A degenerate taste for equality

“We encounter in the hearts of men a degenerate taste for equality which inspires the weak to bring the strong down to their level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality in freedom.”

— Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Legends and Myths are Eternal Truths

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

J.R.R. Tolkien

For this the German soldier fought

 

Essere compresi non è necessario

"We have to give up being understood, being understood is not necessary."

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

We have a Task

"We have a task. The question is only whether we are capable of being this task itself; every German soldier has fallen in vain if we do not hourly strive for the rescuing of a beginning of the German essence, beyond the now quite released and definitive self-devastation of all modern humanity."

Heidegger, Black Notebooks

To make a new Thermopylae

 

The mountains look on Marathon --

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dream'd that Greece might yet be free

For, standing on the Persians' grave,

I could not deem myself a slave.

...

Must we but weep o'er days more blest?

Must we but blush? – Our fathers bled.

Earth! render back from out thy breast

A remnant of our Spartan dead!

Of the three hundred grant but three,

To make a new Thermopylae.

Byron, The Isles of Greece

The Ideal and the Higher Self

"Some regard their ideal with shy humility and would like to deny it: they fear their higher self because, when it speaks, it speaks demandingly."

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The Brightest of All

 

“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”

― William Shakespeare

Rome's Saviour Gaius Marius

Marius Amid the Ruins of Carthage by John Vanderlyn.

"And there is nothing a Roman soldier enjoys more than the sight of his commanding officer openly eating the same bread as him, or lying on a plain straw mattress, or lending a hand to dig a ditch or raise a palisade. What they admire in a leader is the willingness to share the danger and the hardship, rather than the ability to win them honor and wealth. They are more fond of officers who are prepared to make efforts alongside them than they are of those who let them take things easy."

Plutarch, Marius

The God of tragic contrast

Triumph of Bacchus, oil on canvas by Ciro Ferri, 17th C.

“At [Dionysus’] conception the earthly was touched by the splendor of divine heaven. But in this union of the heavenly with the earthly, which is expressed in the myth of the double birth, man’s tear-filled lot was not dissolved but preserved, rather in sharp contrast to superhuman majesty. He who was born in this way is not only the exultant god, the god who brings man joy. He is the suffering and dying god, the god of tragic contrast. And the inner force of this dual reality is so great that he appears among men like a storm, he staggers them, and he tames their opposition with the whip of madness. All tradition, all order must be shattered. Life becomes suddenly an ecstaty—an ecstasy of blessedness, but an ecstasy, no less, of terror.”

— Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult