Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed.
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
Homer, The Iliad, Book 1: lines 1-8
1. These opening lines are the ground zero of Western literature and civilization. Cynically, we could say the literature like civilization is but a set of canonical texts that are meant to teach young people toxic dominant values to become good little obedient citizens. So what are dominant values? All things domination, of course. The Iliad is about brutal, graphic, violent domination, make no mistake. He doesn’t lie. This is why Simone Weil fucks with him and it, because she believes it’s the perfect depiction of a godless world. To her, Homer knows the truth of war (turning people into things, in her famous formula, one that anticipates Aimé Césaire’s thingification), whereas basically Virgil is a disgrace in her opinion, basically nothing more than a state propagandist with a nice style.
2. Civilization, whose society gets to have or be one—and whose doesn’t? The word “civil” relates to civitas, a Latin word, for city. And clearly the ancient political theorists and philosophers are all very clear on this. If you have a city of laws, you’re civilized. If you do not, you aren’t. You’re a barbarian, savage, lawless. Anything goes. Not that this imperialist logic is self-consistent. The Greeks flattened Troy off the face of the earth, though they were a warrior civilization with laws, borders, ranks and armies, and worshipped the same exact gods.
3. There are few major philosophers I detest like I detest Aristotle—and I have contempt for many of them. Yet like Homer—and unlike his teacher Plato (whose authoritarianism and elitism is more elegant and poetic, dramatic, secretive, hence to my eyes more seductive)—Aristotle is quite blunt:
And now that it is clear what are the component parts of the state, we have first of all to discuss household management; for every state is composed of households. Household management falls into departments corresponding to the parts of which the household in its turn is composed; and the household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen. The investigation of everything should begin with its smallest parts, and the primary and smallest parts of the household are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children; we ought therefore to examine the proper constitution and character of each of these three relationships, I mean that of mastership, that of marriage (there is no exact term denoting the relation uniting wife and husband), and thirdly the progenitive relationship (this too has not been designated by a special name).
So society consists in a city state and households, with both requiring rulership: whether king or father. (The king as father, one might say, though Aristotle early on tries to claim they are different things—his reasoning turns murky.) Aristotle announces nakedly everything bell hooks means by the phrase “white supremacist imperialist heterosexist patriarchy.” No, there were no white people in Homer or Aristotle’s time. There would be no such thing as a heterosexual either. Yet it is the structural identity of domination that is relevant as ever and precisely homologous. Whiteness is an invention of modernity, yes. Still, there are seeds where slavery has already become racialized in the Middle East of the Qur’an before turning into a fully-formed and legal identity by the 1600s in the British Atlantic colonies (1644 being the year where the first law ever written in the Western world to distinguish between white and non-white men). See The Black Holocaust for Beginners by S.E. Anderson (1996).