The Nine Worthies, Part 1: The Pagans

The Champions of the Once and Once More

Or i met l’en les neuf preux qui furent au siecle,

Les plus vaillans qui onques fust ne qui onques seit,

De trois religions, si con l’en dist au bref:

Trois paiens, trois de la Loi, trois de la loi Jhesu Crist.

—

Here one places the Nine Worthies of their age,

The most valiant of those who ever were or will be,

Of three religions, which can be said in brief,

Three pagans, three under the Law, and three of the Law of Jesus Christ.

Introduction

I had thought about writing more about the current political debates raging on the right, and there is of course much that can be said. In sum, the conservative faction of superannuated Reaganites, neocons, and establishment sinecure-holders commonly called ConInc. has been on a jihad against the more authentic rightists emerging all around them. The pretext for this was Tucker Carlson platforming the odious Nick Fuentes, but like most ConInc. campaigns, it quickly escalated, morphing from eradicating people for supporting Nazism to declaring people Nazis in order to eradicate them. Thus the pathetic spectacle of people who find Human Events to be intellectually taxing and NRO to be the cutting edge of right wing thought lumping together the Groypers with the post-liberals like Patrick J. Deneen and Adrian Vermeule.

The True Cons can’t handle the white hot radicalism of . . . Rod Dreher.

But those men and others like them can (and have) defend themselves. There’s really not much I could add in long form. Those who’ve chosen to sit in the Cuck Chair of History are beyond convincing and are frankly irrelevant. It’s fine to offer qualified praise of William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan, but to pretend these are timeless political authorities, or that corporate deregulation, mass immigration, and endless foreign wars ever were or ever can be the basis of a sustainable politics, is absurd. ConInc. coasts on the fumes of donors past, unable to offer a vision for the future, trying to reform a fusionist coalition that could only be viable in a country with demographics the true conservatives have long since destroyed in the name of saving a buck.

By conjuring this foundation into being, I’ll be able to cuck from beyond the grave…

At the same time- and bound up with this- there is a kind of three-way battle over the respective meanings of Judaism, Christianity, and paganism. One camp, made up of neocons, Republican Jews, and certain Evangelical Christians, insists that there is a biblical mandate to defend the modern state of Israel, one which America must fulfill. Christians who keep to more traditional interpretations of Scripture hold instead that the Church is the New Israel, and that look askance on foreign commitments that are both costly and counterproductive, to say the least. Over and against both of them is a small but noisy contingent of rightists who reject any role for either Judaism or Christianity in the future of the West on both racial and cultural grounds, which for them amount to the same things.

All of this together is both unfortunate and salutary. It’s unfortunate in the sense that public bickering is never good and insults are flying among a lot of people who should know better. One hates to imagine what is happening behind the scenes, what emails of denunciation are flying around, what cabals of cancellation are being formed. But when a body is sick, paths must be created to expel the disease- ubi pus, ibi evacua. The question is, what medicine should be administered after the surgery. What will fill the space left by a collapsing liberal order? If what exists must perish, what will its resurrection look like?

And that is what I thought I would write about. The answer, the cure, is to look within the traditions of the West for those proper forms, those mythic structures, around which to rebuild. We must return to the well. This is a perennial theme of mine in every sense. What I’m talking about is not nostalgia, not a return to some idealized time and place. Rather, I firmly believe that constructing a meaningful politics and culture means adopting ideas that are neither older nor newer, but higher and better. We will never perfectly instantiate them, but we can envision them and embark upon them, and in this mortal life, that’s certainly better than working to increase the GDP or make the Conservative Case for Sodomy.

That’s not a joke.

It means a return to Christianity, not as one liberal lifestyle option among many, but as a real spiritual and cultural force. But this does not involve a rejection of Judaism or paganism, but rather, their incorporation and fulfillment. The Christian is the heir to all truth, Christ the proper object of all prophets, even those who see but through a glass darkly. A politics that recognizes this can reorient the whole of our civilization.

One might object that all of this is too abstract, that the real questions involve how to expel foreigners or make housing more affordable or what the correct way to reindustrialize might be. I agree that what I write about here is not actionable policy. My hope here is to provide a set of what might be called contemplative sketches, outlines comprising myth, history, and faith pointing to a kind of reintegration of the timeless into the temporal, the sacred into the profane. When people read this, I want them to be moved by the possibilities involved, not in terms of the particular circumstances of the lives noted, but rather, an expansion of cultural horizons beyond the mundane and contemporary.

Not that you can’t also get rid of foreigners while doing so.

Beginning in Late Antiquity, and on through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the great cultural work of the West was comprehensive sorting out of inheritances. From the Classical world came the glorious legacy of Greece and Rome, but the spiritual dimension of that culture was rendered problematic with the adoption of Christianity, heir to the universal monotheism of the Ancient Israelites. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem” was not mere rhetorical exercise, but rather a pressing political, social, and theological question of the utmost importance. Neither Marcionism nor pagan reaction ever gained much purchase in the Christianized Germanic kingdoms that emerged in the wake of Rome’s fall; the question was never whether Jewish or pagan heritage should be rejected, but how they each should be reconciled within the new order. Indeed, the culture of the newly ascendant Germanic peoples itself had to be adapted to fit the new religious sensibilities, in particular, their warrior code of reciprocal loyalty and personal honor.

One manifestation of this new fusion was the Code of Chivalry. Some have made more of the Germanic influence in this than is perhaps warranted; it was certainly a part, but Christianity was by no means a definitively pacifist creed, especially after its adoption by the Roman Empire, and there was a cult of soldier saints of long standing before the emergence of feudalism. But the theorists of Chivalry were as likely to draw on Old Testament examples of holy warriors as they were St. George or St. Demetrius, or any Germanic exemplars. The south of France, the Celtic Crescent, and lore from further abroad also contributed. Chivalry was a pan-European, Christian, multifaceted phenomenon. As an ideal it is at once comprehensible and aspirational for Western man, once almost reflexively, but the sensibility, I hope, is dormant rather than dead.

In keeping with its diverse origins and universal appeal within the West, along with the deep medieval drive to categorize and systematize, writers of chivalric romances created thematic groupings and subgroupings of relevant lore. There were the ‘matters’ particular literary cycles centered on different settings; the Matter of France dealt with stories related to Charlemagne and his paladins, while the Matter of Britain contained the Arthurian legends, and the Matter of Rome all the Classical material. But there were also subdivisions of heroes into distinct collections. The most famous of these was the Nine Worthies.

The Nine Worthies were a triad of triads- three pagans, three Jews, and three Christians- each of them an exemplar of chivalric knighthood and leadership. The original outline for them comes from a poem appended to the Alexander Romance,Voeux de Paon (Vows of the Peacock), written by Jacques Longuyon around 1312. They were, for the most part, warrior kings, or at least, the medieval approximation of them. Longuyon and the other medievals’ understanding of these men as actual historical figures was severely limited by the lack of access to primary sources relating to many of them, a situation only beginning to be remedied by the advent of the High Middle Ages. Here were moderns, blessed with academic resources they lacked, can help.

I begin this series the way Longuyon introduced them, with the three pagans. My next installment will highlight the three Jews, then the three Christians. It is very difficult to find Longuyon’s work in its entirety, and for that I am grateful to Grok for the assist in sourcing the material, as well as help with translation. I read modern French well enough to render it in modern English, but the Old French of Voeux de Paon is obviously another layer of challenge. I also made use of other texts; the full quotes introducing the Worthies come from a later set of inscriptions from frescos adorning the Castello della Manta in Italy. Nevertheless, I did not default to AI for translating; I used Grok for the meanings of particularly obscure words or idiom, but the passages you see in English, for better or worse, represent my own editorial decisions. I welcome any input from any native French speaker who is perhaps better equipped to comprehend older forms of his own language- The Brothers Krynn, Fortissax. Here is a link to the Grok query I made, with the original Old French next to Grok’s translations. As you can see, I departed from them significantly in places for purposes of aesthetics and tone.

The Worthy Pagans

Hector (Ector, Ἕκτωρ)

Je fui de Troie nee et fis du roy Priam,

E fuy qant Menelas e la gregoise gans

Vindrer a segier Troie a cumpagne grant;

La ocige XXX rois et des autres bien CCC:

Puis moy ocist Achiles a ses vilainemant

Devant que Diu nasquit XI.CXXX ans.

—

Trojan born I was, King Priam’s son,

And I was there, fighting, when Menelaus and his Greek army came,

To put Troy under siege with a great host,

And of them there I slew thirty kings and three hundred others beside,

Until I was laid low villainously by Achilles,

This 1130 years before God was born.

Hector first appears in the oldest extant text of Western literature, the Iliad. Here he is one of the Trojan heroes, the ἄριστοι (aristoi), who win κλεος (glory) through armed combat with enemies of similar status. He is the greatest of the Trojans, a prince of Troy, very unlike his cowardly and selfish brother Paris. His death at the hands of Achilles is fated to signify the imminent fall of his city.

Steve Inman’s faithful poetic film depiction of the doom of Hector.

Interestingly, the medievals had no access to the full text of the Iliad, and knew the story mainly from potted Latin summaries, which may have actually been a blessing in disguise, allowing Hector to become a cultural hero minus a lot of the metaphysical baggage a straight Homeric hero would have brought. The world of the Mycenaean Greeks was both brutal and deterministic, with warriors doomed to live lives that were violent and brief but which, were, in any case wholly outside of their control. Rather than Nietzschean supermen imposing their wills on the world, they spent a lot of time literally crying about their impotence in the face of cosmic indifference, and their inevitable end as flittering shades in the underworld, their only semblance of hope to be remembered by bards at a fireside.

But Hector is not wholly alien, neither to medieval man nor us. His name in Greek comes from the verb ἕχειν, meaning “to have” or “to hold.” This signifies him as a defender, someone who protects his country from invasion, a man willing to give his life to make his home secure. Alone among the characters in the Iliad, Hector has a conventional and happy home life; one of the most moving scenes comes from him comforting his wife in the face of his impeding doom and what he fears will be her and their child’s own end. He removes the helmet that scares his infant son, and, knowing his fate, still proclaims:

Zeus, … grant that this my child may be even as myself, chief among Trojans; let him be not less excellent in strength, and let him rule Ilius with his might, that one may say of him as he comes from battle, ‘The son is far better than the father.’

In this, he is the only character in the epic who professes anything like the Christian virtue of hope. Hector loves his gods and his family and his country, and dies fighting for them, in a doomed but honorable contest to prevent his people from being conquered and despoiled by foreigners. In this he represents the most noble and moral recourse to arms, sentiments readily comprehensible to us. It’s why he was made a Worthy over the “villainous” Achilles. From Thermopylae to the Alamo, men of the West have known that death cannot triumph over courage.

It should be noted that modern scholarship has fairly unambiguously determined Hector to be a wholly fictional character. But the distinction we make between history and literature would have seemed strange to a medieval writer, a class who generally assumed that if people bothered to write it down it must be quite true, at least in some sense. The fallout from the death of Hector and the sack of Troy was, after all, the background story to the founding of Rome, Britain, and the Norse gods, among other things. I feel that Eric Bana’s Hector from Troy (2004) captures the character well.

Alexander (Alisandre, Αλέξανδρος)

Jay coquis por ma forceles illes d’outramer;

D’Orient jusques a Ocident fuge ja sire apeles.

Jay tue roy Daire, Porus, Nectanebo l’egiptien;

La grant Babiloigne fig je veer moy encliner;

E fuy sire du monde; puis fui envenimes:

Ce fut III.C ans devant que Diu fut nee.

—

By my might I conquered the Isles of Outremer,

From the East to the West I was called a lord,

I slew Darius, Porus, and Nectanebo the Egyptian,

Babylon the Great I laid prostrate before me,

I was king of the world, then I was poisoned,

I was 300 years before the birth of God.

Alexander the Great presents a contrast; where Hector was the defender par excellence, Alexander is the unconquered conqueror. Also unlike Hector, Alexander was an undoubtedly historical figure. But like Hector, the Medievals knew about him from fiction rather than history; they largely drew on the 4th century AD Alexander Romance, and nothing of Plutarch or Arian had come down to them directly. Note that the verses have Alisandre claiming to have killed Darius and Porus (didn’t happen) and Nectanebo (gone long before Alexander).

It’s thus not surprising that the Alexander of the Nine Worthies is less a Macedonian king than a crusader lord. I kept the word “outremer” in the original Old French in my translation, since it would have had particular symbolic resonance with the original readers. Outremer was the collective name given to the territories conquered from the Saracens in the First Crusade and held tenuously for long after; by 1312, they were almost all gone, but lingered as a powerful cultural memory even as other theaters of crusader warfare opened. It’s thus easy to see the attraction of a warlord who blitzed through the East to Longuyon’s readers.

It’s important to remember that for all the differences between the Alexander of the original and successor romances and the Alexander of history, even the historical works we have are comparatively late. Alexander died in 323 BC. Only fragments and inscriptions survive from before the first century BC, and it’s not until the first century AD that Greek and Roman historians created full histories. These incorporate some earlier material, but they are very much products of their time as much as the medieval stuff.

Mary Beard would argue that Alexander the Great is a kind of Hellenistic-Imperial Roman hybrid construct and that the histories offer little in the way of insight into Alexander as his contemporaries knew him. Perhaps. But I think it’s more true to say that the Alexander of legend is both a construct and the real thing. The man in life was perhaps the most successful live-action role player who ever walked the Earth, Achilles-cosplaying his bloody way to the Punjab.

Forward by David French

Certainly he was too much for his peers. If there’s one thing the Final Cut of the Oliver Stone biopic captures perfectly, it’s the king’s inscrutability to the men around him. They wanted wealth and power and to dominate foreigners. Alexander gained everything a man could wish for through conquest, but the conquest was the point. War was its own end, not for the sake of hate and domination, but to build something newer, better, something inchoate to others and perhaps even to himself- creative destruction in an aristocratic rather than bourgeois liberal sense. The brilliant boy who had sat at the feet of Aristotle wanted to learn from the barbarians as well, to be an Egyptian god-king, a Persian shahanshah, the maharaja of the distant Indies. He represented the acquisitive spirit in the West in its best sense, high adventure for gold and girls and glory, but also for the broadening of horizons. The most successful of the crusaders learned Arabic and knew the laws of the Koran even as they were prepared to die for Christ and the Church militant. Alexander literally married into an obscure barbarian people in order to bridge what for the Greeks was the chasm of Hellene and barbarian. His cross-cultural project opened up the West to the East and vice versa in a way that would be impossible again until the next great age of Western imperialism. He created a Hellenistic Age, where the West predominated, but offered a culture that was open and confident, rather than hidebound and fearful.

The Final Cut of this film really does capture the man in all his glorious ambiguity:

Julius Caesar (Julius Cesar, Gaius Iulius Caesar)

D Rome fuge ja dis emperere et roy;

Jay conquis tote Spagne, France, e Navarois;

Pompee, Amilcar, e Cassarion li roy;

La cite d’Alisandre a mim somis voloir:

Mort fui devant que Diu nasquit des ans XL trois.

—

Of Rome I was* once emperor and king,

I conquered all of Spain, France, and Navarre,

Pompey, Hamilcar, and Caesarion [?] the king,

The city of Alexandria I took at my wish,

I died 43 years before God was born.

[*note: ‘fuge’ is ambiguous. I take it to be ‘fu je,’ ‘was I,’ but it might mean ‘fuge’ ‘I fled. The former seems more likely, especially given the same word is used unambiguously in previous verses with the former meaning.]

Julius Caesar differs from his fellow pagans here in that he is introduced as an emperor and king. The Caesar of history was neither in the strict sense, but what’s meant to be conveyed here is the aspect of chivalry related to statesmanship. Like Alexander, Caesar is a conqueror, but like Hector, he has a role to play defending a community and a political order. Caesar would have been quite relevant to medieval political discourse, because the Roman Empire that emerged in the wake of his career had been revived in the days of fellow Worthy Charlemagne, and was very much a going concern in 1312.

The Baron was christened Guilio Cesare Evola.

The want of Plutarch or any golden age Roman historians is quite telling in this passage. Caesar in the poem conquered Spain (not quite), France (fairly accurate) and Navarre (arguably). His enemies are interesting. There’s Pompey, which makes sense, but Hamilcar seems to refer to the father of Hannibal, telescoping the events of the Punic Wars into Caesar’s time, and I’m unable to determine precisely who Cassarion is; I think the poet means Caesarion, but that was Caesar’s bastard by Cleopatra, not a rival king he defeated. The historical Caesar did more or less conquer Alexandria, so there’s that.

Caesar the Roman ruler is the connection between the Hector narrative (the Iulii clan were descendants of Aeneas, Hector’s brother) and that of Alexander (he conquered the conqueror’s city). But Caesar is not primarily a defender or really even a conqueror, though those are importantly aspects of his character. Caesar is a builder, the initiator of reforms that would result in an enduring political order at the heart of Western identity. Rome and its empire became the perennial symbol of cultural continuity with the vanished world of classical pagan antiquity. Caesar’s changes made it possible, a vision of a Europe united under an enlightened but militaristic hegemony, open to the world while being sure of, and sufficient unto, itself.

By closely examining the hairstyle, we can date this bust to some time between 1996 and 2005.

Caesar is also the only one of the pagan Worthies whose own writing survives into the present, resurrected in the West beginning in the early Middle Ages. Longuyon seems to know about De Bello Gallica, at least in part. Caesar’s spare and readable Latin is often a modern student’s first encounter with the language, easier to master than eloquent Cicero or baffling Tacitus. Like Alexander, Caesar shows in his own life that a prince must be both valiant and learned, a lion and a fox. So too must anyone seeking nobility in his own right.

Caesar, more than anyone, is the through-line from modernity to the Classical Age. His life and works were known to his contemporaries, his successors, the Christian monks who preserved the culture of his Empire, and the Medievals who revived that culture in the West. Through them they informed the Renaissance. Cortes knew his works, as did the American Founding Fathers. If you study AP Latin in high school, you become very familiar with the third person tense.

DEI FFS WTF

But of course, when one thinks of contemporary American politics, one necessarily thinks of Rome (unless one is cuckservative, where every year is 1933 and every foe Hitler). When we see the imperial decay around us; when we see the rotten plutocracy that governs us, and when we see the cultural exhaustion behind it all, many begin to wonder how it will end. Some hear the hoofbeats in the distance. They hear the call of the Man on Horseback, summoning his legions once more. Some call him the Red Caesar. Whatever he may be, one cannot doubt that he is no dead thing from books. After all, the past is never really the past.

Literally everything Ciaran Hinds does is so great. There should be a Royal Academy of Based Actor Kino that he’s in charge of somewhere.