Beauty Is the Reward of Valor

Women don't respond to timorous men. But they respond (in almost shocking ways) to strong, driven, valiant ones… with beauty as valor's reward.

Writing of the invasion in 396 A.D. of Alaric and the Goths into Greece (not long before the fall of Rome, and well after Greece had declined as a regional power and slid into decadence and decay), Edward Gibbon notes:

The troops which had been posted to defend the Straits of Thermopylae, retired, as they were directed, without attempting to disturb the secure and rapid passage of Alaric; and the fertile fields of Phocis and Boeotia were instantly covered by a deluge of Barbarians who massacred the males of an age to bear arms, and drove away the beautiful females, with the spoil and cattle of the flaming villages.

...

The vases and statues were distributed among the Barbarians, with more regard to the value of the materials, than to the elegance of the workmanship; the female captives submitted to the laws of war; the enjoyment of beauty was the reward of valor; and the Greeks could not reasonably complain of an abuse which was justified by the example of the heroic times.

The descendants of that extraordinary people, who had considered valor and discipline as the walls of Sparta, no longer remembered the generous reply of their ancestors to an invader more formidable than Alaric. "If thou art a god, thou wilt not hurt those who have never injured thee; if thou art a man, advance:—and thou wilt find men equal to thyself."

The Goths had finished sacking Asia Minor, yet, unable to breach the walls of Constantinople, had wheeled about, crossed back into Europe, and burned a path through Greece.

The Greeks, no longer the manly warriors of their forebears, retreated, leaving the pass of Thermopylae unguarded. 900 years earlier, the Spartan King Leonidas I had for three days resisted a 100,000-man Persian army with a force of 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians at Thermopylae. And even only 140 years earlier, circa 250 A.D., the Greeks halted an earlier Gothic invasion at Thermopylae. This time, however, the soft and timorous Greeks retreated from the pass, and the Goths carved through, slaughtered the young men like pigs, and took the females as their prizes.

You might at first pity the Greeks.

Poor soft, unwarrior-like, decadent Greeks, invaded by the savage Goths, the quivering young men of Greece murdered, the fair young women of Greece carried away as war brides.

Yet, the people and land of Greece were hers to lose. Her soldiers shrunk back in fear of the invading Goths, and the Goths claimed their spoils, of blood, gold, and women.

And as Gibbon says, the enjoyment of beauty is the reward of valor.

Beauty is not something enjoyed by the man too cowardly to earn it.

In your own life, too, if you wish to enjoy beauty, you must behave with valor.