26 Ancient Ideals
brown. Achilles in his wrath is like a lion, being hunted by the men
of a village, feeling his might and about to spring on his fi rst victim.
These similes and others like them establish congruence between
what happens in the natu ral world and what is happening in the war
on the plains of Troy. The fi ghting men are not doing anything un-
natural by fi ghting. In making war they are not defying the order
of things. War is as natu ral as the fl ight of bees, the passing of the
generations of leaves, the hunger of a virile lion for his prey.
The lives of the Greek warriors are full of meaning, and not
because they are subtle phi los o phers and engage in ongoing dia-
lectical exchange about war and its values. There is no place for
philosophy at Troy. To the heroes the only form of thinking that
matters is strategic. How shall we ambush the enemy? How can we
bring the walls of the city down? The warriors do not have to think
about what kind of life is best, for they know that theirs is: Nature
corroborates them constantly. The Greeks take obvious pride in
their conviction that they have created a culture that is as close to
Nature as any human beings before have done or (presumably) will
do. What Nature loves, the warriors love; what Nature despises,
they despise as well—or so they believe. Nature loves beauty and
strength; the warriors camped on the beach at Troy and those en-
closed within the city’s walls love the beautiful and the strong. And
it is on earth as it is in heaven.
Most currently existing individuals cannot claim to value what
Nature values. (Describing human beings now through analogy
with lions or bees would probably sound absurd: we are too much
the products of our culture to be rendered in natu ral terms.) At their
most humane, people today endorse fairness, equality, decency,
democracy, and one law for all. However admirable these standards
may be, no one thinks of them as natu ral. The animal kingdom is
not a realm of equals; survival is not won by the judicious and fair.
Most people feel a disjunction between what they value and what