Waxing on the Trojan War

And from this expedition we may infer the character of earlier enterprises. Now Mycenae may have been a small place, and many of the towns of that age may appear comparatively insignificant, but no exact observer would therefore feel justified in rejecting the estimate given by the poets and by tradition of the magnitude of the armament.

This is an interesting point. We have to be very careful about inferring the military power of a place from the insignificance of the towns. If an atom bomb leveled our civilization and left us with nothing but huts to later generations, later historians couldn't infer from this that America's military was insignificant. Sparta was a humble farming town, but their armament was intimidating. The less sophisticated colonies had an armament that beat the more sophisticated British.

For I suppose if Lacedaemon were to become desolate, and the temples and the foundations of the public buildings were left, that as time went on there would be a strong disposition with posterity to refuse to accept her fame as a true exponent of her power. And yet they occupy two-fifths of Peloponnese and lead the whole, not to speak of their numerous allies without.

Lacedaemon was the ancient Greek name for Sparta, used by Homer. If Sparta was desolate, why would later posterity think she was famous? Because of her power? Later posterity wouldn't be disposed to think that, because they think power is a reflection of the luxury of the towns.

Still, as the city is neither built in a compact form nor adorned with magnificent temples and public edifices, but composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas, there would be an impression of inadequacy. Whereas, if Athens were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any inference from the appearance presented to the eye would make her power to have been twice as great as it is.

Sparta is made up of villages. It looks like they wouldn't have an inadequate armament. But they did. Athens was the opposite of Sparta. Later posterity would look at how luxurious Athens is and wrongly infer that their military was more great than it was. Good points. Bruce Lee may be smaller than John Candy, but that doesn't mean Lee would lose in a fight.

We have therefore no right to be sceptical, nor to content ourselves with an inspection of a town to the exclusion of a consideration of its power; but we may safely conclude that the armament in question surpassed all before it, as it fell short of modern efforts; if we can here also accept the testimony of Homer's poems, in which, without allowing for the exaggeration which a poet would feel himself licensed to employ, we can see that it was far from equalling ours.

We shouldn't look to a town as a reflection of its power, or to the extent of a town's power as a reflection of the luxury of a town. Sparta, even though it was a farming society with villages, had the strongest military, stronger than any that came before it. But even so, says Thucydides, this Spartan power didn't equal 'ours'. I'm assuming he is talking about Athens, since he is an Athenian who commanded a fleet in the Peloponnesian War.

He has represented it as consisting of twelve hundred vessels; the Boeotian complement of each ship being a hundred and twenty men, that of the ships of Philoctetes fifty. By this, I conceive, he meant to convey the maximum and the minimum complement: at any rate, he does not specify the amount of any others in his catalogue of the ships. That they were all rowers as well as warriors we see from his account of the ships of Philoctetes, in which all the men at the oar are bowmen.

Boeotia was a region of ancient Greece. Philoctetes evidently led seven ships from Methonē and other towns of that region in the expedition to Troy. He was eventually dumped off on the coast of the island of Lemnos, because he was bitten by a snake, and the festering wound made him cry out and curse the Greeks. Odysseus had had enough and persuaded everyone to abandon him on the coast - but not before Philoctetes had the bow and arrows of Heracles, arrows which never missed their mark. When Odysseus captured Helenus (a Trojan seer), he told Odysseus that he'd never win unless Philoctetes could fight with his bow and arrows. After his snake bite was healed, he shot Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, and helped win the Trojan War.

1. Philoctetes ships - 50 men - rowers and warriors.
2. Boeotian shipts - 120 men - rowers and warriors.

Now it is improbable that many supernumeraries sailed, if we except the kings and high officers; especially as they had to cross the open sea with munitions of war, in ships, moreover, that had no decks, but were equipped in the old piratical fashion. So that if we strike the average of the largest and smallest ships, the number of those who sailed will appear inconsiderable, representing, as they did, the whole force of Hellas.

Supernumeraries (Latin for 'beyond the number) just meant in excess of the normal number of whatever. But the number who sailed appears inconsiderable, of small relative size. And this was the Greek military force during the Trojan War.

And this was due not so much to scarcity of men as of money. Difficulty of subsistence made the invaders reduce the numbers of the army to a point at which it might live on the country during the prosecution of the war.

That makes sense. With little subsistence, there can be little invaders, since many invaders would soon not be able to subsist. 20 armed men can easily overtake a solitary homemaker; but what if her house doesn't have enough to feed the 20? They'll either have to get the subsistence themselves, or overtake some other house.

Even after the victory they obtained on their arrival- and a victory there must have been, or the fortifications of the naval camp could never have been built- there is no indication of their whole force having been employed; on the contrary, they seem to have turned to cultivation of the Chersonese and to piracy from want of supplies.

Greece won the initial battles on their arrival to Troy. They needed to win, because they needed a naval camp. But Greece didn't use everyone in their military. There wasn't enough subsistence on Troy. Chersonese (a peninsula that runs in a south-westerly direction into the Aegean Sea) was important as a wheat growing district.

This was what really enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years against them; the dispersion of the enemy making them always a match for the detachment left behind. If they had brought plenty of supplies with them, and had persevered in the war without scattering for piracy and agriculture, they would have easily defeated the Trojans in the field, since they could hold their own against them with the division on service.

What enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years is that the Greeks always needed to do some piracy and farming. As the Greeks were always dispersed by the Trojans, the dispersed Greeks would always meet their match against some Trojan detachment. It was like the stalemate with the trenches in World War 1: each charge met their match by some defensive detachment. If the Greeks had brought enough supplies initially, they wouldn't be easily dispersed, and so they'd be able to defeat the Trojan detachment. A house not divided won't easily fall.

In short, if they had stuck to the siege, the capture of Troy would have cost them less time and less trouble. But as want of money proved the weakness of earlier expeditions, so from the same cause even the one in question, more famous than its predecessors, may be pronounced on the evidence of what it effected to have been inferior to its renown and to the current opinion about it formed under the tuition of the poets.

The Greeks could have won the war a lot sooner if they weren't easily dispersed. If the Greeks had more money, they would have had more supplies; if they had more supplies, they wouldn't have had to resort to being pirates and farmers; if they weren't farmers and pirates, they wouldn't have had a weak expedition in Troy; Troy would have been won a lot sooner, and it wouldn't have taken 10 long years.

Thucydides: chapter 1 continued

I decided a line-by-line analysis was better because of the density of the text, and I didn't want to do my understanding an injustice, and it would be all the more clear where I'm not picking up on something.

With respect to their towns, later on, at an era of increased facilities of navigation and a greater supply of capital, we find the shores becoming the site of walled towns, and the isthmuses being occupied for the purposes of commerce and defence against a neighbour.

More facilities of navigation and more capital! More Navy. The shores begin to have towns, and the towns begin to have walls. The isthmuses begin to be occupied; they begin to have commerce, and they gain the capacity to defend themselves against the neighbors if need be. So, these facilities of navigation and the capital seem to be the result of the shores getting their walled towns, and their isthmuses becoming occupied, with their commerce and capacity for defense.

But the old towns, on account of the great prevalence of piracy, were built away from the sea, whether on the islands or the continent, and still remain in their old sites. For the pirates used to plunder one another, and indeed all coast populations, whether seafaring or not.

The old towns were built away from the sea because of pirates. This is the case with islands and on the continent. The pirates would plunder both each other and the coast populations, regardless of whether they traveled by sea. It's amazing how prevalent piracy was. I wonder what kept the pirates from wondering inland? Maybe it wasn't an airtight strategy; but it worked on the whole.

The islanders, too, were great pirates. These islanders were Carians and Phoenicians, by whom most of the islands were colonized, as was proved by the following fact.

From Caria ('deep country'), the Carians are mentioned in 2 Kings 11:4 and possibly at 2 Samuel 8:18, 15:18, and 20:23. Herodotus says the Carians were the aborigines of Caria, before they became more civilized when moving inland, after they were islanders. The Phoenicians (who basically came up with the alphabet from which ours is derived) took up what today is Lebanon, Syria, and northern Israel. They evidently moved from this mainland to populate the islands.

During the purification of Delos by Athens in this war all the graves in the island were taken up, and it was found that above half their inmates were Carians: they were identified by the fashion of the arms buried with them, and by the method of interment, which was the same as the Carians still follow.

When the Athenians dug up the graves after they purified Delos (the island in the middle of the Cyclades, a group of islands south-east of Greece), they found Carians, because of the kind of weapons they had on them, and the kind of burial they had. The Carians of 'today' have the same weapons and the same burial.

But as soon as Minos had formed his navy, communication by sea became easier, as he colonized most of the islands, and thus expelled the malefactors.

Three generations before the Trojan War, Minos (ruler of Crete, the biggest Greek island) ruled the seas, or the islands of the Aegean Sea to be exact. Because of this, he could now communicate by sea much more efficiently.

The coast population now began to apply themselves more closely to the acquisition of wealth, and their life became more settled; some even began to build themselves walls on the strength of their newly acquired riches.

Because of Minos' rule, the people on the coast could more easily gain wealth, and the Greeks became more settled. Using their wealth, they could build walls to keep out the pirates.

For the love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion of the stronger, and the possession of capital enabled the more powerful to reduce the smaller towns to subjection. And it was at a somewhat later stage of this development that they went on the expedition against Troy.

'The love of gain': an interesting factor. This seems like rudimentary Capitalism. The weaker are reconciled to the stronger's dominion, because the stronger have the wealth, and the weaker enter into contracts with the stronger to make a living. This is the sense in which smaller towns (weaker) are subjected to the stronger, the ones who amass wealth. This snowballed into their eventual capacity to engage Troy in battle.

What enabled Agamemnon to raise the armament was more, in my opinion, his superiority in strength, than the oaths of Tyndareus, which bound the suitors to follow him.

Tyndareus, the father of Helen (of Troy: whose abduction caused the Trojan War), was indecisive about choosing a suitor for his daughter. Odysseus, being one of the suitors, saw that he had no chance, because he didn't have any gifts. Odysseus proposed to Tyndareus a solution for his indecisiveness, if Tyndareus would set him up with Penelope, daughter of Icarius. Odysseus gathered together all the suitors to swear that whoever was chosen, they would defend him against anyone who challenged. The oath was sworn. Menelaus was chosen, the brother of Agamemnon king of Mycenae and leader of the Greek army during the War; he was a central figure in the Trojan War. These are the oaths of Tyndareus. Thucydides proposes Agamemnon raised the armament more because of his strength than these oaths. It is better to be feared than loved.

Indeed, the account given by those Peloponnesians who have been the recipients of the most credible tradition is this. First of all Pelops, arriving among a needy population from Asia with vast wealth, acquired such power that, stranger though he was, the country was called after him; and this power fortune saw fit materially to increase in the hands of his descendants.

The Peloponnesus peninsula was named for Pelops. Pelops, father of Atreus and Thyestēs, was king of Pisa, an ancient town in the western Peloponnese, Greece. He arrived in a needy population from Asia; because of his wealth, he had lots of power, even though he was a stranger. Fortune decided to spread this power to his posterity.

Eurystheus had been killed in Attica by the Heraclids. Atreus was his mother's brother; and to the hands of his relation, who had left his father on account of the death of Chrysippus, Eurystheus, when he set out on his expedition, had committed Mycenae and the government.

Eurystheus was an interesting character, the king of Tiryns (ancient city of southern Greece in the eastern Peloponnesus) in Argos (city of ancient Greece in the northeast Peloponnesus near the head of the Gulf of Argolis), son of Sthenelus (Son of Perseus and Andromeda, and king of Mycenae) and Menippē, a descendant of Perseus.

We see here that he was killed in Attica (ancient region of east-central Greece around Athens) by the Heraclids, supposedly the descendants of Hercules himself.

Atreus was Eurystheus' mother's brother, which would make him Eurystheus' half-brother, and - remember - son of Pelops, and eventually father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. At one time though, Atreus is king of Mycenae, the Greek city in the northeast Peloponnesus.

Well, it looks like Atreus had killed Chrysippus (his half-brother), because he thought that Chrysippus would inherit the throne of Pelops. For clarification, Atreus was Eurystheus' brother, so that would mean that Eurystheus left for Attica, while leaving Atreus in charge of Mycenae. After Eurystheus was killed in Attica, Atreus was to inherit the throne.

As time went on and Eurystheus did not return, Atreus complied with the wishes of the Mycenaeans, who were influenced by fear of the Heraclids- besides, his power seemed considerable, and he had not neglected to court the favour of the populace- and assumed the sceptre of Mycenae and the rest of the dominions of Eurystheus.

Again, it is better to be feared than loved. Atreus used the fear the Mycenaeans had toward the Heraclids to become king! He already had much power, but the fear made it happen: in this case, it was power motivated by fear. In this way, Atreus gained the throne.

And so the power of the descendants of Pelops came to be greater than that of the descendants of Perseus. To all this Agamemnon succeeded.

It follows that "this power fortune saw fit materially to increase in the hands of his descendants." And because Agamemnon was the son of Atreus, it increased in the hands of him as well.

He had also a navy far stronger than his contemporaries, so that, in my opinion, fear was quite as strong an element as love in the formation of the confederate expedition. The strength of his navy is shown by the fact that his own was the largest contingent, and that of the Arcadians was furnished by him; this at least is what Homer says, if his testimony is deemed sufficient.

Here, however, fear and love work together, even though Thucydides would still hold that if you can't have them both together, better to work with fear, rather than love. The fear came from the strength he had, because he had the largest navy, given to the Arcadians, which is just another way of saying 'Greeks', or more specifically, southern Greece. Or, so says Homer.

Besides, in his account of the transmission of the sceptre, he calls him "Of many an isle, and of all Argos king." Now Agamemnon's was a continental power; and he could not have been master of any except the adjacent islands (and these would not be many), but through the possession of a fleet.

Remember, Argos was one of the most powerful cities of ancient Greece until the rise of Sparta. On the whole, Agamemnon had power on the mainland, and it extends to only a small amount of islands, which seems strange if he had a 'navy far stronger than his contemporaries'.

To Begin at the Beginning: History of the Peloponnesian War

I'm reading through this classic again. My intention isn't to provide an in-depth and full, scholarly commentary on the text, but to just provide my own personal reaction to it, completely up for grabs, and subject to correction. I've wanted to read this for the longest time and maybe you can put in your knowledge of the text as a guide to lead me along. This will be slow, but even a slug, given enough time, would make it from the east to the west coast!

For instance, it is evident that the country now called Hellas had in ancient times no settled population; on the contrary, migrations were of frequent occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the pressure of superior numbers.

Hellas (Greece) didn’t have a settled population. It was like the sifting sands of a desert. There was much migration, like flocks of birds flying to a more ready food source. Tribes abandoned their homes because armies of a larger number threatened their existence, as a lone scorpion will make away for a horde of superior ants. This was Hellas.

Without commerce, without freedom of communication either by land or sea, cultivating no more of their territory than the exigencies of life required, destitute of capital, never planting their land (for they could not tell when an invader might not come and take it all away, and when he did come they had no walls to stop him), thinking that the necessities of daily sustenance could be supplied at one place as well as another, they cared little for shifting their habitation, and consequently neither built large cities nor attained to any other form of greatness.

These factors explain why Hellas had the characteristics noted above. They had no commerce: no large-scale buying and selling, no market. They couldn’t talk with any of their neighbors, because they didn’t have any ships, and they didn’t have an effective way to travel by land. They cultivated for themselves just what was necessary for them to survive, like a wayfaring pride of lions. They didn’t add onto or expand their territory; like the homeowner who, for the rest of his life, leaves his house as it is, rather than add onto it: no new rooms, no new walls. Only Hellas was worse, for they wouldn’t be considered, as far as territory is concerned, homeowners at all. They’re like a band of homeless nomads using alternating freeway overpasses based on what they need for the moment, or chosen because of the convenience of proximity. And not being in a civilized nation, they might be the constant prey of predatory invaders, much like the ancient Jews were before they found their promised land. They were like the baby turtles hatched on the beach making their frantic quest to the ocean, and all the while, birds of prey would swoop down and take them away. Blessed with reason, though, Hellas knew that this would be their final destination if they stayed put: on or back they must go - to stay is death. Being without the capacity that a China had to build a wall keeping out, or slowing down, the Mongolian hordes, they knew they must be on the constant move, as a shark must be always on the swim, lest it suffocates. Hellas knew enough about the geography to know that what food they found in one place could probably be found in another, so a nomadic existence, while not the best, may not be on that account unreasonable. Because of habitual relocation, a Rome or a New York City was out of the question, for metropolitan cities rise because of a settled habitation, afforded by all the factors Hellas lacked. Hellas, therefore, doesn’t seem destined to be a city on a shining hill.

The richest soils were always most subject to this change of masters; such as the district now called Thessaly, Boeotia, most of the Peloponnese, Arcadia excepted, and the most fertile parts of the rest of Hellas.

All the districts of Hellas had rich and fertile soils besides Arcadia, which is littered with mountains. It looks as if Arcadia is the Switzerland of Greece, for - or for other factors unbeknownst to me - the Alps made conquest of such a territory needlessly cumbersome, and was contrary to tactical superiority, unless a Hannibal was available with a herd of elephants.

The goodness of the land favoured the aggrandizement of particular individuals, and thus created faction which proved a fertile source of ruin. It also invited invasion. Accordingly Attica, from the poverty of its soil enjoying from a very remote period freedom from faction, never changed its inhabitants. And here is no inconsiderable exemplification of my assertion that the migrations were the cause of there being no correspondent growth in other parts.

So, some people used this fertile land for their own gain, which makes sense. But when more than one person has access to such capital, the opportunity - because of sin - for competition and pride comes into play. Factions arise. Oh, how history repeats itself! Even in our own lives, how we duplicate and reenact this theme over and over again! A fertile medium is most readily exploited by smaller natures. Herein maybe lies the mystery behind Christ’s beatitude of assigning blessedness to the poor in spirit, the less fertile in spirit, where fertile might mean ‘blessed with the virtues this world finds appetizing’. Along with Arcadia, another exception is Attica, a land not abounding in good land, but thus abounding in the liberty of togetherness, without partisans favoring one exploitative group over another. Because the tree was planted for a time, it sprang deep roots, the inhabitants lingered, and factions vanished. This corroborates Thucydides’ point that migration leads to no growth, just if you were to keep plucking up a baby tree every day would lead to its stunted growth, or just as the man who moves from woman to woman will never know the true meaning of love, or even sex, compared to the rooted, married man.

The most powerful victims of war or faction from the rest of Hellas took refuge with the Athenians as a safe retreat; and at an early period, becoming naturalized, swelled the already large population of the city to such a height that Attica became at last too small to hold them, and they had to send out colonies to Ionia.

From the Hurricane of war and faction sweeping through Hellas, Athens became a haven, an underground shelter from the funnel cloud of the exploitation of the more powerful. Contrary to what the Latin Americans are doing here in America, the natives of surrounding Hellas were naturalized in the ways of Athens, the glue to a sound nation and culture. The population bubbled over like a fountain and the dam became too short to hold back the building waters of the population. I notice the threatening trends of population growth in the cities close to the Mexican border, but with the failure of naturalization, over-population is mixed with the decadent culture’s failure to adapt, thus threatening the resurrection of the dreaded factions. In Greece, even the whole promontory of Attica became too small to hold the incoming legions, a foreshadowing for America if we would only heed it. Do we have an Ionia to which to send them? Maybe our Ionia is turning haphazardly and unintentionally into America’s southwest? The analogy doesn’t hold because of the point about naturalization.

There is also another circumstance that contributes not a little to my conviction of the weakness of ancient times. Before the Trojan war there is no indication of any common action in Hellas, nor indeed of the universal prevalence of the name; on the contrary, before the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion, no such appellation existed, but the country went by the names of the different tribes, in particular of the Pelasgian.

Lack of common action: a house divided against itself cannot stand. If there is no unity to a body, it cannot run. If one leg doesn’t cooperate in a certain way with the other, movement shall not result. If neurons aren’t directed in a unitive way by the soul, a consistent personality is not likely to emerge. A disorganized orchestra will yield clanging rubbish. We are introduced to Hellen, the son of Deucalion, which may or may not be the one who was born of Prometheus; but Hellen was the George Washington that perhaps reintroduced into Hellas this sought after common action. Before such unity, the body of Hellas was fraught with fractures, the orchestra of Hellas was fraught with disharmony, each tribe a varying nation marching to the beat of its own drummer, an army without a commander, a fleet of ships without a main captain. The Pelasgians are an interesting bunch, preceding the Hellenes, a certain tribe, before the beginnings of the Greek language, resembling the Old English that might have preceded the gradual evolution of the English we speak today. Homer made them the allies of Troy, by the Aegean coast of Turkey. The point is that the Pelasgians were the predominant tribe in Hellas before the era of common action brought by Hellen.

It was not till Hellen and his sons grew strong in Phthiotis, and were invited as allies into the other cities, that one by one they gradually acquired from the connection the name of Hellenes; though a long time elapsed before that name could fasten itself upon all. The best proof of this is furnished by Homer. Born long after the Trojan War, he nowhere calls all of them by that name, nor indeed any of them except the followers of Achilles from Phthiotis, who were the original Hellenes: in his poems they are called Danaans, Argives, and Achaeans. He does not even use the term barbarian, probably because the Hellenes had not yet been marked off from the rest of the world by one distinctive appellation. It appears therefore that the several Hellenic communities, comprising not only those who first acquired the name, city by city, as they came to understand each other, but also those who assumed it afterwards as the name of the whole people, were before the Trojan war prevented by their want of strength and the absence of mutual intercourse from displaying any collective action.

We are told, obviously enough, of the origin of the appellation ‘Hellenes’, for ‘Hellen‘ and ‘his sons’, growing up in Phthiotis, a prefecture in Greece, the term ‘prefecture‘ coming from the word periphery and the style of government then extant in Greece. It took a while, but eventually made its effect known, as prolonged exposure to the sun won’t feel like sunburn until after one has already gone inside thinking one has been spared. As I already mentioned, Thucydides makes it clear: Homer doesn’t call anyone in The Iliad ‘the Hellenes’, and he doesn’t say anyone is from Phthiotis except for the minions of Achilles, who were the original Hellenes, as yellow is already native and original in the color green, since it is more primary. The emergent hue only exists because of ‘after-the-fact‘ contingencies. Homer cordoned off ‘Hellenes‘ with the name ‘Achaeans’. No umbrella term could be used, because it couldn’t be applied. This proves that the Hellenes had no collective action before the Trojan War; the collective action sprung afterwards, with the advent of strength and mutual intercourse, effected by mutual language and rooted location; the blossom of the Hellenes had not sprouted before the Trojan war, because it had no soil in which to draw the necessary nourishment before the Trojan war.

Indeed, they could not unite for this expedition till they had gained increased familiarity with the sea. And the first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Carians and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.

For without such familiarity they’d be doomed, as the lost ship is doomed without a familiarity with the stars. A map of the sea allows for the exploitation of tactics, and with tactics for warfare come the opportunity of defense, retaliation, and proactive conquest. But without collective action, the creation of a map is hard to come by. It is a hard feat just as building a mansion by yourself or with a few people is a hard feat. The cooperation of a mass of people is needed because the project’s subject matter is geographically massive, just as the cooperation of a mass of people is needed in building a mansion, for the mansion is structurally massive. Enter Minos, the antidote for this malady - he created the envied Navy. He became Zeus of the sea. The Cyclades became his private kingdom. The Carians were expelled, and the sons of Minos were appointed over this peppered collection of islands. The fires of piracy were briefly extinguished before the impending back-draft.

For in early times the Hellenes and the barbarians of the coast and islands, as communication by sea became more common, were tempted to turn pirates, under the conduct of their most powerful men; the motives being to serve their own cupidity and to support the needy. They would fall upon a town unprotected by walls, and consisting of a mere collection of villages, and would plunder it; indeed, this came to be the main source of their livelihood, no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory. An illustration of this is furnished by the honour with which some of the inhabitants of the continent still regard a successful marauder, and by the question we find the old poets everywhere representing the people as asking of voyagers —“Are they pirates?”— as if those who are asked the question would have no idea of disclaiming the imputation, or their interrogators of reproaching them for it. The same rapine prevailed also by land.

Why the temptation to turn pirates? Why by a Joker in the midst of an ordered Gotham? The Hellenes intermingled with the barbarians of the coast and islands. Bad company corrupts good character. Piracy was reinforced with the beams of cupidity and support for the needy, a sort of greedy Robin Hood to steal from the rich and give to the poor, including himself. Communication by sea lead to the plundering of villages. The pirates were red in tooth and claw and preyed on the unprotected like a swarm of locusts. We live in the time of a paganism so no element of Christian judgment checked their action; the label of honor and glory went to the stronger, the spirit of the Ubermench reigned as a foreshadowing menace. Stealing was a virtue, which makes one question the Tao Lewis outlined in The Abolition of Man. But as Chesterton says, the thief doesn’t disrespect property; he only thinks that by stealing it, he can more perfectly respect it. A virtue poked itself up sneakily as a stump among the fog in a movie like Heat, where the livelihood of being a thief is an unspoken virtue, or at least made to look attractive. As with the sea, rapine leaked over onto land, like smoke seeping in underneath the crack of a door.

And even at the present day many of Hellas still follow the old fashion, the Ozolian Locrians for instance, the Aetolians, the Acarnanians, and that region of the continent; and the custom of carrying arms is still kept up among these continentals, from the old piratical habits. The whole of Hellas used once to carry arms, their habitations being unprotected and their communication with each other unsafe; indeed, to wear arms was as much a part of everyday life with them as with the barbarians. And the fact that the people in these parts of Hellas are still living in the old way points to a time when the same mode of life was once equally common to all. The Athenians were the first to lay aside their weapons, and to adopt an easier and more luxurious mode of life; indeed, it is only lately that their rich old men left off the luxury of wearing undergarments of linen, and fastening a knot of their hair with a tie of golden grasshoppers, a fashion which spread to their Ionian kindred and long prevailed among the old men there.

There is nothing new under the sun. Rapine was rampant in present day Hellas as it is under a new guise in modern America, and it is praised in new modes in movies like Wallstreet. Look at the implied action of Hellas to the rampant nature of rapine! Did their government seize their arms? Did Hellas think that by an erasure of weapons the rapine was slowly recede, like the fizz of an agitated soda? No: every bee in the colony was armed with a stinger. As you said: if you outlaw the arms, only the outlaws have arms. As with Hellas, an outlawing of arms implied that the pirates and the barbarians would have free and uninhibited reign to plunder, as rain would have no obstacle to soak a crowd without umbrellas. But why, then, could the Athenians be so foolish as to strip themselves of their armor? I notice the concomitance of those who lay aside weaponry and those you lead lives of luxury. Why, one wonders, do the ones who enact what seem to be the most foolish and suicidal modes of action and thought be the ones who bathe in the hypnotizing, toxic fumes of luxury and wealth? History echoes itself once again! Why can’t they squeeze themselves through the eye of the needle of rationality?

On the contrary, a modest style of dressing, more in conformity with modern ideas, was first adopted by the Lacedaemonians, the rich doing their best to assimilate their way of life to that of the common people. They also set the example of contending naked, publicly stripping and anointing themselves with oil in their gymnastic exercises. Formerly, even in the Olympic contests, the athletes who contended wore belts across their middles; and it is but a few years since that the practice ceased. To this day among some of the barbarians, especially in Asia, when prizes for boxing and wrestling are offered, belts are worn by the combatants. And there are many other points in which a likeness might be shown between the life of the Hellenic world of old and the barbarian of to-day.

But look what happens. The rich adopting a modest style of dress: in athletics, stripping naked and oiling themselves, almost like the modern bodybuilder - all this to support that then-present barbarism mirrored sophisticated Hellas.

And I'll work my way further any chance I get. This has got to be a page turner.

The Inconsolable Secret

The more I contemplate the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the more I think I've hit upon the true nature of reality. If I didn't think it compatible with Christianity, I'd toss it away in a heartbeat. But I think it is. It fits in beautifully, and when all the pieces fall into their rightful place, and the planets of his system are aligned with those that are revealed in Christianity, I feel such an assurance of knowledge and certainty that any festering doubts that I may have had fade away into nonentity.

First published in 1818, Schopenhauer wrote his seminal The World as Will and Representation, a book that continues to impact me. To understand Schopenhauer, we need to understand one important aspect of the philosophy of Kant, whom Schopenhauer was responding to. Kant thought the world could be divided into two realms, the thing-in-itself (noumenon), and the thing-as-it-appears-to-us (phenomenon). We see the world only through the way our minds represent it to us. The way our minds represent the world to us is a world in space and time. Space and time are not 'out there'; they are forms our minds project onto the 'world-in-itself' in order for us to make sense of and organize our experience. Kant thought there was no way for our minds to pierce through the veil or curtain of phenomenon. The phenomenon is an insurmountable cliff on which we cannot climb and beyond which we cannot see. It is the sole mission of our minds to study and organize phenomenon and leave the noumenon to exist unexplored.

But Schopenhauer denies that the cliff is insurmountable. Agreeing with Kant, Schopenhauer believes that all science can clarify for us is the nature of phenomenon, not noumenon. For the noumenon lies behind, or over and above, the representation, the idea, that which is phenomenon. Dissenting from Kant, Schopenhauer ascribes a particular nature to the noumenon. Yes, it is the thing-in-itself, but it is also more: it is pure, unadulterated, relentless, unstoppable, yearning, desiring, 'willing'. It is 'The Will'. Thus, what science elucidates is our ideas about phenomenon; what lies beyond and behind the idea, our representations, is noumenon, pure willing. We get a brief glimpse of this reality, like a short-lived oasis, when we will bodily movement. But it is only a fleeting revelation.

What Schopenhauer says about the phenomenon rings true. No matter what, the world as we know it comes through the window of our perception, and through that window we become conscious of whatever is perceived. Through this perception, we 'represent' the world to ourselves. This is what Schopenhauer means when he says the world is my idea, or the world is my representation. But based on perception alone, we haven't climbed the cliff, for the cliff is nothing but appearance, not the deepest taproot of reality. We are like the wondering wayfarer who, wanting to enter the castle of reality, walks aimlessly around the moat surrounding the castle, knowing more and more about the outside, but unable to find the way in which the drawbridge can be let down to allow entrance into the inside. What lies behind the walls of the castle, beyond the cliff?

The first we can deduce about the noumenon is that it is without space, time, and causality, categories we impose on the nature of appearances, the world as my idea, the world explained by science. The world as Will is timeless, spaceless, uncaused. But we despair because the world as Will seems to be out of our reach, since what's in our reach seems to be restricted to what our perception can gather. Like I said earlier, this restriction is relieved momentarily when we contemplate our own individual willings. It's wonderful to think about. I look at my hand, and then I move my hand. How mysterious! Mystical! But, you might object, hasn't cognitive science shed light on this, demystified it by outlining all the neural conditions that give rise to movement? Schopenhauer would cry foul, for (remember) science only reveals the nature of the appearance, which isn't the true nature of reality. Thus, in moving my hand, I catch a glimpse of the movement as an appearance (since I perceive it) and as reality (since our wills our one with The Will).

To fully appreciate Schopenhauer's next point, I'd like to focus on a quote from C.S. Lewis:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

I equate the desire Lewis is talking about with the individual willings Schopenhauer is talking about. Schopenhauer's next point is that the pure, disinterested contemplation of art is the window through which we can momentarily escape our own willings and merge with The Will, ultimate reality. We lose ourselves in and through art, and through the beauty we see in nature, and through the sublime. We can lose ourselves and have our longings burning with delight through the vision of a mountain range or a crag, a waterfall, a landscape; in works of art, artists communicate through their artistic medium an emotion to an audience. To those who contemplate a work of art, they can attain to pure knowing, certainty, almost the Platonic Form of whatever the work of art is focused on. Art reveals these forms.

Consider the sublime. The sublime, in contrast to the beautiful, presents a danger to human existence or well-being. A pleasurable contemplation of a mountain range from a comfortable and safe perspective at its base is 'the beautiful'. In the midst of a growing swells on a ship in the middle of the sea while an ominous storm cloud hovers and swirls and thunders above is sublime, for it renders our existence a precarious reed and frightens us with its immensity and overpowering nature. Both of these, however, are windows into The Will, since both are art forms. These art forms, though, are not direct routes to the Will, only windows, tools that allow us to organize and insufficiently appreciate varying aspects of what The Will might consist of.

The art form that distinguishes itself from all the other art forms in that it gets us closer to The Will than any other art form is MUSIC. Music reveals the very nature of reality; it is not just a copy of a representation of The Will, a mere window, but a copy of The Will itself. Thus, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata isn't a copy of Beethoven's melancholy, but the nature of melancholy itself, and thus a copy of an aspect of The Will itself. Pearl Jam's Black doesn't ultimately tell us about Vedder's own lost love, but the nature of lost love itself. And it changes you: as Wittgenstein tells:

. . . how a friend describes going to Beethoven’s door and hearing him ‘cursing, howling and singing’ over his new fugue; after a whole hour Beethoven at last came to the door, looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and having eaten nothing for 36 hours because his coo and parlour-maid had run away from his rage. That’s the sort of man to be.

Schopenhauer realizes that this point about music is unverifiable. He knows that we can't have a Mozart symphony and compare it to the The Will itself to verify that the symphany sufficiently copies The Will or not. Schopenhauer postulates his view with the aim of providing a plausible explanation of music's power, and he calls on us to keep his view in mind when listening to music to see if his view can be more plausible than its denial.



We are full of desire, and the momentary fulfillment of particular desires, or the frustration of those desires, end in our unhappiness. Satisfaction of particular desires ends in despair and boredom. The fulfillment of sexual desire with a different woman every night, of excitement in bigger and better thrills, of travel in more remote and exotic locations, of popularity in the gathering up of more and more friends and acquaintances: this kind of life is purely aesthetic and shall end in despair and meaninglessness when once boredom is attained and when the contemplation of our own death shatters all our pretentious striving after satisfying petty desires. But if through art, and especially music, we can see the true nature of reality, there is the possibility of salvation, inevitable escape from suffering: not physical suffering, but spiritual, the kind of suffering that is no longer suffering because it is the portal through which we see and experience The Will; we become one with Him, as a river runs out of a coast into the sea.

In The Will, we not only see that we are One with Him, but One with one another. As Christ Himself said:

I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one. (John 17:11)

And:

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: (John 17:22)

A White Reservation

In the greatest of Western films, the philosophical main character Gus and his best friend Call have a discussion on their work clearing Texas of the Comanche menace. While doing so, they look about them at the Indians and Mexicans in the town and Gus opines that "In twenty years they'll be putting us on a reservation." Of course, true to form Call disagrees, but I wonder if he would if Gus had said "200 years" instead?

Recent figures from the California show that Latinos make up over 50 percent of the students in the school system. When one considers that every year 100 thousand native born leave California for an America that resembles the one they grew-up in, it doesn't seem to be too long before the gringo's time in Azland will have come to an end.

As my father told me as a child: what happens in California spreads throughout the rest of the land. California is the bell weather for America. When Ronald Reagan signed California's no fault divorce legislation into law, it was the first state in the union to allow such an obama-nation; yet, today it is the norm. Why should someone not be able to abandon their union before God as easily as they would an order at Wendy's? At least that is the thinking today, but it wasn't always so. But, what started in the sunshine state infected the rest of the land: so it has been and so it shall be.

But, what is there to fear: Things have worked out famously for the Indians.

Through the looking glass, or not?

Lets examine the alleged inadequacy of the metaphor of x being a mirror image of something else. You accuse the metaphor of being a shortcoming because of its nonsense under scrutiny. To get there we'll have to see at least how it's used and then put it under the logical microscope to see if its credentials can be salvaged. If I say of something that x is a mirror image of y, what exactly am I saying? It seems to me, that I'm saying that x resembles y in almost every aspect. If so, lets see how this holds up when we examine 'mirror image of' completely literally.

When I use the saying loosely and without thinking of meaningful exactitude, I mean 'roughly the same'. But if I were to start using it while paying more attention to the meanings of the words making up the phrase, I'd have to reserve it for, not undiluted identity, but perhaps just 'reflection'. Reflection differs from identity in that a reflected world inverts every relational property of the world reflected. But my point might be to say that there are other usages than literal ones. If language only had literal usages, it would a denuded language indeed.

In our talk on the phone, I mentioned the metaphor of 'My muscle is a rock.' in an effort to prove that all metaphors, if taken literally, are nonsense. You, if I remember, contested this counterexample by saying that this isn't a true exception because there is still sensible similarities between a rock and a muscle: say, hardness. But then I'd say the same about x being a mirror image of y: say, resemblance. But, you might object, the resemblance isn't of the 'reflected kind' I mentioned earlier and therefore its being chosen is nonsense. But if it comes to that, I could say that my muscle's hardness isn't of the 'rocky kind'. The puzzle is solved if we realize that a metaphor is being used. I'm not saying that x literally is the mirror image of y; I'm saying that x figuratively is the mirror image of y. With the 'muscle is a rock' metaphor, it's the same thing: we're not saying my muscle is literally a rock, but figuratively a rock. In the latter case, the property shared is 'relative hardness'; in the former case, the property shared is 'relative similarity' or 'relative resemblance'.

If taken literally, we could only use 'mirror image of' when perfect reflection is attained, an extremely rare event, stripping the poet and the richness of language significantly. All figurative language would be put under this crucible. The Psalms couldn't say the trees clapped for joy. God couldn't be called a vine or a fire. Christ couldn't be called a gate. For a gate is a material construct connected by hinges to a fixed post of some kind, able to be closed or open, designed to keep in or keep out certain things. But Christ is a person, spiritually connected to the Trinity. But when we say Christ is a gate, we mean that He is figuratively a gate in that through Him and Him alone we have access to the Father.

Tell me what you think!

Devils tearing your life away: Jacob's Ladder

The demons in Jacob's Ladder look like the demonic paintings of William Blake. This is an original, terrifying movie. I picked it up by accident because the plot interested me. But I didn't know what I was in for. I was struck by the same feeling I had when I watched The Descent for the first time. It was a sleeper and barely made a blip on the radar in terms of gross. It's looks like it's the same with Jacob's Ladder.



Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam war veteran, a mentally unstable one at that. A bayonet pierces his side during the war, but his consciousness soldiered on in some unfamiliar mode. Has he died? We don't know for sure. Horned creatures begin to terrorize him. Interesting territory is explored. Just how is our consciousness going to adjust after death? Do we have any idea? Are we going to notice? Assuming we don't have a good clue because we're really old. How long will it take for our consciousness to catch up, to realize it's dead, assuming there is a hereafter, and if there is, there's a limbo, a no man's land, not quite Heaven, but not quite Hell. It's almost like the long, swift sucking sensation you get when you go down a steep water slide, or maybe the feeling you get when you just clear the edge of a gigantic waterfall: you're no longer on the river; but you're not where the waterfall meets the water down below.

That's sort of where Jocob might be. Little things begin to break through. He swears he sees a lizard-like tail squirm beneath a homeless man. Hideous faces that look like melting wax roam slowly just behind passing car windows. During a scene, Jacob's chiropractor quotes the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:

Eckhart saw Hell too; he said: 'the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.'

Jacob's Ladder is what Jacob is supposed to be on, the ladder being a meeting place between Heaven and Hell. But 'the Ladder' also has another meaning: it was an experimental drug given to American soldiers during Vietnam, and without their knowing. The drug made a short-cut to a person's urge for primal rage. It's a ladder leading down to that part of the psyche. New revelations about the drug shed light on the mystery of Jacob's alleged death!