Ascra is a miserable village in winter, unbearable in summer, and seldom good at any time. My father fled here from Cyme across the dark sea, fleeing poverty, not realizing he was trading the terrifying whims of the sea for the equally terrifying whims of the local lords. When he died, he left what little he had scratched from this harsh Boeotian dirt to my brother, Perses, and me. I wanted only to divide it fairly, to take my plow to my half and let the seasons dictate my fortune. But Perses had the ear of the basileis—the bribe-swallowing lords who sit in the high seats and pass judgment over our lives. He slipped gifts into their greedy hands, and with a few crooked words, they gave him my livelihood.

I watched them deliver their false verdicts, men draped in the trappings of authority, convinced that their word alone constituted the law. We men of the earth labor endlessly to build great stone walls around our cities, trusting in their sheer mass or perhaps the magic of their consecration to keep the enemy at bay. We think the danger always comes from the outside. But what good is a sacred, towering wall, what good are ramparts and watchtowers, when the rot is already inside the gates? A city that harbors crooked judges has already breached its own defenses from within.

It was in the bitter cold of that loss that I understood a truth those lords will forever ignore: Justice—Dike—is not an invention of kings. It is not whatever the powerful decree it to be in the town square. It is the daughter of Zeus. When corrupt men drive her out with crooked judgments, she wraps herself in mist, walks through the streets weeping, and brings ruin upon the entire city. The crops fail, the women bear no children, and the great walls eventually crumble. The lords may feast today on the bribes they swallowed, but they are eating the seed corn of their own destruction. There is a divine, immovable order to the world that bends toward righteousness, not the whims of tyrants. I write my verses not merely to win back a patch of stolen dirt, but to warn them: the eye of Zeus sees everything, and he does not forgive those who mock his daughter.

When I was a younger, more foolish poet, I thought of Eris (‘Strife’) as a single, terrifying force. I sang of her only as the bloody-handed goddess who walks the battlefield, the one who drives men to slaughter each other over a barren strip of land or an imagined slight. I have heard the endless, grim tales of ancient warfare—of men freezing in squalid winter quarters, of grinding, years-long sieges designed to slowly starve a populace into submission, of kings taking the sons of their rivals as hostages to enforce a fragile, bitter peace. It is a terrible, consuming fire that leaves nothing but ash, orphans, and weeping widows. If that were the only Strife in the world, humanity would have been extinguished long ago by its own hand.

But age, and a long life observing the mechanics of the world, have taught me to correct my own songs. I look around my village, and I see that there are actually two goddesses of Strife on this earth. The first is that cruel mother of war and sieges. But the second is older, born of the dark night, and Zeus placed her in the very roots of the earth to help us.

This second Strife is the one that makes a man build a better, swifter ship because he sees his neighbor’s wealth growing. It is the fierce envy that drives the potter to shape a finer, more elegant vessel than the potter next door, or the builder to lay a straighter, stronger wall. This good Strife does not demand hostages or blood. She demands excellence. She stirs even the laziest, most shiftless man to work. When a man sees his neighbor rushing to plant his fields and order his house before the winter rains, he feels the sharp sting of that good Strife and reaches for his own plow. We must turn our backs entirely on the goddess of the battlefield. The true test of a man is not how long he can endure a winter siege to destroy another city, but how hard he is willing to strive to build his own.

…