Of Lions and Men is the first in a series of essays on tribalism as it relates specifically to masculinity, transcendence and the warrior path. The focus will be on Indo-European, Aboriginal, Modern, and Postmodern contexts. If any readers are knowledgeable in regards to the expression of these themes in other cultural contexts your contributions are welcome. Please email your file to the author at jameslafond dot-com at gmail dot-com.

The second, three-part, essay in the series will be Of Dogs and Men, with the focus being on the above mentioned themes in the context of tribal war.

The third, six-part essay will be Of Chains and Men, being a history of forced emasculation. For this reason slavery is not covered In Lions and Dogs except for the necessity of describing the Hellenistic and Roman chattel systems, and then not to describe the slaves’ lot, but rather the social landscape in regards to the warrior class.

The ancient Greeks, through their art, preserved many masculine traditions that antedate nationalism, empire, monotheism, and philosophic ideology; these four themes being the cornerstones of modern and postmodern life. So, when we wish to excavate the rubble of our collective soul to find what it was to be a man before the social cancer of civilization began pressuring us to become women with male genitalia, then looking to the ancients is a fine place to start. In many cases the masculine traditions of ancient Hellas come to us through the effete prism of the political ideologues and emasculated philosophers who made fun of ancient athletes, and who presented their primal quest for honor as a fool’s errand.

In #2 we will follow the hero Polydamus across the masculine landscape of Classical Hellas for an ‘eleventh hour’ view of masculine freewill and tribal expression on the eve of Empire.

In #3 we will follow the slave fabulist Aesop and eventually meet his Imperial Roman counterpart, Androcles, as we look into the single most important emasculation tool in pre-modern society—the Roman arena.

In #4 we will take a look at the Hellenic renaissance in the late Roman Empire, when the failed material order of Rome was resuscitated by a handful of Greek hero kings that harkened back to the examples of Achilles and Alexander.

But first, let us examine a sketch of the Masculine Spheres of Hellas, from the individual, outward to the ocean-encompassed world.

The Paternal Line, or the masculine half of a family, was the basis for manhood, and also the basis for the tribe, therefore the Hellenic notion of family and tribe were interdependent, constituting two of the three legs of manhood. A man was known to be made by men, from the child taken from the women, and so made according to the traditions of the tribe, constituted of the paternal family units. Family came before divinity and was equal to tribal identity in the epigrams left by ancient athletes, who were not athletes in the modern sense but would be better understood as ‘leading men’. No athlete neglected to name his father or his community.

The ancient perspective of the supernatural was closer to the ghost-mania of modern ‘paranormal investigators’ than to any notion of God we might harbor*. God was not ‘way out there’ or ‘above in heaven’ as traditional religions might imagine. Nor was God ‘within us’ as the modern notion might imagine. God was also not ‘let in to possess one’s soul’ as evangelic traditions might promote. God was next to you behind that rock, looking up at you from beneath the river, or very likely lurking half-damned about a sacred precinct.

God was made of many ghosts who had been promoted via human adoration from the House of Death below. And, even if such an entity won the crown of heaven, he would be just as likely to fling a thunderbolt through your heart or rape your sister as he would be to fulfill some godly duty. A man did not attain or retain warrior status unless he paid his sacral dues, made his sacrifices, and kept his one-sided pacts with the cruel supernatural order. The sacral dimension and the acts of the man interacting with it served notice to those men he might interact with that he could be treated with in war, and allied with in peace, that he kept his word because it was his word. Alexander, even as a man who felt fated to become a god, was a fanatical devotee of numerous god cults.

The Man of Arete, was a man of strength, of honor, of excellence. He was determined by others to be so through his participation in ‘agonies’ under the training and supervision of his father, brothers and uncles, in sacred precincts, and before the altars of the supernatural order. Through warrior excellence a man hoped to achieve transcendence and be immortalized as a hero ghost, such as Hipposthenes [Horse-strong] of Sparta, the matchless wrestler who came to be associated with Poseidon, and had a shrine near the greater god’s temple.

All this talk of gods and altars seems quaintly allegorical from our vantage. But the ancients took these beliefs seriously, and by abiding by what seem to us to be childish traditions, actually did achieve immortality [thus far, 2,500 years on] and are known to many of us to this day, even though few of us could name the Medal of Honor awardees for any, let alone all, of our American wars.

The Hellenic man was three parts: one part family [human loyalty], one part sacred [loyalty to principal], and one part excellence, his tool kit for the expression of his loyalties.

Depending on the dialect, the translator, and the place this concept translates into English variously as tribe or clan. To the general reader and even to many historians from outside the field, ancient Greece is often regarded as a post tribal society, a civilization on the urban civic order of our own. Unfortunately, thanks to a Roman torch, we only have 1 out 151 community constitutions. To one who reads the athletic inscriptions left at the agonal sanctuaries one gets a sense for the tribal underpinning of the Greek community.

A Greek community, or polis, or city state, was made up of from 2 to 12 tribal or clan units. The tribe remained an important substructure of the community until the Roman period, when a very thorough regional version of what we see now as ‘globalism’, or ‘culturecide’ came to the fore. Quaint relics of the primal age such as clans and tribes were cast into the dust bin of history. But, until that age of soul-crushing empire, the tribe served as the link between the family unit and the focus of the warrior’s life—war. Just as the family linked the man to his tribe, serving as its building block, the tribe linked the warrior to the army as a member of the tribal war band, which served as the building block for the army.

A Hellenic community was known as a polis, and the war leaders were referred to originally as polemarchs, indicating that the Hellenic community—usually consisting of 3 to 7 tribes or clans—was originally a war alliance that adopted a central defensive point and walled it, instead of worrying about defending various villages. Each tribe might be assigned a gate to guard, or, in times of war, a leader from each tribe might alternately serve as general.

The community was originally a defensive military alliance of tribal units.

Our word xenophobia comes from the ancient Greek and is directly translated as ‘stanger-fear.’ A barbarian is not a xeno, he is a strange-speaker, an outsider. The xeno is a ‘speaker in the true way’, a Hellene, a person with shared tribal values who is neither an enemy or a member of the tribe. The value placed on ‘the scared word’ ‘truth seeking words’ etc., would seem strange to us. Much of the cultural identity that is now vested in race, in genetics, was, in ancient times, vested in language and ways of thought.

The Hellenic world was a maritime economy of over 700 linked small communities. A polis that did not entertain strangers would—like Sparta—be left behind during this age of rapidly expanding knowledge.

Therefore strangers would be permitted to visit and especially skilled or useful strangers—such as Aristotle, Plato and other intellectuals—would reside away from their home communities as metics, or resident aliens, in major cities like Athens, or in the community of the tyrant that patronized them. These people did not have full rights, but were also privileged to carry on activities beyond the ken, means, or habit of the locals. The vestige of metic enclaves in ancient communities in the Middle Ages was the Jewish quarter or settlement, whose members, though hated, were generally tolerated as they provided services that were taboo for Gentiles.

The modern habit of permitting free immigration of the laboring class from other like-minded communities would be unthinkable. The postmodern policy of encouraging the immigration of laboring class people from among peoples of another culture and language would be regarded by the ancients as the voluntary suicide of a community, nation, or empire—and so it went when the Romans tried it.

The league was an offensive military alliance, or an alliance against a common threat, between different communities. At this point in the social evolution of the state the tribe had been reduced to a manpower pool for mobilizing a company or battalion strength unit and infusing those men with a buoying sense of identity.

The crude Persian Empire was a ‘king of kings’ tribute network in which tribal structures remained respected. With the rise of the Athenian League and later the Macedonian and Roman Empires we have entered the age of tribe-extinguishing macro-polities. All of the three above entities devoted themselves externally to genocide of any tribal society that wished to retain its identity, and internally to a process of homogenization, a kind of political correctness. It is no accident that modern tyrants such as Napoleon and the 20th Century fascists looked so fondly on Rome as a model for nation building, in that Rome was the social leveling polity for which Alexander’s empire had been the prototype; a political framework for the extinguishing of tribal identity in service to the development of a homogenous national character.

For all its imperial trappings Rome recognized geographical limits to its potential extent and was therefore a nation state, rather than an ever-expanding or all-encompassing empire of which Alexander dreamed, and for which modern world leaders continue to strive. It is of some interest that although Alexander’s military success was built on using tribal warbands, that he eventually betrayed those very warriors and demanded they strip themselves of their tribal identity in service to elevating him to living godhood. Alexander, the prototypical globalist, was ironically stricken with a lethal illness after getting drunk with these very men.

Barbarians were simply outsiders, those who did not speak the true words. Again, racial sensibilities in the ancient world were not what they are now. For the ancients it was about culture, not genetics. If a barbarian learned to speak Greek, and adopted Greek customs, he could be accepted as a metic or xeno, or even adopted into a community. Indeed barbarian gods were recognized as the same as Hellenic gods, only vested with the trappings of another people.

The Natural World was seen in the Middle East as something to be conquered, and later in the Roman West as an enemy tribe-spawning threat matrix to be extinguished or walled off. In contrast the ancient Greek ideal was somewhere between the Nordic view of nature as a soul-tempering force for measuring warriors and the American Indian ideal of a spiritual wellspring for the generation of warriors.

The Hellenes definitely saw themselves as apart from the wild natural order, but remained in a state of close association. So, where the Babylonians would seek to control and harness the natural world, aborigine peoples would seek to be one with nature, and the Romans would either destroy or demonize it, the Hellenes would coexist with and test themselves against it. This is an important concept in understanding ancient warrior identities and tribal expression.

The ancient Hellenes believed their world to be surrounded by a great ocean in the center of the cosmos. There world was not limitless. In this way, their perspective matches our own, as we know ourselves to be surrounded by a void that the vast majority of us regard as un-breachable. The state of knowledge may be different. But the modern perception of the natural world and the human context is similar.

The ancient Hellenic warrior’s perspective on his tribal identity would vary from community to community but would also overlap, and may be roughly described as such:

-family first

-with respect for the sacred

-expressed in excellence

-for the glory of the tribe

-and the good of the community

-with allies and against enemies

-for the preservation of the true speakers

-against the false-speaking outsiders

-for the good of humanity

-in the context of the natural order

-in hopes of transcendence and ultimately immortality

For the postmodern man who would seek to salvage his masculinity in a tribal context in the face of this physically soft yet violent-minded world, consider studying the lives and values of the Hellenes. Their ghosts and heroes are denied tribal status by blinded modernist minds because they sought a higher dimension. For a person who would like to cultivate a vibrant tribal identity, and seek the truth denied us be the same forces that deny that Men any longer have a place in society, the ancient Hellenes might provide a good starting point.