Fight, Fight, Fight: The Martial Roots of Education and Politics

Pursuing the Liberal Arts Should Not be the for the Faint of Heart

Are the liberal arts soft? They didn’t used to be, and they don’t have to be. Classical education need not be airy and inconsequential, dwelling always in the realm of the transcendental. But because modern mainstream education is so utilitarian where it is not hopelessly ideological, classical education often distinguishes itself by rejecting utility and practice as ends. It shouldn’t.

John Adams wrote that “all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.” Part of what that means is that we are of service to our fellow man. I don’t mean that students become activists or try to “change the world.” But we ought to measure their success by the roles they come to take, and we ought to ensure that they take leading roles.

In this light, I cite the long controversy over the question of the “ruling art” in the liberal arts. Marshall McLuhan, in his work The Classical Trivium, details how at various points in the intellectual culture of the West, either rhetoric or dialectic, or logic, have been emphasized. I simply point out that rhetoric is most emphasized in situations of political freedom, when politics is most visible and important. When it is not, logic and dialectic are emphasized. Logic and dialectic most serve mathematics, philosophy, and theology, while rhetoric serves politics.

By “political freedom,” I don’t necessarily mean republicanism or democracy. Political freedom of the sort I will emphasize is compatible with princely rule, with aristocracy, with many political forms. It is a political situation that allows for the expression of man’s ruling ambitions, his ambition to rule, whether despotically because he is vicious, or in service of the good of the community and his own noble aspirations, if he is virtuous. It is to be contrasted with the situation of an established empire or a deeply settled monarchy, especially ones that emphasize bureaucratic skill and administration.

Political freedom is where individual excellence has the most room for the free expression of its powers. That’s why a well-established and deeply delineated law can be restrictive of this freedom. Anarchy and lawlessness are also restrictive, although perhaps the situation of political freedom is more akin to anarchy of a certain sort than to well-established law, with its judges and lawyers and volumes of rules and regulations. I have in mind as the best environment for political freedom and thus the preeminence of rhetoric one which involves a highly sophisticated regulatory laxity, a looseness and simplicity of law which is nevertheless highly formalized: a place where surprising contenders can emerge on the basis of merit, a kind of arena of human excellence.

The Greeks had a word for this arena: the agōn, the struggle, the contest. Athletic competition is an agōn; the games of the Greeks—chariot racing, boxing, wrestling, etc.—were all modeled on war. The same is true of the agōn of politics. The first liberal art is combat. What makes a man free, and allows him to rule—and, I argue, the liberal arts qualify a man to rule, both himself and others—is that he fights: first this, and not even that he fights well, although this means a great deal as well: that he fights and he wins.

I am not saying that rhetoric is a form of combat where words are weapons. We have a name for this (eristic), which is a sub-rhetorical form of sophistry. But there is a connection between combat and rhetoric we often ignore. Both occur in an atmosphere of freedom—terrifying and dangerous freedom, to be sure—but an arena one must enter in order to be free, to be qualified to rule. There is something Nietzschean in this, even Thrasymachean, but it’s nevertheless something we can also see in our more wholesome tradition, even if it’s something that non-fighting academics tend to downplay or ignore.

In the Iliad, the men we see are rulers, the kings and noblemen of their cities. That they fight in this terrifying way is a significant part of what gives them title to rule; that they rule, furthermore, is what obliges them to fight. See what Sarpedon says to his kinsman Glaukos:

Glaukos, why is it that we two are honored so highly,
Get the best places at table, choice meat, cups always full,
Back in Lycia? Why do all men there look on us like gods?…
That’s why we must take our stand among the front-line Lycians,
And face up with them in the searing heat of battle,
So that Lycia’s corseleted soldiers may say this of us:
Not short of renown, then, are Lycia’s overlords,
These kings of ours: they may banquet on fattened sheep,
And drink the best honey-sweet wine, but there’s also great
Valor in them—they’re out with Lycia’s foremost fighters.

The connection goes deeper than this, though. It is not only that the same men fight and rule, but that fighting and ruling have an essential connection because there is something shared in their activities. Achilles’ tutor, Phoinix, reminds him:

He had me go with you, did the old horseman Peleus,
Just a child, with no knowledge yet of warfare’s common business,
Or of the assemblies where men achieve distinction.
That was why he sent me, to teach you all these matters,
To be both a speaker and a man of action.

Note here that he does not say, “the common business of the assemblies,” or “warfare, where men achieve distinction.” This is what we would expect. Of course, these phrases also ring true. This is because both war and the assembly are places where men conduct common business and win distinction. They are interchangeable epithets.

The connection goes even deeper with the ancient Germans, whose political tradition is more closely tied to our own. Of their practice in assembly, Tacitus writes:

When the multitude think proper, they sit down armed…. Then the king or the chief, according to age, birth, distinction in war, or eloquence, is heard, more because he has influence to persuade than because he has power to command. If his sentiments displease them, they reject them with murmurs; if they are satisfied, they brandish their spears. The most complimentary form of assent is to express approbation with their weapons.

And later (a passage which incidentally shows us the true roots of our Second Amendment):

They transact no public or private business without being armed. It is not, however, usual for anyone to wear arms till the state has recognized his power to use them. Then in the presence of the council one of the chiefs, or the young man’s father, or some kinsman, equips him with a shield and a spear. These arms are what the toga is with us, the first honor with which youth is invested. Up to this time he is regarded as a member of a household, afterwards as a member of the commonwealth.

Montesquieu’s point about this is worth noting: he says the ancient Germans were a people who had only the law of nations, no civil law, as the Romans do. It’s the toga-wearing Romans who perfected the art of rhetoric. And they do not carry weapons to the assembly. In fact, weapons of war are prohibited inside the sacred Roman limits, the pomerium. Is it not then, to highlight this connection between politics, rhetoric, and war, to celebrate barbarism and reject the refinement of civilization?

Indeed, Machiavelli, writing of Phoinix’s instruction of Achilles, says he taught him “to use the beast and the man.” We might also recall those first two words of the Aeneid, “arma virumque,” arms and the man, and see that there is something sub-human about combat. We see the battle in the Iliad become particularly bestial when the gods withdraw. But this very observation reveals the corresponding contrast: when battle is gloriously human, and expressive of, and productive of, human freedom. 

While war can be human, rhetoric can be bestial when detached from its proper context—and here is the crux of the matter—its proper context is combat and arms, or what these represent or make possible in terms of human excellence.

We have examples of this in the epic tradition. In the Iliad, the soldier Thersites makes a speech saying many true things we ourselves have already recognized about Achilles and Agamemnon, but does so improperly, in a combative, vituperative way, and is punished by being smashed on the head for this with Agamemnon’s scepter by Odysseus. What are we to make of this: the scepter, instrument of speech and sign of formal assembly, used as a weapon, Odysseus, the great speaker, reduced to the dumb violence of an Australopithecus ape hitting another ape with a deer bone? There is a proper context for arms and a proper context for speech, but there is a continuity between them. The Virgilian parallel to Thersites, Drances, is the advocate for peace when war is called for. Turnus tells him: “O Drances, you are always rich in words,/even when war has asked for swords; and when/ the elders are assembled, you are first.”

It’s worth noting that Drances gets much longer than Thersites to speak, and he does not get beaten in the end. But the Romans are, of course, a warlike people. There have been many warlike peoples who did not have a refined oratory, but I would suggest that there are very few with a refined oratory without also being very warlike. The Romans, of course, were both. This is not to say that there was not a suspicion of oratory among warlike Romans, especially since it came to Rome from Greece, which Rome had defeated in battle. But these things retained their connection in Rome: war, speech, and freedom. There is a simplicity to speech on the part of the noble man who fights. He has courage; he has shown his trustworthiness and virtue in battle. So Cato the Elder, who initially rejected the teaching of Greek rhetoric, says: “the end of education is simply the good man, vir bonus, to which is added, dicendi peritus, speaking well; “grasp your matter, Cato says, “and the words will follow.” Even in the most elaborate and sophisticated rhetoric, this core of simplicity and honesty must be preserved. It is a sign of one’s virtue, that is, one’s manliness, that is, one’s possession of qualities that make him free and give him title to rule in common with his equals.

This is the ideal maintained and upheld by Cicero and his followers into the empire, where their teaching becomes increasingly irrelevant to the political situation, and therefore reactionary: through Seneca, Quintilian, and Tacitus. These all decry what rhetoric has become, even as Cicero did: empty pedantry, servile and utilitarian, to suit petty private advantage and joust in the law courts, playing silly language games using an increasingly unreal lexicon of ahistorical set-pieces for declamatory practice, and disconnected from the fundamental questions of human good, especially as these would be debated by free men engaged in the common deliberative work of the assembly, itself an extension and derivation of the work of fighting men-at-arms and thus a place where one can win excellent glory. It is disconnected from these things because the Romans are no longer free, those who speak and those who fight are no longer the same (since Rome’s wars are fought by foreign mercenaries and professional soldiers), and citizenship exists in name only. These authors we celebrate are part of a tragic chorus, reminding us of what rhetoric was and should be.

This rhetorical tradition was not lost with the Romans. In the Italian Renaissance, we see an intellectual tradition emerging out of centers of political power and the kind of political freedom I described above, where young men are taught arms and letters. Examples of the revival of the understanding of rhetoric I have outlined abound during this period. I will give just two brief ones. First, Leonardo Bruni, outlining a course of study for a brilliant young noblewoman, Battista Malatesta. He here advises her not to waste too much time in the study of rhetoric. He writes:

Why should the subtleties of [rhetoric] consume the powers of a woman, who will never see the forum?… The contests of the forum, like those of warfare and battle, are the sphere of men. Hers is not the task of learning to speak for and against witnesses, for and against torture, for and against reputation; she will not practice the commonplaces, the syllogisms, the sly anticipation of an opponent’s arguments. She will, in a word, leave the rough-and-tumble of the forum entirely to men.

I do not bring up this example to contrast the male and female, although it is not irrelevant to this consideration. This example highlights one more connection between war and rhetoric: both involve great power to help and to harm. They involve a great weight of responsibility and great dangers for oneself and for others.

This connection is not atypical among the Renaissance writers. Pier Paolo Vergerio was a contemporary of Bruni who wrote a work entitled The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth. Here he writes that “among the studies and liberal arts of mankind are two in particular that have the greatest affinity with cultivating virtue and obtaining glory, namely instruction in letters, and arms.” He notes that while rhetoric has in his time fallen into almost total “misuse,” “in judicial rhetoric many young Romans once achieved great glory, either by denouncing the guilty or defending the innocent.” Here we see a link between rhetoric and arms reminiscent of the ancient Greeks (whose education Vergerio praises). Today, we talk a lot about cultivating virtue, not so much about obtaining glory.

But the Renaissance was not the end for the connection between rhetoric and war. The sense of the liberal arts as training for the free-born man who will come to take his place on the stage was maintained until a very late date. The recently canonized 19th-century Catholic theologian John Henry Newman, for instance, took it for granted, writing in his The Idea of a University, that “war… however rough a profession, has ever been accounted liberal.” The same could be said of politics. We ought not today to disdain their training, or leave these arenas to the craven and illiberal. The coming times will not be “soft.” I believe that our classical education movement is training those citizens who, in the course of time, will take the stage to lead their country in a time of crisis and danger. This, in addition to their own happiness and salvation, will be the test of whether our education and movement is successful.

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