Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
There was also a very interesting point Erichthonios made in the cutscene after you defeat him in Pandaemonium, in that he firstly mentions how Themis and the WoL "do not look like mercenaries", and then adds "you do not look like prize fighters either" (paraphrased) - both career paths you would not think a supposedly 'perfect' society that Ancient Etheirys would have.

So, the question has to be asked, why would the Ancients have need of soldiers-for-hire, and for that matter, why would a society that prized cerebal pursuits like philosophical debate and rhetoric over fiticuffs, have fighting contests? Does that mean that they still had wars and had actual soldiers doing the fighting, as opposed to say, specialized aetheric constructs (as in, familiars?).

If that is true, and this does tarnish the image of the Ancient world as 'perfect' a lot, then the idea of Venat's "traveller's ward" spell starts to make better sense (and once again makes Emet look like a liar, or at the very least wanting to sweep the more nasty aspects of his supposed "perfect society" under the rug simply to take the moral high ground). And thus things like war, battle and combat would also go hand in glove with that.
Frankly I've always thought Amaurot was never actually a perfect society, both because I highly suspected Emet was hiding a whole bunch of questionable stuff, and because it's named Amaurot. I think a lot of people who saw that name and learned that it was from the book 'Utopia', and then kinda called their research there, without getting far enough to see that Utopia was most likely a satire or critique. Granted a lot of social context of stuff like this gets lost over time, but the point of Utopia is essentially laying out all the ways this supposed 'perfect society' works in a way that suggest it's actually got some pretty terrible elements (slavery, for one), and is only 'perfect' to the person that's isolated from those elements.


That said, a tiny bit of devil's advocate: it's entirely possible that the Ancient world had war, but doesn't anymore for whatever reason; that'd explain why they'd have a word for something like 'mercenary' even if they don't really exist anymore. And as for 'prize fighter'... well, that doesn't necessarily imply a culture of war and violence, that just means some people fight for prizes. All that requires is competitiveness and combat techniques, and we know they've got both. Surely they've got some kind of combat sport going, it's just probably not very close to the two extremely ivory-tower corners of the Ancient world we've been. After all, if your only windows into America were Congress and Harvard, you probably wouldn't find direct evidence of MMA, but that doesn't mean MMA doesn't exist.