Dear Plutarch,

I never expected that I would write you so many letters, almost as many as I write to Cicero. Your books are always on my bedside shelf and your stories are continuously mixing in my mind.

I am beginning to see how certain ideas were transmitted through time. I have been fascinated by the depth of discussion on Atomic theory, and the whole realm of Natural Philosophy. I would like to ask you, do you know who first recorded the idea of atoms? Lucretius said that he was translating from Greek writers who lived two hundred years before him, (so about 250 BCE). Epicurus has something to say about it, as well as Cicero, Plato too I think. It seems like a pretty hot topic. Does it surprise you to learn that atomic theory as a science that has only increased in importance and is now influencing almost every single facet of human society, through the practical applications of ideas dreamed up in the shadows of archaic Greece. From medicine and power to the most powerful weapons ever developed by man. Who first dreamed the atom and who wrote it down?

Perhaps I will find it among your extensive work. I only just discovered your fifteen volume collection of essays and books on every topic imaginable, your Morales. I'm especially looking forward to your work criticising Herodotus. I love him so much that I can't imagine what you could possibly have to say against him.

So, more reading there for me.

I'll tell you what's really been on my mind: The birth pangs of democracy in Greece and Rome. Yup, that's what I've been stewing over for few weeks as more and more stories are revealed to me about the contradictions and convoluted pressures acting within early Mediterranean democracies. In particular, I want to talk about how Solon was voted in as dictator of Attica.

So let's get down to business.

Solon. 640 – 560 BCE approximately:

A law-maker, a dictator by popular vote, a poet and traveler. 

I'm gonna dive right in and talk about some of his laws, please excuse my paraphrasing and piecemeal quotes of your work.

Solon passed a law which forbade slaves from having boy lovers. “His intention was evidently to class this as an honourable and dignified practice, and thus in a sense, to recommend it to reputable men, by the act of forbidding it to the unworthy.” Solon himself is rumoured to have had a long romantic relationship with a distant cousin, a man named Pisistratus, who himself had a boy lover named Charmus, whom Pisistratus was so fond of that he “...dedicated a statue of Love in the Academy, where the runners of the sacred torch race light their torches.”

Now I'm not sure exactly what you mean by boy lover, but I'm assuming you mean boy as in, not yet a man, a teenager. Now, the very suggestion of an adult having a sexual relationship with a young adult or child is today abhorrent, completely and utterly detested as the worst of harmful deviant behaviour, but it was different in your day, wasn't it? Those kinds of relationships were looked at differently and were often public. It's a really touchy subject, even mentioning it might get me branded as some kind of sympathiser with paedophilia, which is absolutely not what I am trying to put forward. My era has placed a huge amount of importance on what it calls the 'age of consent', and violations of that law incur heavy prison sentences. I agree with my society on this. I am proud of any nation's efforts to enshrine the rights of children in law, and to defend the defenceless. Predation of the young is a violation that my society tries hard to stamp out, and I applaud our efforts, even if our successes are limited. However, I am assuming that what you mean by 'boy lover' is not a child, but a teenager.

But the reason I'm even bringing it up is not to criticise you or moralise about the age of consent, it is to talk about laws surrounding homosexuality. I'm mentioning it because of the way that I can discern your values through your writing. First of all, the modern words, gay or homosexual never come up, as if such definitions of sexual preferences were not necessary in your time (or Solon's). This might be a matter of the translators choices of words, or of your own intentions as a writer, I cannot say. People in my time are mightily concerned with definitions of sexual gender identity and preferences and it can make one's head spin. Every year a new gender gets added to the list, as well as a new set of acceptable terms for describing them. That's not a complaint, people are allowed to call themselves whatever they want, and to insist upon appropriate names and divisions. I only mention it for comparison.

I find it fascinating in your writing Plutarch, the total lack of moralising on your part concerning sexual preference, as if it were not worthy of mention. If a man loved a woman, fine, if he loved a man, also fine. If he married a woman and loved men on the side, it was complicated. Same as today. It actually seems odd that gay marriage was not legalised back then, excepting of course for one detail.

I feel proud to tell you that it was this year that the government of my nation legalised marriage between two men, or two women, adding these new categories to the established marriage laws. A lot of the beliefs about marriage that were present in Solon's and your time seem present today. Assertions on the laws of nature, and marriage being, as you write, “...that a man and wife should live together for love, affection, and the procreation of children.” This definition was also Solon's argument against the young and old being allowed to marry one another, as it does “...not fulfil the function of marriage, and indeed defeated its object.”

It is the object of marriage, which the people of my nation, and a few others, have dismantled. Marriage is now for adult partnership. The procreation of children is voluntary and wedlock is no longer a strong social prerequisite for pregnancy. Of course, people marry for all sorts of reasons, and in a nation like mine, populated as it is with cultures from over the globe, the weddings are diverse and come with a variety of vows. The divorce rate seems about the same now as in your time though.

The objection to the objects of marriage aside, it surprised me to read of the value placed on love and affection in marriage. Solon's abolishment of dowries seems to me thoroughly modern and forward thinking, claiming as he did that “...marriage should not be a mercenary or profit-making institution.”

But Solon does not seem to be equally forward thinking regarding women in general. You write that Solon “...made a law which regulated women's appearances in public, as well as their mourning and their festivals, and put an end to to wild and disorderly behaviour. When women went out of doors they were not permitted to wear more than three garments, or to carry more than an obol's worth of food or drink, or a basket more than eighteen inches high, or to travel at night except in a wagon with a lamp in front of it.”

He also abolished the practice of lacerating one's own flesh at funerals, so, y'know, maybe he wasn't all bad. Actually the laws about women seem a bit strange. It's hard to understand what might have motivated Solon to restrict women in this particular way. What do you mean by 'wild and disorderly behaviour'? It stirs my imagination, just how wild and disorderly did these women have to be, that they were forbidden from wearing too many clothes and carrying too much food and drink? Were funerals and festivals apt to fall into debauchery and public disobedience? I have another book on my shelf that I have yet to read, 'The history of orgies', by Burgo Partidge. Perhaps I'll find my answers there.

Jokes aside, you gave me dark a glimpse into the quality of lives led by women when you mentioned Solon's laws regarding rape. “...the offence of rape against a free woman was punished by a fine of no more than 100 drachmae. If the man seduced her, he would be fined 20 drachmae, except in the case of courtesans who openly sell their bodies.”

Further on you clarify that - “...a sheep and a bushel of grain were reckoned at one drachma; a prize of 100 drachmae was awarded to a victor of the Isthmian games, and one of 500 to a victor at Olympia.”

The offence of rape against a FREE woman. Which I assume means that there was no charge for raping a slave. If there is one thing I know about the ancient world, it is that slaves were everywhere, they were big money, a massive economic driving force. Slaves formed a huge, invisible portion of the population, and their rights before the law are famously non-existent.

So in a society where the punishment for rape was a fine, and where slaves held no rights before the law at all, the women became so 'wild and disorderly' that the men restricted women's gatherings, behaviour and appearance by law. Hmm...

Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions and that if I actually read Solon's original laws, I would find more details that would alter my perspective. I shouldn't be surprised at the situation though, since there are countries even now who do not punish the rapist, but rather punish the victim for dishonouring herself and her family. Even in my rather progressive society, female rape victims are often blamed on the ground they have provoked their rape because of the 'alluring' way they have dressed. It seems that inhumane peculiarities are not the providence of one nation or culture, but that we are all compromised by our collective history.

I feel that I should tell you about Eurydice Dixon, a young woman who was raped and murdered only a few days ago, and whose public shrine of flowers was vandalised in the night by persons unknown. It has caused an uproar and thousands of people recently gathered in vigil to celebrate the young woman's life and to declaim the evil of the crime for which no suspect has yet been arrested.

I ask myself, is the violence of man a sickness which cannot be cured? It seems that nothing has changed in millennia and that women are still the victims of oppressive laws and discriminatory attitudes. I wonder what might happen on the day that a rape victim publicly executed her assailant in defiance of civil law? What would happen to my society if women took violence and justice into their own hands and simply killed every man who violated their sacred bodily rights? If they used the tools of their oppressors against them? Since there is little protection to be found in the shelter of the law, or of the police who often blame the victim, it would be a righteous battle fought for just aims.

Is there any solution for violence, other than better violence?

Is that even a sensible question?

What do I mean by better violence? Is revenge a good enough substitute for justice, when the courts do not protect the innocent?

It makes me think suddenly of Damon Peripoltas. You mention him in passing in your biography of Cimon.

Damon Peripoltas: “...who stood out among all the youths of his age for his proud spirit and exceptional physical beauty.”

“The Roman commander of a cohort which was quartered for the winter in Chaeronea fell in love with this Damon, who was only just past his boyhood. This officer found that he could not win over the youth by importunity or by offering him presents, but before long it became clear that he would not stop at using force.

Angered by the attentions the Roman paid him, Damon gathered sixteen friends in a conspiracy, and one night daubed their faces with soot, drank unmixed wine to nerve themselves, and at daybreak fell upon the Roman officer as he was offering sacrifice in the marketplace. They killed him with a number of his men and then fled the city.

The Senate of Chaeronea met and pronounced sentence of death on the murderers. But that evening, while the chief magistrates were dining together, according to their custom, Damon and his band broke into the city hall, massacred them and once again made their escape.”

Damon and his band, now fugitives, began raiding and marauding the countryside, and even threatened the city. The Chaeroneans lured Damon back into the city by making decrees to conciliate him, claiming to have forgiven him his crimes, but one day not long after, while he was in the public baths, they killed him. For a long time afterwards apparitions were seen in the baths and groans heard throughout the building and so the baths were closed. Even in your day Plutarch, some five hundred years later, those who lived in the nearby neighbourhood claimed to be haunted by terrifying sights and sounds. The descendants of Damon were called the “Asbolomeni” or “Soot Faced”, because of what he had done.

So what do I mean by better violence? What do I mean by revenge as a substitute for justice? What do I expect the outcome to be, and would it be any different in my time than it was for Damon and his comrades in arms?

I must admit to a bias on my part. Vigilante justice is not just theoretical for me. It is a living part of my family's history. I am beneficiary to the successful application of better violence. My family has within its living branches a Brutus of sorts, who when only twelve, slew a Caesar of his own, and freed his family from the unrestrained violence of their tyrant father.

Pity not the land who has no hero, pity the land in need of one.

Theseus slew Procrustes. Tomyris slew Cyrus. Brutus slew Caesar and I am Brutus' son.

...I'm in a deep hole of doubt about the future of my society. Please understand that I do not wish to advocate vigilante justice. The rule of law and the rights of every citizen to a fair trial and representation before the courts are pillars supporting the peaceful co-existence of everyone in my country.

Except these laws don't protect everyone equally.

In modern India, vigilante women's gangs have sprung up in rural areas where justice is corrupt and domestic violence against women is rife. They are the Pink Gangs, founded by the heroic 51 year old mother of four, Sampat Pal Devi, who had seen enough to know that action had to be taken. The Pink Gangs are a success story of the just and restrained use of violence against the violent. The women all wear bright pink sari's and carry large heavy walking sticks which they use to defend themselves against police and against angry men clawing to maintain their power over women.

THE PINK GANG

What would a Pink Gang look like in Australia? How long would it take for them to be come 'soot-faced' and find themselves in the hands of the justice system they sought to circumvent? Trapped in the cycle of their own violent methods, trapped by the laws they had to break in order to pursue a goal of just retribution for crimes unpunished. I'm probably going overboard just imagining such an outcome in Australia. The problem of of false accusations is only the first hurdle in dealing with the morality of vigilantism, and I'm not sure I even want to go down that road in this letter.

So...

I am aware that when we are talking about events in the 500's BCE, we tread territory blending myth, fable, propaganda, and historical fact. All I can do is to find fascination with the mystery of history, and to keep reading. Keep asking questions.

Even though it seems that there are no answers to be found.

* * *

… A few days have passed, I've been reading, thinking. I know I promised to get to the Solon dictatorship question, but I just can't leave the gender issue alone. I've been reading Partridge's History of Orgies, and I found a reference to self flagellation that made me think of the ban Solon put on the practice at funerals. I found a further reference to Aphrodite Anosia, (Aphrodite the Unholy) and how in Thessaly, just north of Attica, an all female festival to this Goddess was held. Partridge says that details are lacking, but that it is known that erotic flagellation played an essential part. I think this was going on around 500 – 600 BCE, so around the same time as Solon, but information is pretty sketchy. It might seem peculiar to pick up on this detail, but it centres around the theme of laws and gender, so I'm going to run with it. Solon banned the practice of self flagellation at funerals in Attica, while in Thessaly to the north, religious festivals were held celebrating the practice of erotic flagellation.

A lot can be learned about a society, by observing the ways they legislate sex. The manner in which governments regulate prostitution, they way they police (and classify) sex offenders, they way they prohibit certain kinds of marriages. It is in the activities a society bans that the shadow of their ideals can be found, for every ban is a response to a perceived threat, and seeks to suppress a practice that is already in play.

Gay marriage remained illegal in my country for so long because it was a perceived threat to the predominately Christian ideology, which enforced a set of beliefs not all that different from Solon's day. Solon banned self inflicted injury at funerals. Why did he do that? Had the practice gotten out of hand? Was Solon just opposed personally to the practice?

So what was going on in Thessaly that provided the kind of society that celebrated erotic flagellation as a custom of religion? It might be better to call the worship of Aphrodite Anosia a mystery cult. There were a lot of different religious groups, a lot of different gods, each with their own regional variations, and orgiastic practice was not uncommon. The list of different names attached to Aphrodite alone, and the differing personalities that accompanied such tiles, is a long list. Some sources linked her title, 'unholy' with another related title meaning 'dancer on the graves'.

But getting back to the laws about women, and the wild, disorderly behaviour that Solon apparently put an end to.

Pausanius makes mention of Attica in his writing, and of the Thyiads, women who go every year with the women of Delphi to Parnassus, and there hold orgies on mountain tops, in honour of Dionysus. It was the custom of these women to dance at various places on the road during the nine day journey from Athens.

Was Solon trying to interfere with women's religious rites, by limiting their ability to travel and stay abroad for extended periods? Is the 'wild and disorderly' behaviour actually Aphrodite's sacred rites? This sort of thing happens in the modern world. In America, Cannabis and Hemp plants were prevented from being grown, not by an outright ban, (at least not at first) but by prohibitive taxes. Solon didn't outlaw the women's festivals, he just made it illegal for those who couldn't afford a carriage, to travel to them.

Of course, there is no way of knowing. It's also possible that I am simply asking the wrong questions. I might be looking at the past through a lens too modern to do anything but distort my vision. Maybe Solon restricted women's ability to travel on foot at night, as a way to reduce their becoming victims of banditry and theft. Some of Solon's other laws concerning violence and its punishment certainly open the door to debate about his intentions and about the practical societal problems he was trying to combat, violence being only one of many on a long list.

I could be looking at this the wrong way entirely. I am a student, mistakes are my trade.

I try to tread carefully through the territory of your histories Plutarch, blended as they are between myth and fact. I find myself fascinated with the mystery and I keep reading. Keep asking questions.

Which brings me back to how Solon was voted in as dictator.

But it is late, so that will have to wait for next time.

Thank you Plutarch, for your contradictions and your facts, your pathos and your scepticism and your belief. They are all lessons for me to learn from.

Morgan.

                           Gabor Berenyi (20/10/1930 – 28/11/2011)

Dear Uncle Gabor,

We should have talked more when you were alive, but isn't that always the way. I was too young to know you properly, but in my mind you are always laughing, always smiling, always cooking, always with a glass of wine in your hand. Your lonely vintner's existence was to me, strange and normal at the same time, the way a child's world view often is. The way you lived in a shed without carpets or floorboards, just rammed earth. A shed without interior walls, just curtains hung from the metal railings. I remember the tractor and and lot of things covered with heavy cloths, and your living space, a tiny corner of the high ceilinged shed, with a camp stove and a camp bed and a photo of your family back home in Hungary.

Running in the mountains through the snow and the ice

escaping in the winter, gotta look behind twice.

Your family back home in Hungary also kept a photo of you up on the mantle over their fire. They called you hero, they called you the lucky one and they told stories of you and kept your legend alive.

You crossed the Carpathian Mountains in winter with nothing but a loaf of bread and a photograph. Escaping the Russians, escaping oppression, escaping the nineteen fifties to live another five decades, eventually making a new home in Australia. Growing grapes, making wine, bringing the best things from your home and making them grow in foreign soil. We drank your wine at your funeral. Organic, preservative free, using old Hungarian methods that didn't strip the tannins from the grapes, resulting in a different flavour every vintage. We drank and you were in the room with us, even your son, who gave a speech and was very humble, contrite.

He wished he could have loved you better while you were alive, but isn't that always the way.

Tonight I went to a concert, a Hungarian/Transylvanian gypsy violinist named Anti von Klewitz.

After the show I spoke with her and I told her of you, running through the mountains to start again in a new country.

Now I will tell you of her, and of my time at the concert.

Anti von Klewitz

* * *

When I am gone, wait for me until the wheat is tall and yellow

if am not back by then, wait until the grapes are blue and sweet

and if I am not back by then,

you don't have to wait any longer

because I will not be coming home ever again.

Thus spoke Anti von Klewitz. Thus the nature and character of Hungarian gypsy music speaks of an unending homesickness that can never be satiated. She, tall, wild of hair, with bony fingers and a bony face, a woman with a straight back and a laugh that knows all there is to know about pain, but which is still laughter.

The room is hot, I peel off my coat as I enter, uncoil my scarf and twist the cap off my wine bottle, a glass poured before I speak to anyone. The room is full and bursting with conversation an hour before the show, the kitchen too crowded to even open a drawer, pots of soup simmer, cakes and biscuits and wine in tea-cups are in hands and on shelves. Grey hair, silver hair, bald heads. Beaded jewellery, seeded jewellery, faces like coastlines, like good books.

But the music...oh the music.

A trio.

The upright bass, played at times with bow, at others he plucked. The player is tall strong, unshaven and skinny, his white shirt is wrinkled, worn. His black rimmed glasses give him that magnified look, like a man in love, like whatever he's lookin' at, he's staring at it, like, buddy he's here for the music and you better believe that.

The guitar player could be a warrior, or a mountain priest, or a father of four with a good job. He is broad shouldered with strong and proud features. His white wrinkled shirt, short white goatee and bald head give him the air of someone who is in charge, but his playing is all for her...

She, smoky voice, dusty violin, white wrinkled shirt and heavy belt worn in a mannish way. She like a woman whose life is music and who has paid the price every step of the way. She describes the musician's life as one long mistake. Musicians are human as well, after all she laughs in that way that you know she's laughing with you at everything, at the whole human joke.

This song is about, that, Love is a curse you know, but it is something we need anyway. The song says, Love is like growing roses, they need a big space to really bloom.

She sings, the violin pressed out from her shoulder, like a rifle, like a crutch, pointing it at us, and her voice...

Oh, what a thing to behold a person who sings like themselves. Sometimes not much more than speaking, sometimes singing duet with the melody of her strings, she was the voice of the music, and the poetry, though Hungarian, seemed easy to understand.

These three, between the fireplace and the bookshelf, were together for us. They were servants of the songs, releasing a sort of manna, a quintessence into the room, which we drank, faces aglow and eyes and minds and ears and all our attention pouring towards them. Synchronicity seems too mechanical a word, symbiosis too cellular. They played together like the music meant something to them, and the chance to play it meant something more. They listened so carefully to each other that the tiniest fragment of disagreement could not be heard between them, the comfort and confidence they displayed to us is an example that can be applied to all life. The softest and subtlest nuances in volume, or pressure was felt by all three and all three responded as if they were dancing down a staircase, hand in hand, hand in hand, hand in hand.

And we,

the audience seated with our soup cups and wine cups...

We saw all that, we witnessed it together, that testament to the astounding purity and beauty of human intentions.

Music.

We are not the fearful, aggressive, greedy, manipulative, harmful, corrupt and vengeful human race.

We are this. Music. Hand in hand.

* * *

Thank you Uncle Gabor, for your smile which is forever shining in my mind. You who had the least, were the happiest. You who lost your home, your country, your family, your farm, your wife, your son...you were the happiest of us. You knew something that no-one else even believed in. I cannot name it, but you know it, and I want to know it, and perhaps when I have lost as much as you, then I will smile like you.

With a glass in my hand and a song in my broken heart

Morgan.

* * *

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

Dear Francesco Petrarca,

It is with some small embarrassment that I write to you this late in my project. You who in 1345 first discovered the collected books of Cicero's letters, and who, so enamoured of that great author's humanity, wrote letters to him. I only just found out about your initial discovery yesterday, and only began reading your letters to Cicero then. Imagine my surprise and delight however to find that you were writing to him about the very same things that I have written to him about, even making references to the same quotes.

I don't yet know enough about you or your writing to scribe a full letter to you yet, but rest assured that you will hear from me again soon.

Petrarch's Letters to Cicero (and his other dead friends)

So dear Petrarch (as you are known these days), this letter was written to you in the land of the living, on the rocky slopes upstream of the Meechi River in the Adelaide Hills in Australia, on the thirty first day of May, the last day of Autumn, in the two thousand and eighteenth year from the birth of that God whom we both knowest.

With a growing sense of destiny,

     Morgan Peter Philip Stephen Taubert

...wait. I want to tell you something.

At the hour of the setting sun, I travel from my home in the Borderlands, towards the city. From the rocky fringes on the green edge of the woodland, I climb winding roads through trees growing taller and through towns growing smaller, more wealthy, until the hills are dotted with lonesome estate homes. The red fire of the departing sun brushes its rouge upon the cheek of grey storm clouds hanging close to the forested hilltops. I pass through a tunnel carved straight into the heart of a hill and emerge upon the city entranceway, a road hidden snakelike within a steep valley whose sides have been cut deep to make way for the needs of man.

The city roads wet and crowded with cars (modern wagons), the footpaths empty, my destination is a tavern on the road to the port, named after an early governor of the city. I go to meet with a dancer and a harmonica player.

These are the last days of Autumn.

* * *

             (A fragment of the original text of Histories, by Herodotus)

Dear Herodotus of Halicarnassus

...uh...

I'm starstruck, tongue-tied. Your book Histories is...well, where do I start? I asked Plutarch for advice on what I should write to you about and he told me about the Greeks Artabanus, and Themistocles. They seemed a good bridge to cross to since you and Plutarch both wrote about them. But I won't start there.

I asked my wife what I should say to the Father of History, the Father of Lies, and she said I should start with a lie.  (She always has the best ideas...)

So...

I will start with a story, and I want you to tell me whether or not it is true.

A king and a pauper went walking down to the river one day. They knew each other but were not exactly what you would call friends. The King saw a fish in the river and asked the pauper to catch it for him. This the pauper did and when he brought the fish back and gave it to the king, the king discarded the fish and slew the pauper, throwing his body into the river which floated downstream to a lake, where it sank.

Unknown to the king, a guard was watching from the castle tower and at first he did not tell anyone about what he had seen, but kept it secret and turned it over in his mind. When he had decided what the king's actions meant, he spoke to his wife and told her that he had been asked to report for night duty that week. She, knowing her husband better than he credited her, suspected her husband of some clandestine purpose. She had seen how troubled his mind had been and knew that he was at pains to hide something from her that he believed might cause her harm if she knew.

At first she did not tell anyone what she knew, but turned it over in her mind and went at last to the oracle. She told the priestess of her dilemma, to which she replied:

What harm may come of ignorance

may also come of knowledge.

Tell me, which do I trust, my husband or my king?

The woman went home and considered that her husband must be involved in some plot against the king. So the woman told her mother, who was a household servant in the king's service. The mother began to ask among the palace servants and guards if anyone knew of a plot to kill the king?The questions started a rumour that such a thing was true, and soon there were whispered fears even among the kings guardsmen, of which the husband was one.

When the husband was asked by his officer if he knew anything of a conspiracy against the king, he kept a straight face and spoke the truth. He had not heard of any such thing.

That night the husband went home to his wife and told her the truth. Together they decided that the king did indeed have to die. So the wife invited her mother over and the three of them made their plans.

The next day the mother asked amongst the servants if anyone else had heard a rumour of the assassins plans to dig a tunnel beneath the palace and so gain access to the king. Soon even the king had heard these rumours and demanded that his bed-chamber be moved to the tallest tower, while guards were posted on every floor beneath.

Next the husband reported to his officer that he had heard someone in the kitchen talking about poisoned fish. When the guards interrogated the kitchen staff but found no-one willing to admit to knowledge, the King ordered them all to draw nets across the river and catch every single fish in it, and have their entire number burned. This was done and the smoke of the fire clouded the sky. The king in his tower grew more fearful every day.

Then the wife, who had been working in her own kitchen for many days, crafted a poison which contained no odour nor flavour, but which killed every rat or mouse or bird that she fed it to. So, going to the river, she collected a pitcher of water and brought it to her mother, who took it into the palace where guards and other servants drank from it, and many died.

When news of the poisoned river water reached the king, who now lived in an anxious state of mortal fear, he ordered that the river be destroyed, broken up and diverted to pass the city but not to enter it. All water must come to him only from the sky. He imprisoned all his servants, and all his palace guards, along with the husband, the wife and the mother.

When the river was diverted, the lake dried up and there in the mud the people saw hundreds of bodies. People of every class and station, sodden and rotten and decaying in the quagmire of the king's madness. Many of the kings enemies were found among the dead, and many more of his own subjects.

The people liberated the imprisoned, and locked the king in his tower, where he quickly died of thirst.

* * *

Of course, its not true. But that's not the point is it. It's the stories that matter, and you the master storyteller seem to have told them all first. The rest of us who followed after you can only stare into the oceanic narrative of your epic tome of history with awe and wonder and a delightful sort of helplessness. You wrote everything. All the writers who came after you are mimics of your styles, of your plots, and your character archetypes. Your book is the catalogue of all our striving and failure and beauty and savagery and nothing new has really happened since, only scenes played and played again with costume and backdrop changes, new names and faces, but always the same stories. Why? Because we are repetitive? No. Because we do not learn? No. Why? Because you wrote so much, so many stories and biographies and geographies and murder mysteries and romantic dramas and war tales and political conspiracies and religious miracles. The world you describe is colourful, complex, diverse and so broad that its borders simply fade gradually from first hand knowledge into the realm of hearsay and eventually into pure myth.

A king and a pauper went walking down to the river one day.

It's hard to fully estimate just how popular and well known the tale of the 300 Spartans is. For you it seems to have been an important story to tell in great detail, and the people of the future are grateful for the care an attention you took to amassing all the information that you did. Not many people believe any more that Xerxes had 1.7 million soldiers marching with him when he invaded Greece from Persia. Modern estimates are generally around the 5-600,000 mark. These figures and their inflation are trifling exaggerations, their inaccuracy does not detract in the least from the lively and passionate depictions of courage and virtue that you give to the Persians, the Spartans and the Greeks.

Plutarch, who seems to have been a big fan of your work as well, says something rather memorable in his Moralia.  (I'm paraphrasing here, not quoting exactly...)

“Lay down you arms and we will make you kings of all Greece.” 

Said the ambassadors from from Xerxes to the Spartan King Leonidas, who stood with his 300 warriors, ready to lay down their lives to defend Greece.

“Having come, take.” He replied. 

Molon Labe in the original Greek. These words are incredibly famous. They are translated and expressed in a few different ways in modern popular language, including, 'Come and get them', or more lavishly, 'Come pry them from our cold dead hands' which while certainly more colourful than regular Laconian speech, conveys the implied meaning of the original.

But I don't want to go on about the Spartans. I'm sure you've had your fill. I'll write again soon, but next time I want to talk about the Scythians, and Queen Nitocris, since she seems like a singularly fascinating woman whose name, like Sparta, has survived into the modern world.

I could read your book a hundred times,

With admiration and respect,

        Morgan of the Borderlands