Book Two, Letter 10

To Cicero, on Tiberius Gracchus.

October 2018 CE

Dear Cicero,

I just wanted to write to you. I haven't ready any more of your stuff, I've been busy with Thucydides. He sure can talk.

The weeds do not grow on the farm Cicero, the drought here is sinking its teeth in. The October heat makes its promise of a summer we will all have to suffer through. Still, all that flowers, does so with great vigour and happiness. All the brilliant yellows and whites and pinks of Spring are dazzling to my eye as I walk the paths of the garden. The flowers seem to shout, to sing: Stop! Stop and see us. Stop and look at us, look at the world, for this moment will not come again.

It's an old, familiar message, but its easy to forget, isn't it.

Stop and smell the roses.

For me, this has been a year of finishing things, Cicero. I'm reaching fruition on some long term goals, projects I have worked diligently at for many years. With a steady hand upon the wheel, I have never taken my eye off these goals. Writing. Music. Art. This year, my novel reached an important landmark in the editing process – the difficult third draft. This year I completed recording my solo music album. This year I finished the triptych painting I started three years ago. The painting is to be a gift for the man in whose home recording studio my album was made.

A year of endings.

So, it's finally time I talked to you about the Catiline conspiracy. The Roman Republic was not a house of straw that fell down in a strong wind. It was an international system of political and military rule that broke down under its own weight over many passing decades. You can find cracks anywhere you look, but a good place to start, a dramatic way to begin the story, is the Gracchus brothers

Before the brothers, though, was their mother Cornelia, and their father, Tiberius (the elder)

                                                                                                  

Cornelia Graccha (Africana) rejecting the offer of marriage

                  from King Ptolemy.

                        Cornelia, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus

After the elder Tiberius Gracchus' death around 150 BCE, Cornelia (Tiberius' wife) took charge of the family estate and their twelve children. She is remembered as a discrete, noble and devoted mother. When the King of Egypt, Ptolemy, asked for her hand in marriage, she turned him down, preferring to stay a widow. In the course of her life, nine of her children died, leaving a daughter, Sempronia, and two sons.

In my own life, Cicero, after my family was torn apart by domestic violence, my mother took my sisters and I to live in a new town, where she raised us mostly by her own solitary efforts, putting the three of us through school, taking us to church, feeding us, clothing us, and providing a home for us during the difficult years following her separation and divorce from my father.

I know that I have often spoken very highly of my my father, but he was not always the kind, wise gentleman he has become in his twilight age, and the noble devotion and courage my mother displayed towards my sisters and I, shepherding us away from his violence and towards a better future, has impressed upon me a powerful respect for the heroism of ordinary women.

My mother, Patricia, was not rich like Cornelia. My mother was not born into a family of power and influence. No kings courted her hand in marriage, no servants waited on her hand and foot.

My mother is a great reader of books. When I visited her today, on the dining table was a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a new illustrated edition. She read me some passages, and I shared a something from Marcus Aurelius, and from Epictetus.

We drank coffee together at the kitchen table and talked about the world; books, movies, Christmas plans. In the next room, the library, is an ancestor shrine of framed photos; every table, bookshelf and even the piano top, is crowded with images of family. In a prominent place amidst the books and pictures, is a stone bust of Queen Nefertiti, a miniature monument she has possessed for as long as I can remember.

My mother is a strong woman, intelligent and possessed of an enduring fortitude, and like Cornelia, she is an inspiration to her three children, and to the grandchildren who sprang forth from them.

Cornelia had twelve children, and only three survived to adulthood, Sempronia, Gaius and Tiberius. I marvel at the strength of will it must have taken to survive an onslaught of such repeated calamities as would take the lives of so many little ones. (I try to not think about it...if I ponder the possibility of my own children dying, I can only see a bottomless pit of despair inside me...)

I wonder in silence at the courage of women and the everyday valour of mothers.

Cornelia raised to adulthood her two sons and one daughter, and Cicero, it is the story of those sons that I wanted to discuss with you today.

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, whose names are now synonymous with sedition and revolution.

Plutarch describes them well...

“Tiberius was gentle and composed, mild and reasonable, alike in his cast of features, expression and demeanour. When addressing the people, Tiberius always spoke in a decorous tone, and remained standing in the same position as he spoke. He was conciliatory and appealed to men's sense of pity, his speaking style was pure and his language was chosen with extreme care.

                                        

Whereas Gaius was highly strung, impassioned, harsh, impulsive, and often, against his better judgement, allowed himself to be so far carried away by anger while he was speaking that his voice would rise to a high pitch, he would lapse into abuse, and loose the thread of his argument. To guard against such digressions he employed a well educated slave name Licinius, who stood behind him with an instrument which was intended to correct the tones of his voice and give them their proper pitch. Whenever he noticed that Gaius's voice was becoming harsh or broken with passion, he would sound a soft note, and as soon as Gaius heard this he would immediately moderate his anger, tone down his voice, and show that his emotions were under control.”

So these brothers were raised to be high class, well educated gentlemen with political aspirations. Tiberius, being the elder brother, entered politics first, on a populist platform of land reform and citizenship rights.

As Rome conquered neighbouring territories, the land gained was annexed and divided up, a portion often being set aside for the poor of Italy. The wealthy of Rome had, through corrupt dealings, taken over this land, and had filled it with the slaves taken from foreign conquests. This meant that there were lots of Italian nationals, homeless, unemployed and angry. Many of them moved to Rome, where they could hope to find a place to live, and eke out an existence on food handouts.

It was a mess. So Tiberius, along with a circle of other influential men, drafted a series of law reforms which were generally considered to be very conciliatory. They would enforce the already existing legal limit on the amount of land any one individual could own, (which the wealthy had circumvented through proxy buyers) and the government would compensate the prior owners in a buy-back scheme, in order to redistribute the land back to the poor. No one would be prosecuted for illegal land purchases. It should have been perfect solution.

But Cicero, when is politics ever about finding real solutions?

The wealthy classes and the landowners hated the reforms and did everything in their power to oppose them, going so far as to accuse Tiberius of sedition, claiming that his entire motive for introducing such reforms, was to undermine the very foundations of the state. Their efforts were fruitless, however, against the powerful eloquence of Tiberius' oratory:

“The wild beasts that roam over Italy, have their dens and holes to lurk in, but the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else. It is their lot to wander with their wives and their children, houseless and homeless, over the face of the earth. And when our generals appeal to their soldiers before a battle to defend their ancestors' tombs and their temples against the enemy, their words are a lie and a mockery, for not a man in their audience possesses such a family altar; not one out of all those Romans owns an ancestral tomb. The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own.”

The wealthy classes, realising they could not win by argument alone, sought the assistance of one of the Tribunes, Marcus Octavius. A Tribune is a people's representative in the senate, and they have veto power over decisions such as this. So, with Octavius in opposition, the reforms were stonewalled.

Tiberius, infuriated, changed his reforms to make them more pleasing to the common people, and set about to take the land from the wealthy, now offering no compensation, since they were in fact, in breach of the law. Octavius continued to refuse to give in on even a single negotiating point in the deal, rejecting it totally. The people grew restless. Tiberius made a choice which was illegal at the time, by calling on the people, to vote on whether or not to depose Octavius, so that the land reform vote could go through unopposed. Tiberius knew that it was wrong, he begged Octavius to reconsider, he threw his arms around him and kissed him in full view of the senate. Octavius stayed silent for a long time, tears filling his eyes, but when he looked out to the crowd and saw his backers, the rich and powerful standing together, his strength wavered and he told Tiberius to do as he pleased.

The people voted for Octavius' deposition. The crowd nearly murdered him as he was escorted from the senate house, but Tiberius threw himself into the melee and prevented any harm from coming to him, though one of Octavius' loyal slaves, whilst trying to protect his master, had his eyes torn out.

The story had seemed quite a lot like modern politics, up till this last point.

It's all fun and games until someone looses an eye, as they say.

Tiberius then got the land reform bill through. If only it could have ended there, but like sharks who gather at the smell of blood, Rome turned on herself, and things got really ugly.

Tiberius, in order to garner even more public support for his future attempt to be voted Tribune for a second year in a row, put forth new laws reducing the term of military service, and appointing equal numbers of the Equestrian Order, to serve on juries, which previously were only filled by those of senatorial rank. This last measure would effectively cripple the control over the courts held by the Senatorial class, and at the voting booths, a great conflict broke out between the two opposing camps, with clubs and staves being handed out among the crowd, and furniture broken up to arm the rest.

In the conflict, Tiberius was run down and clubbed to death by one of his fellow Tribunes, Publius Satyreius, who crushed his skull with the leg of a bench. More than three hundred other men were killed in the fray, by sticks and stones, but none died by the sword.

                                    The Death of Tiberius

Tiberius' body was forbidden formal burial, and was instead thrown into the river along with the other bodies from the conflict. Some of Tiberius' supporters were banished without trial, others were arrested and executed; Gaius Villius was shut up in a vessel filled with poisonous snakes, and so met his end in this way.

So ends the sad story of Tiberius Graccus, aged twenty nine. But the greater story to which he belongs, has only just begun. All this began long before your time Cicero, but these calamities form the foundation of what became the Cataline conspiracy, and so I began, as many other writers have, with the Gracchus brothers.

In my next letter, Cicero, I will discuss the life of Gaius Gracchus and ask you some difficult questions about that Republic which you held so dear to your heart.

In anticipation of many letters, and many more after those,

with gratitude and love

Morgan.

Book Two, Letter Six

Part 6 of 6

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy.

I have an apology to make, Thucydides.

There are some problems with the way that I have thought about this whole women issue, and they stem from an initial, and false assertion:

The very idea that there is a stronger sex, is fallacious.

History shows me that great courage, wisdom, valour and compassion are not the purvey of one gender, just as ignorance, insincerity, barbarism and hatred do not belong to one gender, or one culture or empire or race. There are also many problems with trying to look at history through a modern moral or cultural lens, the conclusions I draw can be misleading, or at worst, utterly false. In reading and learning any new subject, I must always be careful not to think that I own solid answers. I have been guilty of some of these crimes, and for that, Thucydides, I apologise.

These are the stories of the human animal. Perhaps the most socially complex creatures on the planet, we not only build empires and go to war and write music and make love, but we also tell stories about these things. Stories, I think, are neither true nor false, but occupy a loose state between both fact and fiction. The way we tell ourselves stories about the past, dominates the way we think about, and behave in the present. Your story, Thucydides, is still having an effect on us over two thousand years after you wrote it, and the people of my generation are reading your book, and understanding your story in our own way. We are making new conclusions about ancient history, actually people do this all the time, with all sorts of history. With each new archaeological dig, with each new book published, we reassess the past in light of new knowledge, and new perspectives are gained. Hopefully, we move towards the truth.

However, I am no archaeologist, or historian. I am just a student, writing letters to my dead friends. I am inspired by Petrarch, the French monk who discovered Cicero's letters in 1345 CE, and who seemed to have felt as I do, that the dead live on in us as we read their words. This is the immortality that Cicero spoke of: Only through writing may a person live forever.

Making my initial assertion about there being a stronger, or weaker sex, was really a bit of an experiment in perspective. The way we phrase our questions and the assertions we make upon beginning our search, define the outcome of our study. I like experimenting with different ways of thinking, and thinking about the Peloponnesian war from the women's perspective seemed like an interesting way to explore your magnificent book. I could have focussed on the peace treaties. I could have written to you about the propaganda styles of democratic speeches versus those of a monarchy. I could have made a study of the successful military tactics used in ancient warfare...perhaps in the future I will. This time around though, I decided to write about women. I want to know why you never mention women by name. Anthony Trollope, Cicero's biographer, says that there is no better way to know a person that by their own words, and so I have tried to read between the lines in an attempt to understand you, Thucydides, since we know so very little about you personally. It is an impossible task however, and my ideas about you may be completely false.

I have also learned a bit more about Spartan and Athenian society in the months since I first began reading your book (and writing most of this letter), and I have come to understand more about the powerful role women played in politics and war. I still find it curious that you never mention them, especially now that I understand something of the ways in which women were hugely influential in your time and place. The Athenian courtesans seems especially interesting. I have more questions than answers now, which is a state of being I enjoy immensely. There is so much more to read, so much more to learn, and reading your book has been the tip of the ice-berg. The stack of books on my bedside table grows ever taller.

*

I really should have finished reading the whole book before I began writing to you Thucydides . I have leapt to some unfair conclusions about you, and I am sorry. I still have one chapter left, so I will probably apologise again before I am done.

You see, I've finally read the last chapter of book seven. You're not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes. You're not shy of telling the truth, there is no romance in this chapter of the war: The defeat of the Athenian army on the island of Sicily. I almost don't want to repeat what you have to say, but it is important that I acknowledge my mistake in accusing you of having rose coloured glasses.

I speak of course, of the Athenian retreat. (Book 7, Chapter 7)

“...in the actual leaving of the camp there were sad sights for every eye, sad thoughts for every mind to feel. The dead were unburied, and when any man recognised one of his friends lying among them, he was filled with grief and fear; and the living who, whether sick or wounded, were being left behind caused more pain than did the dead to those who were left alive, and were more pitiable than the lost. Their prayers and lamentations made the rest feel impotent and helpless, as they begged to be taken with them and cried out aloud to every single friend or relative whom they could see; as they hung about the necks of those who had shared tents with them and were now going, following after them as far as they could, and, when their bodily strength failed them, reiterated their cries to heaven and their lamentations as they were left behind. So the whole army was filled with tears and in such distress of mind that they found it difficult to go away even from this land of their enemies when sufferings too great for tears had befallen them already and more still, they feared, awaited them in the dark future ahead.”

“...sufferings too great for tears...”

I don't want to go on quoting from this chapter, which is filled with stories of the suffering, imprisonment, starvation, degradation and death of the fleeing Athenian army. I feel pity for their human suffering, and considering the small percentage of people who actually held democratic voting rights in Athens, these soldiers seem to be the victims of powerful political greed and overreach. I don't know, war is a complicated mess.

But Thucydides, I do feel pity. For those men, those Athenian soldiers, raised to believe in the righteousness of their cause, raised and trained as warriors in the name of democratic freedom, were led to the slaughter by politicians and generals who didn't seem able to tell the difference between glory and greed. Of course, it's impossible to be sure about anything at this distance of time, but your book is full of passion, and I cannot help but feel moved by your story. People are driven by extreme circumstances to often choose between the lesser of two evils. Sometimes that is what war is. A choice between two evils. I shouldn't judge. The Spartans and Athenians both seem to have had justifications for choosing war, even if that choice opened the door to greater horrors than they could have imagined. The future is unwritten, and the Oracle speaks in riddles.

*

I've finished reading the whole book now. The last part, Book 8 is worthy of its own letter, but that will have to wait. If I'm going to start talking about the Persians, I want to make a whole letter of it.

Next I will find a copy of Xenophon's 'Hellenica', and read his continuation of the story where you left off. I'm looking forward to it, I love Xenophon's style. I just re-read his book 'On Horsemanship', and even though I know nothing about horses, and have no particular interest in them, it is wonderful just to take a walk in his world, and to see something of the world as he saw it.

I wonder about your death Thucydides, and there is some disagreement about your demise, but I wonder about the last page of your work. You leave us hanging, half way through a sentence concerning Tissaphernes making a sacrifice to Artemis...

Did you die at your writing desk?

Plutarch, in his biography of Cimon (since you were related to the family of that great man), claims that you were slain at Skapte Hyle, in Thrace. You had gold mines there didn't you? Thrace, home of those Thracian mercenaries who laid waste to Mycalessus. How strange, the way fate turns back upon its own narrative threads. Plutarch also claims that your remains were returned to Athens, where they were entombed along with those of Cimon.

Were you murdered at your desk while writing? An old man, hard at work on your book, which was not meant, “to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.” Did you die by the sword or the dagger? Did you face your attackers and fall in battle, or were you assassinated by sly killers with some wartime grudge against you? We will never know. Pausanias claims that you were murdered on the road home to Athens after your exile was rescinded.

We will never know.

*

So Thucydides, in writing to you, from the future generations for whom you wrote, I say thank you. Your book is not very popular, but it is well known, (though I suppose that there might be more copies in print now than ever in any other time in history). There is a funny saying about you, well it's about you and Plutarch.

“Where Plutarch has one hundred readers, Thucydides has only one, and that one only came to Thucydides, recommended by Plutarch.”

Right about the time I wrote this letter, (between October and December 2018CE) the new Assassins Creed game came out. By chance, I began reading your book months before I had heard anything about the game, a game that tells something of the story of the Peloponnesian War in full animated colour, with music and action and romance. There is even a female Spartan-born mercenary named Kassandra, as a main character. There are a lot of female characters as major parts of the story too. I have been playing it a lot, exploring the islands you described, visiting the famous battlegrounds, I even get to sail around with Herodotus and talk philosophy with Socrates. Hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of people who play this game will learn something of what you hoped they might, something which you knew was important, and worthy of documenting with such devoted care and literary style. I think that soon, Thucydides, you might gain some ground on Plutarch and a few more people will read your book because of this game.

                      Kassandra, from Assassins Creed: Odyssey

We are the future you wrote this book for. You are speaking directly to us. With your every word you implore us to learn something, anything from the calamities of your time, and to put this to good use in solving our own modern troubles. For we are certainly in the teeth of your Thucydidean Trap: Many great rising national powers, the decay of old empires, the birthing of new ideologies, new people's movements, new political agendas, and new wars.

It all sounds familiar, doesn't it Thucydides?

I hope that we can learn from the example of your history.

With gratitude and respect,

Morgan.

Book Two, Letter Nine

Part 5 of 6

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy.

I think I might now understand why you don't write about women. I found this towards the end of your book, in the seventeenth year of the war. The city of Athens was being directly besieged by the Spartans, and it had gone on for a whole year. You say this of the people of Athens:

“They were deprived of the whole of their country; more than 20,000 slaves, the majority of whom were skilled workmen, had deserted, and all the sheep and farm animals were lost”

“Every single thing that the city needed had to be imported, so that instead of a city it became a fortress.”

“...yet now in the seventeenth year after the first (Spartan) invasion, having suffered every kind of hardship already in the war, here were the Athenians going out to Sicily and taking upon themselves another war on the same scale as that which they had been waging all this time with the Peloponnesians” (Book 7, Chapter 2)

You don't have to mention women. Athens, emptied of the men who were away fighting, emptied of slaves who had deserted, emptied of all but the women and children and elderly, locked in their homes in a siege lasting more than a year. I think, Thucydides, that you don't want to mention women because their story is simply too terrible to relate. I'm not even going to talk about the early plague years, long before the siege. By Book Seven, you seem disgusted by the ongoing futility of this war of attrition, so disgusted that you actually relax from your cool, mostly objective political narrative, to tell us the tragedy of Mycalessus.

The Athenians, occupied with the simultaneous invasions of Sicily and Lacadaemon (Sparta), hired Thracian mercenaries to conduct raids along the coast through the Euripus. When they came to the city of Mycalessus, they “...at daybreak assaulted the city, which is not a big one, and captured it...”

“The Thracians burst into Mycalessus, sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither the young nor the old, but methodically killing everyone they met, women and children alike, and even the farm animals and every living thing they saw. For the Thracian race, like all the most bloodthirsty barbarians, are always particularly bloodthirsty when everything is going their own way. So now there was confusion on all sides and death in every shape and form. Among other things, they broke into a boys' school, the largest in the place, into which the children had just entered, and killed every one of them. The disaster fell upon the entire city, a disaster more complete that any, more sudden and more horrible.”

“It was a small city, but in the disaster just described its people suffered calamities as pitiable as any which took place during the war.” (Book 7, Chapter 2)

                                                       Thracian Swords

                                                    Thracian warriors

So I've found my answer. Where are the women? They are in their homes being killed and raped and kidnapped and sold as slaves, just as they have been in every war. I think now that you didn't write about women because there was little more to say about them, other than what you describe in this tragedy of Mycalessus. I can forgive you this omission. What need is there to say what everyone already knows about war? Instead, you restrict yourself to the political facts, the military manoeuvres, the speeches and the chronology of calamity. These specific names and details are unique to your time, to your war, to your culture, the rest is too common, and too terrible to bear mentioning.

This Peloponnesian war seems driven by a very masculine nationalistic pride, in defence of the honour of a warrior code. In reality, it is driven by greed and ambition and fear and any claims to virtue made by the combatants seem ridiculous. Pretty words and clever speeches whitewash over the grim truth. Men are not the stronger sex. They never have been, and if the news reports of my own time are any evidence, they never will be. Men seem so insecure as to be easily manipulated by pride and shame, and in their insecurity, commit crimes of violence in order to save face. The ideologies we men believe in are all too often the result of momentary politics, and the wars we fight in so often seem more like crimes of passion, than quests for justice.

If for you, Thucydides, you believe that the greater glory of women is to be least talked about by men, whether in praise or criticism, then their glory is in written all throughout your book in their undocumented endurance.

The women survived, they prevailed with glory to tell their story in stoic silence, while all the praise that could be heaped upon the military and political leaders of your time, will never cover over the shameful crimes they committed in the name of honour, courage, valour, democracy, freedom and justice. All of those words feel hollow now, like propaganda slogans.

Sometimes I get carried away, I know. I'm looking at this through a very modern a lens. I tend to look at history with a feminist filter, and I know that it clouds my vision, like any filter does. Is there really anything implied by your choice to not document the lives of prominent women during the war? I don't know enough about ancient Greece, but it seems that stories of prominent women should have been worthy of your attention. Is your choice, your very careful choice, to include that little detail about women in Pericles speech, your way of saying, through the absence of any other mention of women, that you thought them worthy of the glory of not being inferior to what God made them?

What did God make women, Thucydides?

I think God made them strong.

*

I found this in “Earth Abides”, a post apocalypse science fiction novel written in 1950, by George R Stewart. In this scene, the male protagonist is silently contemplating the strength of his female partner, particularly her courage in wanting to bring children into the world.

“Yes, he thought humbly, that strong courage was his only at great moments - with her it was part of daily life.”

Man's courage seems fleeting, momentary. A valiant charge against the enemy, the stoic endurance of hardship while on the march. Women's courage is displayed every day, in every living moment and activity. Their daily lives require the kind of courage that men generally do not recognise. Perhaps that is a one sided a way of looking at the issue. I think that men and women often do not recognise the courage and virtues of the other gender, we misunderstand each other, we are ignorant of the other's struggles. I wonder what gains might be made if men learned more of women's history, and women learned more of men's? For all too often their stories run parallel, and learning only of one, can leave the student nescient of the other.

*

Oh, another thing Thucydides, I have also been reading the Richard Crawley translation of your book, and in his version of the speech of Pericles, he does not use the word God in the above statement about women. (Book 2, Paragraph 45) Instead, Crawley writes:

“On the other hand, if I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will all be comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character...”

What is the natural character of women?

I think that the message is the same.

Book Two, Letter Nine

Part 4 of 6

                                                  Thucydides

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy

Ok, so back to the tyranny of Athens.

Once again, I will quote from Pericles, an Athenian leader. (Book 2, Chapter 6)

“And do not imagine that what we are fighting for is simply the question of freedom or slavery: there is also involved the loss of our empire and the dangers arising from the hatred which we have incurred in administering it.”

The hatred which the Athenian's incurred seemed to have been quite justifiable, since Athens “...has spent more life and labour in warfare than any other state, thus winning the greatest power that has ever existed in history, such a power that will be remembered for ever by posterity...”

It seems that the Athenians were well aware of the “democratic dictatorship” they held over their subject nations, and found the cause of Empire to be satisfactory justification for their overbearing dominance. I read of excessive taxes, unfair trade deals, punishing levels of conscription and continual wars of foreign conquest or the subjugation of rebellions. Essentially the same model for Empire that had existed since long before Athens.

Athens, proud of its military achievements against the Persians in the previous war, seems strangely unaware that their own war with Sparta was just a border conflict, funded and encouraged by the distant Persians, who were always ready to pay Greeks to fight each other. Actually, a lot of what we moderns would criticise America for, in their greedy manipulations of the middle east, comes across as standard procedure in the ancient world. The Persians seem to have laid the groundwork for modern empire management, and this whole Peloponnesian war would probably appear on Persian tax records as money well spent keeping the Greeks busy fighting each other, and out of western Asia.

It has been observed of the French revolution, that the revolutionaries rather quickly became the new tyrants, having slain their enemies. It seems that Athens, having united most of Hellas (Greece) in their prior war against Persian subjugation, got right on with business subjugating their own allies, just as the Persians would have done, had they won.

From a speech made by the Mytilleneans (former allies of Athens) at a gathering at Olympia. (Book three, chapter one):

“The object of the alliance was the liberation of the Hellenes from Persia, not the subjugation of the Hellenes to Athens. So long as the Athenians in their leadership respected our independence, we followed them with enthusiasm. But when we saw that they were becoming less and less antagonistic to Persia and more and more interested in enslaving their own allies, then we became frightened. Because of the multiple voting system, the allies were incapable of uniting in self defence, and so they all became enslaved...”

“...In most cases goodwill is the basis of loyalty, but in our case fear was the bond, and it was more through terror than through friendship that we were held together in alliance.”

Living in a democracy as I do, we are taught to believe that democracy and freedom are universal truths that will bring about justice for all, and that ultimately all other forms of government are variations of oppression not to be tolerated in the least degree. Your book, Thucydides, tells a very different story, and I shudder at the visible parallels within my own world.

It is horrible to contemplate the diminishing cycles of history. The mistakes we seem unable to avoid. I don't have any solutions, no alternatives to the tragedy of the Thucydidean Trap, as they call it: namely that powerful nations live in fear of rising nations, and that war is the common outcome of this fear.

I read, I take notes, I write. I am a grain of sand on the beach of our common ancestry.

Book Two, Letter Nine

Part 3 of 6

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy.

I found three entries regarding women, that I would like to discuss specifically.

This first is from the speech given by Pericles (an Athenian leader), at the Athenian annual public funeral for the war dead. (Book 2, Chapter 4):

“Perhaps I should say a word or two on the duties of women to those among you who are now widowed. I can say all I have to say in a short word of advice. Your great glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of a woman, is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you, or criticising you.”

                                                                           Pericles

Book 3, Chapter 5: Revolution in Corcyra

“The women also joined in the fighting with great daring, hurling down tiles from the roof-tops and standing up to the din of battle with a courage beyond their sex.”

This third passage is from the final words of Book 5, chapter 7:

“...the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves.”

So that's about it. There a few other references to women being taken as slaves, but basically that's all you have to say about women. I'm not criticising you, not specifically, but it's the whole, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence thing again. Now I'm sure it seems obvious to say that there would have been very few women among the officer corps with which you lived, but very few, and none at all mentioned ever, is a different thing entirely. No mothers, daughters or wives are ever mentioned by name. (At least I'm pretty sure...your book is huge, my copy is filled with my scrawled notes and underlined passages.)

You chose specifically to not write about women in anything but the broadest terms.

But I also wonder about the role of gender separation in your society. I understand that Athenian women in particular often led rather cloistered lives, separate from the affairs of men. Their lives and influence perhaps held little relevance for you. For a writer such as yourself, that is, a conspicuously detailed narrator of facts and figures and events, from political and social customs and ideologies, to the legal minutia of peace agreements - I suspect that you didn't write about women, because you might not have known much about women.

                                                           Athenian Women

I understand that your book is a political history book, you are very careful to not get dragged down into philosophy or overly emotional descriptions of battles or civilian suffering, but women are pretty much everywhere, and they exert their influence, political and otherwise in every sphere of human endeavour, even in the ancient world, so the lack of women in your book is conspicuous, and a little suspicious. It seems that there should have at least have been something said of Spartan women who are famous even now for their bravery, physical prowess and assertive natures.

                                                                Spartan Women

Archidamia: a Spartan Queen

340 - 241 BCE

Thucydides, you seem to confess to an unwillingness to write about women, by quoting from the aforementioned Pericles, and his intentional desire that nothing ever be known of women; a declaration that their silence and invisibility are their only glory.

Fascinating.

But there must have been women everywhere...what were they doing I wonder? You either didn't know, or didn't recognise their influence, or you would have written something about them other than to say they were sold into slavery or killed. Just how separate were the lives of men and women in your era? Did you really consider women not worth writing about at all? Herodotus before you, and Xenophon after you wrote about influential women, but not you Thucydides.

This actually plays into another idea I toy with, that is knowing something by its opposite.

We all know that war is a visceral, terrifying, murderous mess, but you rarely describe it in this way. Since I know you are omitting these details, all your descriptions become like code phrases for the actual terrors hidden beneath. Hence, lay waste to the land, has its real meaning in all the things it doesn't want to mention, and you, Thucydides, do not want to mention women.

Who exactly are you protecting with your mythology of battle? The soldiers? Well certainly, you were one of them, you saw both sides of the war. You served with the Athenians in battle for years before you were exiled to the Spartan allied territories, after your failed command at Amphipolis. You would want to justify your life, everyone does, that's normal. You certainly weren't pulling the wool over anyone's eyes who was there at the time, but I am from that forever you wrote this book for, and you certainly don't fool me either.

Why this romance of War?

I'm not criticising, again, not at all. I'm just struggling to understand you. I have nearly finished reading your book and I have loved every page. I live within a culture who romanticises war in ways just as powerful and illusory as you seem to, so I get it. You have to do it, you have to believe in the beautiful lie, because if all you believed in were the terrible facts, you couldn't possibly go on living.

In my day, Thucydides, many do not. Go on living, that is. Suicide amongst returned soldiers is currently at appalling levels, and I don't think for a moment that your book's romantic notions will help cure that ill in any way, but I do think that it says something about the usefulness of rose coloured glasses.

We live with a lot of terrible facts, and the romance of life doesn't always cover over the stain of reality. People slip off the edge all the time. We call it post traumatic stress disorder now. It used to be called other things...battle sickness, shell shock. Soldiers from the Vietnam War of the nineteen sixties and seventies are famous for returning from the war with the thousand yard stare.

Sometimes I think that no one really survives a war. Not the soldiers, not winners or the losers, and not the civilians caught in between.

P.S.

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Youtube Video

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Kickstarter Page

Book Two, Letter Nine

Part 2 of 6

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy.

I'm finally going to talk about democratically elected dictators, and I'm going to start with what Plato said on the topic. I'll try to summarise in my own words:

The struggle between rich and poor, between the working, intellectual and ruling classes, has been going on for all human history it seems,

Plato, in The Republic (Book VIII) outlines the path from oligarchy, through democracy, to tyranny.

(Oligarchy: the ruling of the many, by a select class of wealthy families or corporate bodies.)

As a society ruled by an oligarchy becomes more powerful, more influential, and grows as a nation, its governing bodies, being vulnerable to many of the same corruptions as a democracy (financial, political, military etc.), gradually grows greedy for greater and greater control, thus squeezing the people tighter. The people who, across all levels of society, demand more freedoms, more wealth, more liberty, then more land, more empire, and finally voting rights...and thus through this struggle, a democracy is born.

Democracies are vulnerable to many of the same corruptions as an oligarchy, and so, as individual freedoms increase, so too does the impunity with which the ruling classes behave. A large proportion of the population are now involved in the management of the democratic government, servant drones, as Plato calls them, I guess we'd call them bureaucrats. These drones serve the powerful people in the government, and are subject to the will of the ruling class. The drones grow fearful and obedient, and do not allow anyone to speak out against the government they serve.

This manifests as the perpetual class struggle between rich and poor, and gives rise to the people's hero, (a demagogue), a politician who cries for justice, who stands for the people's rights, for economic reform, for land reform.

The ruling class then have one of two choices, either assassinate this popular leader, or become subject to him. They usually exile or imprison him, but he always comes back, stronger than ever.

The people's hero, in order to inflame the passions of the mob, will gather a bodyguard around them to protect themselves from the violence of the ruling class. The people will demand that their leader be allowed to have this guard, “Let not the people's friend be lost to them”, they will say. This bodyguard will incite violence against their enemies, killing or exiling all who oppose them.

Then the people and their demagogue will finally overthrow the established ruling class, and install their tyrant hero, who, in defence of the freedoms of the people, will actually strip away all the people's rights and establish himself as dictator, taxing the people harshly so that they have no strength to oppose him. He will start facile wars in order that the people should require a leader, he will murder his enemies, and when he can get no more support from the people, he will hire fake mobs to protest for his cause. All who serve him, do so compelled by fear of death.

Thus tyranny is born from democracy, democracy from oligarchy.

*

So...reading Plato reminded me a lot of the rise of the Nationalist Socialist Party (the Nazi's) in Germany during the nineteen thirties, and of the people's hero gathering his private police force, which became an army, which marched over Europe, east and west, spreading chaos and destruction.

When I read The Order of the Death's Head: a history of Hitler's SS, by Heinz Höhne, I had in mind that the patterns of tyranny might have repeating echoes, and that by studying the details of past examples, I might understanding something of the other kinds of despotism in the modern world. I worry about my own country, Thucydides. A looming Australian tyranny seems to be rising from the cesspit of Parliament House, and it is as ugly as the nineteen thirties, motivated by similar fears and prejudices, though it is not yet as bloody.

Plato is just the context though, a way to understand the broader meaning of the Peloponnesian War. I really want to talk about some of these speeches included in your book Thucydides. They are really my favourite parts of your book. Sure the battle descriptions have their charm, but the speeches - the intellectual concepts, and the clever, cunning, manipulative use of wartime propaganda language is fascinating.

And, just like Plato, it all feels very familiar.

*

PS....
Zebulon: Music of an Invisible Enclave (Kickstarter Promo #2)