Dear Lucius Plutarch,

I am reading The rise and fall of Athens: nine Greek lives. As I mentioned in my last letter, modern publishers do not group your Roman and Greek lives together as you did, but prefer to keep them separate, to let each nation have its biographies considered separately. That aside, I have a few questions, and comments to make concerning the first noble Greek, Theseus.

In your tale of the life of Theseus, founder of Athens, you describe his early heroic adventures, subduing and slaying thieves and bandits in his homeland. In Erineüs, Theseus slew Damastes (aka Procrustes) “...by forcing him to make his body fit his own bed.”

What on earth does that mean? At first I imagined Theseus pulverising his enemy and spreading him like jam upon the bed. Then with a little further reading, I discovered historians saying that it was a method of torture that Damastes used on his own victims and that Theseus in turn killed him by means of his own cruel device, the Procrustean Bed, as it is called; a sort of rack used to stretch and break the victims bones, or if the victim was longer than the bed, to shorten him by cutting off his limbs. I tend to think of such a torture as being from the European middle ages, the period best known for the witch burnings, so it is a little disheartening to learn that this torture and execution method was known long before the Inquisition. It is however satisfying to read of a terrible criminal reaching his doom by the methods he used to doom others. Poetic Justice we call it these days.

Yet in the same story you also say:

“The truth is that every man's soul has implanted within it the desire to love, and it is as much its nature to love as it is to feel, to understand and to remember. In this desire it clothes itself, and if it finds nothing to love at home, it will fasten upon some alien object...It is quite common, for example, to find men of harsh temper who will argue against marriage or the procreation of children but who, as soon as their servants' or concubines' children fall ill and die, will be tormented with grief and give way to the most abject lamentations, or others who suffer the most degrading and intolerable anguish even at the death of dogs or horses.”

Many writers and thinkers of my time condemn the violence inherent in men, and though it must be observed that since time immemorial the violence of man has indeed been excessive, it seems now unpopular for men to speak on the strengths of their own gender, since many of those strengths have been used to oppress others, particularly women. At the same time women are lauded for speaking on their own strengths, while quieting any talk on feminine vices. Reading your thoughts on love is comforting to me, yet you go on to say how “...those who have failed to learn how to fortify themselves against the blows of fortune lay up endless troubles for themselves, and it is not affection, but weakness which brings this about.”

This kind of tearless stoicism is unpopular now. Men are expected to feel and to express their anguish, holding back nothing of their inner turmoil, but to release it through conversing, and so transform their pain into something less burdensome. The man who silently overcomes his sufferings, and stands proud of his strength in the face of adversity is now sometimes confused as weak and insecure. His unwillingness to submit to his feelings is described as the root of male violence, rather than an expression of (as you write) the reason by which he may forearm himself against misfortune. Yet, many men take their own lives from the loneliness of their heroic inner struggles, unable to by reason alone conquer the beasts of their nature and survive the stones of adversity.

I cannot pass judgement on the strength of any position, since all opinions seem to omit and include truths vital to real understanding. Still, it is exciting/frightening to read of men's strengths and of their valour, unburdened by a modern sense of criminal guilt and uncomplicated by our modern confusion of psychological terminology. These heroes you write about, and the violence of their solutions to a violent world, are totally absent from my society where nearly all weapons are banned for possession by civilians, and where nearly all murders are investigated with the full force of a police force, law courts and prisons. There is still lawlessness, not all that different at times with the banditry of Theseus' time, but it is not solved by heroes who slay criminals and free towns from terror, or who unite tribal confederations to defeat their neighbouring enemies I live in a VERY peaceful country, foreign invaders have not brought war to our shores in around seventy five years, and the rule of law keeps the peace among the people who are almost all immigrants and their descendants, from nations all around the whole world. I live in a country where large scale armed civil dissension has not been seen since the days of war with the natives, over one hundred and fifty or so years ago. It is difficult to describe the modern world to you, so I am trying to translate it in terms that you might understand, for it is precisely this difficulty that I am trying to address with this letter.

How on earth am I to make sense of your stories, when the moral values your noble Greeks prize are so confoundingly different from my own, yet so intermingled with wisdom relevant to the pressing questions being asked by ordinary people today?

Are your heroes still heroes if today their behaviour would be described as murderous and seditious war-profiteering, or vigilante killing sprees, or tyrannical crimes against humanity?

The heroes of today are pioneers, they are inventors, civil rights activists, explorers, entrepreneurs, sports stars, actors, musicians...all civilian peace time careers.

I don't want to get into our modern wars here, but it is something I will have to address in the future. If I am to understand the value of your historiographies, then I feel that I must understand how to reconcile these moral differences between our heroes.

But your stories are not only about violence, that would make you a poor author indeed. What makes you great in my mind is that you write about everything. Some people criticise you for letting your feelings about a subject over-ride the importance of absolute historical facts, others, myself included, also claim that this is your biggest strength. You are trying to tell us something about the world, about the people who moved and shook, who took command and for good or for ill directed the course of human endeavour. In telling us of these men, you tell us of their world. You tell us of the women too, and the influential roles they played. I have written to other friends about Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, and the story of his mother Volumnia marching with all the women to confront him before he invaded his own home city with a foreign army.

                                            The story of Coriolanus and Volumnia

It's fair to say that women's stories are sadly lacking in the broad spectrum of writings from the ancient world, but from you at least, women are present, they are not central, but neither are they disregarded. Your decision to include the stories of women, I think, is another reason why you are still so popular today. Herodotus too. I really should write to him soon, but I don't know where to begin. What do you say to the Father of History? What do you ask of the Father of Lies.

I didn't plan for this letter to be a discussion on gender politics, I was actually just going to mention Theseus and the whole Procrustean bed thing, and then go on to talk about Solon and his pioneering efforts in democracy, but it feels like that should wait for another time. So instead I will return to Theseus and what has become the theme of this letter, being that of the meaning of violence, and heroism.

You quote Philochorus in claiming that Theseus, when commanding an army against the Thebans, was the first man ever to call for a “...truce for the purpose of recovering the bodies of the dead...” and also that Theseus was “...the first to restore the bodies of the dead to his enemies.”

So when we talk about violence, when we talk about men, when we talk about war, this is also what we are talking about. We are talking about a soldier's ability to see his enemy as human, and to honour him and the sacrifice he makes in service to his own cause. Even in war, men can still stand up from the mud and blood and declare that honor and fair conduct still have value in Hell. It is naieve to simply declare that all war is evil, and that men are to blame for all violence. Some wars are just. They are, and I will stand by it. All wars are hell, and none who enter may leave. Those people who walk home from battle may have been like us once, but they are transformed upon their survival. I will not try to say what they are, but they are not like the rest of us who have never fought in war, we who have not been burned cannot claim to understand the fire. My Grandfather, Snow Pedersen fought in a war for four years. The eyes he saw the world through were not like anyone else's. He knew the value of Peace. The value of Life, of Time, of Roses and Children. He knew it down to the pennies and pence.

I try to understand.

In the midst of the meat grinding butchery of armed combat, there come to us these legends of men who invented new standards for behaviour. Out of the bloodlust and barbarism of ancient war, Theseus, it is claimed, restrained his savage human nature and declared that his enemy was deserving of kindness and compassion. Theseus, who declared that though war must be fought, that savagery need not be its only law. In my own era we are quite proud for outlawing the use of chemical weapons in war, and for some decades this has been largely successful. One war was fought before the ban, a holocaust of such magnitude that even if you added together all the dead in all the wars that Caesar fought, they would not compare in the slightest to the scar that the War to End All Wars war has left on the human race. Chemical weapons were used with impunity by all sides of the conflict, poison clouds drifting low and heavy across the land, killing every living creature who breathed in the noxious gas. One hundred years later, there are still parts of France (Gaul to you I suppose...) that are forbidden zones where the earth is still poisoned.

When this chemical war was concluded, an (almost) global organisation, a League of Nations was formed with the intention of preventing future wars. They banned the use of chemical weapons in war, a ban which has been largely successful, though many of their other efforts have failed.

Theseus returned the bodies of his enemies. Perhaps he did so in disgust at the sight of so many heaped corpses. Perhaps he simply looked his enemy in the eye and knew him to be human and decided that it would be the honourable thing to do. Perhaps it wasn't Theseus, perhaps it was some other general, some ordinary man who found a reason to be honorable amidst the dishonor of organised killing and Theseus claimed the legend for his own.

I don't have answers to these questions, and neither do you.

Questing, questioning, curious,

Morgan.

*     *     *

Dear Cicero,

I wanted to share this with you, regarding your daughter Tullia. On the same day that I found out about her death and her tomb, I read this poem. Poetry has changed a lot since your time, it has expanded to include thousands of forms, some casual, others ornate, but suffice to say that the creative human spirit has continued unabated by war, deprivation, horror, gluttony decadence and peace, and that in the twentieth century, a poet of such popularity was born that his works are translated into dozens of languages, and who wrote this...

For Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough:-

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling beads

in black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

like that

or knew

my name

could never die

in the common verity of dying,

and I pick

up her lovely

dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak

to all the Gods,

Jewish Gods, Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread,

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

without a chance,

hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

I lean upon this,

I lean on all of this

and I know:

her dress upon my arm:

but

they will not

give her back to me.

Charles Bukowski was a very different writer from you, but like you, his works have been translated and spread around the world influencing people from all walks of life. The above poem For Jane, is from his first book, published in 1969, entitled, The days run away like wild horses over the hills. He was a working class man, a plebeian if you will, born in 1920 in Germany, but he lived in America...which is a country so far from Rome that I don't know how to describe it...lets see, if you went east of Persia...all the way to other side of the world...that's about where America is.

Charles Bukowski poem - the man with the beautiful eyes

idols, pills, bread,

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

Grief smothers everything, makes madness of mundanity, pain inconsolable, incontestable.

I thought it a lovely coincidence to have found that poem when I did. What little consolation it might be, but that you might know that grief is a common ground between us. By that I don't mean between you and I, for I have not lost a child, or even a close family member. I mean between you and NOW. I've mentioned it before I'm sure, that our common humanity shows itself in the raw meat of our lives. I mentioned in a letter to Xenophon, that the world we both look upon is the same world. We are united by common cause of our animal nature, and by the peculiar awareness we call intelligence, that arises from that nature.

But let us turn to lighter matters, perhaps I will tell you of the rain dripping from the brim of my hat as I worked today. There are moments when the sun catches a falling drop in just the perfect way, and the spectrum of light splits and I can see all the colours of the sun. Or I could tell you how I watched my fingers fly across the fret board of my ukulele tonight. Free from my control, the melodies that they (my fingers) play are far superior to the melodies of my cranking, clunking, cluttered and corn-seed-counting mind. My hands know exactly what to do, if only I would get out of the way and let them feel the music. Let the music play my hands.

I wonder what music is to you? I mean, your writings don't seem to make mention of music except in passing reference, and in your letter 'On Duties' written to your son, you disapprove of musicians and performers as a class of people. So too with dance, since in your society, dance was something not to be done by persons of higher standing. A lady might sometimes dance, but never a gentleman. In my culture, everyone is allowed to dance, even encouraged, the young, old, rich and poor. Dancers as professionals are not always regarded with respect, but dancing in general is something that no strong taboos prohibit. Still, whatever you think, I will continue to tell you about my own experiences because they are central to the way I engage with and experience my society. Most everywhere I go, it is with an instrument in my hand (or a book), and my most active pursuit outside of my home and work, is music. I have no standing politically, and no aspirations for such. If we are to understand each other I cannot suppress the importance of music in my life, just as oratory is your primary passion. As such I will speak on it with openness, regardless of any prejudice you may have against it.

Yet I and people all the world over feel that we have a great deal in common with you, and despite our differences, despite the centuries divide and cultural obliquity, we strive to understand you, and to call ourselves worthy of having been inspired by you. For it is in your courage, honesty and discipline that we find commonality. as well as in your fidelity. Your moments of weakness and doubt, your fear and your pride, your striving and your kind words and your scalding, scathing, burning vitriol. Your passion for scaling the heights of your intellectual capacity is what inspires us.

But I have a difficult question to ask you, about the Gracci brothers and the Cataline conspiracy, because from my perspective there is some very muddy water, ethically speaking, in this story.

So let me make sure I've got this at least a little bit straight. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus; on the surface they seem like democratic reformers, representatives of the people, standing up for the rights of the Italian citizens, for the allies, for the returned soldiers. I'm still a little vague about the connection between them and the later Cataline Conspiracy, but basically it seems as though it was a class war, with the senatorial class upset about their 'liberty' being challenged, and the poor plebeians fighting for voting and land rights as a result of economic disparity caused by a massive influx of foreign slaves.

That's a pretty broad summary, and I think that I need to do a bit more study before I really discuss this with you. The gist of my question, the root of my doubt, is that the story of the Gracci brothers, and your role in the much later Cataline Conspiracy makes the senators seem like the villains, and you who supported their continued oligarchical rule, look like a defender of the old, corrupt, violent and greedy order. Both the Gracci brothers were assassinated, then Saturninus, then Drusus the Younger. Their multi-generational plight seems the root of the political gang violence in Rome, and led to the empowerment of the the most savage dictators in the republic's long and noble history.

Cataline. He's the real issue. His attempt to deal with the shocking wealth disparity in Rome by proposing a bill to cancel all debt, and his swift, illegal arrest, imprisonment and execution, looks like a very standard sort of totalitarian suppression. It looks like every other anti-human institution in history, disposing blithely with their enemies, treating the poor and the foreign as expendable resources without rights or needs of any kind.

I definitely need to read about this more before I bring it up with you in full. It's an incredibly complex story and it throws doubt on your name, nobility and your humanity. I read Petrarch's letter to you, and I will quote from him for I cannot think of a better way to say it.

I grieve at thy lot, my friend; I am ashamed of thy many, great shortcomings, and take compassion on them.

The Cataline Conspiracy makes you seem like the eloquent defender of upper class privilege. Some modern historians warn me to be more cynical and to consider the Gracci brothers, and Catline as shrewd politicians manipulating the mob in order to gain tyrannical power over the Republic. Two thousand years have clouded the issue, but there is something about the whole drama that strikes me as having great contemporary relevance. I want to understand. I cannot possibly understand. I am trying to learn.

With grief and compassion,

Morgan