The ancient Romans understood the danger beauty posed. The word "beauty" comes from Old French (beaute), which in turn derived from the Latin word "bellus," meaning handsome, fine, or pretty. Yet the Latin word for "war" is "bellum"--a difference of one letter, and at the end of the word, indistinguishable from the neuter form of the adjective (also "bellum"). The Roman goddess of war was Bellona.
The Romans believed that war had beauty, perhaps a terrible beauty, but a beauty all the same. Why else did Caesar write so movingly about war? And why did the Romans make dying in the service of the Mars a far more honourable and glorious death than did the earlier Greeks, from whom they stole so much.
Interestingly enough, while Venus was the Roman goddess of love and beauty, studies show that she evolved from a comparatively weak and generally benign goddess in the Greek Iliad to a goddess of both compelling beauty and treachery in later Greek and Roman poems.
Even the term "belladonna" is Italian for "the beautiful lady," but it refers to the herb from which the poison atropine was extracted. Throughout human history, beauty has been and continues to be regarded with great suspicion. Those who would define it are often called to task, and their efforts dismissed with the old cliche that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Yet… individuals have attempted to describe and define deities. Cultures have striven to create art of great beauty, whether in hard and tangible stone, or in the intangible and fleeting creations of music and song. Beauty is accepted as an attribute of creations or of individuals, but never as an absolute. Religions and cultures have attempted to define other so-called abstracts in hard terms, abstracts such as justice, mercy, compassion. Yet any serious scholar who attempts to define beauty in the same terms runs the risk of ridicule or ostracism…
Why do people so fear the ideal of beauty that stands by itself, unlinked from creations or individuals? Is it because so few can appreciate it? Understand it? Or because beauty is transcendent, and those who can define it within themselves have climbed an intangible step above the masses who, like the ancient Romans, find their beauty in destruction?
Archform:Beauty - chapter:20
L. E. Modesitt Jr.
