A Historical Criticism of Costin Alamariu's "Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy"

I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy.

— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

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On September 15, Dr. Costin Alamariu published a revamped version of his dissertation under the title Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy to great fanfare, becoming the 20th best-selling book on Amazon within two days.

The book has attracted significant enthusiasm, but little critical engagement with its thesis. Hitherto most criticisms of Dr. Alamariu have been impotent and uninformed screeds by mainstream conservatives, with the sole outcome of enhancing Dr. Alamariu’s prestige.

This essay aims to give Dr. Alamariu the challenge a thinker of his calibre rightfully merits.

I won’t bore the reader with tedious exposition, and will cut right to the chase:

Part 1 summarizes Alamariu’s thesis in a way that is both concise and comprehensive.

Part 2 refutes it.

Part 3 explains the historical origin of Alamariu’s exegesis of Plato.

Part 4 addresses Dr. Alamariu’s intellectual project of “vitalism” and its shortcomings as a foundation for dissident right politics.

1. Summary of Alamariu’s thesis

2. Foundational criticisms of Alamariu’s thesis

   2a. The Männerbund hypothesis

   2b. The agroikos: wild man?

   2c. Nomos despotes: the problem of Sparta

   2d. Bellum et otium?

   2e. The erromenesteroi in Gorgias and the turannos eros

   2f. Greek eugeneia

   2g. Plato’s Academy as an institute for seizing power?

   2h. Nietzsche and the affirmation of life

   2i. Christianity and the “misbreeding” of man

3. Historical origins of the “political Plato” interpretation

4. Whither vitalism?

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1) Summary of Alamariu’s thesis

Dr. Alamariu’s thesis goes as follows:

• The central concept that pervades the entire book is the distinction between nomos (convention, tradition, positive law) and phusis (nature, heredity, stock). The two are in intrinsic opposition. The superior man is the “nomos-independent” man, for he has such a fullness of being from his inborn arete that he is driven by passions and ambitions which cannot be satisfied by any nomoi, city or settled life. The superior man is a wild man, the synthesis of beast and man with all the best qualities of the lion and fox. This distinction is also linked to an anthropological dichotomy: in distant prehistoric antiquity (which also perennially recurs in present-day social structures), the default state of life was the absolute rule of tribal elders, shamans and medicine men. There was no independent frame of reference beyond the despotism of ancestral custom. Such a society is at once ruthlessly egalitarian, collectivist and authoritarian. This began to change when these primitive tribal chiefdoms were conquered by virile steppe pastoralists, who layered themselves on top as a Herrenrasse (a ‘lordly race’ or master race). The resulting social bifurcation permitted the ruling race to create a pathos of distance between themselves and their lowly subjects, from which a concept of nature as an independent source of valuation could now be developed. This early speculation on nature/phusis was an outgrowth of the unique pursuits of the aristocracy: hunting, raiding, animal breeding, military drilling, etc. That is to say, “nature” was not some extrinsic speculation about the primary causes or essences of things, but an intrinsic description of the aristocracy’s own hereditary traits. Initially this is conveyed through mythopoetic means — stories about battle prowess, glory, half-man/half-animal creatures (reflecting the wild and liminal state outside of civilization in which the ancient Männerbünde of young warrior outlaws practiced their ecstatic rites so as to frenzy themselves up into a berserker fury — howling like wolves, barking like dogs — to then disperse and conquer sedentary farmers), and so on. Philosophy is a “radicalization” of aristocratic myth which for the first time takes an exoterically rationalistic and dialectical outlook, but esoterically seeks the rebarbarization of the superior man to free up his nature from the stifling conventions of the city — that is to say, to unleash the daimonion within him by unbridling his eros. Philosophical schools are thus a throwback to the Männerbünde of old, but this time made more sophisticated as “breeding projects” to create the superior man through the laws and nomoi of a eugenic polity (the ideal city). Paradoxically and very deliberately so, the goal of this new eugenic nomos (or more accurately, politeia) is to create a man who will surpass it in excellence and therefore destroy it by imposing his own phusis, having outgrown the conventions in which he was bred: the philosopher-tyrant. Or, at any rate, this is supposed to be the “radicalized” version of the aristocratic ideal when its own private mores have degenerated. However, Dr. Alamariu generally gives priority to such an aristocratic radicalism as his basic model for what an aristocracy aspires to.

• Hence: “Though a certain kind of training may be necessary to cultivate [phusis], this is not primarily a matter of being taught, and certainly not being taught by nomos or custom,

  but of being bred. The primary function of nomos is 'social control,' homogenization, taming, tribal survival, the continuation and preservation of mere life-through a regime of commands, speech and teaching that covers up and suppresses nature. Excellence, virtue, on the other hand, is a matter of nature, of blood, and it cannot be taught.”

• Nomos and phusis manifest in other domains: nomos is the “mere life” of the anthropon (mortal), concerned with domesticity, menial labor and social obligations. Phusis is the higher life-affirmation of the andres (man, as distinguished from mere mortal): the love of war, adventure, piracy and perfect freedom which glorifies physical acts of vitality. Phusis is rude, savage and untamed — a man with phusis is said to be an agroikos, a man of the wilderness, one who descends from the agrios (fields or woods), a place that is “outside the walls” or “beyond the pale,” in which he learns secret skills from fantastical beings like the Centaur, which exist on the threshold between culture (ecstatic life of the higher man, self-cultivation, limitless ambition) and civilization (domesticated life of the inferior mortal, self-sacrifice to the herd, no outlet for own ambition). Phusis is about the phue, the living body that radiates its own power, in contrast to soma, the passive and lifeless corpse. Aristocratic education (paideia) is therefore education outside the city, the coming to the fore of what is already “in his blood,” likened to communion with divine beings and mythical beasts. Indeed, divinity itself is simply the awe-inspiring radiance of superior physique as perceived by the domesticated herd. Godhood is not outside but within the superior man.

• Therefore: “So far from being understood as a series of repeated attempts to reestablish order and settled life, Greek history, especially Greek aristocratic history, should rather be understood as a series of raids and incursions that seek reestablish the opposite. The original 'antinomian' aristocratic orientation is repeatedly revitalized.” Both the philosopher and the tyrant then emerge from an internal crisis of the aristocracy (implied to be racial degeneration), which creates types of men that are at once booming with vigor and passion, but which are no longer satisfied by the training regimen of the aristocracy. Each going their own ways, the philosopher and the tyrant both make their own superior natures the standards of all value, but in subtly different ways: the philosopher lusts after knowledge (which is really knowledge of breeding, the techne by which higher specimens can be produced) so as to perpetuate excellent breeds, whereas the tyrant lusts after imposing his own individual excellence in the here and now, to subdue a city and mold it into his own image for himself, but not necessarily for the race as a whole. Nevertheless, they are quite similar: the philosopher’s knowledge ultimately comes from himself and his own blood which he seeks to impose as a universal form, and similarly the tyrant wants to impose his blood unto others, but in a particular and unreflective way — the philosopher is, in other words, the self-aware tyrant who has learned the technique of reproducing his own kind in a way that is scientifically repeatable. Or, in Alamariu’s words: “Philosophy and tyranny are means of carving out, within the life of the city, 'game preserves' for the preservation of nature: the ancient aristocratic breeding project now unbound from the identity of any historical class or tribe and made abstract, is preserved by political philosophy as a kind of fossil.”

• Plato’s sympathies were with Callicles all along. In turn, Callicles’ position is simply the Archaic Greek aristocratic view of Theognis and Pindar. As Alamariu says, “Callicles reaches the dramatic and radical conclusion that the right by nature only shines out when convention is suppressed and violently broken. According to Callicles, nature is systematically hidden by convention. It is covered up by the somehow related forces of nomos, demos, and shame [aiskhune].”

• Callicles’ preoccupation is with how to emancipate from convention the raw material by which healthy human specimens can be bred, the erromenesteroi (ἐρρωμενέστεροι, ‘the stout, vigorous, in good health’), or the “better-turned-out” as Alamariu calls them. Dr. Alamariu makes the word erromenesteros the central concept in his reading of Gorgias, suggesting that it’s a key notion in the eugenic worldview of the Greek aristocracy. He uses the word some 28 times in the entire book and devotes extensive focus to it.

• Once again, nomos versus phusis, as applied to philosophical knowledge: “…To try to tunnel into Callicles' mind for a

  moment, consider that the pre-Socratic insight has two closely related, perhaps initially inextricable components: that there is a nature that is the same everywhere; and that human association is arbitrary or based on chance and circumstance. If a talented, ambitious, and erotic young man hears this and understands all of this to be true, liberation from the city's

  ways becomes a necessity. To conform to the city's ways cannot be acceptable, because it has been agreed that the city as such consists only in the common decisions of the many. These common decisions lack all justification besides the word of the many, which is no justification at all.”

• Therefore, all forms of human association and civilized existence consist of connivances by which the weak masses organize themselves to magnify their brute strength against the beautiful and radiant power of Great Men — the city is ultimately built on fear of the Great Man, on strength through numbers, of quantity against quality. The self-preservation of the herd-instinct.

• Socrates’ great innovation over Callicles is to introduce the idea of politeia (regime, polity) which is the actualization of nomos by phusis. That is to say, it is a conventional regime instituted, indeed sculpted like a work of art, by the higher human specimens to perpetuate their posterity and liberate themselves from the herd. It is convention instantiated by force, by nature, by the higher type. “The politeia is at once the work of the law-giver, the nomothetes, literally the establisher of convention, and the source and sustainer of all particular nomoi.”

• Philosophy, therefore, aims to pave the foundation for the lawgiver who will deliver the superior men from the stifling conventions of the herd, by creating a form of polity in which the herd is more perfectly subordinated to the superior men as docile helots, as instruments for the greater purposes of the superior, but exoterically justified with appeals to justice, virtue, and the common good. Philosophy must rule in the city.

• Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism continues and attempts to revitalize the lineage starting from Theognis, Pindar, Callicles and Plato. This is the true esoteric meaning of Platonism: paideia (education, breeding) of higher specimens. The Platonic Academy was meant to be a Männerbund for the rearing of such specimens, who would go on to rule the cities and impose the law of nature, the right of the strong, over the slavish masses. This esoteric meaning was lost, leaving only the exoteric spiritual dimension of Neoplatonism, a kind of “Platonism for the people” that through its heir Christianity has led to the misbreeding of man and the rise of democracy, egalitarianism, socialism and communism. Nietzsche’s project is to restore the possibility for true culture and philosophy by resisting the calamitous tide of modern dysgenics. The transvaluation of values is precisely the rewilding or rebarbarization of man, the harnessing of the wilderness. This is because “Philosophy is liberation from nomos and return to nature and therefore to the 'teaching of force,' the teaching of the beast-the lion and the fox-which is 'regime-independent.'“

• The ultimate revelation of philosophy: “Man as such is matter or raw material for the work of the legislator or founder.”

I believe this is a fair summary of Dr. Alamariu’s work. Let us proceed to a deeper analysis of the arguments.

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2. Foundational criticisms of Alamariu’s thesis

• 2a. The Männerbund hypothesis

Throughout Dr. Alamariu’s book, we find the following word associations that are ubiquitously repeated:

1. nature = wild = beast = hunting = breeding = virtue = excellence = Männerbund = philosophy = tyranny = animal power = culture

2. convention = city = labor = family = domesticated = egalitarian = tribal = ancestral = gerontocratic = democratic = civilization

These comprise the basic conceptual framework of the whole work, and it is essential that blood, breeding and nature manifest in a space completely outside of convention, obligation, and sedentary life. The Männerbund - the primeval warband - is the archetype of the natural (excellent, powerful) hierarchy, to be distinguished from mere association which is only conventional.

Indeed, in sharp contrast to the usual motto of “Blut und Boden” (blood and soil), Alamariu’s basic message is that blood and soil are mutually antagonistic concepts.

The term Männerbund is the traditional appellation for what has more recently been categorized under the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European noun *kóryos. The former originated in German scholarship in the 1900s, and in fact was initially used to describe initiatory male societies among African, Polynesian and American Indian peoples. It quickly became a term of art in Indo-Germanic studies by the 1920s with a short work by Lily Weiser, who in turn influenced its most important exponent - Otto Höfler.

Dr. Alamariu mentions the usual classics of Indo-European comparativism, including Stig Wikander and Georges Dumézil.

Curiously absent from his references, however, is Otto Höfler. It was precisely Höfler who perfected the Männerbund theory as an ideal type in Indo-European comparative mythology and linguistics, and nearly all subsequent treatments are indebted to him at least indirectly. His 1934 work Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen presented the theory in the context of the Germanic peoples, drawing from Tacitus, Old Norse sagas and German folklore.

The Männerbund does not mean just any military brotherhood or male fellowship. Rifle clubs, hunting parties, fraternal lodges and things of this sort are not true anthropological Männerbünde, though the concept is widely vulgarized in this way for the purposes of political exhortation.

The Männerbund in the proper sense is a youthful warband living in a liminal space completely outside of any settled life, not subject to any superior outside the brotherhood, sustaining itself purely out of rapine and loot without any fixed wealth or property, and possessing an esoteric spiritual dimension in the form of initiatory cultic rites, theriomorphic transformations into wild animals (especially canids), and rituals meant to achieve a furious state of daemonic ecstasy such as biting of shields, frantic war cries, howling, and so on.

Let me quote the relevant passages from Dr. Alamariu:

Now let us briefly consider a third and even more specific institution of pastoral aristocratic society that could have, again, presented a model or principle of life separate from and even antagonistic to nomos or convention. This is the institution of the warband, or the warrior band of youth.

Tacitus’ account is hardly the only example, though. The same institution existed arguably in very early Rome—Romulus’ comitatus was such a warband—and in the most primitive period of Greece. The war band of youths who live outside the rest of the tribe is associated across cultures with the totemic symbol of the wolf—Romulus’ and Remus’ being reared by a wolf is not unique by any means—and in general with “wolfish” images or themes. An image of this phenomenon exists in the Iliad in the form of Achilles’ war band, especially in Book XVI, where they are compared to a band of wolves. Sparta, which was likely founded by a Dorian warband and which existed to support such a warband parasitically, had for its founder Lycurgus, the “wolf-worker.” This then is yet another cultural feature by virtue of which the Greek mind was able to move beyond the strictures and absolute rule of ancestral nomos, beyond the primitive “rule of elders” that characterizes all early society, and that, again, seemingly provides no “out” from within. The comitatus was independent and not under the control of tribal elders—it represents an important, and perhaps unique, exception to the ubiquity of ancestral nomos or custom that we have seen both Frazer and Strauss describe in some detail.

Furthermore the warband was understood to be essentially lawless, and of the wilderness—initiation into the warband meant life with companions in the wilderness. The youths saw themselves as wild dogs or wolves, and inhabited by the wilderness, outside the bounds of tribal convention. The warband was mythically associated with shape-shifting, “externality,” the transgression of boundaries between the dead and the living, and so on. In fine, it represented in every way a transgression of nomos and its bounds as such, it enthusiastically embraced, not the preservation of mere life, but in fact death and a vital, martial, orgiastic element that was believed to reside in the wilderness, outside the boundaries home and of the tribe. This dangerous cultural institution, that could become a calamity for the tribe itself at any time—could it be that, aside from offering, as such, a model for “life outside convention” or a principle that is opposed to convention—could it be that it also forms the cultural prototype for the philosophical school or sect? And also forms the prototype for the piratical tyrant and his bodyguard or war band, above all law and all responsibility to home and hearth? Certainly it appears that Plato himself connected the tyrant to the “wolfish man,” and in turn both to the fraternity of young warriors.

Later, commenting on Pindar:

This is a recreation of the primeval Mannerbund, morya, comitatus or, in Greek, kouros, ephebes, hetairia, the society of young warriors, mentioned already in the first chapter—the raw material or most basic form from which, as we will see, the philosophical brotherhoods and schools of a later time will take their form as from an archetype.

Dr. Alamariu therefore rightly emphasizes the theriomorphic, cultic and daemonic aspects of the Männerbund.

The Männerbund theory plays a central role as the anthropological (and not just allegorical) grounding of Alamariu’s conceptual framework — phusis as wild and untamed nature outside of convention, and nomos as the domesticated and servile existence of mere life bound by despotic ancestral custom. Not only that, Alamariu directly states that philosophy and philosophical academies were meant to revitalize the primitive ecstasy of these Männerbunde in an exoterically rational context. Since both the philosopher and the tyrant are “nomos-independent men,” the product of breeding for rebarbarization, they exist in the same relationship to the city as the ancient wolf-warrior did to the village.

Dr. Alamariu is quite fond of animal similes as evidence. Now before I get to the source evidence for Männerbünde, I would like to bring up a couple of examples that can illustrate the pitfalls of using the comparative method in a way that rashly presupposes genetic continuity.

We find, in various medieval hagiographies and chronicles, comparisons of Old Prussians and Polabian Slavs (both pagan) to wolves and dogs. In one of the lives of St. Adalbert of Prague, who was martyred by Old Prussians, written in the early 11th century, an encounter with hostile heathens is presented like so: “Suddenly a long line of dogs' heads surrounds the heaven-dweller. They spread their bloodthirsty jaws open and ask: 'Where did he come from? What is he looking for? Why did he come, whom no one had summoned?' The wolves are thirsty for blood, they threaten with death: Why did he come to them risking his life?”.¹

Gumpold of Mantua’s Passion of St. Wenceslaus reports on the fate of the men who martyred him: “As it has been truthfully related to us many times, after the triumph of the most steadfast athlete, all those who spilt his innocent blood were struck by anger from above and were either seized by the power of demons and never appeared again among people, or they changed their nature and began to bark like dogs instead of speaking, imitating the dog's bite by gnawing their teeth; or again, they withered in pitiful dryness of body and, forever deprived of their hearing, soon ended their hateful life.”²

Now the way that many an Indo-Europeanist would approach this, especially the more enthusiastic among them like Kris Kershaw, is to start linking this to a grabbag of legends and stories about cynocephaly, the Harii in Tacitus, the ulfheðinn of Norse legend, stories of lycanthropy from Arcadia, and so on — in a completely synchronic fashion with little regard to differences in time and place, assuming a pristine and unbroken line of cultural continuity from the Rigveda to whatever other unconverted Indo-European nation happens to be analyzed. The conclusion would be that these saints must have encountered a cultic wolf-warrior brotherhood.

The actual explanation is much simpler. All of these stories were written in a monastic literary context, where sources like the Bible, Virgil and Isidore would be paramount. The wild barking dogs are the ones outside the gates of heaven in Revelation 22:15 (“Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood”), i.e. a befitting description of heathens.

Now the most famous piece of evidence for the Männerbund is, of course, the archaeological site at Krasnosamarskoe. And while Anthony and Brown have done very fascinating and valuable work on it, there is something of a circularity in their case: they rely on the pre-established certainty of the comparative-mythological and linguistic evidence to make the identification. But as we shall see, said evidence is far from certain. But this poses a much bigger problem for Dr. Alamariu than for archaeologists. For the latter, it is sufficient that the koryos should have existed at some distant point. But for the former, it is the sole culture-bearing force against all forms of primitive-democratic domesticity.

The quintessential Germanic Männerbund theory is, as mentioned, that of Otto Höfler. It consists of drawing several connections: the Chatti and Harii described by Tacitus are linked to the Scandinavian berserkirs, who in turn are linked to the einherjar (the ghost army in Valhalla), and finally to the modern folklore motif of the Wild Hunt about nocturnal processions of the dead. On balance we therefore have at least a good thousand years of daemonic initiatory death cults forming the backbone of Germanic history, and leaving their trace in guilds and other later medieval fellowships.

Let’s start with the berserkirs.

The linguistic difficulties in decoding the phenomenon of berserkirs behind the fragmentary source evidence we have were well described by Anatoly Liberman in 2005.³ The famous word ulfheðnar (wolfskin) appears to be a hapax legomenon attested as a common noun solely in the skaldic poem Hrafnsmál, where it is used right next to berserkir. All subsequent Norse sagas speak of berserkirs only. One should therefore assume they are the same. Since this is so ‘ber-’ should probably be read as it was by the first philologists who studied the question — bareshirts, not bearshirts. Note that “bare” does not mean nude. It simply means fighting without chain mail on.

The definitive categorization of berserkir references in the Norse sagas was undertaken by Roderick Dale.⁴ Whenever berserkirs show up, they basically correspond to one of four archetypes: a) elite warriors in the royal hird, b) braggards who go around challenging other warriors in mead-halls, c) bandits and marauders who prey on farmers only to be thwarted by the hero, or d) viking raiders and privateers who typically share their loot with other lords or kings. None of these correspond to the ideal type of the koryos, unless one squints really hard to turn any kind of privateer and mercenary into a koryos-brother — but privateers work under a contract to deliver goods to a superior, and they “commute” back to their settled base. And most importantly a privateer isn’t generally an outlaw in his society.

Berserkirs were regarded as a criminal nuisance at least by the early 11th century, and the Grettirs saga records the Norwegian earl (and de facto king) Eiríkr Hákonarson outlawing both berserkirs and dueling:

Before leaving Eirik summoned all his Landmen and the larger bondis to meet him. Eirik the jarl was an able ruler, and they had much discussion regarding the laws and their administration. It was considered a scandal in the land that pirates and berserks should be able to come into the country and challenge respectable people to the holmgang for their money or their women, no weregild being paid whichever fell. Many had lost their money and been put to shame in this way; some indeed had lost their lives. For this reason jarl Eirik abolished all holmgang in Norway and declared all robbers and berserks who disturbed the peace outlaws. Thorfinn the son of Kar of Haramarsey, being a man of wise counsel and a close friend of the jarl, was present at the meeting.

Clearly by this point we are not dealing with relics of an ancient koryos, but with common bandits and thieves. No doubt these bandits would have had some sort of thieves’ cant among themselves, but that is a very far cry from a cultic initiatory brotherhood dedicated to a host of the dead. And an even further cry from any kind of culture.

In the Brennu-Njáls saga (chapter 99) we have a gang of heathen berserkirs being bested by the Christian missionary Thangbrand.⁵

The only connection we have between the berserkirs and Odin’s army is in Snorri’s Ynglinga saga. That Iceland had been thoroughly Christianized by the time Snorri wrote is no longer in doubt from the evidence, romantic longings to the contrary notwithstanding.⁶ Since Snorri would have mostly known berserkirs as bandits, the association with heathenry is only too natural. But there is an even more important point which has seldom been raised: Snorri does not portray Odin as a deity or spirit in the Ynglinga saga, but as a crafty magician who had settled to Scandinavia from the East and dazzled the people with his skills in sorcery and scald-craft such as to deify him: “He taught the most of his arts to his priests of the sacrifices, and they came nearest to himself in all wisdom and witch-knowledge. Many others, however, occupied themselves much with it; and from that time witchcraft spread far and wide, and continued long. People sacrificed to Odin and the twelve chiefs from Asaland, and called them their gods, and believed in them long after.” This is very far from an authentically pagan or even particularly flattering portrayal, and the rage of the berserkirs is attributed to sorcery, quite in line with Biblical views where witchcraft is one of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:19-21 alongside “enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions.”

Liberman therefore rightly concludes⁷:

If we dismiss idle speculations, we will come up with the following results. Some warriors were at one time called berserkir. They seem to have been elite troops renowned for their recklessness in battle; they may have fought without coats of mail. It is unclear whether folk etymology connected them with bears and whether Snorri or anyone heard an allusion to ber- ‘bear’ in their name. They had nothing to do with religious cults. Even in the oldest eddic lays, the word berserkr has an archaic ring, but it survived in people’s memory and degraded into a synonym for ‘fighter’. With the end of the Viking epoch, professional warriors found themselves unemployed. A similar disintegration of the military class happened when the epoch of chivalry and crusades came to an end, and in recent times when a huge contingent of the Soviet army went out of business. Displaced soldiers typically become urban riffraff. Unused to resistance, irascible, and thoroughly unhappy, former Vikings often developed psychoses that plagued the Middle Ages (cf. St. Vitus’s dance, flagellants, and so forth), the violent analogs of depression, the scourge of our time. The disease was contagious, and its symptoms were easy to simulate. The very words berserkr, like the word vikingr, acquired highly negative connotations. Gangs of such outcasts (young, unmarried, destitute men in their prime) became the bane of farmers’ life in Norway and later in Iceland. Laws against berserkers and active attempts to eradicate them make their existence an established fact, even if all the adventures in the sagas were concocted for enlivening the plot. The rest, from poisonous mushrooms to secret unions and service to Óðinn, is (science) fiction.

The Wild Hunt fares no better, and much of the scholarship around it has been subject to a thorough reappraisal by Ronald Hutton.⁸ “Wild Hunt” is itself a rather artificial taxonomy imposed by Jacob Grimm on disparate folkloristic evidence. Antiquity does not record any legends corresponding to armies, companies or retinues of the dead roaming the sky.

The legend of visible companies of the dead leading nocturnal processions only emerges in the 11th century as a direct consequence of reforms in Christian penitential practice. The “army of the dead” are in fact the souls in purgatory:

The turning point in the making of such a tradition came in the eleventh century, when a greatly enhanced interest in the fate of the Christian dead becomes obvious in literary sources: as both Jean-Claude Schmitt and Jean Verdon have noted, accounts of ghosts in general become both more common and more detailed, and the trend continued into the twelfth (Schmitt 1994, 191; Verdon 2002, 54-56). As part of it, the dead were more often represented as gathering in groups. In the early eleventh century, Rodulfus Glaber of Cluny told a story of how a living monk met a throng of Christians martyred by Muslims, preparing to journey to heaven together (Duby 1967, 77). From the middle of the century comes a tale of two brothers who saw a crowd of people passing through the air, one of whom identified himself as their father, doomed to roam until they made good a wrong that he had committed (Otloh, Book of Visions, quoted in Lecouteux 2011, 34).

In the same period an archdeacon of Toul recorded how a vast company in white was seen near the city of Narni, one of whom explained to a citizen that they were souls not yet fit for heaven, doing penance by visiting holy places (Wipert 1923). This new concept of moving groups of penitential dead forms the backdrop to the celebrated account by the Anglo-Norman monk Ordericus Vitalis, from the 1130s, of how a Norman priest to whom he himself had spoken claimed to have seen a long and noisy procession of the dead on New Year’s Night 1091 or 1092 (Ordericus 1973, bk 8, chap. 17). It was made up of people from all divisions of society, on foot or horse and in varieties of dress in accordance with their former station, and all were being tormented in a manner appropriate to their sins during life: most attention in the account was paid to the armoured knights. Demons were active in it, and a giant, the nature of whom is never discussed, preceded it. The story emphasized the point that masses and prayers offered by the living for those tortured in the procession could shorten their sufferings and eventually release them. The priest who told it added that he had been left ill for a week by the encounter.

Since the so-called “Wild Hunt” is a Christian legend with origins among clergy, any connection to the einherjar in Valhalla or the Harii of Tacitus is immediately ruled out. This, coupled with the evidence that berserkirs were either elite champions in the royal hird or marauding bandits rather than any cultic antinomian brotherhood, just about smashes the Germanic Männerbund theory.

But we must also add the famous comitatus, described by Tacitus as “[having] no home or land or occupation; they are supported by whomsoever they visit, as lavish of the property of others as they are regardless of their own, till at length the feebleness of age makes them unequal to so stern a valour.” The comitatus is therefore defined by its pure reliance on rapine, very much the ideal type of the koryos.

The comitatus, assuming it had ever existed in pure form, would have been defunct by the start of the Migration Period circa the 4th century. Tacitus was writing circa 95-98 AD, at a time when Germanic national histories, written law codes and comital administration barely existed — which, of course, raises a significant difficulty right off the bat in singling out the comitatus as the bearer of culture. In the 5th century Burgundian laws, comites are royal judges. The same was true of the Salian Franks and then the Merovingians. Indeed, the whole concept smacks of a Romanism: the comitatus was the name of the personal travelling retinue of the Roman Emperor while out on campaign, and existed precisely under that name during the reign of Domitian, when Tacitus was writing Germania. All recordings of comitati among Germanic societies after Tacitus invariably occur within a Romano-Germanic cultural synthesis. The term comitatus has frequently been applied to Anglo-Saxon society, despite being completely inappropriate due to the presence of retainership based on land grants and fyrd (militia) duty to maintain bridges, fortresses and other fortifications. Indeed, the very existence of permanent fortifications and garrison duty immediately puts us outside the classical Männerbund. Archaeological evidence shows the widespread proliferation of gold arm and neck-rings beginning in the 4th century, which are consistently associated in Old Norse sources as gifts by the king to his most trusted retainers and housecarls, which implies personal dependence on a ruler and not the perfect freedom of a warband.⁹

At one point, Dr. Alamariu suggests that the luperci (the priests of the Lupercalian festival in Rome) were originally a wolf-warrior brotherhood that founded the Etruscan state. The luperci, however, did not wear wolfskins but rather goatskins, in devotion to the god Pan. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that Pan had a cult in Arcadia at Mount Lykaion, under the title “Pan Lykaion,” leading later writers to posit a false wolf etymology. The luperci probably did not exist prior to the close of the 5th century BC, and not as anything besides a priestly college.¹⁰

The Athenian ephebeia was not a koryos, either. It was public garrison duty established c.330 BC by Lycurgus of Athens, roughly a century after the death of Pericles.¹¹ Prior to that, ephebos meant the age of maturity for becoming a full citizen, and it involved swearing an “ancestral ephebic oath” to “be obedient to whoever exercise power reasonably on any occasion and to the laws currently in force and any reasonably put into force in the future,” the very embodiment of nomos if there ever was one.¹²

Alamariu then brings up the cult of Zeus Lykaios:

Certainly it appears that Plato himself connected the tyrant to the “wolfish man,” and in turn both to the fraternity of young warriors.

The comparison comes in Book VIII of Republic, and let’s see what kind of “wolfish man” the tyrant is:

And the protector of the people is like him; having a mob entirely at his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen; by the favourite method of false accusation he brings them into court and murders them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizen; some he kills and others he banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of debts and partition of lands: and after this, what will be his destiny? Must he not either perish at the hands of his enemies, or from being a man become a wolf --that is, a tyrant?

…

At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets; --he to be called a tyrant, who is making promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to every one!

…
Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him? Clearly.

In fact, the analogy to the rite at Mount Lykaios is brought up while on the subject of the origin of tyranny from democracy. This seems quite remote from the natural aristocratic code of a wolf-warrior outlaw that Alamariu posits.

Actually the original words in Republic 565d are:

τίς ἀρχὴ οὖν μεταβολῆς ἐκ προστάτου ἐπὶ τύραννον; ἢ δῆλον ὅτι ἐπειδὰν ταὐτὸν ἄρξηται δρᾶν ὁ προστάτης τῷ ἐν τῷ μύθῳ ὃς περὶ τὸ ἐν Ἀρκαδίᾳ τὸ τοῦ Διὸς τοῦ Λυκαίου ἱερὸν λέγεται;

What, then, is the starting-point of the transformation of a protector into a tyrant? Is it not obviously when the protector's acts begin to reproduce the legend that is told of the shrine of Lycaean Zeus in Arcadia

τῷ μύθῳ — the myth. Plato is actually thinking of a specific myth here: the story of the Olympic boxer Damarchus, who according to Pausanias:

As for the boxer, the Arcadian from Parrhasia named Damarchus, all the things the charlatans say about him are unbelievable to me, except, that is, for his victory at Olympia. They say that he changed from a man into the form/appearance [eidos] of a wolf at the sacrifice to Lykaian Zeus and that after this he became a man again in the tenth year. Nor does it seem to me that the Arcadians say this about him, for if so it would be stipulated by the inscription at Olympia. It says this: ‘Damarchus son of Dinytas, a man of Parrhasia in Arcadia by birth, dedicated this statue.’ This is as far as it goes.

All versions of the Damarchus story involve a passage of 9 or 10 years between the transformation into a wolf and the return to human form. Even if we take this at face value, a decade is far too long to count as a rite of passage for a juvenile koryos, and consequently the myth’s origins probably have nothing to do with any “fraternity of young warriors.”

Dr. Alamariu’s passion for seeing ancient Aryan wolf-warriors everywhere leads him to some really fascinating readings. Witness how he interpets the legend of Jason and the Argonauts:

A young man of wild nature—Jason, or Achilles—who has been bred for power and trained in the wilderness by Cheiron the man-beast, returns to claim his place as ruler by superior right—superior physical power and daring, and superior prudence, or counsel in war. The false king, the suppressor and usurper of nature—Pelias, Agamemnon, king nomos— through trickery, perfidy or cowardice casts out the hero and his companions from the realm. The hero and his young companions are now an independent society of warriors or pirates on the outskirts of society, superior by nature, but outside all law and custom. They undertake many hard tasks and adventures, loving danger and exhibiting contempt for mere life and for death. They return to take power as rightful rulers of their society or become rulers of a new society, which they take by superior physical force and by trickery, often winning the daughters of the false kings.

I am rather curious how Dr. Alamariu reads the plot of Argonautica as an “independent society of pirates outside all law and custom” fighting against the gerontocratic nomos. Jason has tears in his eyes as he leaves his fatherland, he calls upon Apollo and the Pythian oracle, declares that “even the most shameless [of men], reverence the ordinance of Zeus, god of strangers, and regard it,” and the main act of the plot is set up and maintained by the divine intervention of Hera, who vows to deliver Jason in order to punish Pelias for leaving her unhonored with sacrifice. Fortune and providence are the main themes, not voluntarism. I suppose Dr. Alamariu is thinking of some hypothetical “original” version of the legend according to koryos theory, but then that is pure conjecture.

In the Indo-Iranian case, too, by the time that Herodotus was writing, the “kara” was the professional retinue of the king, not a warband: “Also in Darius’ Behistun inscription (Old Persian II.17), the king calls his own forces kāra Pārsa utā Māda [Persian and Median army] which were under his direct control.”

In summary: the evidence for the Männerbund is a lot shakier than the confidence of many Indo-Europeanists would suggest. But the essential question isn’t the abstract point of whether it existed (in some distant and inaccessible past it must have), but whether culture and breeding arose from it. Suffice to say, no. Think of all the Baltic Slav and Wendish pirates who lived a wild life of raiding on the frontier without having either a culture or a civilization, and getting conquered by an imperial nomos which did. It is not until warbands beat swords into ploughshares and establish a fixed settlement in the form of a patriarchal household and inheritance of land, at which point primeval warbands become proper levies of troops, that culture begins. Endogamous norms are henceforth enforced by class stratification and private laws. Dr. Alamariu’s obsession with perpetually roving and landless bands of vagabonds isn’t simply dubious history, it is, above all, a sign of infantilism and arrested development in his core vision.

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• 2b. The agroikos: wild man?

An example of where Dr. Alamariu’s bare etymological approach fails him and does not substantiate his crucial equivalence “philosopher = tyrant = wild man = nature,” is in his discussion of the word agroikos (ἄγροικος) as used in Gorgias.

Alamariu writes:

Callicles is not sufficiently “de-civilized” enough, for he has not learned at the hands of a Cheiron in the woods—his teacher has been the urbane orator Gorgias, and not a “wild” man like Socrates, who is repeatedly called agroikos in this dialogue.

Socrates’ agroikia or barbaric wildness becomes quite significant both in the Gorgias and in the Hippias Major, and especially revealing for us; see above, Pindar on Cheiron where he is called agroteron using a similar word.

Furthermore … Socrates has repeatedly been called rude to the point of being agroikos, not of the city. Although Callicles’ statements are the ones that appear most overtly anti-conventional and radical, the means by which Socrates shames him justifies the description of Socrates as agroikos: a wild man, not of the city, rude in the extreme.

The relevant passages include: a) Gorgias 462e — “μὴ ἀγροικότερον ᾖ τὸ ἀληθὲς εἰπεῖν,” conventionally translated as “I fear it may be too rude to tell the truth.” and b) Gorgias 461c where Polus tells Socrates “ἀλλ᾽ εἰς τὰ τοιαῦτα ἄγειν πολλὴ ἀγροικία ἐστὶν τοὺς λόγους” (“I call it very bad taste (rude) to lead the discussion in such a direction.”)

As we see, Alamariu insists on reading this as an animal simile between the “agroikos” and the figure of Chiron, the cenotaur who raised many noted Greek heroes like Achilles and Jason.

We therefore have to ask ourselves: how was the “agroikos” used in the Greek textual corpus around Plato’s time? What we find is that the “agroikos” had by then become a fixed character archetype and a stock character in comedies. And the connotation is the exact opposite that Alamariu suggests: the “agroikos” (the boor) was not a wild and erotic man, but a domesticated and dull one. The relevant evidence comes from Aristotle, Theophrastus and Aristophanes.

In Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics we read:

For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean.

With regard to pleasantness in the giving of amusement the intermediate person is ready-witted and the disposition ready wit, the excess is buffoonery and the person characterized by it a buffoon, while the man who falls short is a sort of boor and his state is boorishness.

So the boor is characterized by his insensitivity to pleasure and his inability to enjoy himself.

Theophrastus’ Characters also gives a sketch of boorishness:

He is wary of friends and family, but asks advice from his servants on the most important matters. He describes to hired laborers in the field all the proceedings of the city assembly.

This is very far from an untamed warrior who only consults with his koryos-brothers, if anyone.

But most revealing of all is the character of Strepsiades in Aristophanes’ Clouds, who refers to himself as an “agroikos” (translated as rustic) in this monologue:

Alas! Would that the match-maker had perished miserably, who induced me to marry your mother. For a country life used to be most agreeable to me, dirty, untrimmed, reclining at random, abounding in bees, and sheep, and oil-cake. Then I, a rustic, married a niece of Megacles, the son of Megacles, from the city, haughty, luxurious, and Coesyrafied. When I married her, I lay with her redolent of new wine, of the cheese-crate, and abundance of wool; but she, on the contrary, of ointment, saffron, wanton-kisses, extravagance, gluttony, and of Colias and Genetyllis.

The agroikos (boor) therefore, is a stuck-up peasant who “abounds in bees, sheep and oil-cake,” and is something of an ascetic and miser in his disposition. In short, he is a thoroughly domesticated man.

Polus’ rebuke to Socrates, calling him a boor, should therefore more accurately be read not as indicating that Socrates has a wild nature outside the nomos, but that on the contrary he is showing a lack of proper symposium etiquette that every aristocrat must know — after all, what good is hunting without feasting? Alamariu’s example does not work.

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• 2c. Nomos despotes: the problem of Sparta

If there ever was a polity that exemplified the eugenic ideal, it was definitely Sparta. Yet it is precisely here that we run into trouble if we insist on Dr. Alamariu’s specific reading of nomos versus phusis.

It seems that Dr. Alamariu is on some level aware of this, which is evident in the constant vacillation and ambivalence he has about Sparta throughout the book.

On the one hand, in passages like these, Alamariu cites Sparta as an exemplar of his framework:

Sparta was a “fossil,” preserving very early customs and regime form; and is therefore especially valuable in understanding what is fundamental or original to the Greek aristocratic orientation. The importance of Sparta and other Dorian-type regimes for the aristocratic Greek value system, and particularly in the work of Plato and Xenophon, is a commonplace in the literature. But what it appeared to have consisted in, yet again, is the imposition and preservation of a “wild,” war-band based, martially regimented but, most of all, unsettled way of life on top of a servile, provincial, settled way of life. The latter is only prized insofar as it gives greater freedom and intensity of expression to the former.

It is then entirely to this purpose that the Greek state is directed and therefore this purpose—the creation of military genius—is in some sense the original “intention” of nature. The “return to nature” is an “ascent to nature,” to the nature of the genius, originally of the military genius. Human nature is “achieved” or manifested in the production of genius. The martial state, the Spartan state, is the prototype of the state: in its being dedicated to the production of military genius it lays the precondition, or presents the model, for the state as dedicated to the production of genius more generally, for the state as the cultivation of human nature or as the staging ground of higher culture.

But in other passages Dr. Alamariu isn’t so sure. For instance, he also compares the Spartan gerousia to the tribal elders of the domesticated nomos:

In the passage above the role of the Brahmans as hereditary priests could be seen as roughly analogous to the that of the primitive “council of elders” in prephilosophic societies; similarly so for the ruling body that could depose a Spartan king after eight years.

As well, Dr. Alamariu views Sparta as a potentially strong objection to Callicles’ argument, and he has to engage in some handwaving to disarm it:

Can such a thing be said about the conventions in Sparta or Egypt? It is possible to maintain that in some way such things can be said about any regime: that despite its form, mass rule, or oligarchic, or even one-man rule, that in the end it is all still for the benefit of the multitude and set up for their sake. And Callicles is not a Spartan sympathizer.

Most pertinently of all:

A problem, however, appears at this point: for it is not clear yet how and why an aristocracy as such should produce high culture, let alone philosophy. After all, Sparta is the aristocratic regime that fits the model discussed so far par excellence and yet it produced no high culture to speak of, and no philosophy; and, tellingly, managed to suppress its tyrannical or great men—among whom, Pausanias, Lysander, Brasidas, Clearchus.

…

Sparta was able to create what Nietzsche would call monstrous or amazing specimens as a result of its regime, but this never resulted in a flowering of high culture. This may have something to do with the fact that Spartan aristocracy never had a period of decay or decline in the sense of the Athenian aristocracy: the Spartan regime did not have a political collapse, it ended because it simply ran out of men; for example, after the second Battle of Mantinea, when it was only able to field a few hundred heavy infantry.

We observe that Sparta poses a very genuine problem for Dr. Alamariu’s thesis, as he himself worriedly admits. He can’t quite put his finger on whether it truly exemplifies phusis or nomos. In some places, he insists on Doric Sparta as the paradigm of the ancient Maennerbund, the Doric invasion the strongest example of the preconditions for the aristocratic pathos of distance from which the study of nature develops, and the Spartan regime as a genuine politeia that produced the highest of specimens. But in other places he identifies it with gerontocratic tendencies, the suppression of tyrannical-wild-erotic men, and the lack of high culture. He tries to resolve this aporia by saying that Sparta was, in some sense, too good and pure to have had true culture; that there was no period of degeneration (only a shortage of manpower) for tyrannical men to emancipate themselves from nomos and in so doing lay the foundations for philosophy and culture. But this is hardly persuasive, as it still implies that nomos can be associated with the production of higher specimens.

Dr. Alamariu’s worries are by no means misplaced, for we shall see that Sparta is a major complication for his recurring nomos-versus-phusis argument.

The Spartans were characterized by an immense religious piety and devotion to ancestral custom. This is made abundantly clear by both Herodotus and Thucydides.

All Spartan military commanders were obligated to perform a sacrifice (diabateria, διαβατήρια) upon exiting the Laconian frontier. If the sacrifice was not performed correctly, they had to return.

Thucydides 5.55:

The Lacedaemonians also drew forth their army against Caryae; but then again, their sacrifice for passage being not to their mind, they returned.

Thucydides 5.116:

The winter following, the Lacedaemonians being about to enter with their army into the territory of the Argives, when they perceived that the sacrifices which they made on the border for their passage were not acceptable, returned. And the Argives, having some of their own city in suspicion in regard of this design of the Lacedaemonians, apprehended some of them, and some escaped.

Indeed, this was considered obligatory conduct for any kind of general into the Hellenistic period. Onasander’s Strategikos directs:

Before the general leads out his army he must see that it is purified, by such rites as either the laws or soothsayers direct, and must avert whatever taint there is in the state or in any citizen, by expiatory sacrifices.

While we’re at it, Onasander also recommends that generals ought to be married men, an ideal far removed from the wild koryos:

I should prefer our general to be a father, though I would not refuse a childless man, provided he be a good man. For if he happens to have young children, they are potent spells to keep his heart loyal, availing to bind him to the fatherland, a power­ful and keen incentive to a father, capable of arousing his heart against the foe. And should his children have reached manhood, they will become advisers and aides, faithful guardians of his secrets, and they will help him to bring the affairs of state to a success­ful issue.

Returning to the Spartans, they would strictly abstain from military expeditions during the Carneia, a festival honoring Apollo. Herodotus 9.7: “At present the Carneia was in their way, but once they had completed the festival, they intended to leave a garrison at Sparta and march out in full force with all speed.”

Herodotus 5.63 also records that the Spartans drove out the descendants of the tyrant Pisistratus “despite the fact that the Pisistratidae were their close friends, for the god's will weighed with them more than the will of man,” in response to the Delphic oracle.

Xenophon’s long paean to the virtues of Spartan king Agesilaus II is also quite telling about the pious image the Spartans wanted to present:

Agesilaus reverenced holy places even when they belonged to an enemy, thinking that he ought to make allies of the gods no less in hostile than in friendly countries.

To suppliants of the gods, even if his foes, he did no violence, believing it unreasonable to call robbers of temples sacrilegious and yet to consider those who dragged suppliants from altars pious men.

In the hour of success he was not puffed up with pride, but gave thanks to the gods. He offered more sacrifices when confident than prayers when in doubt.

He would not allow a statue of himself to be set up, though many wanted to give him one, but on memorials of his mind he laboured unceasingly, thinking the one to be the sculptor's work, the other his own, the one appropriate to the rich, the other to the good.

In the use of money he was not only just but generous, thinking that a just man may be content to leave other men's money alone, but the generous man is required also to spend his own in the service of others.

The poetry of Tyrtaeus describes a very clear commitment to self-sacrifice for the fatherland and the genos. Fragment 12 describes martial valor as a “common benefit for the polis and all the people,” and Fragment 10 opens “dying is a beautiful thing in the frontlines, if one has fallen as an agathos man, fighting for the fatherland.” This is very much a nomic orientation to race and state, not simply to one’s personal excellence outside of convention.

This explains the exiled Spartan king Demaratus’ famous reply in Herodotus 7.104 that “[the Spartans] are free, yet not wholly free: law is their master [δεσπότης νόμος], whom they fear much more than your men fear you.” They lived under despotes nomos sanctioned by the divine authority of Lycurgus, whose laws were spoken to him by Apollo at an oracle, and in turn authorized by Zeus.

Connected to this is Spartan king Archidamus II’s eulogy to his people’s virtues in Thucydides 1.84: “We are both warlike and wise, and it is our sense of order that makes us so. We are warlike, because self-control contains honor as a chief constituent, and honor bravery. And we are wise, because we are educated with too little learning to despise the laws, and with too severe a self-control to disobey them, and are brought up not to be too knowing in useless matters.”

It should be noted that these portrayals are colored by the Athenians’ own view of the superiority of their system. The emphasis on Spartan rigidity by Archidamus acts as a foil to the much more famous oration by Pericles that follows. Even so, it demonstrates two things: a) that Athenian democrats saw themselves as a nomos much freer and “closer to nature” the nomos despotes of the Asiatic barbarian and the Spartan alike, and b) that the Spartan regime which produced such healthy specimens was doubtlessly a nomos held by ancestral convention.

Dr. Alamariu struggles here in large part because of his highly euhemerized and naturalistic approach to religion. He doesn’t seem to take the omnipresence of omens, oracles, sacrifices, libations, cults and divine supplications in the Greek thought-world at all seriously, or believe that a virile warrior aristocracy, supposedly being savage men of the wilderness, could have possibly revered such “nomic” things. But they did, and this poses major conceptual problems for his antinomian view of phusis.

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• 2d. Bellum et otium?

I would like to make some reservations over Dr. Alamariu’s assertions about the uncompromising and total disdain for farmwork, tilling and labor that he characterizes as a universal trait for all aristocracies across time, as in the passages below:

All later aristocracies, indeed, even if they did not go to the extreme of valuing pillage and piracy, maintained an antagonistic attitude to the peasant, the serf, the tiller of the soil and the preservation of mere life. The famous motto of the Roman aristocracy was “Bellum et Otium”; in marked distinction, of course, to the later Christian “Ora et Labora.”

For this reason Nietzsche begins his early essay on the Greek state by pointing out that the Greeks would have rejected as vile lies and cant our modern ideas of the dignity of human life and the dignity of labor. Labor, as the mere maintenance or preservation of mere life, has no value in and of itself, because mere life has no value.

The disdain for manual labor, and in particular for farmwork, is also universal, as we are about to see. The matter of contempt for farming and manual labor is crucial.

This is something of a cliche about aristocracy in general, but it’s highly oversimplified, even for the Archaic Greek period. Hesiod’s poetry fundamentally revolves around the bucolic life of the honest laborer, contemporaneous with the heroism of Homer. The two poles therefore coexisted from the start.

We read, for example, in Plutarch’s Life of Solon that:

For he was admittedly a lover of wisdom, since even when he was well on in years he would say that he "grew old ever learning many things"; and he was not an admirer of wealth, but actually says that two men are alike wealthy of whom one

"much silver hath,

And gold, and wide domains of wheat-bearing soil,

Horses and mules; while to the other only enough belongs

To give him comfort of food, and clothes, and shoes,

Enjoyment of child and blooming wife, when these too come,

And only years commensurate therewith are his."

However, in another place he says:

"Wealth I desire to have; but wrongfully to get it, I do not wish. Justice, even if slow, is sure."

And there is no reason why a good statesman should either set his heart too much on the acquisition of superfluous wealth, or despise unduly the use of what is necessary and convenient. In those earlier times, to use the words of Hesiod,​ "work was no disgrace," nor did a trade bring with it social inferiority, and the calling of a merchant was actually held in honour, since it gave him familiarity with foreign parts, friendships with foreign kings, and a large experience in affairs. Some merchants were actually founders of great cities, as Protis, who was beloved by the Gauls along the Rhone, was of Marseilles. Thales is said to have engaged in trade, as well as Hippocrates the mathematician; and Plato defrayed the expenses of his sojourn in Egypt by the sale of oil.

Lest it be objected that this is only a nostalgic paean to the Golden Age, we have even stronger testimony in Xenophon’s Memorabilia:

“What, Aristippus,” exclaimed Socrates, “don't you think that there is just this difference between these voluntary and involuntary sufferings, that if you bear hunger or thirst willingly, you can eat, drink, or what not, when you choose, whereas compulsory suffering is not to be ended at will? Besides, he who endures willingly enjoys his work because he is comforted by hope; hunters, for instance, toil gladly in hope of game. Rewards like these are indeed of little worth after all the toil; but what of those who toil to win good friends, or to subdue enemies, or to make themselves capable in body and soul of managing their own homes well, of helping their friends and serving their country? Surely these toil gladly for such prizes and live a joyous life, well content with themselves, praised and envied by everyone else? Moreover, indolence and present enjoyment can never bring the body into good condition, as trainers say, neither do they put into the soul knowledge of any value, but strenuous effort leads up to good and noble deeds, as good men say. And so says Hesiod somewhere:

“‘Wickedness can be had in abundance easily: smooth is the road and very nigh she dwells. But in front of virtue the gods immortal have put sweat: long and steep is the path to her and rough at first; but when you reach the top, then at length the road is easy, hard though it was.’
” (Hes. WD 285)

“And we have the testimony of Epicharmus too in the line:

“‘The gods demand of us toil as the price of all good things.’
” (Epicharmus)

Again, one might object that this is simply an aristocratic redefinition of “labor.” I do not deny this, but it is still a problem for Alamariu, whose conception of aristocracy is fundamentally tethered to the idea of the comitatus, the loose band of raiders who scorn any kind of wealth, property and stable existence in favor of continually replenishing themselves through plunder. This is hardly capable of describing an aristocracy that engages in cultured leisure, which presupposes landed wealth and inheritance. Even the very idea of “patria” (fatherland) presupposes a level of development far beyond the comitatus. Alamariu’s aristocrats, of course, much like the proletariat, have no fatherland. Suffice it to say the later European aristocracy and landed gentry would have obligatorily possessed a copy of Virgil’s Georgics in their bookshelves, and the needs of country estate management alongside an oikonomic worldview where the house-father was central, led to a burgeoning genre of Hausväterliteratur in the early modern period.¹³

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• 2e. The erromenesteroi in Gorgias and the turannos eros

Dr. Alamariu’s exegesis of Gorgias in Chapter 3 is where he turns from analyzing the aristocratic concept of nature to suggesting an esoteric interpretation of Platonism as a doctrine based on the reconstitution (or “rewilding”) of said nature through paideia — cultivation, breeding by a lawgiver.

Before we discuss the shortcomings of Alamariu’s reading, we need to address the philological question as to the meaning of erromenesteros (ἐρρωμενέστερος). As noted in the summary, this is a central concept in Dr. Alamariu’s reading not just of Gorgias but of ancient Greek eugenics as a whole, with over two dozen references in the book.

Here are some relevant passages by Alamariu:

In conclusion, to repeat, the escape of the erromenesteroi, the healthy human specimens, from the enslaving grasp of convention is at once the emotional focus for Callicles’ passion, as well as the substantial and dramatic crux of both his speeches.

In this context it is most significant that the word used by Callicles (and by Socrates) all along in their discussion for the “better-turned-out” is erromenesteros, a word with biological connotations. This word comes from rhonnumi, to have strength, might, to be in good health; this word, the same that Plato uses in the Republic (sungeneia erromene, emphasizing inborn might and health at Rep. 491c; at 491d he uses the word in relation to botanical [phuton] or animal [zoon] growth) to describe the potential philosopher, is often otherwise used to indicate vigor, vigorous growth, vehemence. The preservation of the “superior breed” or biological specimen is the preservation of nature in the world and therefore the guarantee of the emergence of truth about the world.

It is the superior human specimens or the erromenesteroi who have the unique access to the distinction between nature and convention, and they only have this access in the best circumstances; they are ever in danger of being corrupted, enslaved, smothered by nomos. It is the issue of the erromenesteros that is central in the Gorgias. The word erromenesteros represents the raw natural element of superiority, as opposed to words such as phronimos, kreitto, beltion, and so on, which all indicate a particular direction in which the native superiority has been trained.

[Socrates and Callicles] seem to agree on the fact that the erromenesteros and his salvation and preservation is what matters; that without this, there is neither philosophy, nor tyranny, nor the “original” and raw, wild biological matter from which each uniquely grows.

Greek abounds in different words to compare ways in which one man excels over another; the above three may be provisionally translated as “better, more prudent; better, stronger; better, more noble” etc.; but erromenesteros, the word that both Callicles uses in the Gorgias, and Socrates uses in the Republic, refers to the “raw material” for all this: to the end-product of an aristocratic breeding project that stands opposed to the native egalitarian conventions of the commons.

And that the end-product of this breeding, nature itself, is the erromenesteros: the word that Socrates uses uniquely for both the “raw material” of the philosopher and the tyrant.

To unpack. According to Dr. Alamariu:

• Erromenesteros, which is the comparative of erromenos, the passive participle of rhonnumi, is a term with uniquely eugenic connotations compared to all other Greek appellations for inborn superiority.

• The erromenesteroi are the “healthy human specimens” and the “better-turned-out.”

• Erromenesteros is the raw matter used by the selective breeder, corresponding to the innate characteristics, to be distinguished from acquired characteristics.

• Erromenesteros is also the end product of said breeding, i.e. the healthy specimen.

Evidently, it is meant to be of immense significance.

Dr. Alamariu focuses on two primary cases: Gorgias 483c and Republic 491d.

Gorgias 483c:

πρὸς αὑτοὺς οὖν καὶ τὸ αὑτοῖς συμφέρον τούς τε νόμους τίθενται καὶ τοὺς ἐπαίνους ἐπαινοῦσι καὶ τοὺς ψόγους ψέγουσιν, ἐκφοβοῦντες τοὺς ἐρρωμενεστέρους τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ δυνατοὺς ὄντας πλέον ἔχειν, ἵνα μὴ αὐτῶν πλέον ἔχωσιν, λέγουσιν ὡς αἰσχρὸν καὶ ἄδικον τὸ πλεονεκτεῖν, καὶ τοῦτο ἔστι τὸ ἀδικεῖν, τὸ πλέον τῶν ἄλλων ζητεῖν ἔχειν· ἀγαπῶσι γάρ, οἶμαι, αὐτοὶ ἂν τὸ ἴσον ἔχωσι φαυλότεροι ὄντες

[So it is with a view to themselves and their own interest that they make their laws and distribute their praises and censures; and to terrorize the stronger sort of folk who are able to get an advantage, and to prevent them from getting one over them, they tell them that such aggrandizement is foul and unjust, and that wrongdoing is just this endeavour to get the advantage of one’s neighbours: for I expect they are well content to see themselves on an equality, when they are so inferior.]

Republic 491d:

παντός, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, σπέρματος πέρι ἢ φυτοῦ, εἴτε ἐγγείων εἴτε τῶν ζῴων, ἴσμεν ὅτι τὸ μὴ τυχὸν τροφῆς ἧς προσήκει ἑκάστῳ μηδ᾽ ὥρας μηδὲ τόπου, ὅσῳ ἂν ἐρρωμενέστερον ᾖ, τοσούτῳ πλειόνων ἐνδεῖ τῶν πρεπόντων: ἀγαθῷ γάρ που κακὸν ἐναντιώτερον ἢ τῷ μὴ ἀγαθῷ.

[“On the subject of every seed or growing thing,” I said, “whether growing in the ground or living creatures, we know that any which does not get its proper food, or climate or environment, the stronger it grows, the more it lacks these essentials. Evil is more opposed to good to my mind than it is to what is not-good.”]

Its use in the context of organic growth in Republic 491d is the central piece of evidence for Alamariu’s interpretation.

We will apply the same distributional-semantic method as with agroikos to see if this consistently holds in other contexts.

Remember that our primary concern is whether this is a characteristically eugenic concept, i.e. whether it’s cognate to concepts like gennaios and eugeneia, and whether it is foremost about breeding.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the Ars Rhetorica records a passage from an exhortation to athletes:

λόγος γὰρ εἰς πάντα ἐπιτήδειος καὶ πρὸς πᾶν ἐπιρρώννυσιν· οὕτως καὶ ἐπὶ πολέμου καὶ ἐπὶ παρατάξεως δέονται στρατιῶται τοῦ παρὰ τῶν στρατηγῶν λόγου καὶ τῆς προτροπῆς, καὶ αὐτοὶ αὑτῶν ἐρρωμενέστεροι ἐγένοντο. μάλιστα δὲ οἱ ἀθληταὶ δέοιντο ἂν τῆς ἀπὸ τοῦ λόγου προτροπῆς καὶ ἐπικελεύσεως, ὄντες μὲν καὶ αὐτοὶ Ἑρμοῦ τε καὶ Ἡρακλέους μαθηταί τε καὶ ζηλωταί (ὧν ὁ μὲν εὑρετὴς τοῦ λόγου ἢ αὐτὸ χρῆμα λόγος· ὁ δὲ σὺν τῇ Ἀθηνᾷ πάντα κατώρθωσεν τὰ ἐπιταχθέντα· ἡ δὲ τί ἂν ἄλλο εἴη ἢ νοῦς τε καὶ λόγος;), καὶ ὁσημέραι δὲ ἐπὶ ταῖς γυμνασίαις ἑκάστοτε τοιούτους τοὺς ἐπικελευομένους ἔχοντες αὑτοῖς

For words are suitable for all purposes and add strength to any endeavor. Thus, soldiers in battle formation need a speech of exhortation from their generals, through which they surpass themselves in strength and vigor. Athletes in particular require exhortation and encouragement through speech. They are, after all, themselves students and followers of Hermes and Heracles, and while the former is the inventor (or the very embodiment) of speech, the latter accomplished everything he was ordered to do with the help of Athena—and what is she if not intellect and speech? So, day in and day out, athletes have people like these encouraging them every time they are training.

Here the strength and vigor is explicily said to arise from “the word,” and the “erromenesteros” is the power received by said exhortation. Actually there are several similar usages, all in the context of military campaigns.

In Plutarch’s Alexander we find it used in consequence not just of a rousing battle speech, but of an omen by a seer after performing a sacrifice:

…Ἀρίστανδρος ὁ μάντις ἐσφαγιάζετο καὶ τὰ σημεῖα κατιδὼν θρασύτερον διωρίσατο πρὸς τοὺς παρόντας ἐν ἐκείνῳ τῷ μηνὶ πάντως ἁλώσεσθαι τὴν πόλιν. γενομένου δὲ χλευασμοῦ καὶ γέλωτος ἦν γὰρ ἡ τελευταία τοῦ μηνὸς ἡμέρα, διηπορημένον αὐτόν ἰδὼν ὁ βασιλεύς καὶ συμφιλοτιμούμενος ἀεὶ τοῖς μαντεύμασιν ἐκέλευε μηκέτι τριακάδα τὴν ἡμέραν ἐκείνην, ἀλλὰ τρίτην φθίνοντος ἀριθμεῖν: καὶ τῇ σάλπιγγι σημήνας ἀπεπειρᾶτο τῶν τειχῶν ἐρρωμενέστερον ἤπερ ἐξ ἀρχῆς διενοήθη.

…Aristander the seer made a sacrifice, and after taking the omens, declared very confidently to the bystanders that the city would certainly be captured during that month. His words produced laughter and jesting, since it was then the last day of the month, and the king, seeing that he was perplexed, and being always eager to support his prophecies, gave orders to reckon that day, not as the thirtieth of the month, but as the twenty-eighth; and then, after the trumpet had sounded the signal, he attacked the walls with greater vigour than he had at first intended.

It is instructive that this greater vigor should have come as a result of Alexander’s religious piety — trusting the omen where his own troops initially mocked it.

In Xenophon’s Hellenica we read of the fall of the Spartan commander Mnasippus during the Siege of Corcyra:

τέλος δὲ οἱ πολέμιοι ἁθρόοι γενόμενοι πάντες ἐπετίθεντο τοῖς περὶ τὸν Μνάσιππον, ἤδη μάλα ὀλίγοις οὖσι. καὶ οἱ πολῖται ὁρῶντες τὸ γιγνόμενον ἐπεξῇσαν. ἐπεὶ δʼ ἐκεῖνον ἀπέκτειναν, ἐδίωκον ἤδη ἅπαντες. ἐκινδύνευσαν δʼ ἂν καὶ τὸ στρατόπεδον ἑλεῖν σὺν τῷ χαρακώματι, εἰ μὴ οἱ διώκοντες τὸν ἀγοραῖόν τε ὄχλον ἰδόντες καὶ τὸν τῶν θεραπόντων καὶ τὸν τῶν ἀνδραπόδων, οἰηθέντες ὄφελός τι αὐτῶν εἶναι, ἀπεστρέφοντο. καὶ τότε μὲν τροπαῖόν τε ἵστασαν οἱ Κερκυραῖοι τούς τε νεκροὺς ὑποσπόνδους ἀπεδίδοσαν. ἐκ δὲ τούτου οἱ μὲν ἐν τῇ πόλει ἐρρωμενέστεροι ἐγεγένηντο, οἱ δʼ ἔξω ἐν πάσῃ δὴ ἀθυμίᾳ ἦσαν.

Finally, all of the enemy massed themselves together and charged upon Mnasippus and his troops, which were by this time very few. And the citizens, seeing what was going on, came out to join in the attack. Then after they had killed Mnasippus, all straightway joined in the pursuit. And they probably would have captured the very camp, along with its stockade, had not the pursuers turned back upon seeing the crowd of camp-followers, of attendants, and of slaves, imagining that there was some fighting ability in them. At this time, accordingly, the Corcyraeans set up a trophy and gave back the bodies of the dead under a truce. And after this the people in the city were stouter of heart, while those outside were in the utmost despondency.

The “stoutness of heart” comes from the victory, but also from the magnanimous gesture during the short truce, a direct result of the upper hand gained by the Corcyraeans.

Probably the most famous example, again from Xenophon, is in Anabasis 3.1.42: “For you understand, I am sure, that it is neither numbers nor strength which wins victories in war; but whichever of the two sides it be whose troops, by the blessing of the gods, advance to the attack with stouter hearts, against those troops their adversaries generally refuse to stand.”

But let us end with an example from the Platonic corpus: the Timaeus.

Timaeus, is of course, the most “spiritual” of all the Platonic dialogues, and in Tim. 89e we find the “erromenestaton” in direct connection with the tripartite soul:

ὅτι τρία τριχῇ ψυχῆς ἐν ἡμῖν εἴδη κατῴκισται, τυγχάνει δὲ ἕκαστον κινήσεις ἔχον, οὕτω κατὰ ταὐτὰ καὶ νῦν ὡς διὰ βραχυτάτων ῥητέον ὅτι τὸ μὲν αὐτῶν ἐν ἀργίᾳ διάγον καὶ τῶν ἑαυτοῦ κινήσεων ἡσυχίαν ἄγον ἀσθενέστατον ἀνάγκη γίγνεσθαι, τὸ δ᾽ ἐν γυμνασίοις ἐρρωμενέστατον

there are housed within us in three regions three kinds of soul, and that each of these has its own motions; so now likewise we must repeat, as briefly as possible, that the kind which remains in idleness and stays with its own motions; in repose necessarily becomes weakest, whereas the kind which exercises itself becomes strongest

And in 90b Plato adds: “Whoso, then, indulges in lusts or in contentions and devotes himself overmuch thereto must of necessity be filled with opinions that are wholly mortal, and altogether, so far as it is possible to become mortal, fall not short of this in even a small degree, inasmuch as he has made great his mortal part.”

One could, of course, decide to interpret this as some allegory for breeding, but the subject matter is clearly cosmological and deals with the doctrine of the world-soul. We do not have the unambiguously organic context as in Republic 491d. And the Timaeus was by far the most influential dialogue all throughout the Middle Ages, the bedrock of all Neoplatonists — i.e. it is that which, in Dr. Alamariu’s view, is the most “exoteric” of all in the sense of being outwardly apolitical.

I therefore do not understand the inordinate attention that Dr. Alamariu chose to give this word, making it the centerpiece of his Gorgias exegesis. Even if we grant biological connotations on an etymological level (which there are, hardly unusual for Greek), the pragmatic contextual usages are hardly as clear-cut across texts as in Alamariu’s favorite example of Republic 491d. Neither can this be blamed purely on semantic drift from later Hellenistic authors. More to the point: the elaborate connection of the word erromenesteros to his reading of phusis and the claim that it’s a key concept for the Greek view of breeding, the “raw material” for healthy human specimens, is completely tendentious. Dr. Alamariu seems to have left his own daimonion spur him into a Bacchic frenzy of overinterpretation. We will discuss Greek concepts of eugenics in the subsequent section 2f.

But first let us finish the discussion of Gorgias.

In order for Dr. Alamariu to get his much desired symmetry between philosopher and tyrant, he has to omit three crucial problems:

• the tyrant as a victim of flattery (kolakeia), mentioned in the Gorgias and also a common trope in the wider Greek world;

• the distinction between the philosopher and the tyrant in Book 9 of Republic;

• the fact that mere paranomia (upending of convention) is not on its own any manifestation of phusis.

In Gorgias 521a Socrates asks:

SOCRATES: Then to which service of the State do you invite me? determine for me. Am I to be the physician of the State who will strive and struggle to make the Athenians as good as possible; or am I to be the servant and flatterer of the State? Speak out, my good friend, freely and fairly as you did at first and ought to do again, and tell me your entire mind.

The kolax (flatterer) was a stock character depicted as a sycophantic toady to wealthy patrons, marked by “low origins, eagerness for a meal, dependence upon wealthy patrons, and a nonchalant indifference towards exclusionary social norms.”¹⁴

The hallmarks of a kolax, according to the Rhetoric, are: “Praising people to their faces is characteristic of kolakeia, and over-praising someone’s good qualities but glossing over their failings, and over-sympathizing in person with someone in distress, and other things of this sort, these are all marks of kolakeia.”

In contrast, the essential opposite of the kolax, is best given by the well-known story of Solon at the court of Croesus of Lydia. Croesus keeps asking Solon who is the happiest man that he has seen in his wide travels, expecting Solon to give him a flattering answer that it is Croesus. Instead Solon demonstrates a courageous parrhesia (integrity of speech) in refusing to indulge the vanity of a mighty potentate, much to Croesus’ displeasure.

Solon’s parrhesia reflects the triumph of the rational part of the soul over the epithumotic appetites of Croesus. Tyranny is an imbalance in the three components of the soul (reason, spirit/thumos, appetites) in which the spirit and appetites involuntarily rule over against the directive power of reason. In the vast majority of cases, men beset by tyrannical passions will never rise to any position of standing at all. They will simply retreat to private indulgences or petty criminality, lacking the control of reason that can direct the appetites and passions into productive endeavors. In the same way, the political tyrant will be surrounded by flatters feeding him idle pleasantries (representing the lower orders of the soul), but will have no true friends to admonish him when he faces genuine threats (representing the higher orders of the soul). Hence tyranny is a condition of fear or self-preservation in which words lose their connection to things and become mere tools of self-delusion.

In Book 9 of Republic we have Socrates:

He first takes their property, and when that falls, and pleasures are beginning to swarm in the hive of his soul, then he breaks into a house, or steals the garments of some nightly wayfarer; next he proceeds to clear a temple. Meanwhile the old opinions which he had when a child, and which gave judgment about good and evil, are overthrown by those others which have just been emancipated, and are now the bodyguard of love and share his empire. These in his democratic days, when he was still subject to the laws and to his father, were only let loose in the dreams of sleep. But now that he is under the dominion of love, he becomes always and in waking reality what he was then very rarely and in a dream only; he will commit the foulest murder, or eat forbidden food, or be guilty of any other horrid act. Love is his tyrant, and lives lordly in him and lawlessly, and being himself a king, leads him on, as a tyrant leads a State, to the performance of any reckless deed by which he can maintain himself and the rabble of his associates, whether those whom evil communications have brought in from without, or those whom he himself has allowed to break loose within him by reason of a similar evil nature in himself. Have we not here a picture of his way of life?

The tyrant is paranomic, but that is a far cry from having self-mastery over his nature. Here an analogy from Book 7 is useful: “… the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not-the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer's art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling.” The philosopher’s knowledge of causal principles are precisely those things of techne (craft) that elevate the accidental violation of convention into an essential knowledge of nature. Besides, nomos and phusis are not in truth unbridgeable opposites, since every nomic order needs to some extent reflect the natural proclivities and tendencies of the men it subordinates.

It seems that Dr. Alamariu is a victim of his own stark dichotomy between nature and convention, that he has to equate nature with emancipation from convention. This could only work if we blithely assume that conventions have no coterminous overlap with nature, if we beg the question (as Alamariu does) that ius naturale is a contradiction in terms since “nature” can only be manifested through independence from and a contempt for the mores of a regime. In fact, if we take this reasoning to its conclusion, it would follow that the politeia, the idea of nomos actualized by the force of the wise lawgiver, is impossible. The wild and erotic men of passion would have to revolt against the politeia as much as any other convention, even before the “end-product of breeding” is completed. Or are we to declare that the end product has been finished as soon as there are paranomic men in the politeia? No, because clearly not all paranomia are equally base or noble — but then we fall right back to the Socratic dictum that the passionate tyrannical man is not acting according to his “true” desires, which is the very sort of conceit (“Platonism for the people”) that both Nietzsche and Alamariu would like to get out of. Actually for Dr. Alamariu the problem is even worse: on numerous occasions he equates nature with outright antinomia. The true man of nature, the superior man, the healthy man, is the one who lives in the agrios among the beasts. How could any politeia be up to the manic and untamed fury in the wilderness? The answer that the politeia offers a “eugenic training regimen” is unsatisfactory, since Dr. Alamariu completely begs the question by assuming eugenic breeding necessarily serves aristocratic ends, when it could just as easily have communitarian and “gyno-gerontocratic” motivations. In fact, let me cite the words of Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936), the founder of anthroposociology and a famous advocate of Nordicist eugenics, in 1927¹⁵:

The transition to the state of society only commenced when man found himself reaching out from his individual interest to collective ends. It developed when it became possible to constrain the mass to ordered life. But it is not yet complete, and society will only be truly created in that day when each individual will live only for the whole, a degree which has been reached by the more ancient, if less well endowed biological societies as those of the ants, the termites and the bees. The crystalization of instincts will never doubtless be as complete amongst men, and that is probably to be desired, as a much higher grade of perfection would be thereby excluded, but each step made in this direction separates man more widely from the ancestral primates who lived each for himself.

Man will not have escaped wholly from the animal level till that moment when the selfish instinct will have been destroyed by a long course of selectionist population policy.

So we see here that the explicit intention of one of the greatest modern eugenic thinkers was to shape men into a eusocial insect colony. Clearly this is completely contrary to Dr. Alamariu’s worldview, but he seems to lack awareness of the problem due to his simple equivocation of teknopoiia and noble breeding. The vast majority of aristocracies did not preserve their lineage through “eugenic population policies” writ large, but through private laws self-enforced by the rules of honor and dignity governing the morality of their own caste. Endogamy does not require a regimen.

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• 2f. Greek eugeneia

We saw in the previous section that the erromenesteroi of Callicles, which Dr. Alamariu elevated to the key concept of Greek aristocratic breeding, is in all likelihood a spurious connection and dead end as to actually reconstructing what the Greeks meant by good (noble) birth. Where should we look, then? The most obvious place, actually: eugeneia (εὐγένεια).

But first, I want to comment on Alamariu’s discussion of Pindar’s sixth Nemean Ode. Alamariu writes:

That is, there is the question of regression to the mean on one hand, or of certain hereditary qualities “skipping a generation” on the other—in keeping with well-known Mendelian rules for trait inheritance. Children of very tall people, for example, will tend to regress to the mean of the population in question—Socrates’ sons were nonentities. This mechanism explains how it may be that inborn excellence will exhibit itself in one generation of an aristocracy but not in another.

The [in-text] bolded verse that Alamariu is commenting on reads “we do not know, by day or by night, towards what goal fortune has written that we should run. Even now Alcimidas gives a great sign to be seen that his inborn is like the fruitful fields, which, in alternation, at one time give men yearly sustenance from the plains, and at another time gather strength from repose.”

Dr. Alamariu looks at this basic observation about how fortune is volatile and bad seeds can sprout from a good stock, and infers a sophisticated knowledge of Mendelian inheritance and regression to the mean possessed by the Homeric aristocracy. This is a massive overreading if I ever saw one: as if the ancients had a clear concept of unit-inheritance as opposed to pangenesis, or of a distinction between somatic and gametic cells. Dr. Alamariu is being overenthusiastic in drawing modern parallels over sticking to the sources.

The same idea as Pindar’s is expressed in more sophisticated form in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 2.15.3:

The idea of noble birth refers to excellence of race, that of noble character to not degenerating from the family type, a quality not as a rule found in those of noble birth, most of whom are good for nothing. For in the generations of men there is a kind of crop as in the fruits of the field; sometimes, if the race is good, for a certain period men out of the common are born in it, and then it deteriorates. Highly gifted families often degenerate into maniacs, as, for example, the descendants of Alcibiades and the elder Dionysius; those that are stable into fools and dullards, like the descendants of Cimon, Pericles, and Socrates.

As far as I know, Aristotle was the first to draw the formal distinction between “descending from a noble breed” and “being true to the type of a noble breed,” which is what Pindar was hinting at in poetic form, and what any farmer knows at least primitively. The former is εὐγενὲς and the latter is γενναῖον. Thus, being eugenes (of good birth) may not necessarily coincide with being gennaios (species-appropriate, well-turned-out). Aristotle outright says that most of the time they do not coincide. This alone makes him far more pessimistic than the 20th century eugenic utopian promising milk and honey with a few simple techniques like marriage certificates and sterilization laws.

Demosthenes’ Against Aristogeiton even makes this same point to argue for the constancy and regularity of nomos as against the unreliability of phusis: “The whole life of men, Athenians, whether they dwell in a large state or a small one, is governed by nature and by the laws. Of these, nature is something irregular and incalculable, and peculiar to each individual; but the laws are something universal, definite, and the same for all. Now nature, if it be evil, often chooses wrong, and that is why you will find men of an evil nature committing errors.”

Eugeneia is again defined in Rhetoric 1360b:

Noble birth (εὐγένεια), in the case of a nation or State, means that its members or inhabitants are sprung from the soil (αὐτόχθονας), or of long standing; that its first members were famous as leaders, and that many of their descendants have been famous for qualities that are highly esteemed. In the case of private individuals, noble birth is derived from either the father's or the mother's side, and on both sides there must be legitimacy; and, as in the case of a State, it means that its founders were distinguished for virtue, or wealth, or any other of the things that men honor, and that a number of famous persons, both men and women, young and old, belong to the family.

Observe the curious qualifier that the eugeneia are αὐτόχθονας (autochthonous), being sprung from the soil. In fact, the deep connection between noble birth and autochthony was a well-established trope in the Attic Greek consciousness. The Athenians prided themselves on having ripened from the Attic soil, the only people in the world not to have migrated from some other place, but literally born out of their land.

There are many other examples of this. Notably we have Socrates’ extended oration in Plato’s Menexenus:

Firstly, then, let us eulogize their nobility of birth, and secondly their nurture and training: thereafter we shall exhibit the character of their exploits, how nobly and worthily they wrought them. Now as regards nobility of birth, their first claim thereto is this—that the forefathers of these men were not of immigrant stock, nor were these their sons declared by their origin to be strangers in the land sprung from immigrants, but natives sprung from the soil living and dwelling in their own true fatherland; and nurtured also by no stepmother, like other folk, but by that mother-country wherein they dwelt, which bare them and reared them and now at their death receives them again to rest in their own abodes. Most meet it is that first we should celebrate that Mother herself; for by so doing we shall also celebrate therewith the noble birth of these heroes.

This autochthonous birth is in fact an ἰσογονία (isogonia, equality of birth) which directly produces the more well-known ἰσονομία (isonomia, equality of laws):

On the contrary, the one principle of selection is this: the man that is deemed to be wise or good rules and governs. And the cause of this our polity lies in our equality of birth. For whereas all other States are composed of a heterogeneous collection of all sorts of people, so that their polities also are heterogeneous, tyrannies as well as oligarchies, some of them regarding one another as slaves, others as masters; we and our people, on the contrary, being all born of one mother, claim to be neither the slaves of one another nor the masters; rather does our natural birth-equality drive us to seek lawfully legal equality, and to yield to one another in no respect save in reputation for virtue and understanding.

What this shows is that the democratic regime’s foundational myth was no less eugenic than those of many aristocratic ones.

The same theme is the subject of Demosthenes’ Funeral Oration:

The nobility of birth of these men [ἡ γὰρ εὐγένεια τῶνδε τῶν ἀνδρῶν] has been acknowledged from time immemorial by all mankind. For it is possible for them and for each one of their remote ancestors man by man to trace back their being, not only to a physical father, but also to this land of theirs as a whole, a common possession, of which they are acknowledged to be the indigenous children. For alone of all mankind they settled the very land from which they were born and handed it down to their descendants, so that justly one may assume that those who came as migrants into their cities and are denominated citizens of the same are comparable to adopted children; but these men are citizens of their native land by right of legitimate birth.

As to what might be called “eugenics” as a practical art, the best we have is, of course, Book VII of Aristotle’s Politics. It’s pretty clear that Aristotle, along with virtually all pre-modern theoreticians of heredity, did not have the same modern genetic-environmental distinction we did. This is because, in the Aristotelian view, the bodily constitution depended on the temperature and humidity of the blood, which could be modified by various climactic, dietary and other factors in such a way that they could be passed down to offspring. This is why Aristotle’s advice includes specific guidelines such that conception should ideally occur in the winter, what mental activity is expected out of the mother (for well into the 19th century it was widely believed that maternal imagination could influence the likeness of the child — there has even been some research on this phenomenon in the modern day), up to childrearing advice that “violent crying contributes to growth, for it serves in a way as exercise for the body, since holding the breath is the strength giving factor in hard labor, and this takes place also with children when they stretch themselves in crying.” Much of this advice lived on in medicine even as it may have lost any specifically political valence.

In any case, we see that the concept of eugeneia was closely tied to nomoi.

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• 2g. Plato’s Academy as an institute for seizing power?

In line with the equation of philosophy and tyranny, and hence with the natural rule of the well-born based on their pure self-sufficient racial stock as emancipated from any ancestral convention (the “regime-independent men”), it is Alamariu’s basic contention that Platonism was an esoteric doctrine for installing a polity founded on the right of might, and that the cosmological, dialectical, metaphysical and other doctrines were on the whole meant as inoffensive exotericism whose deeper meaning (breeding the higher type) would only be grasped by the worthy few. What the city-as-soul analogy really means, in this view, is that the well-born souls must be the city — the raw material for a eugenic program.

The question is: what evidence do we have that the Platonic Academy had esoteric teachings dealing with the seizure of political power and the cultivation of new “lords of the earth”? Alamariu basically points to two things: Alcibiades, Critias and the Cyrenaics being pupils of Socrates, and the unflattering stories told about Plato and the pupils of his academy in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae in addition to gossip recorded by Diogenes Laertius.

Let me start with the weakest link in Dr. Alamariu’s case. He cites the testimony of Epicurus, who called Plato a “Dionysokolax” — flatterer of Dionysios and by extension of tyrants, in obvious connection to the Syracusan adventure relayed in Plato’s Seventh Letter. But strangely enough, Dr. Alamariu does not quote the primary source. Instead, he quotes a paraphrasal by Nietzsche.

The full quote from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers on Epicurus’ words is as follows:

Epicurus used to call this Nausiphanes jelly-fish,​ an illiterate, a fraud, and a trollop; Plato's school he called "the toadies of Dionysius," their master himself the "golden" Plato,​ and Aristotle a profligate, who after devouring his patrimony took to soldiering and selling drugs; Protagoras a pack-carrier and the scribe of Democritus and village schoolmaster; Heraclitus a muddler; ​Democritus Lerocritus (the nonsense-monger); and Antidorus Sannidorus (fawning gift-bearer); the Cynics foes of Greece; the Dialecticians despoilers; and Pyrrho an ignorant boor.

What this clearly shows is that Epicurus was an acerbic wit who had creative insults for all of his philosophical rivals. Thus, it is hardly testimony about any esoteric political ambitions of the Academy or its scholarchs.

Dr. Alamariu has a better point in bringing up Athenaeus’ testimony of a certain Chaeron of Pellene, “who was not only a pupil of Plato, but of Xenocrates also.” Of him it is said that “having usurped the supreme power in his country, and having exercised it with great severity, not only banished the most virtuous men in the city, but also gave the property of the masters to their slaves, and gave their wives also to them, compelling them to receive them as their husbands; having got all these admirable ideas from that excellent Republic and those illegal Laws of Plato.”

Now, there are two things to note here: a) when Alamariu quotes that paragraph, he bolds the part up to “exercised it with great severity,” yet curiously does not do so for the crucial point that he “gave the property of the masters to their slaves.” From this description, Chaeron does not come across as an aristocratic radical who breaks from convention to assert his superior nature. On the contrary, his tyranny takes the form of a Saturnalian revolt against nature where base and noble are inverted — slaves becoming masters; b) there is conflicting testimony from contemporary orators over whether Chaeron really was a pupil of Plato and Xenocrates, and more to the point he was directly installed as a tyrant by the Macedonian dynasty, with some orators blaming Alexander the Great and not Chaeron for the banishment of Pellene’s citizenry. On the whole, this episode is not persuasive for Alamariu’s argument.

What of Athenaeus’ claim that the Academics “live in a scandalous and infamous manner”? This actually has a straightforward answer: the philosophers (many of them) did lead scandalous private lives. They drank to excess, had wild banquets that went contrary to etiquette, openly consorted with their concubines, and so on. In fact it has been well-established that a lot of the lurid tales about the Academics cited by Athenaeus derive from a lost work by Herodicus, who was a staunch Homeric traditionalist. Athenaeus is thus criticizing many of Plato’s pupils from their own premises, i.e. their words (logos) not living up to their deeds (ergos). But there’s a much more crucial point here: the fact that boisterous and unrestrained behavior was regarded as a potential incubator of tyranny by patriotic citizens does not therefore indicate that this lurid behavior was an exoteric display of esoteric intentions to seize power in the cities. The most scandalous philosophers in outward behavior were precisely those Cynics who renounced the political life and declared themselves cosmopolites. As Dr. Alamariu well knows, the private indulgence of erotic passions does not translate to, but often conflicts with the higher political ambitions of a successful tyrant. Thus, while this episode can be cited to gauge the subjective perceptions Athenians had of philosophers, it is not enough for Alamariu’s contention that there was an objective intention by the Platonists to breed the “nomos-independent man” who would rule as philosopher-tyrant, which would have raised hostility from the polis.

Political involvement by philosophers was quite common and nothing unusual, even for the Pre-Socratics. This is as much an indication of the importance of the public life and public cults and festivals to the Greek thought-world (bearing in mind Benjamin Constant’s famous juxtaposition between liberty of the ancients and liberty of the moderns) as it is any particular lust for power that philosophers may have had.

For example, the Pythagoreans had close involvement with the court of Philip II of Macedon, as reported by Diodorus Siculus. Archaeological excavations have found that Philip’s palace at Aigai had the Pythagorean golden triangle incorporated into its building plan.¹⁶ Actually we could even trace “political philosophy” in a narrow sense back to Solon himself, who, as the story goes “spent some time in studies with Psenophis of Heliopolis and Sonchis of Saïs, who were very learned priests” (Plutarch) where he is said to have learned the story of Atlantis. It is not surprising that men of leisure and status who have the time and capacity to study with scholarchs will go on to have public lives in political affairs.

But there is another way of litigating this issue: what do we know of the scholarchs who succeeded Plato? What we see is that it was Xenocrates who created a solidified “Platonist” canon, and this included unifying Plato’s cosmology by positing the fundamental principles of the One and the Indefinite Dyad — a thread that would be taken and developed further in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus. The key texts for the academic Platonists were always the Timaeus and Phaedrus. In Xenocrates’ canon there was a threefold separation between categories of being into perceptible, intelligible and mathematical such that “The Forms lie beyond the heaven, the sensibles below the heaven, and the heaven itself is a realm of mathematical intermediates, where the visible and the intelligible are interwoven.” Moreover, there is clear textual evidence that the Republic was relegated to a subsidiary work.¹⁷ This itself strongly militates against a “political Plato” interpretation.

Such a development of the Platonic canon puts the famous statement in the Seventh Letter about the inferiority of the written word in a different light:

Anyone who has followed this discourse and digression will know well that, if Dionysios or anyone else, great or small, has written a treatise on the highest matters and the first principles of things, he has, so I say, neither heard nor learnt any sound teaching about the subject of his treatise; otherwise, he would have had the same reverence for it, which I have, and would have shrunk from putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness. For he wrote it, not as an aid to memory-since there is no risk of forgetting it, if a man's soul has once laid hold of it; for it is expressed in the shortest of statements-but if he wrote it at all, it was from a mean craving for honour, either putting it forth as his own invention, or to figure as a man possessed of culture, of which he was not worthy, if his heart was set on the credit of possessing it.

It stands to reason that the unwritten doctrines of Plato implied in the Seventh Letter were precisely those canonized by Xenocrates, taken up later by Neoplatonism, and reconstructed in our day by the Tübingen School. The “esoteric” content of Platonism, therefore, was not a political program for breeding the rebarbarized regime-independent man, but precisely those intellectual constructions that Dr. Alamariu asserts are a degenerated “Platonism for the people” — but should more accurately be called a “Platonism for the sages.”

A surviving fragment from the comedian Epicrates of Ambracia depicts Plato’s Academy as a place where students disputed on the finer points of dialectic: “For, in propounding definitions about nature (περὶ φύσεως ἀφοριζόμενοι), they were differentiating (διεχώριζον) the way of life of animals, the nature of trees, and the genera of vegetables. And in these arguments, they were investigating to what genus one should assign the pumpkin.”¹⁸

In all likelihood, “investigating what genus one should assign the pumpkin” is a more faithful reflection of what went on inside than anything else. The political involvement associated with the academic pupils was a matter of the pupils’ own independent ambitions, not of the academic project as such. The Academy could, of course, send pupils as emissaries when requested to do so.

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• 2h. Nietzsche and the affirmation of life

Dr. Alamariu’s chapter on Nietzsche, in truth, does not add much to the core thesis of his book. This is because Dr. Alamariu is already adopting a Nietzschean perspective throughout his reading of Greek philosophy, and so the final chapter simply links up Alamariu’s arguments to their origin in the Nietzschean corpus. Nevertheless, there are some additional points worth commenting on.

Alamariu writes:

If Nietzsche had made a statement about Napoleon alone, the reader could perhaps be safe to dismiss it as more Nietzschean “great man worship” or rhetoric against modern democracy. But, leaving aside the fact —pointed out already by Kaufmann among others—that Nietzsche is not in general interested in extolling the likes of Genghis Khan, Agathocles of Syracuse, let alone the machtpolitik of imperial Germany of his time, of which he is instead quite critical; leaving all this aside, the reference to Napoleon is in an essay about a philosopher, Schopenhauer, not vice versa, and in the context of the resurrection of an ancient or classical understanding of philosophy, not manliness, and the prerequisites for philosophy. Nietzsche’s admiration of Napoleon—who, it must be recalled, was not just a warlord but admired by and served as the inspiration for some of the greatest artists and literary minds of the 19th century— should be understood as part of his concern with high culture and with philosophy.

There are two points to unpack here.

In fact, Nietzsche’s exaltation of Napoleon was not simply “part of his concern with high culture and with philosophy,” but part of his deliberate provocation against the German Bildungsbuergertum (cultured bourgeoisie) and its national-romantic approach to history. The Napoleonic era was perceived by the German national liberals at large as the Franzosenzeit, a time of occupation, and Napoleon as a tyrant who was driven out by Freikorps veterans in 1813. For example, the text of Das Fluchtlied, a patriotic song: “With man and horse and chariot / that's how God struck them! / It wanders through snow and forest / The great, mighty French army / The emperor on the run, soldiers without discipline.”

Nietzsche’s contempt for Wilhelmine Germany led him to deliberately counterpose himself against nationalist historical narratives. His infamous praise of Frederick II Hohenstaufen in Beyond Good and Evil should also be read in this way, for Frederick II was always the epitome of the “un-German” and “Oriental” emperor among patriotic historians like Heinrich von Sybel.

This is also the primary reason for Nietzsche’s distinctive anti-Nordicism (though to avoid anachronism it should be noted he wrote a decade before Nordicism really became a major tendency):

There is yet a THIRD claim to superiority: in the French character there is a successful half-way synthesis of the North and South, which makes them comprehend many things, and enjoins upon them other things, which an Englishman can never comprehend. Their temperament, turned alternately to and from the South, in which from time to time the Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty of blood—our GERMAN infirmity of taste, for the excessive prevalence of which at the present moment, blood and iron, that is to say "high politics," has with great resolution been prescribed (according to a dangerous healing art, which bids me wait and wait, but not yet hope).

Or his statement in The Will to Power that one must become “super-European” and “more Oriental”:

…to overcome everything Christian by something super-Christian, and not only to rid oneself of it,—for the Christian doctrine is the counter-doctrine to the Dionysian; to rediscover the South in oneself, and to stretch a clear, glittering, and mysterious southern sky above one; to reconquer the southern healthiness and concealed power of the soul, once more for oneself; to increase the compass of one's soul step by step, and to become more supernational, more European, more super-European, more Oriental, and finally more Hellenic—for Hellenism was, as a matter of fact, the first great union and synthesis of everything Oriental, and precisely on that account, the beginning of the European soul, the discovery of our "new world":—he who lives under such imperatives, who knows what he may not encounter some day? Possibly—a new dawn!

Or his infamous judgment on Martin Luther in The Gay Science, a statement carefully calculated to scandalize German Protestant sensibilities: “Today it is easy enough to see how in all cardinal questions of power Luther's disposition was calamitously myopic, superficial, and incautious. He was a man of the common people who lacked everything that one might inherit from a ruling caste; he had no instinct for power.”

On the second point, Dr. Alamariu makes an important remark that he fails to elaborate upon:

[Nietzsche is not interested in general in extolling …] let alone the machtpolitik of imperial Germany of his time, of which he is instead quite critical

Indeed, Nietzsche was quite critical of it, but Alamariu doesn’t grasp the true significance.

Nietzsche’s diary entries right before the loss of his mental faculties have him attacking Imperial German policy in utterly hysterical tones. “Todkrieg dem hause Hohenzollern,” the Germans as the “lowest, stupidest, meanest race that now exists on earth,” “I will not have my hands free until I have the Kaiser's Christian hussars, this young criminal and all his accessories, in my hands,” and most tellingly of all:

Only by branding the criminal madness do I always brand the two most curse-worthy institutions that have so far sickened humanity, the actual institutions that are mortally hostile to life: the dynastic institution that fattens itself on the blood of the strongest, the best and the most magnificent the priestly institution that, with a terrible guile, tries to destroy these very same men, the strongest, the most well-off, the glorious ones from the outset. I think that emperors and priests are in agreement here: I want to be the judge here and put an end to the criminal madness of dynasts and priests for every millennia.

Nietzche’s antipathy towards the German bourgeoisie, and in this particular case the influence of Christian Social court chaplain Adolf Stoecker, led him to fiery denunciations of kings, priests and ultimately national power just as Germany was undergoing significant colonial and naval expansion.

In the face of Imperial German will-to-power, Nietzsche was raging much like any other moralist, or perhaps “immoralist” in his case.

This is no isolated incident, but reflects a deeper aporia in Nietzsche’s philosophy that he could never solve. Nietzsche attempted to overcome what he called “Socratism.” The basic approach of Socratic philosophy in criticizing the tyrant, recall, is to say that there is a mismatch between the subjective desires and objective desires of the tyrant. The tyrant seems to be enjoying himself in bountiful wealth and pleasure, but he is not “really” happy, he is merely a “slave” to his passions, he lacks self-mastery over his eros. He therefore does not have “true” power over hiself or others, but is dominated by the power of his disordered soul.

Nietzsche does not actually manage to get past this ‘otherworldly’ Socratic dichotomy — between justice according to inborn strength, and justice according to the ideal form of justice, and the superiority of the latter to the former. Nietzsche’s project, at least outwardly, is to reconstruct morality on the basis of physiology and medical pathology. Good and evil are replaced by healthy and sick, life-affirming and life-denying. Master morality is healthy morality preached by the party of life, consisting in affirmation of power. Slave morality is sick morality is priestly morality is ascetic morality, consisting in the denial of life, renunciation of power and the browbeating of the healthy.

But Nietzsche engages in the same Socratic conceit when he insists that slave morality and priestly morality is the renunciation of the will to power. In other words, the ascetic and the slave are not really exercising any power according to their station or capabilities, they are simply resentful and malformed individuals. How can this be when priests have always exercised the dreadful and binding power over the conscience of their flock? And if a free man becomes enslaved or imprisoned as a captive of war, does he suddenly lose the capacity for a “true” exercise of will-to-power if he uses flattery and conceit to coax his superiors into making life more comfortable for him?

Simply put, Nietzsche fails to naturalize the concept of power. He continues to attach a moral dimension to it, which is why for him the ascetic does not have a "true” will-to-power, just as for Socrates the tyrant does not have “true” virtue. But if we actually look at things from a truly amoral perspective, then each man will try to work with whatever power is available to him according to capability and circumstance. Hereditary endowments are but one means in the struggle for power.

I can’t help but think Nietzsche must have known this. Note how, in his infamous physiopathology of Socrates in Twilight of the Idols, when he interprets Socrates’ dying words — “About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of life. What does that prove? What does it demonstrate?” — he in fact misinterprets and misquotes.

Socrates’ last words, in Phaedo 118a:

Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.

ὦ Κρίτων, ἔφη, τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα: ἀλλὰ ἀπόδοτε καὶ μὴ ἀμελήσητε.

Not only does Nietzsche add “The Savior” (Heiland), effectively just to hammer his idiosyncratic point “Socratism = Christianity = 2000 years of anti-nature,” but by omitting the latter command to “pay the debt” he portrays Socrates’ last words as a confession of his world-weariness, of his hostility to life. But there is absolutely no “confession” of the sort. The injunction to “not neglect the debt” refers back to Phaedo 115b where Socrates gives Crito his directions to “take care of yourselves you will serve me and mine and yourselves, whatever you do, even if you make no promises now; but if you neglect yourselves and are not willing to live following step by step, as it were, in the path marked out by our present and past discussions, you will accomplish nothing.” Far from Socrates revealing that the jig is up, he dies fully content with his life’s work.

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• 2i. Christianity and the “misbreeding” of man

Dr. Alamariu’s chapter on Nietzsche goes on as he approaches a crescendo. But a few points along the way:

Nietzsche, however, tunnels somewhat more deeply than this: the aristocratic regime requires something more fundamental, certain orientations or attitudes that precede what we might consider to be the virtues. These are intolerance, cruelty, and what Nietzsche calls the pathos of distance. Aristocratic cruelty and the pathos of distance-cruelty against slaves, and, internalized, against the lower orders of one's own soul-is argued to be the foundation of higher cultural and intellectual life.

It is somewhat amusing that Alamariu should interpret the struggle against the lower orders of the soul as an allegory for brutality towards slaves when the same Athenaeus that he cites for gossip on the Platonic Academy also records Greek laws against maltreatment of slaves.¹⁹ Or what about the story so famous in antiquity about Augustus attending a banquet by Vedius Pollio, who, about to a feed a slave to his lampreys, was stopped by Augustus’ act of clemency?

When, finally, the “fortunate moment” of political weakness comes, the previously-enforced homogeneity breaks down and the long-pent-up tension in the regime bursts free. The homogeneity is replaced by a “tropical” proliferation of “monstrous” types, most of them weakened or deficient, but a few luckily enhanced. The qualities or virtues, the inner states, that are the result of aristocratic breeding and education are now “liberated” to take their paths in new and unexpected directions, in directions no longer constrained by the necessity for political survival. There is indeed a taste for the new as such, and a taste for transgression, a boredom with the law and with equality: much like, for example, in imperial Roman times, there seemed to be a constant joy in the mockery and transgression of the old aristocratic republican personae and mores. Among these new specimens may be “amazing” enigmatic types like Alcibiades or Caesar—tyrannical men—or otherwise artists like da Vinci.

Alamariu’s equivalence of political decadence with the conditions for the proliferation of “monstrous” types who become liberated from convention and “acquire a taste for transgression, a boredom with the law,” fails to hold in many crucial cases. Take, for instance, the Glorious Revolution in England. It was a reaction, in part, to the rakishness of Restoration drama and court manners. The “commonwealthman” rhetoric at the time emphasized rustic austerity and simplicity. Indeed, the direct aftermath of the Glorious Revolution was a socially conservative counterrevolution in morals — of which the newly founded Society for the Reformation of Manners was a most conspicuous example. It is simply a personal bias of Dr. Alamariu that he should detect Bacchanalian orgiastic frenzy in every social upheaval.

But let us now come to the main contention:

What Plato and his followers didn't count on was the emergence or eruption of an international missionary religion, based on revealed truth. The final result of the Christian project, which is also the final result-surely unintentional -of the Platonic project, is the misbreeding of modern European man. Christianity was 'Platonism for the people,' or, which is the same thing, an entirely exoteric Platonism. A Platonism with a priesthood that no longer understood nor cared for the fact that the outward moral and political orientation was meant as a protective outer wall for an inner garden where nature itself was nurtured and preserved.

Furthermore the failure of Platonism in this regard is in fact entirely separate from any substantial teaching or doctrine: as is apparent in the passage just quoted, the problem is when religion oversteps its bounds and becomes sovereign, as opposed to its being a useful tool of the statesman or the philosopher. This overreach, the possibility for this kind of priestly authority, is rooted in the peculiar origins of Christianity as a revealed religion and in the historical peculiarities of the late Roman world that adopted this new faith.

Let us remember that the Platonic teaching is profitable to a late-stage civilization and therefore entirely inappropriate to the cultural and spiritual life of barbarians who are just about to be civilized for the first time. In this case Platonic morality, as interpreted by Christianity, corrupts, stunts, misbreeds, tames.

Christianity is exoteric Platonism, the misbreeding of man, the result of religion overstepping its use as a tool of the legislator. It is particularly harmful to the vitality of untamed barbarian peoples.

What comes to the fore in all of this is Dr. Alamariu’s rather facile view of aristocracy.

A utilitarian view of religion has no actual religious sanction. What good are the lawgiver’s promises, oaths and pledges to protect property, liberty and privilege if he adopts an “external” view and does not see first and foremost his own conscience bound to uphold the pacts he makes with nobles and other peers, lest divine wrath fall upon him? We saw the examples of Spartan piety above, and there is no way that such religion could ever be a tool from the “outside.” Religion is nothing if it does not constrain all of its believers, if it is not a total worldview.

Let me point out here that it was not a “Christian,” but none other than Julian the Apostate who considered Socrates a greater man than Alexander the Great! This is from his Letter to Themistius:

On the contrary I maintain that the son of Sophroniscus performed greater tasks than Alexander, for to him I ascribe the wisdom of Plato, the generalship of Xenophon, the fortitude of Antisthenes, the Eretrian and Megarian philosophies, Cebes, Simmias, Phaedo and a host of others; not to mention the offshoots derived from the same source, the Lyceum, the Stoa and the Academies. Who, I ask, ever found salvation through the conquests of Alexander? What city was ever more wisely governed because of them, what individual improved? Many indeed you might find whom those conquests enriched, but not one whom they made wiser or more temperate than he was by nature, if indeed they have not made him more insolent and arrogant. Whereas all who now find their salvation in philosophy owe it to Socrates. And I am not the only person to perceive this fact and to express it, for Aristotle it seems did so before me, when he said that he had just as much right to be proud of his treatise on the gods as the conqueror of the Persian empire. And I think he was perfectly correct in that conclusion. For military success is due to courage and good fortune more than anything else or, let us say, if you wish, to intelligence as well, though of the common everyday sort. But to conceive true opinions about God is an achievement that not only requires perfect virtue, but one might well hesitate whether it be proper to call one who attains to this a man or a god. For if the saying is true that it is the nature of everything to become known to those who have an affinity with it, then he who comes to know the essential nature of God would naturally be considered divine.

It appears that Julian was infected with the fatal malady of “Socratism,” and of course one would always be tempted to blame this on “Hellenistic degeneration” or what have you. But since we saw good reasons above to think Neoplatonism followed in the steps of Plato’s unwritten doctrines, the sentiments expressed above by Julian likely are Platonic esotericism.

The political question is this:

Would one prefer a ruler who makes penance for his sins and restitution for his transgressions, or one who treats the state simply as his own work of art to sculpt at pleasure?

The question is a complete no-brainer, that is unless you are a dispossessed and deracinated have-not, which most whites invariably are as a consequence of recent social developments. Only in our time could the latter appear to be an enticing vision, whereas in actual virile times of recent past, the restlessness of the adventurer and conqueror was not something to be done for its own sake, but so that one may retire as a country squire free of care in ripe old age.

The whole point of a frontier is to settle it. But for Dr. Alamariu all settlement, all cultivation, is a betrayal of nature — the perpetual and unspoiled infancy of the woods.

Let me quote from an Anglo-Saxon royal diploma by Æthelred the Unready, in which he makes penance and restitution for despoiling the estates of the Rochester Cathedral in his youthful regency²⁰:

Now, however, because I have reached a mature age thanks to merciful heavenly kindness, I have decided to amend my childhood deeds. Therefore, encouraged by the grace of the Lord, I am reconsidering whatever I have unjustly done, encouraged then with wicked instigation against the sacred apostle of God; now, fully before God, with the tearful contrition of my heart, I repent/do penance [peneteo] and restore freely that which rightly belongs to this place, hoping to receive the tears of my repentance and to be loosened from the fetters of my earlier ignorance by Him, Who does not want the death of a sinner, but rather that he convert and live.

What beauty, what magnanimity. Can one imagine any of our rulers atoning for all their misdeeds against the natural order with such heartfelt gravity? “I restore freely that which rightly belongs to this place. I return the alien to his own shores and give back to the tillers of this soil.”

I also invite the reader to look through the Hirðskrá, the Christianized Norwegian laws of the royal retinue, and see if they have anything that is “inappropriate,” “corrupting” or “stunting” to the barbarian, or rather if they were edifying to him.

Nay, aristocracy and other men of privilege have no “taste for the new.” The very word nieuwichede (novelty) was a profanity to the Flemish nobility and bourgeoisie of old.²¹ Novelties and innovations are treason against heredity, against rightful possession and established usage. They are literally prejudicial, superfluous to right judgment. It is not innovators we want, but renovators! Not to make new, but to make the venerable and true shine like new again.

Aristocracy is a corporate status by its nature, there is no “aristocracy” in the wild.

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3. Historical origins of the “political Plato” interpretation

We have analyzed Dr. Alamariu’s thesis, and found it wanting. But we must also add that it is far from a novel one. Alamariu’s reading largely descends from a strain of Plato scholarship that emerged shortly after World War I and rapidly achieved dominance until its displacement after World War II.

The so-called “political Plato” interpretation began in the poetic circle of Stefan George, reached out to academics like Werner Jaeger, Julius Stenzel and Paul Friedländer, and was taken for granted by Third Reich intelligentsia including Hans F.K. Günther.

The traditional view of Plato emphasized dialogues such as the Timaeus, Phaedo, Crito and Apology. Plato was therefore seen as an epistemologist, ethicist, metaphysician, that is to say a “philosopher” in the sense established since the early modern period. This is the Plato who Stefan George and many other students of his generation were taught in the gymnasium.

After World War I, for reasons we will get into, a new core Platonic canon was established consisting of Republic, Laws and the Seventh Letter. Plato’s personal biography was increasingly emphasized.²² The sheer popularity of Republic as “the” Platonic dialogue is, at least in part, the lingering effect of this 20th century scholarly turn. Consider the fact that in antiquity Iamblichus completely excluded Republic from his canon of 12 Platonic dialogues.

Though there were all sorts of differences in the concrete particulars, all of the “political Plato” interpretations shared the same family resemblances: Plato was a folkish pedagogue, a national awakener, almost a “founding father” Kemalist statesman of sorts, whose primary task was to reform the Athenian polity from its decadent state after the Peloponnesian War. The unwritten doctrines implied by Plato’s skepticism of writing are assumed to be political ones, thus dividing Platonism into an exoteric shadow and an esoteric core. The Platonic core was almost always identified with the rule of the guardians and the pedagogic function of the state, possibly supplemented with some kind of Führer as hierophantic philosopher-king. The guardians would in turn be selected from the youthful generation of the front with their values of self-sacrifice and comradeship. The doctrine of Forms or Ideas was now literally equated with the “idea” as artistic vision through which the statesman-lawgiver molded his people. How much of this was explicitly connected to racial doctrines differed — some like Werner Jaeger were generally indifferent, others like Ernst Krieck made it central.²³

Karl Popper’s notorious proclamation of Plato as the father of totalitarianism was the direct result of political Plato readings becoming the default interpretation of his day. Popper was not alone, and many other public intellectuals expounded on similar platitudes about Plato as an authoritarian, oligarch, lackey of the reactionary ruling class, and — naturally — a fascist.²⁴ Although these shrill denunciations were discredited by the 1950s, the larger legacy remained of equating Platonism with the Republic and with a literalistic reading unmoored from the hermeneutic conventions established by ancient commentators like Proclus.

Every cultural moment has its own Antikenbild, or image of the ancients. For an 18th-century Englishman (especially a colonist), the ideal figures were Cato, Cincinnatus and Brutus. Later, as documented by Quentin Broughall, the Victorian peak of the British Empire was characterized by the displacement of Hellenophilia and the predominance of Roman motifs beginning in the 1860s.²⁵ Prior to that, Hellenism was in vogue, a wave beginning with the Byronic enthusiasm for the Greek War of Independence. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood seldom painted Roman themes, for those still had an association with French revolutionary neoclassicism. With the modernization of the Colonial Office and the intensification of the Scramble for Africa, the archetype of Rome rapidly rose again to the fore after a period of ambivalence.

Furthermore, classics education and classical philology was still an important marker of high-born status. The Compulsory Greek requirement at Oxford was only lifted in 1920. But until then²⁶:

Neither at Oxford nor Cambridge did the disadvantages that compulsory Greek created for women or other non-traditional students carry the debate; the impact of the First World War on the education of boys forced a shift in priorities. The dominance of classics in the curriculum was already decreasing by the turn of the century. In 1860, 26 of the 32 masters at Eton had taught classical subjects, but by 1905 classicists made up only half of the teaching staff. When young classics masters went to the war, there were few qualified to take their places. The study of Greek in schools never returned to its pre-1914 status, and ‘classics other than Latin became largely the preserve of the public schools’. The more immediately accessible study of Latin continued to perpetuate a sense of class identity, while Greek was ‘choicer fare’, a marker of particular exclusivity. After the Second World War, there was pressure to reduce the amount of time allocated to Latin in grammar (selective state secondary schools) and public schools. Oxford and Cambridge continued to require entrants to have passed an O-level qualification in Latin until 1960.

The case in Germany was similar, but even more pronounced. The notion of a specific “Greek-Germanic” affinity was culturally ubiquitous due to the lasting influence of Winckelmann, Hölderlin and Humboldt in German academia and the educated public at large.

The essential cultural values of the German bourgeois were Herkunft (pedigree, not in the sense of noble birth, but in upbringing within an educated and prosperous family), Besitz (property) and Bildung (aesthetic self-cultivation or character-building in the humanistic sense).

The Bildung ideal was always linked to the cultivation and refinement of one’s person, of education without focus on any particular vocation, specialization or technical utility. Bildung is not learning-to-do, but learning-to-learn. As Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the University of Berlin, put it²⁷:

Instead, all schools, being looked after not by a single corporation but by the entire nation, or rather, the state, should rather aim at the general education of the individual. What is required by the demands of life or rather by one of its individual activities must be kept separated and be acquired only after having completed a general education. If the two approaches [general and specialist] were to be mixed, education would be spoiled and it would produce neither complete individuals nor full citizens of the different social classes.

Young people should be allowed, on the one hand, to begin building up all the materials to which they will owe the entirety of their creative potential and, on the other hand, to build on their learning at will in the future and also to develop their intellectual and mechanical skills. Thus, young people are engaged in a two-fold way; firstly, directly with learning and, secondly, with learning about learning.

This was the humanistic ideal of pedagogy.

This ideal collapsed after World War I, in part due to the typical push for more technical education as seen everywhere, but in the German case there was a much more dramatic factor: the Social Democratic revolution of the Weimar Republic. In the span of a couple of years, Germany saw nothing less than a total socialist upheaval of its education system:

In addition to these confessional divisions, Lamberti highlights the existence of exclusive, public-supported elementary schools (Vorschulen) which prepared students from the upper classes for entrance to advanced high schools and, eventually, to university. The result, Lamberti observes, was that the Weimar Republic inherited a school system that was both "confessionally segmented" and "socially stratified".

In the heady days of the Revolution and early years of the Republic, elementary teachers and their professional organization, the German Teachers' Association, were finally able to move on their reform agenda. Their vision was that of a unified public school system (Einheitsschule), one which put children of different faiths and different social classes together. Revolutionary edicts did away with such practices as school inspections by church officials (greatly resented by teachers) and school prayer. The Weimar constitution followed up with articles banning private preparatory schools, mandating inter-confessional tolerance in education, declaring religion to be a school subject like all others, elevating the training of teachers to a university program, and establishing a common school combining students of all beliefs and all classes as the norm (Regelschule). Given the rapid and sweeping introduction of these long-sought reforms, it is no wonder that elementary teachers tended to express "an idealistic and exuberant view of the young republic, and were willing to engage in "intense political activity" in order to make these provisions of the Weimar constitution a reality…

The teachers were undeterred. Despite setbacks on matters of religion, they managed to introduce major pedagogical reforms throughout the German school system. Education became more socially just with the abolition of the elite preparatory schools and the establishing of four-year basic schools (Grundschulen) which could lead to higher education for any student, including those from the lower classes. The reformers promoted active learning in elementary education, in line with the discoveries of developmental psychologists (especially those from Leipzig). Most importantly, many teachers adopted a more learning-based, individually-oriented, and child-friendly tone in the classroom, breaking with a long tradition of authoritarian instruction and group recitation.

In the case of some two hundred experimental schools, reformers abandoned grading and corporal punishment entirely. These experiments were by no means isolated pedagogical practices, Lamberti argues, but influential and widely-adopted innovations (especially in urban schools) designed to realize progressive education in a democratic state.

This is the critical social context for understanding the proliferation of radicalized classical educational ideals in the form of “political Plato” readings. Classical philologists and other academics faced a massive demotion in their prestige and status with the abolition of private preparatory schools through which most of their gymnasium students (and future political elite) were pipelined. The gymnasium itself lost its role as the centerpiece of German pedagogy, now that both the floodgates were opened to social classes outside the Bildungsbuergertum, and now that technical schools were on an equal footing in the system.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. Bildung could no longer be left to the aesthetic cultivation of the individual. It had to become the project of a cultivating state. Bildung was radicalized into Züchtung (breeding). The abolition of class distinctions untethered the masses from their proper social station, requiring an “emergency medical procedure” through a total state which could shape all of that raw human material into something usable, from which a new class of guardians could then be selected.

The political interpretation of Plato was an allegory not for the radicalization of aristocracy away from ancestral custom, but for the radicalization of the academic philologist deprived of his beloved Kaiser under whom he prospered. It is no coincidence that the political Plato interpretation was pioneered in a formal setting by the dean of German philologists, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in 1919 at the age of 71, near the close of his already highly accomplished career.

---

4. Whither vitalism?

To close off our criticism, we must touch upon the more directly political matter of Alamariu’s worldview. Hitherto we have been in a relatively scholarly terrain, but the nature of Alamariu’s commitments means that a common response to our criticism would be: “So what? You’re missing the real point, which is to inspire young men to nobler deeds.”

But in my judgment there is no such animating potential in vitalism, and I will try to explain my reasoning in the most subdued tone I can muster.

As I see it, the vitalist doctrine has two principal defects that color everything else: a) the radical and unbridgeable gap it poses between nature and convention ends up conflating all forms of paranomia (transgression) with the expression of inborn and superior nature, and hence cannot discriminate between political action and mere private indulgence, and b) the image of aristocracy, nature and superiority that the vitalist worldview promotes is one of ancient wolf-warrior brotherhoods in the wilderness, leading to a kind of primitivism in which any sort of settled and urbane existence based on property, obligation and duty is scorned as only so many shackles of the herd fastened upon the superior man.

The problem is this: if the greatest issue of our day is rewilding and rebarbarizing man, and if human excellence essentially only ever exists outside the walls of the city, how can political action within the highly technical, formalized and bureaucratic realities of the modern administrative state be justified? It would seem that real-world politics is far too “servile” and “beneath” the dignity of the superior man, which means he ought to passively abstain until the coming of a Caesar — and even then, said Caesar being an individual specimen of such radiant brilliance could probably do with no more than a dozen housecarls. Indeed, such sentiments are commonplaces among “vitalists,” and they demonstrate the utter trivialization of politics.

The administrative state in America has roughly 9000 political appointments in the executive administration besides 2.1 million employees managed by federal supervisors. All of these positions have elaborate ranks in the civil service according to both pay grade and position classification. Said executive administration then presides over departmental structures each with their own internal secretarial orders, working groups, interagency agreements, and so on. It presides over a massive federal grantmaking and procurement machine with thousands of pages of directives and guidance for cost accounting principles, in which grants can approach over a quarter of state budgets. It has vast duties and powers to apportion congressionally appropriated spending into the proper accounts and then transfer and reprogram funds. It routinely uses internal advisory committees for outside guidance when career civil servants are not up to par. The same administration has a government-wide management agenda, is built on a tapestry of OLC memos, presidential directives, national security directives, executive orders, signing statements, prosecutorial discretions, and other internal laws and procedures that bind its own practice. The elaborate infrastructure of rulemaking and adjudication is so complex that agencies routinely delegate the drafting of rules and regulations to private contractors. Moreover, the administrative law judges that serve in these tribunals are, along with most other federal employees, covered by collective bargaining contracts and can challenge policy on contractual grounds. The vast national security complex allows for agencies to incorporate non-treaty agreements into domestic regulations through foreign affairs exemption. The Treasury sanctions foreign companies in order to enforce international rights conventions. Etc. etc.

Of what relevance is “vitalism” to all of that? Or any soothing tales of ancient Aryan Männerbünde?

If it were merely irrelevant, that would be one thing. Worse than that it is being detrimental. Since the reality of administration is no place for a wild man of shining nature, the vitalist worldview instead famously encourages the so-called aestheticization of politics.

What this basically does is reduce all political questions to the projection of an ideal self-image. Indeed, there is a tried and true script. The vitalist will continually repeat the following cliches: “human excellence,” “Faustian man,” “superior man,” “conquering the stars,” “reaching to infinity,” and so on. Whenever someone raises a troublesome practical question, the vitalist immediately retreats to his happy place where all of our problems are simple: just put 12 superior men in a room and heaven on earth will be done. As to why these 12 superior men never end up congregating in that room, it is because the inferior masses are holding them down. This becomes the canned answer that the vitalist delivers to every problem. The vitalist is not actually a political person at all. He is apolitical. Worse than that: he is anti-political. After all, politics is the world of nomos, and by definition superiority cannot thrive in a nomos. Every single political question becomes nothing but a solipsistic aggrievement. It’s always “great men” being “obstructed,” “held down,” “longhoused,” or whatever. Not a single word of the state, of administration, of management, of actual politics.

The trouble with vitalism is that its social ideal not only fails to find practical application in the year 2023, it fails to find practical application even in the year 1023. The whole ethos of a feudal aristocracy with its strong emphasis on kinship, inheritance, primogeniture, estate administration and the centrality of the patriarchal household is utterly at odds with the Männerbund ideal presupposed by vitalism. The Männerbund is at best a reflection of aristocracy in its prehistoric infancy, but there arrives inevitably a certain level of development in which one must “beat swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-knives” (Isaiah 2:4) and “sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree” (Micah 4:4). This means the acquisition of a fixed abode, a domain, a patrimony, a household, conjugal bonds, heirs, trusts, and service to a king not on the basis of a temporary warband but of permanent hereditary right.

Actually a major issue that vitalists have with their “regime-independent man” is that they confuse service with servility. Serving a political or economic superior is not the same as being of unfree or servile status, because the former is a question of what one renders to others, and the latter is a question of what personal capacities one has to render anything at all. A lot of vitalists are paralyzed by a hysterical fear that they’re enslaving themselves if they bind themselves to any kind of agreement. You see this in the fact that they constantly dream of being pirates, colonial adventurers, brigands and mercenaries. That way they can imagine there is an escape from their suffering and agony in a decaying 21st century civilization. There isn’t.

Now despite championing the primacy of aesthetic judgment, the aesthetics of vitalism leave much to be desired. Which of the following is more aesthetically pleasing: a) a child conceived in wedlock under lawful matrimony, b) a child selected out of a test tube? The vast majority of vitalists would respond b), which reveals the utterly bizarre and counterintuitive understanding of “beauty” that they have. There is no emphasis on the purpose and intentionality from which order and symmetry is produced. From the vitalist perspective, all that matters is an attractive person with healthy traits is doing something. Since he is attractive and healthy, it follows that no base act can possibly despoil his purebred nature. The problem with ugly criminals and fornicators isn’t that they’re criminals or fornicators, but that they’re ugly. Vitalism is the beauty pageant theory of politics.

Since the vitalist sees all political judgments as aesthetic ones, he will end up elevating banal personal pleasures into revolutionary political statements against the spiteful dysgenic masses who despise the fact that he’s enjoying himself. The lifestyle of Dr. Costin Alamariu is that of a wining, dining and globe-trotting bon vivant who mingles with Z-list Dimes Square celebrities. In other words, a purely private existence, no different in practical outcome from the ruralite who isolates himself in flyover country.

The vitalist loves stories of discoverers, founders and explorers, but has absolutely nothing to say about renovators, maintainers, and conservators of what has been found. Result: complete political paralysis. The vitalist lacks power to create since the masses and the herd are blocking his creative faculties, and he is not satisfied with mere reform of what actually exists. Therefore, he will do nothing at all.

The vitalist will engage in endless and futile grandstanding about how “the Aryan man can do anything” and proudly declare that he is too good for the society he lives in. Precisely because he is too good and no one deserves him, he will do nothing. Vitalism is, in many ways, the opiate of the right-wing.

What we call “the dissident right” in its present incarnation has now existed for at least some 15 years. Perhaps its time has been spent. The fatal conceit of the vitalist: politics is about the right attitude or worldview. Not so. Politics today is a question of technical expertise and procedural knowledge. When inauguration rolls around, what will the vitalists have to offer? If they reform themselves and do offer something, they will no longer be vitalists. If they stay where they are, they will have nothing to offer. But that is no great worry, for it will not spell the end of practical men. It will only spell the end of Costin Alamariu and the dissident right.

1. Sosnowski, M. (2013) 'Prussians as bees, Prussians as dogs': metaphors and the depiction of pagan society in the early hagiography of St. Adalbert of Prague. Reading Medieval Studies, XXXIX. pp. 25-48. ISSN 0950-3129 Available at https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/84661/

2. Neyra, Andrea Vanina. Slavs and dogs: depiction of Slavs in Central European sources from the 10th-11th centuries. Medium Aevum Quotidianum, Krems, v. 69, p. 5-24, 2014.

3. Liberman, Anatoly (2005). Berserks in History and Legend. Russian History, 32(1), 401–411. doi:10.1163/187633105x00213 

4. Dale, Roderick Thomas Duncan (2014) Berserkir: a re-examination of the phenomenon in literature and life. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

5. “Then Thangbrand asked if men were willing to take the faith, but all the heathen men spoke against it.

"Well," says Thangbrand, "I will give you the means whereby ye shall prove whether my faith is better. We will hallow two fires. The heathen men shall hallow one and I the other, but a third shall he unhallowed; and if the Baresark is afraid of the one that I hallow, but treads both the others, then ye shall take the faith."

"That is well-spoken," says Gest, "and I will agree to this for myself and my household."

And when Gest had so spoken, then many more agreed to it.

Then it was said that the Baresark was coming up to the homestead, and then the fires were made and burned strong. Then men took their arms and sprang up on the benches, and so waited.

The Baresark rushed in with his weapons. He comes into the room, and treads at once the fire which the heathen men had hallowed, and so comes to the fire that Thangbrand had hallowed, and dares not to tread it, but said that he was on fire all over. He hews with his sword at the bench, but strikes a cross-beam as he brandished the weapon aloft. Thangbrand smote the arm of the Baresark with his crucifix, and so mighty a token followed that the sword fell from the Baresark's hand.

Then Thangbrand thrusts a sword into his breast, and Gudleif smote him on the arm and hewed it off. Then many went up and slew the Baresark.”

6. 'Edda and "Oral Christianity": Apocryphal Leaves of the Early Medieval Storyworld of the North', in: The Performance of Christian and Pagan Storyworlds. Non-canonical Chapters of the History of Nordic Medieval Literature, L. Boje Mortensen och T. Lehtonen, (Turnhout: Brepols 2013), pp. 171-197

7. Liberman, A. (2003). Berserkir: A Double Legend. Brathair, 4, 97-101.

8. Hutton, R. E. (2014). The Wild Hunt and the Witches' Sabbath. Folklore, 125(2), 161-178. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2014.896968

9. Wendt, Antje, 2008. Viking Age Gold Rings and the Question of "Gefolgschaft". Lund Archaeological Review 13-14 (2007-2008), pp. 75-90

10. “The Lupercalia rite proceeded from the sacrifice of a goat made by the Luperci priests to a god sometimes called Lupercus in a grotto called the Lupercal. The derivation of these three or four terms is obscure, though some ancients associated it with Rome’s founding she-wolf, lupa, whose den the Lupercal grotto had supposedly been. If the first element of these terms does indeed salute the ‘wolf ’, the second element remains obscure: Servius suggested a derivation from arceo, ‘ward off ’, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary tentatively agrees. In the distinctive rite itself the Luperci ran about, naked save for animal-skin loincloths, whipping the (denuded?) women of Rome with thongs. However, these loin-cloths were not made of wolfskin but of goatskin, as indeed were the thongs. Ovid preserves a pleasing aetiology of the rite: Juno had ordained that a failure in fertility could be ended if a sacred he-goat penetrated the matrons of Rome (Italidas matres . . . sacer hirtus inito); an Etruscan augur had found the least unacceptable way to fulfil her command, the breaking of their skins with a goatskin lash. Indeed, the Luperci themselves could actually be termed crepi, a version of the familiar capri, ‘goats’. The animal at the heart of these celebrations was evidently the goat, not the wolf. Ancient scholars could not agree on the identity of the god, sometime Lupercus, in whose honour the rites were performed, but he is first identified for us in Greek sources, Eratosthenes and Heraclides of Pontus, as the appropriately caprine Pan... However, while there is evidently some knowing play with parallel lupine (pseudo-?)etymologies here, the Lykaios in question was not the Zeus of the wolves (or anything else), but (explicitly) Arcadia’s other great god, Pan again, the Pan of Mount Lykaion, himself closely associated with Zeus Lykaios, and supposedly imported to Latium by the Arcadians under Evander. It was doubtless on the basis of this perceived association that there arose the tradition, found not only in Varro but also in Dionysius and in Plutarch, that the Lupercalia festival was somehow derived from or equivalent to the Arcadian Lykaia.” (Daniel Ogden, The werewolf in the ancient world. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Appendix C.)

11. “These epheboi were eighteen and nineteen year old Athenian citizen males who were obliged to perform a two year long military service, which consisted of garrison duty in the Athens-Piraeus enceinte and the border fortresses. They have a distinct status, separate from the rest of the citizen body in a physical and a civic sense, and are required to complete the ephebeia in order to attain their full franchise. The initial publication of the Athenaion Politeia is conventionally dated to the late 330’s, with revisions in the text made during the first half of the 320’s to keep it up to date. Since the chapter contains no perceptible later revisions, the author’s description of the ephebeia probably also dates c. 330. Contemporary with the Athenaion Politeia are the earliest of the corpus of ephebic inscriptions erected in honor of those ephebes who have completed their term of military service. Currently this corpus consists of twenty-eight inscriptions, which are either securely dated to or are thought to belong to the years 333/2-323/2. Though ephebic inscriptions continue for nearly six hundred years from 333/2, with the last extant example dated just after the Herulean invasion of Greece in 267/8 A.D., the ephebic corpus in the Lycurgan period forms a homogenous group on account of its distinctive format.

The content of these inscriptions is both consistent with the Athenaion Politeia’s description and provides additional information on various aspects of the ephebeia: they use the term epheboi in a way which is consistent with the treatise, mention the same officials (along with others which only appear on inscriptions in this period), and show ephebes performing the same garrison duties as those described in the Athenaion Politeia. The epigraphic and literary evidence thus clearly refer to the same institution, though they do not call it the ephebeia or any other such term.

While the Athenaion Politeia does not shed light on the ephebeia’s origins or indicate for how long the institution had existed, the epigraphic evidence is suggestive of a terminus ante quem for its inception. Beginning with Foucart’s publication of E2 in 1889, the earliest securely dated ephebic inscriptions are for the enrollment class in the archonship of Ctesicles (334/3), which were erected at the end of the ephebes’ second year of service (333/2). Wilamowitz argued that Foucart’s inscription was proof that the ephebeia was created after Chaeronea. Both the advocates for an early ephebeia and their opponents generally consider this epigraphic evidence his strongest argument and the most difficult to counter.”

[Friend, John Lennard. The Athenian ephebeia in the Lycurgan period, 334/3–322/1 B.C. Diss. University of Texas, Austin (http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/6635).]

12. ibid.

13. Rychnová, L., Akimjaková, B., Judák, V., Hlad, Ľubomír, & Ďatelinka, A. . (2022). Hausväterliteratur in the Educationand Spirituality of a Noblemanin the Early Modern Era. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 13(2), 503–514. https://doi.org/10.15503/jecs2022.2.503.514

14. Edwards, A. (2010). 7. Tyrants and Flatterers: Kolakeia in Aristophanes’ Knights and Wasps. In P. Mitsis & C. Tsagalis (Ed.), Allusion, Authority, and Truth: Critical Perspectives on Greek Poetic and Rhetorical Praxis (pp. 303-338). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110245400.2.303

15. De Lapouge G. Contribution to the fundamentals of a policy of population. Eugen Rev. 1927 Oct;19(3):192-7. PMID: 21259857; PMCID: PMC2984700.

16. Moore, K.R. (2016). Of Philosophers and Kings: Concerning Philip II of Macedon’s Alleged “Debt” to Plato.

17. Sedley, D. (2021). Xenocrates’ Invention of Platonism. In M. Erler, J. Heßler, & F. Petrucci (Eds.), Authority and Authoritative Texts in the Platonist Tradition (pp. 12-37). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108921596.002

18. Horky, Phillip Sidney (2018). Speusippus and Xenocrates on the Pursuit and Ends of Philosophy. In Harold Tarrant, Danielle Lane, Dirk Baltzly & François Tanguay Renaud (eds.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity. Leiden, Netherlands: pp. 29-45.

19. "But the Athenians, having a prudent regard to the condition of their slaves, made a law that there should be a γραφὴ ὕβρεως, even against men who ill treated their slaves. Accordingly, Hyperides, the orator, in his speech against Mnesitheus, on a charge of αἰκία, says, “They made these laws not only for the protection of freemen, but they enacted also, that even if any one personally ill treated a slave, there should be a power of preferring an indictment against him who had done so.” And Lycurgus made a similar statement, in his first speech against Lycophron; and so did Demosthenes, in his oration against Midias. And Malacus, in his Annals of the Siphnians, relates that some slaves of the Samians colonized Ephesus, being a thousand men in number; who in the first instance revolted against their masters, and fled to the mountain which is in the island, and from thence did great injury to the Samians. But, in the sixth year after these occurrences, the Samians, by the advice of an oracle, made a treaty with the slaves, on certain agreements; and the slaves were allowed to depart uninjured from the island; and, sailing away, they occupied Ephesus, and the Ephesians are descended from these ancestors.” (Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 6.92)

20. ROACH, L. (2013). Penitential Discourse in the Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘the Unready’. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 64(2), 258-276. doi:10.1017/S0022046912003685

21. DUMOLYN, J. (2008). Privileges and novelties: the political discourse of the Flemish cities and rural districts in their negotiations with the dukes of Burgundy (1384–1506). Urban History, 35(1), 5–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44613733

22. Orozco, Teresa (1998). Platonische Paideia in Deutschland um 1933. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 41:180-185.

23. Facundo Norberto Bey (2020): State Typohumanism and its role in the rise of völkisch-racism: Paideía and humanitas at issue in Jaeger’s and Krieck’s ‘political Plato’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1835642

24. Demetriou, Kyriakos N. (2002). A ‘Legend’ in Crisis: The Debate Over Plato’s Politics, 1930–1960. Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 19(1-2), 61–91. doi:10.1163/20512996-90000040 

25. Broughall, Quentin J. (2015) Assuming the purple: the rehabilitation of ancient Rome in Victorian culture, 1837-1901. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.

26. Hurst, Isobel. 2019. Classics in Education after 1880. In: Kenneth Haynes, ed. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 5: After 1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 23-41.

27. Ugolini, Gherardo. "Humboldt, the Classical Gymnasium, and the University of Berlin". History of Classical Philology: From Bentley to the 20th century, edited by Diego Lanza and Gherardo Ugolini, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 91-114. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110730388-005