Lafargue on the moral precepts of emerging European class societies.

‘Formation of the Heroic Ideal’ by Paul Lafargue from Social and Philosophical Studies. Charles H. Kerr Publishing, Chicago. 1906.

One and the same word is used in the principal European languages to indicate material goods and moral Good. We may without suspicion of rashness conclude that the fact must be the same in the idioms of all nations which have arrived at a certain degree of civilization, since we know today that all traverse the same phases of material and intellectual evolution. Vico, who had set forth this historic law, affirms in his Scienza Nuova that

“there must necessarily exist in the nature of human affairs a mental language common to all nations, which language designates uniformly the substance of things which are the moving causes of social life. This language bends into different forms, as numerous as the different aspects which the things may assume. We have proof of this in the fact that proverbs, these maxims of popular wisdom, are alike in substance among all nations, ancient and modern, though they may be expressed in the most different forms.”

I pointed out in the preceding articles on the origin of abstract ideas and the idea of justice, the twists and turns through which the human spirit passed to represent in Egyptian hieroglyphics the abstract idea of motherhood by the image of the vulture and that of justice by the cubit. In this study I shall try to follow it in the tortuous road which it has traversed to arrive at confusing under the same word material goods and moral Good.

The words which in the Latin and Greek languages serve for material goods and moral Good were originally adjectives applied to the human being.

• Agathos (Greek), strong, courageous, generous, virtuous, etc.
• Ta agatha, goods, riches.
• To agathon, good, to akron agathon, the Supreme Good.
• Bonus (Latin), strong, courageous, etc.¹
• Bona, goods, bona patria, patrimony.
• Bonum, Good.

Agathos and bonus are generic adjectives. The Greeks and the Romans of barbarous times to whom they were applied possessed all the physical and moral qualities required by the heroic ideal; so their irregular superlatives, aristos, esthlos, beltistos, etc., and optimus, are in the plural used substantively to indicate the best and the foremost citizens. The historian, Velleius Paterculus gives the name of optimates to the patricians and the rich plebeians who leagued them selves against the Gracchi.

Strength and courage are the first and most necessary virtues of primitive men in perpetual war among themselves and against nature.² The savage and the barbarian, strong and courageous, possess in addition the other moral virtues of their ideal. Thus they comprise all physical and moral qualities under the same adjective. Strength and courage were then so near to the sum total of virtue that: the Latins, after using the word virtus for physical strength and courage, came to employ it for virtue, while the Greeks gave the same successive meanings to the word areté; and that the word pavelin, the primitive weapon, which in Greek is called kalon serves later for the beautiful, while the Latin word for it, quiris indicates the Roman citizen. Varro tells us that originally the Romans represented the god Mars by a javelin.

It was inevitable that strength and courage should make up the whole of virtue at that time, since to prepare for war, to acquire bravery in order to meet its perils, to develop physical strength so as to endure its fatigues and privations; and moral strength in order not to fall under the tortures inflicted upon prisoners, was the whole physical and moral education of the savages and barbarians. From childhood their bodies were suppled and tempered by gymnastic exercises and hardened by fasts and blows, under which they sometimes succumbed. Pericles, in his Funeral Oration over the first victims of the Peloponnesian War, contrasts this heroic education still in force at Sparta, which preserved its primitive customs, with that of the young men of Athens, which had entered into the democratic bourgeois phase. “Our enemies,” said he, “from the earliest childhood train themselves to courage with the severest discipline, and we, brought up with mildness, have no less ardor for running the same risks.” Livingston, who found among the African tribes these heroic customs, drew a similar contrast for certain black chieftains between the English soldiers and the negro warriors.

Since courage in ancient times was the whole of virtue, cowardice must necessarily have been vice; thus the words which in Greek and Latin mean cowardly, kakos and malus, have the meaning of evil, vice.³

When the barbarian society became differentiated into classes, the patricians monopolized courage and the defense of the country. This monopoly was “natural” (if I may apply the expression of bourgeois economics), although nothing appears more natural to the capitalists than to send in their place on colonial expeditions working men and peasants, and even, when they can, to entrust the defense of their country to proletarians, who possess neither an inch of land, nor a cog of a machine. The patricians reserved to themselves, as a privilege, the defense of their country, because they alone had a country, for, then, one had a country only on condition of possessing a corner of its soil. The foreigners who for reasons of commerce and industry resided in an ancient city, could not even possess the house in which they trafficked from father to son, and they remained foreigners although living in the city for generations. It required three centuries of struggles for the Roman plebeians who lived on the Aventine Hill to obtain property in the lands on which they had built their dwellings. The foreigners, the proletarians, the artisans, the merchants, the serfs and the slaves were relieved of military service and had no right to bear arms, nor even to have courage, which was the privilege of the patrician class.⁴ Thucydides relates that the magistrates of Sparta massacred treacherously two thousand Helots, who by their bravery had just saved the republic. From the moment that it was forbidden to the plebeians to take part in the defense of their native country, and consequently to possess courage, cowardice must necessarily have been the sovereign virtue of the plebeians, as courage was that of the aristocracy. Thus the Greek adjective, kakos (cowardly, ugly, bad), indicates a man of the plebeians; while aristos, superlative of agathos indicates a member of the patrician class – and the Latin malus indicates ugly, deformed as were in the patrician eyes the slave and the artisan deformed according to Xenophon, by their trades, while the gymnastic exercises developed harmoniously the body of the aristocrat.⁵

The patrician of ancient Rome was bonus and the eupatride of Homeric Greece was agathos because both possessed the physical and moral virtues of the heroic ideal – the only ideal that could have been engendered by the social environment in which they moved. They were brave generous, strong of body, and stoical of soul and moreover landed proprietors that is to say members of a tribe and of a clan possessing the territory on which they resided.⁶

The barbarians, who practice only the raising of cattle and agriculture of the rudest kind, give themselves up passionately to brigandage and piracy, as an outlet for their surplus physical and moral energy and to procure goods which they know no other way of procuring. In the Greek poem, of which only one strophe remains (the skolion of Hybrias), a barbaric hero sings, “I have for wealth my great lance, my sword and my buckler; ramparts of my flesh, with them I plow, with them I harvest; with them I gather the sweet juice of the vine, with them I am called ‘Master of the Mnoia’” (troop of slaves of the community).⁷ Caesar relates that the Suevi every year sent half of their male population on pillaging expeditions. The Scandinavians, when their planting was finished, boarded their vessels and went out to pillage the coasts of Europe. The Greeks, during the Trojan War, left the siege to give themselves up to brigandage. “The trade of piracy then had nothing shameful about it; it led to glory,” said Thucydides. The capitalists hold it in high esteem. Colonial expeditions of civilized nations are nothing but wars of brigandage; but while the capitalists have their piracies committed by proletarians, the barbaric heroes paid in their own person. The only honorable way of gaining riches was then by war. Thus the savings of the son of a Roman family were called peculium castrense (money gathered in the camps). Later on when the dowry of the wife came to increase them they took on the name of peculium quasi castrense. This general state of brigandage made the Middle Age proverb literally true: “Who has land, has war.” The proprietors of flocks and crops never laid aside their arms. They accomplished with their arms in their hands the functions of every day life. The life of the heroes was one long combat. They died young, like Achilles, like Hector. In the Achaean army there were but two old men, Nestor and Phoenix. To grow old was then a thing so exceptional that age became a privilege – the first that slipped into human societies.

The patricians, assuming the defense of the city, naturally reserved to themselves its government. This was confided to fathers of families; but when the development of commerce and industry had formed in the cities a numerous class of rich plebeians, they were obliged after many civil struggles to make for them a place in the government. Servius Tullius created at Rome the Order of Knights with plebeians possessing a fortune of at least 100,000 sesterces (about 1,000 dollars) as estimated by the census. Every five years, they revised the roll of the equestrian order, and the knights whose fortune had fallen below the census figure, or had incurred a censorial stigma, lost their dignity. Solon, who had grown rich through commerce, opened the Senate and tribunals of Athens to those who possessed the means of maintaining a war-horse and a yoke of oxen. In all cities, of which historical records have been preserved, we find traces of a similar revolution, and everywhere wealth, which comports with the support of a war-horse, gives political rights. This new aristocracy, which took its origin in wealth amassed by commerce, industry and especially usury, could only gain acceptance and maintain itself in its social supremacy by adapting itself to the heroic ideal of the patricians and by assuming a part in the defense of the city, in whose government it shared.⁸

There was a time in antiquity when it was as impossible to conceive of a proprietor without warlike virtues as in our days to imagine a superintendent of mines or of a factory of chemical products without some administrative capacity and scientific knowledge. Property was then exacting; it imposed physical and moral qualities upon the possessor. The very fact of being a proprietor presupposed the possession of the virtues of the heroic ideal, since property could be conquered and preserved only on condition of having these. The physical and moral virtues of the heroic ideal were in some fashion incorporated into the material goods which communicated them to their proprietors. It is thus that in the feudal epoch the title of nobility was welded to the land. The baron, dispossessed of his manor, lost his title of nobility, which was added to those of his conqueror. It was the same with the dues and services; they were regulated according to the conditions of land and not according to the persons occupying it. Thus nothing was more natural than the barbaric anthropomorphism which endowed material goods with moral virtues.⁹

The role of defender of the nation, which the proprietors reserved to themselves, was not a sinecure. Aristotle remarks in his Politics that during the Peloponnesian Wars the defeats on land and sea decimated the rich classes of Athens; that in the war against the Iapyges the upper classes of Tarentum lost so many of their members that it was possible to establish a democracy and that thirty years before, following certain unhappy combats, the number of citizens had fallen so low at Argos that they were obliged to grant the right of citizenship to the periœeci (colonists living outside of the city walls). War made such ravages in its ranks that the warlike Spartan aristocracy feared to engage in it. The fortune of the rich, as well as their persons, was at the absolute disposition of the state. The Greeks designated among them the Liturgists, the Trierarchists, etc., who were obliged to defray the expenses of the public feasts and of the armament of the ships of the fleet. When after the Persian Wars it was necessary to reconstruct the walls of Athens destroyed by the Persians, public and private edifices were demolished in order to procure the materials to reconstruct them.

Since it was permitted only to the proprietors of real and personal property to be brave and to possess the virtues of the heroic ideal; since without the possession of material goods, these moral qualities were useless and even hurtful to their possessors, as is proved by the massacre of the 2,000 Helots, related above; since the possession of material goods was the justification of the moral virtues – nothing was then more logical and natural than to identify moral qualities with material goods and to confuse them under the same word.

NOTES

1. The same phenomenon may be observed In our own language: bon (good) in the old French signifies courageous. The song of Roland implies it always in this sense:

Franceis sunt bon, si ferrunt vassalement (The French are brave, they will strike bravely, XCI.)

Speaking of the archbishop Turpin, Roland says:

Li arcevesque est mult bons chevaliers:
Nen ad meillur en terre desuz ciel,
Bien set ferir e de lance e d’espiet.

(The archbishop is a brave knight, none better on earth under heaven, he knows how to strike well with the lance and the spear, CXLV)

King John had been surnamed “Good” on account of his courage. Commines, who wrote in the fifteenth century said good men for brave men. Goodman, after having been in English the epithet for the soldier and after having indicated the head of the family, the master of the house ends like the French bonhomme in being applied to the peasant, – goodman Hodge. Hodge is a contemptuous term for peasant. It is no doubt when bonhomme came to be generally applied to peasants, whom the nobles and soldiers pillaged (to live on the goodman, was a current expression) that the word took on the ridiculous meaning which it has kept. According to Ducange, it has had at times the significance of cuckold. The addition of a suffix makes good and bon grotesque, goodie, bonasse. Agathos and bonus could not in ancient times acquire such a meaning. It is only in the Latin of the Middle Ages that we meet with, bonatus goodie. The writers of the Byzantine period used agathos especially in the sense of gentle, mild, and it seems that the gamins of modern Athens use it for imbecile.

2. Physical force was so prized that in the Third Book of the Iliad, when Helen points out to the old men of Troy the Greek chieftains, it is not by their age, their physiognomy or their character, but by their strength that she distinguishes Ulysses from Menelaus and Ajax, both of whom he surpasses in the breadth of his shoulders. Diodorus Siculus, in summing up the qualities of Epaminondas, mentions first the vigor of his body, then the strength of his eloquence, his bravery, his generosity and his skill as general.

3. Imbellis, imbecillus, which signify unsuited for war are especially used by the Latin writers for cowardly, weak in body and mind: malus has a more general sense. It is the epithet applied to one who physically and morally does not possess the requisite virtues.

4. Even in democratic Athens in the time of Aristophanes, the merchants were not drafted for military service. The sycophant of his Plutos declares that he has become a merchant so as not to go to war.

Plutarch says that Marius,

“to fight against the Cimbri and the Teutons, enrolled, in spite of the customs and laws, slaves and vagrants. All the generals before him excluded such from their armies. Arms, like other honors of the Republic, were only for men who were worthy and whose well known fortune answered for their fidelity.”

5. “Work at a trade deforms the body and degrades the mind. It is for this reason that those who engage in these labors are never called upon for public services.” (Xenophon’s Economics)

6. The epithet stoical applied to barbarian heroes is an anachronism, but merely a verbal one: the word was manufactured to indicate the disciples of Zeno, who taught under the portico, stoa; the barbarians possessed the moral force, which the stoics forced themselves to acquire.

7. The cavaliers at the end of the Middle Ages, who had been ruined by the Crusades and dispossessed of their lands, by their internal dissensions, lived only by war, and like the Greek hero gave the name of the “Harvest of the Sword” to the booty gained in combat.

8. Aristophanes, an advocate of the aristocratic party and an adversary of the Athenian democracy, opposes the ancient manners to the new, and by a strange inconsistency, overwhelms with the most envenomed arrows of his satire Lamachus, Cleon and the demagogues, demanding that obtaining in spite of the opposition of the aristocrats, the continuance of the war against Sparta. The times had changed, the ancient aristocracy of blood and the new aristocracy of wealth had lost a great part of their warlike sentiments and preserved in its integrity only the proprietor sentiment, war no longer enriched them. It carried off their cattle, ravaged their fields, uprooted their olives and their vines, destroyed their crops and burned their houses. Aristophanes, himself, had estates in Eubœa, which was one of the battle fields of the Peloponnesian war. Plato, who in his quality of idealist is an ardent defender of property, demands in his Republic that the Greeks decide that in every war among themselves, houses and crops should not be burned. These warrior pastimes should be permitted only in barbarous countries.

9. An inverted phenomenon of hippomorphism was produced In the Middle Ages. The nobles, having reserved to themselves the right of bearing arms on horseback, had by this fact such superiority in combats that the horse appeared to communicate to the feudal baron certain warlike virtues; so he took, like the rich men of ancient republics, the name of his mounts and called himself chevalier, caballero, etc. His most highly prized virtues were those of the horse as chevaleresques, caballerescos, chivalrous. Don Quixote judged the horse so important a personage in errant chivalry that it required all his casuistry to permit Sancho Panza to follow him mounted on an ass.

The Charles H Kerr publishing house was responsible for some of the earliest translations and editions of Marx, Engels, and other leaders of the socialist movement in the United States. Publisher of the Socialist Party aligned International Socialist Review, the Charles H Kerr Co. was an exponent of the Party’s left wing and the most important left publisher of the pre-Communist US workers movement.

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