>>16154801
2
Our understanding, wisdom, or sophia, requires both great insight and imagination. One must see images and figures, not ideas and simple lines. This is in the power of art which takes us away to other worlds as if in a dream. It is of the intellect, but also formed of something more. Today we hear of headless men, aképhalos, and rather than fight them most will use whatever is left of their intellect to join their mass.
We may best to understand this world of forms through the very image of warfare. The form is really born of dominion, as in the Roman pomerium (I'm not sure if there is a Greek equivalent, but this is still useful since Tyche is a corresponding goddess). The held territory outside of the pomerium serves as a transitional place of opposing laws. In it one may sense great threats, and yet the presence of war is also a strengthening factor, a natural law which may only strengthen the pomerium. Tyche is a diplomat for the warring gods of a city. As an Oceanid we see that the great boundary of the world also exists as the law of a city. Permanent war may be equated with perpetual peace because this greatest of laws. Total violence is what rules over the gods, but also gives birth to them and allows them to return from punishment or death.
Our own understanding of war is opposite to this. The paradox of a strong defense is the explication of armaments, building towards that which will inevitably overwhelm. Mere territory is eroded and borders force themselves into the divine territory of friend and enemy without regard for any other law. This is, in its origin, opposite to the law of conquest in which the territory of the defeated enemy threatens to spill its blood into the homeland. The Roman Triumphal Arches are also gates of hell, the coffered vaults as eyes of the plunder watching over the triumphal procession.
This is also the law of bronze, the mirror of the form; and the Aegis, that great mirror of divine warfare. The procession of worlds, where one confronts death in its totality, even invites the death of absolute law. Bronze and the Aegis are reflections of the world of "utmost violence". Beauty is one of the greatest laws of war, and where bronze is abandoned one must assume that Aphrodite and Ares have been killed.