Let me insist that what I am pointing to here, is not the modern ‘clerk’s’ extolling of the military spirit, but of the warlike instinct. It is the cult of the warlike instinct, outside all social spirit of discipline or sacrifice which is meant by the following assertions of Nietzsche, glorified by a French moralist whom himself has numerous followers:-- ‘The values of the warrior aristocracy are founded on a powerful bodily constitution, excellent health, without forgetting all that is necessary to the upkeep of that overflowing vigour--war, adventure, hunting, dancing, physical games and exercises, and in general everything which implies a robust, free and joyous activity.’ ‘That audacity of noble races, a mad, absurd, spontaneous audacity ... their indifference and scorn for all safety of body, for life, comfort ...’ ‘The superb blond beast wandering in search of prey and carnage ...’ ‘The terrible gaiety and profound joy felt by heroes in all destruction, in all the pleasures of victory and cruelty.’ The moralist who quotes those remarks (Sorel, _Reflexions sur la Violence_, p. 360) adds, in order to leave no doubt about his recommendation of them to his fellow human beings: ‘It is quite evident that liberty would be seriously compromised if men came to look upon the Homeric values’ (which, for him, are the values just praised by Nietzsche) ‘as being characteristic of the barbarous peoples only.’ Is it necessary to observe how, here again, the moral presentation dominant among the world’s educators is essentially Germanic, and shows the bankruptcy of Graeco-Roman thought? Before our times you do not find in France a single serious moralist (including de Maistre) or even a poet (if you consider only the great ones) who praises the ‘pleasures of victory and cruelty’.[113] And it is the same for ancient Rome, among the nations to whom war had given world supremacy. I do not find a single passage which puts forward the instincts of prey as the supreme form of human morality in Cicero, Seneca, or Tacitus, or even in Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian. On the other hand, I find a great many which attribute this rank to the instincts on which civil life is based.[114] Moreover, in primitive Greece, long before the philosophers, the myths very soon give an important place to civil morality. In a poem of Hesiod the tomb of Cycnus is engulfed in the waters by Apollo’s command, because Cycnus was a brigand. The defence of warlike instincts by Mediterranean moralists will be one of the amazements of history. Some of them, moreover, seem uneasy about it, and feel they ought to claim that the Homeric values (we have seen what they mean by that) ‘are very close to the values of Corneille’[115]--as if the French poet’s heroes, with all their sense of devotion to duty and the State, had anything in common with lovers of adventure, prey, and carnage!