“May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer; may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love. Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife? Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman? For your ways are in full view of the Lord, and He examines all your paths. The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them. The cords of their sins hold them fast. For lack of discipline they will die, led astray by their own great folly.”
—Proverbs 5:18-23—
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In the final weeks before the decade-long war between the Greeks and the Trojans came to its climactic bloody end, Chryses, Trojan priest of Apollo, landed on the shores of Achaea to beseech Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, for the return of his daughter Chryseis in exchange for treasure. Only months before, Agamemnon and his army of Greeks had sacked the Trojan region of Moesia and carried Chryseis away to be a royal sex slave. But as Chryses—priest of Apollo and respected even among the enemy Greek soldiers—concludes his plea to Agamemnon to let his daughter go, Agamemnon replies with mockery and disrespect. “Old man, don’t let me catch you loitering by the hollow ships today, and don’t be back later, lest your staff and the gods’ ribbons fail to protect you. Chryseis I shall not free; old age will claim her first, far from her own country, in Argos, my home, where she can tend the loom and share my bed. Away now; don’t provoke me if you wish to leave safely.” When the priest was dismissed, shaken and even more distraught than when he arrived, Agamemnon then boasted to the men in his court, “I refused a shining ransom for Chryseis, as I prefer her to my wife Clytemnestra, and wish to keep her in my home since she is in no way inferior in beauty, character, mind, or handiwork.”
But the god Apollo was watching his servant Chryses as he begged for the safe return of his daughter, and his wrath was kindled against King Agamemnon when he gloated about his daily rape of the girl. A plague from the heavens thus descended upon the Greek army, causing one man after another to drop from disease until the deaths numbered in the thousands; and everyone understood the reason why. With word of Agamemnon’s humiliation of Chryses traveling far and wide, the soldiers knew their own virtue, discipline, and reverence for the gods counted for nothing against their leader’s unruly ego, mouth, and cock. For when the wicked rule, the people groan.
Among the Greeks most enraged at the impiety was Achilles—greatest of the Peloponnesian warriors and son of goddess Thetis—who was pained upon hearing how Agamemnon treated Chryses. Unable to stomach the arrogance of a ruler (even his own) being so willing to insult the servant of a god as mighty as Apollo, Achilles agreed to protect a prophet named Calchas as the sage rebuked his king: “When we offended that old man, suffering came upon us. There is only one way to rid ourselves of it. Restore to Chryses his daughter with the sparkling eyes, before it’s too late.” Never lacking in carnal appetite and wickedness, and taking offense at Achilles’ protection of Calchas, Agamemnon’s reply directed at Achilles was: “I will send Chryseis back to her father, on my ship, with my men. But then I’ll come to your tent and take for myself the beautiful Briseis, your prize, so that you’ll know who is the stronger, and all men will learn to fear me.” And it became so. Achilles’ concubine Briseis—whom he loved and wanted to spend his life with—was seized and given to Agamemnon in exchange for Chryseis being returned to Chryses.
Meanwhile in Troy, Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, hid away behind the walls of his father’s kingdom with Helen of Sparta, whom he kidnapped from her home - an act that sparked the war between the Greeks and Trojans in the first place. Helen despised Paris; something she shared in common with the rest of the kingdom of Troy. For Paris was neither battle-hardened nor intelligent. He achieved his high rank in the army only due to his royal blood, and many of the Trojan troops hated him for drawing them into such a lengthy and costly conflict. Helen longs to return to her husband Menelaus; king of Sparta and second to Achilles in terms of strength and fighting experience. And Menelaus, sensing his wife’s undying loyalty and love, wars mercilessly against the Trojans in order to save her.
The Iliad is a Greek poem written by Homer in the 8th century BCE, spanning 24 “books” and chronicling a ten-year war against the Trojans in its final weeks; with the vivid imagery therein surrounding the fall of Troy inspiring the later poet Virgil (in his Aeneid, 19 BCE) to proclaim that the last surviving Trojan escaped from Troy to Italy and became ancestor to the Romans. Reading through The Iliad over the course of the last twelve days, its heart racing scenes of sword fights and colliding chariots make it the ancient literary equivalent of a little boy taking all his action figures and smashing them against each other going “Bsh! Bsh!” Which is to say, there’s so much more that takes place in Homer’s Iliad besides infidelity and jealous rage about infidelity. There’s a lot of action, a lot of cloak-and-dagger political maneuvering, a lot of rivalry between gods (Zeus and Athena and Poseidon versus Apollo and Aphrodite and Artemis), and a whole lot of death. And as such, reading my brief rundown above, you shouldn’t take it as a good summary of the whole story. What it is instead is a brief description of part of the story that I think teaches us a complementary lesson to my previous essay: how beauty can destroy just as she can save.
In my previous essay on Beauty & The Beast, I talked about how true beauty—being a combination of aesthetic perfection and virtue—has a kind of “purging” and “salvific” effect on people (especially creatives) who are devoted to becoming the best version of themselves. I also delved into another lesson of Beauty & The Beast, which is that the ultimate expression of human beauty is the family; and thus, just as beauty requires a person to burn away the vices and flaws that sabotage them in order to become a high achiever or make great art, so beauty also requires men and women to burn away their selfishness in order to build great families.
But if Beauty & The Beast teaches us about beauty’s saving power—both in terms of individuals sacrificing for their own development and in terms of partners sacrificing themselves for one another—then The Iliad teaches us about beauty’s destructive power.
In this classical Greek epic, one man’s runaway lustful appetite for the daughters and concubines of friends and enemies earns him the disdain and distrust of men charged with protecting him, while another man’s runaway lustful appetite for his neighbor’s wife destroys the kingdom he was bound to inherit.
“Well then shouldn’t the title of your essay be ‘Homer’s Iliad On Lust’s Destructive Power’?” I guess it could be, sure. But by focusing on lust as merely a negative character trait (note: I distinguish lust from attraction), we risk not seeing at play what beauty—as a “spirit” from the world of forms*—actively does to those addicted to their lust.
It’s true, yes, that lust is when men and women are driven mad by beauty, and that lust is when beauty is chased by those who have no concern for the virtue that accompanies her. But the other half of the picture is that when beauty is chased by those who are unworthy of her, she destroys them with fury. A man addicted to watching the nakedness of many women—for example—will be destroyed over time if he doesn’t come to his senses: Consumed by his lust, beauty destroys the man who is a strip club regular by causing him to spend all his money on false attention until he is destitute. Or, consumed by his lust, the man who faps to videos on a computer screen is destroyed by beauty by becoming flaccid and having his brain’s “reward centers” fried. And this is no surprise. Beauty is both a choosy and jealous spirit. She does not like unworthy strangers trying to possess her or claiming to possess her, and she does not like those who mistake her for her counterfeits.
In The Iliad this means Paris gets mortally wounded by the warrior Philoctetes, and when he seeks the healing powers of his wife Oenone, she refuses him because he abandoned her for Helen. And though The Iliad itself is silent on the fate of Agamemnon, its sequel—The Odyssey—is not. Agamemnon is killed by his wife’s lover Aegisthus, whom she had seduced and put up to the plot, because Agamemnon embarrassed her when he boasted that Chryseis was better at sex than she was. As for Achilles and Menelaus, whom Beauty “blessed” with true love: they would be reunited with their women. Achilles would marry Briseis before rushing back to the Trojan battlefield, and Menelaus returned with Helen to Sparta where he lived happily with her till the end of his days. Homer is clear: none of his characters who run wild with their lust get away with it. They all pay. The favor or enmity of Olympian gods be damned.
Clearly The Iliad is an ancient warning to modern Western societies that denigrate romantic love and long term commitment in favor of cheap, easy, unattached flings to stop doing that because it causes a lot of unforeseen consequences. Clearly the ancients—including Homer and later Greek philosophers—were onto something when they insisted that metaphysical forces such as beauty, wisdom, and the sublime are not products of the human imagination or relative to human judgement, but fixed things in a fixed transcendental order.
In my essay on Beauty & The Beast, I had harsh words for a large percentage of single women in Western countries. I accused them of looking with contempt at marriage and motherhood. I accused them of being addicted to gossip and drama, of being hungry for influence and money, and of being hateful of men. I accused them of these things and I won’t back down.
But single men in Western countries are not off the hook.
While Beauty & The Beast serves as a cudgel against single women who have turned their backs on modesty, virtue, and femininity, The Iliad serves as a cudgel against young men who have turned their backs on ambition, virtue, and masculinity. Bongs, porn, anime, and video games have become stand-ins for a pacifier and blanket to guys running away from responsibility; viewing responsibility as a “trap” rather than as the only way one can add meaning to their lives.
One thing that hit me while reading Homer’s work was just how boldly the men in the story behaved when it came to going after what they wanted or doing what they thought was right. A stark contrast to the Western men of today who suffer from a dearth of “drive”, of virility, of joie de vivre. And suffering from such, suffer also in their dating prospects.
What’s this you say? “There are no women in the West worthy of me doing that much work on myself”?
Don’t be stupid.
Yes, many modern single women in the West are vacuous and vulgar and spiteful, and I’ve talked about that (as well as talked about the benefits of American men and women with traditional values marrying foreign spouses who share those same values), but there are also plenty of modest, virtuous, feminine single women in the West who find themselves in a desert when they look for good men. I’ve heard from them. They’re frustrated. “Well smart guy, what is a ‘good man’ in this context?” Excellent question! A good man—in the context of what virtuous women look for, and in the context of The Iliad—is not merely one who is gentlemanly, tells the truth, or sustains himself financially (although those are good things), and is certainly not “nice” in the sense of being completely unthreatening and boring. A good man—in the context of what a virtuous woman looks for, and in the context of The Iliad—is a man who is willing to pursue his object of affection to the ends of the earth even if it entails danger and rescue. Women like to be pursued. Women like to be fought for. Women like to be won. “Nah bro, women like to be ‘won’ by the men they’ve already chosen.” Yes… and no. In some ways this is true and in some ways this is a cop out by men who are too scared to approach. Either way it is of no matter. It is of no matter because by becoming the kind of man who pursues, competes, enforces his will, and is decisive, a greater share of the female population will see you as someone whom they would like to build a lasting “mini kingdom” with.
But beyond love and dating, and beyond even the focus on beauty and its attributes, the bigger point of the story of The Iliad is that by becoming the kind of man who pursues, competes, enforces his will, and is decisive, you will like yourself more. You will like yourself more because through discipline and self-examination, you will have driven a spear through the worthless schlub you once were to become the man you ought to be.
So… if you are currently the kind of Western man who feels like a boy in a man’s body, and if you wake up every morning not liking the person staring back at you in the mirror, The Iliad is speaking to you. The Iliad is speaking to you when it says “Briseis is looking for Achilles. Helen is looking for Menelaus. Troy is looking for its defender. The Greeks look for the one who will lay siege. Are you them? If not yet, become them.”