This specific chapter of Sparta and its Law has been moved: here.
If you want to read the book Sparta and its Law from the beginning, click: here.
Category: Plato
Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil.
Another queer saint! One does not trust one’s ears, even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they philosophized differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit—amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions... What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato?
A new art form of the Greek agon: dialectics. Finally, I recall—against Schopenhauer and in honor of Plato—that the whole higher culture and literature of classical France too grew on the soil of sexual interest. Everywhere in it one may look for the amatory, the senses, the sexual contest, “the woman”—one will never look in vain…
Oh! That my spirit were yon Heaven of light
To gaze upon thee with a thousand eyes
—Plato
Tomorrow Sunday I won’t post any entry here to leave my visitors the opportunity to read carefully my latest entry on “Women and marriage” in Sparta. The uttermost importance of what the author says in that post is explained in my “metaphysical” comment in that thread.
Since that post is related to Eros in Ancient Greece, the issue of other forms of Greco-Roman sexuality should be addressed.
It irritates me that LGBT deviants and writers like James O’Meara want to usurp the legacy of the classical world to rationalize their lifestyles. The fact is that the missing color in their rainbow flag—the Hellenes’ infatuation with handsome adolescents, not adults—was the only form of homosexuality tolerated in some Greek and Roman cities. This had nothing to do with the contemporary “gay” movement or sex between coeval adults.
As a dilettante in classic literature I tried to say something about it in “On classic pederasty,” but there are people who are far more knowledgeable than me. Today, surfing the internet starting here, I found several posts by a blogger in The Phora that complement what I have said. The erudite blogger, Ixion, is the one who uses as an avatar an image of the Virgin Mary; you may skip the other comments in that thread, “Debunking Ancient Greek Homosexual History.”
But all of this is a distraction related to my differences with Counter-Currents: what really matters is the subject of hetero-sexuality in Ancient Greece.
Or:
Time to kick the philosophers in the balls
For Francis Bacon (1561-1626) the metaphysicians were like spiders that constructed their webs with a substance segregated from their insides, resulting in that their conclusions kept little if any connection to empirical reality. Here there are some chosen excerpts from Will Durant’s chapter on Bacon in his splendid book, The Story of Philosophy. Pay attention how Bacon differs from Buddha-like opinions on human desires:
At the age of twelve Bacon was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. He stayed there three years, and left it with a strong dislike of its texts and methods, a confirmed hostility to the cult of Aristotle, and a resolve to set philosophy into a more fertile path, to turn it from scholastic disputation to the illumination and increase of human good…
Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy had turned into premature death? And besides, it is an impossible philosophy; for instinct will out…
He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: “men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators”…
All through the years of his rise and exaltation he brooded over the restoration or reconstruction of philosophy, Meditor Instaurationem philosophiae. It was a magnificent enterprise, and—except for Aristotle—without precedent in the history of thought. It would differ from every other philosophy in aiming at practice rather than at theory, at specific concrete goods rather than at speculative symmetry… Here, for the first time, are the voice and tone of modern science.
Just as the pursuit of knowledge becomes scholasticism when divorced from the actual needs of men and life, so the pursuit of politics becomes a destructive bedlam when divorced from science and philosophy…
Philosophy has been barren so long, says Bacon, because she needed a new method to make her fertile. The great mistake of the Greek philosophy was that they spent so much time in theory, so little in observation. The predecessors of Socrates were in this matter sounder than his followers; Democritus, in particular, had a nose for facts, rather than an eye for the clouds. No wonder that philosophy has advanced so little since Aristotle’s day; it has been using Aristotle’s methods. Now, after two thousand years of logic-chopping with the machinery invented by Aristotle, philosophy has fallen so low that none will do her reverence. All these medieval theories, theorems and disputations must be cast out and forgotten…
Philosophers deal out infinites with the careless assurance of grammarians handling infinitives. The world as Plato describes it is merely a world constructed by Plato, and pictures Plato rather than the world…
Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire. So we study mathematics in order to reckon quantities and build bridges…
And when the great minds of the French Enlightenment undertook that masterpiece of intellectual enterprise, the Encyclopédie, they dedicated it to Francis Bacon.
“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods
as to desert them for the Jews?”
—Julian, addressing the Christians
Priscus to Libanius
Athens, June 380
I send you by my pupil Glaucon something less than half of the Emperor Julian’s memoir. It cost me exactly 30 solidi to have this much copied. On receipt of the remaining fifty solidi I shall send you the rest of the book.
We can hardly hope to have another Julian in our lifetime. I have studied the edict since I wrote you last, and though it is somewhat sterner in tone than Constantine’s, I suspect the only immediate victims will be those Christians who follow Arius. But I may be mistaken…
I never go to evening parties. The quarter I referred to in my letter was not the elegant street of Sardes but the quarter of the prostitutes near the agora. I don’t go to parties because I detest talking-women, especially our Athenian ladies who see themselves as heiress to the age of Pericles. Their conversation is hopelessly pretentious and artificial.
Hippia and I get along rather better than we used to. Much of her charm for me has been her lifelong dislike of literature. She talks about servants and food and relatives, and I find her restful. Also, I have in the house a Gothic girl, bought when she was eleven. She is now a beautiful woman, tall and well made, with eyes grey as Athena’s. She never talks. Eventually I shall buy her a husband and free them both as a reward for her serene acceptance of my attentions, which delight her far less than they do me.
But then Plato disliked sexual intercourse between men and women. We tend of course to think of Plato as divine, but I am afraid he was rather like our old friend Iphicles, whose passion for youths has become so outrageous that he now lives day and night in the baths, where the boys call him the queen of philosophy.
Hippia joins me in wishing for your good—or should I say better?—health.
The memoir. It will disturb and sadden you. I shall be curious to see how you use this material.
You will note in the memoir that Julian invariably refers to the Christians as “Galileans” and to their churches as “charnel houses,” this last a dig at their somewhat necrophile passion for the relics of dead men. I think it might be a good idea to alter the text, and reconvert those charnel houses into churches and those Galileans into Christians. Never offend an enemy in a small way.
Here and there in the text, I have made marginal notes. I hope you won’t find them too irrelevant.
Categories
Two consuls
An interesting debate followed Matt Parrott’s recent article at Counter Currents about the pros and cons of fascism for the coming ethnostate.
I admire both Julian and Hitler, who ruled without a system of checks and balances. But at the same time we must avoid blundering on colossal scales (Julian’s invading Persia; Hitler’s invading Russia). That’s why at Counter Currents Trainspotter asked me a most pertinent question about the concept of the Two Roman Consuls to avoid such civilization-destroying blunders.
This is the lead paragraph of the current Wikipedia article on Roman consuls:
A consul served in the highest elected political office of the Roman Republic. Each year, two consuls were elected together, to serve for a one-year term. Each consul was given veto power over his colleague and the officials would alternate each month.
However, after the establishment of the Empire, the consuls were merely a figurative representative of Rome’s republican heritage and held very little power and authority, with the Emperor acting as the supreme leader.
If someone deserves to be compared to LOTR’s Isildur he was Julius Caesar. We are barely taught at school the history of the Aryan people called the Celts. Studying their tragic history ought to change our idealized image about Caesar and the beginning of the Roman Empire.
Caesar betrayed the Republic and started what became known as the Roman Empire. The empire fell under the spell of the One Ring, “economics over race,” especially considering that the conquered Celts were whiter than the Romans. (It was the Romans, not the Celts, the ones who by the times of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul had started to miscegenate.)
Last year I was shocked to learn that Caesar practiced a sort of exterminationist anti-whitism. You see nothing of this barbarism in TV series like Rome or the other idealized series on the fall of the empire. But the grim fact is that Caesar killed… one of every four Gauls!
For instance, when his troops occupied the Gaulish town of Avaricum Caesar ordered all 40,000 inhabitants put to death. His conquest of Gaul was exterminationist, with whole tribes, including pure Aryan women and children, being slaughtered.
In William Pierce’s history of the white race we are told that by the autumn of 54 B.C. Caesar had subdued Gaul, having destroyed 800 towns and villages. More than three million (!) Celts were enslaved. And what is much worse, “behind his armies came a horde of Roman-Jewish merchants and speculators,” with “hundreds of thousands of blond, blue-eyed Celtic girls” that marched south in chains. They were “pawed over by greasy, Semitic flesh-merchants in Rome’s slave markets.”
So the century when we were born was not the first time that a “Hellstorm,” which we could define as whites’ enslaving and genociding the cream of their own race, happened in Europe.
From the time of Caesar’s abolition of the Two Consuls system, the fate of Rome was sealed. No Roman Emperor after Caesar ever shared power. All became absolute dictators. No Consul had veto powers. Miscegenating Romans started to forget the republican principles that had made them so strong—disciplina potestas, probitas, severitas, gravitas, pudicitia, pietas and especially the principle that the common good is the highest law: salus populi suprema lex. Instead, they started to behave like American pigs or, to use a Petronius term during the reign of another mad emperor, Caligula, like Trimalchios.
Marble bust of Brutus
Not Caesar but Brutus should be our model. And the history of Brutus’ ancestors, the founders of the Roman Republic, should be studied starting perhaps with Lucius Junius Brutus.
I told Trainspotter that throughout Plato’s Republic runs the fear that the degenerative Ionian and Athenian lifestyles could potentially ruin the state, and that this propensity of whites to behave like miscegenating pigs in the later stages of civilization could only be prevented by a tough Dorian discipline.
In a nutshell, the coming Fourth Reich must adopt the Two Consuls principle and repudiate all sorts of Caesarism.