You must learn to see the secret language of nature and what it drives at: there is one path that drives for the production of a supreme specimen. It… - Bronze Age Pervert

In the Bible three of the Ten Commandments deal specifically with this matter: do not covet another man’s wife, do not commit adultery, and honor mother and father; the last is the first “substantial” commandment that doesn’t directly involve honoring God but that concerns human behavior as such, and for this reason among others Nietzsche believed it was the constitutive goal of the Hebrews, the striving that defined them as a people. In Judaism during the holiest day of Yom Kippur the prohibition specifically against incest at Leviticus 18 is traditionally repeated, which, as Leo Strauss mentions, agreeing with Nietzsche, is the precondition for honoring mother and father. But the language of Leviticus 18 with its list of sexual prohibitions is especially powerful, contrasting the new laws of the Hebrews with those of the Egyptians and with others who came before them, who defiled the land, and who were vomited out by the land.

Critias, Socrates’ student, was the Hitler of the ancient Greek world. He and his friends established a regime based on atheistic biologism so to speak; on “Sparta radicalized,” a eugenic antinomian dictatorship. He was maybe what Hitler’s most hysterical detractors claim of him today. Critias killed more Athenians in his short rule than died in the decades of the war with Sparta. He expelled almost everyone from the city, and burned the docks, which were the perceived source of democratic power. He wasted all the priests of Eleusis for being tedious religious moralists. He saw the purpose of the Spartan constitution as the creation of one “supreme biological specimen,” and Critias sought to found a state based on such ideas. He and his friends were overthrown quite quickly. Against this catastrophe, carried out in the name of philosophy and nature (of biology) there was a predictable reaction. Socrates’ other students, most of them at least, as well as Isocrates and others, went out of their way to distance themselves from Critias and what he was perceived to stand for: “We are not like that guy. We are good boys. Philosophy isn’t actually about that. We’re doing something different. We’re socially responsible good guys.” Does this sound familiar?

in the relentless concern of the aristocracy with biological quality, you see an attempt to mitigate the great evils of civilization.