Tag: ancient Rome

2,127 words

There is a time for us to wander.
When time is young and so are we.
The woods are greener over yonder.
The path is new, the world is free.
There is a time when leaves are fallin’.
The woods are gray, the paths are old.
The snow will come when geese are callin.’
You need a fire against the cold.
— The Dillards, “There is a Time,” 1963 (more…)

712 words

Virtus was the highest moral aspiration of Roman patriots. It had a simple meaning: Rome before oneself. Romans were judged by their service to the common good. To our own Founding Fathers, virtus was the “central element in public life.” (more…)

4,647 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

There is a wonderful Ridley Scott film from 1977 called The Duellists, based on a Joseph Conrad short story, “The Duel.” It follows the exploits of two hussars in Napoleon’s Grande Armée as they traveled from 1800 Strasbourg, to 1812 Russia, and back again to France after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. Were their enemies the Prussians, or the Russians, or the British? No, their true enemies were one another — (more…)

4,626 words

Throughout the North, the ground still lies beneath a blanket of snow, and springtime seems a distant memory. Yet now, at the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, signs of nature’s rebirth are starting to appear: cold mornings give way to sunny, warm afternoons, grasses and blossoms begin to emerge, and the sound of birdsong once again fills the forest. The time of snow and ice is not yet past and the Earth still lies dormant — but she is starting to awaken.

The first weeks of February were of special significance to our European ancestors, and a number of holy days, now largely forgotten, took place at this time: (more…)

1,019 words

For a while now, I’ve found that I cannot bring myself to enjoy new films, new TV shows, and other new media, not only due to the active war on whiteness waged therein. I expected Netflix’s Barbarians to be no different, but people were talking it up and I was having trouble sleeping, so I thought, what the hell. I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. This may be the first series that I have, as the kids would say, binge-watched.  (more…)

Epictetus.

1,447 words

Philosophy is a subject that never really sparked my interest. While I understand that philosophy is important to living a virtuous life, I simply think that virtue and morality are useless if you are forced to live around people that do not share your same morals and virtues. This is the situation that white people are now facing in our own countries. (more…)

1,297 words

1. Steele Brand, Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) 

This is an excellent work of military history that examines the tradition of civic militarism in the Roman Republic. Brand combines detailed analyses of battles with insights about Roman culture and society. His analysis of the Battle of Sentinum (295 BC), for instance, includes diagrams of battle formations as well as a discussion of the history of the devotio, (more…)

611 words

Translation and commentary by Cologero Salvo

In “Roma e il natale solare nella tradizione nordico-aria” (La Difesa della razza, 1940), Evola writes:

Very few suspect that the holidays [i.e., Catholic holy days] of today, in the century of skyscrapers, radio, great movements of the masses, are celebrated and continue . . . a remote tradition, (more…)

Sol Invictus crowned with a diadem of sun rays

611 words

Translation and commentary by Cologero Salvo

In “Roma e il natale solare nella tradizione nordico-aria” (La Difesa della razza, 1940), Evola writes:

Very few suspect that the holidays [i.e., Catholic holy days] of today, in the century of skyscrapers, radio, great movements of the masses, are celebrated and continue . . . a remote tradition, (more…)

Julius Caesar by Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci, ca. 1512

9,042 words

The following is the complete text of the second chapter of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, vol. I, originally published in 1899, which was translated from the German by John Lees in 1910 and revised in 1912. The original Cyrillic Greek words for “Spartans” and “Acheans” have not been included. The text was provided by A. E. Stern.

DISPOSITION

To define in clear terms what we have inherited from Rome, what out of that vast manufactory of human destinies still exercises a living influence, (more…)

Augustus as Pontifex Maximus

1,847 words

As (post-)Christian moderns, we are twice handicapped in trying to understand the religions of the ancient pagan states such as Sparta and Rome. Where we tend to think of religious belief as universalistic, other-worldly, monolatrous, and dogmatic, ancient paganism was particularistic, world-embracing, polytheistic (almost ecumenical), and non-dogmatic (but ritualistic).  (more…)

1,092 words

Ezra Pound: “Make it new!”

The great monologist Jean Shepherd used to remark, “In four thousand years, no one will know that you ever existed.” This statement is shocking for modern man, who — while not believing in an immortal soul — is convinced that technological advances will soon grant immortality to his physical being. Mortality might come as a shock to deracinated modern man — who is never more than a few feet away from a hand sanitizer or a “safe zone” to protect him from the challenges of bacteria or differing opinions — yet this was not always the case. (more…)