Die Götzen-Dämmerung, 2

Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil.

Another queer saint! One does not trust one’s ears, even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they philosophized differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit—amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions... What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato?

A new art form of the Greek agon: dialectics. Finally, I recall—against Schopenhauer and in honor of Plato—that the whole higher culture and literature of classical France too grew on the soil of sexual interest. Everywhere in it one may look for the amatory, the senses, the sexual contest, “the woman”—one will never look in vain…

Sparta – XIV

This specific chapter of Sparta and its Law has been moved: here.

If you want to read the book Sparta and its Law from the beginning, click: here.

Homosexuality in ancient Greece?

Oh! That my spirit were yon Heaven of light
To gaze upon thee with a thousand eyes

—Plato

Tomorrow Sunday I won’t post any entry here to leave my visitors the opportunity to read carefully my latest entry on “Women and marriage” in Sparta. The uttermost importance of what the author says in that post is explained in my “metaphysical” comment in that thread.

Since that post is related to Eros in Ancient Greece, the issue of other forms of Greco-Roman sexuality should be addressed.

It irritates me that LGBT deviants and writers like James O’Meara want to usurp the legacy of the classical world to rationalize their lifestyles. The fact is that the missing color in their rainbow flag—the Hellenes’ infatuation with handsome adolescents, not adults—was the only form of homosexuality tolerated in some Greek and Roman cities. This had nothing to do with the contemporary “gay” movement or sex between coeval adults.

As a dilettante in classic literature I tried to say something about it in “On classic pederasty,” but there are people who are far more knowledgeable than me. Today, surfing the internet starting here, I found several posts by a blogger in The Phora that complement what I have said. The erudite blogger, Ixion, is the one who uses as an avatar an image of the Virgin Mary; you may skip the other comments in that thread, “Debunking Ancient Greek Homosexual History.”

But all of this is a distraction related to my differences with Counter-Currents: what really matters is the subject of hetero-sexuality in Ancient Greece.

The Satyricon

Educated homosexuals like to pull out the old Ancient Greco-Roman card that the liberals use. They project their values onto an idealized past that never existed in order to legitimize their lifestyles today.

Judge it by yourself. What could be more decadent in the Greco-Roman world than the homoerotic adventures recounted in a novel written in times of Nero or Caligula? However, classic pederasty was not meant for coeval adults, as is the LGBT movement of today.

Below I include my translation of the prologue by Jacinto Leon Ignacio to one of the Spanish translations of Petronius’ novel (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):

Rome,
centuries ago

In the vast and important Greek and Roman literature from which we still live, there are just a few novelists. Maybe for an overwhelming majority of illiterates it would had been much more affordable the theater, which is enough to listen, that the written narrative which must be read. The same was true of poetry and the rhapsodies recited in public.

The fact is that in Greece there are only a few examples of novels, apart of Longus, and from the Romans only Apuleius and Petronius, whose work we offer here.

It appears that, at the time, the Satyricon enjoyed considerable popular success, for both Tacitus and Quintilian commented it in their manuscripts, although it is apparent that neither knew it directly, only from hearsay. It is likely that they did not grant it much literary value because its style and form collided with all the concepts in vogue.

However, the Satyricon was not lost and copies were kept in the Middle Ages, while jealously concealed because of its subject matter [pederasty] and for being the work of a pagan. The work continued to be ignored by the public to the point that only scholars knew its title, but believed it was lost.

Therefore, a scandal broke when, in 1664, appeared the first edition of Pierre Petit.

Soon after, the Satyricon was translated into several languages, including ours, with such success that has made it one of the great bestsellers in history. There were those who sought to take advantage that the work is incomplete, rewriting it to their liking. It was easy nevertheless to expose them.

Presumably, however, the author would not work at top speed like if we should go to a literary prize. He seems to have devoted years to this task. Do not forget that what is now known are only fragments of the original, estimated in twenty books. The author might have started writing when Caligula reigned and Nero followed, to see the publication during the reign of the next emperor. It can be no coincidence that the book mentions contemporary events known to all, or that the author considered worth mentioning many names.

This is a job too conscientious not to be the work of a professional. Moreover, the action does not take place in Rome, but in the provinces and almost none of the men are Latins. It seems as if the author had had an interest in showing the reality of the empire, a reality ignored in the capital.

The novel consists merely of the travel story of [Encolpius] and his servant Gitone through different locations. The incidents, sometimes unrelated, their adventures and the people they encounter are the text of the Satyricon, which lacks a plot as was the style of the epoch. We could actually say that it consists of countless short stories of the two protagonists. This technique influenced many centuries later the books of chivalry, the picaresque and even Don Quixote. Throughout many incidents the author reveals us an extraordinary real view of the life in the Roman provinces, although tinged with irony.

Petronius simply tells us what he saw. In a way, his novel was an approach to realism, leaving aside the epic tone of the tragedies to focus on current issues, as Aristophanes did in Greece. And that was the pattern followed by Petronius. There is a huge difference between his style and that of other contemporary writers.

Poets, despite their undoubted genius, are pompous and in the tragedies the dialogues are extremely emphatic. Petronius by contrast, remains accessible to everyone. He expressed himself in a conversational tone, which justifies the use of a first person that conveys the feeling that someone is telling us a live tale. That’s why today we can read his Satyricon with the same interest of his times and nothing of its freshness is lost.

Writing is, in a sense, a childbirth with the same joys and suffering. Both things must have accompanied Petronius in this trip with [Encolpius] and Gitone through the decline of Rome.

The idolatry of homosexuality

by Michael O’Meara, excerpted from an American Renaissance essay-review of exactly a year ago. Ironically, this book-review was reproduced at Counter-Currents):

Homophilia and feminism are the most important children of the cultural revolution. They share, as such, much of the same ideological baggage that denies biological realities and makes war on the family. Mr. Faye claims that in the late 1960s, when homosexuals began demanding legal equality, they were fully within their rights. Homosexuality in his view is a genetic affliction affecting fewer than 5 percent of males, but he does not object to homosexuals practices within the privacy of the bedroom. What he finds objectionable is the confusion of private and public realms and the assertion of homophilia as a social norm. Worse, he claims that in much elite discourse, homosexuals have quickly gone from being pariahs to privileged beings, who flaunt their alleged “superiority” over heterosexuals, who are seen as old-fashioned, outmoded, ridiculous. Heterosexuals are like women who center their lives on the care of children rather than on a career, and are thus something bizarre and implicitly opposed to liberal-style “emancipation.”

Mr. Faye, who is by no means a prude, contends that female homosexuality is considerably different from and less damaging than male homosexuality. Most lesbians, in his view, are bisexual, rather than purely homosexual, and for whatever reason have turned against men. This he sees as a reflection on men. Even in traditional societies, women who engaged in homosexuality retained their femininity and so were not so shocking as their male counterparts. By contrast, male homosexuality was considered abhorrent, because it violated the nature of masculinity, making men no longer “properly” male and thus something mutant. To those who evoke the ancient glories of Athens as a counter-argument, Mr. Faye, a long-time Graeco-Latinist, says that in the period when a certain form of pederasty was tolerated, no adult male ever achieved respectability if he was not married, devoted to the interests of his family and clan, and, above all, was never to be “made of woman,” i.e., penetrated.

[Chechar’s note: see e.g., my essay on this very subject]

Like feminism, homophilia holds that humans are bisexual at birth and, willfully or not, choose their sexual orientation—as if anatomical differences are insignificant and all humans are a blank slate upon which they inscribe their self-chosen “destiny.” This view lacks any scientific credibility, to be sure, even if it is professed in our elite universities. Like anti-racism, it denies biological realities incompatible with the reigning dogmas. Facts, though, have rarely stood in the way of faith or ideology—or, in the way of secular 20th-century ideologies that have become religious faiths.

Despite its progressive and emancipatory pretensions, homophilia, like sexual liberation in general, is entirely self-centered and indifferent to future and past, promoting “lifestyles” hostile to family formation and thus to white reproduction. Homophilia here marches hand in hand with anti-racism, denying the significance of biological differences and the imperatives of white survival.

This subversive ideology now even aspires to re-invent homosexuals as the flowers of society: liberators preparing the way to joy, liberty, fraternity, tolerance, social well-being, good taste, etc. As vice is transformed into virtue, homosexuality allegedly introduces a new sense of play and gaiety to the one-dimensional society of sad, heterosexual males. Except, Mr. Faye insists, there’s nothing genuinely gay about the gays, for theirs is a condition of stress and disequilibrium. At odds with their own nature, homosexuality is often a Calvary—and not because of social oppression, but because of those endogenous reasons (particularly their attraction to their own sex) that condemn them to a reproductive and genetic dead end.

In its public displays as gay pride, homophilia defines itself as narcissistic, exhibitionist, and infantile, thus revealing those traits specific to its abnormal condition. In any case, a community worthy of itself, Mr. Faye tells us, is founded on shared values, on achievements, on origins—not on a dysgenic sexual orientation…

From the above discussion—of the family, homophilia, and feminism—the reader should already sense the direction Faye’s argument takes, as he relates individual sexuality to certain macro-changes now forcing European civilization off its rails. Because this is an especially illuminating perspective on the decline of the white race (linking demography, civilization, and sex) and one of which there seem too few–I think this lends special pertinence to his essay.

JVLIAN excerpts – IV

“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods
as to desert them for the Jews?”

—Julian, addressing the Christians

Priscus to Libanius
Athens, June 380

I send you by my pupil Glaucon something less than half of the Emperor Julian’s memoir. It cost me exactly 30 solidi to have this much copied. On receipt of the remaining fifty solidi I shall send you the rest of the book.

We can hardly hope to have another Julian in our lifetime. I have studied the edict since I wrote you last, and though it is somewhat sterner in tone than Constantine’s, I suspect the only immediate victims will be those Christians who follow Arius. But I may be mistaken…

I never go to evening parties. The quarter I referred to in my letter was not the elegant street of Sardes but the quarter of the prostitutes near the agora. I don’t go to parties because I detest talking-women, especially our Athenian ladies who see themselves as heiress to the age of Pericles. Their conversation is hopelessly pretentious and artificial.

Hippia and I get along rather better than we used to. Much of her charm for me has been her lifelong dislike of literature. She talks about servants and food and relatives, and I find her restful. Also, I have in the house a Gothic girl, bought when she was eleven. She is now a beautiful woman, tall and well made, with eyes grey as Athena’s. She never talks. Eventually I shall buy her a husband and free them both as a reward for her serene acceptance of my attentions, which delight her far less than they do me.

But then Plato disliked sexual intercourse between men and women. We tend of course to think of Plato as divine, but I am afraid he was rather like our old friend Iphicles, whose passion for youths has become so outrageous that he now lives day and night in the baths, where the boys call him the queen of philosophy.

Hippia joins me in wishing for your good—or should I say better?—health.

The memoir. It will disturb and sadden you. I shall be curious to see how you use this material.

You will note in the memoir that Julian invariably refers to the Christians as “Galileans” and to their churches as “charnel houses,” this last a dig at their somewhat necrophile passion for the relics of dead men. I think it might be a good idea to alter the text, and reconvert those charnel houses into churches and those Galileans into Christians. Never offend an enemy in a small way.

Here and there in the text, I have made marginal notes. I hope you won’t find them too irrelevant.

Johnson and O’Meara are just wrong

A formal response to Greg Johnson (editor) and James O’Meara (author) about the latter’s new book defending homosexuality appears now in the new Appendix to The West’s Darkest Hour.

My article is entitled “On classic pederasty,” or “Pace Johnson and O’Meara, the Greco-Roman ‘lover-beloved’ institution was not ‘gay’ in the modern sense of the word.”

Gitone’s magic

This piece has been chosen for my collection Day of Wrath. It has been slightly modified and presently can only be read as a PDF within the book, ready for printing in your home for a comfortable reading.