy, let us hear Darius’ talk of oligarchy once more, ‘Contrariwise, in oligarchies, where men vie with each other in the service of the commonwealth, fierce enmities are apt to arise between man and man, each wishing to be leader, and to carry his own measures; whence violent quarrels come, which lead to open strife, often ending in bloodshed.’ A league therefore is an oligarchy of pyramid states rather than individuals, but Darius’ words still ring true, and in like manner, the words of friendship in all of the subsequent leagues that we will witness throughout history, ring false.

Already therefore we see the alliances of those who, once freed from the yoke of fear, turn alliances into greater hope of power for themselves, and hence create greater fear in others, that defeats this hope. The irony is that the Greeks possessed the language of reason that they created in the words, ‘Hubris and Nemesis’, by the story of Croesus above as the father of their culture, and did not learn from it, as they watched these two gods control them, to teach them a lesson they refused to learn, because the price of its wisdom was too high to the individual for-itself. It is cheaper to make others pay. War is cheaper than work. A penny today is worth two pennies tomorrow….. All very reasonable, apart from the experience of plague, war, defeat, starvation, humiliation, hatred, and war once again, ad infinitum, that might suggest otherwise.

Let us now here the more in-depth history of exactly why these truths played out. In other words let us look beyond the economics and passions of the pyramid’s perspective, as described above, and look at the same history through the perspective of those within the pyramids themselves, the players. We will take our language game of the three pigeons and their three natures and see how the individuals who all possess these three potential modes of behaviour (karmic patterns of habit) played their games within this great game of war, whether of monarchy, democracy, or oligarchy. Always as a guiding light, we will weigh these stories in the balance against the question, who benefits, and hence see whether it is bad-faith to believe the story the pyramid tells you, about its right’s and moral duty, as it makes killing lawful and God on their side, supporting the slaughter. Is it esteem, necessity, justice, honour, hope, fear, reason, or progress that motivates these individuals, or is it the State that they ‘sacrifice’ themselves for?

“The ‘timeless wisdom’ (or Realist Philosophy) formed by the experiences of Thucydides – Bad Faith

“Thucydides was a fifth century Athenian general who wrote the ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’ between Athens and Sparta in 431-04 BC. This work of history has inspired many a Realist to take a ‘tragic view of life and politics’ across a period over 2,500 years (Lebow 2007:54.). Claiming a timeless wisdom to Thucydides’ work gives Realists a real propaganda coup when it comes to attracting support for their theories because they can portray them as being applicable far beyond ‘any condition or attribute in the modern world…but…as a central feature of prior epochs as well’ (Sterling-Folker 2006e:15).

Thucydides tells a story of an age of a few ‘great powers’ and many lesser powers, an inequality that was ‘considered to be inevitable and natural’ (Jackson and Sorensen 2007:62). Thucydides’ harsh dictum was that in order to survive and prosper, states of all sizes had to adapt to the reality they found themselves in and conduct themselves accordingly to stay safe- from here you can trace a line to Hobbes’ international state of nature. Here, Thucydides opened the way for a discussion of morality and justice in the conduct of foreign policy that later Realists such as Hans Morgenthau would build upon.” (Daddow:2009:84)

“Thucydides feels passionately about Athens and about the great leader of Athenian democratic imperialism, Pericles. He sees clearly and makes clear to us all the arguments which might be and which were used against Athens by her subjects and by those who feared her further expansion. More remarkable still, he shows us how on the Athenian side, as the war proceeds, the claim to exercise power over others, which at one time might have been represented as ‘just’ or at least ‘noble’ has, through the mere logic of events, to be expressed with the most brutal cynicism. Yet this belief in the fact and in the ideal of Athens of Pericles never wavers. It was the belief in which he had been brought up, and, if he believed in a lost cause, there is no doubt about the fact that to him the cause was worth any and every sacrifice. And when one reflects that the achievements of his city in two or three generation are unexampled in the whole history of the world, one is inclined to think that he was right.” (Thucydides:1962:6)

“Thucydides, the son of Olorus, was born probably about 455 B.C. and died, after the end of the war, in about the year 400.” (Thucydides:1962:8)

Thucydides first tells us of how the Greeks themselves lived in their new city-states between the time of The Iliad up unto the present day:

“For in those early times, as communication by sea became easier, so piracy became a common profession both among the Hellenes and among the barbarians who lived on the coast in the islands. The leading pirates were powerful men, acting both out of self-interest and in order to support the weak among their own people. They would descend upon cities which were unprotected by walls and indeed consisted only of scattered settlements; and by plundering such places they would gain most of their livelihood. At this time such a profession, so far from being regarded as disgraceful, was considered quite honourable. It is an attitude that can be illustrated even to-day by some of the inhabitants of the mainland among whom successful piracy is regarded as something to be proud of; and in the old poets, too, we find that the regular question always asked of those who arrive by sea is ‘Are you pirates?’ It is never assumed either that those who were so questioned would shrink from admitting the fact, or that those who were interested in finding out the fact would reproach them with it.” (Thucydides:1962:15)

“Piracy was just as prevalent in the islands among the Carians and Pheonicians, who in fact colonized most of them. But after Minos had organized a navy, sea communications improved; he sent colonies to most of the islands and drove out the notorious pirates, with the result that those who lived on the sea-coasts were now in a position to acquire wealth and live a more settled life. Some of them, on the strength of their new riches, built walls for their cities. The weaker, because of the general desire to make profits, were content to put up with being governed by the stronger, and those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller cities under their control. Hellas had already developed some way along these lines when the expedition to Troy took place.” (Thucydides:1962:16-17)

“The Athenians were the first to give up the habit of carrying weapons and to adopt a way of living that was more relaxed and more luxurious.” (Thucydides:1962:16)

“Yet the Spartans occupy two-fifths of the Peloponnese and stand at the head not only of the whole Peloponnese itself but also of numerous allies beyond its frontiers. Since, however, the city is not regularly planned and contains no temples or monuments of great magnificence, but is simply a collection of villages, in the ancient Hellenic way, its appearance would not come up to expectation. If, on the other hand, the same thing were to happen to Athens, one would conjecture from what met the eye that the city had been twice as powerful as in fact it is.” (Thucydides:1962:18)

In other words we see Architecture as Esteem and its links to awe and power for the Athenians, but no such artifice from the Spartans whose own physical individual architecture of their warrior bodies served that purpose.

“The old form of government was hereditary monarchy with established rights and limitations; but as Hellas became more powerful and as the importance of acquiring money became more and more evident, tyrannies were established in nearly all cities, revenues increased, shipbuilding flourished, and ambition turned towards sea-power.” (Thucydides:1962:20)

“All the same these Hellenic navies, whether in the remote past or in the later periods, although they were as I have described them, were still a great source of strength to the various naval powers. They brought in revenue and they were the foundation of empire.” (Thucydides:1962:21)

“And in the Hellenic states that were governed by tyrants, the tyrant’s first thought was always for himself, for his own personal safety, and for the greatness of his own family. Consequently security was the chief political principle in these governments, and no great action ever came out of them- nothing, in fact, that went beyond their immediate local interests.” (Thucydides:1962:22)

These Hellenic states then were introspective and merely fought or traded and robbed, each other. Indeed Sparta (the land power- as was Russia) and Athens (the sea-power – as is America) were already necessary enemies, and were in fact at war shortly before the Persians showed up and made them think a bit bigger for the first time:

“Not many years after the end of tyrannies in Hellas the battle of Marathon was fought between the Persians and the Athenians. Ten years later the foreign enemy (Persia) returned with his vast armada for the conquest of Hellas, and at this moment of peril the Spartans, since they were the leading power, were in command of the allied Hellenic forces. In face of the invasion the Athenians decided to abandon their city; they broke up their homes, took to their ships, and became a people of sailors. It was by a common effort that the foreign invasion was repelled; but not long afterwards the Hellenes- both those who had fought in the war together and those who later revolted from the King of Persia- split into two divisions, one group following Athens and the other Sparta. These were clearly the two most powerful states, one being supreme on land, the other on the sea. For a short time the war-time alliance held together, but it was not long before quarrels took place and Athens and Sparta, each with her own allies, were at war with each other, while among the rest of the Hellenes states that had their own differences now joined one or other of the two sides. So from the end of the Persian War till the beginning of the Peloponnese War, though there were some intervals of peace, on the whole these two Powers were either fighting with each other or putting down revolts among their allies. They were consequently in a high state of military preparedness and had gained their military experience in the hard school of danger.

The Spartans did not make their allies pay tribute, but saw to it that they were governed by oligarchies who would work in the Spartan interest

Athens, on the other hand, had in the course of time taken over the fleets of her allies (except for those of Chios and Lesbos) and had made them pay contributions of money instead. Thus the forces available to Athens alone for this war were greater than the combined forces had ever been when the alliance was still intact.” (Thucydides:1962:22-23)

After Persia was defeated then, each Greek city-state therefore began telling new stories of hatred. This time, not for Persia but their previous allies- for Athens or Sparta- as it was to their advantage to believe respectively in order to increase their hope for increasing their power, under the artifice of fitting the names of our ‘animal nature’ and injustice to these new enemy, ‘Others’, against the ‘sacred virtues and culture’ of the ‘Other-Others’- the allies,  who they were aligned with. Thereby magically conjuring the consequent infinite valued social capital feelings of hatred and disgust, and then turning them into the infinite valued social capital feelings of honour and superiority, through culling these people in war with these just allies. The methods of achieving these alliances, were by the stick for the Spartans and by the carrot for the Athenians. Remember how early sedentary hunter-gatherers would combine under a name that they pretended lineage from, and then leave if it was to their advantage or if force was used by the chief. The Name of a League is this same relationship of mutual advantage but with the pyramid being represented as an individual State.

The same individual State that espouses equality, liberty, and fraternity, and means when it does so, that it as the State for-itself, not for the individual states of those within the State. The only difference is that in a stick-world the State cannot leave the League, just as the individual could not leave the chief. We saw that this led to villages becoming exploited by the new entity of cities- Babylon. When States play this same game in a stick-world, States by necessity must perceive themselves as Empires, controlling the lesser States through either wielding the stick of the army- oligarchy- Sparta, or the wielding the carrot of alliance- con-tribute- Athens.

Of course every ruler of every State knows this to be true constitutively, but the nature of the regulative game according to the stick path or the carrot path is very different, and so the Noble Lie attached to them must be one that will allow the behaviour required to become lawful and right, whilst making it appear to ‘be’ lawful and right, i.e. morally necessary.

Let us hear then some of the great speeches of the individuals who represent these subject allied States as they try to use this ‘power of allegiance’ to their advantage and of how Athens and Sparta, respond. We will see that the artifice of the Noble Lie is quickly dropped and the truth of gain becomes the only language game in town.

The situation that we look at firstly is one where Corcyra, a colony of people that has originally come from the people of Corinth and is still under its dominion. Corcyra has become greedy and taken a small island Epidarmus from the Corinthians and are not paying tribute and so consequently it now fears invasion from Corinth in order to exact ‘justice’. Due to this imminent fear Corcyra, a power weaker than Corinth, has therefore sent an envoy to Athens to seek alignment, because of fear of Corinth taking its power and hope of freeing itself from Corinths grip and gaining enough power to then take Corinth. This has consequently caused Corinth to see its own hope of gain turn into fear of a loss of power, so they approach Athens themselves, with their own envoys overtures of friendship and allegiance.

“When the news of this move reached Corinth, the Corinthians also sent representatives to Athens, fearing that the combined strength of the navies of Athens and Corcyra would prevent them from having their own way in the war with Corcyra. An assembly was held and the arguments on both sides were put forward. The representatives of Corcyra spoke as follows:

‘Athenians, in a situation like this, it is right and proper that first of all certain points should be made clear. We have to come to ask you for help, but cannot claim that this help is due to us because of any great services we have done to you in the past or on the basis of any existing alliance. We must therefore convince you first that by giving us this help you will be acting in your own interests, or certainly not against your own interests; and then we must show that our gratitude can be depended upon. If on all these points you find our arguments unconvincing, we must not be surprised if our mission ends in failure.

‘Now’ Corcyra has sent to you in the conviction that in asking for your alliance we can also satisfy you on these points. What has happened is that our policy in the past appears to have been against our own present interests, and at the same time makes it look inconsistent of us to be asking help from you. It certainly looks inconsistent to be coming here to ask for help when in the past we have deliberately avoided all alliances; and it is because of this very policy that we are now left entirely alone to face a war with Corinth. We used to think that our neutrality was a wise thing, since it prevented us being dragged into danger by other people’s policies; now we see it clearly as a lack of foresight and as a source of weakness.

‘It is certainly true that in the recent naval battle we defeated the Corinthians single-handed. But now they are coming against us with a much greater force drawn from the Peloponnese and from the rest of Hellas. We recognize that, if we have nothing but our own national resources, it is impossible for us to survive, and we can imagine what lies in store for us if they overpower us. We are therefore forced to ask for assistance, both from you and from everyone else; and it should not be held against us that now we have faced the facts and are reversing our old policy of keeping ourselves to ourselves. There is nothing sinister in our action; we merely recognize that we made a mistake.

‘If you grant our request, you will find that in many ways it was a good thing that we made it at this particular time. First of all, you will not be helping aggressors, but people who are the victims of aggression. Secondly, we are now in extreme peril, and if you welcome our alliance at this moment you will win our undying gratitude. And then, we are, after you, the greatest naval power in Hellas. You would have paid a lot of money and still have been very grateful to have us on your side. Is it not, then, an extraordinary stroke of good luck for you (and one which will cause heartburning among your enemies) to have us coming over voluntarily into your camp, giving ourselves up to you without involving you in any dangers or any expense? It is a situation where we, whom you are helping, will be grateful to you, yourselves will be stronger than you were before. There is scarcely a case in history where all these advantages have been available at the same time, nor has it often happened before that a power looking for an alliance can say to those whose help it asks that it can give as much honour and as much security as it will receive.

‘In case of war we should obviously be useful to you, but some of you may think that there is no immediate danger of war. Those who think along those lines are deceiving themselves; they do not see the facts that Sparta is frightened of you and wants war, that Corinth is your enemy and is also influential at Sparta. Corinth has attacked us first in order to attack you afterwards. She has no wish to make enemies of us both at once and find us standing together against her. What she wants is to get an initial advantage over you in one of two ways- either by destroying our power or by forcing us to use it in her interests. But it is our policy to be one move ahead, which is why we want you to accept the alliance which we offer. It is better to have the initiative in these matters- to take our own measures first, rather than be forced to counter the intrigues that are made against us by others.

‘If the Corinthians say that you have no right to receive one of their colonies into your alliance, they should be told that every colony, if it is treated properly, honours its mother city, and only becomes estranged when it has been treated badly. Colonists are not sent abroad to be the slaves of those who remain behind, but to be their equals. And it is quite clear that Corinth was in the wrong so far as we are concerned. We asked them to settle the affair of Epidarmus by arbitration; but they chose to prosecute their claims by war instead of by a reasonable settlement. Indeed, the way in which they are treating us, their kinsmen, ought to be a warning to you and ought to prevent you from falling into their deceitful traps of listening to what may appear to be their straightforward demands. When one makes concessions to one’s enemies, one regrets it afterwards, and the fewer concessions one makes the safer one is likely to be.

‘It is not a breach of your treaty with Sparta if you receive us into your alliance. We are neutrals, and it is expressly written down in your treaty that any Hellenic state which is in this condition is free to ally itself with whichever side it chooses. What is really monstrous is a situation where Corinth can find sailors for her ships both from her own allies and from the rest of Hellas, including in particular your own subjects, while we are shut off from a perfectly legitimate alliance, and indeed from getting help from anywhere: and then, on top of that, they will actually accuse you of behaving illegally if you grant our request.

In fact it is we who shall have far greater reasons to complain of you if you are not willing to help us; you will be rejecting us, who are no enemies of yours, in the hour of our peril, and as for the others, who are enemies of yours and are also the aggressors, you will not only be doing nothing to stop them, but will actually be allowing them to build up their strength from the resources of your own empire. Is this right? Surely you ought either to stop them from engaging troops from your own subjects, or else to give us, too, whatever assistance you think proper. Best of all would be for you to receive us in open alliance and help us in that way.

‘We have already suggested that such a course would be very much in your own interests. Perhaps the greatest advantage to you is that you can entirely depend on us because your enemies are the same as ours, and strong ones, too, quite capable of doing damage to those who revolt from them. And then it is quite a different matter for you if you reject alliance with a naval power than if you do the same thing with a land power. Your aim, no doubt, should be, if it were possible, to prevent anyone else having a navy at all: the next best thing is to have on your side the strongest navy that there is.

‘Some of you may admit that we have shown that the alliance would be in your interests, and yet may still feel apprehensive about a breach of your treaty with Sparta. Those who think in this way should remember that, whether you feel apprehensive or not, you will certainly have become stronger, and that this fact will make your enemies think twice before attacking you; whereas if you reject us, however confident you may feel, you will in fact be the weaker for it, and consequently less likely to be treated with respect by a strong enemy. Remember, too, that your decision is going to affect Athens just as much as Corcyra. At the moment your thoughts are on the coming war- a war, in fact, which has almost broken out already. Certainly you will not be showing very much foresight for your own city if, at this time, you are in two minds whether you have on your side a power like Corcyra, whose friendship can be so valuable and whose hostility so dangerous to you. Apart from all other advantages, Corcyra lies in an excellent position on the coastal route to Italy and Sicily, and is thus able to prevent naval reinforcements coming to the Peloponnese from there, or going from the Peloponnese to those countries.

‘The whole thing can be put very shortly, and these few words will give you the gist of the whole argument why you should not abandon us. There are three considerable naval powers in Hellas- Athens, Corcyra, and Corinth. If Corinth gets control of us first and you allow our navy to be united with hers, you will have to fight against the combined fleets of Corcyra and the Peloponnese. But if you receive us into your alliance, you will enter upon the war with our ships as well as your own.’

After this speech from the Corcyraean side, the representative of Corinth spoke as follows: ‘These Corcyraeans have not confined their argument to the question of whether or not you should accept their alliance. They have named us as aggressors and have stated that they are the victims of an unjust war. Before, therefore, we go on to the rest of our argument, we must deal first with these two points. Our aim will be to give you a clear idea of what exactly we are claiming from you, and to show that there are good reasons why you should reject the appeal of Corcyra.

 ‘”Wisdom” and “Moderation” are the words used by Corcyra in describing her old policy of avoiding alliances

In fact the motives were entirely evil, and there was nothing good about them at all. She wanted no allies because her actions were wrong, and she was ashamed of calling in others to witness her own misdoings. The geographical situation of Corcyra gives its inhabitants a certain independence. The ships of other states are forced to put in to their harbours much more often than Corcyraean ships visit the harbours of other states. So in cases where a Corcyraean has been guilty of injuring some other national, the Corcyraeans are themselves their own judges, and there is no question of having the case tried by independent judges, and there is no question of having the case tried by independent judges appointed by treaty. So this neutrality of theirs, which sounds so innocent, was in fact a disguise adopted not to preserve them from having to share in the wrong-doings of others, but in order to give them a perfectly free hand to do wrong themselves, making away with other people’s property by force, when they are strong enough, cheating them, whenever they can manage to do so, and enjoying their gains without any vestige of shame. Yet if they really were the honourable people they pretend to be, this very independence of theirs would have given them the best possible opportunity of showing their good qualities in the relations of common justice.

‘In fact they have not acted honourably either towards us or towards anyone else. Though they are colonists of ours, they have never been loyal to us and are now at war with us. They were not sent out in the first place, they say, to be ill treated. And we say that we did not found colonies in order to be insulted by them, but rather to retain our leadership and to be treated with proper respect. At all events our other colonies do respect us, and indeed they treat us with great affection. It is obvious, then, that, if the majority are pleased with us, Corcyra can have no good reason for being the only one that is dissatisfied; and that we are not making war unreasonably, but only as the result of exceptional provocation. Even if we were making a mistake, the right thing would be for them to give in to us, and then it would be a disgrace to us if we failed to respect so reasonable an attitude. As it is, their arrogance and the confidence they feel in their wealth have made them act improperly towards us on numerous occasions, and in particular with regard to Epidarmus, which belongs to us. When this place was in distress, they took no steps toward bringing it under their control; but as soon as we came to relive it, they forcibly took possession of it, and still hold it.

‘They actually say that they were prepared in the first place to submit the matter to arbitration. The phrase is meaningless when used by someone who has already stolen an advantage and makes the offer from a safe position; it should only be used when, before opening hostilities, one puts oneself on a real and not an artificial level with one’s enemies. And in their case there was no mention of this excellent idea of arbitration before they started to besiege Epidarmus; they only brought the word forward when they began to think that we were not going to let them have their own way.

‘And now, being in the wrong themselves over Epidarmus, they have come to you and are asking you not so much for an alliance as for complicity in their crime. They are asking you to welcome them at a time when they are at war with us. What they should have done was to have approached you in the days when they were really secure, not at this present moment, when they have wronged us and when danger threatens them. Under present circumstances you will be giving aid to people who never gave you a share in their power, and you will force us to hold you equally responsible with them, although you took no part in their misdeeds. Surely, if they expect you to join fortunes with them now, they should have shared their power with you in the past.

‘We have shown, I think, that we have good reason for complaint, and that the conduct of Corcyra has been both violent and grasping. Next we should like you to understand that it would not be right or just for you to receive them as allies. Though there may be a clause in the treaty stating than any city not included in the original agreement is free to join whichever side it likes, this cannot refer to cases where the object of joining an alliance is to injure other powers; it cannot refer to a case where a city is only looking for security because it is in revolt, and where the result of accepting its alliance, if one looks at the matter dispassionately, will be, not peace, but war. And this is what may well happen to you, if you will not take our advice. You would not only be helping them, but making war on us, who are bound to you by treaty. If you join them in attacking us, we shall be forced to defend ourselves against you as well as against them…” (Thucydides:1962:30-6)

“This was the speech of the Corinthian delegation. The Athenians, after listening to both sides, discussed the matter at two assemblies. At the first of these, opinion seemed to incline in favour of the Corinthian arguments, but at the second there was a change, and they decided on entering into some kind of alliance with Corcyra. This was not to be a total alliance involving the two parties in any war which either of them might have on hand; for the Athenians realized that if Corcyra required them to join in an attack on Corinth, that would constitute a breach of their treaty with the Peloponnese. Instead the alliance was to be of a defensive character and would only operate if Athens or Corcyra or any of their allies were attacked from outside.

The general belief was that, whatever happened, war with the Peloponnese was bound to come

Athens had no wish to see the strong navy of Corcyra pass into the hands of Corinth. At the same time she was not averse from letting the two Powers weaken each other by fighting together; since in this way, if war did come, Athens herself would be stronger in relation to Corinth and to the other naval Powers. Then, too, it was a fact that Corcyra lay very conveniently on the coastal route to Italy and Sicily. So, with these considerations in mind, Athens made her alliance with Corcyra.” (Thucydides:1962:37-8)

“So Corcyra remained undefeated in her war with Corinth and the Athenian fleet left the island. But this gave Corinth her first cause for war against Athens, the reason being that Athens had fought against her with Corcyra although the peace treaty was still in force.” (Thucydides:1962:43)

So we see that the moral argument of regulative justice claimed by the Corinthians, meant nothing when it came to the constitutive interest of Athens. That regulative stories of an honourable State are therefore really constitutive lies of fear of loss an hope of gain- paranoia. That the story of the State of neutrality is really the constitutive pyramid independence as the most powerful way to take and play off the surrounding states, as a buffer state, until one is strong enough to take a positition, seen by others no longer as neutral but as an imposition. That the treaty between Sparta and Athens meant nothing once the power of Nature as geography came into play in regards to keeping Athens’ sea-power intact, and that therefore the regulative peace treaty of increased security is in reality a constitutive Noble Lie that reveals the true game- the constitutive balance of power between two necessarily increasing pyramids of desire. It doesn’t matter the belief system, the regulative dance, of the pyramid, because the pyramid only exists through the collection of individuals being-for-itself through desire and fear of losing their desired, hence valuable, possessions, which allows the stick, which allows the pyramid to emerge from the circle and the magical story of hierarchy to build it.

What the do the Corinthians do, now that the Athenians have revealed their justice and dominion over them? They of course, by necessity, not friendship or moral  justice approach Sparta for its allegiance. Let us hear their artful speech in which they turn-coat (change garments) and ask the enemies of the Athenians, who they have just offered allegiance to and failed, to become their allies and trust them to be good ones. Will they only use artifice or will they drop the Noble Lie and speak of self-interest over morality or the gods or right:

“’Then we also think we have as much right as anyone else to point out faults in our neighbours especially when we consider the enormous difference between you and the Athenians. To our minds, you are quite unaware of this difference; you have never tried to imagine what sort of people these Athenians are against whom you will have to fight- how much, indeed how completely different from you. An Athenian is always an innovator, quick to form a resolution and quick at carrying it out. You, on the other hand, are good at keeping things as they are; you never originate an idea, and your actions tends to stop short of its aim.

Then again, Athenian daring will outrun its own resources; they will take risks against their better judgement, and still, in the midst of danger, remain confident. But your nature is always to do less than you could have done, to mistrust your own judgement, however sound it may be, and to assume that dangers will last for ever. Think of this, too: while you are hanging back, they never hesitate; while you stay at home, they are always abroad; for they think that the farther they go the more they will get, while you think that any movement may endanger what you have already. If they win a victory, they follow it up at once, and if they suffer a defeat, they scarcely fall back at all. As for their bodies, they regard them as expendable for their city’s sake, as though they were not their own; but each man cultivates his own intelligence, again with a view to doing something notable for his city.

If they aim at something and do not get it, they think that they have been deprived of what belonged to them already; whereas, if their enterprise is successful, they regard that success as nothing compared to what they will do next. Suppose they fail in some undertaking; they make food the loss immediately by setting their hopes in some other direction. Of them alone it may be said that they possess a thing almost as soon as they have begun to desire it, so quickly with them does action follow upon decision. And so they go on working away in hardship and danger all the days of their lives, seldom enjoying their possessions because they are always adding to them. Their view of a holiday is to do what needs doing; they prefer hardship and activity to peace and quiet. In a word, they are by nature incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so.

‘That is the character of the city which is opposed to you. Yet you still hang back; you will not see that the likeliest way of securing peace is this: only to use one’s power in the cause of justice, but to make it perfectly plain that one is resolved not to tolerate aggression. On the contrary, your idea of proper behaviour is, firstly, to avoid harming others, and then to avoid being harmed yourselves, even if it is a matter of defending your own interests. Even if you had on your frontiers a power holding the same principles as you do, it is hard to see how such a policy could have been a success. But at the present time, as we have just pointed out to you, your whole way of life is out of date when compared with theirs. And it is just as true in politics as it is in any art of craft: new methods must drive out old ones. When a city can live in peace and quiet, no doubt the old-established ways are best: but when one is constantly being faced by new problems, one has also to be capable of approaching them in an original way. Thus Athens, because of the very variety of her experience, is a far more modern state than you are.” (Thucydides:1962:51-2)

The Athenian delegation sent to Sparta in the hope of stopping any allegiance being formed now respond to these Corinthians allegations

There first tactic, still used by politicians today as a first tactic is to not answer the question raised about their character, but to change the subject completely by changing the nature of the question that they are not going to answer, and invalidating the very basis upon which it was asked. Were these politicians educated by Thucydides? Yes they were as we have already seen. 

“This delegation of ours did not come here to enter into a controversy with your allies, but to deal with the business on which our city sent us. We observe, however, that extraordinary attacks have been made on us, and so we have come forward to speak. We shall make no reply to the charges which these cities have made against us. Your assembly is not a court of law, competent to listen to pleas either from them or from us. Our aim is to prevent you from coming to the wrong decision on a matter of great importance through paying too much attention to the views of your allies. At the same time we should like to examine the general principles of the argument used against us and to make you see that our gains have been reasonable enough and that our city is one that deserves a certain consideration.

‘There is no need to talk about what happened long ago: there our evidence would be that of hearsay rather than that of eye-witnesses amongst our audience. But we must refer to the Persian War, to events well known to you all, even though you may be tired of constantly hearing the story. In our actions at that time we ventured everything for the common good; you have your share in what was gained; do not deprive us all of our share of glory and of the good that it may do us. We shall not be speaking in the spirit of one who is asking a favour, but of one who is producing evidence. Our aim is to show you what sort of a city you will have to fight against, if you make the wrong decision.

‘This is our record. At Marathon we stood out against the Persians and faced them single-handed. In the later invasion, when we were unable to meet the enemy on land, we and all our people took to our ships, and joined in the battle at Salamis. It was this battle that prevented the Persians from sailing against the Peloponnese and destroying the cities one by one; for no system of mutual defence could have been organized in face of the Persian naval superiority. The best proof of this is in the conduct of the Persians themselves. Once they had lost the battle at sea they realized that their force was crippled and they immediately withdrew most of their army. That, then, was the result, and it proved that the fate of Hellas depended on her navy. Now, we contributed to this result in three important ways: we produced most of the ships, we provided the most intelligent of the generals, and we displayed the most unflinching courage. Out of the 400 ships, nearly two-thirds were ours: the commander was Themistocles, who was mainly responsible for the battle being fought in the straits, and this, obviously, was what saved us.

You yourselves in fact, because of this, treated him with more distinction than you have ever treated any visitor from abroad. And the courage, the daring that we showed were without parallel. With no help coming to us by land, with all the states up to our frontier already enslaved, we chose to abandon our city and to sacrifice our property; then, so far from deserting the rest of our allies in the common cause or making ourselves useless to them by dispersing our forces, we took to our ships and chose the path of danger, with no grudges against you for not having come to our help earlier. So it is that we can claim to have given more than we received. There were still people living in the cities which you left behind you, and you were fighting to preserve them; when you sent out your forces you feared for yourselves much more than for us (at all events, you never put in appearance until we had lost everything).

Behind us, on the other hand, was a city that had ceased to exist; yet we still went forward and ventured our lives for this city that seemed so impossible to recover. Thus we joined you and helped to save not only ourselves but you also. But if we, like others, had been frightened about our land and had made terms with the Persians before you arrived, or if later, we had regarded ourselves as irretrievably ruined and had lacked the courage to take to our ships, then there would no longer have been any point in your fighting the enemy at sea, since you would not have had enough ships. Instead things would have gone easily and quietly just as the Persians wished.

‘Surely, Spartans, the courage, the resolution, and the ability which we showed them ought not to be repaid by such immoderate hostility from the Hellenes- especially so far as our empire is concerned. We did not gain this empire by force. It came to us at a time when you were unwilling to fight on to the end against the Persians. At this time our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them. It was the actual course of events which first compelled us to increase our power to its present extent; fear of Persia was our chief motive, though afterwards we thought, too, of our own honour and our own interest. Finally there came a time when we were surrounded by enemies, when we had already crushed some revolts, when you had lost the friendly feelings that you used to have for us and had turned against us and begun to arouse our suspicion: at this point it was clearly no longer safe for us to risk letting our empire go, especially as any allies that left us would go over to you. And when tremendous dangers are involved no one can be blamed for looking to his own interest.

‘Certainly you Spartans, in your leadership of the Peloponnese, have arranged the affairs of the various states so as to suit yourselves. And if, in the years of which we were speaking, you had gone on taking an active part in the war and had become unpopular, as we did, in the course of exercising your leadership, we have little doubt that you would have been just as hard upon your allies as we were, and that you would have been forced either to govern strongly or to endanger your own security.

‘So it is with us. We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up. Three very powerful motives prevent us from doing so- security, honour, and self-interest. And we were not the first to act in this way. Far from it. It has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong; and besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power. Up till the present moment you, too, used to think that we were; but now, after calculating your own interest, you are beginning to talk in terms of right and wrong. Considerations of this kind have never yet turned people aside from the opportunities of aggrandizement offered by superior strength. Those who really deserve praise are people who, while human enough to enjoy power, nevertheless pay more attention to justice than they are compelled to do by their situation. Certainly we think that if anyone else was in our position or not.

Yet, unreasonably enough, our very consideration for others has brought us more blame than praise. For example, in law-suits with our allies arising out of contracts we have put ourselves at a disadvantage, and when we arrange to have such cases tried by impartial courts in Athens, people merely say that we are over fond of going to law. No one bothers to inquire why this reproach is not made against other imperial Powers, who treat their subjects much more harshly than there is no need to bring in the law. Our subjects, on the other hand, are used to being treated as equals; consequently, when they are disappointed in what they think right and suffer even the smallest disadvantage because of a judgement in our courts or because of the power that our empire gives us, they cease to feel grateful to us for all the advantages which we have left to them: indeed, they feel more bitterly over this slight disparity than they would feel if we, from the first, had set the law aside and had openly enriched ourselves at their expense.

Under those conditions they would certainly not have disputed the fact that the weak must give in to the strong. People, in fact, seem to feel more strongly about their legal wrongs than about the wrongs inflicted on them by violence. In the first case they think they are being outdone by an equal, in the second case that they are being compelled by a superior.” (Thucydides:1962:53-6)

Here then the Athenians who wish for luxury accuse the Spartans of taking for their own, which one must imagine taking place in space and time- reality. The space was the landscape described above of Spartan villages of equality and thrift, being compared to the Athenian city from whence they had come where twice the level of real esteem was flagrantly displayed. The time of this speech it must also be remembered is just before the Athenians are about to take the Delian league for themselves and turn it into its own navy in order to do the paradoxical right thing, as already cited by Thucydides of enacting ‘Three very powerful motives’ – security, honour, and self-interest’ that can only mean war. A state of affairs we are told that within the pyramid of Athens results in the enviable situation where its polis feel injustice when denied any possession or right to possession, and ingratitude when receiving anything from the state they already possess by their right and power to vote, and who regard their right as more right than the laws they profess to uphold when to their advantage. What a lovely bunch of people who democratically rule that is! You are judged on their individual gain, not by any morality, and that is also how they therefore vote. By the very Nature of Reason.

The level of hypocrisy is paramount

The Noble Lie resounds, and the ring of Gyges falls away to reveal the naked reality of these people- takers who will only reciprocate under a social contract if they will gain still more by doing so, or desert the state if at anytime the opportunity presents itself as to their individual interest. As we will see, it will, and they do.

Upon Athens being turned down by Sparta in regards to the justice of its argument (surprise, surprise!), Athens now decides that the Delian League- of which it so honourably spoke of as its founder and of being the saviour of the Spartans themselves, should come under its control as its rightful possession and arm of its will. Thucydides relays the history from its formation to this shift in perspective and hence its state:

 “So Athens took over the leadership, and the allies, because of their dislike of Pausanias, were glad to see her to do so. Next the Athenians assessed the various contributions to be made for the war against Persia, and decided which states should furnish money and which states should send ships- the object being to compensate themselves for their losses by ravaging the territory of the King of Persia. At this time the officials known as ‘Hellenic Treasurers’ were first appointed by the Athenians. These officials received the tribute, which was the name given to the contributions in money. The original sum fixed for the tribute was 400 talents. The treasury of the League was at Delos, and representative meetings were held in the temple there. The leadership was Athenian, but the allies were originally independent states who reached their decision in general congress.” (Thucydides:1962:66)

“The first action of the Athenians was the siege of Eion, a town on the Strymon occupied by the Persians. Under the command of Cimon, the son of Miltiades, they captured this place and made slaves of the inhabitants and colonized the island themselves. Next there was a war with the Carystians, who were not supported by the rest of Euboea. In the end Carystus surrendered in terms. After this Naxos left the League and the Athenians made war on the place. After a siege Naxos was forced back to the allegiance. This was the first case when the original constitution of the League was broken and an allied city lost its independence, and the process was continued in the cases of the other allies as various circumstances arose. The chief reasons for these revolts were failures to produce the right amount of tribute or the right numbers of ships, and sometimes a refusal to produce any ships at all. For the Athenians insisted on obligations being exactly met, and made themselves unpopular by bringing the severest pressure to bear on allies who were not used to making sacrifices and did not want to make them.

In other ways, too, the Athenians as rulers were no longer popular as they used to be: they bore more than their fair share of the actual fighting, but this made it all the easier for them to force back into the alliance any state that wanted to leave it. For this position it was the allies themselves who were to blame. Because of this reluctance of theirs to face military service, most of them, to avoid serving abroad, had assessments made by which, instead of producing ships, they were to pay a corresponding sum of money. The result was that the Athenian navy grew strong at their expense, and when they revolted they always found themselves inadequately armed and inexperienced in war.” (Thucydides:1962:67-8)

Why did the Athenians take the Delian League under their own single control?

The answer is the same as that which confronts the UN today, and which we shall see later on in that regard. How does a democracy of states vote when it comes to war, for-itself, or for-others. Does each state look out for gain by the loss of another in the alliance or does it sacrifice that gain for the greater good- meaning less gain overall but equal gain for all. Would you vote for someone who did so?

“In a single battle the Peloponnesians and their allies could stand up to all the rest of Hellas, but they cannot fight a war against a power unlike themselves, so long as they have no central deliberative authority to produce quick decisive action, when they all have equal votes, though they all come from different nationalities and every one of these is mainly concerned with its own interests- the usual result of which is that nothing gets done at all, some being particularly anxious to avenge themselves on an enemy and others no less anxious to avoid coming to any harm themselves. Only after long intervals do they meet together at all, and then they devote only a fraction of their time to their general interests, spending most of it on arranging their own separate affairs. It never occurs to any of them that the apathy of one will damage the interests of all. Instead each state thinks that the responsibility for its future belongs to someone else, and so, while everyone has the same idea privately, no one notices that from a general point of view things are going downhill.” (Thucydides:1962:93)

The problem of making decisions quickly in times of peace are not so important, but in a time of war they become paramount, for the enemy is at the door. The Athenians realised, that if their sea-power was under one rule then they could act quickly, and plan pre-emptively against the Peloponnesian land-army under the Spartans, because the Spartan alliance was already divided by takers of pyramids with equal powers- an Oligarchy of oligarchies. A democracy in other words, that couldn’t make a decision to save its life, because it is a democracy constituted by takers who do not have the power of the stick, only the carrot, and therefore must parade a finite amount of carrots in front of each other, in such a way that everyone agrees, but that is to all intents and purposes, impossible.

By Athens forcing allies back into the pyramid of Empire that they were forging- perhaps unknowingly – they brought the power of the stick into their world and that removed the problem of indecision, whilst also empowering themselves. Thucydides- an Athenian General- looks from his perspective and tells us that the allies were themselves to blame for this weakening of power that allowed this stick-world to emerge amongst supposed allies. But we know that in reality it is the nature of all of these states to behave in such a fashion, if the opportunity arises. Archidamus tells us of the paranoid superiority of the Athenians and how the reason taken from this perspective forged the, behaviour and experience of these peoples.

“’And the city against which we are marching is very far from being incapable of defending itself. She is extraordinarily well equipped in every respect, so that we ought to consider it very likely that they will come and meet us in battle; and that, if they have not yet set out against us before we are there, they will do so when they see us in their own country laying waste and destroying their property. People grow angry when they suffer things that they are quite unused to suffer and when these things go on actually in front of their own eyes. They do not wait to think, but plunge into action on the spur of their impulse. And the Athenians are especially likely to act in this way, since they think that they have a right to supremacy and are much more used to invading and destroying other people’s land than seeing this happening to their own land… After making this short speech, Archidamus dismissed the assembly. (Thucydides:1962:103-4)

“leadership based on greed and ambition..(by) men committed to the power struggle… (who) treated as their prize the public interest to which they paid lip service and, competing by every means to get the better of one another, boldly committed atrocities.” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 3.82)

The Spartans and allies meet to discuss the betrayal of the Delian League

“Meanwhile the ambassadors from Mytilene who had been sent out in the first ship had been told by the Spartans to come to Olympia, so that the other allies also could hear and discuss what they had to say. They therefore went to Olympia, and when, after the festival was over, a meeting of the allies was called, they made the following speech:

“… ‘The alliance between us and Athens dates from the end of the Persian war, when you withdrew from the leadership and the Athenians stayed to finish what was left to do. But the object of the alliance was the liberation of the Hellenes from Persia, not the subjugation of the Hellenes to Athens. So long as the Athenians in their leadership respected our independence, we followed them with enthusiasm. But when we saw that they were becoming less and less antagonistic to Persia and more and more interested in enslaving their own allies, then we became frightened. Because of the multiple voting system, the allies were incapable of uniting in self-defence, and so they all became enslaved except for us and for Chios. We, supposed to be independent and nominally free, furnished our own contingents in the allied forces. But with the examples before us of what had already happened, we no longer felt any confidence in Athenian leadership. It seemed very unlikely that, after having brought under their control the states who were fellow members with us, they would refrain from acting towards us, too, in the same way, if ever they felt strong enough to do so.

‘If we had all still been independent, we could have had more confidence in their not altering the state of affairs. But with most of their allies subjected to them and us being treated as equals, it was natural for them to object to a situation where the majority had already given in and we alone stood out as independent- all the more so since they were becoming stronger and stronger and we were losing whatever support we had before. And in an alliance the only safe guarantee is an equality of mutual fear; for then the party that wants to break faith is deterred by the thought that the odds will not be on his side.

‘In fact the only reason why we were left with our independence was because the Athenians, in building up their empire, thought that they could seize power more easily by having some specious arguments to put forward and by using the methods of policy rather than of brute force. We were useful to them because they could point to us and say that we, who had votes like themselves, could not possibly have joined them unwillingly in their various expeditions and could only be doing so because the people against whom we were being led were in the wrong. By these methods they first led the stronger states against the weaker ones, leaving the strongest to the last in the certainty of finding them, once all the rest had been absorbed, much less formidable to deal with.

  If, on the other hand, they had started with us, when all the other states still had their strength and had also a centre round which they could stand, they would not have subjugated them so easily. Then also they felt some alarm about our navy, in case it might come together as one force and join you or some other power, and so become a danger to Athens. Another factor in securing our independence was the trouble we took to be on good terms with the Athenian assembly and with their various leading statesmen.

Yet, with the examples we had of how they had behaved to others, we never expected to be able to maintain ourselves for long, if this war had not broken out

‘How could we feel any genuine friendship or any confidence in our liberty when we were in a situation like this? The terms on which we accepted each other ran counter to the real feelings of both sides. In wartime they did their best to be on good terms with us because they were frightened of us; we, for the same reason, tried to keep on good terms with them in peace-time. In most cases goodwill is the basis of loyalty, but in our case fear was the bond, and it was more through terror than through friendship that we were held together in alliance. And the alliance was certain to be broken at any moment by the first side that felt confident that this would be a safe move to make. So it is wrong to condemn us for breaking away first simply because Athens had not yet taken action against us, or to say that we ought to have waited until we were quite sure what action they would take. For if we had the same ability as they have for planning action and then putting it off, we should be their equals, and there would be no need for us to be their subjects. As it is, they are always in the position where they can take the initiative in aggression; we should be allowed the initiative in self-defence.” (Thucydides:1962:167-8)

Speech by a democratic Athenian regarding the democratic Mytilenians who did not wish to pay for their membership in the Delian League. Remember that no democracy has gone to war with each other, as you read this, and see how ridiculous a claim it is, now and, soon, then. At this present moment in time the western democracies are living in a time described below where, ‘the right way to deal with free people is this- not to inflict tremendous punishments on them after they have revolted, but to take tremendous care of them before this point is reached, to prevent them even contemplating the idea of revolt, and, if we do have to use force with them, to hold as few as possible of them responsible for this’, which is how we will see America treat its ‘allies’ after World War II following the advice of Diodotus not Cleon:

“So an assembly was called at once. Various opinions were expressed on both sides, and Cleon, the son of Cleaenetus, spoke again. It was he who had been responsible for passing the original motion for putting the Mytilenians to death, exterminating the entire race. He was remarkable among the Athenians for the violence of his character, and at this time he exercised far the greatest influence over the people. He spoke as follows:

‘Personally I have had occasion often enough already to observe that a democracy is incapable of governing others, and I am all the more convinced of this when I see how you are now changing your minds about the Mytilenians. Because fear and conspiracy play no part in your daily relations with each other, you imagine that the same thing is true of your allies, and you fail to see that when you allow them to persuade you to make a mistaken decision and when you give way to your own feelings of compassion you are being guilty of a kind of weakness which is dangerous to you and which will not make them love you any more. What you do not realize is that your empire is a dictatorship exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favour; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any goodwill of theirs. And this is the very worst thing- to pass measures and then not to abide by them. We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, than with good laws that are constantly being altered, that lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals.

These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws, who want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they feel that they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of great importance, and who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country. But the other kind- the people who are not so confident in their own intelligence- are prepared to admit that the laws are wiser than they are and that they lack the ability to pull to pieces a speech made by a good speaker; they are unbiased judges, and not people taking part in some kind of a competition; so things usually go well when they are in control. We statesmen, too, should try to be like them, instead of being carried away by mere cleverness and a desire to show off our intelligence and so giving you, the people, advice which we do not really believe in ourselves.

‘As for me, I have not altered my opinion, and I am amazed at those who have proposed a reconsideration of the question of Mytilene, thus causing a delay which is all to the advantage of the guilty party. After a lapse of time the injured party will lose the edge of his anger when he comes to act against those who have wronged him; whereas the best punishment and the one most fitted to the crime is when reprisals follow immediately. I shall be amazed, too, if anyone contradicts me and attempts to prove that the harm done to us by Mytilene is really a good thing for us, or that when we suffer ourselves we are somehow doing harm to our allies. It is obvious that anyone who is going to say this must either have such confidence in his powers as an orator that he will struggle to persuade you that what has been finally settled was, on the contrary, not decided at all, or else he must have been bribed to put together some elaborate speech with which he will try to lead you out of the right track. But in competitions of this sort the prizes go to others and the state takes all the danger for herself.

The blame is yours, for stupidly instituting these competitive displays

You have become regular speech-goers, and as for action, you merely listen to accounts of it; if something is to be done in the future you estimate the possibilities by hearing a good speech on the subject, and as for the past you rely not so much on the facts which you have seen with your own eyes as on what you have heard about them in some clever piece of verbal criticism.

Any novelty in an argument deceives you at once, but when the argument is tried and proved you become unwilling to follow it; you look with suspicion on what is normal and are the slaves of every paradox that comes your way. The chief wish of each one of you is to be able to make a speech himself, and, if you cannot do that, the next best thing is to compete with those who can make this sort of speech by not looking as though you were at all out of your depth while you listen to the views put forward, by applauding a good point even before it is made, and by being as quick at seeing how an argument is going to be developed as you are slow at understanding what in the end it will lead to. What you are looking for all the time is something that is, I should say, outside the range of ordinary experience, and yet you cannot even think straight about the facts of life that are before you. You are simply victims of your own pleasure in listening, and are more like an audience sitting at the feet of a professional lecturer than a parliament discussing matters of state.” …

’Now think of your allies. If you are going to give the same punishment to those who are forced to revolt by your enemies and those who do so of their own accord, can you not see that they will all revolt upon the slightest pretext, when success means freedom and failure brings no very dreadful consequences? Meanwhile we shall have to spend our money and risk our lives against state after state; if our efforts are successful, we shall recover a city that is in ruins, and so lose the future revenue from it, on which our strength is based; and if we fail to subdue it, we shall have more enemies to deal with in addition to those we have already, and we shall spend the time which ought to be used in resisting our present foes in making war on our own allies.” …

‘Let me sum the whole thing up. I say that, if you follow my advice, you will be doing the right thing as far as Mytiliene is concerned and at the same time will be acting in your own interests; if you decide differently, you will not win them over, but you will be passing judgement on yourselves. For if they were justified in revolting, you must be wrong in holding power. If, however, whatever the rights or wrongs of it may be, you propose to hold power all the same, then your interest demands that these too, rightly or wrongly, must be punished. The only alternative is to surrender your empire, so that you can afford to go in for philanthropy.” (Thucydides:1962:180-4)

“So Cleon spoke. After him Diodotus, the son of Eucrates, who in the previous assembly also had vigorously opposed the motion to put the Mytilenians to death, came forward again on this occasion and spoke as follows:

“… ‘The good citizen, instead of trying to terrify the opposition, ought to prove his case in fair argument; and a wise state, without giving special honours to its best counsellors, will certainly not deprive them of the honour they already enjoy; and when a man’s advice is not taken, he should not even be disgraced, far less penalized. In this way successful speakers will be less likely to pursue further honours by speaking against their own convictions in order to make themselves popular, and unsuccessful speakers, too, will not struggle to win over the people by the same acts of flattery. What we do here, however, is exactly the opposite.

Then, too, if a man gives the best possible advice but is under the slightest suspicion of being influenced by his own private profit, we are so embittered by the idea (a wholly unproved one) of this profit of his, that we do not allow the state to receive the certain benefit of his good advice so to give has to tell lies if he expects to be believed. And because of this refinement in intellectuality, the state is put into a unique position; it is only she to whom no one can ever do a good turn openly and without deception. For if one openly performs a patriotic action, the reward for one’s pains is to be thought to have made something oneself on the side. Yet in spite of all this we are discussing matters of the greatest importance, and we who give you our advice ought to be resolved to look rather further into things than you whose attention is occupied only with the surface- especially as we can be held to account for the advice we give, while you are not accountable for the way in which you receive it.

For indeed you would take rather more care over your decisions, if the proposer of a motion and those who voted for it were all subject to the same penalties. As it is, on the occasions when some emotional impulse on your part has led you into disaster, you turn upon the one man who made the original proposal and you let yourselves off, in spite of the fact that you are many and in spite of the fact that you were just as wrong as he was.

‘However, I have not come forward to speak about Mytilene in any spirit of contradiction or with any wish to accuse anyone. If we are sensible people, we shall see that the question is not so much whether they are guilty as whether we are making the right decision for ourselves. I might prove that they are the most guilty people in the world, but it does not follow that I shall propose the death penalty, unless that is in your interests; I might argue that they deserve to be forgiven, but should not recommend forgiveness unless that seemed to me the best thing for the state.

‘In my view our discussion concerns the future rather than the present. One of Cleon’s chief points is that to inflict the death penalty will be useful to us in the future as a means for deterring other cities from revolt; but I, who am just as concerned as he is with the future, am quite convinced that this is not so. And I ask you not to reject what is useful in my speech for the sake of what is specious in his. You may well find his speech attractive, because it fits in better with your present angry feelings about the Mytilenians; but this is not a law-court, where we have to consider what is fit and just; it is a political assembly, and the questions is how Mytilene can be most useful to Athens.

‘Now, in human societies the death penalty has been laid down for many offences less serious than this one. Yet people still take risks when they feel sufficiently confident. No one has ever yet risked committing a crime which he thought he could not carry out successfully. The same is true of states. None has ever yet rebelled in the belief that it had sufficient resources, either in itself or from its allies, to make the attempt. Cities and individuals alike, all are by nature disposed to do wrong, and there is no law that will prevent it, as is shown by the fact that men have tried every kind of punishment, constantly adding to the list, in the attempt to find greater security from criminals. It is likely that in early times the punishments even for the greatest crimes were not so severe as they are now, but the laws were still broken and in the course of time the death penalty became generally introduced.

Yet even with this, the laws are still broken

Either, therefore, we must discover some fear more potent than the fear of death, or we must admit that here certainly we have not got an adequate deterrent. So long as poverty forces men to be bold, so long as the insolence and pride of wealth nourish their ambitions, and in the other accidents of life they are continually dominated by some incurable master passion or another, so long will their impulses continue to drive them into danger. Hope and desire persist throughout and cause the greatest calamities- one leading and the other following, one conceiving the enterprise, and the other suggesting that it will be successful- invisible factors, but more powerful than the terrors that are obvious to our eyes. Then, too, the idea that fortune will be on one’s side plays as big a part as anything else in creating a mood of over-confidence; for sometimes she does come unexpectedly to one’s aid, and so she tempts men to run risks for which they are inadequately prepared.

And this is particularly true in the case of whole peoples, because they are playing for the highest stakes- either for their own freedom or for the power to control others- and each individual, when acting as part of a community, has the irrational opinion that his own powers are greater than in fact they are. In a word it is impossible (and only the most simple-minded will deny this) for human nature, when once seriously set upon a certain course, to be prevented from following that course by the force of law or by any other means of intimidation whatever.

‘We must not, therefore, come to the wrong conclusions through having too much confidence in the effectiveness of capital punishment, and we must not make the condition of rebels desperate by depriving them of the possibility of repentance and of a chance of atoning as quickly as they can for what they did…

‘Our business, therefore, is not to injure ourselves by acting like a judge who strictly examines a criminal; instead we should be looking for a method by which, employing moderation in our punishments, we can in future secure for ourselves the full use of those cities which bring us important contributions. And we should recognize that the proper basis of our security is in good administration rather than in the fear of legal penalties. As it is, we do just the opposite: when we subdue a free city, which was held down by force and has, as we might have expected, tried to assert its independence by revolting, we think that we ought to punish it with the utmost severity. But the right way to deal with free people is this- not to inflict tremendous punishments on them after they have revolted, but to take tremendous care of them before this point is reached, to prevent them even contemplating the idea of revolt, and, if we do have to use force with them, to hold as few as possible of them responsible for this.

‘Consider what a mistake you would be making on this very point, if you took Cleon’s advice. As things are now, in all the cities the democracy is friendly to you; either it does not join in with the oligarchies in revolting, so that when you go to war with them, you have the people on your side. But if you destroy the democratic party at Mytilene, who never took any hand in the revolt, and who, as soon as they got arms voluntarily gave the city up to you, you will first of all be guilty of killing those who have helped you, and secondly, you will be doing exactly what the reactionary classes want most. For now, when they start a revolt, they will have the people on their side from the beginning, because you have already made it clear that the same punishment is laid down both for the guilty and the innocent. In fact, however, even if they were guilty, you should pretend that they were not, in order to keep on your side the one element that is still not opposed to you. It is far more useful to us, I think, in preserving our empire, that we should voluntarily put up with injustice than that we should justly put to death the wrong people. As for Cleon’s point- that in this act of vengeance both justice and self-interest are combined- this is not a case where such a combination is at all possible.” (Thucydides:1962:186-9)

Here then we see that justice and injustice are now pinned to self-interest and the state, and should be simply disregarded if they do not concur with it. God has left the building. We also witness a democracy going to war against another democracy. Which we have been told by a Nobel prize winner for peace has never happened, but which has happened, and happened immediately another democracy got in the way, and is recounted in a book that all politicians and commentators of politics should have read, especially those giving out the Nobel Peace prize. Maybe they had an ulterior motive? We shall answer that later…

The democratic vote of the Athenians by the way was to massacre the democracy of the Mytileneans. We will see the reaction of this to their inner world, their nemesis from their hubris shortly played out in their art and architecture, as a fig life to hide their shame.

To continue with the Peloponnesian War for now however, let us see how a democracy reacts when it comes to being threatened:

“During the seven days that Eurymedon stayed there with his sixty ships, the Corcyreans continued to massacre those of their own citizens whom they considered to be their enemies. Their victims were accused of conspiring to overthrow the democracy, but in fact men were often killed on grounds of personal hatred or else by their debtors because of the money that they owed. There was death in every shape and form. And, as usually happens in such situations, people went to every extreme and beyond it. There were fathers who killed their sons; men were dragged from the temples or butchered on the very altars; some were actually walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.

So savage was the progress of this revolution, and it seemed all the more so because it was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state- democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians- and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans. In peacetime there would have been no excuse and no desire for calling them in, but in time of war, when each party could always count upon an alliance which would do harm to its opponents and at the same time strengthen its own position, it became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a change of government to call in help from outside.

 In the various cities these revolutions were the cause of many calamities- as happens and always will happen while human nature is what it is, though there may be different degrees of savagery, and, as different circumstances arise, the general rules will admit of some variety. In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence.

 Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence. And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties in the cities had programmes which appeared admirable- on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy- but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves. In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour. Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action. As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek World. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-manoeuvred in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, over-confident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order

There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbours; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions. Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true-colours, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice. Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.” (Thucydides:1962:208-11)

So this is the truth that all politicians of all democracies are trained in. Do you think that they believe in justice first, or power over the people for-itself. Do you think that the law has un urgrund of morality or desire?. Does a rich man feel that he is being covetous when he sees his neighbours Ferrari? No he doesn’t he feels desire, and then goes and gets himself a Ferrari, because he is rich. Coveting, felt as desire, is a pleasant feeling, it is felt firstly as desire, then briefly as a lack, but an empowered one with no angst, and then pleasure, what the rich man collectively refers to as- happiness. Fortunately desire is infinite so he may never lack for anything. Oh except of course for those things of the inner world that cannot be bought, only destroyed by such behaviour in the world especially for others who become covetous as a result, then competitive, then violent, then war. Coveting is a feeling that poor people feel relative to rich people.

It is a feeling brought into consciousness more sharply to the hunter-gatherer as he looks upon the possessions of the settler, who is possessed by these possessions. It was always a part of the cave-man nature but it required the manufacture of artifice to raise it above its ‘normal’ level of perception and become the perspective through which the world is seen, as being-for-itself. How many rich religious people believe that they have never coveted anything, simply because they cannot experience the lack of power required to perceive it, i.e. living in bad-faith surrounded by possessions and the abject whose feet were washed by their Christ, or the saints of their God.

In like manner, doesn’t everyone in a democracy covet power, but not feel it because they possess an equal amount, despite being surrounded by possessions and the abject whose bodies were thrown in the river of the Leviathan and washed away in a flood of desire. Why is it that many people in a democracy don’t use their vote of power, and politicians can’t understand it? What is a politician but someone who covets power? This does not mean they are good or bad, wrong or right themselves, but it doesn’t mean that they will be able to make a right, good, or wrong decision in a constitutive pyramid of beings-for-itself, trained to hate in docility and the rightness of their desires to be possessed. It means bad-faith, a Noble lie and internecine warfare, that will organise parties of them into war in order to stop change, if they have the power, or to cause change so they get the power. Whatever they are, if they don’t play this ruthless game then, as Thucydides tells us, ‘As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed’.

It is strange that those who live in a democracy feel that they have a right to their power to vote because they are told that they do, by tradition and the actions of their parents and peers, as if the role of other cast upon all others is the valid way to see people and that each other has the right to vote upon the actions of each-other because that is fair, rather than that no-one has the right to vote about the actions of each-other, but that the actions of each-other necessitates a negative cult because of the nature of the other and yourself in creating a situation where negative cults and punishments must be handed out, in the same manner as we saw with the story of the thief, the shopkeeper and the law, earlier. When I think about this unquestioned power that I take in hope of power, but reason in fear of loss, as mine, I feel like this is the closest I can get to being a prince who is about to become a king, and has been told that I have the authority to decide the fate of those subject to my power.

From day one we have both been told that we have the right to rule, and have believed it, but it is only me that believes that I have a power that I do not actually have, whilst the prince is aware of the negative requirements of that power through his necessary behaviour, I believe that I am voting freely, as I vote to negate an-others freedom, and they do the same to me. A zero-sum game of internecine warfare, a league of dancing pigeons pecking once at a plate of power that by being pecked once by a few million people produces enough seed that those in power then hand out as they see fit, to keep them in power, and to make them wealthy, to structure the pyramid of status through reciprocation, and only then to be seen to give justice to all.

The prince may have been a fool to believe in his root to authority, but he was an understandable fool, if democracies in like manner can fool their people into believing that they rule the world when the state does, that they are free when the state is, that they are a fraternal nation when the abject they create are their brothers. In the modern world, the richest state is a democratic one with the most richest individuals, that requires 28 million of its subjects (10%) to take Prozac, just to feel esteem and the ‘right to happiness’ that they proclaim, and who imprisons more people than any other country in the world (1%) and sets them to work as free people now imprisoned- slaves- who by their labours make all of the paint that that State uses each year for its artifice and all of the soldiers clothing that that State requires for its true constitution, unconcealed in Being, by these factual states, under the regulative dance, shown to contain no moral content of, ‘the right to happiness’ for all, in a finite world of infinite desire, where relative wealth defines the term happiness. Bring on the dance of war, it seems like the only right thing to do. America, not a dreamtime of equality, liberty, and fraternity for free, but a realtime where you can make your dreams come true at the expense of equality, liberty and fraternity for the price of war for future generations, and finally desertification of course.

A desert that may well be a whole new technological desert- a radioactive desert for the next 20,000 years- Hubris and Nemesis- the true justice- the true natural law.

Will the American polis get to vote on this democratic decision to end the world, or will it, like the Delian League by made by those in true power?

Maybe I’ll just keep pecking its plate and see how the seed falls, from inside this electrified cage, whilst standing upon the abject bodies around me, that by cause and effect I create by my constant pecking despite the fact that I am obese and need a little electric cart to get me to move through this pile of dead bodies, when I desire something out of arms reach that I believe is rightfully mine.

The democratic Athenians who are already at war with Sparta now see an opportunity to also go to war with Sicily, which, due to its geography is a great source of wealth, and so in order to start a second war, based solely on covetousness, they use an excuse to invade.

“Next summer, at the time when the corn was beginning to ripen, ten Syracusan and ten Locrian ships sailed to Messina in Sicily and took over the place on the invitation of the inhabitants. Thus Messina revolted from Athens. The move had been engineered by the Syracusans mainly because they saw that the place afforded a base against Sicily and they feared that in the future the Athenians might use it as such and come to attack them with a larger force.” (Thucydides:1962:230)

The Messanians and the Syracusans then claim further parts of Sicily for themselves- in order to protect it from Athens- and this creates problems between the states of Sicily who are supposed to be ‘cohered by the fear’ of Athens, but instead squabble amongst themselves out of self-interest and honour:

“A number of different points of view were expressed as the various delegates came forward with their complaints and their claims in respect of matters in which they considered they were being unfairly treated. Finally Hermocrates, son of Hermon, a Syracusan, whose speech was in fact the most influential of all, spoke to the conference as follows:

‘Men of Sicily, in what I am going to say I shall not be speaking as a representative of a city of minor importance or of one which has suffered particularly heavily through the war; what I want to do is to put clearly before you all the policy which I consider to be the best one for Sicily as a whole. That war is an evil is something which we all know, and it would be pointless to go on cataloguing all the disadvantages involved in it. No one is forced into war by ignorance, nor, if he thinks he will gain from it, is he kept out of it by fear. The fact is that one side thinks that the profits to be won outweigh the risks to be incurred, and the other side is ready to face the danger rather than accept an immediate loss. If, however, on these very points both sides happen to be choosing the wrong moment for action, then there is something to be gained from attempts at mediation. And this, if we could only be convinced of it, is just what we need most at the present time.

‘When we went to war in the first place we all, no doubt, had the idea of furthering our own private interests, and we have the same idea now that we are attempting, by a process of claims and counter-claims, to arrange a settlement. And if things do not work out so that everyone goes away with what he considers his due, then no doubt we shall go to war again.” (Thucydides:1962:262-3)

 Here we see another democracy of pyramids attempting to make a settlement because there is no stick-wielder of fear as the ‘capital’, it is only the fear of the Athenians that has brought them together, fear has ‘come to a head’, creating an alliance but it is the hope of gain that keeps them apart, consequently. Unable to make a settlement the Sicilians now create a scape-goat and betray Syracuse- their saviour- and invite the Athenians to protect them. Athens conquers Sicily. Firstly, due to Sicily’s permanently divided nature over coveted carrots, that always defeats sticks of fear, as we were told above by Diodotus, and secondly due to the fact that Athens democratically votes in a unified fashion to go get those carrots, as our right, and in order to do so, sends an immense fleet that it knows will overpower the Syracusians but also the Sicilians afterwards, also. Let us hear Athens’ speech to Sicily upon coming to take the place over- or as they put it, ‘to place it under their protection from the oppression of Syracuse’, by taking possession of it. Possession coming from the latin word posidere meaning ‘to remain near’, from the latin sedentarius meaning- sedentary, the settler way of life.

We have already seen the greater power of democracy in its being used to destroy family ties through revenges, breaking the familist bond for individual self-interest by using the power of the State, which gives the individual more power than a family does, and unleashes more hate and violence than a family does, as war not warfare. In this speech of the Athenians to the Sicilians who betrayed Syracuse we see that this ‘truth’ is an honourable one, not a taboo to be left unspoken, concealed in the nature of their being. Indeed it is honourable because of self-interest, and the egoic perfection that honour implies and that the gods of the Iliad find nourishment in through alimental communion of blood for self-gain in war without shame or a negative cult.

Those savages who use warfare and sacrifice a few people to their gods in a temple and not do not sacrifice thousands or millions on a battle field really are so barbaric aren’t they, in relative comparison. Alright the result is the same, a decrease in population- demand, and an increase in supply through slowing down desertification, but the way that they go about it is so wild and untamed. If only they could learn our ways and learn the art of war, they would then become civilized, and they could progress from such a State. Alright, we would then go to war with them and easily defeat them, and take their power by killing them, but that is no reason for them not to walk this same path of reason and become a just people who fight to rules necessitated by the same reason- ‘Rights’.

The bene-fits are obvious, just look at the art that culture produces for a start! Benefit literally means, a kindness conferred from bene, meaning well, and facere, meaning to do. To do well, in a civilization does not mean to confer a kindness it means to do well for oneself. To live on benefits does not mean to do well, it means to be abject in the pyramid State. Confer means to bring together, to collect, to bestow, and in civilization this means to come together in a culture, not to bestow a gift but to take what is desired. We have already met this word confer twisted by the pyramid, for the etymology of this word, comes from fer-tile, and is the root of the word circumference, the boundary of a circle.

Therefore those collected within a circle are their to do well because of the fruit its bears to its desires, to the benefit for-itself, and whichever circle benefits the individual the most is the one he jumps in to. Egalitarianism, was usurped by familism- God was usurped by Daksha; Familism, was usurped by patriotism- Daksha was usurped for Monarchy (a demi-god); and Monarchy, was usurped by partism- political parties- oligarchy; and oligarchy was usurped by individualism- democracy. In reality, the Greeks reveal to us the same truth as seen before at the beginning of the demise of egalitarianism, that individual totemism is the urgrund of the settler, and that this urgrund is one of fear, hope, desire, lack- paranoia. Collectively known as civilization.

“When a man or a city exercises absolute power the logical course is the course of self-interest, and ties of blood exist only when they can be relied upon; one must choose one’s friends and enemies according to the circumstances on each particular occasion. And here in Sicily what suits our interest is not to weaken our friends, but to use the strength they have to render our enemies powerless. This is something which you must not doubt. In Hellas our leadership of our allies is adapted to make each ally most useful to us. The Chians and Methymnians provide ships and are independent: most of the others have rather harsher terms and pay regular contributions of money; while some allies, although they are islanders and easy for use to take over, enjoy complete freedom, because they are in convenient positions round Peloponnese.

It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that here, too, in our Sicilian policy, we should be guided by our own interests and, as we say, by our fear of Syracuse. The aim of the Syracusans is to rule over you, and their policy is to make you unite on the basis of your suspicions of us and then to take over the empire of Sicily themselves either by force or, when we have retired without achieving anything, because there will be no one to dispute it with them. This is bound to happen if you do unite with them, since so great a combined force would no longer be easy for us to deal with, and, once we had disappeared from the scene, they would be quite strong enough to take their measures against you.

‘Anyone who does not agree with this will find that the facts are against him. When you asked for our help originally, what you held in front of us was the fear that, if we allowed you to fall into the power of Syracuse, we ourselves would be in danger. It is hardly fair for you now to mistrust the very same argument which you thought was the one to convince us then, or to be suspicious of us because we have come against Syracuse with a force rather larger than you expected…

We say that in Hellas we rule in order not to be ruled; in Sicily we come as liberators in order not to be harmed by the Sicilians; we are forced to intervene in many directions; now, as previously, we have come as allies to those of you here who are being oppressed; our help was asked for, and we have not arrived uninvited. And it is not for you to constitute yourselves judges of our behaviour or to act like schoolmasters and try to make us change our ways.

That is not an easy thing to do now. Instead you ought to grasp and make full use of everything in our interventionism and our general character which fits in with your interests, and you should reflect that these circumstances of ours, so far from doing harm to all allies, are to the majority of the Hellenes a positive blessing. It is something which has its effect on all men everywhere, even in places where we are not established, because the possibility of our intervention is always something to be considered both by those who fear aggression and those who are actually planning an aggressive move; the former can hope of our help, the latter must reflect that, if we do intervene, their enterprise is likely to be a dangerous one; so in both cases we make ourselves felt: the potential aggressor is forced, even against his will, to behave reasonably, and those who might have been his victims are saved without having to exert themselves. Do not reject this security which all who ask can have and which is now available to you. Do as the others do: join with us and, instead of always having to be on your guard against the Syracusans, transform the situation at last and threaten them as they have threatened you.’

This was the speech of Euphemus.” (Thucydides:1962:419-20)

Having claimed Sicily by doing exactly what they said were the motives of the Syracusans, and by using the same argument that the Syracusans used to take it, the Athenians therefore force the Spartans to increase their fear and so they now add to their land-power technologies and increase the arms race by entering the geography of the sea and become a sea-power too. All of which costs a great deal of money and men which of course means that Sicily becomes coveted for its economic wealth and strategic importance too by Sparta. Why though did the allies of Athens and Sparta fight over Syracuse on their behalves. We think that we now know the answer, but proof is the pudding, that we will eat in order for it to become a part of us, as it is being digested, in order to increase our body of knowledge, and hence our personal power. Incentive enough it seems:

“No doubt the sum total of the forces enrolled in this war under Athens and Sparta was greater, but otherwise there had certainly never been so many peoples gathered together in front of a single city. The following were the states on the two sides, for and against Sicily, who came and fought at Syracuse to help either in the conquest or the defence of the island. They stood together not because of any moral principle or racial connexion; it was rather because of the various circumstances of interest or of compulsion in each particular case. The Athenians themselves, being Ionians, came of their own free will against the Dorian Syracusans, and with them came their colonists, who still spoke the same dialect and had the same laws as the Athenians- the Lemnians, Imbrians, Aeginetans (that is, the people who were then occupying Aegina), and also the Hestiaeans who lived at Hestiaea in Euboea. Of the rest of the forces in the expedition some came as subjects of the Athenians, others as independent allies, others as mercenaries.

In the class of tribute-paying subjects were the Euboean peoples from Eretria, Chalcis, Styria, and Carystus, the peoples from the islands of Ceos, Andros, and Tenos, and from Ionia the peoples of Miletus, Samos and Chios. Of these last, the people of Chios were not in the tribute-paying class, but provided ships instead and came as independent allies. These were all, generally speaking, Ionians and, except for the Carystians who are Dryopes, descended from the Athenians. They were subjects, certainly, and served under compulsion, but still they were Ionians fighting against Dorians. There were also people of the Aeolian race- the Methymnians, subjects who provided ships instead of paying tribute, and the Tenedians and Aenians, who were in the tribute-paying class.

These Aeolian peoples fought under compulsion against their fellow-Aeolians and Plateans, though Boetians who were with the Syracusans. Only the Boetians for the good reason that they were their enemies. The peoples of Rhodes and Cythera were both Dorian; the Cythereans were colonists from Sparta and fought on the side of the Athenians against the Spartans with Gylippus; and the Rhodians, who were Argives by race, were forced to make war on the Dorian Syracusans and on their own colonists, the Geloans, who were serving with the Syracusans. As for the islanders round the Peloponnese, the Cephallenians and Zacynthians joined the expedition as independent powers, though in fact, with Athens in command of the seas, their position as islanders left them little freedom of choice. The Corcyreans were not only Dorians, but actually Corinthians, and were openly joining in against Corinthians and Syracusans, though they were colonists of Corinth and racially connected with Syracuse.

They could claim that they were obliged to take this course, but in fact they were acting of their own free will, because of their hatred of Corinth. The Messenians, as they are now called, from Naupactus and from Pylos, which at this time was occupied by the Athenians, were also brought into the war. There were also a few exiles from Megara, who now found themselves in the position of fighting against fellow-Megarians from Selinus.” (Thucydides:1962:467-8)

Fear, and hope, hatred, racism, ethnicity, and gain are the motivators of a being-for-itself in a stick world of rightful possession and each one a step more distant from perceiving Wakan- not for any moral principle

The Athenians lose Sicily in this great battle and we see how greed and superiority (paranoia) meets its nemesis- humanity and reality in the name of the true Nature of the Object- war and its objective- gain, for the Athenians:

“It was a terrible scene, and more than one element in their situation contributed to their dismay. Not only were they retreating after having lost all their ships, and instead of their high hopes now found themselves and the whole state of Athens in danger, but in the actual leaving of the camp there were sad sights for every eye, sad thoughts for every mind to feel. The dead were unburied, and when any man recognized one of his friends lying among them, he was filled with grief and fear; and the living who, whether sick or wounded, were being left behind caused more pain than did the dead to those who were left alive, and were more pitiable than the lost.

Their prayers and their lamentations made the rest feel impotent and helpless, as they begged to be taken with them and cried out aloud to every single friend or relative whom they could see; as they hung about the necks of those who had shared tents with them and were now going, following after them as far as they could, and, when their bodily strength failed them, reiterated their cries to heaven and their lamentations as they were left behind. So the whole army was filled with tears and in such distress of mind that they found it difficult to go away even from this land of their enemies when sufferings too great for tears had befallen them already and more still, they feared, awaited them in the dark future ahead. There was also a profound sense of shame and deep feelings of self-reproach.” (Thucydides:1962:480)

Let us turn to Sparta now and see how it deals with its allies who are day by day gaining more and more honour in the war and are expecting further rightful gain in some kind of capital goods, such as possession of lands or riches or dominion over others, etc. However the Spartans know that if they give to one side then they will have to give to another, and soon rebellion will be instigated by the greatest takers- the greatest to be honoured- and the war against Athens will be lost. They therefore must maintain cohesion of their allies under fear of themselves as stick-wielders and not as carrot bribers as Athens does, but they cannot destroy the armies of these most honoured as they need them. They therefore form a cunning (therefore honourable in Greek language) and necessary plan:

“The Spartans were also glad to have a good excuse for sending some of their helots out of the country, since in the present state of affairs, with Pylos in enemy hands, they feared a revolution. In fact they were so frightened of their unyielding character and of their numbers that they had had recourse to the following plan. They made a proclamation to the effect that the helots should choose out of their own number those who claimed to have done the best service to Sparta on the battlefield, implying that they would be given their freedom. This was, however, a test conducted in the belief that the ones who showed most spirit and came forward first to claim their freedom would be the ones most likely to turn against Sparta. So about 2,000 were selected, who put garlands on their heads and went round the temples under the impression that they were being made free men. Soon afterwards, however, the Spartans did away with them, and no one ever knew exactly how each one of them was killed.”  (Thucydides:1962:276)

In other words, those who were being-for-itself ‘were secretly murdered in the night’. We must remember the tribal peaceful, equal, peoples of the hunter-gatherers whom we met earlier who performed the same murderous ritual upon any member of the group, whose being-for-itself had become so large as to destroy their cohesion. An operation that maintained their way of life up until they were invaded in 1779 by the British. An operation that the North American Indians failed to do and led to internecine war (that is war that is destructive to all parties involved) and greedier leaders that promoted revenge and hatred in order to increase their power of decreasing their fear (but automatically increasing it in others), from these self-prophecying wars of gain and loss, hope and fear of Pandoras Box of desire.

However we must also remember that hunter-gatherers did not have the Iliad and its honourable esteem gods in their mind-set. The Spartans did, and so they were still driven by the idea of individual honour to be gained by empowering the State and the necessity of war as a way of life consequently, in order to be-have, to be in possession of honour through this behaviour. Did the Spartans then treat their won lands as tyrants or as just oligarchs?:

“Now, on this present occasion, the Spartans were glad to send out 700 as hoplites to serve with Brasidas. The rest of his army were mercenaries whom he had raised from the Peloponnese. Brasidas himself was sent out by the Spartans largely because it was his own wish, though the Chalcidians also were eager to have him, a man who in Sparta itself had a great reputation for energy in every direction and who on his foreign service had shown himself to be so valuable to his country. And on this occasion it was his upright and moderate conduct towards the cities which caused most of them to revolt (from Athens) and enabled him to take others by treachery, so that when Sparta wanted to make peace (as she did in the end) she was in the position of having places to offer in exchange for those held by Athens, and in the meantime the Peloponnese was relieved of much of the burden of war.” (Thucydides:1962:276-7)

“The Athenians also feared that their allies would revolt, since Brasidas was behaving with great moderation and was constantly declaring wherever he went that his mission was the liberation of Hellas. The cities subject to Athens, when they heard of the capture of Amphipolis, of the terms being offered, and of the considerate behaviour of Brasidas himself, eagerly embraced the idea of a change, made overtures to him, begging him to march on into their territory, and vied with each other in being the first to revolt. Indeed, they fancied that this was a perfectly safe thing to do, though, as was proved later on, the power of Athens was as great as had been their mistake in underestimating it. As it was, their judgement was based more on wishful thinking than on a sound calculation of probabilities; for the usual thing among men is that when they want something they will, without any reflection, leave that to hope, while they will employ the full force of reason in rejecting what they find unpalatable.” (Thucydides:1962:292)

So many Athenian allies left the alliance in order to be ruled by an oligarchy rather than a democracy, because the oligarchy was more benevolent- meaning voluntarily giving (not taking), just as the tyrant Pisistratus who first controlled the Athenian polis’ desires, was more benevolent than their own democracy was in treating its polis equally, or any of its allies justly. Underlying this benevolence though, in both of these cases was still the constitutional aletheia of the desire for power. The allies geographically near Athens were merely trading chips for Sparta, treacherously lured by the carrot of more gain, or benefit, as they framed it. In other words, the individual-State of Sparta, seen as a being-for-itself constitutionally plays the same game on a State level as Clisthenes did on an individual level with the Athenians to create a democracy.

The individuals of Athens to Clisthenes were merely trading chips to placate the aristocracy. They were treacherously lured by the carrot of more power, or justice, as they framed it, where no such relative power existed, for reasons that were ‘unreflected but full of hope’, but then possessed for reasons that would come ‘in full force and be found unpalatable’ if they ever lost this ‘sacred-right’ to vote. They would fight to retain the right to join the rain-dance of increase, and believe their dance of peace was separate from their dance of war, as their dance of right was so separate from wrong, and those who reflected them by their dance- darpan were so wrong and so separate from right. Superior to inferior, loved to hated, lest no-one live rightly, becomes by right, let no-one rightly live.

After ten years of fighting the Spartans and Athenians now sign a peace treaty, but it is the allies of these powers that begin the war once again, just as they had started it in the first place, as we saw with the Corinthians and Corcyrans, because they wished more power for themselves, and the previous treaty did not serve them and so was ignored, as all laws are when in contradistinction to a takers will, as we have been told by Diodotus, and will see throughout history:

“After the peace treaty and the alliance between Sparta and Athens, made after the ten years’ war, when Pleistolas was ephor in Sparta and Alcaeus archon in Athens, there was peace so far as those who had accepted the terms were concerned. But Corinth and various other cities in the Peloponnese were trying to upset the agreement, and Sparta found herself immediately in fresh trouble with her allies. Then, too, as time went on the Spartans also lost the confidence of the Athenians because they failed to carry out some of the terms of the treaty. It is true that for six years and ten months they refrained from invading each other’s territory; abroad, however, the truce was never properly in force, and each side did the other a great deal of harm, until finally they were forced to break the treaty made after the ten years, and once more declare war openly upon each other.” (Thucydides:1962:323-4)

In other words, the peace that had lasted six years was in reality a ‘closed’ war and not an open one.

This is what peace really means, for it is only made – manufactured – with ones enemy

Upon the recommencement of war Argos’ polis decide that they might gain out of this if they drop their pretended neutrality of which they have done well by over the last ten years, especially in light of the fact that the warring parties have been ever depleting their own power and peoples, whilst they have not:

 “The people in Argos with whom they had been in touch referred the proposal to the Government and to the people, and the Argives passed the decree and chose twelve men who were empowered to negotiate alliances with any Hellenic state that wished to do so, except for Sparta and Athens, neither of which was to be admitted unless the matter was first put before the people of Argos. The chief reason why the Argives adopted this policy was because they saw that war between them and Sparta was bound to come, now that their treaty was on the point of expiring, and also they hoped to gain the leadership of the Peloponnese. For this was the time when the reputation of Sparta had sunk very low indeed and she was despised for the losses she had suffered; whereas Argos was very well off in every direction, having taken no part in the Attic war, indeed having profited greatly from her position of neutrality.” (Thucydides:1962:325)

Neutrality is a lie for gaining- look at Switzerlands neutrality today, and then look at Switzerland’s Gold and its banking system, the most concealed and unregulated banking system in the world that has been used for laundering criminal money and supporting violent regimes, including Al-Qaeda, and illegal gun sales, drug money, etc, etcetera. Is it justice or gain that forms its policies? Then look at its geographical position in Europe and notice how it is a buffer state between Germany and France, who both gain from this same ‘neutrality’ as did Argos in a similar geographic position between Athens and Sparta, that of-fered no strategic advantage (benefit) to be gained for Athens or Sparta itself, for those years of peace, better than it being a buffer state.

Later on we will look at America’s stance of being neutral in World War II. Thucydides and Montesquieu have already told us previously that it is better to keep many States under subjection so that your singular enemy must go through them  before they get to you, and Diodotus has already told the Athenians that is far better to harness to the power of the Mytileneans than to kill them, and to treat them therefore with benevolence. Why did Brasidas do this again?. What is a benevolent friend in a world of paranoia:

“The reason why we made them our allies was not that we wanted them to send us reinforcements here, but in order that they should be a thorn in the flesh for our enemies in Sicily, and so prevent them from coming here to attack us. This is the way we won our empire, and this is the way all empires have been won– by coming vigorously to the help of all who ask for it, irrespective of whether they are Hellenes or not. Certainly if everyone were to remain inactive or go in for racial distinctions when it is a question of giving assistance, we should add very little to our empire and should be more likely to risk losing it altogether. One does not only defend oneself against a superior power when one is attacked; one takes measures in advance to prevent the attack materializing. And it is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire we want to have. The fact is that we have reached a stage where we are forced to plan new conquests and forced to hold on to what we have got, because there is a danger that we ourselves may fall under the power of others unless they are in our power.” (Thucydides:1962:378-9)

Rights and justice seen from this democratic perspective of the commonwealth, are justified by fear of loss and ever increasing insecurity from gain

To see this, let us hear the Athenians ‘persuading’ the Melians to stay in the Delian League as they outline their idea of justice. As you will see it is the same definition used by Thrasymachus and not Socrates, (who proved Thrasymachus a fool), who did not know what was good for either him or the State, but knew that justice was merely power, and injustice the surest road to its increase. We will then hear what rights the Melians believe in, before they are crushed and the Athenians prove that might ‘is’ right:

“Athenians: Then we on our side will use no fine phrases saying, for example, that we have a right to our empire because we defeated the Persians, or that we have come against you now because of the injuries you have done us- a great mass of words that nobody would believe. And we ask you on your side not to imagine that you will influence us by saying that you, though a colony of Sparta, have not joined Sparta in the war, or that you have never done us any harm. Instead we recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what we both really do think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Melians: Then in our view (since you force us to leave justice out of account and to confine ourselves to self-interest)- in our view it is at any rate useful that you should  not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men- namely, that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing, and that such people should be allowed to use and to profit by arguments that fall short of a mathematical accuracy. And this is a principle which affects you as much as anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance and would be an example to the world.” (Thucydides:1962:360)

The mathematical accuracy referred to here by the Melians as the measure of justice of the Athenians, simply means the ‘calculated gain’ the esteem-ated (estimated) increase. It is a path of reason that re-fers (meaning to add more fertiliser- bullshit) to the use of reason based upon economics to decide justice and not natural law as discussed earlier, where the inner subjective world or morality has a reason to be heard- The mosquito and the Wind. This economic reasoning  is currently being used in order to right new law today- more of this later- but for now let us witness that 2500 years ago, it was already seen as a bogus form of justice weighted to the advantage of the State that professes it, and cannot allow humanity into its scales. For now let us return to the protection racket speech made by the democratic Athenians, who invented the word humanity, to the Melians. ‘Let me make you an offer you can’t reasonably refuse’:

“Athenians: … We do not want any trouble in bringing you into our empire, and we want you to be spared for the good both of yourselves and of ourselves.

Melians: And how could it be just as good for us to be the slaves as for you to be the masters?

Athenians: You, by giving in, would save yourselves from disaster; we, by not destroying you, would be able to profit from you.

Melians: So you would not agree to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?

Athenians: No, because it is not so much your hostility that injures us; it is rather the case that, if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness in us, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.

Melians: Is that your subjects’ idea of fair play- that no distinction should be made between people who are quite unconnected with you and people who are mostly your own colonists or else rebels whom you have conquered?

Athenians: So far as right and wrong are concerned they think that there is no difference between the two, that those who still preserve their independence do so because they are strong, and that if we fail to attack them it is because we are afraid. So that by conquering you we shall increase not only the size but the security of our empire. We rule the sea and you are islanders, and weaker islanders too than the others; it is therefore particularly important that you should not escape.

Melians: But do you think there is no security for you in what we suggest? For here again, since you will not let us mention justice, but tell us to give in to your interests, we, too, must tell what our interests are and, if yours and ours happen to coincide, we must try to persuade you of the fact. Is it not certain that you will make enemies of all states who are at present neutral, when they see what is happening here and naturally conclude that in course of time you will attack them too? Does not this mean that you are strengthening the enemies you have already and are forcing others to become your enemies even against their intentions and their inclinations?

Athenians: As a matter of fact we are not so much frightened of states on the continent. They have their liberty, and this means that it will be a long time before they begin to take precautions against us.

We are more concerned about islanders like yourselves, who are still unsubdued, or subjects who have already become embittered by the constraint which our empire imposes on them. These are the people who are most likely to act in a reckless manner and to bring themselves and us, too, into the most obvious danger.” (Thucydides:1962:360-2)

“while on the other side the Athenians fought to conquer a country that was not their own and to save their own country from suffering by their defeat; the Argives and independent allies to help the Athenians in conquering what they had come to conquer and, as the reward of victory, to see again the country they had left behind; as for the allies who were subjects, they were spurred on chiefly by the desire to save their lives at the present time, which they could scarcely hope to do unless they were victorious; there was also the secondary consideration that, if they helped Athens in adding to her empire, they might themselves be governed less oppressively.” (Thucydides:1962:409)

“At about this time also there took place the rising of the people against the ruling class in Samos. This was done in co-operation with some Athenians who were there with three ships. The people of Samos put to death about 200 in all of the most prominent people in the governing class, exiled 400 more, and took their land and houses for themselves. After this the Athenians passed a decree giving them their independence, regarding them as being now quite reliable, and they took over the government of the city for the future. The landowners were entirely excluded from the government and no intermarriage was any longer permitted between them and the people.” (Thucydides:1962:499)

In the above quote we see that property rights and the aristocracy as government is seen as a bad idea by the Athenian aristocracy who owned the lands of Athens and governed its peoples. Why? Because the aristocracy who own the land and govern the people know that this is the key to the abuse of power and so will not allow it to happen by their subjects dominions as they know it will naturally confer the power that will cause the ambition, deceit, and then war, under the guise of justice of these landowners, just as it did in Athens where they themselves were doing the same thing for themselves, with honourable ‘cunning and guile’ to its polis. Do as I say, not as I do, the famous line of the hypocrite becomes the law of the land, a right.

18: Karma – Self-Interest versus state-interest, the Pupil of Socrates Goes to Persia

A state as corrupt and disloyal and self-centred as Athens, maintains its cohesion by offering the carrots of power and wealth to its reciprocating peoples under the causal story of the honour and the effect of status, by which they will reasonably receive these carrots for killing its enemies and gaining the finite power and ‘justice’ by which to gain the infinite goal of self-perfection (egoic desire), by using this same technique. This is the root of the ‘Western Mind’ otherwise known as the being-for-itself, a nature known as humanity, not human nature, which may choose to be a being-in-Being, or a being-for-Others, or a being-for-itself, in order to ‘perfect’ its infinite nature, that we are exploring by living it in our thrownness, and worlding by our will, and our relative power to will it. Rights are a necessary regulative language-trap played out upon this landscape. A landscape that we have walked through the pages of this book. A landscape that ‘dwells’ in the Earth, as bones, and weapons, as totems and churingas all become dust before being reincarnated into the spirit of civilization- Daksha- the whore of Babylon- the race of Ham. It is an arms race trying to possess individual human ‘rights’ of be-having-for-itself-subject-by-others-as-object. This great hyphenated word, described the perspective of the meaning ‘individual human’ in reality. The right to be ‘free’ that our caveman possessed but had no cause to effect a reason to possess it- name it- (i.e. the reason being the unpalatable fact of having it taken from him)- as a ‘right’.

Propaganda – The State of Aletheia: The Hubris of Democracy – The Nemesis of Being-for-itself

With all the gold, wealth, and power of Persia knocking at the door of Athens’ democratic world of carrots, how long do you think it will be before Athens is betrayed by its own kind? Well, the actual story- that we already reasonably foresee by the facts surrounding us- is even juicier than you might dream, because the betrayer of Athens was one of the very pupils of the truthful man of Athens- Socrates- whom the Athenians killed because he told them of their true nature as worshippers of egoic false gods and as self-aggrandisers. The same Socrates who we witnessed telling Glaucon that it was useless to teach youth a better way of life, when the polis, all around them (circumference), were really the teachers conferring the ‘normal’ way by their behaviour, a behaviour that the youth would find impossible to resist, and would not even question if its injustice benefited him.

This traitors name is Alcibiades and the Persian General that tempts him is Tissaphernes. We begin with Thucydides’ account of Alcibiades being found suspect in this world of intrigue, through the intrigue of the Spartans who advise that this man, like the 200 helots they killed for the same reason, be killed before he becomes too big for his boots and takes power and even Athens it-self, for-himself. They are right in their warning but their purpose is to remove a cohesive carrot-wielding status member from the Athenian pyramid and to cause internal strife, as his wealth, status and power are redistributed, within this competitive teknon, organisational practice- architecture of the pyramid. At this time it is Sparta that is taking Persian gold in order to pay its soldiers and defeat Athens, to the mutual short-term advantage of Persia and themselves, but Tissaphernes sees a new opportunity of weakening both Athens and Sparta through the ‘friend’ of these enemies, Alcibiades:

“At this time, and even earlier, before they moved to Rhodes, the following intrigues were going on. After the death of Chalcideus and the battle at Miletus, Alcibiades became suspect to the Peloponnesians, and a letter was sent by them from Sparta to Astyochus with orders to put him to death. He was a personal enemy of Agis and was generally considered unreliable. In his alarm Alcibiades first sought refuge with Tissaphernes and then used his influence with him to do all the harm he possibly could to the cause of the Peloponnesians. He became his adviser in everything, and it was he who cut down the rate of pay so that, instead of an Attic drachma, only three obols a day were offered, and even than not regularly. He told Tissaphernes to say to the Peloponnesians that the Athenians had had longer experience than they had in running a navy and only gave their own men three obols a day, not so much because they could not afford more, as in order to prevent their sailors getting out of hand through having too much and either impairing their fitness by spending money on the kind of things which lead to bad health or deserting their ships, as they might do, if they were not leaving behind arrears of pay as a security for their proper conduct.” (Thucydides:1962:512)

So Alcibiades deserts and joins the monarchy of Persia, revealing his true thoughts about democracies sanctified position in his mind as a politician. He then tells Tissaphernes how to weaken the Spartan (Peloponnesian) forces by a story with disempowering consequences if believed, whereby the King would take power in the war by providing the gold to continue it, but also create disorder and injustice in the form of a lie into their ranks, thereby weakening them at the same time. You may think that Alcibiades tells Tissaphernes this ruse because he wishes Athens to win, but it is not, it is so that Persia will win and he will be rewarded by Tissaphernes, by becoming monarch of Athens.

How will the rest of the Athenian aristocracy take it when firstly they find that Tissaphernes is helping the Spartans and then that through Alcibiades they may be offered the power and support of Tissaphernes thereby weakening Sparta. Will these senators rally to the cause of democracy and its moral superiority?

“The members of the most powerful class of Athenians, who were also suffering most from the war, now began to entertain great hopes on their own account of seizing power for themselves and of coming out victorious in the war. When they came back to Samos they got hold of the right people and formed their own party from them, and said openly to the main body of the forces that the King [of Persia] would be their friend and would provide them with money if Alcibiades were recalled and the democracy abolished.” (Thucydides:1962:514-5)

But surely the allied states of this democracy would leave the alliance if it became an oligarchy, as was their enemy, Sparta?

Phrynichus, one of the Athenian aristocracy gives us his view on this question:

“As for the states in the Athenian alliance, who, no doubt, were promised oligarchical governments simply because Athens herself was no longer to be a democracy, Phrynichus said that he was perfectly sure that this prospect would not have the effect either of winning over the cities now in revolt or of making the others any more reliable; they were more interested in being free under whatever kind of government they happened to have than in being slaves, whether under an oligarchy or a democracy; besides, they saw no reason to suppose that they would be any better off under the so-called upper classes than under the democracy, considering that when the democracy had committed crimes it had been at the instigation, under the guidance, and, usually, for the profit of these upper classes themselves.” (Thucydides:1962:515)

The aristocracy now raise the fears of the people in order to end the democracy, with the news of Persia’s support for Sparta, and how this will spell doom for Athens. But then, lo! Over the horizon comes a great hope- a hope of salvation- Alcibiades, but it is a hope at a price, democracy itself. Why? Because a king can only trust a few peoples and so he demands oligarchy, nothing at all is mentioned about the fact that the oligarchy themselves have orchestrated the whole thing, but plenty is told of how Sparta will surely win without this action. Will the sacred idea of democracy at least be fought for by the people themselves, or will they give in to fear and hope of gain, over power for-itself in a powerless state? Or will they act in the same manner as the allies of Athens would have done? Will the regulative dance of democracy, named as their ‘constitution’, be seen as sacred or profane, to be aborted for good reason, to be taken from the centre of the circle and turned into a scape-goat its-self? Will the great god-democracy- become sacrificed to the greater god of desire- Daksha?:

“Pisander then came forward in the face of a great deal of violent opposition and, taking separately each one of those who had spoken against his proposals, asked him the following question: ‘Now that the Peloponnesians have as many ships as we have ready to fight us at sea, now that they have more cities as their allies, and now that the King and Tissaphernes are supplying them with money, while ours is all gone, have you any hope that Athens can survive unless someone can persuade the King to change sides and come over to us?’ When they replied that they had not, he then spoke straight out and said to them: ‘Well, then, that is impossible unless we have a more integrated form of government, with the power in fewer hands, so that the King may trust us. At the moment what we have to think about is our survival, not the form of our constitution. (We can always change that later, if we do not like it.) And we must bring Alcibiades back, because he is the only person now living who can arrange this for us.’

The idea of an oligarchy was very badly received by the people at first, but when Pisander had made it perfectly clear that there was no other way out, their fears (and also the fact that they expected to be able to change the constitution again later) made them give in.” (Thucydides:1962:518)

So democracy was given up by its founders because it paid them better to abandon it than it did to abandon their settlement, wealth and status. It was not therefore a sacred constitution but merely the regulative dance that brought the most power to the individual being-for-itself, to be abandoned when this ‘most power’ became ‘less relative power’, and then taken up again once it paid to do so. Once this democratic power would no longer be true power then democracy no longer became a necessary lie or gained any support or dancing pigeons reciprocating it. The fact that none of the promised hopes given to the polis of greater power under Persia, cited in the above quote, were ever true, but in fact promised the death of all Hellenistic power in reality, whilst those few under Persia’s wing would benefit, was a lie started by a rogue, who wished to take the sheep and the village, and was quite happy to watch the polis jump off a cliff to their doom in the hope of individual gain. Egoic reason and reason are not one and the same thing.

Further proof of Alcibiades’ perfidy is now shown as the Athenian delegation of this oligarchy, no longer a democracy, comes to the court of Tissaphernes to discuss the carrots that Tissaphernes demands in order to support this oligarchy that he knows nothing about, but which the Athenian peoples think that he has insisted upon. It is Alcibiades himself who speaks for Tissaphernes, but does he do so for Athens, for the Oligarchy of reciprocators, to reciprocate with Tissaphernes, or for himself. His behaviour is the same used by such institutions as the World Trade Organisation today when dealing with lesser developed countries or Israel ‘in talks’ with Palestine, as we shall see:

“And now the Athenian representatives with Pisander arrived at the court of Tissaphernes and entered into discussions with a view to reaching the agreement they had come to make. Alcibiades, however, did not quite know where he stood with Tissaphernes, who was more frightened of the Peloponnesians than of the Athenians and who still followed Alcibiades’s own advise and wanted to wear both sides out. He therefore got out of the difficulty by the following scheme, so as to make an agreement impossible because of the extravagant demands made of the Athenians by Tissaphernes….Speaking for Tissarphenes, who was present, Alcibiades made such exaggerated demands that it was the Athenians who were left with the responsibility for the breakdown of the talks, even though for a long time they had agreed to everything that was asked of them. He first claimed for Tissaphernes the whole of Ionia; then the islands off the coast and various other concessions. To all this the Athenians raised no objections, and finally, at the third session, fearing that they would really find out how little power he had, he put in the claim that the King should be allowed to build ships and sail along his own coast wherever and with as large as fleet as he pleased. Here was a point where the Athenians could yield no further ground. They saw no good purpose in going on with the discussions and, considering that they had been deceived by Alcibiades, went away in an embittered frame of mind and returned to Samos.” (Thucydides:1962:519-20)

When people in power come to a talk with lesser powers, they do not necessarily want to talk, but merely to be seen to be talking by the Third, the on-looker State, who will then witness the lesser powers walk out of the talks and a reasonable person, representing the more powerful institution, saying that it was impossible to come to an agreement with all of these States. Of course, the more powerful single person gets the air-time and not the many individual lesser powers. What one is talking about achieving, isn’t necessarily what one is achieving by talking. In other words, words themselves are artifice, that have power to do a rain dance, not to achieve rain, but to confer drought upon ones neighbours.

What I am referring to is the idea of propaganda, of taking good-faith, and turning it to bad-faith secretly by corrupting the truth of the words spoken or written. Concealing the truth behind a garment, in order to increase fear or hope accordingly.

Let us here from Herodotus who also recorded this history of the Peloponnesian War, in regards to a propaganda, both in terms of between states, but also in terms of the propaganda that is democracy itself as a gain in power for the individual in the state.

The first is in regards to the Noble Lie of protection, security, insecurity, hope and fear as paranoia and as a modus operandi of the State against the reality of these words used by the State, under the term ‘social contract’. It is not enough to ask will I be safe, will I gain from abiding by these words. One must ask firstly- who benefits from these words, before proceeding on to ask about ones-self. It is not reasonable to believe that these words have been written by an-Other for the benefit of an-Other and not themselves first of all, particularly when, as you read the words they have written, you in like manner are asking yourself what benefit to me do they bestow? The writers of words know this though and use it to their advantage in how they construct the words, and where and when they place them in the World, in order to world their world, not yours. In other words, they tell you what you want to hear the- propaganda of hope if gained, of fear if lost. At this time the King of Persia has changed from Darius, who gave us the first written laws in the world, to his son Xerxes:

“And now Themistocles chose out the swiftest sailors from among the Athenian vessels, and, proceeding to the various watering-places along the coast, cut inscriptions on the rocks, which were read by the Ionians the day following, on their arrival at Artemisium. The inscriptions ran thus: ‘Men of Ionia, ye do wrong to fight against your own fathers, and to give your help to enslave Greece. We beseech you therefore to come over, if possible, to our side: if you cannot do this, then, we pray you, stand aloof from the contest yourselves, and persuade the Carians to do the like. If neither of these thing be possible, and you are hindered, by a force too strong to resist, from venturing upon desertion, at least when we come to blows fight backwardly, remembering that you are sprung from us, and that it was through you we first provoked the hatred of the barbarian.’ Themistocles, in putting up these inscriptions, looked, I believe, to two chances- either Xerxes would not discover them, in which case they might bring over the Ionians to the side of the Greeks; or they would be reported to him and made a ground of accusation against the Ionians, who would thereupon be distrusted, and would not be allowed to take part in the sea-fights.” (Herodotus:1996:622)

What we see in the above quote is the tray game of what is and what is not

Themistocles uses the power of propaganda by which to control the power of other States in the great balance of power of war and peace. By using these words alone, he has gained power for himself no matter who the look of the Third is upon them. The Third who looks upon these words will become possessed by their power, believing it to be knowledge, whereas in fact it is paranoia only. The story of Hellenistic ethnicity as a story of power of cohesion now becomes a story of incoherence through propaganda, or as the Bible put it, as a language that will confuse all mankind for all time.

We have seen the nature of being-for-itself result in the necessary Noble lie of the ‘right’ to authority in order to stop desertification and control desire through a negative cult- religion. We have seen this Noble lie become heaven and hell, with the Earth in between and God nowhere to be seen upon it as it is valued through this perspective into demons and gods- Asuras and Devas- Hades and Olympus. With this act of Themistocles we now see the Noble Lie become reason itself. It is more reasonable to lie, for the power it brings, than it is to tell the truth. As Diodotus tells us above about even the motives of a good man in power, even, ‘if a man gives the best possible advice but is under the slightest suspicion of being influenced by his own private profit, we are so embittered by the idea (a wholly unproved one) of this profit of his, that we do not allow the state to receive the certain benefit of his good advice so to give has to tell lies if he expects to be believed’.

Herodotus shows us another way of looking at this same truth, not from the mouths of politicians but from the votes of the individual beings-for-itself that make up a democracy i.e. a polis of people such as the Athenians who are so egoically driven, so self-centred, as to believe that the perceive themselves as the power of the State, and Nature- the geography, sun, moon, and stars, that support them have no ‘rights’ at all. The first vote of an individual is always a vote for ones own self, this is why democracy creates war just as much as any other system of rule, and why politicians today, as then, only speak to the public about issues concerning the individual. They know that speaking about the rest of the issues is a waste of finite time, as the individuals only have one vote. The truthful nature of this was understood by the Greeks and so in order to make a better decision they gave themselves two votes when a decision was to be taken amongst a collection of equal takers who would gain greater power through reciprocation. In other words, they admitted the egoic truth of democracy and attempted to over-right this powerful truth, whilst today, politicians deny the egoic truth, and attempt to make voting a sacred act, for the State of Daksha:

“When the spoils had been divided, the Greeks sailed to the Isthmus, where a prize of valour was to be awarded to the man who, of all the Greeks, had shown the most merit during the war. When the chiefs were all come, they met at the altar of Poseidon, and took the ballots wherewith they were to give their votes for the first and for the second in merit. Then each man gave himself the first vote, since each considered that he was himself the worthiest; but the second votes were given chiefly to Themistocles. In this way, while the others received but one vote apiece, Themistocles had for the second prize a large majority of the suffrages.” (Herodotus:1996:660)

From where you are in the river, dear reader, how do you vote, and why? Will the result be the same as it was for the Athenians? What was that fate ultimately.

The Death of Athens, Sparta, and Persia- Socrates’ pupil Plato produces Aristotle his pupil- Alexander the Great- Karma

“In the case of war one suggestion is the role of ‘intelligent design’- it is deliberately implanted in our imagination by states or political leaders. War has always been designed by politicians and poets involved in what the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls ‘the military-poetic complex’. But philosophers have sometimes colluded too. Alexander the Great took with him on campaign a copy of The Iliad annotated by his teacher, Aristotle.” (Coker:2010:100)

The result of these wars between the Persians, Spartans and Athenians, was that they all weakened themselves to the point where they could no longer maintain the level of war that they desired, and were taken by another power all together, once they were weak enough from fighting each other to death. The Alliance between Sparta and Athens broke as soon as Persia no longer had the resources to attack, and so they turned on each other, by the necessity of the fact that they required to feed their army and its ever growing need for esteem as honour and wealth in exchange, and of the fact that ‘talks’ were never really ‘talks’ but propaganda, as were treaties, and leagues, as we saw. When Persia became involved once again it did not get involved in the fighting but merely paid to see the Hellenistic world weaken itself, but this cost technique of war cost the Persians great wealth to employ two armies to fight each other for a long-term gain that would never in fact come. It was a great white hope.

The Peloponnesian war then became a spiral of weakness to all three States as they attempted to gain strength, so that ultimately an-other State gained from these weakened ones under one man, Philip II of Macedon who would defeat all of Greece within just two decades of taking over a warring land of rival clans, and becoming their King (King of kins- a kingdom, a land). With little agriculture, and in little more than a decade his son, Alexander the Great, defeated all of Persia, Egypt, and beyond, becoming (King of kings- many kingdoms- an empire). Alexander was made docile, or taught, as a student of Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, but in a world of war and honour, the world of the Iliad’s artifice, this teaching was usurped by those around him, as predicted by Socrates- the truthful man. It was the Iliad that Alexander possessed and that possessed Alexander.

In other words, Socrates, Plato’s teacher, who was killed for telling the truth about the Pyramid to the people in the pyramid, karmically created Plato who told a noble lie in place of the truth, in order to create social harmony in a world of self over Being within the pyramid (just as Solon did for the Athenians in not giving them good laws but simply ‘the best laws they could observe’) , and then his student Aristotle having seen the truth of the Peloponnesian wars as we have just done through the eyes of Thucydides and Herodotus as the Noble lie that they were, taught Alexander about the true animal nature of the polis and of its responsibility to the Social Contract as reciprocation- domestication of that spirit- to the taker-ruler as power. The Iliad had come of age, for it now taught Alexander about the ego and its right to power, which he chose to believe, whilst the history and philosophy subsequently produced from this story, now proved the Noble Lie of Awe allied to a warrior and not a priest to be the traditional, expected karma, of a leader of nations.

Alexander saw the world in terms of the beast of the polis and the awe of the gods for himself by his perfection from this nature, by which he ‘rightfully’ deserved all of the rewards he received and the power he commanded. The demons and gods of Nature were about to become those of our own nature, as the horse and the rider, the animal spirit and the intellect, passionate desire and the power of reason as honour, guile, cunning, bribery, lying, propaganda, for the reason of power.

The result then of these Noble stories of The Iliad, of the gods, of honour as honesty, of the duty of protection of the people, came to nought against the truth of the three pigeons in an electrocuted world of infinite demand and finite supply. The ego won out and created the powerless desert of Athens, that it still is to this day.  Just as the fertile plains of Babylonia still disempower those peoples that came afterwards these heroes, who sired its saline fields.

What then did it mean for the rest of Greece:

“That victory ended Greek city-state freedom once and for all because after Chaeronea Philip installed his despotic rule throughout Greece and his son Alexander thereafter maintained that despotism as the springboard for the conquest of half of Asia. Much irony resides in the fact that Alexander’s tutor during his early teenage years had been Aristotle, the very Greek philosopher who insisted that humans are so designed by nature for life in city-states that “he who can live without one must be either a beast or a god”… it is now widely agreed upon that Alexander was driven forward solely by a quest for power and glory that verged on megalomania….In his own day the story was told that a sea pirate taken captive by the mighty conqueror told him that the only difference between them was one of scale….” (Lerner et al:1993:143-4)

The only difference truly between them is that Alexander held the scales, upon which justice would be weighed, and right decided. The pirate was a mosquito in comparison. The joke about all of this is that if the Greeks had stuck to the cohesive spirit that they had maintained during the Persian war, they could have done exactly what Alexander had done, and defeated Persia together instead of turning upon each other. Greece could truly have been great in space, and not just in time, as history, but apparently it was more ‘right’ and ‘just’ to follow the orders of those who held the power (despite what Socrates said) and kill the Other Hellenes for the amusement of the gods and the perfection of their selves.

“At the battle of Marathon in 490, the Athenians dealt Darius the only major setback he ever experienced. Although in 480 his sons and successor, Xerxes, attempted to avenge the humiliation by crushing all Greece with a tremendous army, heroic resistance by Athens and Sparta forced him to retreat and abandon his plans a year later. At that point the Persians must have realized that the limits of their expansionism had been reached, and that they now had to beware of the European Greeks as their implacable enemies.

In fact from 479 B.C. until Alexander the Great’s invasion of Asia Minor in 334 B.C. the Greeks were usually too embroiled by internal rivalries to pose any aggressive challenge to Persia. From the Persian perspective that was extremely fortunate, for during the period in question the Persian Empire was beset by mounting governmental instability caused by intrigues for the throne and rebellions in various provinces. Thus by the time of Alexander, although the empire has survived intact, it had become extremely rickety.” (Lerner et al:1993:139)

So everyone lost in the end, even Persia itself, and for the same reasons- the desire to gain enough power to get what is desired- what is otherwise referred to as ‘natural law’ or eternal justice- or a commonwealth. The story of a ruler, no matter what the format of rule, seems to be powerless against the ontological story of the being-for-itself and its insatiable desires, ‘it is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire we want to have…, because there is a danger that we ourselves may fall under the power of others unless they are in our power.’.

This then is the zero-sum game of war, the father of everything, but also the dispossessor of everything gained by its paternal care, accompanied by desertification and powerlessness, death and disillusionment of ‘Greatness’, for the generations that follow the heroes of desire, and thereby increase the power of the god- desire. But reason tells us still, that it is war that has gained the power to create the word powerless. War causes power – hubris, and then its effect- nemesis- powerlessness, just as we saw with the murder of truth in Socrates create the effect of the Noble lie in Plato that caused the creation of the social contract and the reciprocator- as hubris under Aristotle, and then its effect- nemesis- powerlessness, as Athens and all of Greece fell to the barbarian Alexander. Not a hero but a much more cohesively efficient- god.

Now the truth of the three pigeons rises again with Aristotles pupil Alexander who murders Athens in a grand karmic lesson we will fail to learn. And so mankind and us, as readers of this book, will begin the same lesson once again beginning with Alexander the Great and see how many reciprocators of stick-wielding justice he can cohere to his person through the same techniques that we have already discussed, but now jiggled about a bit. How will he change the story of awe in order to still keep the warrior and not the priest as the ‘true’ increasers of power, but bind others to him through religion to use its negative cult to decrease their ‘true’ individual power, in a technique more efficient than these two god-centred, and self-centred stories have been combined an acted out by Greece and Babylon, so far.

Nothing that Alexander does will be new, but they will use different words, to be used in different systems, that create different experiences and change the meanings of old words accordingly, but they are the same techniques that we have already covered. Indeed now that the Greeks have done away with God as a system of rule and justice, whilst keeping a thumbnail presence of the gods for a social lubricant, it is safe to say that there are no new techniques that are invented by the being-for-itself up until the present day. Secular party politics today, may claim no God, but they money that they use still proclaims their trust in one. Communism, as we shall see, is not a cohesive system in times of great fear or hope, and defeats itself without a god. Durkheim was right- religion is the birth place of society.

All stories are therefore based upon this urgrund of Nature ‘Being’ separate from man (being), and hence the split in his perception into an egoic perspective is affirmed by this religious story as a valid cohesive experience of separation as lack and suffering and the status of its tellers (priests) and the unquestioned tradition of its telling by those in your circle, confers authority upon these two frameworks of perception allowing the World to become split in like manner into the sacred world and the profane world, as the ‘right’ way to see and ‘be-in-itself’. As this separated individual in pain, amongst other separated individuals in pain, in a profane world, where they possess the sacred, and you are conferred with the sacred only when in conference with them. From now on then we are merely playing the zero-sum game of the drama triangle in a world of desertification, the scale of this enterprise will merely be defined by Art as it uses these techniques.

Artillery, artifice, law, and religion, may change their regulative story, and increase in their efficiency, but they will not change these basic techniques whilst in a pyramid of desire because they are still talking to the same individuals as they were by the time that the consciousness of the Greeks had been created.

In other words, all that follows is darpan. We are looking in a mirror at ourselves, at our natures, imprisoned in the same perspective, there is no ‘epistemic distance’ between ourselves and them, only between ourselves and Nature, Wakan, the Way or God- depending on what you wish to call this force that is conscious energy.*

*Science tells us that Nature is not conscious, but that is because it perceives Nature as separate from ourselves- who are conscious. As we have seen, this is a perspective of the being-for-itself, and not of a being-in-Being, who attributed consciousness to the Universe, as a spirit that was breathed into our clay in order to bring us to life. By a critique of pure reason, we know that both of these views are both reasonable and unreasonable to hold without having walked a mile in the shoes of each of these perspectives in order to gain experience by which to judge. That is how one becomes conscious of one’s conscious nature-in-Nature, of being-in-Being, or of one’s conscious nature in-itself, being-for-itself, respectively by cause and effect, the first step in a chain of reasonable experiences, that even crows, dolphins, octopi, and chimpanzess, consciously ‘crow on about’ by their N/nature and subsequent culture when they impose a three-dimensional form onto Nature, consciously for good reason.

Aristotles democratic version of just what it means to be a free man, now that the city-state is seen as mans means by which to raise himself above warfare and barbarism, reveals the worlding that Alexander and the Greeks left us in reality, our thrownness in this real World. War that poetically denies the animal spirit that really drives it, but separates reason from its urgrund, raises it above the clouds of perception and calls it the seat of the gods themselves. What monsters lie in the murky depths of denying that we are one with our animal spirit, and not separated from it by reason? What monsters have we already discovered in the murky depths of denying that we are one with the Great Spirit- Wakan. Is the reasonable idea of a God in the sky a monster that denies us the path back to the Garden of Eden our cave-man has left all those thousands of real years ago, in real space, in real time. Isn’t this all just a dreamworld, a dreamtime. ‘Life could be a dream sweet heart’….

Let us hear then Aristotles ‘humanitas’ and of the true state of democracy that this means to individual humans who are subject to it, and reflect this through darpan in regards to the ‘natural law’ of equality, fraternity, and liberty. They become a possession of the State for its reasons, and your reason becomes a possession of the State too by rights, equal ones yes, but that doesn’t make it right, does it?:

“’It is clear that some men are by nature free and others are by nature slaves, and that for these latter, slavery is both expedient  and right,’ Aristotle had declared in his Politics (350 BC)- to the approval of almost all Greek and Roman thinkers and leaders. In the ancient world, slaves and the working classes generally had been considered creatures lacking in reason, and therefore naturally fitted to dismal lives, as beasts of burden were to tilling fields. To hold that they might have rights and aspirations would have been thought by the elite to be no less absurd than to enquire into the mental state and level of happiness of a hammer or scythe.” (Botton:2004:48)

It seems then that for Aristotle some of the democratic humans in civilization are, by Nature, beasts of burden, donkeys whose animal spirit needs rightfully to be crushed and tamed, as is the role of stick-wielders, to produce the carrots that, produce not just, justly esteemed warriors but justly esteemed administrators, and justly esteemed aristocrats who never produce anything but take more than anyone, and whatever is produced, the poor as scapegoats are still the ones to suffer, because in order for those above to be esteemed, there must be someone below, so how can these slaves and working class ever be saved, or made rich, or given their rights, even if there is a hoard of wealth and a law of rights, if the technique of the system demands esteem by reflective lack of esteem in these people? ‘If they get some we will need more to retain our relative place in the river’. Someone has got to be chucked in. Some scapegoat has to bear the sins of humanity.

Every object desired creates an abject sired, born from this coupling of desire to the egoic self of perfection. The now named ‘animal spirit’ of desire- the being-for-itself, is now to be tamed with the reasons given by the State of desire, in the hope that this will lead to an increase in fulfilling infinite desires for security, protection, peace, wealth, luxury, decadence, and inequality. The stick-wielder feels that he is doing justice when wielding the stick, the carrot taker feels that he is justly rewarded when he is counting more carrots for himself than an-other, and the abject feels that he is being justly dealt with when he is named ‘worthless’ by this same reason. Improving oneself may change your place in the river if your improvement is for others and not oneself (even if it is as well). You must perfect yourself for others before you have the power to perfect yourself for-its-self. You must be subject before you can gain your object. You must fight, or pay someone to fight for you. You must kill, you must be cull-tured

To take this analogy to its truth we need only understand the root of the word sire. Sire gives us the word sir, being short for sire, and sire literally means to be senior, meaning old. All of these words come from the root word- senate- meaning a council of elders, a group of senators, to be called sir. Sire also means the male horse or stallion that produces off-spring, in other words the father of a nation of horses. The elders as priests or as warriors sire a nation of priests or warriors. De-sire is the animal spirit, the stallion that fathers all nations, that is to be tamed by the elders through religion as priests, or the carrot and the stick as kings. This horse then, the king and his sir knights, ride constitutively and can never get down from it in order to be amongst the people on their level- equal, as they will be polluted by this lower nature. The despisal of the banausoi, the workers, and slaves, that we saw above. The warriors, the administrators, the priests, and the kings, are those who are sired in order to control these animals who must bear the burden of work in order to perfect their natures, whilst their higher status natures are by birth, and from birth, tamed by the higher nature of reason. This is the true equality perceived through the perspective of those in the pyramid at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom.

What though if one could combine this lower nature with the nature of the senate, through the story of the Iliad and the story of God. One would then have the carrot and the stick clothed in a different garment, hung upon a single thread. And couldn’t one simply tie the carrot to the stick and hang the carrot in front of the donkeys look in order to motivate it-self. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to turn the donkey himself into the stick-wielder, not by beating him but by creating desire and giving it the carrot of angst, of covetousness (advertising might also help as propaganda of hopes and fears). Isn’t the power of this feeling of lack a long term motivator rather than that of rewarding desire, and isn’t it cheaper? Wasn’t it better to randomly reward a pigeon than do so regularly. Aren’t their fruit machines, in every pub, and lottery machines in every newsagents, etc, etc. We will see far greater modern uses of these techniques later on, but for now these examples may give a flavour of what I am trying to allude to above.

What though, less importantly, is more powerful, carrots or sticks in a stick-world with lots of carrots?

The answer of course is who ever has the stick-power to hold on to the carrots. But the answer to the question of who gets the stick-power seems to depend on esteem, which of course carrots can be turned into. Which came first the chicken or the egg, the esteem or the stick? Answer- the self came first and willingly created the stick (egoic-power) with a carrot on the end of it (self-esteem) to empower its-self by raising its-self above another- competition. Who is the winner?- I am it. Who is the loser?- I am it. Who is the best?- I am it. Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

I love the Olympics, where modern-day warriors vie for praise from their nation-state, by fighting, and proving their gymnastic ability on the horse, and running a marathon, to remind us of the Persian war. It is so brilliant at creating a feeling of hostility towards other nation-states, and a story of superiority through winning for our own. Didn’t you know that it was the state of Jamaica that sired the fastest runner in the world ever? And Australian members of state are brilliant swimmers, and the United States of America’s are great at everything because of their unity, whilst China surprised us all when it hosted the Olympics with, not only its medals haul, but with the amount of artifice that was used to create ostentation for the world to see and raise their esteem amongst us. I wonder why they did that, when so many of their peoples are starving, and they are fighting to become a super-power?

Have they left the way of the Spartans and joined the Athenians across the Pacific Ocean and found it more efficient as a method of production power? Will it result in war and the death of these two super-powers? Let us ask history some more before we give a definitive YES, and then I think we will give a definitive Yes and look at the nuclear framework of this answer in action. Maybe, possibly, despite the fact that history will reveal no positive framework by which to do so, we might then just stop. Sorry I’m actually laughing as I write this, the tears that should accompany it, have already fallen, and have become the ink of this book.

“As well as venerating the Sun-Gods of diverse origins, Dionysus and Apollo, the Greeks worshipped celestial gods, like Zeus, Earth-Gods, like Athene and Demeter, of Asiatic and Mediterranean origins, and as a result of the country’s military and political history, the Nordic deity of the warrior’s greatest asset, the horse, which became associated with the Sea-God, since the Aegean Greeks felt that the sea, even more than the horse, was the source of power. …

Religion, apart from the oracles, provided the Greeks with other unifying elements. If the oracles were the basis of political legitimacy, over-riding the decisions and laws of man, the collective religious ceremonies were opportunities of strengthening the sense of cultural and racial unity. The Games, in which the athletic and intellectual gifts were exalted, have already been noted in Crete, and were a feature of an aristocratic society in which men had to glorify individual excellence to justify the gap between the privileged few and the masses….

The true significance of the days of contest lay in this moment: the selection of the best, most perfect, most god-like men to offer up a tribute or a sacrifice. Thus Hellenic unity was strengthened by the system of trials which selected and prepared men to perform the holy rite of bridging the distance between gods and men, men whose human perfection approached divinity and conquered the heights that set the gods above man. The political importance of the Games lay in this very feature, that they gave men the conviction that they had no need of kings or priests in order to be befriended and listened to by the gods. Greek political development was rooted in the two fundamental religious ideas of the Games: the unity of the Greeks in origin and religion, and the concept of aristocracy which held that there was ‘something god-like’ in certain men: the Games enabled this divine element to be recognised in anyone of Greek blood and birth.

The Olympic games were the oldest and the most illustrious. It is significant that the Greeks measured time according to the cycle of the Olympiads…. It was the Delphic and Delian Games in honour of Apollo that confirmed the importance of intellectual qualities amongst the elements of individual excellence.” (Levi:1955:43-5)

“Those who believe that sport has nothing to do with politics are living in a dreamworld”  – Lord Peter Carrington, British Foreign Secretary, 1979-1982- Dan Snow’s History of the Winter Olympics- BBC Two

19: Bad-Faith

“[N]ever before had the social, economic and military relationships of the various groups in any community created a situation in which the poorest citizen class could claim political power.

The conquest of the Attic community had not yet spread to the whole of Greece. The reforming political current had swept over Athens, but the conservative domination of parts of Greece was still untouched, and the country as a whole was still represented by the Spartan oligarchy, which controlled, amongst other things, the law-making institution of the Delphic oracle. …

The problem of relations with Sparta and the other Greek centres also weighed very heavily on an Athens under popular control, for new motives of internal politics were added to the usual reasons of foreign policy.

For many years the rise to power of the democrats did not mean that men of this class took over complete control of the administration. The men who had governed under the old conservative coalition continued to govern- different individuals, different policies, but the same families and social class- and the transformation of the lower orders into a dominant class came about in the only way possible, which became the pattern of later social revolutions on the Athenian model. The idea governing developments in Athens was that some way must be found to enable the men who had to work day by day for their living to take part in the assemblies and public administration. The solution found was that of paying compensation for attendance at the judicial assemblies….

Once the system of payment for attendance at the judicial assemblies had been worked out, a method of levying public funds for the relief of the poorest citizens was used for the first time. No tribute was demanded of the rich to pay compensation to jurors, but the public treasury which met these expenses was no longer responsible for other public expenditure or for the usual redistribution of profits to the citizens, and this created a sort of indirect taxation of the rich to benefit the poor which could not have been carried through directly.

The compensation to the jurors of the Heliaia was, inevitably, only a beginning. Gradually all public offices came to be salaried, attendance at the political assembly was paid, and finally it became customary to distribute money at public festivals and the theatrical performances that accompanied them. The poor had gained control of public administration, and naturally encouraged the view that they should be able to leave work to carry out any public office of any sort. This led to the feeling that people taking such an important part in public life, without any adequate education to prepare them for it, should be given access to every opportunity for cultural and spiritual development. So a special form of compensation was invented, enabling the treasury to make payments for attendance at the most accessible and useful form of cultural life, the theatre.

The revolution in Athens was no easier to keep going than in any other part of the Greek world. The popular majority had to defend itself against all sorts of ambushes and obstacles. Although the power of the upper classes had been reduced by the limitations imposed on the Areopagus, it was still strong enough to organise the democracy to their advantage in some ways. In particular the men of the upper classes had the advantage of an education which enabled them to attract the attention of the masses by their oratory and eloquence, and win great prestige for themselves. In the same way their financial position aided them, for by giving work to the employees of their farms and factories they could secure their votes for themselves. Birth and family retained their importance; men of the upper classes continued to be elected to posts of command, and even when they were under the supervision of delegates of the popular party and working in its interests, their link with relations and friends in the opposition party were only too clear and dangerous.” (Levi:1955:90-2)

Entertainment sponsored by the educated for themselves.

We have seen that Athens’ system of democracy, as a hoped for means of creating equality, resulted in Aristotles experience of democracy and inequality, an inequality that existed before the democracy began and is still the experience of those in all democracies today. We have also seen that this democracy voted almost continually for war due to hope of gain, than any other Hellenistic state, and that the result of their democracy was the annihilation of the Hellenistic states and itself, and desertification of its lands for all generations that they sired after them. The reason behind these actions of not doing any work but instead killing people in order to gain still more (a silver mine not being enough- whereas for the Spartans it would have been) we have seen called as natural law and hence justice- ‘might is right’. This is the root of our democratic judicial system, but the greatest silver mine of all time is yet to be discovered, do you think that when it is it will result in the feeling of enough for the being-for-itself, or merely more insecurity, fear, and war? We will see, but when we do let us not pretend to call it just.

What I wish to do in this section on bad-faith, is therefore to look at how the Greeks actually perceived these effects of their votes causing the death of all of Hellene, as they came into being- worlded- by their voted will. Was there not a voice that prophesied their fate other than Socrates? Well yes there was, but unfortunately, those who chose which voice was heard were not trying to achieve what the words that they were saying, but the exact opposite of them. No they weren’t priests this time, as they were in Babylon prescribing their negative cult whilst pushing drugs, whores and usury at the same time. This time they were the secular aristocrats of the senate, and the words of the priest that were once spoken in a temple to the sacred people required a different architecture to be spoken to the profane people of a democracy, it required- the a different theatre. But yes, these senators still of course ran all of the drug pushing, whore housing, and usury, as the priests did.

“…Athens invented a powerful and incisive new art form, theatre, an innovation without which perhaps that democracy might never have survived. Drama comes from the Greek word ‘dram’, to do, to act, to perform. And if there is one thing which has become abundantly clear it’s that theatre was never just mere entertainment, never a spectator, it was a performer. From tragedy making our most important beliefs uncomfortable, to comedy, questioning and policing citizenship and keeping people in check. Theatre was a institution that plugged in to religious, civic, political, and military aspects of ancient Athenian society.” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

“For democratic Athenians luxury wasn’t just a political problem it was a moral one too. A taste for private luxury had become a moral failing, and it wasn’t just through fine art and architecture that these ideas were publicised, perhaps even more important, was another Athenian institution, theatre.” Dr. Michael Scott

“For the Athenians going to the theatre was very different than it is today, it was almost a duty to go to the theatre. But putting on plays was an expensive business so the Athenians allowed rich individuals to sponsor those productions, and in return the rich individuals got a chance to show off [building columns in their name]. As a result the Athenians had found a way of channelling the wealth of rich individuals towards the public benefit.” Dr. Michael Scott

In this section then I wish to look at how the drama of the drama triangle is enacted in a pretend world in order to world our real worlding in the real World. How the Art of theatre embodied the words of propaganda, that were supposed to be the true words and hence actions of those running the negative cult to defeat the inequalities in a democratic society- known as luxuries, in order to see the consequences of bad-faith. As we saw above, the containment of luxury through law and peer pressure, could not contain the force of desire, because the very people making these laws and possessing the pressures to oppress luxury, were the same people who needed luxury in order to gain esteem and hence gain greater status for-itself. The reason that democracy survived for as long as it did, is because the Athenians invented a new technique by which to spread these negative cults through awe- the Theatre. Authors of awe would be paid by rich senators to put on negative cult shows, where humans now acted as gods, by which to impress the taboo of luxury upon its ‘on-lookers’, and stop desertification.

The audience, in bad-faith, made the mistake of questioning the show of words and artifice, to have an opinion about the show, but did not look beyond this at the reason for the show-in-itself- for these words and for this artifice and not for other words and other artifice. In other words they did not ask the question, ‘who benefits by them?’ The audience believed that is was ‘the Third’ watching an embodiment of the spirit of Athens, and judging their place, and changing their behaviour within it, consequently. They did not realise that they were a part of a greater show of esteem and consequent power, where the envoker of the words of the gods were the very aristocrats now made invisible behind the scenes- out of sight of the look- and that they were giving their people power to these human ventriloquists of the gods. They knew it to be true, but they were awe-struck by the garment despite-of-themselves, for the esteem and awe it gave Athens and hence themselves.

The Bad-Faith of those reciprocators, takers, and givers of their lives to the democracy of Athens- in a war, in a plague, in starvation, in generations to come living in a desert- and also the heroes of the Iliad that became the role model for all the Hellenic states, is no better depicted than by the Art of Athens during the period that we have been discussing, and by the Hellenistic state (the state after the death of Alexander in 323 B.C.) that came after it, when democracy had failed and monarchy once again ruled, that we shall see in the next chapter. Let us then look at the art, theatre, and literature of this period, to elucidate the nature of bad-faith, in the name of morality.

In the late 6th century as the same time as Athens became a democracy, drama was also born by the Athenians

Also at this time the Athenians discovered a silver mine in their territory and so became rich. The sharing of this wealth amongst the people whilst trying to maintain their cohesion, may well have been the root of creating a democracy in the first place, and hence of the idea of individuality and individual power and rights as the basis of the state. But it is through the journey of the creation of the theatre, the earliest found of which is built right next to these silver mines that the techniques and art of state and the individual were first explored and most importantly, worshipped.

At the same time as archaeologists see theatres being built they also note a change in the representation of individuals in their representative artificial eternal form as statues. In the middle of 6th century statues (the signs of the individuals eternal perfection) were rigid and defined, much as Babylonian or Egyptian statues of kings are, they show the power and esteem of the individual as Object of the State, but by the 5th century they have become full of spirit and grace and become an art form to show the nature of the individual-itself, revealing in their subtletly of art the psyche or personality of the individual sculpted. In other words, the Object of the state in art, fitted into the garment of being an object of the state by being represented to uniform rules, but now the Object of the State became depicted, for the state, as a perfect object-in-itself, and the State, was educated through theatre, by these perfected people, in order to guide the State to fit their art-form. We will see this method of artifice change throughout the book in order to define the ontological consciousness of each State, and its rulers perspective accordingly. What therefore happened with the invention of theatre and democracy, which were both born hand in glove after the discovery of this silver mine, from the worship of a god?

As we have discussed above the Athenians were the peoples who most stridently left behind God and Natural law and justice and replaced it with civic power, civic law, and civic justice, over these forms of social cohesion. They therefore needed to create a new type of temple, by which their priests could tell the peoples how to behave. In Athens this behaviour was of course completely uncharted territory, and so the people needed to be told how to behave in the temple of people, not the temple of the gods, who held no negative cult power over them. They did this by converting the temple of their god of wine, revelry, and community, into a theatre. Theatre means, a place for seeing shows. In the ritual worship of Dionysus (also known as Bacchus- the ithyphallic god of ‘play’- that gives birth to theatrical ‘plays’) the Athenian community would come together to see a show of ritual words spoken as the mystery play of Dionysus, who invoked the invisible force of Wakan’s spirit, as we shall see in greater detail soon.

At certain parts of this mystery play their would be parts for ‘the chorus’, which would be taken up by the audience, in much the same way as in religious services, the priest speaks and the followers respond with a uniform phrase in order to envoke, breathe and hear their collective spirit. The chorus of the temple of the gods was therefore the will of the people and this religious practice lent itself to the nature of a cohesive spirit by which everyone had a voice, and therefore was feeding a nature within us, that through this nourishment would arise stronger, and in companionship with being-for-itself- and the outer world of geography- in order to sire- democracy.

The Athenian theatre took the role of the people as the chorus and made them docile objects who could be a part of the show only as these subjects- looking, but no longer as objects-enacting. In place of the priests they paid actors and in place of the people they paid actors to envoke this same spirit as the chorus.

In other words, the habitual actions of the Athenians- Karma- became a vicarious form of docile karma for the majority through artifice, and became- Drama. That was created publicly in front of the people by a person, and yet worked as a negative cult in place of the gods, due to the awe that surrounded it and that rubbed off on the actors that vicariously embodied it, as if by magic- some of them become the first ‘stars’. Eternal lights of artifice to be worshipped for spewing the propaganda of the aristocrat that employs them, and who demand more gain and more esteem each time that they embody the spirit of the people because they feel the relative increase in power, esteem and status, that they have magically taken upon themselves, as priests of a world where the gods are a part of a human tale, told from the perspective of the hero, the great totem of theatre and of Greek society. If we travel along this road of reason- pathein- long enough, mankind will become so distant from god that it needs to sire the super-hero and the super-star in order to express this super-state. Remember that belief in the causal nexus is a superstition, a super-state, well belief in a State is a super-state also, but we do not call it a causal nexus, but a causas bellus– the cause of war.

The great thing about actors ‘playing parts’ rather than priests being it as a whole of his being, is that an actor does not appear to be a hypocrite when he enacts the god of the negative cult in a show and then turns it into luxury and gain after the show, thereby corrupting the meaning of the show, as a priests actions would. As we all step into the magic circle of Drama we believe that we are in that circular world of pretence and there is no real connection with the outside world- Karma. That is true of the words and the nature of the play produced, but not of the players and the authors, and producers who manifest this artifice, they are real people hiding behind the mask of propaganda.

Prof Oliver Taplin of Oxford University states, “When an actor began to enact rather than narrate, there’s a kind of danger about that, the actor has to become a woman, a slave, and perhaps even more dangerously a god.”

The power of this art form to motivate and educate the emotions of a people who had to invent a democratic way of life was therefore soon noted by the politicians of the day, and utilised in order to teach its citizens. The playwrights who they sponsored wrote tragedies that took heroes of the Iliad or other past-times, and played with them in order to show the Athenian polis how to behave as a democracy, just as a priest narrates his story of behaviour to his congregation today, and television soap-operas educate the post-modern polis in normal behaviour and the concepts of right and wrong.

Prof Paul Cartledge of the University of Cambridge tells us that indeed this mode of thought that bears the democracy and the invention of theatre and the tragedy are one and the same thing in different art forms. “Tragic drama is a democratic invention… Athenian Tragic drama was deeply strongly politicised, not just it happened in a polis, but that it happened in a polis of a particular sort and that it could not have happened before Athens became a polis of that particular sort- a democratic one.”

Prof.Robin Osborne, University of Cambridge – “The theatrical side seems to coincide  fairly closely with the political identity. Theatrical activities of some sort or another were one of the ways in which they expressed the fact that now they all belong together.”

Let us then look at the form of a tragedy and see how it was enacted

Tragedy was not a sad story as it means today, but instead it was a story that posed a problem for the Athenian democratic citizen and asked the question, ‘what would they do in the same situation?’ Just as this book is asking you, and turning out to be quite a sad story at the same time.

The Chorus that stood on the stage and watched the actors of the play was, not a bunch of individuals, but a collective group that represented the Third, that is to say the witnesses who by their reactions judged the actions of the actors, and even of course of the gods themselves at times. They vicariously represented the submerged identity of the individuals watching the play and therefore represented the psyche of the democracy itself. ‘The chorus as a group in a group response try to make sense of what is happening and the suffering becomes a song. It is a very strong emotional experience and a very strong thought experience.’ It is the Carmen perpetuum of civilization, now envoked by the rich aristocrats as the prophets of these divine revelations.

Now the actors and the chorus all wore masks in order to protect themselves from the dangers of taking on these roles upon their own individual natures, and these masks were called psyche, from where we get our word psychological meaning soul or life, originally meaning to breathe or to speak. In other words as the being-in-Being becomes a being-for-itself the universal spirit becomes experienced and henced named as a soul in the individual and it is this soul which speaks words through the mask of the body in order to bring it to life as breathe- the psyche, just as God breathed life into Adam, and just as Christ is described as ‘the word’ that becomes flesh in the gospel of John. When an actor spoke through the psyche of a god he was speaking the logos- meaning ‘the word’- through him, just as the Logos- in the form of the muse- narrated through Homer in order to create the mythic poetic complex of war over warfare in The Iliad. These actors however are not enacting the revelations of the gods to espouse natural law but those of the aristocrats to espouse civic law, not human behaviour but civic behaviour, not the art of living, but the art of war, of being-subject-for-itself, and of how to fit in to this State.

The Greek word for playwright is dedasculus meaning teacher or trainer, and many scholars believe this name refers to the role of the playwright in training the audience itself in democracy through the medium of tragedy

The Greek word Tigareso was the key to the reason for tragedy, it meant, ‘What would you do in this situation?’ It is the question that the tragic play poses. “What shall I do?” is the key word that lies behind it, the perspective of the individual. But the Athenians by taking the awe from the temple and placing it in the theatre as a show of civic power and virtue, have twisted the question of ‘what shall I do in the eyes of the gods’, to ‘what should I do in the eyes of the polis’. By giving up the role of enacting this mouth of the polis as the chorus who envoke the words of tradition through their spirit, they give up possession of the eyes of the polis to those who control the polis, through possessing the power of the chorus. Each individual leaving the show, now finds themselves silently judged by this same chorus through the look of the other participants who all know that the other knows these words, and is therefore complicit in them, and therefore judged by them, and thereby perceived in relation to them. The power of judgement has been taken from the gods, and placed in the hands of the individual authors of awe, who use their right to power to empower what they see as right.

Through the power of awe under the garment of drama and the voice of the chorus, each individual ‘look’ upon an-other becomes framed through this lens, and so the negative cult is no longer spoken by the priest but envoked in the silent look of the other. It becomes an oppressive look of judgement taught by those wishing to gain power and given through drama as a possession of each individual, and enacted through democracy through the vote as a possession of each individuals right. When it is silent it is a power of negativity all encompassing, when it is placed within the word and spoken it is opinion. The right to my opinion. The right to speak, but to be aware that those words spoken may in future be used against you in a court of law. Remember how theatre was used to police a democracy.

We see this truth in the word tragedy itself. Under Dionysus tragedy was a ritual to the universal spirit- the logos- that imbued our consciousness and this was represented by Dionysus performing a miracle in turning water (consciousness unfermented by the experience of God) into wine  (consciousness that now contains His spirit of life- fecundity- especially for the crops- as we saw with Demeter and Pandora earlier) and his followers were the family of the vine- the nation of peoples that contained that spirit. In the wedding at Canaan it is Jesus as the logos, and not Dionysus who performs the very same miracle, and thousands of years before either Jesus or Dionysus, the Egyptian son of the Great God Ra- Osiris, performed this same miracle. In other words we are talking about the logos entering the consciousness of its followers as a divine wedding of alimental communion (not experienced as a sacrifice and hence not named one) between man and god, known in alchemy as the chemical wedding, where the individual sacrifices his ego, his psyche, takes off his mask of being-for-itself-, his psyche, and becomes one with God.

“The early Egyptian Christian Basilides believed that Jesus was baptized on 6th January, a date which had been celebrated for centuries in Egypt as “the Day of Osiris”. Some Christians commemorated this date as the day on which Christ “sanctified the water”. They offered prayers at midnight on 5th January and then all rushed with pitchers to a river to obtain water which was believed now to be holy and possess purifying powers. For hundreds of years before Christ Egyptians had been doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. The night of 5th January was said to be a time when the waters of the Nile gained miracle-working powers, through the grace of Osiris…

The night of 5th January was also the time when Dionysus was believed to miraculously change water into wine. According to Pliny, on the island of Andros a stream of wine flowed in the temple of Dionysus and continued for seven days…

During the Greek festival called Thyia, three empty basins were put into a room in the presence of citizens and foreigners. The room was then locked and sealed, and anyone who wanted to could bring his own seal to add to the seal on the door. On the next day the seals remained unbroken, but those entering the room found that the three basins had miraculously been filled with wine.”  

A tragedy originally meant, in this light, literally ‘a goat-song’ because a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus who cultivated the vine, and due to the zodiacal nature of Capricorn- the goat- who Jesus, Dionysus, and Osiris was born under (as were many many many more). It also meant a ‘goat-singer’ who would give breathe and life to the spirit of the sacrificed victim in the ritual, performed by the Chorus. For Dionysus then in this light as witness to the tragedy of the settled people that worship him his song is a sad story that narrates the plight of settled peoples who have to throw others in the river (sacrifice scape-goats as well as sacrificial goats) in order to create the religious mindset of a negative cult.

The word miracle comes from the Latin ‘mirus’ meaning wonderful, which itself comes from the Sanskrit ‘smaya’, meaning to wonder, itself from ‘smi’, meaning, to smile. When the spirit of God enters the waters of consciousness held within the jar of your physical body, then this makes you smile at the wonder of it. It is such an important event in a persons life that it is worth recording and re-enacting in ritual for ones followers. As a party trick that makes people at a wedding smile because they wish to get more drunk with egoic spirit and now can by the power of God, it is a tragedy, not a miracle. I wonder what I will do, twisted into existence from, ‘I will wonder’

Miracle also however, lends itself to two other words that are derived from it, and which will help us to understand the Nature of the miracle-story. The first word is ‘admire’, meaning to wonder. Who did the Athenians admire after being educated vicariously by their authors through the chorus, and who did the religious followers of Dionysus ‘admire’, after educated themselves by being their own authors as the chorus. Being-for-itself and being-in-Being are the respective, reasonable, answers. This is because of the Nature of the second word derived from miracle, ‘mirror’.

We have seen the Hindu word for mirror- darpan- as a reflection of our karmic selves in civilization, seen through an egoic psyche, without empathy- darshan. The mirror then reflects back to us the perspective of the world that we experience. From the perspective of the being-for-itself, it is a tragedy-story embodied in the nature of the theatre as a Drama triangle, without a transcendent spirit. From the perspective of the being-in-Being, it is still a tragedy, but in the Nature of Nature as Dionysus or to envoke his 40,000 year old name Wakan, this is a wonder, a ‘goat-song’ of alimental communion with the universe, of which one takes part in a ritual wedding or Bacchanalian play, or Osiric rite.  This is the miracle of wonder that makes you smile in the looking-glass mirror, when seen through the perspective of Darshan. The same looking-glass to which the evil-witch asks only, ‘who is the fairest off them all’ and will kill if the answer is not me- relative to all Others. It is the same looking-glass through which Alice steps in order to see the same world from a new perspective that denies reason, cause and effect, but instead feeds an experience of wonder. ‘Oh, to see heaven, in a grain of sand’.

The Athenians through the invention of theatre have transformed Darshan into democracy for those within their pyramid. Empathy for us and not for them, who are not as fair as we are and so can be killed. Please also remember the Nature of Snow-white and her seven dwarves that make up this Nature of whiteness, and of the rainbow, the chakras, and the seven types of earth. Through theatre gods voice is their voice, gods words are their words, gods spirit is their spirit, by right, and so they turn themselves into gods in plays through the God of Play.  They turn the chorus of gods spirit into negative cults of empathy in good-faith, in order to stop desertification, but they do all of this in bad-faith outside of this Drama in the real world of Karma. Increasing the relative wealth of these authors of awe whilst living through plague and war, poverty and abjection.

Docile and silent, sitting in the architecture of the theatre of Drama, themselves as merely witnesses to these stories the polis perceives itself as no longer fully responsible for the karmic result of being docile and silent, as they have been told. Consequently it is the experience of such a way of telling a story that the goat-song of tragedy can change its meaning to the civic song of tragedy, and the wonder of what we are doing with Nature becomes the wonder of what would you do about the situation, if you were in a position to act. It from this perspective that we now judge others, not from the perspective of the authored gods who merely witness it, and advise us so dramatically.

“Every year for almost the next two centuries they came to the theatre to rework the old myths into tragic dramas that spoke to the problems that had beset and were fundamental to one of the most important stories in history, the rise and fall of Athens. And at the same time those very same people were here in the assembly, making the decisions that effected those events.” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

The tragedy of Dionysus was then transported to the Architecture of the theatre, away from the forests and plains. “These theatres were places where people could gather together. They were “multi-purpose civic spaces”, “not just for drama but also for democracy itself”. These spread across all Attica. Every year the politicians spent a fortune on the great Dionysian festival.”  Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

What then was this festival like. What did it teach and most importantly, Who did it benefit?

‘The festival began with a procession, with much drinking and eating, when it reached the altar of the 12 gods in the marketplace, there was a holy dance. The more one drank the closer to Dionysus one became. But the Greeks had a word for this experience- ecstasy, meaning ex- out, and stasis- meaning above. In other words one would enter a super-state of the self. In modern times we take ecstasy to commune at  a rave to the hedonistic self. In Athens they made this a rave to democracy. “The more wine you drink the more you get outside of yourself as you do when you dance, and when you where a mask it is the same” Dr. Soi Agelidis- German Archaeological Institute, Athens.

This hedonistic procession of esteemed self-worshipping democrats in a super-state of paranoia, then proceeded from the altar of the god Dionysus to the theatre of tragedy, past tripods built by the politicians who had sponsored the plays that advertised the greatness of the politician, not the god any longer, he had been left behind and was no longer to receive the look of the polis, they were. Great monuments were also put up to glorify the winning sponsor of the winning playwright in order to advertise his greatness.

“It was a religious but also a political incident, when they take their seats in the theatre they become a collective of people with a new identity as worshippers of Dionysus. All of this set them up for the play to follow.” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

“But before the play began another set of rituals had to be performed. The audience would sit in the same groups as those groups when they went to war, as were the actors on the stage. Reserved seats at front were for the priests and important politicians. Then libations to Dionysus would be passed round by the military generals. Then a parade of tribute of all money paid by Athenian states to Athens was paraded in front of these groups who had paid for it. Then a list of those who had benefited the city in some way, i.e. honoured. Then orphans of parents killed in battle were paraded who were going to be supported by the state. They were dressed in armour of war and then were seated. Then the play began. From dawn ‘til dusk, for 5 days they would watch these plays, which sent powerful messages to the citizens audience.” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

Of the over 1,000 plays that were written in the two centuries that Athens existed as a democracy, only 32 survive, and it to these we must now look in order to elucidate the Bad Faith of the Athenians who had processed physically and literally from the worship of the gods to the worship of themselves through this great politic-religious education of the masses in the theatre.

The first play that we shall look at is the play that attempts to tame one of the heroes of The Iliad- Ajax, to turn him into a democratic individual who will compromise his right to self-perfection and esteem for the greater good that it brings the State. In other words a culture of negative instructions is imposed upon his god-given nature to perfect himself, that priests and not politicians sponsoring playwrights have held the right and authority and necessity to do (en-act) before, and not just act like they are doing.

In Sophocles’ play, ‘Ajax’ who fought victoriously and with great honour at Troy is unable to accept the vote that awards Achilles’ armour to Odysseus and not to himself. Untamable Ajax goes on a killing spree amongst his fellow warriors but upon seeing the destruction he has caused then kills himself through shame of his sin to the state of heroism.

Upon his death the Greeks debate about burying him or not- honouring him or not- Odysseus says this line, ‘Don’t let force have such control of you that you allow your hate to trample justice down.’

“This is the critical point in the play. This play then plays out the dilemma because it shows empathy and justice to the community by which to come together, make a decision, and then move forward.” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

In other words the worshippers of Dionysus in the political theatre of democracy that bore tragedy, would see its own people take on the role of the scape-goat Ajax, and the Third, as the state as judge in the Chorus who would sing the sad song of the scape-goat who served to remind a democratic polis of its negative cult in curbing its desires for-itself and sacrifice them for the greater good of the state. This then is the honour and justice prescribed by Odysseus. A civic justice, not a priestly god-given justice, as right.

This mirror on the wall, through which the Athenians would prove to themselves that they were the fairest of them all, was a device of reflecting their own nature to themselves and using artifice in order to change that behaviour and the consequent manifestations that came with it. And it began with a procession, a train of people, being led away from the gods, and towards a super-state drunk upon its own esteem, wealth and benevolence, in the form of architecture, tribute and orphaned abjects, before themselves taking the logos of the gods for themselves and enacting it, so nourishing their psyches through this communion. The super-state of the perfection of the egoic-self, as a right by which to judge others from, and ones-self, relatively, by ‘which to come together, make a decision, and then move forward.’-Progress, the father of which we saw above, through Greek eyes, is- War. The aletheia of the drama triangle.

“It’s therefore no surprise that a common subject matter in Athenian drama was a problem that constantly dogged the Athenian assembly- war. Aeschylus an Athenian General of the Persian war wrote The Persians (472 B.C.) sponsored by Pericles, to tell the story of the Persians after their defeat. His overall lesson to the Athenians was taken up through the character Darius an old Persian King who is summoned in desperation by King Xerxes the current and now defeated king of Persia, as a ghost who then tells the Persians that their defeat was their own fault, ‘They themselves are to blame, because their pride, and their ambition has led them to disregard the gods: “The voiceless heaps of slaughtered corpses shall eloquently show that no one human should puff up inflated thoughts. You see how insolence once opened into flower produces fields ripe with calamity, and reaps a harvest-home of sorrow.” This is the crucial theme of the play.’ Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

“The key word here is Habros, which suggests softness, luxury, delicacy… These are the Persians against the austere Athenians, who begin to wear Persian garments.” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick

Remember how the Athenian Thucydides educated in these theatres, authored his words to tell us that the betrayal of Athens by taking the Delian League for themselves, was not their fault, but in reality it was the allies ‘themselves who are to blame’. What was Sophocles teaching his audience of this negative cult, through his tragedy-story, ‘The Persians’:

Dr.Rosie Wyles- Kings College London- “Well I think really at its heart, its really a tragedy about Hubris…. And the Persians had done that. It’s really asking the society to reflect.”

“It offers a warning at a time when Athens is coming to empire” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

The lesson that Aescyhlus attempts to reflect back to the Athenians is that of desire being the cause of the loss of power and the harvest of sorrow that is will bring home, and not the gain of power that it is supposed to be- Hubris. The timing of this lesson is just before the Athenians vote to take over the Delian league and turn it into the engine of empire themselves. In other words, democracy and its teachers and worshippers, are shown the lesson both historically through the mistakes of the Persians, as reflective lessons- darpan and re-enacted physically as their own psyche- drama, in order to evoke darshan for their community alone.

The next play of Sophocles that we are going to look at, ‘Antigone’, dramatises the distance that Athenians have gone away from the will of Dionysus, and natural law, towards the will of the people and civil law. Its purpose however is not to achieve a more godly state, but to teach the polis, the rightness of their opinion, and of how to put words to that opinion through civic debate.

“Antigone by Sophocles (442 B.C.) teaches its people how to debate (agon). Antigone follows the law of the gods when she buries her brother- Oedipus who has died dishonourably, but the city-law has forbidden this and King Creon (meaning ‘ruler’) orders her death as a consequence. But Creons son is in love with Antigone and he begs his father for mercy stating, “a city is not a city if it is the holding of one man”, [this is] an important democratic educational teaching and the reason for sponsoring the play. But Creon is stubborn and uncompromising,  and the play ends with King Creon losing not only his son who commits suicide along side Antigone, but also loses his power by the injustice of his decrees as seen through the eyes of people and the gods, in the form of the Chorus. Creon has to face the fact that it is his actions alone that have caused this fate and so he is responsible for the loss of his power, status and esteem.” Professor. Edith Hall- Kings College London

Professor Robin Osborne- University of Cambridge, “This isn’t a non-issue this is a real issue… there are two diametrically opposed views and you have to pick your way through those.”

In other words, learning the art of compromise through debate- agon, and not being stubborn or untamable as were Ajax and King Creon (monarchy) by their Nature, was the technique of docility and the nature of the social contract of compromise but right desire, to be fought through words and not warfare within the pyramid, in order to create harmony and not further agony- debate. This was ‘the purpose behind’, the question of the tragedy. In good-faith, (the question of the tragedy) the compromise of ones being-for-itself, led to greater riches for all the State and itself. In bad-faith, (the purpose behind the question of the tragedy) the compromise of ones being-for-itself, led to greater riches for the sponsors of the tragedy.

In order to achieve the authority by which to instruct the now silenced polis, Dionysus was removed from the temple and possessed by actors  for this aristocrat, and so, just as the people had been removed from the chorus, so the god is removed from his true nature and turned into a city-god who made laws for the city that forbade the burying of Orpheus. Dionysus the god of karmic play became Daksha the god of drama plays, that informed the perspective of the people of their power as the polis, that revealed its true self to King Creon, when he wouldn’t compromise, by secretly arranging his murder in the night. The culture of the being-for-itself.

The god of Dionysus, used to invoke this State god, becomes commingled by this drama in our psyche, as the actors don their masks, and so God, or the gods, become perceived as being an ‘accidental phenomenon’ evoked by this polis as a name to identify the force of invisible power that it creates, as Durkheim perceived it, due to his education, and like experience of a God in Catholicism. He was not en-acting ‘il poche’ upon his psyche with a scientific mask of the God of cause and effect- Reason- during this time, only afterwards when he formulated this theory. Did society really invent reason or did it raise a part of nature up until it was a god in their eyes?

The effect of mixing the gods with the nature of drama rather than revelation, as man-made truth, not muse-made truth,was that the gods could serve our collective purpose, and the word commingle shows this to us as it sires the word commerce.       Mingle means to mix, from the Anglo Saxon mang, meaning a mixture, a crowd or assembly, perhaps we can think of a theatre full of people being educated in how the gods think by beings-for-itself. To be in a crowd of people is to be amongst them, to be commingled (or a ‘mob mentality’ as it is so charmingly referred to today to educate us of our perspective of groups over individual rights in the dramatic words of the newspaper shows and political debates that educate us, through these drama plays), and among is derived from mingle in like manner. What then do you call someone in the crowd in which you are commingled when they are a being-for-itself?

We have already seen the commingled nature of the hunter-gatherer and of what they would do to someone we named an ‘entrepreneur’ as a being-for-itself, they would secretly kill him in the night. But in a mixture of people who are all beings-for-itself, what is an entrepreneur called as he stands out from this group. He is named a ‘monger’, meaning a dealer or trader, from the Anglo Saxon, mangian, meaning to traffic, ‘to deal in a mixture of things’ or to barter. What a being-for-itself group does then, as we have seen above, is to secretly kill those amongst them, who will not trade or barter or debate their desires in order to enhance the power of the State itself. As was the fate of King Creon, secretly killed in the middle of the night.

Trade then,  is another word for compromise, barter another word for debate, competition another word for agony. Compromise means, ‘a settlement by concession, a mutual promise (remember mutual advantage), but promise comes from the word ‘missile’ meaning ‘a weapon that may be thrown, from the Sanskrit ‘math’ meaning to agitate or churn.  Barter means, to traffic, but comes from the Middle English bartryrn meaning ‘to cheat, or beguile’. Debate means to argue, and comes from the word batter meaning to beat-up, and when one debates with another it is known as combat, to be beating-each-other-up. Trade means, ‘a beaten path, a regular track or regular business. Therefore the beaten track, the path of karma that we regularly walk is one of competition of a mathein, ‘learning by example’ the techniques of the missile of compromise, as a means by which to be cheated and beguiled as we barter away the gods for our desire gods, that change commingling as being-in-Being into commerce as being-for-itself. Trading each other for gain.

What was the first thing that was trafficked, slaves, and whores

The word commerce, means to traffic in like manner, but its root is a darpan change of reflective perspective into that of the being-for-itself, it is derived from the word merit, meaning ‘to be with merit’- commerce, and merit means, excellence or  worth, from the Old French, meaning, ‘a thing deserved’, ‘to receive as a share’. It is also the root of the word ‘market’, meaning to traffic or to trade, mercari, a merchant.

From these roots we can see the roots of the perspective change from commingling with God to the commerce of God, written in story as the competition of the gods amongst themselves, enacted as the competition of the beings-for-itself amongst themselves, in a silently complicit chorus of awe for the god of desire. Isn’t another name for advertising, when it is on the T.V., commercials? Don’t we live in a meritocracy, where we are valued and then sell ourselves, now that we have sold our gods. Isn’t this the best way to be? That is a matter for debate

This allegiance to ones god and his morality or to ones state became a ‘real issue’  In 1944 Antigone was performed once again. The reason why those words and not others, that show and not another, were chosen to be spoken by the rulers that sponsored it was exactly the same as when Sophocles was sponsored in Athens.  To imitate the same affect upon its audience of worshippers of the nation-state of France  during German occupation of their ‘heartland’ in World War II. France in 1944 was now ruled by Germany under the ‘Vichy Government’, which was a government of French rulers who had bartered their best in order to maintain power and had to compromise their justice by turning their back on French Laws and human rights, and were instead practicing those prescribed by the Nazi’s, such as hunting out the Jews and committing genocide, in the ‘good faith’, that if they complied then the Vichy would be allowed to continue the rule of their own country under Nazi dominion, just like the Athenians would allowed to do under the Persians dominion, if Alcibiades could barter democracy for a oligarchy, through practising deceit.

The French resistance performed Antigone to the French polis in order to fight the Vichy government by educating the audience of their moral conduct under these unquestioned civic laws, that meant selling their country down the river as abject-subjects. Its relevance was no different than that Sophocles was attempting to teach the democracy of Athens. The true urgrund nature of debate- a competition for power no matter the moral price. Morality has been lost and forsaken to the statement, ‘Might is right’. The urgrund reason being, that which Thrasymachus told us earlier, ‘the unjust man gains power, and power is what defines justice’.

Do the words of Sophocles teach the beings-for-itself of Athens anything at all about the lack of morality within their society and of the shame for which they are responsible? No, it doesn’t for 26 years later, or in other words, the next generation after Antigone, need to be taught the same lesson, this time by Euripides. But this time the lesson isn’t one about a fabled ruler from myth, but one taken from the very actions of the Athenians the year before the play was performed. We are already familiar with this action. It is the action described by Thucydides above, when the people of Melos attempt to leave the Delian League. The Melians are told that ‘might is right’ and that therefore the murder of all of the men of Melos and the enslavement of its women and children is therefore just. Through the darpan nature of the theatre Euripides shows the Athenians that they have not heeded the words of Sophocles or the wisdom of debate, for they still refer to the sword in the name of justice, and still neglect the darshan of empathy that may save them from their fate of shame at their murderours, vengeful, democratic, behaviour.

‘The Trojan Women’ (416 B.C.) tells the story of what happened to the women of Troy after The Iliad and its fall. Euripides has the people of Athens don the psyche of these women and witness their men as fathers, husbands, and sons murdered before their very eyes. They and are then enslaved along with their children and colonised by these very same murderous heroes. This then would have directly and starkly reflected the Melian massacre a year earlier that the vote of this democratic polis had produced and of the suffering they had caused. But Euripides, as with Sophocles, meant more than this. The Tragedy of The Trojan Women portrayed the suffering of these women against the injustice they suffered simply because ‘might is right’. It spoke to the Athenians of the disillusionment that they themselves were beginning to feel, the jadedness, of such actions upon a peoples who were responsible themselves for the constant war and tragic consequences that they had wished for and now received and saw re-enacted in front of them. They had become the very basis of the story upon which they themselves were now judged. The Iliad had come back to bite them, and it hurt.

Professor. Edith Hall- Kings College London- “I think that by 415- 416 B.C. Euripides really has seen, that war as a way of life brings nothing but misery to both victors and vanquished…. He is presenting a view of all the Greeks as having barbarised themselves during the course of the Peloponnesian war.”

“Many in Greece now felt that the Athenians was guilty of hubris…In the 6th century the people had built a temple to the Greek Goddess responsible to those guilty of hubris- Nemesis, a name that comes from the Greek verb Nemo, meaning to give what is due. Now after the Melian atrocity it seems like Athenian ambition and pride was beginning to overreach itself. They now not only had an increasing number of enemies abroad. They now had an increasing number of enemies at home as well, who were perhaps beginning to think of democracy as perhaps the immoral inversion of the righteous order.” Dr Michael Scott- University of Warwick.

So the Bad Faith of democracy and the theatre of history upon which it was enacted, lay in believing that it can change the nature of being-for-itself and discovering that it cannot. That the authority of the gods and their right to rule, was ‘right’ and that democracy was an immoral inversion, a reflective darpan lacking empathy and humanitas- darshan. A Hubris whose Nemesis came back to bite them in the form of friends becoming enemies, and the polis competing with word missiles of opinion, deceit, and guile, from within. What really changed the people of Athens was their desire to gain and the individual right to gain it, which caused them to betray the Hellenic people in the Delian League and then to go to war without any moral qualms at all. Far from being a people of philosophy and humanity as suggested in the plays and works of these artists of artifice, and by the modern academics soliloquies upon how ‘great’ the Greeks were and how much they have given us, in our thrownness, especially democracy- the new god, these people became barbarised through these vaunted techniques of art and people power as a right and democracy became the cause for the death of Helen herself. Beauty and harmony do not exist in opinion and debate, they cannot be forged by battering them into submission or be trusted when they are sired from an artifice of deception used to cheat an-other.

It is bad-faith to look back upon this history and believe that it can. Nothing has changed today, we are only now in the part of history where the Delian League is being controlled by America whose land it dwells in… the war is yet to come, but already allies are fighting amongst themselves, and soon enough one of them will ask for help, and be worth helping. So worth helping that it will be for its current possessor too much to lose and they will ask for the assistance of another State who will see the same good reason for helping as America do. World War III here we come. Will America teach its people to hate, China, who they currently love, but previously hated, or Russia, who they currently love, but previously hated, or India, who they currently love, but previously hated, or Pakistan, who they currently hate, but previously hated, or North Korea, who they previously hated, and before were neutral too, because it had no power at all. As the Athenians told the Melians over two thousand years ago, ‘your hatred is evidence of our power’.

The Athenians that are regaled in front of us today in our school education are not the real Athenians of history but the psyche of an idea framed by the artifice of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, the Noble Lie of Plato and the empirical reason of Aristotles social contract. We have now seen the truth of these peoples who their words could not tame, as The Iliad truly told them, had they but listened. Without the gods there is no morality, only the will to power and poor old Helen is dragged along for the ride merely as an artifice of truth by which to cohere these egoic wills. The reality of democracy, as with all pyramids is war, and debate is one of its more efficient missiles, but without a godly morality, one must teach the states version of it, and then try to tame this same truth of, ‘might is right’ for the individual but under the State (as subject), ‘your might is not in fact right’ only ‘our might is right’. In other words, democracy states, ‘it is not honourable to reciprocate a taker (a priest/king and his warriors) but it is honourable to reciprocate each other in taking (a democracy of warriors)’.

We will see this democracy emerge once again from a people who believe that taking through commerce is more honourable than reciprocating through commingling. These people however will tread the path of the ‘trade of goods’, bartering their way around the world in the artifice of pirates when it is more efficient to take and merchants when it is more efficient to barter. The reason for the deceit upon the being-for-itself that watches this show (although it is almost impossible to not be a part of it) is that it allows this story of ‘goods’ ‘rightly-desired’  to be-guile-itself-for-itself. To become beguiled by ‘goods’ to become consumed by desire, to become a consumer. The reality is not to possess what is consumed but to be possessed by the nemesis of this hubris- debt, an object of great worth to those with power and the name for this Noble Lie will be ‘Free-trade’, its method of debate will be war, and the whole world will be bartered away in the name of reason. Didn’t we just see the Athenians get into such a bad state of debt, indebtedness and enslavement, by listening to the same people that put on the educational plays of democracy, that democracy had to be invented? Who did democracy serve then? Why did the aristocrats sponsor these plays, and why did they take it from the temple, and why did they line the processional path to this worship site of the individual, with permanent forms of themselves and not Dionysus?

The internal contradictions of democracy in its resultant inequalities and the guile of its aristocrats as worlded by the pyramid of Athens was so obviously experienced by the Athenians everyday, that art in theatre was used to ameliorate these discrepancies of the philosophy of equality, and the reality of inequality, the philosophy of one vote of power and the reality of one vote, of no power.

The nature of bad-faith that these realities revealed resulted in the art of not tragedy, but of comedy, where those who in reality were men who had taken power through honourable deceit and guile who be brought low in the eyes of the docile crowd and laughed at publicly in a technique to diminish their esteem by revealing the truth behind their actions. By the very nature of such a play that shows the polis its bad-faith and laughs about it in chorus, acting as a stress release valve upon the tensions that this creates, these comedic plays were not set on such a grand stage as the five day long festival that tragedy got with all its accompanying awe. This was because they did not serve to advertise the honour and esteem of the politicians who sponsored them (quite the opposite in fact) and because they were not to be witnessed by Others, but were to kept as an in-house secret between the Athenians. These plays were deliberately worlded in the season when the winds blew away from Athens and so Other States, could not bear witness to these dark truths, and see the true incohered nature of the Athenians and their vaunted democracy of equality, liberty, and most ridiculously of all- fraternity.

These plays were born, as were tragedies, from the Nature of Dionysus before they were co-opted by the State. They were not called ‘comedies’ as we call them today but ‘Satyrs’. A Satyr is mythological creature that whose Nature is depicted in the form of a half-goat-half-person who worships Dionysus and who teaches the people the gods wisdom. The comedic element of this wisdom is the ‘observational comedy’ that we use today to reveal funny things about the state of our individual selves, as that is how we perceive ourselves, for the Athenians they used it to reveal the joke of democracy as they perceived themselves.

What the Satyr image depicts is the wisdom of the ‘goat-song’ that is a part of all men

As we have seen this sacrificial goat song is when sung through the logos of God, by revelation or Christ’s words, one of commingling in sacrificial alimental communion with God and each other. When this goat-song is taken over by the State is serves a different nature (being-for-itself) and so the elements of the Satyr are perceived differently. It becomes a comedic figure because, its higher self is a man of reason, but no matter what it may reasonably believe, its path is being walked by its lower self, its animal spirit now may docile by reason above it. Those who believe that they can exist in pure reason and are unaffected by their animal desires as in bad-faith, that is the joke, and the joke was played upon the politicians and allies that had forgotten this.

Today we call these Satyrs comedies, but the scape-goat must not be forgotten. Another word for comedy is satire, but satire has not etymological link to the name Satyr. Satire means to be full, to be satisfied, but satisfied can also mean to be substituted for, to be satisfied with that. So the Athenian Satyrs were the scape-goats that satisfied the need to admit the truth, amongst the lie, whilst the Tragedies were the sacrificial goats to possess the awe by which to lie, and create the need for Satyrs. They were a magical rite of power cohesion, the war and peace of the drama triangle. In recent times this same technique of comedy alleviates the pressures of a society surrounded by the deceit and guile by which they have bartered their gods for their own people power.

Let us then look at a play written by Aristophanes about the politician Cleon, who we saw earlier in Thucydides’ history, being the first to vote to put the Mytilineans to death because they wouldn’t stay in the ‘secretly’ corrupt Delian league.

Cleon was an opportunistic politician who wooed the aristocracy and then the working class as he saw fit to his art of self-perfection and was famous for his two-faced artifice. He was also famous for his love of Tuna, a delicacy at the time from Sicily, that the Athenians saw as a symbol of inequality, and a sign of luxury that indicated a tyrannical politician in the making. Aristophanes came from the same village as Cleon and in 425 B.C. he staged his play, ‘The Knights’ at Athens. In this play he portrays Cleon as a cunning servant working for an old man Demos, meaning the people. Cleon uses his role as servant to steal and enrich himself, but it is Cleon who ends up stripped of power and selling sausages outside of the city gates of Athens.

Today these plays poking fun at the politicians of the day are seen by scholars as the hallmark of freedom given by democracy in the sacred right to the freedom of speech, because it was Satyr that taught the powerful not to abuse their status to enrich themselves and to reflect upon their own state and its peoples and place in the world, but this is simply not true. The Comedies were not played in front of other states as the tragedies freely were, but were deliberately put on before the spring winds had changed direction whereupon people from other states would begin sailing to Athens to trade and partake in the drama of theatrical life. So they were plays of freedom of speech already censored by the state from other states- democratically, because they were aware of the Noble Lies inherent within their state, of how tragedy reconciled them and of how satire exposed them. These plays are not graffiti or leaflets of propaganda, they are written by, staged within and enacted, solely by Objects of the State, for the State. They were safety valves of necessity, and in reality, this is also what the ‘right to freedom of speech’ is. The right to debate, the right to air the truth- a spirit that becomes a will o’ the wisp, in a web of deceit.

Plays, set within ones own temple, with ones own followers is not freedom of speech but self-reflection that Others are not allowed to hear. The Satyr is a democratic confessional that provides a path for the shame of bad-faith to be looked upon, to be admitted and then expelled as a ritual magic, in a chorus of laughter. It has nothing to do with freedom.

With such a lot of Bad Faith, being promulgated today about democracy and its wonderous humanity, and justice and equality and liberty, etc, in light of the evidence presented by the Athenians own historians and artists and institutions and history; with its charted consequences such as injustice, war, betrayal, self-destruction, and desertification clearly laid out before us; with such self-fulfilling prophecies of as those resulting from these Noble Lies as the realist ‘right wing’ agendas of distrust and hate, taught to our politicians and that formed our western institutions, is it not Bad Faith to witness a world today on the brink of global desertification, after two world wars and a cold war and now another one against terror itself, that have been created by these vaunted ideals, and to think that these problems are not our own nemesis from the hubris of these worshipped Athenians in a liberal democracy responsible for naming them right through might?

The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dover Thrift Editions, 1995. ISBN No. 0-486-28515-4

“And so, in one sense, we might apply to Apollo the words of Schopenhauer when he speaks of the man wrapped in the veil of Maya: Welt als Wille and Vorstellung, [World as Will and Idea] I. p.416: “Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits quietly, supported by and trusting in his principium individuationis.” In fact, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in this principum and the calm repose of the man wrapped therein receive their sublimest expression; and we might consider Apollo himself as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and expression tell us of all the joy and wisdom of “appearance”, together with its beauty.

In the same work Schopenhauer has depicted for us the terrible awe which seizes upon man, when he is suddenly unable to account for the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, when the principle of reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to admit of an exception. If we add to this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost depths of man, aye of nature, at this very collapse of the principium individuationis, we shall gain an insight into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness. It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, which we hear of in the songs of all primitive men and peoples, or with the potent coming of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that these Dionysian into complete self-forgetfulness.

So also in German Middle Age singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, were whirled from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. In the dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, we rediscover the Bacchic choruse of the Greeks, with their early history in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are some, who, from obtuseness, or lack of experience, will deprecate such phenomena as “folk-diseases”, with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own “healthy-mindedness”. But, of course, such poor wretches can not imagine how anemic and ghastly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” seems in contrast to the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers rushing past them.

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. …Now the slave is free; now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice or “shameless fashion” have erected between man and man, are broken down. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with his neighbour, but as one with him; he feels as if the veil of Maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious Primordial Unity…He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxsyms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the Primordial Unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble man, is here kneaded and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusianian mysteries: “Do ye bow in the dust, O millions? Do you divine your creator, O world?”” (Nietzsche:1995:3-4)

“Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and its antithesis, the Dionysian, as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist; energies in which nature’s art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way: first, on the one hand, in the pictorial world of dreams, whose completeness is not dependent upon the intellectual attitude or the artistic culture of any single being; and, on the other hand, as drunken reality, which likewise does not heed the single unit, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness. With reference to these immediate art-states of nature, every artist is an “imitator”, that is to say,  either an Apollonarian artist in dreams, or a Dionysian artist in ecstasies, or finally- as for example in Greek tragedy- at once artist in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him sinking down in his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, alone, and apart from the singing revelers, and we may imagine how now, through Apollonarian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the primal nature of the universe, is revealed to him in a symbolical dream-picture.” (Nietzsche:1995:5)

“From all quarters of the Ancient World,- to say nothing here of modern, from Rome to Babylon, we can point to the existence Dionysian festivals, types which bear, at best, the same relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who borrowed his name and attributes from the goat, does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every case these festivals centred in extravagant sexual licentiousness, whose waves overwhelmed all family life and its venerable tradition; the most savage overwhelmed all family life and its venerable traditions; the most savage natural instincts were unleashed, including even that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty which has always seemed to me to be the genuine “witches brew”.” (Nietzsche:1995:6)

“In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance- the annihilation of the veil of Maya, Oneness as the soul of the race, and of nature itself. The essence of nature is not to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols; for once the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement. Thereupon the other symbolic powers suddenly press forward, particularly those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony. To grasp this collective release of all the symbolic powers, man must have already attained that height of self-abnegation which wills to express itself symbolically through all these powers: and so the dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is understood only by his peers! With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld him! With an astonishment that was all the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this was actually not so very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his Apollonian consciousness which, like a veil, hid this Dionysian world from his vision.” (Nietzsche:1995:7)

“Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians. That overwhelming dismay in the face of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira enthroned inexorably over all knowledge, the vulture of the great lover of mankind, Prometheus, the terrible fate of the wise Oedipus, the family curse of the Atridae which drove Orestes to matricide: in short, that entire philosophy of the sylvan god, with its mythical exemplars, which caused the downfall of the melancholy Etrsucans- all this was again and again overcome by the Greeks with the aid of the Olympian middle world of art; or at any rate it was veiled and withdrawn from sight. It was out of the direst necessity to live that the Greeks created these gods.

Perhaps we may picture the process to ourselves somewhat as follows: out of the original Titan thearchy of terror the Olympian thearchy of joy gradually evolved through the Apollonian impulse towards beauty, just as roses bud from thorny bushes

How else could this people, so sensitive, so vehement in its desires, so singularly constituted for suffering, how could they have endured existence, if it had not been revealed to them in their gods, surrounded with a higher glory? The same impulse which calls art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing one to a continuation of life, was also the cause of the Olympian world which the Hellenic “will” made use of a transfiguring mirror. …At the Apollonian stage of development, the “will” longs so vehemently for this existence, the Homeric man feels himself so completely at one with it, that lamentation itself becomes a song of praise.

Here we should note that this harmony which is contemplated with such longing by modern man, in fact, this oneness of  man with nature (to express which Schiller introduced the technical term “naïve”), is by no means a simple condition, resulting naturally, and as if inevitably….Where we meet with the “naïve” in art, we recognize the highest effect of the Apollonian culture, which in the first place has always to overthrow some Titanic empire and slay monsters, and which, through its potent dazzling representations and its pleasurable illusions, must have triumphed over a terrible depth of world-contemplation and a most keen sensitivity to suffering. But how seldom do we attain to the naïve- that complete absorption in the beauty of appearance!…

The Homeric “naivete” can be understood only as the complete victory of the Apollonian illusion: an illusion similar to those which Nature so frequently employs to achieve her own ends. The true goal is veiled by a phantasm: and while we stretch out our hands for the latter, Nature attains the former by means of your illusion. In the Greeks the “will” wished to contemplate itself in the transfiguration of genius and the world of art; in order to glorify themselves, its creatures had to feel themselves worthy of glory; they had to behold themselves again in a higher sphere, without this perfect world of contemplation acting as a command or a reproach. Such is the sphere of beauty, in which they saw their mirrored images, the Olympians. With this mirroring of beauty the Hellenic will combated its artistically correlative talent for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering: and, as a monument of its victory, we have Homer, the naïve artist.” (Nietzsche:1995:8-10)

“Now the dream-analogy may throw some light on the problem of the naïve-artist. Let us imagine the dreamer: in the midst of the illusion of the dream-world and without disturbing it, he calls out to himself: “It is a dream, I will dream on.” What must we infer? That he experiences a deep inner joy in dream-contemplation; on the other hand, to be at all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, he must have completely lost sight of the waking reality and its ominous obtrusiveness. Guided by the dream-reading Apollo, we may interpret all these phenomena to ourselves somewhat in this way. Though it is certain that of the two halves of our existence, the waking and the dreaming states, the former appeals to us as infinitely preferable, important, excellent and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which alone is lived: yet in relation to that mysterious substratum of our nature of which we are the phenomena, I should, paradoxical as it may seem, maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dream life.

For the more clearly I perceive in Nature those omnipotent art impulses, and in them an ardent longing for release, for redemption through release, the more I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the Truly-Existent and Primal Unity, eternally suffering and divided against itself, has need of the rapturous vision, the joyful appearance, for its continuous salvation: which appearance we, completely wrapped up in it and composed of it, are compelled to apprehend as the True Non-Being, – i.e. as a perpetual becoming in time, space and causality,- in other words, as empiric reality.

If, for the moment, we do not consider the question of our own “reality”, if we conceive of our empricial existence, and that of the world in general, as a continuously manifested representation of the Primal Unity, we shall then have to look upon the dream as an appearance of appearance, hence as a still higher appeasement of the primordial desire for appearance. And that is why the innermost heart of Nature feels that ineffable joy in the naïve artist and the naïve work of art, which is likewise only “an appearance of appearance, the primitive process of the naïve artist and of Apollonian culture….Apollo, however, again appears to us as the apotheosis of the principum individuationis, in which alone is consummated the perpectually attained goal of the Primal Unity, its redemption through appearance.

With his sublime gestures, he shows us how necessary is the entire world of suffering, that by means of it the individual may be impelled to realize the redeeming vision, and then, sunk in contemplation of it, sit quietly in his tossing barque, amid the waves.

If we at all conceive of it as imperative and mandatory, this apotheosis of individuation knows but one law- the individual, i.e., the delimiting of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense. Apollo, as ethical deity, exacts measure of his disciples, and, that to this end, he requires self-knowledge. And so, side by side with the esthetic necessity for beauty, there occur the demands “know thyself” and “nothing overmuch”; consequently pride and excess are regarded as the truly inimical demons of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as characteristics of the pre-Apollonian age- that of the Titans; and of the extra-Apollonian world- that of the barbarians.” (Nietzsche:1995:10-11)

“And now let us take this artistically limited world, based on appearance and moderation; let us imagine how into it there penetrated, in tones ever more bewitching and alluring, the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian festival; let us remember that in these strains of all of Nature’s excess in joy, sorrow, and knowledge become audible, even in piercing shrieks; and fainlly, let us ask ourselves what significance remains to the psalmodizing artist of Apollo, with his phantom harp-sound, once it is compared with demonic folk-song! The muses of the arts of “appearance” paled before an art which, in its intoxication, spoke the truth. The wisdom of Silenus cried “Woe! Woe!” to the serene. Olympians. The individual, with all his restraint and proportion, succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian state, forgetting the precepts of Apollo. Excess revealed itself as truth. Contradiction, the bliss born of pain, spoke out from the very heart of Nature.

And so, wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Appollonian was checked and destroyed. But, on the other hand, it is equally certain that, wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever. For to me the Doric state and Doric art are explicable only as a permanent citadel of the Apollonian. For an art so defiantly prim, and so encompassed with bulwarks, a training so warlike and rigorous, a political structure so cruel and relentless, could endure for any length of time only by incessant opposition to the titanic-barbaric nature of the Dionysian.

Up to this point we have simply enlarged upon the observation made at the beginning of this essay: that the Dionysian and the Apollonian, in new borths ever following and mutually augmenting one another, controlled the Hellenic genius; that from out the age of “bronze”, with its wars of the Titans and its rigorous folk-philosophy, the Homeric world developed under the sway of the Apollonian impulse to beauty; that this “naïve” splendour was again overwhelmed by the influx of the Dionysian; and that against this new power the Apollonian rose to the austere majesty of the Doric art and the Doric view of the world. If, then, amid the strife of these two hostile principles, the older Hellenic history thus falls into four great periods of art, we are now impelled to inquire after the final goal of these developments and processes, lest perchance we should regard the last-attained period, the period of Doric art, as the climax and aim of these artistic impulses. And here the sublime and celebrated art of Attic tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb presents itself as the common goal of both these tendencies, whose mysterious union, after many and long precursory struggles, found glorious consummation in this child, – at once Antigone and Cassandra.” (Nietzsche:1995:12-13)

“we know the subjective artist only as the poor artist, and throughout the entire range of art we demand specially and first of all the conquest of the Subjective, the release from the ego and the silencing of the individual will and desire; indeed, we find it impossible to believe in any truly artistic production, however insignificant, if it is without objectivity, without pure, detached contemplation. Hence our esthetic must first solve the problem of how the “lyrist” is possible as an artist- he who, according to the experience of all ages, is continually saying “I” and running through the entire chromatic scale of his passions and desires. Compared with Homer, this very Archilocus appals us by his cries of hatred and scorn, by his drunken outbursts of desire. Therefore is not he, who has been called the first subjective artist, essentially the non-artist? But in this case, how explain the reverence which was shown to him- the poet- in very remarkable utterances by the Delphic oracle itself, the centre of “objective” art?

Schiler has thrown some light on the poetic process by a psychological observation, inexplicable to himself, yet apparently valid

…In the first place, as Dionysian artist he has identified himself with the Primal Unity, its pain and contradiction. Assuming that music has been correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world, we may say that he produces the copy of this Primal Unity as music. Now, however, under the Apollonian dream-inspiration, this music reveals itself to him again as a symbolic dream-picture. The inchoate, intangiblereflection of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in appearance, now produces a second mirroring as a specific symbol or example….The Dionysian musician is, without any images, himself pure primordial pain and its primordial reechoing. The lyric genius is conscious of a world of pictures and symbols- growing out of his state of mystical self-abnegation and oneness. This state has a colouring, a causality and a velocity quite different from that of the world of the plastic artist and the epic poet. For the latter lives in these pictures, and only in them, with joyful satisfaction. He never grows tired of contemplating lovingly even their minutest traits. Even the picture of the angry Achilles is only a picture to him, whose angry expression he enjoys with the dream-joy in appearance. Thus, by this mirror of appearance, he is protected against being united and blended with his figures. In direct contrast to this, the pictures of the lyrist are nothing but his very self and, a it were, only different projections of himself, by force of which he, as the moving centre of this world, may say “I”: only of course this self is not the same as that of the waking, empirically real man, but the only truly existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things, and with the help of whose images, the lyric genius can penetrate to this very basis.

Now let us suppose that among these images he also beholds himself as non-genius, i.e., his subject, the whole throng of subjective passions and agitations directed to a definite object which appears real to him. It may now seem as if the lyric genius and the allied non-genius were one, as if the former had of its own accord spoken that little word “I”. But this identity is but superficial and it will no longer be able to lead us astray, as it certainly led astray those who designated the lyrist as the subjective poet. …

Schopenhauer, who did not conceal from himself the difficulty the lyrist presents in the philosophical contemplation of art, though he had found a solution, with which, however, I am not in entire accord…

“It is subject of will, i.e. his own volition, which the consciousness of the singer feels; often as a released and satisfied desire (joy), but still oftener as a restricted desire (grief), always as an emotion, a passion, a moved frame of mind. Besides this, however, and along with it, by the sight of surrounding nature, the singer becomes unconscious of himself as the subject or pure will-less knowing, whose unbroken, blissful peace now appears, in contrast to the stress of desire, which is always restricted and always needy. The feeling of this contrast, this alternation, is really what the lyric as a whole expresses and what principally constitutes the lyrical state of mind. In it pure knowing comes to us as it were to deliver us from desire and its strain; we follow, but only for an instant; desire, the remembrance of our own personal ends, tears us anew from peaceful contemplation; yet ever again in the next beautiful surrounding in which the pure will-less knowledge presents itself to us, allures us away from desire. Therefore, in the lyric and the lyrical mood, desire (the personal interest of the ends) and pure perception of the surrounding presented are wonderfully mingled with each other; connections between them are sought for and imagined; the subjective disposition, the affection of the will, imparts its own hue to the perceived surrounding, and conversely, the surroundings communicate the reflex of their colour to the will. The true lyric is the expression of the whole of this mingled and divided state of mind.”…

But it is our contention, on the contrary, that this antithesis between the subjective and the objective is especially irrelevant in esthetics, since the subject, the desiring individual furthering his own egoistic ends, can be conceived of only as the antagonist, not already been released from his individual will, and has become as it were the medium through which the one truly existent Subject celebrates his release in appearance. For, above all, to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing must be clear to us.  The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of this art-world. …Only in so far as the genius in the act of artistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he catch sight of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a marvellous manner, like the weird picture of the fairy-tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself; he is now at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.” (Nietzsche:1995:13-17)

“In connection with Archilochus, scholarly research has discovered that he introduced the folk-song into literature, and, on account of this, deserved, according to the general estimate of the Greeks, his unique position beside Homer, But what is the folk-song in contrast to the wholly Apollonian epos? What else but the perpetuum vestigium of a union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian?…

First of all, however, we must conceive the folk-song as the musical mirror of the world, as the original melody, now seeking for itself a parallel dream-phenomenon and expressing it in poetry. Melody is therefore primary and universal, and so may admit of several objectifications in several texts. Likewise, in the naïve estimation of the people, it is regarded as by far the more important and essential element. Melody generates the poem out of itself by a continuous process….

Accordingly, we observe that in the poetry of the folk-song, language is strained to its utmost that it may imitate music; and hence with Archilochus begins a new world of poetry, which is basically opposed to the Homeric

And in saying this we have indicated the only possible relation between poetry and music, between word and tone: the word, the picture, the concept here seeks an expression analogous to music and now feels in itself the power of music. In this sense we may discriminate between two main currents in the history of the language of the Greek people, according to whether their language imitated the world of image and phenomenon, or the world of music. One need only reflect more deeply on the linguistic difference with regard to colour, syntactical structure, and vocabulary in Homer and Pindar, in order to understand the significance of this contrast; indeed, it becomes palpably clear that in the period between Homer and Pindar there must have sounded out the orgiastic flute tones of Olympus, which, even in Aristotle’s time, when music was infinitely more developed, transported people to drunken ecstasy, and which, in their primitive state of development, undoubtedly incited to imitation all the poetic means of expression of contemporaneous man….

If, therefore, we may regard lyric poetry as the fulguration of music in images and concepts, we should now ask: “In what form does music appear in the mirror of symbolism and conception” It appears as will, taking the term in Schopenhauer’s sense, i.e. as the antithesis of the esthetic, purely contemplative, and passive frame of mind…This is the phenomenon of the lyrist: as Apollonian genius he interprets music through the image of the will, while he himself, completely released from the desire of the will, is the pure, undimmed eye of day.

Our whole discussion insists that lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music just as music itself in its absolute sovereignty does not need the picture and the concept, but merely endures them as accompaniments. The poems of the lyrist can express nothing which did not already lie hidden in the vast universality and absoluteness of the music which compelled him to figurative speech. Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the Primal Unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and before all phenomena. Rather are all phenomena, compared with it, merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never, by any means, disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while the deepest significance of the latter cannot with all the eloquence of lyric poetry be brought one step nearer to us.” (Nietzsche:1995:17-20)

“This tradition tells us quite unequivocally, that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing but chorus; and hence we feel it our duty to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as being the real protodrama. We shall not let ourselves be at all satisfied with that current art-lingo which makes the chorus the “ideal spectator”, or has it represent the people in contrast to the aristocratic elements of the scene. This latter explanation has a sublime sound to many a politician. It insists that the immutable moral law was embodied by the democratic Athenians in the popular chorus, which always wins out over the passionate excesses and extravagances of kings. This theory may be ever so forcibly suggested by one of Aristotle’s observations; still, it has no influence on the original formation of tragedy, inasmuch as the entire antitheses of king and people, and, in general, the whole politico-social sphere, is excluded from the purely religious origins of tragedy. With this in mind, and remembering the well-known classical form of the chorus in Aeschylus and Sophocles, we should even deem it blasphemy to speak here of the anticipation of a “constitutional popular representation.” From this blasphemy, however, others have not shrunk. The ancient governments knew of no constitutional representation of the people in praxi, and it is to be hoped that they did not “anticipate” it in their tragedy either….

For hitherto we had always believed that the true spectator, whoever he may be, must always remain conscious that he was viewing a work of art, and not an empirical reality. But the tragic chorus of the Greeks is forced to recognize real beings in the figures of the drama. The chorus if the Oceanides really believes that it sees before it the Titan Prometheus, and considers itself as real as the god of the scene.” (Nietzsche:1995:20-21)

“Concerning this latter, Richard Wagner says that it is neutralized by music just as lamplight is neutralized by the light of day. Similarly, I believe, the Greek man of culture felt himself neutralized in the presence of the satiric chorus: and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society, and, in general, the gulfs leading back to the very heart of nature….with objective clarity as the satyr chorus, the chorus of natural beings, who as it were live ineradicably behind every civilization, and who, despite the ceaseless change of generations and the history of nations, remain the same to all eternity.

With this chorus the deep-minded Hellene consoles himself, he who is so singularly constituted for the most sensitive and grievous suffering, he who with a piercing glance has perpetuated into the very heart of the terrible destructive processes of so-called universal history, as also into the cruelty of nature, and who is in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art life saves him- for herself….

Not reflection, no! – true knowledge, insight into the terrible truth, preponderate over all motives inciting to action, in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man

There is no longer any use in comfort; his longing goes beyond a world after death, beyond the gods themselves; existence with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond is abjured. In the consciousness of the truth once perceived, man now sees everywhere only the terror or the absurdity of existence; now he can understand the symbolism of Ophelia’s fate; now he can realize the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus: and he is filled with loathing.

But at this juncture, when the will is most imperilled, art approaches, as a redeeming and healing enchantress; she alone may transform these horrible reflections on the terror and absurdity of existence into representations with which man may live. These are the representation of the sublime as the artistic conquest of the awful, and of the comic as the artistic release from the nausea of the absurd.” (Nietzsche:1995:22-23)

“The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of our more recent time, is the offspring of a longing for the Primitive and the Natural; but how firmly and fearlessly the Greek embraced the man of the woods, and how timorously and mawkishly modern man dallied with the flattering picture of a sentimental, flute-playing, soft-mannered impregnable barriers to culture- that is what the Greek saw in his satyr, which nevertheless was not on this account to be confused with the primitive cave-man. On the contrary, the satyr was the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and intensest emotions, the ecstatic reveller enraptured by the proximity of his god, the sympathetic companion in whom is repeated the suffering of the god, wisdom’s harbinger speaking from the very heart of nature, emblem of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek was wont to contemplate with reverence and wonder….Here the illusion of culture was cast off from the archetype of man; here the true man, the bearded satyr, revealed himself, shouting joyfully to his god.

Face to face with him the man of culture shrank to a specious caricature….the satyr chorus- portrays existence more truthfully, more essentially, more perfectly than the cultured man who ordinarily considers himself as the sole reality. The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, like some chimera of the poetic imagination; it seeks to be the very opposite, the unvarnished  expression of truth, and for this very reason it must reject the false finery of that supposed reality of the cultured man. The contrast between this intrinsic truth of nature and the falsehood of culture, which poses as the only reality, is similar to that existing between the eternal heart of things, the thing in itself, and the collective world of phenomena. And just as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of this kernel of existence, and to the perpetual dissolution of phenomena, so the symbolism of the satyr chorus already expresses figuratively this primal relation between the thing in itself and the phenomenon. The idyllic shepherd of the modern man is but a copy of the sum of the culture- illusions which he calls nature; the Dionysian Greek desires truth and nature in their most potent form- and so he sees himself metamorphosed into the satyr.

The reveling throng of the votaries of Dionysus rejoice under the influence of such moods and perceptions, the power of which transforms them before their own eyes, so that they imagine they behold  themselves as recreated genii of nature, as satyrs. The latter constitution of the tragic chorus necessitated a separation of the Dionysian spectators from the enchanted Dionysians….Schlegel’s observation in this sense reveals a deeper significance. The chorus is the “ideal spectator” in so far as it is the only beholder, the beholder of the visionary world of the scene. A public of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theatres the terraced structure of the theatron rising in concentric arcs enabled every one to overlook, in an actual sense, the entire world of culture around him, and in an over-abundance of contemplation to imagine himself one of the chorus. According to this view, then, we may call the chorus in its primitive stage in early tragedy a self-mirroring of the Dionysian man: a phenomenon which is most clearly exemplified by the process of the actor, who, if he be truly gifted, sees hovering almost tangibly before his eyes the character he is to represent. The satyr chorus is above all a vision of the Dionysian throng, just as the world of the stage is, in turn, a vision of the satyr chorus. The power of this vision is great enough to render the eye dull and insensible to the impression of “reality”, to the presence of the cultured men occupying the tiers of seats on every side….

For the true poet a metaphor is not a figure of speech, but a vicarious image which actually hovers before him in place of a concept…. At bottom the esthetic phenomenon is simple: if a man merely has the faculty of seeing perpetual vitality around him, of living continually surrounded by hosts of spirits, he will be a poet. If he but feels the impulse to transform himself and to speak from out the bodies and souls of others, he will be a dramatist.

The Dionysian excitement is able to inspire a whole mass of men with this artistic faculty of seeing themselves surrounded by such a host of spirits with whom they know themselves to be essentially one. This process of the tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see yourself transformed before your own eyes, and then to act as if you had actually taken possession of another body and another character. This process stands at the beginning of the development of the drama…. Here we actually have the individual surrendering himself by the fact of his entrance into an alien nature. Moreover, this phenomenon is epidemic in its manifestation: a whole throng experiences this metamorphosis. Hence it is that the dithyramb is essentially different from every other variety of choric song. The virgins, who laurel branches in hand, solemnly make their way to the temple of Apollo singing a processional hymn, remain what they are and retain their civic names: but the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed beings, whose civic past and social position are totally forgotten.

They have become the timeless servants of their god, living apart from all the life of the community

Every other kind of choric lyric of the Hellenes is nothing but an enormous intensification of the Apollonian unit-singer: while in the dithyramb we have a community of unconscious actors, who mutually regard themselves as transformed among one another….

[A]s the objectification of a Dionysian state, it represents not the Apollonain redemption in appearance, but, conversely, the dissolution of the individual and his unification with primordial existence. And so the drama becomes the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian perceptions and influences, and therefore separates itself by a tremendous gap from the epic. …

We have at last realized that the scene, together with the action, was fundamentally and originally thought of only as a vision, that the only reality is just the chorus, which of itself generates the vision and celebrates it with the entire symbolism of dancing, music, and speech. In this vision, this chorus beholds its lord and master Dionysus, and so it is forever a chorus that serves; it sees how he, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and therefore does not itself act.” (Nietzsche:1995:24-27)

“In accordance with this view, and with tradition, Dionysus, the proper stage-hero and focus of vision, is in the remotest period of tragedy not at first actually present, but is only so imagined, which means that tragedy is originally only “chorus” and not “drama”. Later on the attempt is made to present the god as real and to display the visionary figure together with its aura of splendour before the eyes of all; here the “drama,” in the narrow sense of the term, begins. The dithyrambic chorus is now assigned the task of exciting the minds of the audience to such a pitch of Dionysian frenzy, that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not see in him an unshapely man wearing a mask, but they see a visionary figure, born as it were of their own ecstasy… Involuntarily, he transferred the whole image of the god, fluttering magically before his soul, to this masked figure and resolved its reality as it were into a phantasmal unreality. This is the Apollonian dream-state, in which the world of day is veiled, and a new world, clearer, more intelligible, more vivid and yet more shadowy than the old, is, by a perpetual transformation, born and reborn before our eyes.” (Nietzsche:1995:28)

“Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, appears simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is a reflection of the Hellene, whose nature reveals itself in the dance, because in the dance while the greatest energy is merely potential, it nevertheless betrays itself in the flexibility and exuberance of movement. The language of the Sophoclean heroes, for instance, surprises us so much by its Apollonian precision and clarity, that we at once think we see into the innermost recesses of their being, not a little astounded that the way thereto is so short. But let us, for the moment, disregard the character of the hero which rises to the surface and grows visible- and which at bottom is nothing but the light-picture cast on a dark wall, that is, appearance through and though. Instead, let us enter into the myth which is projected in these bright mirrorings. We shall suddenly experience a phenomenon which has an inverse relation to one familiar in optics.

When, after trying hard to look straight at the sun, we turn away blinded, we have dark-coloured spots before our eyes as restoratives, so to speak; while, reversing the colours, those light-picture phenomena of the Sophoclean hero,- in short, the Apollonian of the mask, – are the inevitable consequences of a glance into the secret and terrible things of nature. They are shining spots intended to heal the eye which dire night has seared. Only in this sense can we hope to grasp the true meaning of the serious and significant idea of “Greek cheerfulness”; while no matter where we turn at the present time we encounter the false notion that this cheerfulness results from a state of unendangered comfort…

In the Oedipus at Colonus we find this same cheerfulness, only infinitely transfigured. In contrast to the aged king, burdened with an excess of misery, whose relation to all that befalls him is solely that of a sufferer, we have here a supramundane cheerfulness, descending from a divine sphere and making us feel that in his purely passive attitude the hero achieves his highest activity, whose influence extends far beyond his life, while his earlier conscious thought and striving led him only to passivity. Thus, the legal knot of the Oedipus fable, which to mortal eyes appears impossibly complicated, is slowly unravelled- and at this divine counterpart  of dialectic we are filled with a profound human joy. If this explanation does justice to the poet, it may still be asked whether the content of the myth is thereby exhausted; and here it becomes evident that the entire conception of the poet is nothing but the light-picture which, after our glance into the abyss, healing nature holds up to our eyes. Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of his mother, solver of the riddle of the Sphinx! What is the significance of the mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny? There is, especially in Persia, a primitive popular belief that a wise Magian can be born only of incest.

With the riddle-solving and mother-marrying Oedipus in mind, we must immediately interpret this to the effect that wherever by some prophetic and magical power the boundary of the present and future, the inflexible law of individuation and, in general, the intrinsic spell of nature, are broken, an extraordinary counter-naturalness- in this case, incest- must have preceded as a cause; for how else could one force nature to surrender her secrets but by victoriously opposing her by means of the Unnatural? This is the secret which I see involved in the awful triad of the destiny of Oedipus; the very man who solves the riddle of nature- that doubly-constituted Sphinx- must also, as the murderer of his father and husband of his mother, break the holiest laws of nature. Indeed, it seems as if the myth were trying to whisper into our ears the fact that wisdom, especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination; that who-ever, through his own knowledge, plunges nature into an abyss of annihilation, must also expect to experience the dissolution of nature in himself. “The sharpness of wisdom turns upon the sage: wisdom is a crime against nature”: such are the terrible expressions the myth cries out to us. But the Hellenic poet, like a sunbeam, touches the sublime and terrible. Memnonian statue of the myth, and suddenly its begins to sound- in Sophoclean melodies.

Let me now contrast the glory of passivity with the glory of activity which illuminates the Prometheus of Aeschylus. What Aeschylus the thinker had to tell us here, but which as a poet he only allows us to surmise through his symbolic picture, the youthful Goethe has known how to reveal to us in the bold words of his Prometheus:-

“Here I sit, forming mankind In my own image, A race resembling me- To sorrow, to weep, to taste, to have pleasure, And to have no need of thee, Even as I!”

Man, rising to the level of the Titans, acquires his culture by himself, and compels the gods to ally themselves with him, because in his self-sufficient wisdom he holds in his hands their existence and their limitations. The most wonderful thing, however, in this Prometheus fable, which according to its fundamental conception is an essential hymn of impiety, is the profound Aeschylean yearning for justice. The infinite tragedy of the bold “individual” on the one hand, and the divine necessity and premonition of a twilight of the gods on the other, the force in these two worlds of suffering operating to produce reconciliation, metaphysical oneness- all this strongly suggests the central and main position of the Aeschylean view of the world, which sees Moira as eternal justice enthroned over gods and men. …The Titanic artist discovered in himself a bold confidence in his ability to create men and at least destroy the gods. He might do this by his superior wisdom, for which, to be sure, he had to atone by eternal suffering.

The splendid “I can” of the great genius, bought cheaply even at the price of eternal suffering, the stern pride of the artist: this is the essence and soul of Aeschylean poetry, while Sophocles in his Oedipus strikes up as prelude the triumphal chant of the saint. But even this interpretation which Aeschylus has given to the myth does not reveal the astounding depth of its terror. As a matter of fact, the artist’s delight in unfolding, the gayety of artistic creation bidding defiance to all calamity, is actually a shining stellar and nebular image reflected in a black sea of sadness. The story of Prometheus is an original possession of the entire Aryan race, and is documentary evidence of its capacity for the profoundly tragic. Indeed, it is not entirely improbable that this myth has the same characteristic significance for the Aryan genius that the myth of the fall of man has for the Semitic, and that the two are related like brother and sister.

The presupposition of the Promethean myth is the transcendent value which a naïve humanity attaches to fire as the true palladium of every rising culture. That man, however, should not receive this fire only as a gift from heaven, in the form of the igniting lightning or the warming sunshine, but should, on the contrary, be able to control it at will- this appeared to the reflective primitive man as sacrilege, as robbery of the divine nature. And thus the first philosophical problem at once causes a painful, irrenconcilable antagonism between man and God, and puts as it were a mass of rock at the gate of every culture. The best and highest that men can acquire they must obtain by a crime, and then they must in turn endure its consequences, namely, the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended divinities must requite the nobly aspiring race of man. It is a bitter thought, which, by the dignity it confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity, deception, weakness in the face of temptation, wantonness- in short, a whole series of pre-eminently feminine passions, – were regarded as the origin of evil.

What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the discovery of the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy in the justification of human evil- of human guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby. The pain implicit in the very structure of things- which the contemplative Aryan is not disposed to explain away- the antagonism in the heart of the world, manifests itself to him as a medley of different worlds, for instance, a Divine and a human world, both of which are in the right individually, but which, because they exist separately side by side, must suffer for that very individuation. In the heroic effort towards universality made by the individual, in his attempt to penetrate beyond the bounds of individuation and become himself the one world-being, he experiences in himself the primordial contradiction concealed in the essence of things, that is, he trespasses and he suffers. Accordingly crime is understood by the Aryans to be masculine, sin by the Semites to be feminine; just as the original crime is committed by man, the original sin by woman….

He who understands this innermost core of the Prometheus myth- namely, the necessity for crime imposed on the titanically striving individual- will at once feel the un-Apollonian element in this pessimistic representation. For Apollo seeks to calm individual beings precisely by drawing boundary lines between them, and by again and again, with his requirements of self-knowledge and self-control, recalling these bounds to us as the holiest laws of the universe…. The suddenly swelling Dionysian tide then takes the separate little wave-mountains of individuals on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, does with the earth. This Titanic impulse, to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and on broad shoulders to bear them higher and higher, farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common.” (Nietzsche:1995:29-33)

“The tradition is undisputed that Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for a long time the only stage-hero was simply Dionysus himself. With equal confidence, however, we can assert that, until Euripides, Dionysus never once ceased to be the tragic hero; that in fact all the celebrated figures of the Greek Stage- Prometheus, Oedipus, etc.- are but masks of this original hero, Dionysus. There is godhead behind all these masks; and that is the one essential cause of the typical “ideality”, so often wondered at, of these celebrated characters. I know not who it was maintained that all individuals as such are comic and consequently untragic…

Using Plato’s terms we should have to speak of the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage somewhat as follows: the one truly real Dionysus appears in a variety of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero and entangled, as it were, in the net of the individual will….the hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, the god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a boy he was torn to pieces by the Titans and has been worshipped in this state as Zagreus: whereby is intimated that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we are therefore to regard the state of individuation as the origin and prime cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself. From the smile of this Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man. …This view of things already provides us with all the elements of a profound and pessimistic contemplation of the world, together with the mystery doctrine of tragedy: the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the prime cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the bonds of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness….

Dionysian truth takes over the entire domain of myth as the symbolism of its knowledge. This is makes known partly in the public cult of tragedy and partly in the secret celebration of the dramatic mysteries, but always in the old mythical garb. What power was it that freed Prometheus from his vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It is the Heracleian power of music: which, having reached its highest manifestation in tragedy, can invest myths with a new and most profound significance. This we have already characterized as the most powerful function of music. For it is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims: and the Greeks were already fairly on the way to restamp the whole of their mythical juvenile dream sagaciously and arbitrarily into a historico-pragmatical juvenile history.

For this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: when under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; when one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their natural vitality and growth; when, accordingly, the feeling for myth perishes, and its place it taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. This dying myth was now seized by the new-born genius of Dionysian music; and in these hands it flourished yet again, with colours such as it had never yet displayed, with a fragrance that awakened a longing anticipation of a metaphysical world. After this final effulgence it collapses, its leaves wither, and soon the mocking Lucians of antiquity catch at the discoloured and faded flowers carried away by the four winds. Through tragedy the myth attains its most vital content, its most expressive form; it rises once more like a wounded hero, and its whole excess of strength, together with the philosophic calm of the dying, burns in its eyes with a last powerful gleam.

What didst thou mean, O impious Euripides, in seeking once more to subdue this dying one to your service?

Under thy ruthless hands it died: and then thou madest use of counterfeit, masked myth, which like the ape of Heracles could but trick itself out in the old finery. And as myth died in thy hands, so too died the genius of music; though thou didn’t greedily plunder all the gardens of music- thou didst attain but a counterfeit, masked music. And as thou hast forsaken Dionysus, Apollo hath also forsaken thee” (Nietzsche:1995:34-6)

“Greek tragedy met an end different from that of her older sister arts: she died by suicide, in consequence of an irreconcilable conflict. Accordingly she died tragically, while all the others passed away calmly and beautifully at a ripe old age. …

And when after this death a new Art blossomed forth which revered tragedy as her ancestress and mistress, it was observed with horror that she did indeed bear the features of her mother, but that they were the very features the latter had exhibited in her long death-struggle. It was Euripides who fought this death-struggle of tragedy; the later art is known as the New Attic Comedy. In it the degenerate form of tragedy lived on as a monument of its painful and violent death.

This connection helps to explain the passionate attachment that the poets of the New Comedy felt for Euripides….Through him the average man forced his way from the spectators’ benches on to the stage itself; the mirror in which formerly only grand and bold traits were represented now showed the painful fidelity that conscientiously reproduces even the abortive outlines of nature. Odysseus, the typical Hellene of the older art, now sank, in the hands of the new poets, to the figure of the Graeculus, who, as the good-naturedly cunning house-slave, henceforth occupies the centre of dramatic interest. What Euripides claims credit for in Aristophanes’ Frogs, namely, that his household medicines have freed tragic art from its pompous corpulency, is apparent above all in his tragic heroes. The spectator now actually saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and rejoiced that he could talk so well. But this joy was not all: you could even learn of Euripides how to speak. He prides himself upon this in his contest with Aeschylus: from him the people had learned how to observe, debate, and draw conclusions according to the rules of art and with the cleverest sophistries. In general, through this revolution of the popular speech, he had made the New Comedy possible. For henceforth it was no longer a secret, how- and with what wise maxims- the commonplace was to express itself on the stage. Civic mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, was now given a voice, while heretofore the demigod in tragedy and the drunken satyr, or demiman, in comedy, had determined the character of the language. And so the Aristophanean Euripides prides himself on having portrayed the common, familiar, everyday life and activities of the people, about which all are qualified to pass judgement. If now the entire populace philosophizes, manages land and goods and conducts law-suits with unheard-of circumspection, the glory is all his, together with the splendid results of the wisdom with which he has inoculated the rabble….

As soon as this chorus was trained to sing in the Euripidean key, there arose that drama which resembles a game of chess- the New Comedy, with its perpetual triumphs of cunning and artfulness. But Euripides- the chorus-master- was still praised continually: indeed, people would have killed themselves in order to learn still more from him, if they had not known that tragic poets were quite as dead as tragedy. But with that death the Hellene had given up his belief in immortality; not only his belief in an ideal past, but also his belief in an ideal future. The words of the well-known epitaph, “frivolous and capricious as an old man,” also suit senile Hellenism. The passing moment, wit, levity, and caprice are its highest deities; the fifth estate, that of the slaves, now comes into power, at least in sentiment: and if we may still speak at all of “Greek cheerfulness”, it is the cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of consequence to be responsible for, nothing great to strive for, and who cannot value anything in the past or future higher than the present.” (Nietzsche:1995:36-8)

“let us pause here a moment in order to recall to our minds our own previously described impression of the discordant and incommensurable elements in the genius of Aeschylean tragedy. Let us think of our own surprise at the chorus and the tragic hero of that tragedy, neither of which we could reconcile with our own customs any more than with tradition- till we rediscovered this duality itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

To separate this primitive, and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to construct a new and purified form on the basis of an un-Dionysian art, morality, and conception of the world- this is the tendency of Euripides as it is now clearly revealed to us….

Dionysus had already been scared from the tragic stage; he had been scared by a demonic power speaking through Euripides. For even Euripides was, in a sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo. It was an altogether new-born demon. And it was called Socrates. Thus we have a new antithesis- the Dionysian and the Socratic; and on that antithesis the art of Greek tragedy was wrecked. …

Let us now examine this Socratic tendency with which Euripides combated and vanquished Aeschylean tragedy….

Euripides is that actor whose heart beats, whose hair stands on end; as Socratic thinker the designs the plan, as passionate actor he executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the execution is he a pure artist. And so the Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning. It is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of the epos, while, on the other hand, it has alienated itself as much as possible from Dionysian elements. Now, in order to develop at all, it requires new stimulants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of the two unique art-impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These stimulants are cool, paradoxical thoughts, replacing Apollonian intuitions- and fiery passions, replacing Dionysian ecstasies; and, it may be added, thoughts and passions copied very realistically and in no sense suffused with the atmosphere of art.

Accordingly, having perceived this much, that Euripides did not succeed in establishing the drama exclusively on an Apollonian basis, but rather that his un-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a naturalistic and inartistic tendency, we should now be able to get a nearer view of the character of esthetic Socratism, whose supreme law reads about as follows: “To be beautiful everything must be intelligible,” as the counterpart to the Socratic identity: “Knowledge is virtue.” With this canon in his hands, Euripides measures all the separate elements of the drama- language, characters, dramaturgic structure, and choric music- and corrects them according to his principle. The poetic deficiency and degeneration, which we are so often wont to impute to Euripides in comparison with Sophocles, is for the most part the product of this penetrating critical process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidean prologue may serve as an example of the results of this rationalistic method.

Nothing could be more antithetical to the technique of our own stage than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For a single person to appear at the outset of the play telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what has happened so far, even what will happen in the course of the play, would be condemned by a modern playwright as a wilful, inexcusable abandonment of the effect of a suspense. We know everything that is going to happen; who cares to wait till it actually does happen?- considering, moreover, that here we do not by any means have the exciting relation of a prophetic dream to a reality taking place later on. But Euripides’ speculations took a different turn.

The effect of tragedy never depended on epic suspense, on a fascinating uncertainty as to what is to happen now and afterwards: but rather on the great rhetorical-lyric scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the chief hero swelled to a broad and mighty stream. Everything was directed toward pathos, not action: and whatever was not directed toward pathos was considered objectionable. But what interferes most with the hearer’s pleasurable satisfaction in such scenes is a missing link, a gap in the texture of the previous history. So long as the spectator has to divine the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of views and inclinations, his complete absorption in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters is impossible, as is likewise breathless fellow-feeling and fellow-fearing….

Accordingly he put the prologue even before the exposition, and placed it in the mouth of a person who could be trusted: some deity had often as it were to guarantee the particulars of the tragedy to the public, to remove every doubt as to the reality of the myth, just as did Descartes who could prove the reality of the empirical world only by appealing to the truthfulness of God and His inability to utter falsehood. Euripides makes use of this same divine truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to reassure the public as to the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between this epic retrospect and epic prospect, is place the dramatico-lyric present, the “drama” as such.

Thus Euripides as a poet is essentially an echo of his own conscious knowledge; and it is precisely on this account that he occupies such a notable position in the history of Greek art. With reference to his critical-productive activity, he must often have felt that he ought to make objective in drama the words at the beginning of the essay of Anaxagoras: “In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came the understanding and created order.” Anaxagoras with his “nous” is said to have appeared among philosophers as the only sober person amid a crowd of drunken ones. Euripides may also have conceived his relation to the other tragic poets under a similar figure. As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe, the nous, remained excluded from artistic activity, things were all mixed together in a primeval chaos.

This was what Euripides was obliged to think; and so, as the first “sober” one among them, he was bound to condemn the “drunken” poets. Sophocles said of Aeschylus that he did what was right, though he did it unconsciously. This would surely never have been the opinion of Euripides. He would have said, on the contrary, that Aeschylus, because he created unconsciously, did what was wrong. Similarly the divine Plato for the most part speaks but ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, in so far as it is not conscious insight, and places it on a part with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter. The intimation is that the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and bereft of reason. Like Plato, Euripides undertook to show to the world the reverse of the “unintelligent” poet; his esthetic principle that “to be beautiful everything must be known” is, as I have said, the parallel to the Socratic, “to be good everything must be known.”” (Nietzsche:1995:41-5)

“That Socrates was closely related to the tendency of Euripides did not escape the notice of contemporaneous antiquity. The most eloquent expression of this felicitous insight was the story current in Athens that Socrates used to help Euripides in poetizing. Whenever an occasion arose to enumerate the popular agitators of the day, the adherents of the “good old times” would mention both names in the same breath. To the influence of Socrates and Euripides they attributed the fact that the old Marathonian stalwart capacity of body and soul was being sacrificed more and more to a dubious enlightenment that involve the progressive degeneration of the physical and mental powers. … Most famous of all, however, is the juxtaposition of the two names by the Delphic oracle, which designated Socrates as the wisest of men, but at the same time decided that the second prize in the contest of wisdom belonged to Euripides.” 45-6)

“The most decisive word, however, for this new and unprecedented value set upon knowledge and insight was spoken by Socrates when he found that he was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing; for in his critical peregrinations through Athens, he called on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, and everywhere he discovered the conceit of knowledge. To his astonishment he perceived that all these celebrities were without a proper and sure insight, even with regard to their own professions, and that they practiced them only by instinct. “Only by instinct”: with this phrase we touch upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency. With it Socratism condemns existing art as well as existing ethics. Wherever Socratism turns its searching eyes it sees lack of insight, it sees the force of illusion; and from this lack it infers the essential perversity and objectionableness of existing conditions. From this point onwards, Socrates conceives it as his duty to correct existence; and, with an air of irreverence and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether different culture, art, and morality, he enters single-handed into a world, to touch whose very hem would give us the greatest happiness. …

We are offered a key to the character of Socrates by the wonderful phenomenon which he calls his daemon

In exceptional circumstances, when his gigantic intellect begins to fail him, he receives a secure support in the utterances of a divine voice which manifests itself at such moments. This voice, whenever it comes, always dissuades. In this utterly abnormal nature instinctive wisdom only appears in order to hinder here and there the progress of conscious perception. Whereas in all productive men it is instinct that is the creatively affirmative force, and consciousness that acts critically and dissuasively; with Socrates it is instinct that becomes critic, and consciousness that becomes creator- a perfect monstrosity per defectum! And we do indeed observe here a monstrous defectus of all mystical aptitude so that Socrates mught be called the typical non-mystic, in whom, through a superfoetation, the logical nature is developed, to the same excessive degree as instinctive wisdom is developed in the mystic. Unlike his instinct, however, the logic of Socrates was absolutely prevented from turning against itself; in its unimpeded flow it manifests a native power such as we meet with, to our awe and surprise, only among the very greatest instinctive forces. Any one who has experienced even a breath of the divine naivete and security of the Socratic way of life in the Platonic writings, will also feel that the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that it must be viewed through Socrates as through a shadow. And that he himself had a premonition of this relationship is apparent from the dignified seriousness with which he everywhere, even before his judges, insists on his divine calling. It is really as impossible to refute him here as to approve of his instinct-disintegrating influence. …

He met his death with the calmness with which, according to Plato’s description, he, last of the revelers, leaves the Symposium at dawn to begin a new day; while his sleepy fellow-banqueters remain behind on the couches and the floor, to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist. The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths- an ideal they had never yet beheld,- and above all, the typical Hellene youth, Plato, prostrated himself before this scene with all the burning devotion of his visionary soul.” (Nietzsche:1995:46-48)

“If tragedy had absorbed into itself all the earlier varieties of art, the same might also be said in an unusual sense of the Platonic dialogue, which, a mixture of all the then existent forms and styles, hovers midway between narrative, lyric and drama, between prose and poetry, and so had also  broken loose froom the older strict law of unity of linguistic form. This tendency was carried still farther by the Cynic writers, who in the greatest stylistic medley, oscillating between prose and metrical forms, realized also the literary picture of the “raving Socrates” whom they were wont to represent in real life. The Platonic dialogue was a sort of boat in which the shipwrecked ancient poetry was rescued with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly submissive to the single pilot, Socrates, they now launched forth into a new world, which never tired of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession. The fact is that Plato has given to all posterity the prototype of a new art-form, the prototype of the novel: which may be described as an infinitely developed Aesop fable, in which poetry holds the same rank with reference to dialectic philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries with reference to theology: that is to say, the rank of ancilla. This was the new position into which Plato, under the pressure of the daemon-inspired Socrates, forced poetry.

Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectic. The Apollonian tendency has withdrawn into the shell of logical schematism; just as we noticed something analogous in the case of Euripides (and moreover a transformation of the Dionysian into the naturalistic emotion). Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who must defend his actions with arguments and counter-arguments, and who thereby so often incurs the danger of forfeiting our tragic pity; for who could mistake the optimistic element in the essence of dialectics, which celebrates a triumph with every conclusion, and can breathe only in cool clearness and consciousness: the optimistic element, which, having once forced its way into tragedy must gradually pass its Dionysian bounds, and necessarily impel it to self-destruction- even to the death-leap into the bourgeois drama.

Let us but realize the consequences of the Socratic maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy.” In these three fundamental forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For the virtuous hero must now be a dialectician; there must now be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, between belief and morality. The transcendental justice of Aeschylus is now degraded to the superficial and audacious principle of “Poetic Justice” with its customary deus ex machina.

In the light of this new Socratic-optimistic stage-world, what becomes of the chorus, and, in general, of the entire Dionyso-musical substratum of tragedy?

The chorus is something accidental, a readily dispensed-with vestige of the origin of tragedy; while, as a matter of fact, we have seen that the chorus can be understood only as the cause of tragedy, and of the tragic in general. … This alteration in the position of the chorus, which Sophocles at any rate recommended by his practice, and, according to tradition, even by a treatise, is the first step towards its destruction, the phases of which follow one another with alarming rapidity in Euripides, Agathon, and the New Comedy.  Optimistic dialectic drives music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy…

For that despotic logician had now and then with respect to art the feeling of a gap, a void, a feeling of misgiving, of a possibly neglected duty. As he tells his friends in prison, there often came to him one and the same dream-apparition, which kept constantly repeating to him: “Socrates, practice music.” Up to his very last days he comfort himself with the statement that his philosophizing is the highest form of art; he finds it hard to believe that a deity should remind him of the “common, popular music.” Finally, when in prison and in order that he may thoroughly unburden his conscience, he consents to practice also this music for which he has but little respect. …The voice of the Socratic dream-vision is the only sign of doubt as “what is not intelligible to me is not therefore unintelligible? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is shut out? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement to science?”” (Nietzsche:1995:49-51)

“With reference to these last weighty questions we must now explain how the influence of Socrates (extending to the present moment, indeed, to all futurity) has spread over posterity like an ever-increasing shadow in the evening sun, and how this influence again and again involves a regeneration of art– yea, of art already in the most metaphysical, broadest and profoundest sense- and how its own eternity is also a warrant for the eternity of art. …

…we have had to have the same experience with regard to these Greeks as the Athenians had with regard to Socrates. Nearly every age and stage of culture has at some time or other sought with deep irritation to free itself from the Greeks, because in their presence everything self-achieved, sincerely admired and apparently quite original, seemed suddenly to lose life and colour, to shrink to an abortive copy, even to caricature…. And so one feels ashamed and afraid in the presence of the Greeks, unless one prizes truth above all things; unless one dares acknowledge to one’s self this truth, that the Greeks, as charioteers, hold the reins of our own and every other culture, but that almost always chariot and horses are of too poor material and hardly up to the glory of their guides. Unless we acknowledge this, who will deem it sport to run such a team into an abyss which they themselves could clear with the leap of Achilles?

In order to endow Socrates with the dignity of such a leading position, it is enough to recognize in him a type unheard of before him, the type of the theoretical man. Our next task will be to obtain an insight into the meaning and purpose of this theoretical man. Like the artist, the theorist finds an infinite satisfaction in the present, and, like the former also, this satisfaction protects him from the practical ethics of pessimism with its lynx eyes shining only in the dark. Whenever the truth is unveiled, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to whatever still remains veiled after the unveiling; but the theoretical man gets his enjoyment and satisfaction out of the cast-off veil. He finds his highest pleasure in the process of a continuously successful unveiling effected through his own unaided efforts. There would have been no science if it had been concerned only with that one naked goddess and nothing else. For then its disciples would have felt like those who wished to dig a hole straight through the earth: each one of them perceives that with his utmost lifelong efforts he can excavate but a very small portion of the enormous depth, and this is filled up again before his eyes by the labours of his successor, so that a third man seems to be doing a sensible thing in selecting a new spot for his attempts at tunnelling. Now suppose some one shows conclusively that the antipodal goal cannot be attained thus directly. Who will then still care to toil on in the old depths, unless in the meantime he has learned to content himself with finding precious stones or discovering natural laws? For this reason Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, boldly said that he cared more for the search after truth than for truth itself: in saying which, he revealed the fundamental secret of science, to the astonishment, and indeed, to the anger of scientists. Well, to be sure, beside this detached perception there stands, with an air of great frankness, if not presumption, a profound illusion which first came to birth in the person of Socrates. This illusion consists in the imperturbable belief that, with the clue of logic, thinking can reach to the nethermost depths of being, and that thinking can not only perceive being but even modify it. This sublime metaphysical illusion is added as an instinct to science and again and again leads the latter to its limits, where it must change into art; which is really the end to be attained by this mechanism.” (Nietzsche:1995:51-3)

A_Put with end of art essay to introduce the art of science.

Explain through the analogy of Voyager II and Carl Sagan’s Golden discs of mankind. The Noble Lie to get the benefit as he acknowledged. Then explain how Voyager II has taken four decades to get to the edge of our solar system, and that the nearest star is a further 40,000 years away. Whilst the Hubble telescope which was launched two years after Voyager I and II finished photographing the outer planets could take photos of the planets, of the first stars ever formed billions of years ago, of distant galaxies. The reality is that if the entire solar system was shrunk to the size of a basketball then it took voyager I and II four decades to get to the edge of that basketball, and the next nearest star would be 5,000 miles away, and take 40,000 years to get there, and 40,000 years to get back, so the information possessed would be 40,000 years old and useless to us who would have evolved our own technology 40,000 years further ourselves. It there exists a technology so advanced that in 80,000 years we couldn’t have evolved it ourselves, then isn’t it easier to await the possessors of this technology to come to us, rather than spend trillions upon trillions upon trillions for the next 80,000 years in order to arrive at it ourselves or give them 80,000 years in which to contact us? What use is a little voyager I or II in comparison to the obvious reasoning that any alien who can travel 40,000 years fast enough to make it worthwhile would send a probe to scan planets at the goldilocks range around the suns of solar systems?

One could argue that every alien nation thinks the same thing and so some-one has got to do it, but once again, if we evolve our technology for another 40,000 years it will make sense to do it then, than now. The art of digging this same hole and believing that it contains an answer other than a measure, i.e. an experience for humanity other than art, an experience of truth, is like looking under your rug in the hallway and rationalising just why that particular rug will have the answer written underneath it. The universe doesn’t care what we know, and what we know has no meaning other than to measure ourselves against. We are a meaningless accident born to consume, in a vast ocean of space that we are in denial about, flailing our intellects against Nature who has finally won, and yet we will not admit it. The journey into the eternal space, at a speed of less than light, which is the only possible speed unless we become gravitons or some other quantum particle we are yet to discover, is impossible, and until that changes and our technology can achieve it, then why send anything other than satellites into space or to mine the moon, or maybe to colonize Mars, but beyond the basketball there is literally nothing that our telescopes can get us to touch, or effect, or dwell in. There is no venture out there, somewhere, unless you think that Teflon and the pen that writes in space, is the technological answer mankind has been waiting for in-itself.

As for living longer, do you want to live for 80,000 years travelling through dark space to tell everyone something they will probably already know by the time you get back, or if they don’t then probably you and they will be incapable of understanding it, if they haven’t figured it out by then. Not forgetting of course, that it is only the next star that is that far away. It doesn’t mean that there will be life, or sentient life or even a life-form that has a technology so advanced but hasn’t bothered to use it and explore the universe.

How hopeful do you feel about those little gold discs now?

Any alien race that finds them, will be given a map to a solar system with mineral wealth and a very weak life-form called humanity, or should I say Russians, and Chinese, and Americans, or whatever people will call themselves in the grand game of Runaround over the next 40,000 years, (we have only seen 6,000 years of civilization so far). If they are like us, do you think that they will come in peace or come in peace as a Noble Lie and then strip our resources, whilst paying us a pittance, whilst promoting an arms race between nations, whilst acting like Persians and playing one side off of another until they can invade easily.

Describe the movie ‘The Box’ and the Alien Empathy Test, that the middle-class fail so badly, and describe how scientology says that aliens are banned from landing here because we are all mad, from original sin in the form of Thetans, little devils that tempt us and control us, as a disparate ego is mirrored through this new art form of science-fiction and turned into the new religion of the ego and its institutions where its disciples, like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, the artists of the age, act out the lifestyle of its priests, money, sex, drugs, and rock’n roll, with no moral precepts applicable to a world of mad people being operated, unlike you, by thetans. The new them is us, and the new them for us has the power of the dialectic to accompany his art on the galactic-stage of the universal worlding of the ego of autonomous man, deus ex machina.

Reason alone suggests without the fiction attached that if there is something out there we should not go looking for it. It is like an ancient relic trying to move towards a man with a metal detector on the other side of the world. It cannot move, it cannot get to the other side of the world, but it is quite happy to lie there and believe that it can succeed if its tries hard enough. The actual value of the relic, was lost when it started to tell a story of worth for the other and not for itself. When it sold its scientific reason to art for its own sake, for its own benefit, and not for those it was set up to serve by bringing them enlightenment.

We have been given Teflon and satellite tv and GPS and mobile phones, that have shrunk the world of ego to the global village of the ego, and use the rest of the missile technology of the space race to build nuclear bombs, and missiles and warheads, and kill any one who will not become ‘normal’ in our village, and our reason is merely economics and self-interest, the export par excellence of autodynamic greek tragedy, that is in reality a comedy, that turns one life into a satire of a satyr, the primordial man, that still exists in a Dionysian darkness beneath the veil, astride his magical horse, whose purpose and venture is to bring love to the kingdom and not things that it desires.

“He who once sees clearly how, after Socrates, the mystagogue of science, one philosophical school succeeds another, like wave upon wave;- how an entirely unforeseen universal development of the thirst for knowledge throughout the cultured world (together with the feeling that the acquisition of knowledge was the specific task of every one highly gifted) led science on to the high sea from which since then it has never been entirely driven. He who sees how through the universality of this movement a common net of thought was for the first time stretched over the entire globe, with prospects, moreover, of conformity to law in an entire solar system;- He who realizes all this, together with the amazingly high pyramid of our contemporary knowledge, cannot fail to see in Socrates the turning-point and vortex of so-called universal history.

For if one were to imagine the whole incalculable sum of energy which has been used up by that universal tendency, – used not in the service of knowledge, but for the practical, i.e., egotistical ends of individuals and peoples- then probably the instinctive love of life would be so much weakened in general wars of destruction and continual migrations of peoples, that, owing to the practice of suicide, the individual would perhaps feel the last remnant of a sense of duty, similar to the of the Fiji Islander who, as son, strangles his parents and, as friend, his friend: and thus a practical pessimism might even give rise to a horrible ethics of general slaughter out of pity- which, as a matter of fact, exists and has existed wherever art in one form or another, especially as science and religion, has not appeared as a remedy for an preventive of that pestilential breath.

As against this practical pessimism, Socrates is the prototype of the theoretical optimist who with his belief in the explicability of the nature of thins, attributes to knowledge and perception the power of a universal panacea, and in error sees evil in itself. To penetrate into the depths and to distinguish true perception from error and illusion seemed to the Socratic man the noblest and even the only truly human calling: just as from the time of Socrates onwards the mechanism of making concepts, judgements, and inferences was prized above all other activities as the highest talent and the most admirable gift of nature….Any one who has experienced in himself the joy of a Socratic perception, and felt how, in constantly widening circles, it seeks to embrace the entire world of phenomena, will thenceforth find no stimulus urging him to existence more forcible than the desire to complete that conquest, to draw the new impenetrably close….

But now science, stimulated by its powerful illusion, hastens irresistibly to its limits, on which its optimism, hidden in the essence of logic, is wrecked. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points, and while there is still no telling how this circle can ever be completely measured, yet the noble and gifted man, even before the middle of his career, inevitably comes in contact with those extreme points of the periphery where he stares into the unfathomable. When to his dismay he here sees how logic coils round itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail- then the new form of perception rises to view, namely tragic perception, which, in order even to be endured, requires art as protection and remedy….

Here then, in a mood of agitation, we knock at the gates of the present and the future: will that “transforming” lead to ever-new configurations of genius, and especially of the music-practicing Socrates? Will the net of art which is spread over the whole of existence, whether under the name of religion or of science, be knit ever more closely and delicately, or is it destined to be torn to shreds under the restlessly barbaric activity and whirl which calls itself “the present?” Anxious, yet not despairing, we stand apart for a brief space, like spectators who are permitted to be witnesses of these tremendous struggles and transitions. Alas! It is the magic effect of these struggles that he who beholds them must also participate in them!” (Nietzsche:1995:51-55)

“Perhaps we may lead up to this fundamental problem by asking: what esthetic effect results when the essentially separate art-forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into simultaneous activity? Or more briefly: how is music related to image and concept? Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner, with special reference to this point, praises for an unsurpassable clearness and perspicuity of exposition, expresses himself most thoroughly on the subject in the following passage which I shall cite here at full length (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I. p.309) [World as Will and Idea]: “According to all this, we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing, which is therefore itself the only medium of their analogy, so that a knowledge of it is demanded in order to understand that analogy.

Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as they are related to the particular things. Its universality, however, is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but quite of a different kind, and is united with thorough and distinct definiteness. In this respect it resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly determinate. All possible efforts, excitements and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universal, in the mere form, without the material, always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon, the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon without the body. This deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it….

We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more, in proportion as  its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon. It rests upon this that we are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such particular pictures of human life, set to the universal language of music, are never bound to it or correspond to it with stringent necessity; but they stand to it only in the relation of an example chosen at will to a general concept. In the determinateness of the real, they represent that which music expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies are to a certain extent, like general concepts, an abstraction from the actual. This actual world, then, the world of particular things, affords the object of perception, the special and individual, the particular case, both to the universality of the concepts and to the universality of the melodies. But these two universalities are in a certain respect opposed to each other; for the concepts contain particulars only as the first forms abstracted from perception, as it were, the separated shell of things; thus they are, strictly speaking, abstracta: music, on the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things. …

When now, in the particular case, such a relation is actually given, that is to say, when the composer has been able to express in the universal language of music the emotions of will which constitute the heart of an event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy discovered by the composer between the two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge of the nature of the world unknown to his reason, and must not be an imitation produced with conscious intention by means of conceptions, otherwise the music does not express the inner nature of the will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon. All specially imitative music does this.”

According to the doctrine of Schopenhauer, therefore, we may understand music as the immediate language of the will, and we feel our fancy stimulated to give form to this invisible and yet so actively stirred spirit-world which speaks to us, and we feel prompted to embody it in an analogous example. On the other hand, image and concept, under the influence of a truly corresponding music, acquire a higher significance. …From these facts, intelligible in themselves and not inaccessible to a more penetrating examination, I infer the capacity of music to give birth to myth (the most significant exemplar), and particularly the tragic myth. …If now we reflect that music at its greatest intensity must seek to attain also to its highest symbolization, we must deem it possible that it also knows how to find the symbolic expression for its unique Dionysian wisdom; and where shall we seek for this expression if not in tragedy and, in general, in the conception of the tragic?

From the nature of art as it is usually conceived according to the single category of appearance and beauty, the tragic cannot honestly be deduced at all; it is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual. For only by the particular examples of such annihilation are we made clear as to the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which gives expression to the will in its omnipotence, as it were, behind the principium individuationis, the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and despite all annihilation. The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of the scene: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is disavowed for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation. “We believe in eternal life”, exclaims tragedy; while music is the immediate idea of this life. Plastic art has an altogether different aim: here Apollo dispels the suffering of the individual by the radiant glorification of the eternity of the phenomenon: here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain is in a sense obliterated from the features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: “Be as I am! Amidst the ceaseless flux of phenomena I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally self-sufficient amid this flux of phenomena!”” (Nietzsche:1995:57-60)

National Anthems or OM it is up to you

“Dionysian art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence- yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming figures. We are really for a brief moment Primordial Being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence. The struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear to us as a necessary thing, in view of the surplus of countless forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains just when we have become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united. …

At the same time, however, we must admit that the meaning of tragic myth set forth above never became clearly apparent to the Greek poets, not to speak of the Greek philosophers; their heroes speak, as it were, more superficially than they act; the myth does not at all obtain adequate objectification in the spoken word… The Greeks, as the Egyptian priests say, are eternal children, and in tragic art too they are only children who do not know what a sublime plaything has originated in their hands and- is being demolished.

That striving of the spirit of music towards symbolic and mythical objectification, which increases from the beginnings of lyric poetry up to Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks off immediately after attaining a luxuriant development, and disappears, as it were, from the surface of Hellenic art: while the Dionysian world-view born of this striving lives on in the Mysteries and, in its strangest metamorphoses and debasements, does not cease to attract serious natures. Will it not some day rise once again out of its mystic depths as art?…only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy…

The unerring instinct of Aristophanes was surely right when it included Socrates himself, the tragedy of Euripides, and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets in the same feelings of hatred, recognizing in all three phenomena the signs of a degenerate culture. In this New Dithyramb, music is outrageously manipulated so as to be the imitative portrait of a phenomenon, for instance, of a battle or a storm at sea; and thus, of course, it has been utterly robbed of its mythopoeic power. For it seeks to arouse pleasure only by impelling us to seek eternal analogies  between a vital or natural process and certain rhythmical figures and characteristic sounds of music; if our understanding is to content itself with the perception of these analogies, we are reduced to a frame of mind which makes impossible any reception of the mythical; for the myth as a unique type of universality and truth towering into the infinite cries to be conspicuously recognized. The truly Dionysian music presents itself as such a general mirror of the universal will: the conspicuous event refracted in this mirror expands at once for our consciousness to the copy of an external truth.

Conversely, such a conspicuous event is at once divested of every mythical character by the tone-painting of the New Dithyramb; music now becomes a wretched copy of the phenomenon, and therefore infinitely poorer than the phenomenon itself: through which poverty it still further reduces the phenomenon itself: through which poverty it still further reduces the phenomenon for our consciousness, so that now, for example, a musically imitated battle of this sort exhausts itself in marches, signal-sounds, etc., and our imagination is arrested precisely by these superficialities….It was a great triumph for the un-Dionysian spirit, when by the development of the New Dithyramb, it had estranged music from itself and reduced it to be the slave of phenomena. Euripides, who, though in a higher sense, must be considered a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithyrambic Music, and with the liberality of a freebooter makes use of all its effective tricks and mannerisms.

In another direction also we see at work the power of this un-Dionysian myth-opposing spirit, when we turn our attention to the prevalence of character representation and psychological refinement in tragedy from Sophocles onwards. The character must no longer be expanded into an eternal type, but, on the contrary, must develop individually through artistic subordinate traits and shadings, through the nicest precision of all lines, in such a manner that the spectator is in general no longer conscious of the myth, but of the vigorous truth to nature and the artist’s imitative power. Here also we observe the victory of the phenomenon over the Universal, and the delight in a unique, almost anatomical preparation; we are already in the atmosphere of a theoretical world, where scientific knowledge is valued more highly than the artistic reflection of a universal law.

The movement in the direction of character delineation proceeds rapidly: while Sophocles still portrays complete characters and employs myth for their refined development, Euripides already draws only prominent individual traits of character, which can express themselves in violent bursts of passion; in the New Attic Comedy, however, there are only masks with one expression: frivolous old men, duped panders, and cunning slaves, recurring incessantly. Where now is the mythopoeic spirit of music? What still remains of music is either excitatory music or associational music, that is, either a stimulant for dull and faded nerves, or tone-painting. As regards the former, it hardly matters about the text set to it: the heroes and choruses of Euripides are already dissolute enough when once they begin to sing; to what pass must things have come with his impertinent successors?

The new un-Dionysian spirit, however, reveals itself most plainly in the denouements of the new dramas.

In the Old Tragedy one could sense at the end that metaphysical comfort, without which the delight in tragedy cannot be explained at all; the reconciliating tones from another world sound purest, perhaps, in the Oedipus at Colonus. Now that the genius of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy, strictly speaking, is dead: for from what source shall we now draw this metaphysical comfort? The new spirit, therefore, sought for an earthly resolution of the tragic dissonance. The hero, after being sufficiently tortured by fate, earned a well-deserved reward through a splendid marriage or tokens of divine favour. The hero had turned gladiator. On him, after he had been nicely beaten and covered with wounds, freedom was occasionally bestowed. The deus ex machina  took the place of metaphysical comfort. I will not say that the tragic world-view was everywhere completely destroyed by this intruding un-Dionysian spirit: we only know that it had to flee from art into the underworld as it were, in the degenerate form of a secret cult…

The noblest manifestation of that other form of “Greek cheerfulness”, the Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man: it exhibits the same characteristic symptoms that distinguished the spirit of the un-Dionysian: it combats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve myth, it substitutes for a metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance, in fact, a deus ex machina of its own, the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the powers of the forces of nature recognized and employed in the service of the higher egoism; it believes that it can correct the world by knowledge, guide life by science, and actually confine the individual within a limited sphere of solvable problems, from which he can cheerfully say to life: “I desire thee: it is worth while to know thee.”” (Nietzsche:1995:60-64)

“It is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiate will can always, by means of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the flux of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibility: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful illusions which the will has always at hand. These three planes of illusion are on the whole designed only for the more nobly formed natures, who in general feel profoundly weight and burden of existence, and must be deluded by exquisite stimulants into forgetfulness of their sorrow. All that we call culture is made up of these stimulants; and, according to the proportion of the ingredients, we have either a dominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic culture: or, if historical exemplifications are wanted, there is either an Alexandrian or a Hellenic or a Buddhistic culture.

Our whole modern world is entangled in the net of Alexandrian culture. It proposes as its ideal the theoretical man equipped with the greatest forces of knowledge, and labouring in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All our educational methods have originally this ideal in view: every other form of existence must struggle on wearisome beside it, as something tolerated, but not intended….

Now, we must not hide from ourselves what is concealed at the heart of this Socratic culture: Optimism, with its delusion of limitless power! Well, we must not be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen- if society, leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually begins to tremble with wanton agitations and desires, if the belief in the earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possibility of such a general intellectual culture is gradually transformed into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian earthly happiness, into the conjuring up of a Euripidean deus ex machina. Let us mark this well: the Alexandrian culture, to be able to exist permanently, requires a slave class, but, with its optimistic view of life, it denies the necessity of such a class, and consequently, when the effect of its beautifully seductive and tranquillizing utterances about the “dignity of man” and the “dignity of labour” is over, it gradually drifts towards a dreadful destruction…. In the face of such threatening storms, who dares to appeal with any confidence to our pale and exhausted religions, whose very foundations have degenerated into “learned” religions?- so that myth, the necessary prerequisite of every religion, is already paralyzed everywhere, and even in this domain the optimistic spirit- which we have just designated as the destroying germ of society- has attained the mastery…

The extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer have succeeded in gaining the most difficult victory, the victory over the optimism hidden in the essence of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of our culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently unobjectionable aeterae veritates, had believed in the intelligibility and solvability of all the riddles of the universe, and had treated space, time, and causality as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal validity, Kant, on the other hand, showed that in reality these served only to elevate the mere phenomenon, the work of Maya, to the position of the sole and highest reality, putting it in place of the innermost and true essence of things, and thus making impossible any knowledge of this essence or, in Schopenhauer’s words, lulling the dreamer still more soundly asleep….

But now that the Socratic culture can only hold the sceptre of its infallibility with trembling hands; now that it has been shaken from two directions- once by the fear of its own conclusions which it at length begins to surmise, and again, because it no longer has its former naïve confidence in the eternal validity of its foundation- it is a sad spectacle to see how the dance of its though rushes longingly on ever-new forms, to embrace them, and then, shuddering, lets them go…Our art reveals this universal trouble: in vain does one depend imitatively on all the great productive periods and natures; in vain does one accumulate the entire “World-literature” around modern man for his comfort; in vain does one place one’s self in the midst of the art-styles and artists of all ages, so that one may give names to them as Adam did to the beasts: one still continues eternally hungry, the “critic” without joy and energy, the Alexandrian man, who is at bottom a librarian and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch, goes blind from the dusty books and printers’ errors.” (Nietzsche:1995:64-7)

“Some day before an impartial judge, it may be decided in what time and in what men the German spirit has thus far striven most resolutely to learn from the Greeks: and if we confidently assume that this unique praise must be accorded to the noblest intellectual efforts of Goethe, Schiller, and Winkelmann, we will certainly be compelled to add that since their time and subsequent to the more immediate consequences of their efforts, the endeavour to attain to culture and to the Greeks by a similar path has grown incomprehensibly feebler and feebler. That we may not despair utterly of the German spirit, must we not conclude that possibly, in some essential matter, even these champions could not penetrate into the core of the Hellenic nature, and were unable to establish a permanent alliance between German and Greek culture?

…Therefore, when the intrinsic efficiency of our higher educational institutions has perhaps never been lower or feebler than at present; when the “journalist”, the paper slave of the day, triumphs over the professor in all matters pertaining to culture; and when there remains to the latter only the often previously experienced metamorphosis of now fluttering also like a cheerful cultured butterfly (tp use the idiom of the journalist), with the “light elegance” peculiar to this sphere;- under these conditions, with what a painful confusion must the cultured persons of a period like the present gaze at the phenomenon which perhaps is to be comprehended analogically only by means of the profoundest principle of the hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius, the phenomenon of the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy. There has never been another art-period in which so-called culture and true art have been so estranged and opposed, as we may observe them to be at present.

We can understand why so feeble a culture hates true art; it fears destruction from its hands. But most not an entire cultural-form, namely, the Socratic-Alexandrian, have exhausted itself after culminating in such a daintily tapering point as our present culture? If heroes like Goethe and Schiller could not succeed in breaking open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic magic mountain; if with their most dauntless striving they could not go beyond the longing gaze which Goethe’s Iphigenia casts from barbaric Tauris to her home across the ocean, what could the epigones of such heroes hope for?- unless the gate- amidst the mystic tones of reawakened tragic music- should open for them suddenly of its own accord, from an entirely different side, quite overlooked in all previous cultural endeavours….

We look in vain for one single vigorous root, for one spot of fruitful healthy soil: Everywhere dust, sand, torpidity, languor! Under such circumstances a cheerless solitary wanderer could choose for himself no better symbol than the Knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has sketched him to us…

But how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilderness of our exhausted culture changes when it is touched by the Dionysian magic! A hurricane seizes everything decrepit, decaying, broken, and stunted; enwraps it whirlingly in a red cloud of dust; and like a vulture carries it off into the air. Confused, we look for what has varnished: for what we see is something risen to the golden light as from a depression, so full and green, so luxuriantly vital, so ardent, so immeasurable. In the midst of this exuberance of life, sorrow and joy, Tragedy sits, in sublime ecstasy; she listens to a sad song, far away- it tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are: Wahn, Wille, Wehe– Yes, my friends, have faith with me in Dionysian life and in the rebirth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, take the thyrsus in your hand, and marvel not if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Dare now to be tragic men, for ye shall be redeemed! Ye shall accompany the Dionysian festive procession from India to Greece! Arm yourselves for hard strife, but have faith in the wonders of your god!” (Nietzsche:1995:73-5)

Klint and Theosophy- abstract arts birth through the Dionysian muse

“Thus does the Apollonian tear us away from Dionysian universality and make us delight in individuals; to these it attaches our sympathetic emotion; through these it satisfies our sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms; it presents us with biographical portraits, and incites us to a thoughtful comprehension of the essence of life dwelling within them. With the immense combined power of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching and the sympathetic emotion- the Apollonian influence uplifts man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and Ionian influence uplifts man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and deceives him concerning the universality of the Dionysian process into the belief that he is seeing a detached picture of the world (Tristan and Isolde for instance), and that, through music, he will be enabled to see it with still more essential clearness. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even excite in us the illusion that the Dionysian is actually in the service of the Apollonian and is capable of enhancing its effects, in fact, that music is essentially the representative art for an Apollonian content? …

Concerning the process just described, however, we may still make the definite statement that it is only a glorious appearance, namely the aforementioned Apollonian illusion, through whose influence we are to be delivered from the Dionysian obtrusion and excess. For, at bottom, the relation of music to drama is precisely the reverse; music is the essential idea of the world, drama is but the reflection of this idea, a detached adumbration of it. The identity between the melody and the living form, between the harmony and the character-relations of that form, is true in a sense opposite to what one would suppose on the contemplation of musical tragedy. We may agitate and enliven the form in the most conspicuous manner, and illuminate it from within, but it still remains merely a phenomenon, from which there is no bridge to lead us to the true reality, to the heart of the world. But out of this heart speaks music; and though countless phenomena of the kind might be passing manifestations of this music, they could never exhaust its essence, but would always be merely its externalized copies.

Of course, as regards the intricate relation of music and drama, nothing can be explained, while everything may be confused by the popular and thoroughly false antithesis of soul and body; but the unphilosophical crudeness of this antithesis seems to have become- who knows for what reasons- a readily accepted Article of Faith with our estheticians, while they have learned nothing concerning an antithesis of the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself- or perhaps for equally unknown reasons they have not cared to learn anything about it…

In the collective effect of tragedy, the Dionysian once again dominates. Tragedy closes with a sound which could never emanate from the realm of Apollonian art. And the Apollonian illusion thereby reveals itself as what it really is- the assiduous veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the intrinsically Dionysian effect: which, however, is so powerful, that it ends by forcing the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to talk with Dionysian wisdom, and even denies itself and its Apollonian conspicuousness. So that the intricate relation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy may really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; Apollo, however, finally speaks the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is attained.” (Nietzsche:1995:79-81)

“The tragic myth is to be understood only as a symbolizing of Dionysian wisdom through Apollonian art-media. The mythus conducts the world of phenomena to its boundaries, where it denies itself, and seeks to flee back again into the bosom of the true and only reality; where it then, like Isolde, seems to strike up its metaphysical swansong:

“In the sea of pleasure’s Billowing roll,

In the ether-wave’s Ringing sound,

In the world-breath’s Drifting whole-

To drown, to sink- Unconscious- extremist joy!”

We may thus make real to ourselves through the experiences of the truly esthetic hearer the tragic artist himself as he creates his figures like a fecund divinity of individuation (in which sense his work can hardly be understood as an “imitation of nature”) and when, on the other hand, his vast Dionysian impulse then absorbs this entire world of phenomena, in order to anticipate beyond it, and through its destruction, the highest artist primal joy, in the bosom of the Primal Unity. Of course, our estheticians have nothing to say about this return in fraternal union of the two art-deities to the original home, nor of either the Apollonian or Dionysian excitement of the hearer, while they never tire of characterizing the struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the moral order of the world, or the purgation of the emotions through tragedy, as the properly Tragic: an indefatigability which makes me think that perhaps they are not esthetically sensitive men at all, but are to be regarded merely as moral beings when hearing tragedy. Never since Aristotle has an explanation been offered, by which an esthetic activity of the hearer could be inferred from artistic circumstances.

At one time pity and terror are supposed to be forced to an alleviating release through the serious action, at another time we are supposed to feel elevated and inspired at the victory of good and noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the interest of a moral conception of the universe; and however sure I am that for countless men precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy, it just as plainly follows that all these men, together with their interpreting estheticians, have had no experience of tragedy as the highest art. The pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle, which philologists are at a loss whether to include under medicinal or moral phenomena, recalls a remarkable anticipation of Goethe. “Without a lively pathological interest,” he says, “I too have never yet succeeded in elaborating a tragic situation of any kind, and hence I have rather avoided than sought it. Can it perhaps have been still another of the merits of the ancients that the deepest pathos was with them merely esthetic play, whereas with us the truth of nature must co-operate in order to produce such a work?” (Nietzsche:1995:82-3)

“He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to whether he is related to the true esthetic hearer, or whether he belongs rather to the community of the Socratic-critical men, need only examine sincerely the feeling with which he accepts the wonder represnted on the stage: whether he feels his historical sense, which insists on strict psychological causality, insulted by it, whether with benevolent concession he admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible to childhood, but alien to him, or whether he experiences anything else from it. For in this way he will be able to determine on the whole how capable he is of understanding myth, the concentrated picture of the world, which, as abbreviature of phenomena, cannot dispense with wonder. It is probable, however, that almost every one, upon close examination, feels so broken up by the critico-historical spirit of our culture, that he can only make the former existence of myth credible to himself by learned means through intermediary abstractions. Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myths that rounds off to unity a social movement. It is only myth that frees all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream from their aimless wanderings. The mythical figures have to be the unnoticed omnipresent genii, under whose care the young soul grows to maturity, by the signs of which the man gives meaning to his life and struggles: and the state itself knows no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical foundation which vouches for its connection with religion and its growth from mythical ideas.

On the other hand, let us now think of the abstract man unguided by myth, the abstract education, the abstract morality, the abstract justice, the abstract state: let us picture to ourselves the lawless roving of the artistic imagination, unchecked by native myth: let us imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred primitive seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities, and to nourish itself wretchedly on all other cultures- there we have the Present, the result of Socratism, which is bent on the destruction of myth. And now the mythless man remains eternally hungering amid the past, and digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig for them even among the remotest antiquities. The terrible historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge- what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal bosom? Let us ask ourselves whether the fervish and uncanny excitement of this culture is anything but the eager seizing and snatching at food of hungry man- and who would care to contribute anything more to a culture which cannot be satisfied no matter how much it devours, and at whose contact the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment habitually changes into “history and criticism”?” (Nietzsche:1995:84-5)

Malevich’s black square at the end of Klint’s vision now that the saviour of Apollo has risen once again to reveal the veil of blackness, as if it is a vision

“Through a remarkable disruption of both these primitive artistic impulses, the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed to be necessarily brought about: with which process a degeneration and a transformation of the Greek national character was quite in keeping, summoning us to earnest reflections as to how closely and necessarily art and the people, myth and custom, tragedy and the state, are rooted together. The ruin of tragedy was at the same time the ruin of myth. Until then the Greeks had been involuntarily compelled to connect all experiences at once with their myths: indeed it was only through this association that they could understand them, so that even the most immediate present necessarily appeared to them sub specie aeterni and in a certain sense as timeless. Into this current of the timeless, however, the state as well as art plunged in order to find repose from the burden and eagerness of the moment.

A people- and, for that matter, also a man- is to be valued only according to its ability to impress on its experiences the stamp of eternity: for it is thus, as it were, desecularized; thus is reveals its unconscious inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the true, that is, the metaphysical significance of life. The contrary happens when a people begins to comprehend itself historically and to demolish the mythical bulwarks surrounding it: with which there is usually connected a marked secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier secularisation, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, with all its ethical consequences. Greek art and especially Greek tragedy delayed above all the annihilation of myth: it was necessary to annihilate these also to be able to live detached from the native soil, unbridled in the wilderness of though, custom, and deed.” (Nietzsche:1995:86-7)

“Music and tragic myth are equally the expression of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and are inseparable from each other. Both originate in a sphere of art lying beneath and beyond the Apollonian; both transfigure a region in whose joyous harmony all dissonance, like the terrible picture of the world, dies charmingly away; both play with the sting of displeasure, relying on their most potent magic; both thereby justify the existence even of the “worst world.” Here the Dionysian, as compared with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as the eternal and original artistic force, which in general calls into existence the entire world of phenomena; in the midst of which a new transfiguring appearance becomes necessary, in order to keep alive the animated world of individuation. If we could conceive of an incarnation of dissonance- and what else is man?- then, that it might live, this dissonance would need a glorious illusion to cover its features with a veil of beauty.

This is the true artistic function of Apollo: in whose names we include all the countless manifestations of the fair realm of illusion, which at each moment renders life in general worth living and impel one to the experience of the next moment.

At the same time, just as much of this basis of all existence- the Dionysian substratum of the world- is allowed to enter into the consciousness of human beings, as can be surmounted again by the Apollonian transfiguring power, so that these two art-impulses are compelled to develop their powers in strictly mutual proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. When the Dionysian powers rise with such strength as we are experiencing at present, there can be no doubt that, wrapped in a cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose fullest and most beautiful effects a coming generation may perhaps behold.” (Nietzsche:1995:91-92)

20: Spartan Bad-Faith

We have spent long enough slating the poor old Athenians and their bad-faith in thinking that they could control desire, but allowing the most desirous to tell them what the gods thought and therefore how they should think. Let us turn to the Spartans and see if they suffered from bad-faith.

As we saw above, the Spartans attended to the idea of harmony and beauty in a different way, staying closer to the matriarchal perspective of authority that we saw in early settler tribes. They stayed closer to the truth in structuring a pyramid of power for the necessity of not creating desertification through desire, whilst living in a world of desirous pyramids, that might attack them. To keep desire under control, they, like the hunter-gatherers before them, kept themselves equal and kept luxury strictly from their worlding, this was their beautiful, harmonious, and honourable way of living in a world of war that was their thrownness.

What then was their bad-faith, if any, how did it manifest itself, and what were the results?

“A famous Spartan marching poem went like this, “No man is good in war unless he can first endure the sight of bloody slaughter”. That military prowess went hand in hand with a system of social equality and a denial of luxury unheard of in Athens. Clothes had to be the same, gold and silver were banned, the currency was so big it was pointless to carry it around with you. No extravagant architecture and all that came with a convenient oracle that said that love of individual wealth would destroy Sparta.” Prof. Paul Cartledge

“The Spartan luxury, par excellence, was their image, and it was the unyielding pursuit of that image that eventually brought them down. The myth mainly applies to the male part of the Spartan citizen body, and that lasted for a very long time. In other words, it was unrivalled, the Spartans didn’t have anybody to sort of puncture it. But when they start coming into conflict and contact with other Greeks then the word gets out, that actually some Spartans are a hell of a lot richer than other Spartans….Imports starts to flow in and silver starts to stick to fingers, and the Spartans acquired a reputation of being notoriously bribe able, and bribed…. In one very obvious way, which is the ownership of land, it’s clear that more and more, there’s a huge division between the majority, who own very little, and the minority who own quite a lot…Poorer Spartans found themselves without enough land to supply their military messes, and as a result they could no longer be Spartan soldiers or citizens. Worse, nearly a century of solid fighting had devastated Spartan numbers. The army declined from nearly 5,000 in the 5^th century B.C. to just 1,500 who fought in battle at Leuctra in 371 B.C…. The very next year, having killed another 400 Spartans, a foreign enemy, led by the city of Thebes invaded Spartan territory, the game was up… It was the end to an astonishing career. After two centuries of military success Sparta had been brought down by the insidious attractions of wealth and luxury.” Prof. Paul Cartledge

So the bad-faith of the Spartans was their individual beings-for-itself

The very urgrund of their settled lifestyle. Individual riches, taken as bribes and betrayal, as land from their brothers until they could no longer be Spartans, and so Sparta could no longer be. Esteem of the perfection of the self, over all others, perceived as beauty, ended the harmony upon which this belief had been founded.

The comedic term that we have today, sired by the nature of the Spartans is that of laconic, meaning ‘to be terse, unemotional’. It is a cutting humour, meant to humiliate and decrease the esteem of the recipient this missile of words is aimed at. It is a competitive critical comedy, that does not question its own righteousness. The Darshan of empathy upon which Sparta was founded in a world of war, had become a darpan of honour where the hero was to gain more for his sacrifice than any other. It became bad-faith and laconic truths served to confess the shame of the collective as Satyr did in Athens. It was not about freedom of speech but speech about subject unfreedom to the social contract of the pyramid.

In this chapter we have seen the gods become co-opted into prophesy of war and right born by the being-for-itself through a dance of relative power named as democracy. We have seen the Hellenes take the power of the gods and harness it under the ‘rightful’ power of the people as ‘authority’, and we have seen them write plays that tell them of their bad-faith, or their immorality, that predict the outcome of the immoral inversion of ‘right’ and ‘god’, when the reality experienced was war, plague, vengeful murder, and finally powerless shame, at their actions upon reflection in the mirror, asking, ‘who is the fairest of them all.’ They left behind a democratic desert of death, and self-destruction, and their own dominion by an-Other.

It is to the nature of this Other that we are going to look in the next chapter, to see how the gods take centre stage once again, now that their role back-stage has proved to not be quite as efficient as was first thought. Bring back the monarchy, but this time, lets keep the warrior and leave behind the priest.