Among the Spartans the work of war is demystified and depersonalized through its vocabulary, which is studded with references both agrarian and obscene. Their word which I translated earlier as “fuck,” as in the youths’ tree-fucking, bears the connotation not so much of penetration as of grinding, like a miller’s stone. The front three ranks “fuck” or “mill” the enemy. The verb “to kill,” in Doric theros, is the same as “to harvest.” The warriors in the fourth through sixth ranks are sometimes called “harvesters,” both for the work they do on the trampled enemy with the butt-spike
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