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.