Book two, Letter four, part three of five.

To Cicero, on the subject of Friends and Enemies

July 24th

The day of rain has passed and today again I am draped in sunshine and shadows beneath the green leaves of lime trees. I listen on and on to your speeches Cicero, and just as Petrarch warned me, I learn that I should not be so quick to judge you. For in the closing words of your second Philippic, I find this:

“I defended the republic as a young man, I will not abandon it now that I am old. I scorned the sword of Cataline, I will not quail before yours. No, I will rather cheerfully expose my own person, if the liberty of the city can be restored by my death.

May the indignation of the Roman people at last bring forth what it has been so long labouring with. In truth, if twenty years ago in this very temple I asserted that death could not come prematurely upon a man of consular rank, with how much more truth must I now say the same of an old man? To me, indeed, O conscript fathers, death is now even desirable, after all the honours which I have gained, and the deeds which I have done. I only pray for these two things: one, that dying I may leave the Roman people free. No greater boon than this can be granted me by the immortal gods. The other, that every one may meet with a fate suitable to his deserts and conduct towards the republic. ”

And from the third Philippic you recount the horrific tale of Antony's' slaughter of three hundred centurions for the crime of remaining loyal to the Republic and not joining with him in his war against Octavian and the Republic.

“A man who in the house of his entertainer at Brundusium ordered so many most gallant men and virtuous citizens to be murdered, and whose wife’s face was notoriously besprinkled with the blood of men dying at his and her feet. Who is there of us, or what good man is there at all, whom a man stained with this barbarity would ever have spared; especially as he was coming hither much more angry with all virtuous men than he had been with those whom he had massacred there?”

Antony really does seem a madman and a drunkard, yet also somehow he was a powerful commander, a cunning manipulator of men and fortunes. He used money to buy every loyalty, and he sold what he stole from Rome to pay for his avarice and debauchery. It seems Cicero, that his villainy was equal to your valour.

Yet I wonder at the loyalty of the troops who did follow Antony. For what did they fight? What cause enabled their spirit to, in the end, conquer the republic, even Rome herself, for they were Roman soldiers who followed Antony in his war against you, and against the Republic. Were they mere mercenaries, or were they the long disenfranchised Italian allies of Rome who had grown weary of their second class rights and sought only to plunder the crown jewel of their own country and gain something of the wealth and status denied to them by the Senate. Those soldiers who followed Antony considered you, Cicero, their enemy as much as Antony considered you so. There is hot blood splattered over every page of your speeches as the crisis of civil war drove brother against brother.

A crisis which in the end caused Antony to plunder the prisons for more soldiers, buying their loyalty with the promise of gold and land and freedom. What an army it must have been that in the end with Antony, marched into Rome, driving you from the city, and ultimately to your death.

Book 2, Letter 4
Part 2 of 5

Dear Cicero,

The ancient writers talk a lot about enemies, and the best ways to deal with them and I feel that, removed from the exact conditions of these wartime narratives, the intellectual or philosophical lessons they offer can be applied to civilian life in many ways.

Philosophically speaking, the destruction of one's enemies need not always be about the ruin of other men or nations. I can think tactically about my own psyche and use ancient wisdom to develop better methods for dealing with my own inner conflicts. I can also find methods to better discredit and destroy the ideas of my enemies. Even a battlefield fundamental tactic like the bull-horns can be used to better structure an argument for or against an issue or person. I have found myself composing these letters with consideration to the tactical delivery of ideas; offering a feint to draw one's attention in a certain direction, then encircling the reader with a counter idea that by well timed collusion, leads them down the river I wish to show them.

So Cicero, this opening feint is all in aid of drawing your attention towards a certain idea, so that I may draw up my cavalry and launch them at your flank. You might have already guessed that this attack would come wrapped in flattery, and so I will quote from your treatise “On Friendship”, (from the Evelyn S Shuckburg translation from the late 1800's).

“Compliance gets us friends, plain speaking hate.

Plain speaking is a cause of trouble, if the result of it is resentment, which is poison of friendship; but compliance is really the cause of much more trouble, because by indulging his faults it lets a friend plunge into headlong ruin. But the man who is most to blame is he who resents plain speaking and allows flattery to egg him on to his ruin. On this point, then, from first to last there is need of deliberation and care. If we remonstrate, it should be without bitterness; if we reprove, there should be no word of insult. In the matter of compliance (for I am glad to adopt Terence's word), though there should be every courtesy, yet that base kind which assists a man in vice should be far from us, for it is unworthy of a free-born man, to say nothing of a friend. It is one thing to live with a tyrant, another with a friend. But if a man's ears are so closed to plain speaking that he cannot bear to hear the truth from a friend, we may give him up in despair. This remark of Cato's, as so many of his did, shews great acuteness: "There are people who owe more to bitter enemies than to apparently pleasant friends: the former often speak the truth, the latter never." Besides, it is a strange paradox that the recipients of advice should feel no annoyance where they ought to feel it, and yet feel so much where they ought not. They are not at all vexed at having committed a fault, but very angry at being reproved for it. On the contrary, they ought to be grieved at the crime and glad of the correction

Well, then, if it is true that to give and receive advice—the former with freedom and yet without bitterness, the latter with patience and without irritation—is peculiarly appropriate to genuine friendship, it is no less true that there can be nothing more utterly subversive of friendship than flattery, adulation, and base compliance. I use as many terms as possible to brand this vice of light-minded, untrustworthy men, whose sole object in speaking is to please without any regard to truth. In everything false pretence is bad, for it suspends and vitiates our power of discerning the truth. But to nothing it is so hostile as to friendship; for it destroys that frankness without which friendship is an empty name.”

So, Cicero, please do not begrudge me this criticism of you. If you had so desired, you might have lived out your life in peace and security, you might have left Rome and met your son in Athens, you might have written a thousand more treatise on topics concerning all mankind and given more to the world than your half cut short maturity allowed. Your love of the republic, and your hatred of Antony seem equal in strength. You might have chosen life, Cicero. Could you have chosen to let it be? To let it go? Antony was your enemy and you held on to the end, to the bloody, disfigured end. I wonder what advice might have convinced you to change course, to see the folly in your continued struggle and sway you to abandon the republic, to abandon Rome?

Book two, Letter Four (part one of five)

July 23^rd 2018 CE

Dear Cicero,

My hands are like pin cushions. All week I have been amongst the thorn branches of lime trees, the hooks of roses and the needle point tips of Agave cactus. This winter continues to be very dry, the result of which is that I am getting a lot of work done at the farm and around my home, pruning trees, pruning shrubs, building walls, and now my hands bear the marks of their use. Yet today's weather bears all the marks of an impending thunderstorm, and the aroma of approaching rain is carried to me on tumultuous winds from the west.

I must apologise, Cicero, for an error in my last letter to you regarding dates as to your being in Rome in 45 BCE when Caesar marched in Triumph through the city. I thought perhaps that you and Tullia may have been there, but I read today that was not the case, for Tullia died in February of that year. Having given birth to a son, (Cornelius I think), Tullia fell ill, seemed to recover, but died from further complications. I cannot find anything in your letters regarding her son, other than a provision being made for him in your will, so historians assume that the child must have died as well. We don't know.

It was not until September that Caesar marched into the city, and by that time Cicero, you were far away, buried in grief amidst your books and finding nothing there to console you, for as you say in a letter to your best friend Atticus, “Reading and writing do not soften it, but they deaden it.” We still have some of what you wrote during this time of grief, fragments of your treatise On Consolation are extant. I shall seek them out and read them. I want to understand, for I have daughters of my own, living wonders of beauty and delight. The thought of their death....well, I can only imagine the insulting proposition that anything could console me in my grief if either of them died.

So I am sorry to have raised such a delightful hope in my imagination. For if Tullia had lived, she might been there to see the giraffe with you, the two of you might have gone to Athens to be with your own adult son, Marcus. If...if....

I have just finished reading your treatise “On Friendship”, written only one year after Tullia's death, while you hid yourself away in your Tusculan villa, so there are a few things I would like to discuss about that, but I have also been listening to your speeches against your arch enemy, Mark Antony.

The speeches known as the Philippics.

You and I seem to share a passion for invective and knife work in oratory, and you certainly could not have hoped for a more villainous enemy, worthy of your skill with the intellectual carving knife, than Mark Antony. I know that he killed you for it, but that only proves my point about your skills, and unfortunately, also proves your passion. For you could not let go of your hatred of him, and in the end..well...I am not here to judge you, but you did write fourteen speeches against him. You couldn't let go it seems, and your love of the Republic was such that you could never stand to see him in a position of power over Rome. Rome whom you loved as your child. Perhaps it gives you some satisfaction to know that Antony did not survive long, and that he killed himself rather than submit to justice. Perhaps this angers you even more though, to know that he managed to escape criminal conviction even in defeat and death.

It is not popular these days to speak of one's enemies, a grammatical convention that is, I think, connected to the way we don't declare war either. Politicians declare a war on drugs, a war on homelessness, a war on terrorism, but these are flimsy hot air declamations, unrelated to actual war. Yet, despite our soldiers fighting in many countries that would still seem familiar to you Cicero, we are not at war. Missiles and guns and artillery are being fired, soldiers and civilians are dying, cities are burning, yet we are not at war. We are involved in foreign conflicts, in civil unrest, in counter terrorist activities. Am I ignorant of the difference between war and conflict? I always consider that any confusion I feel might arise from the ignorance of my own questions. Nothing can derail one's quest for truth like a misleading presumption, or an ill phrased query.

But...

My great-grandfather fought in the first world war, one hundred years ago. He also fought in the second world war. Both my grandfather's fought in the second world war. My father served in the army, but was not deployed to any combat zones, as he served during the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, after the Vietnam war. My uncle Stephen served for decades with the transport division. He has recently had his book published, on the history of Australian Army traditions and culture.

Stephen Taubert's Book

I have never served in the military, and have no expectations to ever do so. I have, however, been taught how to handle, maintain and fire a rifle, a skill passed down to me by my father, with whom I went rabbit hunting in my youth. I am now thirty eight years old, and throughout my entire life I have seen my country involved in fighting in many foreign countries, yet never in my lifetime has this continental/island nation of Australia been directly threatened or invaded.

I have been reflecting on something I said to you Cicero, in a previous letter. I listed the major wars, rebellions and foreign conflicts that occurred during your lifetime, thinking it a long list, and considering that it represented a time of terrible unrest for Rome. But now that I consider my own, short, modern living experience, it seems to me to be the same as in your time. Great Wars have been fought in the past, great enemies defeated, yet conflict looms ahead like a tidal wave we fear will destroy us all. But people compare our time with yours all the time, and these comparisons are as misleading as they might be helpful, so, this little reflection of our two societies should be kept in its proper regard.

It is a thought. Nothing more.

(end part one of five)

Dear Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The dead are a long time in the grave, a long time dead for sure, but dying sure can take its time. I take my father's arm as we walk slowly through the hospital gardens. He is a lumbering giant, an earthen colossus with tree branch arms and an iron rod for a walking stick. He is a strong man burdened with the weakness and frailty of age, a weight that I now, with my arm linked in his, help him to carry.

Yamamoto, you have a lot to say about the right way to die, but not so much about the best way to live in old age. Cicero's writing has been a great help, but he did not live to see his body leak and sag and betray his spirit. My father's body is betraying him, defying his will to live, his passion for new knowledge and new experiences. He tells me stories of his time as a soldier, weapons training done out in the bush with young men. He tells me of the summer he wrote poetry every hour of the day for weeks on end, and how he thought it was a portent of his rapidly impending death....but he has lived twenty years more since that season.

He is full of stories, his cup overflows with life and death and love and adventure and his over brimming eyes burst with the tears of his passion. For he has lived a life defined by the principles of nobility and honour and although he is a man as guilty as any other of sins and errors, as you rightly say, Yamamoto... “A man who has never once erred is dangerous.”

We sit together, my father and I, in the dimly lit comfort of the hospital resting lounge, awaiting the doctor. I have your book, the Hagakure, with me and I read to my father, anecdotes of the wisdom of your era. My father and I share this love of wisdom, and of heroic legends of kings and warriors and poets. We share the same love of immortality and chivalry, and we both endeavour to make real the fantasy of history, in the actions and thoughts of our own lives.

He talks to me about hunting, about the best way to make a clean, swift kill. The correct angle to pierce the shoulder of a beast and puncture the heart in one shot. My father is a skilled marksman, a prize-winning soldier on the rifle range and a hunter of many years experience in the dry mountains and plains of his homeland. A hunter of wild boar and wild goat. He is a student of technology also, and a teacher of sciences both metallurgic and silicone. A boilermaker and welder of great skill, as well as a computing lecturer and tutor. He is an author of books on industrial and domestic chemicals as well as on the history of submarine warfare and of folk legends surrounding weather prediction. A collector of books and coins and model trains and tanks and soldiers. A lover of culture and film and games and music and children and wisdom and good food and fine clothes and fine wine. A peasant king of the feasting table, a master of salads and meats and funny songs and rhymes.

In the kitchen my father always sings. In the mornings he sings to wake me up and in the evenings he sings as he serves up dinner. He is always ready to laugh at his own misfortune and pain, and despite his life long passion for learning, has always considered himself uneducated on account of never even really starting high school, instead entering the workforce at age thirteen. He is possessed of a self deprecating humility, mingled in equal parts with pride and a strong sense of his own worth. He has studied the natural sciences, ecology, ornithology, philosophy and history, but his true passion is film, and the actors who have for his entire life, inspired him with their dramatic portrayals of the never-ending diversity of human experience.

This white haired polymath, my Father, is making preparations for a great journey. The last one he will ever make. The last journey any of us will ever make.

“The person without previous resolution to inevitable death makes certain that his death will be in bad form.” Yamamoto, your wisdom is a heavy stone to carry, but the truth is often so. My father makes preparations that his death shall be in good form, without trembling or fear. “If you are slain in battle, one should resolve to have one's corpse facing the enemy.” My father prepares himself daily, facing the pain of his bodily decay with courage and good humour, ready to fall facing the enemy.

Yamamoto, I wish you could have met my Father. I think that over a bottle of Saki he would have opened up to you and revealed his Way. His Warrior Code. He is an Australian, so understand he is very different from you, but I believe that you both admire similar ideals and would have much to discuss. I will continue to read to him from your book when I can.

Perhaps Yamamoto, one day, I will read to you from my Father's books.

Today I carry water, and tomorrow I will chop wood. For as you say, “There is nothing more valuable than moments of life. All human life is a sequence of moments.”

Carry water, chop wood.

*

The Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo