If I may be permitted a tangent, I always had a problem with the idea of master/slave morality purely on historical terms - Nietzsche's archetypes of them are simply invented, largely based on stereotypes, and don't correspond to any real history. If you're determined to push the Christian-slave aspect, you have to ignore not only what Christian martyrs or ascetics thought they were doing, but also the vast numbers of other committed, deeply pious Christians doing stereotypically 'master' things. If I try to think of a person who behaved like a stereotypical 'master', the best example to spring to mind is actually Cortes, and more generally conquistadors, and those are all the products of a Christian civilisation, frequently using explicitly Christian justifications for their actions. We may question Cortes' piety, but we can't do the same for every crusader or king or warlord who seems to fit the same bill - Charlemagne seems to have been sincerely pious, after all.
But more importantly than that, the master morality model fails to accurately describe or predict even pagan Greek aristocrats. If you read Homer somewhat more attentively, you'll notice that the Mycenaean warrior class was, far from being bold amoral power-seekers disregarding any law or constraint in favour of their own desires, intensely concerned with duty, obligation, and right. Their concepts of obligation weren't necessarily ones we would find sympathetic today, but they absolutely exist, and moreover are extremely communally oriented. That's the common theme in Odysseus' voyages - he is repeatedly offered bliss or the achievement of all the world's desires (the Lotus-eaters, Calypso, etc.), and he rejects these because he is nothing outside of the ordered community, the polis, which gives his life meaning. Without the community of which he is a member he is literally nobody, to the extent that he uses that as a pseudonym in the story (and it's also why he recklessly boasts of his name to Polyphemus afterwards; he must place himself within a community, identifying himself as a man with a history, reputation, family, and so on: "Say that Odysseus, sacker of cities, Laertes' son, a native of Ithaca, maimed you!"). Likewise when he returns to Ithaca, when he conceals his name, he appears a poor beggar, because that is all he can be without the name that locates him within the community.
So even the Bronze Age Greek warlord isn't this Nietzschean stereotype. He may be violent, glory-hungry, desperate for achievement, etc., but none of these amount to being unconstrained or amoral.
I also feel obligated to note that the motivations of the Greek warrior aristocrat are actually parallelled pretty well in later Christian and chivalric literature - the readiness to use violence to defend one's personal honour, obsession with family feuds, devotion to one's family, reverence for hospitality and social obligation, and especially the urgent need to accumulate glory to one's name through public deeds. It doesn't even need to be violent (pagan emperors and Christian kings both patronised the building of monuments, in order to bring shine to their name), but in the case of literature it often is - Achilles is desperate to go to the Trojan War to win glory, and in the same way, Yvain picks fights and is desperate to go on the tournament circuit. For a noble warrior class, glory and reputation are the fundamental concerns.
Now it can be a bit more complicated than that, and both traditions but especially the Christian do problematise this desperation somewhat. The shade of Achilles appears in the Odyssey and confesses that he would rather be alive, even if a poor slave, than one of the glorious dead, in a way that seems to cast some doubt on his earlier values. Likewise for a character like Yvain, that glory-lust is presented as a character flaw, which leads to his downfall and he must redeem himself through anonymous service before finally reclaiming his name.
Anyway, this is not to say that there aren't any shifts or transformations in the way people thought about morality through the rise of Christianity, and it's true that Christianity prizes compassion and humility in a way that the ancient Greeks did not, or at least did not explicitly. But I think Nietzsche projects his master/slave distinction on to them in a way that does not accurately describe either world.
I want to stick a fork in the outlet here: famous writings such as Odysseus are probably best understood to depict not how things were, but how things were modeled, saying more about an ancient collective aspirational conception of self than as how we'd parse their society if we were alongside them.
Oh, certainly. To the extent that Homeric heroes model the values of Mycenaean elite society, they do so aspirationally. I think the overall thesis survives that, though.
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Notes -
If I may be permitted a tangent, I always had a problem with the idea of master/slave morality purely on historical terms - Nietzsche's archetypes of them are simply invented, largely based on stereotypes, and don't correspond to any real history. If you're determined to push the Christian-slave aspect, you have to ignore not only what Christian martyrs or ascetics thought they were doing, but also the vast numbers of other committed, deeply pious Christians doing stereotypically 'master' things. If I try to think of a person who behaved like a stereotypical 'master', the best example to spring to mind is actually Cortes, and more generally conquistadors, and those are all the products of a Christian civilisation, frequently using explicitly Christian justifications for their actions. We may question Cortes' piety, but we can't do the same for every crusader or king or warlord who seems to fit the same bill - Charlemagne seems to have been sincerely pious, after all.
But more importantly than that, the master morality model fails to accurately describe or predict even pagan Greek aristocrats. If you read Homer somewhat more attentively, you'll notice that the Mycenaean warrior class was, far from being bold amoral power-seekers disregarding any law or constraint in favour of their own desires, intensely concerned with duty, obligation, and right. Their concepts of obligation weren't necessarily ones we would find sympathetic today, but they absolutely exist, and moreover are extremely communally oriented. That's the common theme in Odysseus' voyages - he is repeatedly offered bliss or the achievement of all the world's desires (the Lotus-eaters, Calypso, etc.), and he rejects these because he is nothing outside of the ordered community, the polis, which gives his life meaning. Without the community of which he is a member he is literally nobody, to the extent that he uses that as a pseudonym in the story (and it's also why he recklessly boasts of his name to Polyphemus afterwards; he must place himself within a community, identifying himself as a man with a history, reputation, family, and so on: "Say that Odysseus, sacker of cities, Laertes' son, a native of Ithaca, maimed you!"). Likewise when he returns to Ithaca, when he conceals his name, he appears a poor beggar, because that is all he can be without the name that locates him within the community.
So even the Bronze Age Greek warlord isn't this Nietzschean stereotype. He may be violent, glory-hungry, desperate for achievement, etc., but none of these amount to being unconstrained or amoral.
I also feel obligated to note that the motivations of the Greek warrior aristocrat are actually parallelled pretty well in later Christian and chivalric literature - the readiness to use violence to defend one's personal honour, obsession with family feuds, devotion to one's family, reverence for hospitality and social obligation, and especially the urgent need to accumulate glory to one's name through public deeds. It doesn't even need to be violent (pagan emperors and Christian kings both patronised the building of monuments, in order to bring shine to their name), but in the case of literature it often is - Achilles is desperate to go to the Trojan War to win glory, and in the same way, Yvain picks fights and is desperate to go on the tournament circuit. For a noble warrior class, glory and reputation are the fundamental concerns.
Now it can be a bit more complicated than that, and both traditions but especially the Christian do problematise this desperation somewhat. The shade of Achilles appears in the Odyssey and confesses that he would rather be alive, even if a poor slave, than one of the glorious dead, in a way that seems to cast some doubt on his earlier values. Likewise for a character like Yvain, that glory-lust is presented as a character flaw, which leads to his downfall and he must redeem himself through anonymous service before finally reclaiming his name.
Anyway, this is not to say that there aren't any shifts or transformations in the way people thought about morality through the rise of Christianity, and it's true that Christianity prizes compassion and humility in a way that the ancient Greeks did not, or at least did not explicitly. But I think Nietzsche projects his master/slave distinction on to them in a way that does not accurately describe either world.
I want to stick a fork in the outlet here: famous writings such as Odysseus are probably best understood to depict not how things were, but how things were modeled, saying more about an ancient collective aspirational conception of self than as how we'd parse their society if we were alongside them.
Oh, certainly. To the extent that Homeric heroes model the values of Mycenaean elite society, they do so aspirationally. I think the overall thesis survives that, though.
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