Thus, choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour

All these backward-looking arete-loving Spartan-cos playing avatars inspire a kind of hagiographic exercise in the middle-aged, formerly prodigious, supposedly fully formed adult brain which has wrestled with but not been pinned to the Mat by ennui: the idea being something like a Platonic engagement with manly virtue, always coded as necessarily such.

Except the same flaw in the idea of pursuing the ideal comes out, making it horror show overdose of botulism. There’s no such thing as halfway crooks, no turning back on the burnt tongue of a too eagerly hungry wanna-be warrior. Adulation from the crowd, yes; Stockholm syndrome, also yes. Viable hard-won alternative to what actually is, no; path out of the vertiginous maze of clever Daedalus’s clusterfuck double-bind, hard and intractable no.