Late May 2018 CE

Dearest Cicero

''The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.'

I played in the streets today with my band, our dancer dressed in black and blue transforming the music into movement, meeting the crowd half way, translating for them the complicated chords and rhythms and making a moving picture show of songs that strike and soar across unfamiliar ground. I see her dance, I see the crowd watching her and the way they engage with the music through the medium of her body, and I know that her dance is born of our songs, and that our hands and hearts and minds and feet all combine to make something unique, timelessly wrought in the echoing air of the city street.

I have been pondering your words, pondering the long time to come when you do not exist, and knowing that I exist in that future for you. I am one for whom your immortality is a living reality, and though I am small, tiny in comparison with your greatness, I too feel the force of the future pulling me forward into my destiny and beyond into death and the vast wavering darkness of the endless centuries after I am gone from the world and all memory of me is gone.

Inspired by the living pulse of your writing, I write. Inspired by your immortality, I strive to become immortal, to live a life worthy of immortality.

Now I sit writing in a tavern situated on the broad road leading north from the city to the port. I am drinking locally brewed cold ale from a clear glass. As the sunset grows grey with the early autumn evening, workmen come in, their bright work clothes stained with the days labours. One man steps down from his stool to re-kindle the fire in its hearth, while the bar girl lights a second fire in the next room. I have Plutarch with me, The Rise and Fall of Athens. He's a bit after your time, about eighty years between your death and his birth, but this book is telling stories from five hundred or more years before you. I wonder if you know of the legends of Theseus, founder of Athens? Today I was in a comic book store, (story books with as many pictures as words) and there it was on the shelf in hard cover, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which is an incredibly popular story even now, told and re-told in many different ways, in books, theatre and our modern moving pictures (I'll explain later...).

I have been listening to another audio book this week, The Life of Cicero, by Anthony Trollope. Written in the 1870's. I have been hearing today of your return from exile (which you might be interested to know is a method of punishment not in use at all any more), and your involvement in the trial of Milo regarding the murder of Clodius. It is a fascinating story of corruption and senatorial gang warfare, and your speech seems credited as a very early example of legal forensics. What a bloody and frightening time to be in Rome, yet you seemed reluctant to leave it when granted the position of Governor of Cilicia, which everyone writes of as a year of magnificent leadership. This reluctance to leave Rome I find remarkable. I do not feel the same sense of devotion to my own nation that you seem to, and in finding myself so, I feel that I am somehow impoverished by a certain lack of pride in my home country. My modern cynicism seems to prevent it.

But about your Governorship in Cilicia, I think that I should quote Plutarch for you, from his biography of your life.

Gifts he would not receive, not even when the kings offered them, and he relieved the provincials from the expense of entertainments; but he himself daily received men of pleasing accomplishments at banquets which were not expensive, although generous. His house, too, had no door-keeper, nor did anyone ever see him lying a-bed, but early in the morning he would stand or walk in front of his chamber and receive those who came to pay him their respects. It is said moreover, that he never ordered any man to be chastised with rods or to have his raiment torn from him, and that he never inflicted angry abuse or contumelious punishments. He discovered that much of the public property had been embezzled, and by restoring it he made the cities well-to-do, and men who made restitution he maintained in their civil rights without further penalties. He engaged in war, too, and routed the robbers who made their homes on Mount Amanus; and for this he was actually saluted by his soldiers as Imperator. When Caelius the orator asked Cicero to send him panthers from Cilicia for a certain spectacle at Rome, Cicero, pluming himself upon his exploits, wrote to him that there were no panthers in Cilicia; for they had fled to Caria in indignation because they alone were warred upon, while everything else enjoyed peace.

There are few politicians of my own century who might receive such a glowing review of their achievements. This age seems marred by the same impious disregard for good governance that your own was, a political era defined more by its lies than it's honesty. My modern cynicism? Or does that sound familiar to you too?

Which brings me to the next question.

Marc Antony. I know you probably don't want to talk about him, but I was listening to your Philippic against him today, your open letter I think we would call it today. The things you attest as to his behaviour are shocking even now, perhaps even more shocking than in your own time. From the stories I read, Roman conventions of acceptable behaviour included things considered debauchery now, but the claims you make of Antony are fantastic. There is a single minded madness to his continued abuses of himself and to his dereliction of duty, it hardly seems possible that such things could be true, let alone known by the public and tolerated. His alcoholism is legendary, as are his sexual appetites, but the tragedy of Pompey's home is what I want to really address.

Just to make sure I'm getting it right, I'll tell you what I know.

Pompey the Great, a military and civil leader of such renown and nobility that his name is nearly synonymous with 'ceremonial splendour' in my own language. Pompey whose army was finally defeated by Caesar's, and who fled to Egypt only to be murdered on the shores of the Nile by two of his own guards. Pompey whose head was then severed and presented to Caesar in a jar by King Ptolemy, brother of Cleopatra.

Pompey, whose house upon his death was put up for auction and which was purchased by Antony.

Antony who you assert then “...squandered Pompey's substantial fortune, not in a few months, but in a few days...whole store rooms disposed of as gifts to unmitigated scoundrels. Actors and actresses grabbing everything they wanted, the place packed with gamblers, crammed with inebriates. For days on end in many parts of the house, the orgies of drinking went on an on.”

Pompey, “whose house for months afterwards no one could pass without weeping.”

Mark Antony, this dull brute, this insane drunk, this spineless, morally corrupted idiot, this gangster.

Mark Antony. Is this the man on whose order you were murdered?

You Cicero, saviour of Rome. You who defeated the Cataline Conspiracy. You who spoke out against Verres. You Cicero who were an eloquent voice of reason and intellect and justice, and who post-mortem have become the eloquent voice of generations more who speak with your words and with your convictions and with your passions.

You Cicero, murdered and your corpse desecrated by Herennius, a centurion and Popilius, a tribune, on the orders of that inebriated imbecile, Marc Antony. You Cicero, whose last words are recorded as:

"There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly."

You Cicero whose legend, immortalised by Plutarch has survived to this day.

“Then he himself, clasping his chin with his left hand, as was his wont, looked steadfastly at his slayers, his head all squalid and unkempt, and his face wasted with anxiety, so that most of those that stood by covered their faces while Herennius was slaying him. For he stretched his neck forth from the litter and was slain, being then in his sixty-fourth year. Herennius cut off his head, by Antony's command, and his hands — the hands with which he wrote the Philippics. For Cicero himself entitled his speeches against Antony "Philippics," and to this day the documents are called Philippics.”

My question...though I do not wish to ask it, or to know your answer: Could it really be true, that the flame of your glorious life was snuffed out by the rough, dismissive ignorance of an ignoble, power mad drunk?

Can lights as bright as yours truly be extinguished by such dull and gloomy death bringers?

That you are dead, no one can dispute. I found a photo of your tomb. Born January 3^rd 106BCE – Died December 7th, 43BCE. That you lived, none can deny, for despite your unjust end, the justice and veracity of your life has lived on through your writing.

''The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.'

So I, living in that endless time after your existence came to an end, write to you, dear Cicero.

With admiration and a growing sense of wonder,

Morgan.

A note concerning the historical accuracy of my writing.

As Dan Carlin puts it, I am not a historian, I'm just a fan of history.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast

There are assertions I make in my letters to Cicero that you as a reader may disagree with, certain character judgements that you might think excessive, or ill informed. That's fair. This project is intended to tell the story of my study of these ancient texts, and as such, should be considered as an 'opinion in progress'. If I seem to praise one man's actions excessively, or heap scorn upon another without consideration of deeper qualities, I beg your indulgence, each letter is a single step on a long journey of discovery. Sometimes I am fully aware of my bias, and lay in with one side of an argument for the purposes of exposition, with the full intention of countering my own arguments in some later letter. Sometimes my one sided opinions are the result of simple ignorance, expressing an emotive response to some segment of a text without knowing the full details or counter evidence. As I read more and more, I hope to share these mistakes with the honest desire to seek the truth where it can be found, and to correct, and re-correct my opinions as I go.

So if we shadows have offended,

think but this and all is mended:

that you have but slumber'd here,

while these visions did appear

and this weak and idle theme,

no more yielding than a dream.

Gentles – do not reprehend

if you pardon, we will mend.

I pass as a shadow among shadows, holding in my hands the paper monuments of history, only desirous to inspire, to excite, to stir in your hearts and minds some passing interest in the subject which for me burns with all the brightness of Vesuvius, and while I live, I seek only to understand, and to participate in these tales of heroism and drama that unfolded two thousand years past.

Mid May 2018 CE

Dear Cicero,

Today the bonfires were lit at the farm. Pillars of twisting colour and heat, a great row of burning pyramids in the empty fields where once vines grew. A broad section of the vineyard of a variety no longer worth what it costs to grow, was pulled up this summer and for months grand tangled mountains of dead vines have dotted the dry, barren land. Today they were lit. Exquisite. A magnificent sight, a sacrificial fire, a festival, literally burning away the old dead wood to make way for new vines.

It is so good to be able to write to you. Some mornings I wake and auguries are everywhere, illuminated by a sudden stillness that comes over me, a slowing of time, a muffling of the world around the object of attention which becomes sharpened in focus. Perhaps there is a shadow beneath my left eye that I can see reflected in the window, but not in the mirror, or I am followed by a hawk throughout the morning at the farm, or I see six dead animals on the road, or a flock of black winged Ibis.

Or a cascade of red leaves, a Chinese harp glissandi that makes me stand still and give my attention to the world. I stop and take a moment to feel the immediate sensation of the air on my skin. I open myself. I empty and become wind.

You were Augur for a while weren't you? Plutarch as well. Reading flocks of birds and studying the entrails of animal sacrifices to determine the right course of action...what a job! I wonder sometimes if it is all hogwash, just a religious delusion perpetrated for the sake of tradition, but there is a part of me that really feels the connection between the divine and mortal worlds. Your whole culture couldn't have been delusional, surely? There must be something to all those oracular pronouncements. If I can feel the winds of the other-world, maybe others can too, right?

What does it mean that I sometimes see a shadow beneath my right eye? Sometimes I see it on other people too, and that's even scarier. Your son Marcus was Augur too, right before he shared the Consulship with Augustus. What proud sadness you must feel, knowing the honour he achieved, and knowing that you never lived to see him so honoured.

There seem to be few who can write about writing, or speak about speaking, without being redundant or presumptuous. I've been listening to your work, The Orator. I have audio recordings of modern people reading your writing, (Plutarch's, Xenophon's and Herodotus' as well, like I said in my first letter, we have an amazing access to history in my time.) Your examples of high, middle and common style are fantastic and I especially like what you said about the inner work of oratory practice. Study everything, write all the time. The combinations of words, phrases and ideas that need to stew in one's brain must come from many sources, and the practice of writing these thoughts down, of arranging one's ideas on paper, contributes immensely to one's ability to speak with confidence and assuredness in public.

Your exercises for improving memory are excellent as well. To arrange one's thoughts and ideas as if they were stacked in an orderly fashion in each room of a house, and to move through that house as one speaks, picking up each memory in each room and examining it as one speaks. I think that I use a similar method for fiction writing and public storytelling. Each scene takes place in an environment, and all I have to do is remember that environment and the narrative flows effortlessly from my mind.

I'm reading Xenophon's Anabasis at the moment. Do you consider him a good writer, or is his style too much like bragging? I like him because he writes about the world he knows, about the day to day soldier's experiences of life on the march, and what a march! He colours in the monochrome images in my mind of what an army on the move looks like, and now I can just about smell the dust when I pick up his book. I can sense the exhaustion, the hunger and the confusion, but I am also beginning to get a feeling for the motivations and needs of the individuals in his army, the common soldiers. I don't know if you've read his work Cicero, but I think that he contributes something important to my understanding of the ancient world, something that the high society writings fail to grant me.

A bit of a mixed up letter today, but thank you as always for listening. Yours is a mind I can relate to, your ideals I can aspire to emulate. I am on my lunch break right now at the farm, perhaps I will write more this evening after my children have gone to bed.

Grateful and inspired,

Morgan.

* * *

Dear Gino,

I'm playing music in your café this morning. I remember you with your wide brimmed Peruvian hat, your broad belly and your guitar and that sweet African love song you would play. The song you sang on your death bed with your family and your nurse. It is raining today, real Autumn rain, quenching the thirst in the tree roots, while inside, the café is pure medieval exuberance. The old men at the long trestle table are so loud in their conversation that my music is swallowed up by them, I feed them the sounds my hands can make with strings and when they all leave, their coffee's drunk to the last froth, they leave happy and full of life. I am told by another septuagenarian that they are all returned soldiers. (Returned Soldiers, as if anything comes back from a war.) Better to call them born again humans. They say that no man loves peace like a soldier. These twelve men love each other, they love the long table, they love shouting over the top of my music and I love rising to support their clamorous loquaciousness.

I'm trying to love music, but my heart has been burdened with the business, the scrabble and penny pinch accounting of the expense. Music should not be held accountable for its cost. It is what it is and I must ease myself away from thinking that it is my responsibility to make music pay. It's a well observed phenomenon, I'm sure, but the less I care about the outcome, the better I play. I've made leaps and bounds in recent weeks in terms of smoothing out my technique and improving my memory for long complicated passages. I'm becoming a better musician, by not trying to be better than I am. I've pushed myself a long way with the notion that if I just get good enough, eventually my music will be worth money, and I will finally be 'noticed' and I can make a reliable income from my music.

But it doesn't work that way does it Gino. You played for the joy of it and your music was so sweet it silenced loud rooms and your round belly and ready laugh were like butter on toast, and you were happy.

I'm trying to be happy Gino. I'm trying to be like you.

So today, when the room was a festival, and I was the only one in the room who could really hear me play, my technique was smooth, near perfect, I was relaxed, confident, the music played itself, unconcerned with being heard and I smiled and turned my head to savour the strange privacy. Then as the old men left and only couples remained whispering over eggs and pancakes, every, single, note, was, pronounced and rang reverberating in the cup of my hand and the sea-shell of my ears and in the high square ceiling. Every mouthful was peppered with quiet vibrato and I just kept playing, my whole set of songs over again for a room who listened and who gave their silence as well as their bubbling conversational harmonies and the music played itself and I was happy. I was happy playing for my coffee, playing for the silence and for the noise. The music was for itself, for the sake of my own pleasure and the secondary comfort of having it enjoyed by others.

On Sunday I will got to band practice, and on Monday we will play on the street in front of a church and there will be dancing and singing and my hands will feel like they belong to the drum and I will wear my black trilby hat and think of you Gino. Old Man Gino, with your wide brimmed Peruvian hat and your guitar and your love songs.

With sincere admiration,

Morgan.

* * *

Dear Xenophon of Athens

I wasn't sure where you were living these days, so I sent this letter to Laconia. I figured since your exile from Athens, the Spartans might know where you were. So, with that in mind, I apologise for how long this letter might have taken to reach you.

I have just this morning finished reading Anabasis, the tale of your Persian expedition. I've been raving to anyone who will listen about how good it is, and how I can smell the dust and horses and really feel the aching bones of the soldiers in your army. I know that you wrote it a long time after the events, and that there are other accounts that contradict your telling, and that some of it is what I would describe as a returned general recalling his glory days, which might be fair or unfair (but after 2400 years who can say...), yet, with all these inconsistencies and doubts, your tale still stands on its own two feet and marches through the centuries to feel real and bloody and confounding and exhausting. In a word, it feels real.

But my praise aside, there were a few things I wanted to share with you.

In the mountains of Trapezus, some of your men fell to drunkenness and delirium after eating the local honey. I found this little detail just too delicious to not do some further reading. In the Himalayan Mountains, there is a bee species whose honey produces similar effects to those you describe. Apis dorsata laboriosa, which feeds on a species of white Rhododendron flower. They call it the Himalayan Giant Honey Bee, and its hives are found dangling from cliff edges where it is harvested at great risk by hand, by teams of mountain climbers. They call it Red Homey, or Mad Honey, and the locals don't eat the stuff regularly, as it fetches a price five times that of normal honey when exported to Japan, Korea and Hong Kong. I don't know if what you found in the mountains of (what is now called) Turkey, was the same kind of bee, but I thought it interesting nonetheless.

Next, I wanted to thank you for the long description of the shield dances your soldiers performed while you were stationed in Paphlagonia. In the country where I live, there are oriental dancers who frequently use swords in their performances, but none use shields. I loved your description of the Mysian dancer with two light shields, whose dance mimicked combat against two foes, including cartwheeling and the Persian style of bending his knees and leaping up again, all in time to the flute. Also the Mantineans and Arcadians dancing in full dress armour, singing the paean as they went.

But best of all was what you said about the slave girl of the Arcadian, who with light shield and the best dress her owner could procure, performed the Pyrrhic dance. I don't normally think of the Spartans as being a people who gave much respect for dance, but to read that this dancer had studied this cultural war dance since she was five, and that she was greatly applauded for her performance, well it certainly opened my mind a bit wider. I loved that when your soldiers were asked if the women too fought along side the men, they replied that it was the women who had driven the enemy king from his camp in their recent battle.

There is something comforting about the straightforward confidence of your writing style. There is just enough geography to colour the journey, just enough politics to tangle the mind and just enough battle to excite the blood. There are a few things however that as a modern reader are a little harder to find pleasure in reading

The The notion of taking and selling people as slaves seems totally barbaric to people of my era and nation, but I must remember that it was only a hundred or so years ago that slavery was technically outlawed in my country. Slavery still exists to be sure, but it goes by other names and has complicated paperwork to justify and hide its impact. Still, it is shocking for me to think of huge bands of armed men marching around the country taking slaves, cattle and whatever else they want. Burning the homes of those who resist. It is fascinating to read the way in which you write about it. There are no moral considerations of right and wrong, plundering is a custom so deeply ingrained that those questions never really come up. Instead, the shame of being made a slave, and the glory of fighting for one's freedom fill the poetry of justification to the brim, though the carefully counted financial rewards are always detailed in full. The economy of war laid bare. It turns out that it takes a lot to feed ten thousand men. Money is the sinew of war, as Cicero puts it.

Your mercenary life is so strange to me, so removed from the moral norms of my own world, a difference between us that is difficult to fathom, yet you go a long way to bridging that gap in writing of your conversation with Seuthes when you were in Thrace:

Heraclides, no doubt, thinks that there is nothing serious in life compared with acquiring money by every means possible. I, on the other hand, consider that there are no nobler possessions that a man, particularly a man who holds power, can have, than honour and fair dealing and generosity.

There are often comparisons to be made between the ancient world and our modern times, but this statement rings like a bell, loud and clear, calling my attention to its underlying origin. There are many things about us that are the same, our greed and deception are ubiquitous, yet so are our deeper considerations and strivings for a higher way, a better way to live, also present in equal measure. We strive to solve the same problems, possessed with different tools, technologically and culturally, but possessed by the same human spirit (whatever that word means...). We are human together, you and I. When we hunger, the same feeling grips our bellies, when we tire, the same weight hangs upon our bodies, when we laugh the same impulse for joy bursts out, and when we look upon life, we both see the same world, ever changing, ever changeless, the same planet. Our stories are held together by centuries of paper, papyrus, ink and the incredible urge to preserve our lives through the immortality of writing.

You have immortality, whether you deserved it or not. History has allowed you to live on long after your death, generations have been schooled reading your Anabasis and The Education of Cyrus. Your books on horsemanship are still in print, as is your book on farming and your History of Greece and many more too numerous to mention.

Some say you were a mercenary general, helping to lead an army, plundering and killing across western Asia for a year. You certainly weren't popular with everyone back in Greece because of what you did. Others say you were just a soldier doing his best to keep the men under him alive, doing whatever it took to get them home, come hell or high water, through mountains filled with barbarian tribes and through a winter that stole noses and ears and lives.

You tell a story of the continual struggles within a merit based system of leadership, and a democratic decision making process among the generals, if not the whole army. You tell a story of a man who always tries to do the right thing, but who is often compromised by the two evils he must choose between.

I guess that's what your story is about. War is always a choice between two evils.

Thank you. I am glad you took the journey up, if only so that you could make it home to write about it.

Morgan.

Early May, 2018 CE

Dear Cicero,

I watched the movement of autumnal winds over the vineyard today, like the passing of a great invisible beast, its presence causing all the natural world to shiver for a moment, and then, to lay still again. I thought of you and your son Marcus. They say it is better for sons to bury fathers, than fathers to bury sons, so I suppose that your death may have caused feelings other than grief. Pride, I hope. Knowing how your son fought for your good honour and respected name after your murder...well, you set an example, and you son grew to be an important and well reasoned man. Successful and wise. You should be proud of him too. Still, I wonder what you two might have talked of if you had made it to Athens. I am sorry that you did not get to see him one last time. I imagine night and day and night passing without notice as the greater light of you conversations made a dimness of the sun and moon. It is not good to dwell on what might have been, and so today I write to you, dear Cicero. Today on the day that I watched the wind move over the vineyard and I imagined you watching the wind on your own farm, and the two centuries that separate us are nothing but a paper trail. You died only yesterday.

I have much to ask you, many letters to write to you, and hopefully you take pleasure in what stories and diversions I might entertain you with as well. So lets start here: was Julius Caesar really mad? Or was he dying from some illness and plotting his own assassination? Is it as Shakespeare said and that 'all the word's a stage'? Was he just playing the part of a tyrant and a God for an audience that needed a sacrifice? Perhaps the question is foolish. It is impossible to summarise a person in a handful of words. I ask myself, 'was Rome mad?' was your whole society a mess of battle trauma and child sexual assault? How does the madness of your age make sense in light of the madness of my own?

Some heavy questions to start us off with I know, but I didn't wish to bandy about with polite small talk, not with you. Our qualities as men are first defined by the qualities of our thoughts, and then by the actions they inspire. My present action is writing, inspired by your own writing. Your essays and speeches, even your letters. I am so pleased to hear your voice in my head as I read, your personality is so strongly expressed, your whole feeling and rhythm as an orator...but I am flattering you, which I am sure you must tire of.
So my question is this. Was Julius Caesar like he is in the stories? If he wasn't, can you tell me a story about him that shows him differently? Was he a clever killer and a womaniser? Was he a fashion setting, free thinking, fast talking, fast walking builder of an empire? Or was he something else?

You knew him, what was he like?

And If you can answer that, then can you also tell me of Cleopatra, of Clodius and his sister Clodia, of Pompey and Crassus? Or Octavian? Or perhaps that is too much, perhaps you do not want to speak or think of them ever again. So I will ask you a different question.

Did you see the wind in the vineyard today? Stepping like a great invisible beast making all of nature shiver as it passed...

with admiration and friendship

Morgan.

*     *     *

Dear Cicero,
I hope it does not bother you, my writing you so soon after my last letter. Every day I am overtaken by the changes of the world and find that I am in need of your wisdom. Today the rains came, gentle and prolonged throughout the morning, I sat in bed reading a letter your son wrote to Tiro concerning his time in Athens with Crattipus, and of his great respect for you, his father. I also read of the death of your daughter Tullia and I could find no glib wisdoms to console the grief of a father who must bury his child. In time of peace or of war, there must be no greater heartbreak than this, a sorrow that knows no consolation.

Take consolation from this then, for you could not know of the destiny her death would weave into the vast future. Know that the lamp lit in her tomb burned for fifteen hundred years, and it was burning still when archaeologists uncovered her body, and found it as fresh and beautiful as if she had been buried only the day before. I do not regard a need to prove or disprove such legends, since belief in them is far more beneficial than doubt, so take consolation knowing that your daughter's death, and the legend of her tomb serve as an eternal torch in the darkness of history, burning untended through the lost centuries. How bright she must have shone in life, that in her death she burns brighter still.

Here in the borderlands where I live and write, the first rains of Autumn will turn green all that has been burned brown and white by the prolonged summer. Already the air is filled with the smoke of bonfires as farmers gather cut branches and broken timbers for burning. Soon the land will echo with the sound of Autumn festivities, as families and communities all along the River Meechi celebrate the restoration of the soil through the annual boon of winter rains. I pray only that the floods of recent years do not plague us again. Last year, for two weeks the bridge to my farm lay under water and I could do no work.

My question for today is this.

Your era, the last years of the Roman Republic, are described by our historians as being driven by a strong cultural standard that encouraged each citizen to strive for glory. Personal glory, glory for their family, and for their nation. Your generation are remembered for their intense ambition, and for the legends of their success. This ambition is also sometimes credited with being one of the causes of the collapse of the Republic. You know all this I'm sure, you lived and died through it.

You saw the cost of that ambition. You saw how it tore apart all bonds of kinship and was the cause of unjust wars, of corruption and murder. Your nation seemed destroyed from within by its desire to see its dreams come to life.

Tell me, is an individual a microcosm of their nation? Is the individual subject to the same forces that drive and divide their nation? Is there a world inside each of us? Can the story of the individual be divined from the story of their world?

It has been said that he who seeks to destroy Rome, can only destroy himself in the process. I fear that I may be subject to the same destructive forces, and that my ambition, once a source of great pride, now threatens to topple me.

Is there a line separating hubris from ambition? Do all who dream of glory walk a road of flames?

The rain has stopped and the sun has hidden behind thick clouds all afternoon. Life here in the borderlands is quiet and undemanding. The noise and rush of city life does not echo in these rocky valleys, instead only the shadows of birds breaks the stillness.

I look forward to your reply.

With admiration and respect.

Morgan.

*     *     *

Dear Penny,

I keep seeing you, on the street, in cafe's, every tall tough looking girl with tight jeans makes me flick back to make sure it is not you. I have been surprised by the richness of feelings your death has brought about in me. There is a beauty in the inevitability of death for all of us, that you, who chose the day, the time and the means, seem to be a shining example of the courage by which we might all face our own lives, and the endings of them. Your death was an end to intolerable suffering, and in that regard it was a good death. Yet the strength of your convictions, the gravity of your inner resolve to have fought on through the pain for as long as you did, seeking every day a new reason to live, that is what I keep sensing as I see the reflections of your ghost on the street. Your will to live was immense. Your crutches were not the mechanical appendages of a crippled victim of life's cruel vicissitudes, they were the extensions of your courage, your physical and emotional strength. They were like twin swords, or staves of office. With them you stood tall, you walked quickly and with head held high. Though in the darkness of your fear and pain you would weep, the armour you put on to face the world was made of your greatness, it was a sign for all to see that here stands a warrior, wounded but undefeated.

Until of course defeat was the only course left. When the pain had taken you from your life completely.

Today the sun was shining and I thought of you, just like you asked us to in your death note, and when the cake is amazing, and when the cats are themselves, and whenever I see a tall, tough looking girl on the street.

My question, …

I don't think I have a question for you. Only gratitude. For your life burned so brightly that your image is burned into my retina, and your death has made it all the more easy to talk with you, and reflect on the wisdom you gave me when you were alive.

So thank you Penny White. Tiger Moth.

With gratitude and love.

Morgan.

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Dear Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus,

First off I'm a big fan of your writing, and I must say that your biographies of the Graccus brothers were very stirring. A lot of what you had to say about the fundamental differences between the rich and poor still rings true today (sadly). The political and social intricacies of those decades are no less complex than the politics of my own time and country, and I have come to better understand the events of my own time, through gaining an understanding of the events of yours. Actually, you were the first ancient author I read. Your original books have been broken up a bit by modern publishers, and the lives you wrote about are now published in new compilations, not always the Greek/Roman comparisons you arranged them into. So the first book I read of yours was called 'The Fall of the Roman Republic'. Do you like the title? It has six lives in it, all Roman, all from the last generations of the Republic. This book was the first time I had ever heard of Marius, Sulla, Crasssus, Pompey and Cicero. Perhaps it is telling that I already knew of Caesar, but not of Pompey or Cicero. Caesar would probably have been pleased that after two thousand years, his name is still the better known of all his contemporaries.

Next I read 'The Makers of Rome'. Did you know that people are still talking about the Graccus brothers. I went to the forum the other day (Youtube), and there were two historians discussing the very questions you raise in your writing. Were the brothers motivated by a sincere desire to champion the poor and to share the wealth of Rome with all of Italy, or was it a cynical power play, using the mob as their weapon? I wonder now how you would write about the leaders of my time?

Cicero. His name now rings louder than all the others in my ears. Holding firm against the storm of centuries, his his eloquence is today still lauded, and his written works on oration are taught in universities. The example he set in his life and the incredible wisdom of his writing seem now to be rooted in the foundation of the modern global reality. He slept for a long time, but from the time his writings were re-discovered by Petrarch in the 1345 CE, they have influenced the foundation of many new Republics, new Philosophies, new Democracies. Caesar might be more famous by name, but he is famous for being a Dictator, an Emperor, the man who killed the Republic. Cicero is seen as the First among men. The greatest mind of western literature and political/social thought. Hundreds of his letters even survived the centuries, and through them we have come to know Cicero even better than you did when you wrote of him.

Plutarch, (can I call you Plutarch? That's what everyone calls you these days...) this is what I would love most for you to know. In this age, my age, with modern scientific methods and technology, we are able to have a richer, more realistic, more verifiable understanding of history than ever before. We can see further back in time than any civilisation before us, going back twelve thousand years or so. We have museums all over the world, with collections and catalogues of ancient artifacts, and together we have pieced together the history of the world into a more complete, more interwoven picture of the real story of the human race than anyone could ever have dreamed of in your time.

But a big part of WHY, we have so much knowledge about the past, is because of you. Your whole biographical narrative style is so easy to read and understand, and even though you have bias, even though sometimes you get things wrong, we love history because you loved it and you wrote about it. We read it and the horizon of our global historical understanding ballooned outwards. Your passion lit a fire in us and it is still burning strong.

I'm gushing, sorry. I'm just such a huge fan of your books, you've changed my life. That's all I really wanted to say. Thank you for everything.

With thankful happiness,

Morgan.