Finally, I think we need to talk briefly about Alexander’s character and his immediate impact in all of this. As I noted above, Alexander was charismatic and even witty and so there are a number of very famous anecdotes of him doing high-minded things: his treatment of Darius’ royal household, his treatment of the Indian prince Porus, his refusal to drink water in Gedrosia when his soldiers had none, and so on. These anecdotes get famous, because they’re the kind of things that fit into documentaries and films very neatly and making for arresting, memorable moments. But there is a tendency to reduce Alexander’s character to just these moments and then end up making him out – in a very Droysen-and-Tarn sort of way – into the “Gentleman Conqueror”.
And that’s just not a reading of Alexander which can survive reading all of any of our key sources on him. The moment you read more than just the genteel anecdotes (“for he, too, is Alexander”, – though note that Alexander’s gentle words do not keep him from trying to use Darius’ family to extort Darius out of his kingdom, Arr. Anab. 2.14.4-9), I think one must concede that Alexander was quite ruthless, a man of immense violence. I mean, and I want to stress this, he killed one of his closest companions with a spear in a drunken rage. I do not think there is a collection of polite-but-witty one-liners to make up for that. But Cleitus was hardly the only person Alexander killed.
Alexander had Bessus, the assassin of Darius, mutilated by having his nose and ears cut off before being executed (Arr. Anab. 4.7.3). He has 2,000 survivors of the sack of Tyre crucified on the beach (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.4.14-17). Because he resisted bravely and wouldn’t kneel, Alexander had the garrison commander at Gaza dragged to death by having his ankles pierced and tied to a chariot (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.4.29). Early in his reign, Alexander sacks Thebes and butchers the populace, as Arrian notes, “sparing neither women nor children” (Arr. Anab. 1.8.8; Arrian tries, somewhat lamely, to distance Alexander from this saying it was is Boeotian allies who did most – but not all – of the killing). Of the Greek mercenaries enrolled in the Persian army at Granicus – a common thing for Greek soldiers to do in this period – Arrian (Anab. 1.16.6) reports that he enslaved them, despite, as Plutarch notes, the Greeks holding in good order and attempting to surrender under terms before they were engaged (Plut. Alex. 16.13). Not every opponent of Alexander gets Porus’ reward for bravery and pride.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s interactions, as noted above, with the civilian populace were self-serving and generally imperious. That’s not unusual for ancient armies, but I should note that Alexander’s conduct towards civilians was also no better than the (dismally bad) norm for ancient armies: he foraged, looted what he wanted, occasionally burned things (including significant parts of Persepolis, the Persian capital), seized land and laborers for his colonies and so on. Alexander’s operations in Central Asia seem to have been particularly brutal: when the populace fled to fortified settlements, Alexander’s orders were to storm each one in turn, killing all of the men and enslaving all of the women and children (Arr. Anab. 4.2.4, note also 4.6.5, doing the same in Marakanda).
And this, at least, brings back to our original question: Was Alexander “Great”? In a sense, I think the expectation in this question is to deliver a judgment on Alexander, but I think its actual function is to deliver a judgment on us.
The Alexander we have in our sources – rather than in the imperialistic hagiographies of him that still condition so much popular memory – seems to have been a witty, charismatic, but arrogant, paranoid and violent fellow. As I joke to my students, “Alexander seems to have enjoyed two things in life, killing and drinking and he was only good at the former”. He could be gentle and witty, but it seems, especially towards the end of his reign, was more often proud, imperious and murderous.
He was at best an indifferent administrator and because he was so indifferent to that task, most of his rule amounted to questions of the men he chose to do the job for him, and those choices were generally quite poor. He made no meaningful preparations for the survival of his empire, his family or his friends upon his death; Arrian (Anab. 7.26.3) reports famously that his last words were, when pushed by his companions to name a successor, τῷ κρατίστῳ (toi kratistoi), “to the strongest”. Translation: kill each other for it. And they did, killing every member of Alexander’s family in the process.1
He was not a great judge of men – for every Perdiccas, there is a Harpalus – or a great military innovator. He largely used the men and the army that his father gave him, and where he deviated from the men, the replacements were generally inferior. That said, he was an astounding commander on campaign and on the battlefield, managing the complex logistics of a massive operation excellently (until his pride got the better of him in Gedrosia) and managing his battles with unnatural calm, skill and luck. He was also, fairly clearly, a good fighter in the personal sense. Alexander was a poor ruler and a lack-luster king, but he was extremely good at destroying, killing and enslaving things.
To the Romans – who first conferred the title “the Great” on Alexander, so far as we know (he is Alexander Magnus first in Plautus’ Mostellaria 775 (written likely in the late 200s)) – that was enough for greatness. And of course it was enough for his Hellenistic successors, who patterned themselves off of Alexander; Antiochus III even takes the title megas (“the Great”) in imitation of Alexander after he reconquers the Persian heartland. Evidently by that point, if not earlier, the usage had slipped into Greek (it may well have started in Greek, of course; Plautus’ comedies are adapted from Greek originals). It should be little shock that, for the Romans, this was enough: this was a culture that reserved their highest honor, the triumph, for military glory alone. And it was clearly enough for Droysen and Tarn too: to be good at killing things and then hamfistedly attempt – and mostly fail – to civilize them, after all, was what made the German and British Empires great. It had to be enough, or else what were all of those Prussian officers and good Scottish gentlemen doing out there with all of that violence? To question Alexander might mean questioning the very system those men served.
What is greatness? Is it pure historical impact, absent questions of morality, or intent? If that is the case, Alexander was Great, because he killed an exceptionally large number of people and in so doing set off a range of historical processes he hadn’t intended (the one he did intend, fusing the Macedonian and Persian ruling class, didn’t really happen) which set off an economic boom and created the vibrant Hellenistic cultural world, outcomes that Alexander did not intend at all. This is a classic “great, but not good” formulation: we might as well talk of “Chinggis the Great”, “Napoleon the Great” or (more provocatively) “Hitler the Great” for their tremendous historical impact. Yet this is a definition that can be sustained, but which robs “greatness” of its value in emulation.
One cannot help but suspect in many of these circumstances, “greatness” is about killing larger numbers of people, so long as they are strange people who live over yonder and dress and pray differently than we here do. It is ironic that Tarn credited Alexander with imagining the unity of mankind, given that Alexander was in the process of butchering however many non-Macedonians was required to set up a Macedonian ethnic ruling class over all other peoples. One suspects, for Droysen and Tarn, it was “greatness”, to be frank, because they understood the foot inside the boot Alexander was planting on the necks of the world, was European and white and so were they. In that vision, greatness is “our man” as opposed to “their man”. But that is such a small-minded, petty form of greatness, “our killer and not your killer”.
Does greatness require something more? The creation of something enduring, perhaps? Alexander largely fails this test, for it is not Alexander but the men who came after him, who exterminated his royal line and built their kingdoms on the ashes of his, who constructed something enduring. Perhaps greatness requires making the world better? Or some kind of greatness of character? For these, I think, it is hard to make Alexander fit, unless one is willing, like Tarn was, to bend and break the narrative to force it. Had Alexander, in fact, been Diogenes (Plut. Alex. 14.1-5), rather than Alexander, but with his character – witty, charismatic, but imperious, arrogant and quick to violence – I do not think we would admire him. As for making the world better, Alexander mostly served to destroy a state he does not seem to have had the curiosity or cultural competence to understand, as Reames puts, it, “not King of Asia, but a Macedonian conqueror in a long, white-striped purple robe” (op. cit. 212). He surely did not understand their religions.2
In a sense, Alexander, I think, serves as a mirror for us. We question the greatness of Alexander and what is revealed are the traits, ideals, and actions we value. Alexander’s oversized personality is as captivating and charismatic now as it was then, and his record as a killer and conqueror is nearly unparalleled. But what is striking about Alexander is that beyond that charisma and military skill there is almost nothing else, which is what makes the test so discerning.
And so I think we continue to wrestle with the legacy and value of Alexander III of Macedon.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon, the Great? Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-05-24.
- I thus find it funny that every few years another “inspiring” anecdote about Alexander’s wise last words filters around the internet that Alexander’s actual reported last words were so grim and heartless.
- On this, see F. Naiden, Soldier, Priest and God (2018).
November 3, 2025
QotD: Was Alexander “the Great”?
November 2, 2025
QotD: The “Blob”, aka the Deep State
The Blob also includes a special category of “useful idiots” who naively assist them in looting Western Civilization. These people are paid in status or an illusory sense of purpose rather than money. They may not realize they are part of the self-serving Blob, and in the long run are not only harming the trees, birds and whales they say they want to save, but are harming their own health, wealth, national security, and worse, that of their children.
Jo Nova, “The Secret Ruling Class – Why the anonymous Blob needs to be invisible”, JoNova, 2025-07-18.
November 1, 2025
QotD: Bullies
Theodore Dalrymple, interviewed by James Glazov in “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It”, FrontPage, 2005-08-31.
October 31, 2025
QotD: The Zoomers as human Giant Pandas
Not just “breed in captivity”, mind you. Breed in general. Apparently panda lovin’ is like nerds on date night — the conditions must be perfect, it’s incredibly awkward, it takes massive effort, and even the tiniest misstep can throw the whole thing off forever. Your average MGTOW gets more poony than your average panda … all of which prompted in me the very uncharitable thought: Are you sure God doesn’t want it to be dead?
Which — black pill incoming — is pretty much what I feel about the human race right now.
Take a gander at this. The “aki no kure” guy has a lot of issues, no doubt, but when he’s on he’s a very useful read. If for no other reason than that he keeps up with the Kids These Days, and I just can’t, y’all, I just can’t. And here’s why:
Well, if Zoomers never leave the home (something they all make self-deprecating jokes about), then you *are* watching their daily lives as they sit in a chair in front of a computer set-up. Their whole lives are online and virtual, not IRL. Their daily activities are not going to the store and running into neighbors who they share funny stories with, it’s scrolling their timeline and engaging with its content. So you are watching them go through all sorts of daily activities — checking their subreddit, uploading pictures to Instagram, clapping back to haters on Twitter, reacting to other streamers’ video clips, sending text messages, and so on and so forth. And the other characters in their online lives are also entirely online — other accounts who they interact with, although every once in awhile they make an IRL guest appearance.
That right there is my definition of hell. Seriously, if that’s “life” in the Worker’s Paradise, I’m punching out. But: That’s what so many people, not just “Zoomers”, seem to want. See “Every single thing about the Holocough, 2020-present”. If that’s what Western Civ has come to, then let me complete my transformation into the goofiest hippie on campus circa 1992: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
Severian, “Giant Pandas”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-28.
October 30, 2025
QotD: When species’ mating rituals are disturbed, they don’t mate … and Humans are a species
Rob Henderson @robkhenderson
The actual truth is a lot of guys are naturally timid and are secretly grateful that approaching women was stigmatized because it gave them a righteous-sounding excuse for their own cowardice.
Is thirty seconds’ thought before posting too much to ask?
If cold approaching strange women was part of the natural human reproductive cycle, no men would [be] afraid to do it, because those who were would not have had descendants.
Every species has mating rituals. If those rituals are not disrupted, they will mate. If they are disrupted, they will not mate.
This is why a cattery run by a middle aged housewife in her own home can breed Occicats, Russian Blues, or Bengals, but the best zoos in the world can’t make two pandas into three pandas.
The basic mating ritual of human beings does not begin with a man cold approaching a strange woman.
It begins with a woman covertly signalling a willingness to be approached, either to a specific man, or in general. Only then is the man supposed to respond with an overt approach.
Women raised under the heel of feminism not only don’t know how to signal, they don’t even know that they should.
Men raised under the heel of feminism not only don’t know how to spot a signal, they don’t know they should be looking for one. And even if they did, it wouldn’t do them any good, because the women are not signalling.
This is why women’s twitter histories are an endless litany of “don’t approach me at the park, don’t approach me in the dark, don’t approach me here or there, don’t approach me anywhere”, alternating with “why don’t I get any attention? *sob*”.
They instinctively know that an approach from a man they do not favor is an affront, so they are affronted, and demand not be approached, when it happens.
Then everyone stops approaching, and they cry.
They want only men they like to approach them, but they have no idea that it’s their responsibility to make this happen.
If you attempt to make them understand this, most of them think you are telling them to overtly cold approach men, and they hate this idea, because it’s not natural to them, either.
Blank slatists, who don’t think humans have mating rituals, or at least don’t want them to, will insist that men “man up” and do all the work of solving this problem by cold approaching a steady stream of women until something clicks.
Or they will try to get women to do the approaching by building a dating website where only women can make first contact.
Doesn’t work.
Because mating rituals aren’t just “things you’re afraid to stop doing”, they are “things that make you feel attracted at all”.
When I was in my 20s, I would certainly cold approach women. But only for sex. If a woman didn’t make some sort of “come-hither” signal to me, sex was all I was in it for, and sex was the highest level of commitment she could expect from me.
Because it was firmly fixed in my mind, on an instinctive level, that she wasn’t actually that enthusiastic about me. And if she wasn’t enthusiastic about me, how could I be about her?
No thanks. I wanted to be appreciated, and so do most men.
Walking around with your breasts on display may attract the male gaze, but it’s not a substitute for contributing some energy and enthusiasm to the process.
This is what men really mean when they say “you told us not to approach you”.
It doesn’t mean “I am afraid of being called a creepy pervert or even arrested”.
It means “I can’t drum up much enthusiasm if you don’t show any”.
It means “You told everyone not to approach you, and you never shot me that eye contact and smile to say ‘I didn’t mean you'”.
It means “You project an air of defensiveness, and I’m not interested in rowing upstream. I want to be appreciated.”
No one wants to dance with a mannequin.
Devon Eriksen The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-26.
October 29, 2025
QotD: Having kids
There are, of course, downsides: I am typing this very slowly because one of my arms is full of a baby who doesn’t like to nap unless I’m holding him. You have to label the leftover lasagna you’re taking for lunch tomorrow or else someone will have it for a snack. I am staring down the barrel of at least another decade of the exact same Mother’s Day musical program at the kids’ school, and it would probably be rude if I started singing along. And there are days when we’re waiting around like Kurt Russell at the end of The Thing to see where the stomach bug will strike next. But come on, nobody doesn’t have kids because of the existence of norovirus.
So … why don’t more people do this? (Either having a bunch of kids or, increasingly, just having kids period.) I’ve heard a lot of theories: just recently and off the top of my head, I’ve been told that kids cost too much money, that kids don’t actually have to cost a lot of money but we have very high standards for our parenting, that there are too many fun things you can’t do anymore when you have kids, that having a lot of kids is low status, and that being a housewife (an increasingly sensible choice the more kids you have) is low status. And, of course, car seat mandates. There’s something to most of those theories, but they all boil down to one fundamental claim: we’ve built a world where having kids, and especially having a lot of kids, just … kind of sucks.
It’s never going to be easy — there will always be sleepless nights and bickering siblings and twelve different people who all need incompatible things from you all at once — but anything worth doing is hard sometimes. It’s also often wonderful, and it doesn’t need to be this hard.
Tim Carney agrees with me, providing a guided tour of the cultural and structural factors that combine to make American parenting so overwhelming that many couples are stopping after one or two children — or opting out altogether. We think our children require our constant close attention. We worry about them incessantly. We think anything that’s not absolute top-tier achievement is failure. We build neighborhoods that mean they need to be driven everywhere, and then between car trips we all stare at our glowing rectangles. We, and they, are sad and lonely, and then no one around us has kids and we all get sadder and lonelier.
Jane Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-10-14.
October 28, 2025
QotD: Pyrrhus after his bloody defeat of the Romans at Heraclea
On Pyrrhus’ side, his army had been bloodied, but was mostly intact and was almost immediately bolstered by the arrival of his Italian allies, including the Lucanians and Samnites, along with the Tarantines. On the Roman side, Laevinius’ army was battered, but still extant; he fell back to Roman-controlled Campania, eventually taking up a position at Capua, the chief city of that region. Pyrrhus then marched north, entering Campania, bypassing the Roman force at Capua (which had been reinforced with two legions pulled from Etruria) and entering Latium, apparently getting within about 60 kilometers (c. 37 miles) of Rome (Plut. Pyrrh. 17.5). And here the question students as is why not take Rome?
And there is an easy answer: because he couldn’t.
The first thing to remember here is the natural of the human-created terrain Pyrrhus has to operate in: functionally all of the cities of any significant size in third-century Italy were likely to be fortified and their populations – thanks to Rome’s recruitment system – experienced and armed. Consequently, if the locals didn’t voluntarily switch sides, Pyrrhus would have been forced to take their settlements either by siege or storm. Pyrrhus might well have hoped that the Campanians would go over to him, but here the problem is the human geography of Italy: his army is full of Samnites, whose emnity with the Campanians is what started the Samnite wars. This is a feature of Rome’s alliance system noted by M.P. Fronda in Between Rome and Carthage (2010): because Rome extended its alliance system by intervening in local rivalries, both sets of new “allies” had long-standing grudges against the other, which makes it hard to dismantle Rome’s alliance network, since any allies you peel away will push others closer to Rome.
In the case of Campania, Capua might have felt strong enough to try their luck without Rome, but that’s why Laevinius was sitting on it with a large army. But the other Campanian cities (of which there were about a dozen) might well fear exposure to Samnite raiding without Rome’s protection. Meanwhile, the Latins – the people of Latium, the region immediately to Rome’s south (technically Rome is in Latium, on its edge) – seem to have been pretty profoundly uninterested in siding against Rome either at this juncture or later when Hannibal tries to dismantle Rome’s alliance system.
So after Heraclea, Pyrrhus has fairly limited options: he can start the slow process of reducing the cities of Campania one by one to open the logistics necessary to permit him to operate long-term in Latium or he can conduct a lightning raid through Roman territory to try to maximize the psychological effect of his victory and perhaps get a favorable peace. He opts for the second choice and when the Romans opt not to take the deal – though they do consider it – he has to pull back to southern Italy (where he focuses on consolidating control, pushing out the last few Roman positions there).
Why not attack Rome directly? Well, Rome itself was fortified, of course. Moreover, the Romans had raised a fresh levy of troops for its defense (Plut. Pyrrh. 18.1), while dispatching Tiberius Corucanius with his army to reinforce Laevinius in Capua. So as Pyrrhus enters Latium, he has a well-defended fortified city in front of him and a Roman army of, conservatively, 30,000 men (Corucanius’ 20,000 men, plus whatever was left of Laevinius’ army) behind him. I don’t usually quote movie tactics, but Ridley Scott’s Saladin has the right wisdom for this problem: “One cannot maintain a siege with the enemy behind“. Had Pyrrhus stopped to besiege Rome, his supply situation would have quickly become hopeless as the Roman army behind him could have easily prevented him from foraging to feed his army during the long process setting up for an assault on the city, which might then simply fail, since the city was well-fortified and defended.
If Plutarch (Pyrrh. 18.4-5) is correct about the terms Pyrrhus offered – an alliance with Rome, a recognition of their hegemony over Italy outside of his new clients in southern Italy (who would of course, fall under Pyrrhus’ control now) – Pyrrhus may have hoped at this juncture to consolidate southern Italy and turn back towards the East or perhaps head on to Sicily. But the Romans refused the deal and so Pyrrhus seems to have set above clearing out the last Roman strongholds (Venusia and Luceria) in Apulia to consolidate his hold. The Romans responded in the following year by sending a new army, under the command of Publius Sulpicius Saverrio and Publius Decius Mus to challenge him and they met at Asculum, in northern Apulia.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IIIb: Pyrrhus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-08.
October 27, 2025
QotD: Feminine traits
H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918.
October 26, 2025
QotD: The rightward political shift of American secular Jews
I emphasize “secularized” because those are the Jews attracted to non-religious social reform movements. Because of the Ashkenazi genetic advantage in average IQ, they’re disproportionately likely to end up running those movements.
(Idiots, being idiots, think this is evidence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Nope — you’re just comparatively stupid, and correspondingly bad at competing for leadership positions.)
All this is fine, until the Left’s totalitarianizing ideology takes its inevitable anti-Semitic turn. Oops …
That’s how you got what we’re now seeing, which is a shift in the Left’s leadership towards ethno-racial groups with average IQs down in the 80s. Yes, leadership competition is going to select for the right tail of the distribution, but it’s both thinner and shorter.
Expect to see more stupidity, violence, and short-termism from the new New Left. They’ll probably lose their historically impressive skills at institutional capture and run more riots.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-25.
October 25, 2025
QotD: Postmodernism is all about power
Cognitive dissonance isn’t a thing on the Left, obviously, but that’s a bridge too far. So they went all in on Postmodernism. It’s not a fact that Socialism ends in poverty and mountains of corpses everywhere it’s implemented, comrades, because there’s no such thing as a “fact”. Those peasants eating rats, shoes, and each other on their way to the Ultimate Collectivism? Mere social constructions. And so on.
The Postmodernists have done irreparable damage to every language they’ve written in, but that’s a feature, not a bug. And the reason for that is: If you translate their gibberish into plain language, they really only have one idea, and it’s horrifying: There is nothing in this world but Power.
If that sounds like cheap knockoff Nietzsche to you, comrades, that’s because it is. It’s also the sum total of Michel Foucault’s life work, and Foucault was such a cheap Nietzsche knockoff, he should’ve been made by slave labor in Shandong and sold on Amazon. Lenin reduced all politics to two questions — “Who?” “Whom?” — and Foucault expanded that reduction to cover all of human behavior. Your “life”, on Foucault’s reading, is nothing but the sum of your power relations. Subject / object; subjection / domination; there are a million ugly polysyllabic ways to say it, but it all boils down to power relations: Either you have power over someone, or they have power over you.
That’s it. All the stuff we’d call “humanity” — love, friendship, sorrow, joy, aesthetic experience of all sorts, to say nothing of religious experience — are all meaningless. Category errors. If we appear to experience these things, comrades, it’s just because we’re seduced by the surface of things. Give it a proper “unmasking” — another favorite bit of Foucauldian jargon — and you’ll see the power relations, the false consciousness. You don’t “love” your wife and children; you just enjoy the power you have over them, your ownership of their minds and bodies (“What is happiness?” Nietzsche famously asked. “The feeling that power is growing; that resistance is overcome”). Similarly, your boss at work feels no “duty”, to either you or the company. He enjoys his power over you, but grovels to the bigger bosses who have power over him.
Submission and domination. That’s it. That’s all there is to human existence. (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Foucault was really into rough gay sex, and died of AIDS in 1984. Nor is there any cosmic irony about the year of his death).
Severian, “Power”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-02.
October 24, 2025
QotD: What airlines could learn from supermarkets
Mark Steyn, “Flight From Reality”, The Spectator, 2001-11-17.
October 23, 2025
QotD: The importance of ancestor veneration to pre-Christian cultures
And like in China, what develops out of this is an entire domestic religion, or rather a million distinct domestic religions, each with its own secret rites. In China there were numerous attempts over the millennia to standardize a notion of “correct ritual”, none of which really succeeded, until the one-two punch of communism and capitalism swept away that entire cultural universe. But for thousands of years, every family (defined as a male lineage) maintained its own doctrine, its own historical records, its own gods and hymns and holy sites. It’s this fact that makes marriage so momentous. The book has a wonderfully romantic passage about this:
Two families live side by side; but they have different gods. In one, a young daughter takes a part, from her infancy, in the religion of her father; she invokes his sacred fire; every day she offers it libations. She surrounds it with flowers and garlands on festal days. She asks its protection, and returns thanks for its favors. This paternal fire is her god. Let a young man of the neighboring family ask her in marriage, and something more is at stake than to pass from one house to the other.
She must abandon the paternal fire, and henceforth invoke that of the husband. She must abandon her religion, practice other rites, and pronounce other prayers. She must give up the god of her infancy, and put herself under the protection of a god whom she knows not. Let her not hope to remain faithful to the one while honoring the other; for in this religion it is an immutable principle that the same person cannot invoke two sacred fires or two series of ancestors. “From the hour of marriage,” says one of the ancients, “the wife has no longer anything in common with the religion of her fathers; she sacrifices at the hearth of her husband.”
Marriage is, therefore, a grave step for the young girl, and not less grave for the husband; for this religion requires that one shall have been born near the sacred fire, in order to have the right to sacrifice to it. And yet he is now about to bring a stranger to this hearth; with her he will perform the mysterious ceremonies of his worship; he will reveal the rites and formulas which are the patrimony of his family. There is nothing more precious than this heritage; these gods, these rites, these hymns which he has received from his fathers, are what protect him in this life, and promise him riches, happiness, and virtue. And yet, instead of keeping to himself this tutelary power, as the savage keeps his idol or his amulet, he is going to admit a woman to share it with him.
Naturally this reminded me of the Serbs. Whereas most practitioners of traditional Christianity have individual patron saints, Serbs de-emphasize this and instead have shared patrons for their entire “clan” (defined as a male lineage). Instead of the name day celebrations common across Eastern Europe, they instead have an annual slava, a religious feast commemorating the family patron, shared by the entire male lineage. Only men may perform the ritual of the slava, unmarried women share in the slava of their father. Upon marriage, a woman loses the heavenly patronage of her father’s clan, and adopts that of her husband, and henceforward participates in their rituals instead. It’s … eerily similar to the story Fustel de Coulanges tells. Can this really be a coincidence, or have the Serbs managed to hold onto an ancient proto-Indo-European practice?1 I tend towards the latter explanation, since that would be the most Serbian thing ever.
But I’m more interested in what all this means for us today, because with the exception of maybe a few aristocratic families, this highly self-conscious effort to build familial culture and maintain familial distinctiveness is almost totally absent in the Western world. But it’s not that hard! I said before that the patrilineal domestic worship of ancient China was annihilated in the 20th century, but perhaps that isn’t quite as true as it might at first appear. I know plenty of Chinese people with the ability to return to their ancestral village and consult a book that records the names and deeds of their male-lineage ancestors going back thousands of years. These aren’t aristocrats,2 these are normal people, because this is just what normal people do. And I also know Chinese people named according to generation poems written centuries ago, which is a level of connection with and submission to the authority of one’s ancestors that seems completely at odds with the otherwise quite deracinated and atomized nature of contemporary Chinese society.
Perhaps this is why I have an instinctive negative reaction when I encounter married couples who don’t share a name. I don’t much care whether it’s the wife who takes the husband’s name or the husband who takes the wife’s, or even both of them switching to something they just made up (yeah, I’m a lib).3 But it just seems obvious to me on a pre-rational level that a husband and a wife are a team of secret agents, a conspiracy of two against the world, the cofounders of a tiny nation, the leaders of an insurrection. Members of secret societies need codenames and special handshakes and passwords and stuff, keeping separate names feels like the opposite — a timorous refusal to go all-in.
And yet, literally the entire architecture of modern culture and society4 is designed to brainwash us into valuing our individual “autonomy” too much to discover the joy that comes from pushing all your chips into the pot. Is there any hope of being able to swim upstream on this one? What tricks can we steal from weak-chinned Habsburgs and the Chinese urban bourgeoisie?
Jane: I have a friend whose great-grandmother was one of four sisters, and to this day their descendants (five generations’ worth by now!) get together every year for a reunion with scavenger hunts and other competitions color-coded by which branch they’re from. Ever since I heard this story, one of my goals as a mother has been to make the kind of family where my grandchildren’s grandchildren will actually know each other, so I’ve thought a lot about how to do that.
On an individual level, you can get pretty far just by caring. People — children especially, but people more generally — long to know who they are and where they came from. In a world where they don’t get much of that, it doesn’t take many stories about family history and trips “home” to inculcate a sense a “fromness”: some place, some people.5 Our kids have this, I think, and it’s almost entirely a function of (1) their one great-grandparent who really cared and (2) the ancestral village of that branch of the family, which they’ve grown up visiting every year. Nothing builds familial distinctiveness like praying at the graves of your ancestors! But that doesn’t scale, because we’re a Nation of Immigrants(TM) and we mostly don’t have ancestral villages. (The closest I get is Brooklyn, a borough I have never even visited.) And even for the fraction of Americans whose ancestors were here before 1790 (or 1850, or whatever point you choose as the moment just before urbanization and technological innovation began to really dislocate us), the connection to people and place grows yearly more strained.
For the highly mobile professional-managerial class, moving for that new job, it’s even worse. You and I live where we live not because we like it particularly, or because we have roots here, but because it’s what made sense for work. And though we sometimes idly talk about moving somewhere with better weather and more landscape (not even a prettier landscape, just, you know, more), I don’t think any of the places we’d consider have a sufficiently diverse economic base that I’d bet on them being able to support four households worth of our children and grandchildren. We often think of living in your hometown in order to stay connected to your family as a sacrifice that children make — hanging out a shingle in the third largest town in Nebraska rather than heading to New York for Biglaw or something like that — but I increasingly see giving your children a hometown they can reasonably stay in as a sacrifice that we can make as parents.
Fustel de Coulanges has this beautiful, poetic passage about the relationship between the individual and the family:
To form an idea of inheritance among the ancients, we must not figure to ourselves a fortune which passes from the hands of one to those of another. The fortune is immovable, like the hearth, and the tomb to which it is attached. It is the man who passes away. It is the man who, as the family unrolls its generations, arrives at his house appointed to continue the worship, and to take care of the domain.
I love this as a metaphor. It’s generational thinking on steroids: it’s not just “plant trees for your grandchildren to enjoy”, it’s “don’t sell the timberland to pay your bills because it’s your grandchildren’s patrimony”. And there’s something to it, especially when the woods are inherited, because it’s your duty to pass along what was passed down to you. You should be bound by the past, you should be part of something greater than yourself, because the “authentic you” is an incoherent half-formed ball of mutually contradictory desires and lizard-brain instinct. It’s the job of your family and your culture (but I repeat myself) to mold “you” into something real, like the medieval bestiaries though mother bears did to their cubs. But take it literally, as Fustel de Coulanges insists the ancients did, and it feels too much like playing Crusader Kings for me to be entirely comfortable. Yeah, this time my player heir is lazy and gluttonous, but his son looks like he’s shaping up okay, maybe we’ll go after Mecklenburg in thirty years or so. The actual individual is basically incidental to the process. And the entire ancient city is built of this!
The book describes how several families (and it’s worth noting that this includes their slaves and clients; the family here is the gens, which only aristocrats have) come together to form a φρᾱτρῐ́ᾱ or curia, modeled exactly after the family worship with a heroic ancestor, sacred hearth, and cult festivals. Then later several phratries form a tribe, again with a god and rites and patterns of initiation, and then the tribes found a city, each nested intact within the next level up, so that the city isn’t just a conglomeration of people living in the same place, it’s a cult of initiates who are called citizens. And, as in the family, the individual is really only notable as the part of this vast diachronic entity that’s currently capable of walking around and performing the rites. The ancient citizen is the complete opposite of the autonomous, actualized agent our society valorizes, which makes it a useful corrective to our excesses. That image of the family unrolling, of the living man as the one tiny part that’s presently above ground, is something we deracinated moderns would do well to guard in our hearts. But that doesn’t make it true.
Almost by accident, in showing us what inheritance and family meant for the ancient world, Fustel de Coulanges illustrates why Christianity is such a revolutionary doctrine. For the ancients, the son and heir is the one who will next hold the priesthood in the cult of his sacred ancestor. In Christ, we are each adopted into sonship, each made the heir of the Creator of all things, “no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ”.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
- Speaking of ancient proto-Indo-European practices, his descriptions of the earliest Greek and Roman marriage ceremonies are also fascinating. They incorporate a stylized version of something very reminiscent of Central Asian bride kidnapping! I like to think this is also a holdover of some unfathomably old custom, rather than convergent evolution.
- IMO China never really regained a true aristocracy after Mongol rule and the upheavals preceding the establishment of the Ming dynasty.
- The trouble with hyphenation is, what do you do the following generation? I know people are bad at thinking about the future, but come on, you just have to imagine this happening one more time. In fact, the brutally patrilineal Greeks and Romans and Chinese were more advanced than us in recognizing a simple truth about exponential growth. Your ancestors grow like 2^N, which means their contribution gets diluted like 1/(2^N), unless you pick an arbitrary rule and stick with it.
- With the exception of the Crazy Rich Asians movie. Maybe the Chinese taking over Hollywood will slowly purge the toxins from our society. Lol. Lmao.
- Sometimes, as with the Habsburgs, it becomes cringe.
October 22, 2025
QotD: The supposed land crisis Tiberius Gracchus wanted to solve
What they assume is taking place is that the wealthiest Romans – who have, in fact, grown fantastically wealthy from Rome’s overseas wars – have used that wealth to acquire most of the land, either buying up the small freeholds of smaller Roman farmers or getting the leases for that public land. Meanwhile, the Roman small farmer class does most of Rome’s fighting and so the assumption – by Appian – is that these guys are being ground underfoot by heavy military deployments, although as best we can tell, military deployments in the 150s, 140s and 130s are substantially lighter than those from 218-168 (but they’re also in less profitable, more difficult places like Spain, put a pin in that). Those wealthy Romans then work the land not with free laborers, but with slaves, because Roman conquests – remember, we’re at the tail end of Rome’s “iron century” of conquests from 264 to 148 – have brought enormous numbers of enslaved laborers to Italy. Those poor Romans, now displaced, have no land and flock to Rome and are no longer liable for the Roman census.
Except notice the data points being used to come up with this story: the visible population of landless men in Rome and the Roman census returns. But, as we’ve discussed, the Roman census is self-reported, and the report of a bit of wealth like a small farm is what makes an individual liable for taxes and conscription.
In short the story we have above is an interpretation of the available data but not the only one and both our sources and Tiberius Gracchus simply lack the tools necessary to gather the information they’d need to sound out if their interpretation is correct.
All of which now, at last, brings us to the scholarship of the last several decades which has, by and large, concluded that Tiberius Gracchus probably misunderstood the nature of Roman social and economic problems in the late second century and as a result applied the wrong solution.2 The initial problem is that the above model assumes a basically stagnant Italian population: you’re just shifting people around, not generating new people. But survey archaeology shows growing urban centers and new land coming under cultivation, suggesting a modestly rising population, a conclusion reinforced by demographic modeling which recognizes the likely marked decline in military mortality in the back half of the second century. Moreover, the vast expansion of villa estates we ought to be seeing in this period really only comes later, in the first century BC and the first two centuries AD; there’s some expansion (and these patterns are very regionalized) but not enough to explain what we’re being told is happening.3 Those observations, emerging in the 90s and early 2000s, provided the necessary evidence to vindicate the theory advanced by J.W. Rich in the 1980s that the problem was quite different than Tiberius Gracchus understood, in part to explain the one curious fact we could always see about Tiberius’ land reforms, which is that they happened, they went ahead as planned and also they didn’t fix the problem.
Instead what is happening is this: Roman military deployments had, for a long time, been massive. Rome had careened from the major Samnite Wars (343–341, 326–304, and 298–290) to the high-casualty Pyrrhic War (280-275) to the much higher casualty First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars. But the big wars of the early second century had involved a lot more winning and thus somewhat less dying (deaths from disease always outweighed combat losses, but Roman armies are smaller from 201-168, so less disease death too), while after the Third Macedonian War (171-168), Rome doesn’t have any more peer-opponent wars left to fight and so the number of men under arms declines again after 168 and especially after 148. Roman society was thus structured to sustain itself in a situation where military mortality for males was high. And then it dropped.
But recall the average Roman farm is small, so what you have now are suddenly a whole bunch of second and third sons who between 350 and 201 would have gone off to fight and died (or their elder brother would have) but are now alive, but can’t possibly inherit the family farm because they have a living brother and the farm is much too small to split further (or to support an entire second nuclear family unit). Where do they go? Well, to Rome, of course, where they want what Rome has done in the past to deal with this sort of problem: the foundation of new Roman communities (colonies) where they can have land. But there isn’t any Italy left to conquer (Rome controls all of it) and we aren’t yet to founding Roman colonies overseas, so not only is the mortality much lower (and so you have more of these guys) the traditional release valve is stuck. So they’re piling up in the one place that there is meaningful amount of wage labor available (the city of Rome), where they are very visible to the Roman ruling elite.
Meanwhile, Elder Brother-Who-Lived is back on the farm and should, in theory, still be eligible for call-up. But whereas in previous decades he could hope to get sent to fight in places like Greece or Italy or against Carthage where the rewards in loot from defeating wealthy enemies were substantial, in the 130s, the main problem was Numantia: a Celtiberian community perched in a particularly troublesome hillfort in a relatively poor, difficult part of Spain. Campaigns to take the place often failed (see above) but even if they succeeded, there would be little real loot. Moreover, a lack of success made the wars deeply unpopular. Elder Brother doesn’t want to get drafted to go fight in Spain, it’s just not a good bargain for him (unlike earlier wars).
But he has a solution: the census is self-reported. While his younger brothers are in Rome looking for work, he can just not report the farm on the census (or not report his military aged son), understating his wealth to drop below the qualifying requirement for military service. Because the Roman census pays functionally no attention to such men – the capite censi (those counted by their heads) – Elder Brother’s household almost seems to vanish in the census returns and the number of men liable for conscription ticks down by one.
And so you have falling census returns, combined with crowds of poor Romans in the city of Rome, but without it necessarily having anything to do with ager publicus or lost farms. And this is, we think, probably what is happening: surely there is some elite villa-estate expansion and some replacement of freeholding farmers with enslaved workers on that land but in fact the problem the Romans are facing is classic land scarcity with a growing population, but they don’t know that’s the problem because draft-resistance appears in the census as population decline and the census is all they have.
But you can see immediately the problem for Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform: while there is certainly some ager publicus to redistribute (to the great annoyance of the elites holding it), there’s not enough, because the core of this problem isn’t changing land use patterns (more villas, less small farms) but rising population creating economic strain at the bottom (while, it is true, imperial expansion creates vast almost unimaginable amounts of wealth at the top).
But we’re actually not quite done with problems, there’s one more: not all of the ager publicus was being farmed by Romans. Quite a lot of it seems, instead, to have been in the hands of local Italians – the socii. This is another convenient simplification by Appian and Plutarch, a product of them both writing in the imperial period long after citizenship had been extended across Italy. But that hasn’t happened yet. So any law to redistribute ager publicus would mean taking land from the socii who were currently using it for a land-giveaway in which only Roman citizens will be eligible.
You may well imagine that doing something like that might really damage relations with the socii and also fundamentally change the “bargain” by which the Roman alliance system functioned, as before Tiberius Gracchus, the socii seem to have been eligible to settle in Roman colonial foundations on conquered land, but they will not be eligible to get land in Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform bill.
You can quickly flip ahead to the year 91 to see how that turns out in the long run.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- To pause for a second: for the sake of making this understandable, I am using the relatively simple category of ager publicus. However, as Gargola (op. cit.) notes, in actual Roman law, ager publicus was a messy super-category of lands governed by an exciting range of different rules and conditions (some leased, some sold, some held by the state, etc.) – ager censorius, ager quaestorius, ager occupatorius, ager diuisus et adsignatus, the ager Campanus and ager in trientabulis. Simplifying this and treating all of these lands as if they had been governed under the same rubric which Tiberius is merely now enforcing is one of Appian’s deceptive simplifications.
- For the scholarship, this reaction begins with J.W. Rich, “The Supposed Roman Manpower Shortage of the Later Second Century B.C.” Historia 32 (1983). The next major phase comes out of the high-count/low-count population debates around Roman demography because older demographic models, like those of PA Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971)) had assumed a static Roman population, but as noted we increasingly had evidence for a modestly increasing population. The implications of that get worked out in books like N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) and L. De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012). Finally, you also have a recognition that while the wars in Spain were unpopular, they didn’t have massive manpower demands, e.g. Taylor, “Goodbye to All That: The Roman Citizen Militia After the Great Wars” in A Community in Transition, eds. M. Balbo and F. Santangelo (2023).
- In Italy, I should be clear: the pervasiveness and speed with which rich Romans seem to accumulate Sicilian estates suggests a lot of the land acquisition may be happening outside of the ager Romanus.
October 21, 2025
QotD: The Hijab
[. . .]
This fake Islamic hijab is nothing but a political prop, a weapon of visual terrorism. It is the symbol of a totalitarian ideology inspired more by Nazism and Communism than by Islam. It is as symbolic of Islam as the Mao uniform was of Chinese civilization.
It is used as a means of exerting pressure on Muslim women who do not wear it because they do not share the sick ideology behind it. It is a sign of support for extremists who wish to impose their creed, first on Muslims, and then on the world through psychological pressure, violence, terror, and, ultimately, war.
Amir Taheri, “This is not Islam”, New York Times, 2005-08-15
Update, 26 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
October 20, 2025
QotD: Wanting to be a pet, not an adult human
Sagu @Sagutxis
Seeing so many men happy to replace us with robots is very blackpilling nglI didn’t go to college until I was 30. This gave me a chance to see it with the perspective of an adult.
One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget.
The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics.
For example, “maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys”, instead of “be cheerful and upbeat”, or even “interact positively with customers”.
This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable. A job is to do something, not be something.
Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise.
He asked the female students to come up with a job description for “husband”. At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions.
But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way.
And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns.
Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc.
They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears.
And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn’t the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to.
It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities.
These women didn’t want to be wives. They wanted to be pets.
What’s a pet? Well a pet is not a wife, or a friend. A pet is a creature of instinct, which you bring into your home because you like how it naturally behaves.
You get a cat because you want [it] to behave like a cat, and do things a cat naturally does, like play with string, and purr when you pet him. If he’s smart, he’ll adapt [to] you somewhat, but he doesn’t have responsibilities other than “be a cat”.
If you get a wife, you get a wife so she will do things for you, specific things that are the responsibilities of wife, like care for your home, bear and raise your children, cook nutritious meals so you don’t have to eat processed slop, look after your emotional well-being, and so on.
These girls didn’t want to be held responsible for those things. As married women, they might have anticipated doing some of them, but some of the time. When they felt like it.
The cat chases the string if and when it wants to, not because chasing the string is its job.
These young millennial women didn’t realize it, but they wanted to be pets. And that’s what they were in their college relationships. They hung out with guys when they wanted to, had sex with them when they wanted to, broke up with them for someone new when they wanted to.
Their relationships had no element of reciprocal responsibilities. They were perfectly at home with the idea of men having responsibilities to them, but they would repay those men if they chose, and how they chose, not how the men actually wanted.
And as I’ve said twice already, someone you have responsibilities to, but who has none to you, is a pet, or a child.
The reason that a significant portion of men want to invent sentient feminine robots so that they can marry them is because they want wives, and they have given up on the possibility of young women re-embracing the concept of sex roles and actually having to do something for someone else.
Women didn’t spontaneously became more selfish than previous generations, of course. They were the targets of a concerted psyop whose purpose was to convince them that female responsibilities were demeaning. It was tailored to their unique psychological vulnerabilities, and they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
Who mounted that psyop, and why, is a conversation most of us aren’t ready for yet.
But our point for today is don’t worry, young ladies.
The robots aren’t being brought in to replace you.
Just to do the jobs you won’t do.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-18.
