Once More Between Rome and Judea (Part II)
Apollo, Dionysus and Some Abuses of History
II. Apollo, Dionysus and Some Abuses of History.
So far, I’ve largely just outlined the framework from which REM Theory proceeds and identified a number of problems endemic to this framework. To recap, REM Theory is the theory that (i) “myth” (broadly construed) should be understood fundamentally as consciously encoding specific breeding strategies which are generative of racial types, (ii) there exists an esoteric language of symbols which resist modification or reinvention and retain their meanings irrespective of the knowledge or behavior of communities of interpretation, (iii) human minds are attentive and responsive to these symbols (even if only subliminally) and (iv) those “in the know” are capable of identifying and comprehending this symbol language and instrumentalizing it through the application of myth in order to actuate strategic moves in the racial conflict which drives history forward. Now, we turn to several of the concrete historical claims that are foundational to REM Theory and Apolloism. These claims are sporadically sourced to historical materials, but largely are derived by means of inference from mythic content, which is supported by the circular-textual reasoning internal to the theory as described above. The result is a crude, incoherent and anachronistic picture of ancient mythography that reaches across times and places to dissolve regional and cultic variety to assimilate ancient gods into essentialized forms. These forms are then taken to constitute definitive literary characters that can then be projected into a given myth in order to furnish the interpretation most useful to the rhetorical campaign against Jews that is a central motivation behind the theory. I make no attempt here to disentangle or remedy the majority of these errors, other than in my very modest attempts to summarize some basic background on two of the main ancient gods that concern Brahmin: Apollo and Dionysus.
A. Apollo.
As summarized previously, Apolloism proper is the revivalist movement and quasi-political formation that draws on a constellation of beliefs about the ancient cults of Apollo. These beliefs are presented as if they provide historical corroboration for the textual arguments made in REM Theory and consist principally of the claim that ancient Aryans understood themselves as constituting a racial group and that they recognized and understood the subversive myths and symbols swirling within the culture of their peoples for what they were (namely, the insidious work of Jews), and therefore consciously and deliberately undertook the creation of the cult(s) of Apollo as an immune system response to this pathogenic and corruptive mythmaking. Thus, Apollo enters the scene of history in full view as an objective attempt to moralize the racial spirit of the Greeks, Romans and other Aryan peoples of the ancient world.
This thesis relies on the following core beliefs for support: first, Apollo was also known as the “Hyperborean” and invader from the north, which is said to establish him as Nordic or Aryan; second, he is also known as “the Most Greek” and his descriptions and symbols demonstrate that the Nordic type which he embodies was posited as a racial ideal among the ancient Greeks; and third, the seasonal ritual of the thargelia, associated primarily with the cult of Delphic Apollo, places the eugenic purpose behind the god’s development safely “beyond dispute”. Brahmin emphasizes his point: “To be clear, the Apollonian cult was consciously developed as a eugenic cult in citifying conditions. Here we find an effort to maintain and even ameliorate a primary founding type.”
These central contentions, however, are all riddled with unpardonable historical errors, omissions and misrepresentations and are in the final analysis informed by remarkably poor arguments. I’ll first discuss the origins of the cults of Apollo and the claim of conscious development, then introduce some key themes in the ancient discourses on race for evaluating the speculative Nordicist ideal presented by Apolloism, and finally I’ll conclude with a review of the thargelia, the Attic phratries and briefly look at some of the ancient literature on eugenics.
1. Conscious Development and the Origins of Apollo’s Cults.
If the movement of Apolloism can be reduced to a single claim, it is the idea that the cult of Apollo was developed consciously by elites as a rearguard action against a foreign contaminant in the bloodstream of the Aryan myth body. It is striking then that, apart from the specious link proposed between conscious eugenic intent and certain rituals and features addressed below (such as the thargelia), this claim is orphaned from any comprehensive or even partial survey of historiographic and archaeological evidence, linguistic analysis or other standard modes of scholarly inquiry, and includes no proposed criteria for establishing “intent” on the part of any author, priest or other curator of ancient myth; instead it is advanced squarely under the rubric of bald assertions of fact outlined in Section I.C.1. above, supported by either ambiguous evidence or no evidence at all. Here again we find a familiar motif where 19th and 20th Century insights are bastardized from a scholarly tradition, recycled with other borrowed ideological components and re-presented as novelties. The identification of Apollo as Nordic, for instance—particularly in contrast to the understanding of Dionysus as a chthonic, nocturnal, Oriental deity—was advanced in detail and with substantial (if flawed) linguistic, archaeological, literary and historiographical analysis by German scholars such as Günther, Sieglin, Schemann, Schuchhardt, Lehmann, Kynast and others who, like Brahmin, rejected Nietzsche’s exaltation of Dionysus and instead proposed Apollo as the archetypal Nordic Aryan “Lichtgott”. These ideas were further developed by Alfred Rosenberg en route to the Nazification of antiquity in 1930s-40s Germany in a set of writings that Brahmin appears to have at least passed over in his own researches. Unlike Rosenberg and the other German antecedents, however, Brahmin proposes that the cult of Apollo was developed tactically and consciously in the racial struggle that was supposedly known by the ancients to be raging in their midst.
Now, it is not outrageous to suggest that at some point in time Apollo did not exist as a part of any body of myth and then at a later point in time he did, and was therefore the result of some creative process that occurred in history. Speculating about what that creative process looked like and how it might have played out is not a particularly fruitful endeavor without having a body of evidence against which to check one’s speculations. In Brahmin’s estimation, however, the murkiness of origins both condemns the actual source to utter obscurity and simultaneously provides a knowledge gap which he feels licensed to fill with suppositions that wind up doing most of the work for his theory. There are several reasons to think that the story he tells us about where Apollo came from is wrong though.
The first peculiarity about his account is that it imagines that Apollo is the work of a single “author” (or committee of authors or priests, shamans, statesmen or some other elites) mobilized by a concrete set of historical conditions (citification, urbanization, Semitization and degeneration) to consciously create a character that could be cast in the role of racial savior in the mythic terrain that models real world ethnic strife. This single author[1] apparently then engineered its launch and proliferation across the ancient world, subsequently supervised its development and ritual practices, regulated its use and its artistic applications and did so all in furtherance of a specific racial hygienic goal. All of this, again, is supposed to have happened without any of the telltale historical evidential “signatures” of such coordination and activity that I described in Part I. This lack of evidence by itself constitutes sufficient grounds for any reasonable person to reject the entire thesis out of hand as little more than idle speculation, but it must also be noted at the very beginning that this type of account of cultic origin is startling in that it is presented as a positive claim, without any customary qualifications, about a process which scholars are notoriously and creditably cautious in approaching.
The second issue with the “single author” thesis is that it makes use of geographically disparate and anachronic cult traditions to construct a syncretistic picture of Apollo that Brahmin assumes is more or less true to the original form. He presents the god on the basis of details gleaned variously from particular, local Archaic and Classical Greek examples of poetry, myth, statuary and epigraphy, abstracts them from history and projects them proleptically and universalistically onto a much larger imagined situation of Apollo worship encompassing the entirety of the Mediterranean basin and Mesopotamia over a span of some thousands of years. Thus, the “citifying conditions” one finds in late Archaic and high Classical Attica, the mythic accounts of the Hyperboreans found first in Homer, Pindar and then Herodotus, and Classical and Hellenistic depictions of Apollo in statuary, amphorae, poetry and myth as possessing “Nordic” features of blond hair, bright eyes, etc. become the original and eternal characteristics of the god, presumably having been “installed” in the original edition of Apollo launched some millennia earlier at a place and time whose particulars can apparently never be ascertained (as Brahmin himself admits), but yet which also somehow must have likewise reflected these conditions. With this incoherent account, Brahmin also appears to forget that his own writings place Apollo in a historical genealogy stretching back at least to ancient Sumer and the god Shamash, with respect to whom these features and circumstances cannot be applied with any credibility.[2] As we’ll see below, there are other problems with the way these attributes are curated by Apolloism, but the absence of any tradition in Babylonian and Akkadian sources of Shamash sharing in the traits or social and historical conditions that are borrowed from Classical Attica and used to bootstrap the Nordicization of the Greeks presents a problem for this account.
The third issue, closely related to the second, is that the single author thesis cannot easily be reconciled with the fact of cult diversity within ancient polytheism during the time periods that Brahmin haphazardly assumes are representative of the mysterious circumstances of Apollo’s origin (hence my earlier fixation on the mistaken notion of a singular “cult” of Apollo). In the historical record, we see that local cults developed more or less organically around local shrines and among local families, clans and communities; even where gods shared names and surely some anthropological genealogy, they remained “naturally” distinct from one another until exogenous historical and political events forced them to syncretize. The mere existence of a divine name shared by two separate cults was not a sufficient reason to consider them to be equivalent, indistinct or interchangeable. By extension, the gods worshipped in these cults each had their own distinct biographies, stories and histories particular to the community of devotion. Among the Ionians in the 5th-4th Centuries, for example, inhabitants of Delphi worshipped, among others, Apollo Delphios and Apollo Pythios, and those in Athens worshipped, among others, Apollo Patroos; despite each being devoted to Apollo nominally, these particular cults did not coalesce and were in nowise equated with each other until very late—well after the 5th Century BC and possibly closer to the 2nd Century BC.
These Apollonian cults coexisted within Ionia among peoples who spoke the same language, shared much of their history and traditions and were separated by less than 150km, but unification (in a sense of bringing together the disparate cults and characters of Apollo worshipped at the different shrines into a single, merged identity of “Apollo”) only occurred in the extraordinary cauldron of Athenian imperialism during the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, in which new identities were forged by titanic acts of political might through the Delian League, the existential threats of destruction from warfare, the crisis of the Great Plague of 430-27 BC and antecedent political strife stretching back to the cleansing mania of the Peisistratids in the 6th Century.[3] The process of imperial conquest of the Aegean by Athens in the 5th Century, the attendant construction of a new, greater “Athenian” identity and the works of the Athenian theater in this period could be seen as preconditions to the unification of the oracular Delphic god, the cleansing sponsor of the thargelia (Apollo Pythios) and the separate tradition of the Ionian race’s ancestral god (Apollo Patroos). These traditions of Apollo are instead assumed by Brahmin to have been hardcoded into Apollo at his inception.
Similarly, cult diversity can be seen historically as constructive of particular attributes of gods, developing accretively in connection with particular shrines or historical events.[4] Some of the most famous associations that we now make with Apollo include his connection with serpents through the slaying of Python[5] and his identification with the physical sun. With the former though, the tradition is a specifically Delian one that moderns simply apply to an overall, composite picture of the god. Similarly, with his affiliation with the sun, Apollo was actually only rarely considered a “sun god”;[6] widespread devotion to the cults of Sol or Helios and their merger with Apollo were largely developments during the Imperial period of Rome, with the sun and the moon being associated with the cults of Helios and Selene as minor deities for most of Roman history before that point.[7] The vast majority of evidence from antiquity of identification of Apollo with the sun arose largely in the context of a Neo-Platonist philosophic effort during the 2nd-4th Centuries AD to apply physical allegoresis to the tenets of traditional religion in a hermeneutic of natural theology.[8]
In other illustrations of the accretive nature of divine characters, the understanding of Apollo’s fatherhood of Ion (and thus his patronage of Ionians and Athenians generally, which was fundamental to the cult of Apollo Patroos) first arises in Euripedes’ play, Ion in the late 5th Century—there are no prior accounts of Apollo acting in an ancestral role to the Ionians.[9] This fact is relevant to the attempt to position Apollo, the Hyperborean, as the recovery of a primary founding type among Greeks, and shows that rather than it being integral to the development and launch of his original “cult”, it was a later addition to the Apollonian tradition. Likewise, we see in the examples of Apollo Alexikakos and Apollo Acestor supplication for relief from the Great Plague, which introduces a new emphasis (if not an entirely new feature) of Apollo’s role as a savior from plagues (rather than the instigator). Other specific epithets and local cults, like Apollo Akesios of Elis or Apollo Epikourios of Bassae, are noted by ancient commentators in connection with specific shrines and in response to specific historical events.[10] Wolf-Apollo (Apollo Lykeios), one of the oldest cults of Apollo, can be seen in inscriptions from Paros to Corinth and elsewhere as attesting to the ancient Ionians’ understanding of the symbolism of the wolf as representing adolescence or the period in which adolescent boys were on the fringes of society before being introduced into civic life as young adults. Specifically in Athens, Apollo Lykeios oversaw this process of transition and integration of young people into the society of men.[11] These facts naturally complicate any attempt to view Apollo as a more or less static, unitary god having been developed from an orderly inception, fully “installed” from the outset with eugenic, Nordic raiment and prepared to do mythic battle with Jews. Thus, to make the modest point more emphatic, the equation of Apollo to particular literary characters like Superman and Batman simply cannot be taken seriously.
To be clear, the mere fact of cult diversity is by no means a prima facie refutation of the single author thesis or the idea of a single originary cult; indeed, the Apollonian is already well aware that there are many epithets and many different local shrines to Apollo, each with its own history and particularities. All this can easily be explained by him as simply the natural consequence of the development and proliferation of worship in the Bronze Age—there is no inherent conflict between this situation and the idea of an original ancestral Apollonian tradition. The problem with this picture, however, should be clear: if presented with cult diversity, any attempt to “repristinate” the originary form must have clear criteria for discriminating between which examples of the cult are true to the original ideal and which are not—one is not free to pick and choose which forms and which traits, attributes and stories of the god worshipped are original and which ones are corruptions or illegitimate innovations. So, a particular syncretistic form of Apollo, drawn from diverse traditions and circumstances, is imagined by the movement to be consonant with the paradigmatic, originary version of the god. Without attempting to make sense of cult diversity, the basic propositions of Apolloism about the original form of Apollo and the intent behind the cult’s foundation amount to more sophistry and empty speculation and, even if these positions warranted further consideration for purposes of building out the argument, they compel no acceptance as offered. Neither can the Apollonian resolve the issue by declaring that all of the cults and devotional traditions surrounding Apollo are equally valid manifestations of the original, ideal form, as we’ll see shortly.
Carrying the previous point further, the fourth problem we can identify with the repristinated, original form of the cult imagined by Apolloism is that it conflicts with evidence that we do have about the origins and development of Apollo’s cults. In his landmark study of the god, Fritz Graf surveys the major candidates for explaining the origins of Apollo and underscores the composite, syncretistic character of what became the Greek and Roman versions, and how Mycenean antecedents in Crete, certain Near Eastern influences and pre-Archaic Dorian and Cypriot cult belief fed into what became the high classical, composite version we commonly identify with the Periclean and Hellenistic Aegean, complicating attempts to isolate and reconstruct particulars of the god’s creation.[12] Separately, in J. Rendel Harris’ exploration of the cults’ origins over a century ago, several details discussed create acute problems for multiple claims made by Brahmin about Apollo in his originary form. First, Harris observes the “proved mythological consanguinity” of Apollo and Dionysus, the latter of whom can be connected to the Indo-Aryan peoples and their thunder and storm gods.[13] According to Harris, the equivalence between the sun and sky on the one hand and thunder and storms on the other is well-attested in the relevant mythological sources: “The sun-god is, in some way, connected with the Thunder and with the Sky, before he becomes the patron and spirit of the orb of day.” This relationship is borne out by the Babylonian tradition, with Shamash and Ramman (the god of thunder) being merged into Shamash-Ramman in examples from Babylonian sources. The relationship is one of complementarity, with similar ratios being found in the signification between Apollo and Dionysus and those found between bright and dark skies.[14] Furthermore, the equivalence of the two gods was observed by Dio Chrysostom and Macrobius, who each noted that Liber Pater is himself the sun and Apollo, and that many people among them know this.[15] The popularity of this view could be viewed as part of a longstanding tradition within the Greek and Latin worlds, stretching back to Herodotus who observed—without even a hint of scandal—that the Egyptians considered Apollo to be the son of Dionysus and Isis.[16]
Harris further shows that both cults likely have their anthropological origins in plant symbolism. Apollo’s association with oak predates that of laurel, and the oak contains within it the differentiation of the cult of the sky (bright sky and dark sky). The ivy is the symbol of thunder, contrasting with the mistletoe of sunshine. Mistletoe’s solar value is attested by the story of Ixion, the mistletoe man who revolves around Hades on a solar wheel. Apollo too is a mistletoe-man, writes Harris, and in fact there was a town in Rhodes called Ixiae (Mistletoe-town), where Apollo was worshipped under the title Mistletoe-Apollo (parallel to Ivy-Dionysus).[17] Additional attestation of “vegetable-Apollo” and his symbolic affinity for plants is in evidence: Apollo is connected to poplar trees, as shown in ancient coinage and inscriptions (which Brahmin problematically says signify the underworld and are connected to chthonic deities)[18]; we have cult evidence of Apollonian apple trees; archaeologists have found coins of Alabanda in Caria depicting Apollo crowned in ivy; we have written records of crowns of ivy being worn during the Hyacinthia festival (part of the cycle of Apollo’s cult); Apollonian priestesses chewed the laurel for inspiration (just as the Maenads chew ivy in Dionysiac rituals); and cults in Rhodes and elsewhere devoted to Helios (as an avatar of Apollo) are shown depicted crowned with ivy and grapes in Dionysiac manner.[19]
These facts all demand answers from Apolloism. The evidence on early cult activity reveals diversity in ways that confound the narrative proposed by Brahmin about the precipitating causes and motivations behind Apollo’s creation. One imagines that Brahmin would gladly accept all of them, and simply point out that he has never denied the phenomenon of subversion, degeneration and Semitization of the pure, honorable Aryan deity: here, perhaps, we just have more examples of this occurring. This cannot be taken seriously, though. The details mentioned here in at least certain cases come from early cult activity and are too widespread to be the result of a campaign to degrade the myth body, to say nothing of the utter lack of evidence to support this hypothetical explanation (for instance, where is there any record of controversy over symbolism and cult activity like this? Were these controversies just scrubbed from the historical record?). And merely setting aside the inconvenient examples of vegetable-Apollos, mistletoe-Apollo and his genealogical consanguinity with Dionysus as corruptions of the original Nordic version, without any independent criterion for determining the pristine form, is plainly just question-begging and shows the costs in credibility the Apollonian has to pay to maintain his account.
This brings us to a fifth problem with Brahmin’s origin story: the entire notion contained within Apolloism’s single author thesis of conscious, coordinated, intentional development of gods and myths, teleologically oriented toward political, cultural and artistic ends, with supposedly centralized regulation of ritual practice and festivals, and discrimination in storytelling on the basis of moral content is all tantamount to a “Christianization” of Greco-Roman polytheism, a construction of orthodoxy in belief about Apollo. The solution to the issue of cult diversity offered by Apolloism is to propose a central, originary institution akin to the Christian Apostolic tradition of the Church where a governing body regulates and promulgates liturgy, canonicity and the correct set of beliefs about who and what Apollo is. This view of antiquity and pre-Christian polytheism has long been unanimously rejected by scholars though, so any case made for its existence must shoulder a remarkable burden of proof. The cumulative result of these points should be obvious by now: the belief that Apollo was consciously developed as eugenic agitprop runs headlong into a regiment of problems and disproofs in the form of a poverty of supporting evidence, the fact of cult diversity and syncretism, composite origin sources and more parsimonious alternative accounts of historical development.
2. Apolloism and Ancient Ideas about Race.
Moving on from questions of cult origins, what about the descriptions of Apollo highlighted by Brahmin—the bright, fair, blond-haired northern invader, the Hyperborean Archegetes who was the “most Greek”[20]—don’t these speak at least as loudly as any historical or archaeological testimony? The argument Brahmin offers seems to proceed in the following way: (i) blond hair and light eyes are clearly traits associated with Nordic peoples, who inhabit the geographic region north of the Greeks and Romans; (ii) such inhabitants constitute a racial category that the ancient Greeks and Romans were familiar with and which they revered; (iii) these same ancient Greeks and Romans also identified themselves with this category; (iv) Apollo shares these characteristics in common and therefore belongs to this same category; and (v) being a god, Apollo is himself an idealized, existential and aesthetic standard worthy of emulation. Therefore, Apollo is the ideal, Nordic racial form of the Greeks and Romans who worshipped him.
Apart from the embarrassing fact that a non sequitur like this could apparently serve as the central argumentative mooring of the entire movement of Apolloism, the premises that make up the argument hardly withstand any historical scrutiny. Here again, we are given absolutely no evidence of the existence of any background concept of an “Aryan race” in antiquity, much less any inkling that there existed some sort of latent interethnic unity among the Mediterranean peoples (and less still that it applied even more widely to all European peoples as we now understand them). Along with the anachronism of an idealized racial Nordic type that formally appears for the first time in European history in the 19th Century, the entire existence of a broader European racial identity is simply presupposed, against the grain of informed scholarship around ancient concepts of race.[21]
We do not have to guess what the ancients thought about race and its relation to identity, however, for there is an abundance of source material. The Greek naturalists showed a keen interest in the group characteristics that are now subsumed under racial categories and broadly develop three key themes for understanding these: the first is an environmental and geographic framework for understanding human nature; the second involves the belief in the transmission of acquired characteristics; and the third relates to concepts of purity in descent. What the sources tell us is that there is a very complicated and uneven picture of how, where and in whom virtuous and attractive characteristics should appear. In some cases (well known to the Nordicists of the 19th and early 20th Centuries), commentators paint pictures of the blonde northerners that succor presumptions about the courage and warlike ability of these tribes. But these examples cannot be gerrymandered as if they have greater legitimacy than the plentiful other materials that indict the wisdom, discipline, virility, temperament, sociability, civility and industriousness of the same people.
In broad strokes, the Greek tradition of environmental influences on human nature converges on a notion that resonates in the philosophical register, namely the belief that extremes in environment and climate produce distortions in human nature, whereas some balance between polarities results in a prized balance in temperament, character and virtue. We see these themes explored, for instance, in Herodotus’ Histories and the 5th Century BC treatise, Airs, Waters, Places, commonly attributed to Hippocrates. In these and other examples, we find judgments about men’s nature and character linked to climate, geography and institutions in ways that cannot easily be reconciled with the 19th Century scientific racism of Apolloism. Aristotle synthesizes a number of ideas in this vein and observes:
“The peoples of cold countries generally, and particularly those of Europe, are full of spirit, but deficient in skill and intelligence; and this is why they continue to remain comparatively free, but attain no political development and show no capacity for governing others. The peoples of Asia are endowed with skill and intelligence, but are deficient in spirit; and this is why they continue to be peoples of subjects and slaves. The Greek stock, intermediate in geographical position, unites the qualities of both sets of peoples. It possesses both spirit and intelligence: the one quality makes it continue free; the other enables it to attain the highest political development, and to show a capacity for governing every other people—if only it could once achieve political unity.”[22]
In essence, the Greeks are the ideal group because they are located in the middle of extremes and combine the spirit and freedom of the peoples of Europe with the intelligence and competence of the Asiatics. Apart from these sorts of stereotypes which litter the ancient sources, we have other additional examples of the Greeks discriminating against other Greeks (for instance, Plato and Aristotle both counseled strongly against mixed marriages even among different Hellenic ethnoi and supported disallowing Greeks from other city-states into other Greek city-states) and disparaging the Romans in racist terms, deeming the latter unworthy of being counted among the glorious “Hellenes”.
Regarding Greek ideas about heredity, the picture that emerges clearly from the Airs and other sources, is that traits can be physically manipulated and then transmitted by inheritance, and that there is no difference between innate and acquired traits. In his magisterial review of ancient racism, Benjamin Isaac makes the following point about the proto-Lamarckian ideas of the Greeks:
“In contemporary terms, the hypothesis suggests that there is some inherent biological property that enables organisms to pass on physical modifications to their descendants, independently of a Darwinian mechanism of selection. One of the consequences of the theory could be that no animal—or race—is locked forever into its present characteristics, which is the essence of racism, as first stated by Immanuel Kant.”[23]
The third theme in the Greek sources relates to the idea of pure lineage and descent. Here too, the story that Brahmin tells of a pure, unadulterated Hyperborean Nordic origin in Apollo as the eugenic ideal sought after by Greeks is simply rejected by the Ionian and Attic Greeks’ very own account of their autochthonous origin, being proudly born of the earth in which they inhabited (this view having been confirmed by Tacitus, Plutarch and Pompeius Trogus): “Athenians are unique in priding themselves on their origins as well as their development. It was not immigrants or a motley rabble of people brought together at random that founded the city; rather, the Athenians were born from the land which they inhabit, and their home is also their place of origin.”[24] This principle of autochthony is what gave birth to the concept of “mother country” in European thought (contrasted, for instance, with Jews’ view that their promised land is simply given them by God).[25] How then can the idea that the Classical civilizations held some concept of racial unity, of being bound together through an imagined Hyperborean ancestral tradition that can be credibly mapped onto the modern notion of the white European race, be reconciled with these facts? Even in its best light, the Greek sources point us to conflicted conclusions about how racial identity should be understood.
The Roman authorities scarcely offer more support for a racial identity that transcends localized ethnic differentiation. Between the Greeks and Romans, we clearly see different ethnographic traditions, with the Greeks relying heavily on environmental and geographic factors in their racism, and Romans opting for a less systematic approach, but adopting some combination of a North-South geographic dichotomy and a continuation of the Ionian emphasis on “pure lineage” (e.g. Tacitus’ famous description of the Germans as being of pure race; importantly, however, his description does not fit well into the Greek tradition). In any event, the well-known campaigns by the Romans against the Gauls, Germans and Celts reveal the opposite of a shared ancestral tradition.
To review just a few examples, Livy reports that Cornelius Manlius, a Roman general addressing his troops in 189 BC about their Gallic foes, saying that “These are now degenerate, of mixed stock and really Gallogrecians.”[26] The message is not only clear, but was also presumed as obvious to his audience: Gauls mixed with Greeks amount to a degraded stock. These Gauls were described by Roman authors from Caesar to Diodorus as being tall, blonde, strong and courageous in war, but also greedy, heavy drinkers, fickle and unruly, and having little stamina in battle despite being ferocious.[27] The Germans, meanwhile, receive a similarly mixed review from Tacitus, Strabo and Seneca, being savage, lazy, poor, boorish, irascible wild beasts, and lacking the power of human intellect (we see a motif among Romans of identifying the northerners as courageous but dim, and southerners as clever but soft).[28] The Celts, on the other hand, are described by Hadrian’s companion, Polemon of Laodicea, as being typically eunuchs.[29]
There are two related points to make here: first, there is no evidence presented by Brahmin of the Romans or Greeks discussing, debating or adopting any sort of taxonomy of human beings that could fairly be assimilated into the modern Nordicist concept of an ideal European racial type posited by the 19th Century thinkers who were coopted and perverted by Apolloism, and instead plenty of evidence that they held strong and widespread biases against the very peoples whom we would expect them to revere, were such a concept actually in currency among ancient elites.[30] If the Greeks and Romans self-consciously exalted a Nordic form as their ideal type, then surely we would find some evidence from ancient writers and chroniclers noting this relationship in their interactions with their Germanic and Celtic neighbors. But in fact, the record shows nothing of the sort. Moreover both the ancient racial categories themselves and the stereotypes that constitute them simply fail to fit neatly into modern prejudices about what attributes are natural to which peoples.
And second, even if we granted that a pan-European racial category might have made sense to an ancient Roman or Greek, there is no attempt made whatsoever to connect any such idea to any political, social or cultural campaign of unification among European ethnics, no sense at all that any Roman anywhere at any time viewed the Gauls’, Germans’ or Celts’ racial ancestry as providing any basis for any political or military unity, social cooperation or anything else that remotely resembles a common cause. Nor can any such imagined impulse to racial unity be attributed to the cult of Apollo. On the contrary, what we see from the long history of warfare between Rome and their putative racial brethren to the north is a wealth of evidence that they found the Gauls, Germans or Celts to resemble something subhuman (if occasionally romanticized) and significantly less civilized than the Romans themselves; indeed, if anything, we have a prima facie case that the Apollo cult—to the extent it was a political and military force in late Republican and Imperial Rome—actually led the Romans to despise their racial kin with more intensity and to bring the full force of their military down against them in horrific genocidal fashion.
Given the discussion above, there is simply no basis for believing that ancient depictions of Apollo, replete with golden hair, bright eyes and perfect form, correspond to any category of a racial ideal resembling a Nordic Aryan that would have been familiar to Greek or Roman authors or which would have provided a basis for unity around notions of racial identity. So how do we make sense of these attributes then? Quite easily it turns out.
First, the identification of Apollo as a “Hyperborean” is not a straightforward matter of a biographic detail about his geographic or racial origin in a way that could even be connected to Nordic peoples, given that there are mythical accounts of Apollo that do not include a “Hyperborean” association. For instance, the Ephesians said that Apollo and Artemis were born in the grove of Ortygia near Ephesus[31], whereas the inhabitants of Tegyra in Boeotia and of Zoster in Attica claimed that Apollo originated from their shrine.[32] Likewise, there are conflicting accounts in myth about Apollo’s parentage, as noted by Cicero [33] and as previously noted by Herodotus: while the Egyptians believed that he was the son of Dionysus and Isis, the Delians thought him the son of Zeus and Leto and born on the island of Delos (as recounted in the Homeric Hymns and Callimachus’ poetry, which has become the most widely known account of his parentage). I am, of course, not attempting to arbitrate the question of his birth and origin within myth, but the disagreements are important because it means that Apolloism needs a criterion external to the theory by which to determine that some mythic account within the broader corpus is more reliable than another. (Choosing the most common stories would arguably be a legitimate criterion, but this creates different problems for Apolloism, as these same common traditions implicate the god in a variety of unsavory associations, activities and intrigues that are elsewhere disclaimed as being foreign or Jewish corruptions of an imagined pristine tradition.)
But we can stipulate for the moment that Apollo is in fact always and everywhere known as the Hyperborean and that this says something about his origin. What does this mean? As we’ve seen above, parsing “Hyperborean” as a mythic recovery of an ancestral racial tradition of origins in Scandinavia cannot plausibly be reconciled with the abundant evidence of racial prejudice held by Greek and Roman elites about their northern neighbors, or with other ancient traditions about ancestral origin (e.g. the Ionians being autochthonous, the Romans in the early Imperial period declaring their Trojan ancestry). Classicists have long understood “Hyperborea” to refer to Macedonia or the Balkans Mountains,[34] but others have offered different ideas: “In dealing with this question [where the pre-Hellenic “Hyperboreans” are located] we encounter a fairly substantial body of evidence which takes us eastwards from the haunts of Apollo to the steppe country of Central Asia”. In fact, Herodotus tells us that the Scythians knew nothing about the Hyperboreans, other references to Hyperboreans that place them farther and farther East. There are speculations that the Hyperboreans may even come from the Alps in Italy, but Casson says “The Hyperboreans as a nucleus of myths and travelers’ tales belong essentially to the Far East of antiquity. The griffins which are so closely associated with them belong to Asia, while the celestial calm which characterizes the Utopian conditions of the land of the Hyperboreans may well be some faint echo from civilized China which reached the informants of Abaris and Aristeas…The legends of the Hyperboreans undoubtedly reached Greece from the East in the first part of the sixth century BC at the latest.”[35]
Its symbolic significance also complicates any glib assimilation into a Nordic identity. In Hecataeus of Abdera in the 4th Century BC, the Hyperboreans are an imaginary people typical of Golden Age utopian writing: they “know no sickness, old age, toil or warfare” and their land is unusually fecund. Surprisingly they were also not infrequently connected to those who dwelt in the furthest south, the black Ethiopians. Hecataeus’ picture—corroborated by Diodorus[36]—also identifies the Hyperboreans as being a priestly people. This stylizing of an entire people as priests was in fact likely understood as an Egyptizing move, as the Egyptians were renowned in Herodotus and elsewhere as being exceptionally pious. This Egyptization also makes sense of the fact that in Greece, being overly pious was considered superstitious, so the preeminence of oracular Apollo’s Pythian priestess and other sacred offices in his cults required a non-Greek origin for legitimacy—the Egyptians could get away with it because of their natural piety, but not the Greeks. Hecataeus’ other descriptions of Hyperborean rituals and cult practice are also suggestive of Egypt as the inspiration (e.g. role of sacred animals, song, dedication of an entire city to a god, etc.).[37]
The controversy over who the Hyperboreans were, what they meant to the Greeks and how that fails again to figure into a picture of Nordic origin complicates the picture enough, but more problematic still is James Romm’s summary of the Hyperboreans’ relationship to the Greeks: unlike the autochthonous heroes of Delphi and Delos who are actually claimed as ancestors of the Ionian peoples, “the Hyperboreans, by contrast, are not conceived of as the ancestors of any latter-day Greek peoples; their memorials do not mediate between god and man in the same way as, for example, the sites associated with Heracles' labors. We might therefore distinguish Hyperborean landmarks as the signatures of exogenous rather than indigenous heroes, recalling no familial or national triumph but only marking a spot where mysterious outsiders have come and gone.”[38] This all has the effect of distancing the Greeks from the Hyperboreans, rather than anchoring them in a common ancestry.
But then again, all of this may be moot because—shockingly—Brahmin himself appears to offer a not unconvincing argument that we should disregard his insinuations about Hyperborean connoting a northern, Scandinavian ancestral tradition after all. He writes: “Indeed, the cult of the northern hyperborean Apollo is not tied to Anatolia or the Mediterranean…If it is tied to any modern land, it is Scandinavia, ‘the womb of nations.’ Yet even this is wholly irrelevant as before this he dwelt in Caucasia and who knows where.”[39] This admission is bizarre for it appears to neuter the entire point of linking Apollo to the Hyperboreans in order to burnish his racial credentials. If the Aryan race truly has inscrutable geographic origins, then Apollo as the Hyperborean cannot be used as an argument for his Nordic typology. For it cannot be true that a northerly origin both demonstrates Nordicism and simultaneously is just an accidental or occasional feature of Nordicism. Thus, by Brahmin’s own terms, this can only be an ambiguous and irrelevant biographical detail in the end.
So, if the Hyperborean identifier cannot actually authenticate Apollo’s pedigree, we are left with only one or two physical details in descriptions of the god (comprising the premises set out in (i)-(iv) of the argument as presented above) to establish the racial identity that is crucial to the movement’s foundation. Depictions of Apollo as having the physical features that Brahmin attributes to him—golden hair, fair, bright and so on—are indeed well attested in the ancient sources. But while these details are immediately seized upon by Brahmin as indicators of race, this point obscures a tendency in Greek iconography which provides a different, much better explanation for what the traits actually meant to Greeks (particularly in light of the deeper problems with projecting modern racial categories onto the ancients). This tendency is to depict the gods as embodying the objects, places and environments of which they are the divine patrons. There are many examples, but to point out a few: Poseidon is described variously as having deep blue eyes, dark hair or even blue hair, so as to match his oceanic domain,[40] as is Amphitrite, queen of the sea (described by Homer as blue-eyed[41]); similarly, the Nereids, as sea nymphs, are dark-haired;[42] Demeter, as goddess of the harvest, agriculture, crops, grains and wheat is called “blonde Demeter”;[43] Dionysus, as the god of the grape-harvest and wine, is often seen adorned in purples and reds; Hades, as god of the underworld, is naturally black-haired;[44] Selene, the goddess of the moon, is gray-eyed;[45] Zeus, as sky-god, is said to have dark blue brows;[46] the goddess Eos, personifying the rising sun is “bright-haired;[47] and Helios, as a sun god, likewise has flashing golden eyes[48] and gold hair.[49] Given these examples, Apollo, being a god of light (and primarily later on, a god of the sun), would naturally be depicted as having fair, light features simply for reasons of the convention of depicting gods so as to connect them to the objects and environs of their patronage.
There are additional problems with this approach. First, nowhere in ancient Greek and Roman writings do we find any indication that Jews were physically distinctive in any way from gentiles. In the copious ethnographic accounts that survive, we find ancient commentators pointing out the distinctive hair styles, clothing, skin tones, height, build, etc. of foreign peoples—but not a single author makes this type of commentary about the Jews. In order to establish that the physical characteristics being picked out and idealized were intended to emphasize a particular form of identity (Aryanness) as against another (Jewishness), we would need a contrast case for these characteristics. But we have none; for all we know, the ancient Jews equally fit the description Brahmin offers of the gentiles. In any case, there are numerous counterexamples to Brahmin’s proposed interpretation of color imagery as hard racialized molds, such as when Dionysus and Mercury—according to Brahmin, strictly chthonic, Semitic and degenerate deities—are also described by Hesiod and Apuleius, respectively, as having golden or blond hair, with Mercury being especially “radiant”. If attributes of this type are supposed to prove racial identity, then Brahmin has a problem explaining these. Contrariwise, we see Aryan, celestial gods and goddesses like Aphrodite and Hera having dark hair and dark or brown eyes in Homer. The simple result here is that Greek and Roman sources confound any attempt to racialize attributes into the anachronistic categories favored by Brahmin.
3. Thargelia, Phratries and Eugenics.
Apart from Apollo’s identity, we also see the claim that his cult operates as a eugenic force in the ancient world—in Brahmin’s words, the mere existence of the thargelia confirms a fortiori the entire hypothesis, a claim which he then connects to a discussion on the ancient phratries. As mentioned previously, the belief that religion and cult activity have a selective, generative and eugenic effect on peoples is not unique or new to REM Theory or Apolloism. To my knowledge, however, the linking of this phenomenon specifically to the Ionian thargelia is in fact novel. (The aspects of the festival that interest Brahmin are the ritual expulsions of two scapegoats known as pharmakoi, which are often, but not exclusively, taken to be wretched, ugly and detested individuals.) Brahmin makes two basic points about the thargelia: first, that it is central to cultic devotion to Apollo and second, that it clearly testifies to the intentional, conscious, eugenic preoccupation of the same cult. Both of these points however have problems that are not identified, acknowledged or addressed in the theoretical writings.
With the first claim, the principal problems are that the thargelia was an Ionian, rather than a “Greek” or Roman, ritual, and it predates evidence for the arrival of cultic devotion to Apollo in Ionia, dating at least back to the Aegean Dark Ages.[50] Further, we simply do not find it everywhere that Apollo is worshipped.[51] This obviously requires explanation, for if the expulsion of those who are offensive to the Apollonian ideal is taken as integral to the disciplinary eugenic social force exerted by such devotion on its worshippers, then it should certainly follow Apollo in some form wherever he is worshipped. Yet even as late as the 2nd Century BC, the thargelia in the year 129, for example, does not include honors for Apollo Patroos, who had no priest that year despite having his own temple in the agora, showing that even with syncretization, the festival could not even be reliably associated with the different cults of Apollo just within Delphi and Athens.[52] This is a very strange fact if the purpose of the ritual is to honor a primary founding type and yet the quintessentially ancestral cult of Apollo Patroos was not even honored during the ritual.
Secondly, the thargelia was inextricably connected with seasonal renewal, in an association that would ordinarily appear to draw accusations of a dubious and chthonic character from Brahmin. For instance, on the second day of the festival, a first-fruit sacrifice was performed and the eiresione was paraded around the city, in clear indications that the festival sought to secure seasonal renewal and assurance of coming prosperity after the scarceness of winter.[53] Preceding this, on the first day was the expulsion of the pharmakoi, which Bremmer notes is similar to rituals found, inter alia, in Tibet, Ethiopia and Rome, where a ritual purification characteristically precedes the start of a new harvest (for the decidedly non-Aryan Ethiopians, this involved casting two men out to sea, never to return again).[54] Very often, if not in most cases, the examples of actual historical persecution of the pharmakoi was merely symbolic: “The people fling after him stones and dirt, taking, however, great care not to wound him severely, or prevent him from reaching the open country.”[55]
Regarding the character of the pharmakoi, there is disagreement between the historical and mythological sources. While historical sources identify the pharmakoi variously as being ugly, outcasts, or otherwise “useless” persons, the mythical sources are more ambiguous and imply that the pharmakoi could be less marginal persons and could even be royalty.[56] If the purpose of the thargelia was to enshrine a eugenic ritual cleansing of degeneracy, then it seems odd that the historical examples would only show symbolic rather than actual cleansing and the myths that discuss it seem either ambivalent about or altogether ignorant of this purpose. Approaching this situation from a standpoint outside of the circularity of REM Theory, any reasonable person could see that the thargelia actually fits perfectly well into a much larger body of ancient scapegoat rituals and seasonal renewal, which were widespread and utilized by communities well beyond the perimeters of Apollonian or even pre-Christian European cults to ward off plagues, famines and disasters or to win wars and secure a good harvest.
But even stipulating that the thargelia was primarily concerned with the purging of marginal and degenerate individuals from the communal body rather than seasonal renewal, if the mere fact of this ritual’s existence is somehow demonstrative of a conscious eugenic priority, then we must also assume that other historical examples of culturally sanctioned persecution of marginal groups was likewise consciously eugenic. And if this should be so, then how much more eugenic must a culture like late Medieval and early modern European Christendom have been as compared to Apollonian Ionia, since in the former case we have significantly more historical evidence of the large-scale, ritualized prosecution, conviction and execution of tens of thousands of marginal figures (who were overwhelmingly poor, despised, dispossessed and disenfranchised) for witchcraft, sorcery and antisociality? Here, there is not only the symbolic and mythic element of isolating, ostracizing and persecuting those whose wickedness threatened the harvest of crops, fertility of married couples, childbirth, rearing and raising of infants and more, but the entire campaign was even memorialized in legal codes, common law, ecclesiastical orders, writs and the very beating heart of institutions established to ensure justice and right social ordering. The alternative conclusion, of course, is that neither of these examples actually provides any warrant for believing that a conscious, intentional eugenic program was being pursued.
Quickly, I will also address the point of phratries that Brahmin connects to the thargelia in hoping to establish its eugenic orientation. The fact is that scholars know very little about the phratries, and the scholarship shows that there is controversy over Apollo’s relationship to them. While Graf maintains that Apollo did figure importantly as a protector of citizenship through the phratries in Ionia,[57] Cromey argues that the evidence shows that Apollo Patroos was not a god specific to phratries or phratry life, and that his cult was a 4th Century invention. Among the sources for actual phratry inductions, which occurred during the most important festival of the phratries, the Apatouria, there is in fact no record of Apollo Patroos acting as an inductor and no mention of an Apollo “Phratrios” at all: “All phratries celebrated the Apatouria, but Zeus Phratrios, Athena Phratria, and Dionysos were its deities, with Apollo absent, though some now have thought to insert ‘Patroos’ as a ‘fosterer of youths’.”[58] So it seems that—ironically, unlike with Dionysus, who was clearly a relevant force in the civic institution of the Attic phratries—the best case to be made for Apollo’s involvement in the same institutions is one based on conflicting evidence, the meaning of which is disputed by scholars.
A final point about the phratries before moving onto the issue of ancient eugenics. Brahmin writes the following:
“In ancient Greek society, during the month of Apellaios, the Kouros was initiated into the Phratry or “Brotherhood/Fraternity” as he entered manhood. Phratry may also mean “kinfolk” and was a subdivision of phyle or “tribe.” The Phratry controlled access to civic society and membership within the Phratry was a requirement for citizenship. These relatively ideal conditions persisted until the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. The Phratries contained smaller kin groups known as Gene meaning “race, stock or kin.” These subdivisions appear to have arisen later than Phratries and appear to comprise of noble families. Not all Phratry members were involved in Gene. Hence we are encouraged to see even a conscious refinement toward racial or eugenic thinking amid increasingly urbanized conditions. Eventually Gene would become associated with hereditary priestly function. Modern historians commonly scratch their head at these opaque organizations called Phratry, yet, in a sense, what is happening here couldn’t be clearer.”[59]
Embarrassingly, this claim is wrong in several important respects. First, as noted above, the entire relationship between the cults of Apollo and the phratry as a civic institution is disputed by scholars and, even were it certain, would only apply to select cults of Apollo within Ionia at a particular point in time. No one could reasonably infer that anything that is true of certain cults in Ionia in the 5th Century must therefore also be true of the mysterious time and place of Apollo’s actual origin. Second, here we see more ignorant lay philology at work where haphazard adoption of dictionary translations of phratry and gene are shorn of all their nuance and instead are used to launder 19th Century concepts of race. In contrast to this buffoonish attempt to explain what scholars have missed, Cromey fastidiously lays out the difficulties with translating the relevant terms and, as usual with linguistic analysis, the devil is in the details. He writes the following (emphasis mine):
“Leaving Apollo Patroos to one side, it is necessary to illustrate the fact that the γεννῆται are a group separate from, yet participating in, the phratries. If one uses the term gennetai itself without attempting a translation, it soon becomes clear that as a group they were not kinsmen, probably by themselves not forming a 'genos', or 'gene'. It may seem odd, as R. Parker observes, that members of a 'genos' are not called 'gennetai', but clearly the plural came to have a specialized meaning, its singular being γεννέτης. As Ferguson said long ago, ‘the ancient interpreters take pains to differentiate the ties uniting gennetai from real kinship.’”
Without rehashing his fuller analysis, he emphasizes what had been previously shown by scholars, which is that the gennetai are not in fact relatives by blood or descent, a point which even ancient Greeks noted (e.g. Harpocration observes that “genos is not syngeneia”; Cromey observes that, consistent with this point, Harpocration never uses gennetai in place of ekgonoi, which does connote kin by blood descent). Rather the gennetai are civil associations (synodos, koinonia) organized for different purposes altogether.[60] Hedrick corroborates the point (emphasis, again, is mine):
“…Roussel has recently shown that tribal groups, such as the phratry, are not found in tribal Greek states, but only in the settled, geographically fixed world of the polis. The phratry, in other words, was not in origin a kinship group, but a unit of the polis, which was made to resemble kinship groups. Thus the issue of kinship is a red herring. The phratry was in origin a political entity, an institution of the polis. There is no reason, no evidence for the conjecture that the phratry was in the Archaic period or at any time some kind of "pure" kinship group. It is far simpler and more reasonable to suppose that the territorial character of the institution in the Classical period is a continuation and reflection of the essential and original nature of the group.”[61]
We now turn briefly to the question looming in the background of the discussion of thargelia, phratries and gennetai: ancient ideas about eugenics. Eugenics in the sense that we moderns use it dates back to Plato’s Republic and his notion that principles of heredity and fertility could be wielded and regulated so as to form, successively over generations, a more desirable civil body. Similarly, Aristotle devotes an entire chapter in Book 7 of his Politics to regulating reproduction. While many of the recommendations from the Greek philosophers intuitively map quite well onto modern Darwinian ideas about selection, the ancients (e.g. Hippocrates, Megasthenes, Strabo, Arrian, Pliny and others) also clearly believed in proto-Lamarckian principles about the transmission of acquired characteristics that discourage any attempt to equate the schemes too generously.[62] This is significant because it requires us to revise what we think about how, even if they were interested in pursuing positive eugenic politics as imagined by Brahmin,[63] the approach would have to be very different from modern policies. This should not be surprising in any event, given that by the start of the Imperial period, Roman elites viewed adoption as a quasi-divine act, bestowing all of the adopter’s rights and privileges onto the adopted son. Adoption was viewed with such reverence that an adopted son was considered more prestigious and more respectable than a natural son (one need only take the example of Julius Caesar and compare the legacy of his natural son, Caesarion, with that of his adopted son, Octavian).[64]
Nonetheless, the examples from Classical Athens in particular are instructive, especially when compared with the examples from the 19th and early 20th Centuries: the notion that there should be any urgency, obligation or desirability to improving the quality of the mass of common and lower classes is a strongly democratic concern that can scarcely be divorced from the integral, liberalizing or populist society. It is not surprising that the systematic approach to eugenics should first arise with Plato and Aristotle, given that they wrote in the wake of Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms in Athens and therefore that their biopolitics was itself a byproduct of such reforms. Likewise in the modern era, the eugenics movements were inseparable from elite anxieties over the liberalization of civic institutions and expanding the franchise in participatory democracies. Hence the notorious association of progressives with the eugenics movement in America around the turn of the 20th Century. As with so many other examples we have looked at, we find here once more the particulars of a modern American perspective being confused for abstract and universal background principles that operate as constants even in the mists of cult origins. The fact is that there has never been a general interest in perfecting the materiality of race at the political, religious or mythic level that transcends historical contexts.
Finally, I cannot help but to point out something that has been observed by other commentators on the movement of Apolloism, which is an irony inherent in asking Apollo specifically to bear the burden of an ancient biopolitical campaign for eugenics when one also happens to be committed to a bourgeois, quasi-Christian sexual ethics such as what we find in the movement. The irony I’m referring to of course is that Apollo—unlike Dionysus, in yet another layer of irony—was notorious in myth and tradition for his homosexual relationships. Brahmin is well aware of this, writing “[O]ne should understand unequivocally that the love affairs, untoward or otherwise, ascribed to Apollo are a late and decadent development in Greek mythology. Their perspective is certainly Semitic and ‘wistful.’”[65] This is exemplary of argumentation by bald assertion without evidence—insisting without any support whatsoever that Jews invented the stories of Apollo’s homosexual dalliances. But what is striking about this defense is that it requires that Brahmin repudiate a significant portion of the Classical canon as unreliable, including the writings of such luminaries as Callimachus, Virgil, Plutarch, Ovid, Apollodorus and Pausanius, all of whom corroborate uncritically Apollo’s homosexual liaisons. In the case of Plutarch, this is doubly problematic. First, because Plutarch records the following: “it is no mistake when the ancient poets tell their tales of the love Apollo bore Phorbas, Hyacinthus, and Admetus, as well as the Sicyonian Hippolytus”.[66] This of course shows that Apollo’s relationships with these men were known by the ancient poets, implying that they do not represent “late” developments after all. Second, Brahmin cites Plutarch approvingly multiple times when it involves something that Brahmin finds useful for his reconstruction of ancient history. This appears to be mere cherry-picking of source material however, unless he can offer some independent criterion that explains why Plutarch should be reliable when he says something that Brahmin finds useful but unreliable when he insists that the ancient poets were correct in recounting Apollo’s relationships with male lovers. In the final analysis, it is not difficult to see what is going on here, which is the same phenomenon we’ve seen throughout the treatment of ancient texts so far reviewed: a fundamentally unserious, illiterate inconsistent and incoherent approach to myth, history and the ancient world driven by the desire to create a ready-to-hand tradition that can be used to personify online habits in an aspirational new politics.
[To be continued.]