/lit/ - Literature

>>16112148
I forgot about this part, but perhaps it can act like something of a summary, and a possible beginning of answers.

Nietzsche imagines "Carthago delenda est" as an inevitable triumph, and beyond a technical analysis of all the destruction he wishes only to build atop the ruins with further pronouncements of delenda est. His dialectical will is that of the armed idealist built up into barbaric pantheism. Whereas Plato continues to see both "Carthago delenda est" and "Carthago servanda est" even after the defeat, and often has Socrates defend the weaker side. He imagines Carthage as the mirror of Rome, and war as the possibility of the betrayal of the oath of each city. Power is nothing more than a measure of justice, and overstretching threatens the very law of the homeland: if the pomerium is extended it either is weakened or must be applied to a territory which may hold greater autochtonous laws. This is also the law of Diomedes, where man overstretches his power into the heavens he threatens the kingdom of the gods and something far worse than their wrath. However, only the gods seem to be aware of the possibility of their death, and seem terrified that they have unleashed a force within man that threatens their power.

Carl Schmitt gives an account of a Serbian epic in which the hero kills a great Turk warrior. After the battle a serpent appears from within the corpse and tells the hero, 'You were lucky that I slept through the battle.' To which the hero cries out 'Woe is me! I killed a man who is stronger than me!' The modern sense of war cannot hold such sentiments, and it is in the same way that Nietzsche relates to the Death of God. His decision is to destroy all memory of the gods and their idols, and to imagine this figure of man as more powerful than anything it has ever killed.

What Plato saw in the gods was how they had defeated stronger enemies than themselves through a cleverness. In the period after the betrayal of its oath, Athens began to worship historicised gods, the myths lost their imaginative power and the Olympians no longer feared the power of men. An idyllic end to the myths, a slave morality quite opposed to that of the Christian type. Plato imagined instead a reconciliation of the gods, a return to the old order. His cleverness unfolded as a reversal of that type which led to the downfall of the titans and then the gods themselves.