Book Two, Letter Nine

Part 3 of 6

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy.

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

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

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

                                                                           Pericles

Book 3, Chapter 5: Revolution in Corcyra

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                           Athenian Women

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

                                                                Spartan Women

Archidamia: a Spartan Queen

340 - 241 BCE

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

Fascinating.

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

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

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

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

Why this romance of War?

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

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

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

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

P.S.

Here is the third and final promotional video for my album launch kickstarter campaign.  If you like multi-instrumental world fusion, well, just check it out...and watch a few other videos while you're there, I play a lot of different instruments.

Youtube Video

And the link to the Kickstarter page:

Kickstarter Page

Book Two, Letter Nine

Part 2 of 6

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus tyranny is born from democracy, democracy from oligarchy.

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

Dear Readers,

Music of an Invisible Enclave - promo video

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-from her review of the album

I would like to tell you about my solo album : Music of an Invisible Enclave.

Kickstarter Campaign

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I have previous albums already available through Bandcamp and my Youtube channel has a mixture of music, dance and poetry videos.

Also, the blog Music of an Invisible Enclave is the story of the nine months it took to do the initial recordings, documenting my my life as a musician playing in several bands, working with dancers and poets and teaching middle eastern drumming, all in a little city by the sea.

The blog, Indivisible From Magic is sort of a weird sequel, but it's mostly about magic. Writing this blog helped me finish writing my new novel, The Hangman Tree, which is still a few years from release. (The third draft is done, it's in editing as I write this). I'll tell you more about the novel later.

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Thank you,

Morgan (Zebulon) Taubert

...Now, on with my letter to Thucydides...

*

Book Two, Letter Nine

To Thucydides, on men, women, and the tyranny of democracy

Part 1 of 6

Dear Thucydides,

I've been reading your book, The Peloponnesian War every night for months, (the 1954, Rex Warner translation). I thought at first that it was a ten year story, but that is only the beginning. You describe twenty one years of war, including the six tumultuous years of so called 'peace' in the middle. It is an epic tome of the conflicts of many nations, struggling for dominance, or independence, in the long aftermath of the failed (and still famous) Persian invasion of Greece by King Xerxes. This will likely be a long letter, you certainly deserve a carefully considered response, but I'm not going to just flatter you with praise for your book which, in your own words, “...is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.” I've got some hard things to say as well.

I'm going to start with a couple ideas that I don't think you'll like, but here goes.

Democracy can be just as tyrannical as any other form of government.

and

Men are not the stronger sex.

To begin:

Dying in battle seems easy. It doesn't take much to be courageous for a moment, to fight for, and die for your country, or your beliefs.

Being a woman in time of war is hard. Staying alive is hard. Keeping the children fed is hard, ignoring one's own needs in favour of the next generation....that takes true strength. Submitting to the violence of one's enemies, and living on for the sake of one's children, in forced hostage marriages or slavery, is hard. Ancient warfare was every bit as horrid as its modern equivalent, and in typical fashion, the civilian populations suffer just as much than the soldiers.

Yet in twenty one years, in 541 pages, you mention women only three times, Thucydides. To be fair, you hardly mention civilians at all, yours is a political and military story that only lightly touches on the experience of those not serving in armies, but still, women are everywhere you go in the world, but they're not in your book.

This got me thinking about the notion that the absence of evidence, is not the evidence of absence. So, in the almost complete absence of any reference to women in your book, I can see a great sea of information hidden behind the question: where are the women?

If you read between the lines, it's all there. The women are at home suffering through the famine and plague and pillaging armies who “lay waste to the land”, as you so often repeat.

What does that mean? Lay waste?

I can imagine it, and if you are a woman, I'm sure you don't want to imagine it, but that is what this letter is going to be about, among other things.

Men are not the stronger sex.

I say this because men go on and on and on about how strong and brave and courageous they are and I just keep thinking...the gentleman doth protest too much. Books and scrolls and treatises and volume after volume of writing about the courageous acts of heroic men in battle, but the more I read the more I sense a smoke-screen, a beautiful, romanticised smoke screen for a code of behaviour that is in actual fact, the opposite of its professed virtue. Now I know there's the issue of high levels of illiteracy among women throughout history, resulting in very few of their stories being told, but many other authors go to great lengths to include women in their histories. Herodotus, who wrote before you, goes out of his way to find stories of women, and Xenophon, who wrote after you, does the same, as does Plutarch, and he loves your book.

But you don't write about women and I ask myself why? I don't have a straight answer, but my thoughts do seem to take me down a certain path.

I suggest that:

Men are weak who submit to the violence of their natures.

A true gentleman man is known by his restraint.

Yet ...

Men are frequently obligated, in the name of courage, valour, freedom and dignity, to submit themselves upon the altar of Phobos, and join forces with other men to fight in wars all over the globe. Men are frequently required by law to commit violence upon their fellow man, when called upon by their sovereign or government to do so. Some wars are fought for reasons that to me, seem good, or if not good, then at least just. Other wars seem nothing more than the piteous outcomes of political greed, or corporate meat grinding battles for resources. The restraint and gentleness that defines a man in civilian life, becomes a burden and obstacle in times of war. (Although Marcus Aurelius seems to offer an alternative....I'll write to him soon)

Your story Thucydides, is not about gentlemen. It isn't even about heroes and villains. I'm actually very impressed by your seemingly fair and balanced telling of the conflict between democratic Athens, and Sparta (which was a sort of fundamentalist, religious, oligarchical monarchy, I suppose). Though you are Athenian, I don't feel like you pull any punches when you describe their callous , criminal behaviour towards their subject states, and despite having been exiled part way through the war, and living among the Spartans afterwards, I do not feel that you favour them overmuch either, showing their insecurity and corruption in equal measure with their nobility, cleverness and honourable conduct.

But where, Thucydides, are the women?

Book Two, Letter Eight

Early Spring 2018 CE

Dear Herodotus, Father of Lies.

I have another story for you...

There was this girl, sixteen, I was twelve, we were friends in the way only lonely kids can be, when they live on the same street in the same dusty town. Awkward, secretive, honest, weird...

She said one day

I wanna' show you something, but I've only been practicing for a while, so...

We went out to the edge of town, where old cars and farm machinery had over the years been dumped, and together they rusted at the bottom of a little ravine. It was a wild place, an abandoned place. We felt safe there, hidden from the prying eyes of grown ups.

She showed me her hand, and, taking a deep breath, she closed and opened her fingers, only when they opened, there was a glowing orb there, floating a few centimeters above her palm. A green-blue-black light-ball of energy.

What is it? I asked

It's a door.

Huh?

She poked her finger into the orb, and pulling it out again, a small flower was stuck to her skin. Its tiny yellow petals were streaked with white veins and it smelled faintly of honey.

Oh...a door. I get it.

I didn't get it.

Then she put her whole hand into the doorway and pulled out a crumpled piece of yellow paper, thin and ragged with age. She offered it to me, and smoothing it out I read aloud.

A-door A-wall A-window

A-fold A-crease A-wrinkle

A-secret-secret-

Another way Another day

A-door A-wall A-window

A-fold A-crease A-wrinkle

She moved away pretty soon after that, and I haven't seen or spoken to her since, but I kept the yellow paper. And though I do not know if my memories are real, that paper and its poem, are in themselves, A-door A-wall A-window.

*

Herodotus, there are events in my life, sometimes important things, of which I have no memory at all. I can be told stories about these events, but I do not have even the glimmer of recollection. If real things might be missing from my memories, might I not imagine new truths to fill those gaps?

If these fictions I create for myself are of benefit, can they really be called lies?

There was a girl, but not really, and she showed me a door, but not really.

In truth, I imagined her, and I imagined the door and I imagined the flower and the poem, but now they are in the world, drawn forth from the Pandora's box in my mind, and their impact upon my character will be as much or as little as I allow them to be. If useful truths can be found in these lies, what is the overriding value of facts?

Do facts really matter, when what we build our lives around are stories?

Neither true nor untrue.

There are things that I do remember though. There was a boy.

I was that boy...

...and you, Herodotus, were a boy once, growing up in a city on the coast, Halicarnassus, dreaming dreams and writing stories.

Thank you Herodotus. I'm re-reading your Histories, and finding more and more stories you didn't include. In my next letter I will tell you the story of the Secret Scythian Wedding, which I'm sure you'll love. It's got adventure, and conflict and...well, you know.

'til next time.

Morgan.

*

PS. I discovered a funny coincidence to do with a building in your home city. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was built just a little while after you lived Herodotus. This picture is, amusingly, a miniature scale model of the building, located at Miniaturk in Istanbul.

In the city of Melbourne, in my home country of Australia, stands The Shrine of Remembrance, a war memorial, the design of which was inspired by the design of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.

On the Stone of Remembrance inside the shrine, are engraved the words, “Greater love hath no man.” At 11am on the 11^th of December each year, a shaft of light shines though an aperture in the roof to illuminate the word, “love.”

Shrine of Remembrance

Herodotus, with two and a half thousand years between us, somehow you've never been so close.

Book Two, Letter Seven

To Cicero, on making the world a better place.

Late August 2018 CE

Dear Cicero,

We can't change the direction of the wind by blowing hot air, but the trees we plant can give us shelter from the storm.

I've been thinking a lot about change, and about the problems of government and the persistent quandary of tyranny. The story of dictators being voted in by popular demand comes up again and again in the ancient books, and it seems that nothing has changed in the modern world. Fascism wears a different mask in each country it invades, and demagogues are always ready to manipulate the public through the reasoning of fear and insecurity.

Nothing has changed in thousands of years in regard to this problem, so the question seems to be one of survival. How do I survive these years of growing unrest? How do I survive this ever more insidious terror that grips the policies and actions of my nation?

Can I make the world a better place?

What is my duty to the world, or to those around me, to fight injustice, or to struggle against cruelty, violence, greed and vice?

I will quote you, Cicero, from Book III, of your treatise On Duties:

“Will a good man lie down for his own profit, will he slander, will he grab, will he deceive? He will do nothing of the kind.

Surely the reputation and the glory of being a good man are too precious to be sacrificed in favour of anything at all, however valuable and desirable in appearance. No so-called advantage can possibly compensate for the elimination of your good faith and decency and the consequent destruction of your good name. For if a human exterior conceals the heart of a wild beast, their possessor might as well be a beast instead of a man.”

There are few everyday opportunities to display the valour and goodness you praise, Cicero but plenty of opportunities for the other end of the spectrum. May a man set limits on how far he will go, for the sake of his world? I could argue that your own struggles against Marc Antony were futile, certainly harmful to yourself. Could you have served your family, your friends, Rome itself, by restraining your anger, and submitting to one kind of tyranny, in order to prosper in another kind of freedom?

What is one's duty?

Well, I planted cucumbers yesterday, and played my ukulele, and made a salad for my family to eat and I went to work today and pruned the roses in time for their spring renewal. I write every day, and I share my writing so that others may benefit from the insights I am gaining from these ancient texts. I hope that these insights are of benefit to the world. It is a strange pursuit, writing letters to the dead in order to better understand the living.

Because I cannot change the wind by blowing hot air, but the shelter I can give my kith and kin, with my kind words and actions must be worth something. So as the worst people of my nation lead us in their violent ignorance towards war and civil strife, I drink tea with my woman and warm my hands on the cup, warming my heart by the fire of our love.

Not even you, Cicero, could prevent the collapse of the Republic.

So I will learn from your lessons, (your failures?) and drink tea in peace, for as long as that peace shall last, and plant trees for those who come after me.

*

Spring is almost here

and I am still waiting

for winter to arrive

My friends and I, we dance in the shadows, waiting for our time to bring forth music and light and laughter and to change the world by making it more beautiful.

“In such an ugly time, the only true rebellion is beauty” Crimethinc

When I stand in the night, staring through the branches of gum trees up into the endless worlds of outer space, I am reliably overwhelmed with the feeling of REALNESS. The darkness, the cold, the trees and the earth and the light of distant stars – all real. Then there is the loneliness, but not a painful loneliness, just a satisfaction of solitude, a relaxed state of body knowing that I cannot be seen, cannot be judged, cannot be confused by the conflicting opinions of philosophers, or family or friends..it's just me and...

Well, it's just me and you.

Just me and the world as it is.

Without commentary, without description, and if I let go enough, it is a world without names.

That nameless emptiness is so beautiful to me that even thinking about it begins to create a sensation inside me like a great canyon in my chest, filled with wind, a vast and stony red desert, brilliant and resonant with sound. The wind inside me, that's what I'm really talking about. The empty, cleansing, nameless wind inside me that unwinds my stress, that hollows out my bones and makes me sing like a flute.

When I am empty, and can be with the world AS IT IS, then I have no doubt. That nameless world that I experience, is a world I can believe in. It is always itself, never duplicitous, never misleading, always honest – the natural world is perfect and at ease with itself. Mysterious, but not secretive. Serene, but not bored. Nameless, but likewise so full of implied meaning as to make of every moment an encyclopaedia of philosophic and poetic wisdom.

I stand humbled before the vastness.

Humility.

Recently, through the discovery that a vast array of my preconceptions about the world were inverse to the actuality, I found within myself a knee bending humility as I stared up into the staggering vista of my own ignorance, and saw how very small was my knowledge.

Have I told you of my recurring dream since childhood?

Holding one grain of granite in my right hand, and a one tonne block of granite in my left, I know how many grains are in the one tonne block. Then I look up to the night sky and I know how many stars there are and …

I wake up screaming.

It hasn't always been that exact dream, but every variation on the theme has pointed towards the same truth.

So today, I bend my knee and bow down before my ignorance. I empty myself of the shame of my ignorance, and instead embrace the liberation that is the acknowledgement of infinity.

I acknowledge that infinity goes both ways, in and out.

As above, so below.

*

Thank you Cicero, it is always good to talk to you. A bit of an odd letter, but it is of foremost importance that I be honest with you, dear friend. I've been busy reading Thucydides and Xenophon and Marcus Aurelius, so I haven't gotten around to read your all of books On Duties. Some days I can sit in bed and read for hours, and some days I must work. My beard is growing longer, as is my hair. Spring is nearly here, but I am still waiting for winter to arrive.

The world is dry, but with you, my cup runs over.

Morgan.