“The town bloats like a carcass in the boiling sun…”

It is 7000 BC.  The world is somewhere between civilization and the Ice Age.  You find yourself in one of the few settlements on earth.  And it’s dying.  In this time travel adventure, you will travel the Aegean in search of a new home.  Will it be Greek or Minoan?

“The spear slides into his chest…”

You are on an alien world–a world covered in ice and snow.  On this world are a few small groups of scattered humans trying to survive. As a time traveler, you will wake up 20,000 years ago in the middle of the Ice Age.  You can’t be a passive observer.  You have to become the people you’re exploring if you hope to make it back alive.

“You walk blindly into a wall of white…”

You are on an alien world–a world covered in ice and snow.  On this world are a few small groups of scattered humans trying to survive. As a time traveler, you will wake up 20,000 years ago in the middle of the Ice Age.  You can’t be a passive observer in this journey.  You have to become the people you’re exploring.  It’s the only way you’ll survive.

“And then Moscow is gone…”

Hitler does everything right. He pacifies England. He supports Rommel in North Africa. He waits until 1943 to invade Russia. Soon his dream of a Greater Germania is realized and the world is truly Axis. In this alternate history of WWII, you will time travel to a world as it could have been. With the help of music and dramatic sound you’ll be taken on a journey… and you might not like what you see.

Music List:

Ligeti
Lux Aeterna 

Schnittke
Piano Quintet, mvt 2

Shostakovitch
Symphony 11, mvt 3
Symphony 5, mvt 3

Wagner
Tristan and Isolde Overture

Podcast Inspirations:

This show was inspired by Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Show 27: Ghosts of the Ostfront

“The phantom hardens into a train…”

Rome never fell. Marcus Aurelius left the purple to an able general and the line of good emperors continued.  Soon Rome experienced its Industrial Revolution.  Steam power, trains, factories and unbelievable conquest took the standard from India to China and beyond…

Music List:

Zoe Keating
Hello Night
The Path
We Insist
Legions (War)
Fern 

Podcast Inspirations:

Thank you to Rob Cain of Ancient Rome Refocused for recommending the topic for this show.

Rob Cain, Ancient Rome Refocused Podcast

This exclusive interview with Rob Cain, creator of the wildly popular Ancient Rome Refocused, was conducted by Jordan Harbour from the Twilight Histories Podcast in February, 2012.

Jordan Harbour: For all those who haven’t listened to your podcast, can you describe what Ancient Rome Refocused is all about?

Rob Cain: The podcast can be summed up in a quote from Seneca:

“What is then is now.”

We are not a show about the past, but about how the past relates to the now.  The show is about making comparisons.  Our films, plays, art, architecture, law and philosophy have a basis in Ancient Rome.  History, in my opinion, cannot be divided into epochs but lays upon a continuous thread.  Things change, diminish, die and blossom but never fully disappear.  We build on the past or we recreate it to suit our vision of the present.

On the show, we interview authors, artists and historians who have used Ancient Rome as their inspiration.   No matter what the year,  whether 1412, 1812 or 2012 a monk, politician or a guy who sells bikes in Aspin can see similarities between themselves and the Ancient Romans.

It is because of this– ROME will never die.

On the blog, I play a game with the readers called “Name That Classical Connection” and show a picture of something that could be traced back to Rome or Classical Greece and people consistently guess the right answer.  It’s almost like we are hard-wired for it.

On the blog and podcast we delve into other subjects:  Ancient Troy, Egypt, and Greece.    The show is usually divided into three or four parts: a dramatic narration, a small lecture, or an interview with an expert in a field using the past as their inspiration for their art or field of study.

The podcast is protected by two muses.  Yes, I have called on them for inspiration:  Calliope (the muse of epic poetry) and her sister Clio (the muse of history).  On each episode we color between the lines, adding color to make the past come alive, but ALWAYS…ALWAYS… respecting the facts.

Do I want to be Indiana Jones?  I sure do.

Do I want to take you on an adventure?  Most definitely.

Ancient Rome Refocused, history for the brave...

Jordan Harbour: What inspired you to make Ancient Rome Refocused?

Rob Cain: The truth is I should have been an historian.  I would have been happier.  My father recognized this in me, but many sons make the mistake of not listening to their Fathers.  He loved history.  He lived it as a soldier in World War II.   There are few that can say they ‘witnessed’ history.

The director Bryan Dorries who wrote his own translation of the play AJAX, and took it around the country to perform for soldiers suffering from PTSD, said something that sums it up.  “Those that have lived lives of mythological proportions have no trouble relating to ancient myth.”

Today, many people are living on that scale.

They are on their own ‘Odyssey.’  Soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan have the best understanding–carry an M16 and you have something in common with Achilles.   I suspect police officers, doctors, and anyone that must make the BIG decisions  between life and death have to wrap their lives around  ‘the will of the gods’ or ‘fate’ or ‘luck’ can understand the outcomes of mythology as well.

It does not have to be taken literally.  Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to the gods  for fair winds.  How many professionals have sacrificed family for the sake of their careers?

Sysiphus pushed a stone up a hill for eternity, and how many of us have borne an unimaginable weight on a daily basis?  The classics live in our everyday lives.

What inspired me to start Ancient Rome Refocused?  Love of history, and for something else:  ‘street cred.’  I am an aspiring writer (which I’ll talk about later) and I feel the podcast allows me to establish some credibility in this genre I have chosen to undertake.  Ancient Rome Refocused is my crucible.  I made a promise to the listeners I would respect the facts.  If I was totally without merit, totally without understanding of the times, the history and without respect for the truth the listeners would have called me on it – and so they should and so they have.

So far I have retained a certain amount of credibility.  Someone on the blog-o-sphere described me as an enthusiastic amateur.  That’s OK  I can live with that…but just a reminder  that sometimes amateurs have contributed greatly to certain fields.  Maybe, my contribution is promoting an interest in the past. I think it’s working.  Ancient Rome Refocused has been blessed with over 600,000 down loads across 9 episodes.

Someone is listening out there.

The show is going to get even better on future podcasts, by the way. We intend to go on location.

Steven Saylor, author of 'Roma'

Jordan Harbour: Many of your podcasts are shaped by creative writing that sends your listener back in time.  Are there any authors you look to for inspiration.

Rob Cain: Steven Saylor is my hero.  I was lucky enough to interview him.  He rocks.  The man is a wealth of knowledge and is enthusiastic about his subject.  If you ever get the chance to hear him lecture, do so.  During the interview I found out we owned the same REMCO Roman Galley toy.  The oars moved and it propelled itself across the floor.   Forget computer games–the 60s had some great toys!

Jordan Harbour: Have you thought of delving into some historical fiction writing yourself?

Rob Cain: Check out Amazon.com  in the near future to see my new ebook.  It is a novella.    Yes, a gutsy thing to do but what do I have to lose?

Ray Bradbury, the author of The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes said, “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” I am building those wings as fast as I can.

In addition, I have finished a full-length historical novel about Ancient Rome.

Talk about Sysiphus  pushing a rock.

I totally understand his pain…I mean it.  Novel writing is like pushing a boulder up a hill, watch it fall back down to the bottom of the hill and then push it back up in the rewrites.  Right now I am living in my own Hades…but I hope my pain will end soon.  Advice to novel writers:  outline your work, and have a timetable for finishing.

Jordan Harbour: How has your military service influenced your understanding of the Romans?

Rob Cain: That is a HARD question!  I have met an awful lot of stoic characters that would have made perfect centurions or legion commanders.  I still have a memory of falling into a stream during the dead of winter and given a choice: wait in a cold truck or continue the march.  That is an example of Roman stoicism or an attitude of just ‘suck it up’ American professionalism.

I include the Canadians and British in on this as well  (stiff upper lip?).  I have been on road marches and could not help imagine a Roman column moving down a road.

I have flown in on a Huey Helicopter to a tank defensive position and from the markings on the ground imagined a Roman fortification in upper Germany.    I have seen the military’s tendency to have logos and patches imbued with meaning (references to battles and attributes)  and can’t help but think of the Roman practice of placing the legion standards lovingly in a camp temple.  I have carried the platoon standard and felt a surge of pride.  I have mourned friends who have been killed in battle.  I have held the hand of a soldier’s wife (KIA) as she walked away from her husband’s grave while the sound of taps were played across the fields of Arlington.

There are hundreds out there who can make better comparisons which makes this a question I would love to explore on the blog or podcast with other veterans.

Jordan Harbour: As our trusted time travel agent, what kind of package tours to Ancient Rome would you offer us?

Rob Cain: Keep it under wraps, I don’t want the federal government to find out I own a time machine.   I’ve talked to my shareholders and we are discussing a variety of packages.      I can’t bring myself to offer the expected tour.  To take us to the opening of the Coliseum under Titus somehow seems amoral.   I don’t think I have the gall to expose paying customers to the slaughter that we would find there.  Those that died in the arena were not shadows.  THE WERE REAL PEOPLE.  I have no wish to be perverted by the sights one would see.   My ‘package deal’ would be more fireside, more tame, and somehow more illuminating.

Package 1: Dinner and Theatre

Meet the playwrights of the Ancient World.  Attend the opening night of an actual play by the satirist Juvenal.   Dinner is included in the price plus an after-hours wine tasting with the playwright himself who will answer questions.  Latin- to-English translators available.

See the basis for western drama and art.

($120,000 per  ticket)

Package 2: Great Library

Visit the original Library of Alexandria.  Library guides will take your requests for specific manuscripts and provide a reading room for you to review obtained works.  Get a copy of a lost manuscript, bring it back to the 21^st century and publish.  Copying time takes six to 12 weeks.  A visit to the zoo and aviary are available for the kids.  Latin- to-English translators available.

Find knowledge lost to mankind due to the famous fire.

($145,000 per ticket).

Package 3: Tour of Rome

Groups can pick the time period to visit the city.  Early Republic or Imperial Rome – it’s up to you.  Guests will be escorted about the city on litter and guided by resident philosophers of the age.  The Imperial Rome package contains a day at the races at the Circus Maximus.  Special shopping excursion are available.  All purchases are yours to keep.   Great deals to be found on jewelry, pottery and wine (imagine having the oldest vintage at your next party in modern time).  What you do on your vacation time is your business. Take back with you artwork in glass, gold and silver done by first rate artisans. No duty, no taxes.  NO SLAVES WILL BE TRANSPORTED UP-TIME.

($300,000 per ticket).

Package 4: Emigrate to Ancient Rome

Drop into this time frame with the right amount of gold, and you can live out your life in luxury.  Recommend the extensive Latin immersion course before you go.   Augustan period recommended during the PAX ROMANA.  Leave your politics at the door.   This package is recommended for those who want to live a quiet life (avoid politics) and obey the law (Draconian measures are common in this time period).    Just to be safe, take our packaged sword and dagger fighting course before you go is highly recommended.

This package is for those who need to disappear or just bored with the modern times we live in.

($3.5 million dollars per ticket — set up time includes house, servants and cover story for the locals).

Jordan Harbour: Any closing words or plugs?

Rob Cain: YES!  Come and visit us over at Ancient Rome Refocused.  Our podcasts are on itunes and hipcast.  Come to the blog at: http://ancientromerefocused.org.  There is a facebook page group as well.   We have a pretty lively group who get into some pretty interesting discussions.  If you agree, leave a comment.  If you disagree, you are required to leave a comment.  If the facts are wrong, you must write in to leave a comment.   You can call in too at:  855-209-6230.

We are looking for professors, students, and fans to be guest editors on the show.  All you have to do is write me at:  rob@ancientromerefocused.org.   Got any papers or dissertations about Ancient Rome?  We will post them with full credit.  Just have an opinion?  We will post that as well.

What’s more–and this is non-negotiable–make sure you listen to Twilight Histories. 

I do. 

Spain was the great power in the 16^th century in Europe.  It became the dominant figurehead in the Holy Roman Empire, a medieval conglomerate of states that included Italy, the Netherlands, and some German states.

Portugal might have been considered the other dominant power, having championed the age of discovery by sailing around Africa and accessing that delicious wealth of India, China and the Spice Islands.

But Spain was hot on her tail.  With Christopher Columbus, Spain managed to acquire lands in the New World, and soon she encountered a treasure trove equal to–if not even greater than–what Portugal had found.  This treasure was the captured from the Aztecs and Incas who had a mass of gold.

Spain and Portugal fought over all these lands until the Pope stepped in and arbitrated a deal.  Spain was to get half the world, including the Americas, and Portugal was to get the other half, which included the Orient.  No other country could legally trade with the world except through these two states.  And if they tried, they would be out-gunned before they even left Europe.

This was a very tense period where hostilities could break out in flash fires.  When Magellan sailed around the world, the most dangerous part of his voyage was not the Pacific or Cape Horn (although these were incredibly dangerous) but the voyage through the Orient in Portuguese ruled waters.  One of his ships, laden with spices from Malacca, was sunk by a Portuguese vessel and her crew executed after travelling around half the world.

By the time of Sir Francis Drake the hostilities had ended.  Spain had conquered Portugal and now ruled the entire world.

England, at this time, barely had a navy.

She had almost no international trade and watched helplessly as fat treasure ships from America, Malacca, India, China and Japan poured the wealth of the world into her enemy’s pockets.  All England could do was try to sell her textiles to a silk-clad Spanish merchant class that likely scoffed at their simple fabrics, dyed black because they had no access to exotic colored dyes.

To many in England, and especially to the merchants who eeked out a living from this trade, the status quo was acceptable.  Even the English royalty were afraid to rock the boat with Spain.

But there were some who saw the Spanish dominance of the seas as unacceptable.  They wanted equal access, free trade, and they became convinced that as private investors, they had to take this right by force.

I just want to impress upon you the size of the operations that we’re dealing with.  If we remember the Sir Francis Drake sci-fi analogy, the ships going into space would probably have had very small crews.  You simply can’t send thousands of people into space and not spend an absolute fortune.  Things were not so different in the 16^th century.  The numbers that took part in these voyages would at the very most amount to only a few hundred men, and usually they could be counted at under a hundred.

Cortez conquered the Aztecs with a mere 600 men, and Pisaro destroyed the Incas with only 200.  These missions were like going to the moon, but the time scales were so much longer and the risk of death was incredible.

These missions were so dangerous!

If you didn’t die from scurvy, starvation, drowning, infection or other illness, you might easily be killed by natives or by another European man-o-war.  The fact that people like Cabot, Magellan, Vasco de Gamba, and Drake are so famous is because so many people died ahead of them.  The story of the early age of discovery, when Prince Henry the Navigator sent out expedition after expedition to explore the coast of Africa (and in search of a mystical Christian king who never actually existed), is riddled with tales of ships returning like ghosts…  if they returned at all.

And the people who joined these ships were immensely superstitious people.

Sailors have always had a reputation for being a bit superstitious, but in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, the range of their imaginations was incredible.  These people came from proto-scientific societies where the masses were uneducated, believed fervently in witches and magic and saw their dark forests as refuges for evil spirits and monsters which they colored their maps with.

There were creatures that looked like humans but had large faces within their torsos.

There were fairies or pixies that would lure children into the woods and steal them away.

There were even thought to be men with dogs’ heads who inhabited the far flung world.  Missionaries were trained on ways to convert the dog headed people if they came upon them.  We still have their training manuels.

Imagine if you were on one of these ships, months or even years away from home, and you beached at some exotic land never before seen by European eyes.

To us, it might be a postcard image of the coasts of British Columbia or Brazil.  But to their eyes, the mists that hung over the dark forests might hide fantastic monsters, savage cannibals and could even be the home of the devil himself.

What would they think when they saw a Killer Whale with its bizarre black and white patches, or when they heard the howl of wolves rising from the impenetrable forests with their ominous floating mists. How would they have reacted when they saw the tribes of the Haida for the first time, with their war canoes where warriors would dress in full bear skins and dance on deck to the sound of drums and eerie off-key chanting.

We think of places being named after people.  But in this age of discovery, places were often named after nightmares: the Bay of Giants, the Land of Fire, or the Island of Death.

And the sailors who took part in these expeditions, although they staked their lives against ridiculous odds (and even if they survived, they’d likely return home without teeth, or they’d be sickly from disease) would do so with an aim of gaining a fortune.

The fleets worked a bit like a corporation of shareholders where the main investor, whether it be a private lender or the crown, would stake a claim on usually 20% of the cargo in exchange for providing ships and supplies.  The captain would claim around 10%, and whoever survived from the crew would divvy up the rest.

And the amount of money they could earn from a year at sea was astounding to the poor fishermen or longshoremen who watched the ships leave.  When Drake returned from his voyage around the world, he returned with enough treasure in one ship to pay for England’s navy for an entire year.  Even half a percent of this treasure was enough for one of his sailors to live like a baron.

At a time when upward mobility was nearly impossible, risking one’s life to go from a poor fisherman to an estate owner in as little as a few months or years could be quite attractive.

If you’ll allow me, I’d like to go a little bit sci-fi here for a moment.  I want to create a ‘what-if’ scenario.

Imagine for a moment that Communism never fell.  There was no Peristroika, no tearing down of the Berlin Wall, no collapse of the Soviet Union.  In fact, in our alternate reality, the USSR flourishes.  Russia does so well that it takes on America’s star wars challenge (you remember that program when the Americans tried to bankrupt Russia by creating an arms race in space).

Putting weapons in space is so prohibitively expensive that neither country can handle the financial pressures.  They are both haemorrhaging money.  And that’s the whole idea.  The first one to collapse loses.  Then Russia makes a discovery.  They uncover valuable minerals on the moon.  Energy deposits.  Perhaps a hydrogen source that can supply their latest powerplants.  America realizes that if it’s to survive, they must have access to these minerals.  So ships are launched by both countries to the moon, en mass.  Inevitably, there is conflict, and soon these ships are armed with weapons.  Some of the ships are lightly armed transport vessels, and others are deadly war ships, like nuclear submarines in space.

You can just imagine the scale and intensity of a cold war like this.  It’s one of those historical moments that, while it seems horrible and costly, it nevertheless brings about a massive technological shift and shoots us into the next Age. And here’s the thing about this new Age in humanity:  it’s an exclusive club.  There’s only room for the first, the biggest and the best.  And these positions are taken up by two countries, Russia, and America.

Now here’s the next twist in our story.  After about a century of conflict with massive wins and losses and huge technological leaps, America loses the war.  Despite having a large fleet of space destroyers, the Russians manage to defeat America on the home front.  The US is incorporated into Russia and her fleet is annexed.  Russia doubles in size and wealth over night.

You might think at this stage that that’s it for international competition.  Russia is simply too powerful.  There’s nothing any other country can do, and they’re all doomed to fall into a world empire.  But how this little story turns out, you’d be wrong in assuming this.  England, although it relied perhaps too heavily on the might of the US for its defence, has built up at least a small fleet of space ships.  Of course they have nothing to match the colossus of the combined Russia and USA, but that doesn’t stop one brave captain from deciding that he wants a piece of this galactic pie.

So he engages in a private war, funded by private investors in England, against Russia.  He takes a small fleet out, sneaks his way to the moon, and attacks Russian bases.  He is counter-attacked by the Russians everywhere he goes, and looses almost all of his men and ships.  But he returns with a cargo of such wealth, enough to pay for the entire English armed forces for a year, that all the people of England are amazed.

Parliment decides that they must have access to this wealth somehow.  They send him out again this time with a government funded fleet to explore the moon and perhaps lay a claim to some of its wealth.  So off he goes once more.  On his way, he chances upon a Russian transport laden with riches.  He sacks it and continues to the moon.  But the transport managed to send word back to Russia about the attack and soon the entire Russian space fleet is after him.  He races to the moon, desperately trying to evade the fleet, plants a flag for Britain, then dashes off.

The Russian fleet is hot on his tail.  There is no way for him to go back to earth the way he came.  So what does he do?  He flies off into the solar system.

After months of travel, he comes to Mars.  The last time a mars mission was attempted, some 60 years earlier by a Russian cosmonaut, only a handful of dying men returned, warning that it should never be done again.  It wasn’t just the trip to Mars, but the trip back that killed them.  Lack of oxygen, lack of spare parts to repair engines that are put under too much strain, peoples’ nerves shattered by the incredible dangers and long distances… and then there was the war with America on top of that.  After years of travel, one Russian craft, out of a party of 5 ships, returned looking like a death ship.  And now, 60 years later, this English captain finds himself on the same deadly trail.

Circling around Mars to gain momentum, he fires off into the inky blackness.  Another year passes as he floats through space, waiting for the Earth to revolve around the sun until he is aligned with it once more.  The closer he gets to Earth, the more dangerous it becomes as he enters Russian territory once more.  Yet he manages to evade the enemy and returns to England with only one ship, after spending almost 3 years in space.

This English captain becomes an instant hero.

But if you think the story ends here, you’re wrong.  Russia is enraged.  They demand that England should pay for the transport that was plundered.  They demand the captain’s head.  The price for failure: war.

And does parliament concede?  No.  They ask the captain instead to go on a special mission.  They send him out to space where the Russians are massing their fleet for a grand assault.  The English captain puts a bomb on one of his ships, fires off in a capsule and launches the massive bomb into their midst with a Russian flag strapped on the side.  In one huge explosion, England, which had never been a contender for space, wins star wars.  From then on, the underdog England becomes the empire in a solar system where the sun never sets.

And that’s how our little sci-fi story ends.

The reason why I have told this story is because I wanted to put into perspective just how absolutely incredible was Sir Francis Drake, and how unlikely was his contribution to history.  The odds of him surviving any one of his missions were astoundingly bad, and yet he returned to sea, year after year and kept bringing back wealth and victory.  He gave England a map of the world.  He showed them that a small country could pit itself against a juggernaut and win.  And ultimately, he defeated this juggernaut so badly that within decades of his own death, it began to collapse.

With Sir Francis Drake, we see the rise of England as a maritime power.  And soon this little island would have an empire that encompassed the world.  Next, Sir Francis Drake’s World…

Show 2: Ice Age Misery

I’m Jordan Harbour.  Consider me your time travel consultant.  I hope you enjoyed your first journey back in time, that little promotional tour of the ancient world.  Fun, wasn’t it?  Well, I see you’ve signed the contract and you released us from all liability.  You’ve decided to take the plunge and do some real time travel.

As your Time Travel consultant, I have calibrated the machine and will now give you your orientation. For your first real journey, you are about to travel to a very different world.

To give you an idea of where you’ll be headed, just follow this little thought experiment.  Imagine the Earth had a sister planet a bit further out, not unlike Mars, but with an atmosphere and animals and plants.  This world is alien and strange, by our standards, and it’s much, much colder.  It is so cold that it is almost uninhabitable and only the most adept creatures can survive here, creatures with thick hides and long fur.  Temperatures can plummet in moments, great ice storms can hurtle across the alien plains.  Dramatic landscapes of incredible beauty can startle the senses.  Into this hostile and extreme alien world will be dropped some humans.  Not many.  On a continent that looks vaguely like Europe, a population roughly the size of our world’s baboons will be scattered across the landscape.

How would this tiny, scattered population fair?  With nothing more than their intellect, could they survive on this alien world?  If you were to leave them on this planet for tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of years, what would they look like?  What culture, what art, what language, religion and technology would they develop?

‘You are sending me back to the Ice Age?’  you say.  I am sending you back to the Garden of Eden, the place where it all began.  But this garden isn’t tropical and there is no fruit.  There is ice and there is suffering.  Death is sudden and expected.  But you’re a time traveler, and on the form you checked the box that said ‘high adventure’.

“ Yes, but I wanted to see the Romans; I wanted the Renaissance!”  you say.  Patience.  You will have your artists and your famous battles.  But there’s a hazing process.  First, you must learn to survive.  You must learn to adapt to new cultures.  You can’t just blend into the Ice Age.  You have to become the people you’re exploring.  If you don’t, you will die.

“This is not what I signed up for,” you say.  (laugh), no?  Well, be warned.  Once you’re there, you may not want to come back.  It’s happened before.  We’ve had people choose not to return.

You have gone through days of testing.  You have a computer chip inserted in your brain.  Whatever languages you come across, they will be translated and you will be able to speak them.  You have already received your haircut and your clothing hangs on those hooks.  Please put them on now while I finish the orientation.

You are going to be dropped off in the Ice Age, sometime around 20,000 years ago. Your starting point is somewhere in Southern England.  We are not able to control when you come back.  It may be a few months, it may be a few years.  If there’s an emergency, we cannot rescue you.  The good news is, you won’t age.  The bad news is, if you die, you’re dead.  That’s all we can do.  Time travel is pretty new technology.  Oh, and don’t worry about messing up the future.  When you go back in time, you create a new dimension, a kind of branch in time.  What you do there will affect the future of that branch, but this one will remain the same.   Don’t think about it too much.

Well, you look great.  Are you ready?  Do you feel up to this?  Not really, eh?  Well if you’re not a bit nervous there’d be something wrong with you.  Go on.  Step in… You’re going to feel a bit strange and you might have difficulty remembering where you are for the first little while.  Don’t worry.  That’ll ware off.

Good luck.  Oh, some parting words of advice.  Be open.  Listen to them and get out of your head.  It’s the only way you’ll survive!

***

Ice… you can feel the ice crunching under your feet as you walk blindly into a wall of white… there are no features; no trees, there is no horizon.  There is only the snow blasting sideways, first from one direction, then whipping around and blasting you from another.

You trudge on, lost and disoriented.  You can’t remember where you are.  You aren’t sure how you got here.  All you feel is an intense fear bridging on panic.  You must move forward, but where is forward?  How can you get out of this storm?

You are tiring.  Your firs are thick, but the snow has seeped down your neck and back.

Your feet are wet and cold and are starting to ache.  Bursts of energetic panic are punctuated by long spells of exhaustion.

You sit in the snow to catch your breath.  You can no longer feel your fingers or toes.  Your eyelids are starting to sag.  Just a moment of rest, you say to yourself, that’s all you need.  …just a moment… of rest.

You fade in and out of consciousness and your dreams start to meld with reality.  There are dark shapes moving in the storm.  You can’t tell if they’re near or far, real or dreamed.  Your eyes are so heavy.  You fall asleep.

You wake, disoriented and unsure where you are, the pungent smell of cured skin and smoke fills your nose.  It is dark, but you can feel the warm embers of a fire heating the side of your body.  You’re wrapped snuggly in fir blankets.  On your right, you can feel the walls, a skin canvas, shuttering with every blast of howling wind.

You try desperately to remember where you are and your mind races through the dull ache of exhaustion.  It is like waking up in a new apartment for the first time and not quite knowing where you are, only this is much worse.  There’s something about time travel that can be so taxing on the mind.  Time travel… right.  Wherever you are, at least you are safe now.  Safe and warm.  You fall back asleep.

It is morning.  The wind has died and the room is filled with early morning light that seeps through cracks and illuminates the skin walls.  You are warm under your fir blankets but you can still feel a chill on your exposed face making you not want to get out of bed.  You look over and see the embers have died.  There is no one in the tent.

Where are you?  OK, another question… where were you just yesterday?  How far back can you remember?  You must have gotten into the time machine.  You must have passed into a different world.  Before that… putting on furs.  Yes, the firs you on the hooks, for a journey into… the Ice Age.

The tent flap opens and the silhouette of what looks like a bear, walks in.  You jump up with a start and the bear stops.  Then it laughs.  It is a man wrapped in layers of thick fir.  Even his face is covered.

The man tugs off his long gloves and pulls down the fir covering his face.  His skin is leathery and sallow.  His eyes are piercing and demand obedience, but you can tell his strength comes from something other than muscle.  His smile, so quick to form when he saw you jump, loosens to what must be his regular sad scowl.

He sighs and speaks.

“What family are you from.”  He lists some family names.  You mutter that you aren’t sure.  You don’t remember.  He looks at you oddly then shrugs.  “I’m Braun,” he says.  “Welcome to our family.”  He points at the ground near your feet where a pile of furs lies.  He tells you to put them on.  “They were my brothers,” he says as he leaves the tent, “he died last night.”

You stick your head outside the tent.  The sky is white like the ground and there is an icy cold breeze, but there is only a slight fluttering of snow.  You see other skin tents being packed up by thickly padded people wrapped in skins and fir.  There are  perhaps 30 or 35 of them including children.

You step out of the tent and are immediately greeted by a wall of ice that towers to the sky behind you.  You turn to see it stretching on and on into the distance as far as you can see, then you turn once more and see it stretching in that direction as well.  “Glaciers,” says a young woman’s voice behind you.  You turn to see a fir clad person you assume must be the woman.  She pulls down the fir that covers her face.  She has a young and attractive, with a stern face and troubled eyes.  “They’re moving fast,” she says motioning to the glaciers and as if on cue a massive chunk of the ice breaks off far in the distance and crashes into the snow, “we have to move.”

Days pass and you cross the snow filled planes, one painful step at a time always heading towards the sun and away from the glaciers.  You travel all day from the early morning till the sun begins to set behind the hills.  There are no hours of daylight wasted and your tired body aches from the strain of constant hiking through snow.  And you are hungry.  The band is running out of food and you have not yet seen any animals.

One day, the band is spread out.  Anyone who is able bodied is to scavenge the land for food while the older members and the children slowly pull the tents on sleighs.  You trek off with Braun and the young woman who you learn is his daughter, Nina.  There is desperation in their faces.  This is almost suicidal.  There isn’t enough food to feed even the strongest band members, let alone hunt for the entire group.  People are going to start dying.

You scavenge the land all day.  In the evening, as the sun sets, the man and his daughter capture a rabbit and there is great excitement.  They have an insane look on their faces as though this small creature is life itself.  It is.

A small fire is made from twigs dug from beneath the snow and the animal is cooked and consumed.  This is the first cooked meat you’ve eaten in a week and although your portion is small, your stomach aches and turns.  Nina isn’t eating her portion and Braun, seeing into her heart, reminds her this is not enough to feed the whole band.  They have to find something more substantial.  She looks at him angrily and bites into the meat.

The next morning, you rise early and with a hungry stomach trudge on into the flurries of snow.  Your small party has not walked more than half an hour before you almost stumble over a cliff.

Before you is spread a deep snow filled valley that stretches beyond the horizon.  This can only be one thing, the English Channel.

The girl shouts and points into the valley, “there!” she say, “a herd!”  You and the man gaze into the valley and see some small dark spots off in the distance, shrouded by gusts of falling snow.  “No it is!” she says, not waiting for you to decide for yourselves, “come on!”  she says walking in the direction of the band.

You are in the valley – the English Channel – behind you are the white cliffs of Dover, the same cliffs you had been standing on only yesterday.  In a world as strange as this one, it only feels stranger that you are walking where one day crabs will scuttle.  It’s an eerie feeling.  You take your glove off and bend down.  You place your hand into the footprint left by the person in front of you and draw the crunchy ice-encrusted grass through your fingers.  In the Spring, this must be a rich, fertile plain.

“Come on,” says Nina and you rise and continue into the freezing wind.

The tracks of the herd Nina saw are gone, ‘if they ever existed’, you mumble hungrily to yourself.  Or perhaps that was your stomach grumbling.  You are so hungry now you can hardly move one foot in front of the other and you lumber on, head bent over, back arched under the weight of your pack and arms dangling limp at your sides pulling you off balance.  All you can see, all you care about, are the footprints in front of you.  One foot in front of the other.

That night, the little band experiences its second casualty since you arrived.  She was an old woman, the eldest in the band. You wonder how she could have made it so long.  The band is obviously shaken.  Everyone called her either mother or grandmother.  No one has the strength to bury her.

You are scavenging once more with your adopted guides. You seem to have made it to the other side of the valley.  This is France, or is it Belgium?  You don’t really care.  All you want is to role over and die.

You move past the cliffs and up into the hills.  There are more trees here, which may be a good sign.  It means you are getting further from the ice shelf and closer to where things can actually live.  Your guides are hoping they will find game in the woods.  It is much easier to hunt when there is tree cover than out in the open plains.

They both have spears with deadly sharp stone tips bound with skin twine.  They have bows and stone tipped arrows.  You are given a net by Nina for when an animal needs to be snared.

Father and daughter move stealthily through the woods and though you are hungry, you feel as though there has been a change.  They seem confident.

Braun spots some fresh tracks in the snow.  A buck.  These tracks may only be an hour or so old.  You feel your heart beating faster.  Though your fear of killing a creature was shaken somewhat by the death of the rabbit, you wonder how you will be able to deal with a large animal.  What if you have to stab it, or hold it down while they stab it?  What if it’s too strong for you and wounds you with its antlers?  Your excitement is soon tarnished by these thoughts which terrify you as the hours pass in silent pursuit.

And then there it is.  A great buck standing proud amonst the lofty trees.  You’ve never looked at a creature with an intention to kill it before.  At least nothing larger than the rabbit.  And it’s huge!  You watch its muscular legs move easily through the brush and you count the thick husks of antler and wonder if it would be more dangerous approaching from the front or the back.

Two arrows suddenly appear in the bucks’ chest and it tears off into the woods.  The hunters rise from their hiding spots on either side of the clearing and begin to walk excitedly in the direction the buck ran.  You are confused.  It got away.  “Shouldn’t we chase it?” you ask.  “No, it will die,” says Braun, “We’ll catch it in a day or two.”  You walk deeper into the woods, following the footsteps of the buck, punctuated by drops of blood.   “Oh, that was easy,” you think to yourself.

The snow is coming down hard and you can hardly see without squinting.  The buck is limping in front of you, its antlers gnashing dangerously in wide, violent arcs.  You can see its warm breath panting out in bursts.  The two arrows are broken stubs, but the blood is everywhere, made more shocking by its stark contrast with the snow.

The two hunters split up.  You are in the centre with your net, and Braun and Nina move around to each flank.  “How did I get the centre?” you ask yourself, feeling stupid and useless with your net.  The three of you inch in closer and the animal screams in fury, first swinging towards you, then towards Nina, then her father.  It limps backwards.

The girl throws her spear.  Its razor point drives home into the flank, but the buck isn’t stopped.  “It can’t be standing after that!” you think.  Seeing that Nina is unarmed, it races at her. “Throw your net!” calls Braun and you run up and hurl the net at the antlers.  The Buck tears upwards with its antlers but pulls its legs up with them, entwining them in the net.  Braun races forward and drives his spear into the beast.  It wildly bucks at him… and then they both disappear.

You walk forward.  “Stop,” calls out Nina. She catches up to you, appearing out of the whiteness of the snow.  She holds your arm and you inch forward together.  There, not a foot in front of you is the edge of a cliff.  Below, about twenty feet down, you see Braun and the buck.  Both are motionless.

You and Nina pull her father into a cave at the bottom of the cliff.  He’s still unconscious though breathing irregularly and there’s blood on his face.  You think maybe he’s broken some ribs or perhaps even punctured a lung.  You can’t tell if the blood on his face is from the buck or from him.

The girl tells you to go out and gather firewood and bring in the buck.  She is obviously upset and seems on the verge of panic.  You go out into the woods and soon return with an arm full of wood.

“Hurry, hurry,” she says and flakes some wood into kindling which she ignites by rubbing a stick into a piece of wood.  “Go out and get more!  We need much more!”

You go back into the woods and gather more wood, not sure what the big rush is for but imagining its to warm up her father, or perhaps just to keep her mind occupied in this stressful situation.

You return and again she demands more.  She looks scared now, and urgent.  She keeps looking all around the cave and at the entrance.  She hands you Braun’s spear.  “Hurry,” she whispers.

Now she has you spooked.  The hairs on your neck stand on end.  Why did she give you the spear?  She seemed to be looking more at the walls of the cave than at her wounded father.

When you come back with your hands full yet again, you see she’s built a wall of wood around the entrance of the cave which is hissing and popping and billowing with smoke.

You step past the wood and into the cave entrance.  You see a small fire way at the back of the cave and there she is.  She’s melted some snow in a leather pouch over the fire and is cleaning Braun’s face.  A piece of meat is slowly roasting.

“It’s not safe here,” she says, “is that enough wood?”

“Why isn’t it safe?” you ask.

“Look,” she says and pulls a piece of wood from the fire.  She shines the flame against the walls of the cave.  Long, deep gouges are everywhere in the frozen rock.  ‘Nothing could claw into the rock like that,’ you think to yourself.

As if anticipating your skepticism, she shines her torch down at the ground, “Look” she says.

There is a skull sticking out of the thick, gooey mud.  It’s at least three feet long and a foot tall.  It has massive teeth, sharp like razors.

“Cave bear,” she says.  “There are fresh remains.  We can’t stay long.”

Now the fear kicks in.  Your knees tremble.  You suddenly feel claustrophobic .  You grab a piece of wood and look all around the cave.  There are claw marks everywhere.  There are bones of so many creatures.  The dank smell that fills your nostrils is the smell of death.

“Don’t panic,” she says.  “We have to stay for now.  But it will be back soon.  It’s getting dark.”

“OK, what should we do?” you ask.

“This is not the end of the cave,” she says, “it goes deeper.  Here feel this.”

She takes your hand and places it into the darkness.  You feel a slight breeze.  She shines the torch at the back of the cave where you see rocks have collapsed in.

“Dig,” she say, “I’ll take care of father.”

Within an hour or so, you’ve made a hole in the top of the ruble and can feel the stale air flowing out of it.  You shine a torch into the hole.  The flames flickering against the walls of this inner chamber play with your imagination and you think you see giant spiders, fanged beasts and giant rats everywhere.  Your heart is beating and you violently pull yourself out.

“Is it big enough to crawl through?” calls Nina.

“Yes, but there’s no way we’re going in there,” you say sternly.

For the first time, she looks genuinely frustrated with you and grabs your torch.  She crawls through the hole so only her legs are sticking out.  After a moment, she crawls back.

“Good,” she say, looking at you with disappointment, “Grab the meat and pull it in, then bring in the wood.”  There’s something about the way she speaks that makes you obey.

After you’ve completed your chores, she tells you to crawl through the hole.  She’ll pass you her father–carefully.  Together you drag her father up to the hole and you crawl in.  She lifts his limp arms and passes them to you.  You grab his wrists and begin to pull.

Then she tells you to hush.

“What is it?” you ask.  “Shhh”

In a panicked hushed voice she says, “move, move, move!”

You heave on the arms of the comatose man, but half way through the entrance the bulk of his jacket gets stuck.  “Move it!” she snaps, “It’s here!”  You rip at his clothes trying to loosen them.  You can feel her tearing at the clothes from her end.  “Oh Mother, Oh Mother” she calls out, as if in prayer.  You yank violently at the clothes but your mittened fingers can’t get a good grip.  You pull them off and grab hold of Braun’s clothes once more.  You hear Nina crying on the other side.  The torch rolls over and you can’t see.  You reach your hands into the hole and rip wildly at the clothes.  Finally, they loosen and you manage to get them over a snag.  You heave the dead weight in.  Nina reaches into the hole and you grab her hand, “Pull me!” she hisses and you yank her in.  She lands on top of you.

Not a moment later, you see a massive clawed bear paw the size of your entire body burst through the hole.  It’s claw clanks at the walls and rips into the rock tearing at it and sending chunks tumbling to the ground.  The Cave Bear roars and reaches its paw in further, rocks rolling down the heap you’re lying in.  You can see its hot breath bursting into the room in huffs like a steam engine.

Nina raises her spear and slams it into the paw.  The bear screams.

“Come on!” She says.  Together, you lift her father and carry him deeper into the cave.

You find yourself in a magnificent bowl cavern.  The crystals that dot every wall twinkle as you pass your torch in front of them and even the deep chambers where your dim light can’t quite reach twinkle in the distance.  Huge stalagmites tower up from the ground to meet the dangling icicles of liquid carbon that seep down from the melting ceiling.

You think you see a hand in the rock and your heart skips a beat.  Were you imagining it, like you did earlier when you first passed your torch in the other chamber?  But when you shine the torch back on the wall, you indeed see a hand.  It is made of paint, a handprint in the stone.

As you walk by the walls, you see more handprints.  Nina appears from the darkness.  “This is the womb of our mother,” she says, “this cave is the birthplace of life.  It’s a very powerful place.”

She sees you looking at the handprints.  “We can connect with the mother.  Do you want to try?” she asks.  She looks around her on the ground.   She finds a stick of charcoal, probably used by the last artist.  She crumbles it in her hand and bringing her hands to her lips adds some saliva, making a paste.  She puts some of the paste into your own hands and tells you to rub it in so that it covers your hands.  You watch as she places her hands on the wall of the cave, her eyes closed, lips moving in silence.  When she’s done, she looks at you.  “You haven’t done it yet?”

“I don’t know what to do,” you say.

She takes one of your hands and slowly presses it against the wall, her hand on top of yours.  “Let’s pray for father,” she says, “Ask for healing” You can hear her muted words under her breath next to your ear, your hand sticky and cold against the twinkling diamond wall, but very conscious of her touch.

As you close your eyes you feel something strange inside you.  A peacefulness comes over you and you feel strangely safe with Nina whispering in your ear.  For a moment your imagination flashes and you feel as though this isn’t a cave at all but perhaps… just maybe the womb of a mother goddess.

But there is no healing, and after waking up next to Nina, after what seems like days, you see her awake, her body shuddering in the light of the embers.  She is crying.

She uses the charcoal from the fire to paint the plump pregnant belly of the mother goddess into a large stalactite that hangs from the centre of the chamber.  The breasts of the goddess hang over the great belly and a small, round head with no facial features almost disappears behind its shoulders.

“Life,” she says while tears role down her face, “we need life.”

There is a passageway at the back of the chamber.  You and Nina spend some hours passing through small cracks that break into brilliant new chambers, glimmering like diamonds.  You wade through ice cold subterranean pools that rise to your knees.  The passage begins to rise and you crawl through a tight channel in the rock with the fresh smell of living pine and snow in your noses.  And then, finally, you break through, crawling out of the cave as if born new.  You aren’t sure how many days you spent in the womb of the mother, but the sun rising over the hills could not be more beautiful.  Whatever pain you felt, whatever suffering through hunger and exhaustion, and whatever suffering lies ahead of you, this moment, crawling from the dark earth and seeing the sun’s light and feeling the cool scented air on your face… this moment is good.

You and Nina spend days searching for the band.  You aren’t sure how you’ll find them, but she is adamant.  It is her family, after all.  You eventually find the entrance to the cave, and steering well clear, you find your way up to the top of the cliff.  From there, Nina tracks her way back through the woods.  Of course your prints and those of the buck have long been covered by layers of snow.  The snow is much deeper than it had been as though there had been a great storm while you were in the cave.

Eventually, you find your way to the place where you had left the camp.  There is nothing, nothing but snow.

“They must have left,” says Nina.  She is exasperated.  She walks around the tree line looking for clues.

Something in the snow makes you stop.  It looks like a piece of skin rag sticking out of the ground.  You pull at it but it won’t budge.  You drop to your knees and dig into the snow.  The rag grows larger and soon you see a wooden pole stuck within it.  In horror, you realize this is not a rag, but a tent.  You look around and see mounds in the snow all around the clearing.  Nina is still running from tree to tree, searching for some kind of clue as to where her family could have gone.

“Nina,” you say, choking on her name.  She turns to see you kneeling awkwardly in the middle of the clearing, part of the tent in your hand.

One day, you come to a river.  This is good, because you can fish at a river and Nina knows how to fish.  Things are different between you and Nina.  She is much quieter now, and she seems to lack any kind of purpose.  You travel down the banks of the river, but now there doesn’t seem to be a reason to keep going.  Only momentum keeps you hiking from day to day as if chasing a dream that has already died.

And Nina seems to be getting sick.  Sometimes she will wake up in the morning and vomit.  You try to take care of her as best you can, but you are concerned for her.  As the days pass she is able to travel less and less.  You aren’t sure if it is because of her illness or because she has lost her resolve to continue.

Because you have to take more responsibility, you are forced to learn how to fish on your own, how to start a fire using sticks and wood shavings and how to knap stone tools using the thick end of a bone.  You learn to set traps for animals and you even kill and skin them yourself.  Although she is often moody with you and seems depressed staring off down the river, she ravenously eats whatever you bring to camp.

The days are becoming longer and the snow has turned to a crunchy ice that makes your furs wet when you walk through it.  You start to hear birds and the river grows louder with each passing day.  Some days, you even feel warm and have to untie your furs.  It rains for the first time, a slushy icy rain that forces you to find cover.

You come to a bend in the river where a larger body of shallow water is trapped.  Your hunter’s instinct tells you this is a great place to fish and that has the double benefit of attracting animals to the riverside that you can hunt.

“Why don’t we stay here so you can rest,” you say to Nina after you have set up the tent and are preparing the bedding, “this is a good spot.”

She agrees with you that this is a good place, but is leery of staying here.  The more you implore her, the more adamant she becomes that you have to leave. Tomorrow, she says.

After some arguing, she finally tells you she thinks she’s pregnant.  It takes you a moment to swallow her words.  You are momentarily stunned and the clarity of all your thoughts and arguments is thrown into a scattered frenzy that leaves you speechless.  You are a time traveller.  A tourist of time.  This cannot be happening to you.  She is looking at you very carefully, watching your face as it battles against this twisting reasoning.

“What is it?” she finally asks, no longer able to take the silence.

“We should stay,” you whisper, covering your thoughts with the immediacy of your situation.  “We can have the baby here.  There are fish, I can hunt, there are berries and roots…” You start explaining your ideas for gathering plants and farming them, even catching an animal and domesticating it.

She is shaking her head as though none of what you say touches on the deeper issue.

“Your ideas are so good, but we can’t stay here.  You have to understand that Spring is so short.  It will be winter soon.  It will be winter when we have the baby.  And then the ground will be covered in snow as high as you stand.  This river will freeze down to the mud.  We will die and so will the baby.

“The only way we can survive—the only way—is if we find others.  We can’t do this alone.  With others, we can hunt large game, even find a herd to live off of.  With others, we can divide the tasks.  If we get sick, there will be others to feed us.  If we are injured, others can care for us.  We need to find others.  Do you understand?”

‘Be open’, you remember.  ‘Get out of your head.  Listen to them.’

“Alright, we’ll leave tomorrow.”  You place your hand on the slight bulge of her stomach.  She smiles at you, thankfully.  You can’t help but feel at peace in her eyes.

Three days down the river you find the first humans outside Nina’s family.  At first, you see the curling smoke of a fire rising in the distance above the trees.  You feel an excitement welling up inside you and begin to walk faster.  Nina cautions you to slow down.  She has that look of concern in her eyes again, like she did at the cave.

“What is it this time,” you say in frustration, “there are people over there!”

“Let’s just be cautions,” she says.

Following her lead, you walk into the woods away from the riverbank and slowly, quietly move towards the smoke.  Within what seems like an hour, you are within sight of a skin tent on a beach, a fire crackles under a bed of smoked fish.  Around the fire sit three men with long hair.  They are wrapped in furs.

“Come on,” you say and begin to get up.

“No, wait,” she says.  “I don’t like this.”

You pull her hand off your arm and step out of the clearing.  The three men turn and grab their spears, staring at you menacingly.  You instantly regret not listening to Nina.

“Hello,” you say awkwardly.  They instinctively begin to circle you just as you did to the buck so long ago.  ‘This is very bad,’ you think to yourself in a cold sweat.  You drop your own spear and raise your hands, but they continue to circle you.

Nina jumps up behind you into the clearing.  This adds some confusion to the hunters.  You see her looking to the ground and holding her hands up, a string of shell beads from her homeland dangling from them.  She orders you in an angry whisper to drop to the ground and you both place your hands in the sand, your eyes down.

One of the hunters kicks away your spear.  Another uses his spear to pick up the necklace.  All you can see are their feet and you are terrified.  You could be stabbed at any moment like the buck and there is nothing you can do about it, nothing except run and you desperately want to do just that.

“Where did you get these?” says a gruff voice in a heavy accent.

“From the land nearest the ice star,” says Nina.  “They are shells taken from the sea.”

There is a long pause and it sounds like they are passing the shells around.  “I’ve heard of the sea,” mutters one of the men.  “How many days to the Ice Star?”

“We’ve walked for… 80 or 90 days.  That’s where the ice is.”

“Is there anyone else with you?” demands a voice.

“No, they died in the ice.  We’re the last ones alive.  We’re looking to join a new band.”

The hunters speak with each other in hushed voices.  Finally, one of them say, “There is a Tribe down this river, three weeks journey. We’ll take you there.”  You look at Nina with a little jab of triumph.  She looks back at you with daggers.

That night, you sit around the fire with the hunters.  The conversation is less than enlightened.  They ignore you and when you try to join in, they stare at you coldly.  They seem more interested in Nina, although she keeps her eyes low and only speaks in one or two word replies.

You find out through their conversation that they don’t have a band of their own.  They travel the river and trade with different groups.  The one they are heading to is the big one.  There are over 150 people in this tribe, an Ice Age metropolis.  If what they say is true.  They also say the tribe lives off a great herd of mammoths.  There is a mammoth graveyard where all the mammoths go to die.  It gives them enough food to live so there is no need to move.  They can stay there year round and always have enough to eat.

They talk about the great houses made of mammoth bone and packed earth, buildings that can withstand any storm and that are large enough to hold 20 people.

They talk about all the wealth.  They make the best tools, finely crafted blades, axes and needles.  They even make vessels made from clay that are painted and can earn a fortune in other communities up the river.

And they talk about the women.  Always the women.  It makes you feel uncomfortable the way they are speaking about women.  Nina keeps looking at the ground.

Eventually you get up.  Nina rises with you, but the men beg her to stay.  She ignores them and continues into the dark with you.

“This is dangerous,” she says in a whisper.

The next day when you wake in the tent, you have it in mind to part from the men.  You are about to wake Nina, when you hear the sounds of the men taking down their tent outside.

You walk in silence down the river.  The tension is palpable.  It seems pretty obvious that these men do not want you here.  They want Nina.  They’ve already made a name for you, baby duck.   They think its brilliant and the one man who made it up keeps congratulating himself on his wit.  Baby duck, the little one who keeps quacking but can’t fly with the hawks.

The jeering moves from tedious to insidious and by nighttime, you are seriously afraid, both for you and for Nina.  There is no escape, you think.  If you are to reach this tribe, there is only one path and you are all going down it together.  The way they are speaking to Nina, you begin to wonder if they would even let her go.  Their words have grown stronger.  ‘The words come first,’ you think, ‘then the actions.’

You try to leave the campfire early that night.  One of the men points his spear at you and tells you to go.  Another of the men grabs Nina by the arm.  She let’s out a shriek and hits him.  Another of the men grabs her.  You move in and grab her other arm and yank her away, but feel a sharp kick on your back and fall over Nina and the other men.  You roll down the rocky beach and splash into the river.  You hear Nina screaming, but the fire is hidden by the dark shape of a man in front of you, spear raised.

You run through the water and hear the man jumping into the current behind you.  This is it.  He is going to kill you.  His stone spear, the point as sharp as a razor, is going to flay you open.  Your back tingles in the anticipation of the blow as you run desperately through the water and then up on the rocky beach to the dark shape that is your tent.

Next to the door is your spear.  You grab it and turn.  Instantly, you feel the thud of the point entering the shadow that’s chasing you.  First, the stiff bone of the ribs which separate then crack, then the easy slide of the spear through the chest.  The feeling is awful, like killing an animal but this is a man.  Everything seems to be moving slowly.  The man falls on top of you slowly.  You both fall to the ground slowly.  He wimpers slowly.  You can feel the sticky wet blood pouring over you.

There is so much of it.

You hear Nina screaming and the other men yelling curses at her.  You call out in a voice that doesn’t seem your own.  It is the voice of someone fiercer than you.  It is deeper, raspier and crazier than yours.  You yell out that you have killed the man and now you are going to kill them.

There is silence.  Only the popping of the fire and the rustling of the river can be heard.  From Nina and the men, nothing.

You push off the dying man and rise.  You pick up his spear and your own and walk toward the fire.  The two men, their pant down at their ankles, stare at you in horror.  You raise one of your spears and the two men yelp and jump up, tripping over their pants as they try desperately to get away from you.

Nina grabs your arm and tells you to stop.  You turn to her, the adrenalin still coursing through your veins and she looks at you in horror.  “Is that your blood,” she asks fearfully.

The next day, you leave the camp and continue on your journey down river.  Things have definitely improved between you and Nina.  You are shaken by what happened last night, but she thinks it’s great.  She looks at you adoringly and makes every excuse to hold your arm.  She calls you her brave baby duck.  No, you’re not a baby anymore.  “How about a hawk?” you suggest.  “No, you’re not like them.  A brave duck, kind and strong.”

It is a leisurely journey down the river, but Nina is not feeling well.  She hides it, of course.  She shows a stoicism you wouldn’t wish on yourself.  Her stomach is really starting to swell.

It strikes you one day, after hiking for weeks, that the men could have been lying.  There might not be a tribe down this river.  Or what if this tribe is filled with people like those men?  Is it safe to bring Nina to this place?  And what if they won’t let you in?   Or what if they’ll only let Nina in?

That should be fine.  At least Nina will be safe if they let her in, you think.  But the thought of leaving her makes you feel ill.  You’re surprised by how attached you are to her.  She is having your child.  She calls you her family.  You look at her lovingly, and she returns your look, putting her hand over her belly.

One day, you see mammoths.  You see the huge, magnificent creatures walking through the hills in great columns.  They are majestic with huge, curling tusks and domed heads and backs.  There is a peacefulness to them.  They seem to you like pious monks slowly walking in meditation.  Strong in their numbers and their incredible size, there is nothing that can hurt them, neither beasts, not winter, not even humans.  They are the majestic creatures of the Ice Age, a symbol of this world and a symbol of its parting.

And there is the tribe.  Great huts made of mammoth bone and clay described by the men fill the valley.  There are people, so many people.  Children laughing and playing, women going about their business, men meeting with friends.  Some people are hauling in sleighs of mammoth meat while others are firing clay pots in outdoor furnaces.  Some people are gathered together knapping stone tools while others are working the long, curved mammoth tusks, preparing them for tools, art and building supplies.

You look over to Nina, afraid that her razor instinct will warn you to keep moving, but she smiles back at you.  Catching your inquisitive glance she says, “it’s safe.  We will raise our family here.”  Holding hands, you walk down the hill and towards the village together.

Your body starts to tingle and the world is swaying.  You feel sick to your stomach and you find it difficult to walk straight.  You tell Nina you feel dizzy and need to sit down.  “Are you OK?” she asks but her voice is miles away.

“You have a choice.” The words form in your head, but they aren’t yours.  “You have a choice.  Will you return home?  Or will you stay.  You have to decide.  Now.”

***

Hi, I’m Jordan Harbour.  I want to thank you once more for listening to the Twilight Histories.  If you’d like to help others find this podcast, please give it a rating on iTunes.  Giving a show a rating really does help spread the word and I’d really appreciate it.  You can also let me know what you think of the show on the website at twilighthistories.com.  There you’ll find the music list for this show, as well as some recommended further listening, reading and watching.

Please join me for the next show when you’ll be travelling back to Europe during the Second World War.  It’s not the Second World War you’re used to.  In this alternate history, Hitler wins.  Picture this: it’s a blustery, wintery day, and you’re passing through Trafalgar Square on your way to work, your collar turned up and hat low.  You have to stop when you see SS soldiers taking pictures of Nelson’s monument.  This is only the beginning.  Subscribe to the Twilight Histories and be sure not to miss the next show.

Until next time, take care.

In Show 2: Ice Age Misery from the Twilight Histories Podcast, cave art plays a prominent role.  It ties together the shamanic culture of Ice Age Europe.  When Lana descends into the cave, her experience is one of exuberance.  To her, the cave is not rock.  It is life.

In Lana’s Ice Age culture, the cave is the very birthplace of life.  It is the womb of the mother goddess, not metaphorically, but literally.  When she explores the cave and feels its wet walls, she is feeling the womb of life, the skin of the mother goddess herself.   This is where Lana believes all life began and in the deepest chambers with their myriad crystals and shallow rivers, she is in a state of wonder.

You find handprints on the walls.  You are shocked to see them so deep in the cave and at first mistake them for real hands darting out to grab you.  This trick of the eye, an animation of life, is meant to show the power of the cave—that it’s not just dead rock.

When Lana takes your hand and presses it to the wall, you allow yourself to suspend the disbelief for a moment.  You allow yourself to imagine this really is the mother goddess and the hair stands up on your body.  Your mind, already racing from a traumatic experience with a cave bear ealier, makes you think the walls are skin and you can almost feel a heartbeat.  Lana calms you and it is then that you realize just how powerful the cave is to her.

By printing your hand into the cave’s wall, you are joining with the mother goddess, the giver of life.  Whatever touches these walls is blessed–imbued with power.  Whatever is painted on the walls becomes.

Lana’s father is dying after falling from a small cliff.  He is in the cave with you and Lana is doing everything she can to heal him. She makes love to you as she sees this as a powerful and life giving within the belly of the goddess.  She paints the plump body of the goddess on a central stalactite to fill her father with life.

When he dies, she sadly accepts that his spirit is at least housed in this sacred place.

Hardcore History 

Dan Carlin is the master of the history podcast form.  Anyone new to podcasting who enjoys a great story should start with Hardcore History and expand out.  Although I love all his episodes, there are some I listen to more than others.  I’m especially fond of the Ghosts of the Ostfront series which describes the little discussed Eastern Front during WWII.  You might also enjoy Dan’s Punic Nightmare, the story of Rome vs Hannibal.

Listen to the Hardcore History Podcast

Ancient Rome Refocused

This is a personal favorite history podcast and one that was a huge inspiration for the Twilight Histories.  Rob Cain is a brilliant writer and is able to transport his listener to an ancient landscape with his creative words.  His ‘time travel’ idea (episode 2: Time Travel is Easy, History is Hard) was what gave the Twilight Histories its final icing on the cake.  I’ve been lucky enough to speak with Rob and was able to thank him personally for his fantastic podcast series.

Listen to the Ancient Rome Refocused  Podcast

The History of Rome

The History of Rome is a titanic podcast by Mike Duncan that tracks the rise of Rome all the way to its Western collapse in around 200 fantastic shows.  If Mike turned his podcast into a book (and we do hope he does), it would probably be longer than Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and certainly more approachable (I don’t think Gibbon ever used the word ‘awesome’).

Listen to The History of Rome Podcast

12 Byzantine Rulers & Norman Centuries

Lars Browsworth created these two podcast series and we can’t thank him enough for them.  I’ve listened to each podcast series more than once and still there’s information which falls through the cracks.  His story telling style to history brings to life events from a rarely told yet fascinating era.  This podcast is a classic and well worth the listen.

Listen to the 12 Byzantine Rulers Podcast or the Norman Centuries Podcast

First World War Centenary

What’s fascinating about the First World War Centenary podcast is that it seems to replicate WWI in real time.  Every week that passes sees a new installment representing what was going on almost a hundred years ago.  The podcast starts out in June, 1914 and will presumably continue until the end of the war in 1918.  Using interviews from people who went through WWI, the podcast is more than just information.  It gives an emotional kick.

Listen to the First World War Centenary Podcast

Ancient Greek History

Dr. Donald Kagan made this fantastic introductory series on Ancient Greece (iTunes U).  It’s a lecture series from Yale and Dr. Kagan flexes his scholastic muscle in an incredibly entertaining way.  There is a strong focus on the story which keeps the listening experience lively from the Bronze Age right through to the Classical.  It is interesting the way Dr. Kagan gives the benefit of the doubt to the ancients.  Given the choice between doubting their stories and believing them, Dr. Kagan will generally believe what the ancient authors say if no evidence counters them.  This is a unique perspective in the scholastic world and it can be quite refreshing, especially when a good story is involved.

To listen, visit iTunes U and type in ‘Ancient Greek History’

Hannibal

This is a great lecture series by Dr. Patrick Hunt from Stanford and can be found on iTunes U.  ’Hannibal’ completely changed the way I think about the ancient world.  We never really talked about child sacrifice when I was studying the Greeks and Romans.  He gives a fascinating spin on ancient religion.  Once you hear this lecuture, you’ll never be able to separate the ancients from their ideologies.  For instance, think of Hannibal’s name, ‘Hanni-bal’.  The god Bal is a part of his name, as it was with most other Cartheginians.  They were a highly religious culture as were the Israelites.  Once you start to understand their religion, you start to understand who these people were and why they were fighting.

To listen, visit iTunes U and type in ‘Hannibal’

Memory Palace

Nate Dimeo created this fantastic podcast which is a hybrid of storytelling and historical events.  Nate’s writing is superb, his music enchanting and his stories always leave the listener with a deep sense of satisfaction.  The theme for the stories is often one of wonder with a tinge of pathos.  They are often set in the 1800′s when the world was just starting to open up and people were riding Ferris Wheels, trains or cars.  My personal favorite is Episode 24: The Moon in the Sun.  It’s a true story about a journalist who makes up a story that captures the world for a little while.  It’s about an astronomer–a real astronomer who was quite upset about the whole thing when he found out–with the world’s biggest telescope who one day points it at the moon.  And oh the wonders he saw!  Check out the Memory Palace.  Each show is its own little gem.

Listen to the Memory Palace Podcast

“Take a deep breath and step out of your ship…”

In this first episode of the Twilight Histories, you will leave your safe and civilized home and time travel back to the nightmare circus that is the ancient world.  Child Sacrifice, roaming armies, civilization collapse and all the sights and smells of the ancient world are wrapped up in an experience that will leave you awed… and perhaps even chilled.

Music List:

Stravinsky, the Rite of Spring
Borodin, In the Steppes of Central Asia
Ravel, Daphne et Choloe

Podcast Inspirations:

Rob Cain, Ancient Rome Refocussed, Episode 2: Time Travel is Easy, History is Hard
Patrick Hunt, Hannibal, (iTunes U)
Dan Carlin, Hardcore History, Show 9: Darkness Buries the Bronze Age
Dan Carlin, Hardcore History, Shows 21-23: Punic Nightmare

Other:

Star Trek Next Generation, Inner Light, Season 5; Episode 25

Click here to listento the podcast.

Everything seems to be moving slowly backwards.  People are walking backwards, cars are driving backwards.  As the speed picks up, you hear the sounds of life playing out like an eerie record in reverse, the very atoms screaming in protest.  The days and nights start to fold into one another speeding by until the scene before you has the effect of a flickering film.  The signs of human life move by so quickly now that all you can see of your world, the place you know so well, are its buildings and trees slowly getting younger and younger.

Now you are racing backwards in years… 1,2,3,7, 10, 20, 40… the neighbourhood turns heritage, then colonial, and then to farmland.  Trees swarm in–old growth trees in an ancient rainforest that seems to breath with the rhythm of life.  There are no visible signs of humans, only the dim light of an ancient natural landscape.  Hardly any years have passed between you and this mythical world of shadow and mystery, yet the flicker of civilization is lost in an ocean of nature where the stars are heavens and the shadows are spirits.

You rise from the ground in your time machine and cross the earth with a blinding speed.  You are heading to the Mediterranean, although it won’t be called this for many centuries.  The dial on your time machine is slowing down.  1100BC, 1150BC, 1175BC… you are almost there, almost at your destination, deep in the ancient world.

You see the outline of the Pillars of Hercules below you, what we will call the straight of Gibraltar.  Time is slowing from years to days and the flicker of light and dark replaces the dimness of shooting years.  Your ship hugs the African coastline.  Below you can see small wooden fishing and trading ships plighing the seas from the delta of Egypt’s silt filled waters.  You turn your ship north and the water turns from a silty brown to a bright assure green as golden dessert sands melt into the sea.

Now you are on the ancient Levant, what will one day be Isreal and Lebanon.  And there is a city.  It is an island fortress with its homes, temples and palaces hidden snugly behind cyclopean walls that tower out of the sea like cliffs.   Ships are sailing in and out of its stone harbour, bringing the cargos of a Bronze Age civilization with them.

You settle your ship within the harbour.  It is invisible to the inhabitants, and you put on a costume generated for this journey.  You take a deep breath and step out of the ship.

You are at once surrounded by a busy scene.  Merchants with long colourful robes and exotic, dark beards braided and squared at the bottom in Assyrian style stroll with parasols through markets full of poor sunburnt sailors unloading nets of fish.  Women in multicoloured dresses are shopping for figs, dates and grape leaves. Your nose fills with the scents of fried fish, lamb and bread and you can hear the sizzling of barbecues and can see kabobs being turned over hot coals.  The people here are mostly poor.  There seem to be more rags or tattered robes than what you would expect from a Bronze a Age civilization and the number of beggars who approach you with pleas for alms is uncomfortable.

There is a commotion in the fish market.  A trumpet or rams horn is heard and a wild looking priest rises above the crowd.  You listen carefully as your ear translator alters the Semitic sounds into English.  The priest is saying something about the people of the sea, something about famine.  There are invasions and fires along the coasts.  The once thriving cities have been destroyed.  The Hittites, their great neighbour to the north, have been starved and the Egyptians are under attack.  The sailors in the crowd start murmuring about how it is no longer safe to leave port and some merchants are shaking their heads.

The priest tells the people that it is their impiety to the god of thunder and rain that has caused this tragedy.  There is no more food.  The heat has grown unbearable and has baked the earth for years, turning lush fields into desserts so dry the earth cracks from the heat.  The cities of the world have turned to dust bowls of starvation and the roads are filled with roaming bands of marauders in search of food and water, killing mercilessly wherever they go and emptying the land of all life before dying of starvation themselves.  The world is coming to an end and this maritime citadel off the coast of the levant is its stronghold.

They must pray for rain.  They must sacrifice to the thundering god, Baal!  Raise Baal, the ancient god, the mountain god, the god who was swallowed by the underworld.  It was you who abandoned the great god and prayed instead to a weak god of irrigation.  Now is Baal’s revenge.  Baal has pulled his rain from the earth and has baked it.  Raise Baal from the dead and allow the rains to return.  It is time to sacrifice!  Your children!  Only the ultimate sacrifice will save.  Only the ultimate sacrifice will appease the great god.  Bring your children to the fires of Baal and resurrect the god!

The people are horrified.  The women scream and the men are shouting wildly.  The priest moves deeper into the town and the throng follows.  You see soldiers and sailors banging on doors. Children are pulled from their mothers while desperate fathers fight uselessly against the mob that tramples them.

The throng moves through the streets and towards the centre of town where you see a temple, its furnace of coals already lit and burning the first of the sacrificial victims screaming with their children’s voices.  You see terrified children thrown into the coals as the priests dance wildly, cutting themselves with bronze knives so they bleed through their robes as they chant, their eyes crazy and their Assyrian beards with golden braids wave frantically as they sway their heads.  The mob, as if mimicking the trance of the priests, raise their hands to the air and scream the name of Baal, tearing at their clothes and skin.

It is too much.  This is too much and it is quickly becoming dangerous.  You push through the crowd, Pockets of violence break out, fear and anger, here is a stabbing and here a stunned child is pulled past you towards the altar.  It’s too much.  You begin to run in terror through the streets, knocking people over, trying to escape the mayhem that is the fall of the Bronze Age and the greatest die-off of human life in all history.

As you enter your time machine, you see ships past the dock and over the horizon.  They are coming closer.  Horn blowers on the battlements with great ram’s horns sound the alarm.  You set the knobs on your machine and feel a bolt and a weaziness as the scene shoots forward in fast motion.  The ships on the horizon zip towards you and the dock fills with poor, ramshackle warriors, emaciated like zombies on the verge of starvation–hunger in their eyes.  Now they are pressed back by the soldiers of Tyre, the greatest of the Phonecian cities.

The flicker of night and day begins once more as you bolt into the future.  The buildings around you fall into disrepair.  They collapse and are built again as shacks, the great stonework growing old and ruined, the water in the harbour brackish from rotting ships and waste.  1000BC, 975BC, 950BC… now the dilapidated buildings are destroyed and new, stronger ones appear, then they are destroyed, replaced by taller ones, then taller still, 3,4,5 storeys high.  The time machine slows and the rapid flicker of night and day begins to fill your senses.  816BC…. 815BC…. 814BC…. The time machine stops and here you are once more in the same harbour.

You step out of the machine.  These are the same streets, yes, but they are different.  It seems as though there is an excitement in the air rather than a foreboding.  Large ships are everywhere in the harbour, being loaded by sailors and a mass of people, mostly destitute people in rags, are being herded in.   You ask one of the ragged people in line what is happening.  The city has grown too large, he says, and it’s time to move on.  The poor are being colonized.  It is a chance to start over.  They will have land and farms and will be given a chance to make their way in life when it is not possible in Tyre.  What city are you going to found, you ask.  He says its name: Carthage.

As the sun rises in the sky and the decks of the large wooden ships fill with the excited colonists waving to their friends and family who fill the harbour, you see the bright linen sails dropping from the yard arms one by one and the ships slowly creak off into the waters.

You return to your time machine and ignite the quiet engines.  Rising into the sky, you follow the ships.  The digital numbers that mark the date lurch forward and the sun quickly sets, and the bowl sky fills with stars that race across the sky as the ships below move through the waters towards their North African destination.

A week of days and nights passes and the outline of the African coastline is always visible.  First Egypt, then what will become Lybia with its golden Saharan dessert sinking into the azure waves, and finally, a great promontory appears, a massive jut of land.  Far off to the distance, just over the horizon as you fly high above is the island of Sicily, the bread basket of the region with its vast wheat fields, and beyond that, Italy.

The Ships make port in the African promontory in a beautiful natural harbour that is well protected from storms and easily defensible.  Deep inland, off to the south, you can see rich lands, lush with vegetation that stretches in all directions, right to the golden beaches below.

A small settlement has already been started by the older waves of colonists and you can see the lands being cleared around it.  Stone walls are being built, and there is a temple and there the foundations of a senate house.  You can see a town square and a small open-air market where ant-sized people, the first Carthaginians, barter and meet friends.

You accelerate time once more and the flickering of days and nights turns into the dimness of years.  Below, you can see the city expanding.  The city walls balloon upwards and houses race from the centre of town to meet them.  Once the interior of the city is filled, the houses become larger and the center of town becomes a metropolis of giant apartment complexes five, six, seven storeys high, as tall as any modern European city. Elegant marble temples and other exotic masterpieces adorn the wide boulevards, rich with ornamental columns in Greek style.  The harbour, once a natural beach in the shape of a cresant, becomes enclosed by thick walls and then there are two harbours. One is filled with a variety of trading vessels that flicker in and out like phantoms–great barks for transporting figs, dates and exotic dyes and textiles to the ports of Egypt, Greece or Persia only to return with marble, iron and painted pottery.  Smaller vessels for family merchants and fishermen dart in and out like humming birds.  The other harbour is a round naval base with a central stall.  200 naval ships, three decked war boats with oars ejecting like the legs of millipedes from their sides, squeeze into the heavily fortified harbour, this one of the greatest navies of the Mediterranean.  Below you,  one of the flower of ancient civilization is born, possibly only second in size and grandure to Alexandria of Egypt, yet almost entirely lost to us in the modern world.

You set your ship on a journey through the Carthaginian empire.  The lamps of its colonies outline much of the Mediterranean at night, dotting the coast of Africa from Lybia to Morocco, with outposts deep into the Atlantic coast that would not be explored again until the Portuguese Henry the Navigator.  Some of these lights go so deep into the Atlantic that the very stars in the sky are different.  Others can be seen far north on ships exploring the coasts of England.  The city lights and ship lamps stretch back into the Mediterranean through Spain, deep into the Andalucían hills where rich deposits of iron and silver are mined from the landscape.  Next is the rich island of Sardinia where you see the ships preparing for war.  And there, across the sea and up a broad river is the city of Rome, the very city that will one day destroy Carthage and replace it as the centre of power in the Mediterranean.

Rome is a massive, sprawling city with irregular streets that follow organic paths that once were goat trails, then farmlands then dirt paths dotted with ramshackle huts.  The city is now cobbled with irregular blocks of stone that lead from temple-lined thoroughfares where rich Romans are paraded down streets by their clients, to blind alleys deep in the city where chickens and hogs sift through garbage alongside women beating carpets or men playing dice.

The city looks only faintly like the city from text books.  It has none of the features of the imperial age save the seven hills.  There is no Coliseum, no Domus Area, no Circus Maximus and no palace on the Palentine.  Only the forum stands testament to the power of the Republic with its stoic senate house and temples.  The walls of Rome, the sacred teminos, so soon to be broken by civil war stands as a bulwark of Republican virtue.  This city is the Republic.  It is the old fashioned virtue of honour over death that resembles the Spartans so much more than the Imperial Romans of the age of Julius Caesar or Augustus.  It is a city within the ancient world that doesn’t yet speak for its age.  As a city not yet aware of its destiny, it looks to the past rather than the future.  And its past is hardship, toil and perseverance.  Its past is stoicism, courage and death.

You play with the knobs and watch as the city breaths with time, buildings rising and falling, the fields beyond its gates growing and being harvested.  And as the months turn into weeks, and finally days and slow to hours, you see a shadow in the distance pouring over the hills.  Soon, you see that it is not a shadow at all, but an army.  Tens of thousands of men are spread across the landscape, pillaging and burning wherever they go.  Farm houses that once filled the landscape as beautiful as dutch paintings become torches after waves of soldiers tumble over them, their armor glinting in the sun.

You slowly drop from the sky and begin to make out horsemen with blue scarves and dark skin, the famous Numidian cavalry riding under a cloud of dust.  There are black skinned Africans with spears and cowhide shields.  There are Greek mercenaries banded together in tight phalanxes, Persian warriors with Assyrian-style beards and long spears, tanned Egyptians with exotic armor and red haired Celts with silver bracelets and blue paint.  There are even elephants, coated in armour and mounted by their Phonecian guides.  It seems as though the entire peoples of the ancient world have converged on this great city with its gates and its virtues now tightly locked.  It almost seems ironic to you as you safely hover over the city that one day this city will rule them all.  These people who came to Italy for plunder not knowing even where Rome was on a map, their ancestors will fill this city’s arena with their cries.  But for now, the peoples of the Mediterranean would have their day.  They would camp outside Rome’s gates and crash their shields against its stone walls until eventually their general Hannibal would call them off.

You turn your ship south once more and head to Carthage overland through Italy.  The months and years soar by and the army you had seen pouring against the walls of Rome has beaten you to the southern end of the peninsula, ready to return home.  It is now much smaller and much weaker, having spent years maurading through the Etrurian foothills, the plains of the north and the mountains of the south.  They are exhausted and beaten.  The Romans have outflanked them and are moving on Carthage itself.

You fly across Sicily and now you are back in Carthage.  The city is stripped of its wealth, its navy and its colonise and is preparing for total war. This will be the last stand for Carthage and as you descend into the city, the offspring of the great city Tyre, you can’t help but feel that same tension you felt in the Bronze Age town during the fall of that era.  Here is a city that was once the gem of the Mediterranean with a rich culture and lavish art, and now its roofs are being stripped of copper, its temples and palaces sacked as though mauraded by wild bandits if not their own people.  Even the women are using their hair to make ropes for bows and catapults.  The city has been given an ultimatum by the Romans: to abandon the city or die.  The Carthaginians have no illusions as to their options and they know there is only one.  They will defend Carthage to the last.

In the center of the city is a temple and at this temple is a great bronze man with a bull’s head.  It is massive and towering and is red from the bronze.  The sculpture is startlingly real with a thick human torso and large muscular arms.  Its arms are moved by an internal machine so they stretch out in search of sacrifice.  When they are filled, the priests supplicate themselves to the god, grovelling and cutting themselves.  A lever is pulled and the arms drop the sacrifice into the coals below.  The smell of the hellish barbeque fills your nostrils and there are flies everywhere, crawling on the god.

You see Hannibal standing off to the side, weather-beaten from his years in Italy, Gaul and Spain, a patch over one eye from exposure in the Alps.  He was the son of Hasdrubal a Carthaginian general who refused to sacrifice his first born son.  And now, here he stands, watching the sacrifice of his city to the god, a sacrifice he was spared.  Is there a moment of silent guilt in his eye, as though his life, the most celebrated life in Phonecian history, was also the most coveted by the god?  The Phonecians would sacrifice the first born of their entire race, but not this man, their hero.  And here is Hannibal, staring back into the eyes of the red-bronze god, the lord of the flies.  And he walks away.  Soon the god would have the entire city for his coals.

This is the original script for the very first Twilight Histories Podcast.  It is more based on information I found fascinating rather than a story.  It borrows from Dan Carlin’s style and delves much deeper into the horrors of child sacrifice than the final product.  I’d love to know your thoughts.

Lord of the Flies

I’d like to start this podcast with a question.  What is the Lord of the Flies?  OK, that’s easy, you say.  It’s a book we had to read in school.  Yes, but where did the author get the title for the book?  Lord of the Flies.

In the Old Testament, there’s a Lord of the Flies.  His name is Balzebub, and he is Satan. Balzabub in translation literally means Lord, or God, or Bal of the Flies.  Balzebub.  This was a name that struck terror into the hearts of humanity, both for those who prayed to him, and for those who were sacrificed at his altar.  The Lord of the Flies was as real and as frightening to the ancient Mediterranean peoples as anything you can imagine.  And in terms of frightening images, the ancient world is a freak show.

In some ways, you can imagine the ancient world as a kind of terrifying nightmare circus, or a horror film.  If you could imagine living in a world fresh from the savagery of the ancient dark ages (the ancient dark ages was in some ways a complete skinning back of civilization compared with the Medieval dark ages which was a shifting in the culture), Balzebub would be the unholy king who terrified you like a schizophrenic nightmare.

The Lord of the Flies.  What a horrifying name.  It’s horrifying for the image that must surely have been scarred on the minds of those ancients who brought their children to his feet.   A massive red-bronze statue or a half-man, half bull, rippling with muscle, would tower over a pit of burning coals, a barbeque filled with the scorched bodies of sacrificial victims.  The people who gathered around the sacrifice would have held their breath against the smell of cooking flesh.  And the flies!  The flies would have been a permanent feature of Balzebub.  They would have covered the god and flown about the crowd, waiting for the coals to simmer so they could feast.  And this was the pit that you would have to push your child into, a child that was no younger than 5 years old and who must have been terrified by what was happening.  That’s what Balzebub wanted.  Sacrifice.  Real sacrifice.  Goats or sheep wouldn’t do for this god.  He wanted you to suffer.  And he asked for your first born child.  This was the Lord of the Flies.

The Israelites knew the god Bal quite well.  Moses speaks of Bal when the people formed a golden calf.  Elijah speaks of Bal when he drove his followers up the mountain and prayed for fire.  The Middle East was Bal’s land, and all who lived here were his subjects.  The people knew how powerful the Lord of the Flies was.  He was perhaps the most powerful and the most ruthless God on earth.  Even the greatest prophets of the Israelites struggled to pry their people from his terrifying gaze.  The early god of the Jews was a war God, a god to be feared.  But Yahweh was not Bal.  He did not have horns and bronze red skin.  He did not have flies and flesh covering his arms.  Yahweh was terrifying, but in a different sort of way.

Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his first born son.  When he raised the knife to the boy’s throat, the Biblical God stopped him.  Why?  Was it because God wanted to test Abraham’s faith?  Or was it to show Abraham that there was a new way–that this God was different?

The Zoroastrians of the ancient Persian world give us some of the very first accounts of religion.  Long before Judaism, and perhaps long before Bal, two gods were worshiped by the Persians.  One god was good.  The other god was evil.  Both were equally as powerful.

Zoroastrianism is no more than a flicker today.  But echoes of Zoroaster can be found in the Old Testament.  Zoroaster was the father of Good and Evil and his disciples spread throughout the earth.  Did a group of people during the Bronze Age leave Babylon with one god, while another group left with the other?  Is Yahweh the God of Good, and Bal the God of Evil?

If that is so, then a religion literally cracked sometime in the Bronze Age.  It split and the gods that had once danced in a balance of good and evil now stood mightily apart, their armies drawn before them.

Bal was the god of the earth.  He was powerful and very present.  Yahweh ruled the heavens and the mysteries of life beyond, Bal was the god of blood.  To worship Bal was to worship human desire, and this Bal fuelled with his affinity for power.

Bal was the god of the Phoenicians.  The Phoenicians, if you remember, were the greatest maritime people of the ancient world.  They gathered purple dye from Morocco, they sailed  up to Britain, they may have circumnavigated Africa.  And everywhere the Phoenicians went, they made themselves fabulously wealthy.  These were the merchants of antiquity.  These were Bal’s people.

The city of Trier in modern Lebanon was their home.  But they spread across the Mediterranean in all directions, setting up trading posts and bartering with the locals.  One of these trading posts was Carthage, located in modern Tunis just off the coast of Sicily.  It was in the centre of the Mediterranean where it could dominate trade, and its people feasted on lush semi-tropical fields where figs grew to the size of fists.  Carthage became the flower of the Mediterranean, a kind of paradise on earth where the Lord of the Flies could lounge in luxury.  While Yahweh clung to his shepherds in the desserts and mountains of the east, Bal reclined in the warm breeze of his North African paradise.

The Carthaginians were fanatically loyal to their god.  Emissaries from Rome would return with horrifying accounts of savagery from the temple ceremonies.  The Romans knew of infanticide.  In the more stoic households, sickly children would be exposed if they were not thought capable of surviving.  But no one thought of sacrificing their own first born son to a god, especially not if the boy was healthy and about to enter school.  Children were a very precious commodity to the Romans, and boys were the life blood of the family.  Without a son, a Roman house would fall.

When the Romans declared war on Carthage, they had no idea that they were declaring war on the Biblical Satan.  The Lord of the Flies would require sacrifice, and the death that followed was the ancient world’s goternamerung.

Carthaginian names were theophoric.  That means they were named after gods.  Just like Christians are named after the disciples, the Carthaginians were named for the honor of Bal.  Aderbaal
Adonibaal, Khilletzbaal… Hannibal.

Hannibal was the son of Hazdrubal, a mercenary general who fought and slaughtered Roman armies in Sicily during the first Punic war.  He was ruthlessly successful and brilliant beyond his age.  When Carthage sued for peace, Hasdrubal was called home.  He was furious because his army had not been defeated.  When Rome exacted crushing reparations on Carthage, so terrible in fact that the city couldn’t afford to pay him, Hazdrubal left for Spain.  He brought his young son with him.  They conquered Spain and its massive silver mines which they used to build an army.

Hazdrubal had a difficult choice to make.  He was instructed by his culture to sacrifice Hannibal as his first born son.  But Hazdrubal refused.  Rather than sacrifice his son, he made him an instrument of sacrifice.  He made Hannibal swear to always hate the Romans and ultimately to destroy them.  Hannibal would not be the sacrifice.  Bal was to receive the children of Rome instead.

His name, Hannibal, means Thundering Bal.  Barkas means from the mountain.  In ancient memory, the Carthaginians believed that Bal lived in the mountains.  Hannibal might have crossed the Alps, the mightiest mountains in Europe, as a form of worshipping his God.  Where else would Bal reside if not in the Alps?  The crossing may have been an act of purifying, of sanctifying his army.  When he crossed into the Po valley, his army had been blessed by the Zoroastrian god of evil.  Less than half of all who entered survived.

And here’s where it get’s interesting, because now the battle truly begins.  On the one side you have this scourge of the earth, Bal’s unholy messiah, and on the other side you have the implacable discipline of the Romans.  I don’t think the Romans saw themselves fighting a holy war, although that is exactly what it was.  Hannibal was Bal’s sacrifice, just as Jesus was God’s sacrifice.  But Hannibal’s sacrifice was on hold.  Hazdrubal had quite literally made what a Christian might call a deal with the devil that in exchange for his son’s life, and Italy would be laid waste.

Roman religion was so much more lenient than that of the Carthaginian’s.  Theirs was much more a religion of superstition than of messianic fever.  And that’s what made it so porous in its later stages. It did not have the depth and longevity of the bronze age religions.  And yet it was up against the might of an incredibly ancient and deadly god.  The most deadly god in history.

And that makes me wonder, what if the Carthaginians won?  What if everything lined up for Hannibal the way it very well could have and he defeated the Romans?  There were plenty of opportunities.  After smashing the largest army ever fielded, an army that might have had over 90,000 men, including most of the Roman aristocracy, Hannibal chose not to march on Rome.  What if he had?  There was nothing in his way.  The Romans could hardly scrounge up a defensive force from the survivors staggering in from Hannibal’s victory.  They were beaten.  It is hard to imagine the Romans not coming to terms with the Carthaginians at this point.

So what if the Romans were defeated during the second Punic war?  What would that have looked like?

The answer to that question is difficult to imagine because history is so fluid.  Any little event could have drastic effects years down the road.  Just one man standing in the senate and speaking rather persuasively on that particular day could result in the revulsion of the barbarians 500 years later, or Christianity not spreading through the empire, or who knows what?

But let’s just imagine anyways.  Let’s say that Hannibal conquered all of Italy.  Carthage now owns North Africa, Spain, Southern Gaul, Italy and all the islands in between.  It dominates the Mediterranean.  But does it continue to conquer the way the Romans did?

Before the Punic Wars, Carthage wasn’t all that interested in foreign wars.  They preferred trade to conquest.  But after the wars, they had changed.  They were now a very powerful state with massive armies that had as their training grounds the soldiers of Rome.  They also had the best generals, the best officers, the best kinds of soldiers in the known world.  And they had elephants.  Nothing could possibly have stopped the Carthaginians had they decided to keep going.  All they would need was an excuse.

How about the Greeks destroying their Phoenician homeland under Alexander the Great, the city of T only a hundred years before?  How about the need to control the grain routes from pirates in the east?  How about securing the source of the grain itself, Egypt, also in the hands of Greeks?  How about just invading for the sake of all that plunder in the east.  The Romans coveted the Middle East as it was the wealth of the ancient world.  The Carthaginians certainly would have recognized that.  And then there’s the question of Judea.  What to do with that?

Here we may just see the final earthly battle between Good and Evil, a battle played out for centuries in the mythologies of Zoroaster that is now coming to its final conclusion.  Is it not conceivable that the worshippers of Bal would come home?  They knew their own history.  They knew that Bal had all but been extinguished from the temples in Judea.  Genocide and persecution had been their ancestor’s plight at the hands of those who followed Yahweh.  Here it’s time to see Bal triumph once more.  Had Jerusalem been a holy city for Bal as today it is a holy city for Muslims and Christians?  Of all places in the Mediterranean, the east would surely become the site where Bal would extend his reach.  It would be a crusade, or an anti-crusade, where the symbols of Bal would be carried into battle by massive armies, full of elephants and blue painted warriors and African horses and all the peoples of the world.  And if that happened, that is where the story of the good god would end.

There would be no Roman Empire.  There would be no Jesus.  There would be no Middle Ages with their cathedrals and pilgrimages.  There would be no Renaissance.  If Hannibal had marched on Rome after the battle of Cannae, the world would be a very different place.

We are living about 2300 years after Hannibal’s death, but there’s no reason why the ancient world should end.  The Romans collapsed because of their economy, not because of invaders from the north.  They had survived a massive invasion of Germans, possibly 300,000 of them, just after the Punic Wars.  But they had survived quite well.  And this was before Caesar and Augustus and Hadrian.  The Romans could have decimated the barbarian invasion had their economy not been rotten to the core.  Who’s to say that Carthage would have the same problem?  They were a mercantile people who thrived as a nation of traders.  The Romans were farmers who traditionally hated boats and despised merchants.  Could the Carthaginians have survived the barbarian invasions?  Could their love of economics have safe guarded them from Rome’s mistakes?

The Carthaginian civilization could be alive and prosperous today.  Without the god of Abraham, there would be no Islam to threaten the empire.  The Mongols never reached southern Europe.  Perhaps the empire would have ploughed through Persia in the footsteps of Alexander to rest the altar of Bal in the Indus river valley.  The Carthaginians could have had a world empire like the one envisioned by Caesar before he died.  It might have stretched from England to India.  During the Bronze Age, it was customary for civilizations to last hundreds or even thousands of years as did the Egyptians.  After the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Iron Age, things were up in the air.  States were being shifted and the balance of power was in flux.  The tendency was towards big empires.  The Persians conquered and held the lands from Turkey to India and down to Egypt.  Alexander the Great replaced the Persian satraps with Greeks before eying the Carthaginians in the West who were saved by his untimely death.  Julius Caesar, after conquering Gaul and England planned on making a giant swinging hook to conquer the east before his untimely death.  In later centuries, the Abbasids ruled the lands from Spain to India while the Mongols dominated Poland and China.  In our history, the tendency has been towards a world empire.  And once this new world empire was established, with the right governance and economic know how, it might have lasted hundreds of years, as it did with the Romans, or even thousands as it did with the Egyptians.

If the Carthaginians became the masters of that world empire, or even of just the Mediterranean, how would it have evolved?  2300 years of empire is a long time and great swings of fortune, advances in art and technology, religious reforms or even revolutions could cycle through the centuries.  Once they had conquered the Greeks, would Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy have permeated the thick bronze hide of Bal?  Would the intrepid Phoenician sailors, who are said to have explored Britain and even circumnavigated Africa during the Bronze Age, have traded with the Olmec and the Mayans?  And would trading colonies have dotted the coasts of India, China and the Spice Islands long before the Portuguese and Spanish centuries later?

Would the mercantile spirit of the Phoenicians have shot them into a technological society far beyond our own today?  Perhaps they would already be mining asteroids.  Or perhaps the oppressive Bal would have created a theocracy so potent and destructive that no advances could be made.  2300 years after Hannibal’s death we might still be living in the ancient world.

We live in a world that is blessed compared to what it could have been.  If Hannibal had turned his sights on Rome, the evil god might easily have been our god.  Thankfully, this didn’t happen.  Thankfully, the God who stopped Abraham from slaughtering his child survived and not the god who would have demanded his blood.  Whether you are an atheist or a Christian, a Buddhist or a Sikh.  Whether you are a Muslim or Jew, be thankful that Hannibal never marched on Rome.  Today, you might be walking your little son through the marketplace in your town, looking down at him with eyes that must turn to stone.  Soon you will be at the temple where all the parents have brought their young boys before the red bronze idol.  Soon you will feel the heat on your face and buckle under the menacing glare of the Lord of the Flies.

I played around with the idea of time travel where a character from history would be lifted from his environment and transported back in time.  In this case, I took the famous Russian composer Shostakovitch and sent him back to the 18th century.  How would music be different today if one of the greatest geniuses of modern composition had a chance to change history?

Enjoy,

Jordan Harbour

Shostakovich, Time Traveler

Things started to get ‘charming’ in the 18^th century.  Music was nicely in the hands of the landed aristocracy and that’s just what it became… nice.  While the baroque era was rich with texture and a tapestry of emotional landscapes, the new Classical era was interested only in frivolity.  It was as though a charming arms race had broken out between dukes and princes who wished to out-do their neighbors by playing dainty little dances and bouncy superfluous rondos.  Music just kept getting more and more civilized until it matched the ornaments in the aristocracy’s palaces as a kind of theme music for decadence.  Music, to the aristocracy, had become an object to find pleasure in.  It was meant to inspire the word ‘delightful’.

Many people look back to the early Classical era with a kind of nostalgic fondness, imagining the costumes, the grande balls and a pre-Napoleonic Europe that was draped in aristocratic innocence.  Shostakovich, one of the greatest composers of the 20^th century who inspired much of our modern film music, certainly admired this older, simpler time.  But Shostakovich had the luxury to look back on this era nostalgically.  I think if he were placed in a time machine and sent back to Hayden’s era as a court composer, he would quickly find the strict confines a personal hell.

What if Shostakovich was somehow sent back in time and given a small dukedom in central Europe.  We’re talking Shostakovich, a man who commands some of the greatest respect of all time as one of the founders of modern music, without whom we would not have film music as we know it today, let alone a host of incredible works composed in his own day.  This was the Russian composer who was made Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in America during the Second World War for his incredibly inspiring music.  And this was not pleasant music.  This was war music that was surely in the ears of many soldiers as they entered battle.  Their notes would have filled them with courage as they entered hell.

What would this titan of artistic expression do if he were given an 18^th century dukedom and a court orchestra?  Would he be content to listen to the Classical music of the day, going to concerts and humoring other dukes with his own delightful court compositions (written under a pen name, of course)?

Somehow, I think he wouldn’t be able to do this.  I image he would start writing furiously and with a creative passion unrivalled in his Communist life.  He would write for his audience, but he would amaze them.  He would start them off in their own playing field creating compositions that would push all the boundaries of what was possible using the Classical form.  His audience would say that his works were delightful, and yet they would have these mesmerizing melodies stuck in their heads so that they would beg with eyebrows furrowed to hear them again on their next visit.

After he won their hearts, he would start to push them further.  Just like Mozart who was criticized for writing in minor keys yet forced to do so by an inner drive for meaning, Shostakovich would challenge the ears of those he had won.  He would apply his Slavic roots and would begin to hint at modern orchestration.  Perhaps his audience would never appreciate the diatonic modernism of his youth, but surely they could benefit from a paradigm shift in the way they thought about music.  His goal would be to transform music from a simple ornament, to an expression of the human experience.  He would yank it from the aristocracy and allow it to speak to the soul.  Over the years, the idea of this new music would represent a new re-shaping of society just in time for the French Revolution.  It would become their anthem.  And it would stimulate the music to come.

But Shostakovich would do whatever he could to speed up this process.  He would invite the composers of Europe to his dukedom.  He would instruct them on this newly emerging compositional style.  He would demand they adopt the newly invented piano and master it communist discipline, building their technique and flare to unheard of levels of prowess in their small cubist studies.  And he would hold competitions every year to try and give an early birth to the musical eras to come.  The Romantic era would be stimulated with competitions to match poetry and painting to music.  The Impressionists would come alive with awards for music that mimicked the sound of sunlight dancing on water, or the harrowing sounds of artillery setting fire to the distant hills.  He would challenge his composers to transcribe the works of Bach using kettle drums under the onerous Slavic oboe and flute that is able to cast an eerie spell over its audience like the fall of Leningrad.

Before the end of the the 18^th century, a polyphony of soundscapes would be born that stretch far beyond Beethoven and Mozart.  The concert halls of Europe would resound with the sounds of Schubert, Liszt, Ravel, Debussy, Borodin and Khachaturian long before those composers were born.  And when they finally were born, what incredible advantages would they have?  Rather than Beethoven spending his youth painstakingly mastering the works of Hayden, how could his creative genius have been stimulated and thrust forward had he been personally instructed by Shostakovich, his 20^th century equivalent?  Beethoven invented the so-called Immortal Thunder in his day that shook the boundaries of music.  What boundaries could he have shaken had the thunder already erupted?

In our modern 21^st century era, we have experienced a similar degradation in our musical vocabulary as did those who lived through the Classical era.  The difference is that in our time the destruction is complete.  When we think of Classical music, the names Beethoven, Bach and Mozart come to mind, people who lived long before us.  We find it challenging, even those of us who keep up with Classical music, to name even one composer of any merit who is alive today.   The reason is because, just as with the aristocrats in 18^th century Europe, a unified group of people has kidnapped a musical form and made it their own.  This group is made of intellectuals–professors of composition–who guard their discipline with an iron fist.  A potential graduate student who tries to enter a school with compositions that play on the works of Schubert or Bach are quickly rejected by this international body of intellectuals. And like the aristocrats of 18^th century Europe, their compositions are not meant for those outside their inner circle.

The music of the intellectual is defined by wood blocks, males singing diatonically in falsetto, and ornaments that are the only distinguishable melodies within a staccato cacophony of experimental string plucking.  In fact, the new music is defined by both its demand to experiment as well as its rejection of tone.  The music does not seek to touch its audience by placing the mirror before our darkest sorrows or nostalgic joys, but abandons emotional reflection for a higher intellectual pursuit.

What would Shostakovich do if he were alive today?  If Shostakovich was given some kind of power, either a large corporation or a political position, maybe even a commanding post in the music schools of Oxford or Cambridge, what would he say of our classical music?

We know that Shostakovich, especially in his youth, was wild about the new modern music inspired by the paintings of the abstracts artists.  This was a new expression for a new world and one that was opening with possibilities.  But Shostakovich knew his audience and as he matured he adopted a more robust symphonic brilliance that came to define the era after his death.  Would Shostakovich listen to today’s experimental music with a tear in his eye, applauding each work until his hands were raw?

I don’t think so.  He would look at the situation and say to the composers that they had abandoned their audiences.  Then he would discover iTunes.  He would quickly see this his art form was relegated to the title ‘Classical’, a name that implies the death and veneration of a form no longer practiced.  A horde of barbarians destroyed the ancient world.  Intellectualism annihilated an art form.

Shostakovich would have looked around him in a state of alarm.  He would have asked himself, is there anything left?  Can this music be resurrected?  And he would find hints that it could, not in the music of the intellectuals, but in the only place where new compositions are still listened to, purchased online and cherished by young and old.  He would find the grain of hope he was looking for in film music.

Shostakovich would hold a conference of all the film composers of the world for an emergency meeting.  He would ask to review their greatest works and he would put up rewards for new compositions.  These new commissions would sound like film music people knew and loved.  It would be music written for its own sake.

Shostakovitch would then gather the corporate world together and encourage them to find ways of supporting  his seedling art form.  Musicians in his own time were not able to create the music they wrote from ticket sales alone.  They had patrons who would support them as they composed.  Shostakovitch would set up a heritage society with a database where corporate sponsors and philanthropists could find composers they wished to sponsor.  He would commission a crack marketing team to ensure it was a success.

Shostakovitch would work with universities to find ways of allowing his new musicians to gain entrance.  He would first encourage them to set up film music schools, a harmless introduction, but also a wedge that would surely break the intellectual strong arm.  The composers in the intellectual schools would at first do battle with the new wings in their buildings, but these battles would inevitably be lost as new compositions grew in popularity outside their halls.  As the new composers became household names, jumping between film and pure composition, enrolment would soon shift to the popular school and the intellectuals would dwindle.

What could the future of this new form sound like as it grew and evolved?  Because of the boundlessness of film, the form would also be boundless.  Composers would play with Medieval music, modernizing it with symphonic color that adds suspense, romanticism or fear that is recognized by our culture from years of film watching.  It would produce Asian fusions that raise a nostalgic air of ancient China or a techno-modern flavor of urban Japan.  It would tell the story of wars and battles in terms of sound.  It would remind us of love stories using French or Italian ballads for inspiration.  The new form would take old works and transcribe their melodies for the modern audience, putting them into a form and using musical symbolism that our ears can understand.  This new music would be relevant and entrancing.  Unlike older Classical music that can sometimes seem oddly antiquated, this new music would resonate entirely with our modern ear.  In time, in our children’s generation, or that of our grandchildren, the new music would resonate with their evolving ear and the art form would truly come alive.

And in terms of a concert experience, it has very little competition.  A band might have 5 members, but an orchestra could have 100.  The sound that can be produced from 100 incredibly skilled musicians tapped into the works of a great composer that has his audience nailed is a powerful idea.  And while a band might play an entire song with only 4 chords, the new composers would write landscapes of music that spill through torrents of chords and keys, unbound by their form.

Is it too much to expect us to go to one of these concerts?  Would anyone show up?  Tell me that if you just watched an incredible film with an equally incredible sound track (that you happen to listen to often while you work) that you wouldn’t want to go to a concert by that same composer if he came to town.  And what if you knew that concert was going to have the same visual highlights you expect from Muse or Lady Gaga?  –huge screens with stunning visually captivating films made for the music and not the other way around, pyrotechnics that spray fireworks to the rafters, laser shows that shoot bolts of green and red through the dry ice that rolls into the audience with the scent of sulphur wafting from exploded gunpowder that produced the creation of galaxies…

Will this ever happen?  I’m not sure it will.   I’m not sure that it could ever happen as I don’t see any of the signs of us making advances in that direction.  Film composers do write pure compositions, but these are few and far between not having an audience even amongst those who love their screen music.  I saw something like it once using Holst’s Planets with a screen that played different shots of Jupiter and Mars.

Do I think it should happen?  Yes, of course I do.  It would be great to see an art form revived that like no other is able to express the full range of human emotion and experience, that can transport its audience to a lovers yearning in Florence as it can to the creation of the Universe, and all without the need for words.

What I do know is that Shostakovitch lived to see his art form reach its pinnacle.  In his own day, Classical music had evolved into a mature art form that was a defining feature of his society.  During the great struggles of the 20^th century—the purges of Stalin that ended 30 million lives, and the war with Germany that saw the extinguishing of some 40 million more–he saw his music comfort his people.  It allowed them to mourn and it raised them from despair.  It was his music that allowed these people, bent and broken, the courage to continue on.  As they poured out of the concert halls of Leningrad and Moscow during the devastating period of the Second World War when everyone had lost family and friends, it was the psychic impression of his music that played itself over and over in their heads as they began the painful process of rebuilding.

Although he lived through one of the darkest periods in human history, Shostakovitch was lucky to see his music, a music with a direct lineage stretching back to Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, reach its florescence.  Perhaps one day we will pick up where he left off.

The story of China’s borders could be the story of the rising and ebbing tide.  Its borders have flowed in and out since before our written records first documented the cradle of Asian civilization.  And these borders have always moved towards expansion.  Around 1700 BCE, there is a patchwork of loosely connected farmland that expands through rivers and along the sea.  As the dynasties grow, so too the spread of Chinese hegemony.  Over thousands of years, China will collapse and rebuild, expand and retract.  Walls will be built to keep out the northern tribes only to absorb them in an empire stretching from the Baltic coast to Vietnam.  The fiefdoms of Medieval Europe believed some great Christian king in the East was fighting their cause during the crusades.  They could not have known that Baghdad was sacked by the same horsemen that would burn Polish churches.  Two emperors later, the great land empire had receded, yet China remained.

Throughout our history as humans, China has been the idee fix, the perpetual empire.  During Europe’s darkest periods, China called itself the centre of the world.  The Egyptians fell, the Alexander’s empire was fractured, Rome was sacked and the Parthians melted away.  China trudged on.  It was in China that learning, art, and luxury persisted as the world around it sparked and snuffed like dull embers over the course of thousands of years.  If you were to run a time-lapse map of the world with China at its centre, the ebb and flow of its borders would appear to breath as an ever present living being while the rest of the world grew and died around it.

Today, China’s borders are no longer marked on maps by political boundaries.  Chinese politicians speak to their constituents in Vancouver, Toronto, New York and Montreal.   You can find China in Rio De Janeiro and Berlin, Paris and New Delhi.  No longer are the borders of China breathing with armies, but the people themselves are taking root around the world and spreading their story.

When I grew up in the 1980s, my childhood vision of China was one of exoticism and mystery.  When visiting our China town, I was dazzled by a culture that seemed foreign yet also stuck in the past.  The architecture, the bartering, the outdoor markets, incense, brimming storefronts with exotic goods, all this seemed like a vestige of an ancient world that had somehow survived to create a gem of culture within the comparatively drab world outside its walls.

And yet I also grew up in a world where the evil empire of Communism still loomed strong, and where China was a country I could never visit.  The nation was behind the iron curtain where I imagined massive famines and a strange government that forced millions to live out their lives in misery.  This incredible culture that sparked a haven of exotic rituals in my city was a whisper from beyond a gate that was firmly locked.

How could I possibly have imagined the world we live in today, a world in which the colossus of America is selling its schools while the Chinese are building magnetic railroads, oil pipelines and entire cities in the dessert?  Could a child have been forgiven for not predicting that this exotic and ancient culture which had just crawled out of the worst man-made famine in history would become the center of the world?

History moves slowly when you’re living through it.  I sometimes imagine myself living in the late Roman Empire, perhaps in a country estate.  It is late spring and the wind is gently rustling up sweet grasses and flowering trees.  There is a sound of bees hopping from flower to flower.  I can imagine myself in Roman clothing as a child, lying in the grass and watching the arc of Odysseus as it floats lazily by in a cloud.  How peaceful.  Everything in the world seems right.  Could I predict in that moment that it would all come to an end, that my family estate would be destroyed, that roving hordes of strangely painted warriors would pour through the fields and pillage the land?  Could I imagine a world without the Roman Empire?

History moves slowly when you’re living it.  Even when you’re in the midst of great change, it can seem impossible to imagine a world any different than the one in which you live, your home safely tucked in its street, the recycling picked up every Wednesday.

And yet we are living through one of the great shifts in human history.  We are living in an age when oil and water will run scarce, when global warming will turn our fields into dust bowls and when populations will balloon past 9 billion people.  We are living in an age when planets beyond our solar system will be imaged, human beings sequenced without disease, and when organs will be printed like a 3D word documents while you wait on the operating table.  We are living through an age when the might that is the United States will enter its inevitable decline, and the ascendancy of China will rise to take its place.

Should we fear this change?

China has been at the centre of the world for as long as the world was human.  In this time, it carried an emperor and a culture that looked inward rather than out.  While we in the West have traditionally admired our borders as much as the land beyond them, in China the tradition has been to admire the civilization within before those who have none.  This inward looking vision of the world has preserved the civilization as well as nearly destroying it.  For as the West struggled to extend itself like a snake swallowing its tail, the Chinese sought to balance themselves in an empire between heaven and earth.

When it was time to finally explore the world beyond, the Chinese brought the gifts.  They were not interested in the treasures of those who lived beyond their borders.  No present could be worth the notice of the centre of civilization.  While Europeans would arrive on distant shores with empty hauls ready to be filled, the Chinese would raise anchor with cargoes of gifts to stun the strange barbarians they hoped to meet.  Even on their great voyages of exploration, the Chinese interest in the world was never one that could last.  When one emperor would build a fleet of junks the size of battleships, the next emperor would have them scuttled.

Once the Europeans were given an opportunity to better themselves, no advance could ever be lost.  They would persistently work to build and grow their technology, and this persistence would last for centuries.  The Chinese, on the other hand, could advance with remarkable speed, doing in a few decades what would take the Europeans hundreds of years.  For example, the Chinese in the 11^th century built a clock that had scores of characters mechanically driven to enact scenes.  When the emperor who commissioned the work died, rather than taking this bit of technology and building on it, his successor had the clock destroyed.  The Europeans, on the other hand, steadily built clocks for 500 years, improving on them and mastering their art before sending one to China where it became the marvel of the Forbidden City.

The Story of China has been one of amazing feats of human creative and physical power.  The Great Wall, the Imperial Fleet, the mechanical clock and the Forbidden City.  Where Europe would grow steadily and persistently, the Chinese would flare up in a herculean  explosion of activity only to wilt back into the folds of historic anonymity.

It reminds me something of the Bronze Age where one great monarch would try to stamp out the memory of the monarch that came before, regardless of the damage it would cause his culture.  The Egyptians would engrave their names on the pyramids and temples, only to have the next generation of pharaohs engrave their own names even deeper into the stone, claiming as their own those monuments they couldn’t destroy.  The Chinese were to persist directly from the Bronze Age into our modern times.  Was it this same ancient mentality of eternal monarchy where emperors had to stake their claim in history that caused the Chinese not to take advantage of their winning hand?

How has all this changed today?

The Chinese today are the same people they were 1000 years ago, but with some remarkable differences.  They lost the opium wars.  They were defeated by the Japanese and their empire between heaven and earth was shattered.  They adopted an experimental European government that caused them to self destruct, killing millions and nearly destroying their heritage.  The people who live in China today are the same as they were 1000 years ago, but they’ve been shaken.

They were once the middle kingdom.  On a map of the earth, there was only China and a few islands around which together made up the few tribes they heard existed beyond their borders.  This centuries-old naval gazing resulted in the world exploding in on them when the persistent Europeans came on the scene.  For a while, for only one or two hundred years, the Chinese had to change their maps.  They had to deal with an internal struggle and a couple external threats that in the history of the Chinese world are par for the course—they were rocked and yet they survived.  They had to reform themselves and modernize so they could position themselves in this new world.  And now they’ve done that.

The China of today is the same China of 1000 years ago.  They’ve taken communism, that strange and experimental modern political system that failed so dramatically, and they’ve morphed it into something uniquely Chinese.  It’s become imbued with the essence of Confucian balance, that same balance that inward looking China has always sought.  And it’s taken that same explosive human potential that has always lain dormant within its borders and has sparked it into ignition.  That same nation that built a mechanized clock in the 11^th century and a fleet of battleship sized junks in the 15^th, is now building skyscrapers and mag lines in our own age.

Will China continue to grow?

The difference between the old China and the new is that this China recognizes that it is a part of the world rather than the world itself.  What stays the same is that it intends to hold its position at the centre.  China has discovered a way to do this, not by becoming insular, a path it almost chose when it became Communist, but by taking on the rest of the world and playing it to win.

China has become a modern nation.  It rose from one of the poorest nations on earth to the second largest economy of the developed world today, and it did this within three decades after setting its sights on this goal.  There is no Bronze Age fashioned emperor of China to stop this freight train.  It will continue to grow so long as the world can sustain it.

What will the world look like with China back in control?

Even today we can see this traditional role playing itself out in the modern world.  China is not interested in the borders of others and has consistently demonstrated its lack of interest in getting involved in international wars.  It was not interested in Iraq and it has no troops in Afghanistan.  China asks for the world to stay out of its borders, and in exchange it leaves its troops within them.  It encourages other nations to deal with their own problems internally and has no desire to overthrow dictators.  The one thing China wants, if we are to take the long view of history, is for other nations to see it as the new Middle Kingdom, the centre of civilization.

That is probably how it will be.  Just as Chinatowns the world over are insular and tight knit, so too will be the Empire.  China will not ask us to be Chinese, but we will start to move in that direction.  It is common for the dominant culture to lead in fashion, language, art and cuisine.  Soon, we will see Chinese paintings and films en vogue.  We will all have Chinese cookbooks.  We drive Chinese cars.  We will probably even start to learn Chinese as a second language.

What about the environment?

Unlike us in the West, China is traditionally a culture of harmony and balance.  From the Tao to Buddhism, from the Confucian hierarchy to Feng Shue, Chinese culture is one of being in tune with the nature of the universe.  These past thirty years have been a dramatic shift for the Chinese as they’ve yanked themselves from poverty to become one of the wealthiest nations on earth.  If tradition plays itself out, they will soon aspire towards sustainability.  In fact, we are already starting to see this happening.  While in America, a presidential candidate can be assured defeat for proposing Global Warming as a viable theory, China is developing cars that cause a fraction of their emissions.  There is much talk in China of pushing the green agenda and absent is the ignorance that requires a politician to deny scientific facts.

China is also able to project well into the future.  With an ability to plan for the long term, China can look decades ahead rather than just 4 years as seems to be the case in most democracies.  Even though China is still spewing out the emissions, it will not do this once it has regained its position as the Middle Kingdom.  China had the will and the strength to institute the one-child policy in order to prevent a population explosion that would have surely destroyed the nation.  It will one day exercise its sovergnty in hemming the destructive carbon emissions that will extend the Gobi Dessert down to the sunken city of Shanghai.

And what about China’s human rights abuses?

One of the tragedies of sovernty is a government’s ability to use it against its own people.  I lived in China’s far Western province of Xinjiang for a while.  It has been known as the silent Tibet because though the local populace is feeling the squeeze, they have no Dali Lama to represent them internationally.  There were some very strange things that happened out there.  When the war on terror began, Bush and the Chinese government agreed to accept each other’s terrorist lists.  The Chinese would henceforth accept Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization if America would damn the local Uygur freedom fighters.  Within days of this agreement being signed, mosques across the province were being shut down.  I remember a US diplomat coming to town and reporting this back home.  The US shook their finger and said that shutting mosques wasn’t part of the deal.

If there is no international pressure on China, they will feel no need to justify or even curb their cruelties when it comes to human rights.  And they are quickly rising to just this position.  The Chinese have a mentality similar to that of the Imperial British when it comes to their homeland.  The English were embarrassed by Scotland and Wales whenever they were not part of England.  And when they were, there was no small effort to keep them there, however unpleasant it had to be for the locals.

China will do what it can to ensure the unity of its borders.  But the days of the sword are drawing to a close.  While China will continue to be tough on local groups, it is now exercising an economic weapon that is far more powerful.  Rather than wielding the stick of prison and torture behind ethnic groups, it now dangles the carrot of prosperity before them.  Many have fallen for the bait and within a generation the Tibetan and Uygur question may be over.  Even during the year I stayed in Urumqi, I watched as the dirt road in the Uygur sector where one of the largest silk road open markets still thrived was ripped up, paved and shoppers herded into well ventilated malls built for the purpose.  At first I was sad to see this vestige of the silk road destroyed.  But later I asked myself the question, was this better for the people?  While visiting an exotic outdoor market was quaint and nostalgic for me, how did the people feel about it being moved indoors?  This was a climate that would drop to minus 30 in winter and plus 30 in summer.  The malls, by comparison, were heated and air conditioned, protected from wind, snow and storms.  I’m sure there couldn’t have been a single merchant who would rather stay outside.

We are entering a new world.  And this new world looks a lot like the old world.  It is a world where China regains its position as the Middle Kingdom.  It has been out of the race for a couple centuries now, and it has come back with a characteristic fury, the same determination that built the Great Wall or the first mechanical clock tower.  Should we fear this ascendency?  Probably not.  We have had almost 50 years of US dominance and a few hundred from Europe.  In that time we have made incredibly progress in science while also seeing our human potential devastated in two world wars.  It will be interesting to see the balance return to the world’s traditional center.  China has been at the center of civilization for thousands of years and throughout this time has sought balance and harmony, introspection and hierarchical respect.  With the challenges we now face moving into the 21^st and 22^nd centuries, could we not benefit from a European capitalism infused with an Asian harmony?  The scales are tipping for our species and there is little time for an idealism grown impotent.  We have little choice anyhow.  China is rising.  We can only hope it will act as a good stuart of our earth and for our species.

Ice Man: Part I

My Grandpa is 99 years old.  He was born in 1911.  To give you some perspective, the first plane was flown just a few years before he was born.  The First World War hadn’t been fought yet.  Only the uber-rich had cars, these being very simple contraptions that looked like buggies—almost everyone else used horses to get around.  The British Empire was at its height.  This was the age of colonialism when the sun never set of the British Empire.  British soldiers in India wore khakis and pith helmets and were paraded around the streets of Bombay on litters.  The year my grandpa was born, the Titanic was sitting in a dry dock, being furnished and prepared for its first, and only, voyage.

This was an entirely different age from the one we live in today.  And yet, my grandpa has memories of this old age.  Most of his stories come from the 1910s and 20s, living in rural Saskatchewan, or from the 1930s when he led a team of horses, Prince and Bill, as he gathered coal in wagons during the depression.  But if you were to ask him if he felt these early memories were a long way in the past, he would probably respond no.  The memories of his childhood, whether they were of gathering water as a young boy, or visiting the sick with his father, are crystal clear.  Probably more clear than anything from the last 40 years.  All those old costumes, the industrial age people, that to us appear from a fantasy land that could make up a period film, are tactile to my grandpa.  They have a smell.  He can feel the fabric on his father’s Victorian great coat.  If he were to smell some old perfume, the last vapours of which are locked in a museum somewhere slowly evaporating, he would be instantly transported back to an age that is as alien to us now as you can imagine.

And if you’ll allow me to side track for a moment, he once told me that his father’s greatest influence was his grandmother.  That is, my grandfather’s great grandmother.  My great, great, great grandmother.  If that’s confusing, just think of this—this woman, who my grandfather spoke of as if without any thought of its significance, was born in the 1830s!  My grandfather has a living memory passed down to him from the time of Beethoven!  And yet, that’s not that long ago.

We often use our short lives as references when we think about time.  Queen Victoria seems, to us, a very long way off.  It’s an entirely different age when people dressed differently, thought differently, ate, travelled, read, experienced the world differently.  The age of Queen Victoria is like a fantasy world to us, it’s so far in the past, and because of this huge gap in time, it seems estranged to us.  Almost unworldly.  If you were suddenly transported to the Victorian Age, would you be able to get along alright?  Or do your 21^st century moras and values and habits, the way you converse, dress eat… do these things get in the way?  Even if you were to steal some clothes and find your way back to your own city, would you be able to blend in?  Or would people constantly be asking you where you were from?  You’re a foreigner in your own town.  And how in the heck would you get a job?  It might be kind of tough to survive if you woke up in the Victorian Age.

But to my grandpa, the time of Queen Victoria was just a decade before he was born.  It’s a bit like the 1960s to me, not to date myself here.  To me the 1960s doesn’t seem like some weird fantasy world that I couldn’t survive in.  I might have to get used to Crosby Stills and Nash (my Dad’s music), but I’m pretty sure I could get by.  And to my grandpa, the age of Queen Victoria doesn’t seem that distant either.  If we were transported back to the 1890s, my grandpa would probably feel just fine.  He’d probably be able to show me around.  Memory is very relative.

And before you start asking what this has to do with anything, let alone the title of this episode, allow me to start tapping the stake home.

My grandpa lives in a retirement home for the very elderly.  It provides the most care that any retirement home can give.  What that means is that there are a lot of very old people there.  Most, I would say, are in their 90s.  Some are over 100.  I think the oldest person is 103.  For our purposes, because it’s a nice round number, we’ll say everyone in this home is about 100, or nearing to it.

Now something struck me as I was walking through the lunch hall the last time I visited my grandpa.  Here were about 100 people gathered together all at a very advanced age.  The care givers and guests were largely unimpressed with this fact and carried about their business as usual.  But to me, something struck home, in a deep way–something I had never considered before—and it just blew my mind.

You know how you go to a mechanic and there will be a sign that says, “over 80 years of combined experience,” or something like that?  And you know there are probably quite a few guys in there that have worked 10 or 20 years and that all together with the newbies thrown in you’re looking at a number that adds up to 80 years of experience?

Well, for whatever reason, as I was walking through the lunch hall, my mind started doing this with the people around me.  See if you can shift your mind a little and take this in and maybe it will blow you like it did mine.

If you take just one table of these extremely elderly people—just 4 harmless old folks sitting together eating sandwiches–and you added up their combined life experience, their ages, you would be back in the time of Shakespeare.  There, at that table, is 400 years.  That’s what 400 years looks like!  If they lived consecutive lives, end to end, rather than all living at the same time, you’d be right back in the time of Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth I.  And to these people, their combined 400 years doesn’t feel like that much time.

Now grab a table of 5.  OK, that table would bring us back to the conquest of the Aztecs.  Columbus might still be alive at that table.

If you add those two tables together, you’d be right smack in the middle of the Dark Ages.  Genghis Khan is massing his horde in preparation for his invasion of the world.  Europe is one big forest, and you are either a knight or you’re a baron, or you’re a peasant.  Probably a peasant.  Gothic cathedrals haven’t yet come into vogue.  The Black Death is three generations away (two tables).  That’s all it takes to get us back to the early Medieval Period.

Put four or five tables together and you’re right back to Jesus and Julius Caesar.  Just 4 or 5 tables of these people and you’re back in the Roman Republic!  One more table and we’d have Socrates, Plato, the Buddha and Confucius—now we’re in the Axis Age.  Two More tables and we’re into the Bronze Age when Egypt and Babylon reigned supreme.  There it is, 30 people all together, you line them up, you put them in costumes that represent their respective eras and you have 3000 years of human history, the vast majority of all our culture.  Person 1 is wearing Addidas.  Person 30 is wearing sheep skins.  The time of the Pharaohs is not that far off.

And here’s the big mind bender.  That’s just 30 people.  What would it look like if all the tables were added together?  We’re talking here about 100 people, a comfortably sized retirement home.  If we line everyone up and do the math, we’re looking at a combined 10,000 years of human memory gathered in this rather unspectacular eating hall.  That shoots us past thousands of years of Bronze Age civilization, back into the Neolithic Age, millennia before the first metals were cast.  Back before agriculture.  Back into our deep pre-history in a time when oral tradition, stone tools and woolly mammoths were an everyday experience.

If everyone in the hall stood in a line and you added their ages together, that is what the Ice Age would look like.  And if that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will.

The reason why we’re spending so much time talking about the combined ages of people living in a retirement home is because I want to try to impress on you just how young civilization is.  Not our civilization, but civilization in general.  The ancient world is really not that ancient.  And the time of the horse and buggy is still within human memory.

…

When we talk about the ages of human history, we can gage it in terms of generations of people.  To get to Mozart, you need a table of three elderly people.  To get to Charlemagne, perhaps a larger table of 12.

But when we talk about the vast majority of human existence on this planet, we’re no longer talking about generations.  The first anatomically modern Homo Sapiens appeared in Africa, to the best of our knowledge, around 200,000 years ago.  That’s 200,000 years of human existence where if you were dressed in their clothing and were able to practice their customs, you would be able to fit right in.

Oh, but here’s the catch!  That’s only if you were plunked down into a human settlement!  Because there were other species of human-like creatures who might have been living in the next village over.  I’m talking here about Archaic Homo Sapiens, the last vestiges of our ancestors.  Could you imagine living side by side with a proto-human species?  It makes sense, of course, that it could happen.  I mean, when the first anatomically modern humans mutated from our ancestors, the proto-humans wouldn’t have simply died out.  They were scattered all over the world.  There were many different types of proto-humans wandering the globe, each adapted to their separate environments like Darwin’s finches.  And for a very long time, humans were in a minority.  They would have mixed freely with the proto-humans, lived in their societies (we know this because there is plenty of evidence of humans and Neaderthals mating and producing offspring).  Perhaps the proto-humans would have even thought the humans freakish and weak, and not the other way around.  At a time when you had to be incredibly tough to survive, the Neaderthals and other species might have done better to simply expose the humans, and perhaps they did.  We know that exposing children was a pretty common thing in the ancient world.  Could it have been the same in a Neaderthal society when you had to be really frugal when it came to your family?

And here’s a weird thought: what if the male humans were exposed, being too weak to hunt, but the female humans were left alive?  Could the expansion of humanity be thanks to matrilineal decent?  It’s kind of an improvable thought, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

So what were these Neanderthals?  These creatures, or rather your cousins, would have appeared robust and brutish to you.  Their culture might have been simpler, their language would have had fewer words, perhaps it would have lacked the past or future tenses.  And that would have made organization more difficult.  Humans would have been much better at creating survival strategies and working together to achieve them than would the Neanderthals, and that’s probably why they died off.  We out-competed them.  Pushed them from their land.

There’s a term called ethnogenesis.  It means the creation of ethnicity.  It was first adopted when anthropologists saw African tribes brought together in Rhodesia for the purposes of mining copper.  When they arrived, they were more or less similar to one another.  But due to the close contact and constant interaction, these groups formed boundaries.  Eventually, these boundaries turned into metaphorical walls behind which each of the groups built their cultures.  The intensity of this need to define themselves and distinguish them from other groups saw a rapid development of culture so that by the end of a few years, they each group was quite distinct.

If we can imagine a rapidly expanding population of humans moving into Neaderthal territory, could this have happened?  Could culture have developed that clearly defined a Neanderthal community from a human community?  And how would this affect the groups when resources were as scarce as they were during the Ice Age?  A favoured hunting ground could easily, in my mind, turn into a site where tribal warfare would have taken place, each side vying for the very, very valuable protein.  Keep in mind here that meat was to these people what oil is to us.  It was critical to survival.  In a time and a place where vegetation is almost non-existent, meat becomes critical.  Take the Inuit, for instance.  Before grocery stores were introduced to the far north of Canada, the Inuit relied almost exclusively on meat, and it’s still a formative part of their diet.  What would happen if you take ancient Inuit and pit them against a group of Neanderthals for their hunting grounds?  Which group would have survived?

Individually, the Neanderthals would have been ruthlessly well adapted to the harsh climate, especially during the Ice Age.  They had thicker noses that would allow the freezing air to be warmed before it entered the lungs.  They had a massive Occipital bun, or the part of the brain that allowed for site.  So you can imagine them having hawk-like vision.  They had thicker, more robust bones that could have taken more strain and could hold more muscle, and certainly they did have more muscle.  They would have been immensely strong because of this, much stronger than you or I.  We’re talking about a species of Arnold Swartzenagers here.  Ruthlessly tough and built like tanks.

It makes me wonder, what would it have been like if these archaic humans had survived?  What if we didn’t out-compete them?  Or what if we out-competed them, but rather than killing them off, our early ancestors took them as slaves.  They were kept alive.  How would that have looked as we entered the age of civilization?  Would they have done all the manual labour, such as building the pyramids?  Would the Romans have bred them for their armies?  And how would that have changed history when the barbarians came knocking and they found a super army of Arnold Swartenagers waiting for them?

And what would that look like today?  We have such a huge problem even now with racial discrimination, and people with different color skin are humans.  Imagine extending civil rights to Neanderthals.  What would that look like?  Two species living side by side in a civil society with equal rights.  Going to school together.  Working together.  Is that not a weird, bizarre thought?  And yet, it could have happened if we humans hadn’t been so blood thirsty in our past as to wipe them out.

But what I really want to talk about here is not the Neanderthals and ‘what if they had survived’, but about the whispers we can actually hear from them today.  Their speech, their culture, their beliefs are still around us.  They have survived.

For most of human existence, we were not living in a civilized and literate society.  For a couple hundred thousand years, as modern humans, we lived in the Stone Age.  We lived largely in simple egalitarian societies with only a few dozen people around us.  There would have been some larger groupings, or tribes, that had maybe a few hundred people, and there were likely even chiefdoms, a kind of confederacy of tribes that hadn’t quite reached the stage of monumental architecture that marks a civilization, although that comes later.  These peoples, stretching into our deep past, would have had their own unique explanations of how the world works.  We can even see hints of this from our literature.  I’m talking here about our mythologies, the stories that the ancients told and wrote about.

What I love to think about is just how old these stories are.  The ancient Greeks didn’t invent the idea of Gaia, the mother goddess.  Yet it’s in their mythologies.  This is old stuff.  This is the kind of story that would have gone right back to the beginnings of humanity, and even before it!  Let’s not imagine that archaic homo sapiens didn’t have that fundamental question in mind when they looked up at the night sky.  They would have asked, “what is this place?”  They might not have had the genius required to chart the stars, but certainly they had a sense of wonder.  I sometimes think of wolves gathering in a circle and howling at the full moon and it makes me think, do they have a mythology?  Perhaps not a mythology in the sense of a story, but do they look at the moon with a sense of wonder?  It might be a stretch to think of wolves considering their own existence, but even if we question that, how could we deny the Neanderthals a sense of wonder.

If the Archaic Homo Sapiens thought about their existence, that would bring us back half a million, or even a million years.  That’s a million years of humans looking around them and asking the question, “what is this?”  And what would the answer be?  What’s the natural answer to this question, if you were to boil it down to the most rudimentary level, a level that could be explained with the simplest words and hand gestures?  It would be that all life comes from the fertility of a woman.  That would be the basis for your understanding of the world.  People, animals, bugs what have you, all come from a female.  Each female gives birth to new life, the next generation.  And by extension, you could assume that if you kept going back in time, eventually all life would come from one great singular female.  The earth is fertile.  The earth is like a mother.  The earth must be the mother goddess of all creation, that original female.

The oldest surviving piece of figurative art we have is a 36,000 year old carving of a pregnant woman.  Is that the mother goddess?  Is that Gaia, the earth goddess from Greek mythology?  And is it any accident?

When I read ancient mythology, I can’t help but be blown away.  This is not something that was thought up and written down 30 elderly people ago.  There are strains, whispers, in mythology that stretch back into our deep, deep past.  Into our proto-human past.  This mythology is a part of our genes.  It’s a vestige of collective human memory.

Remember when I said how amazed I was that my Grandpa had a human memory passed down to him that stretched back to the 1830s?  Well, now we’re coming full-swing.  Because when you read a passage in ancient mythology about the mother goddess, you are experiencing perhaps the oldest human memory in the world.  There isn’t much left of it.  Perhaps only a few sentences.  But those simple lines represent the most fundamental and ancient sources of human thought.  They are the collective thoughts of beings who had different bone structures than us, lived in a time when the continents had a different shape—a time when you wouldn’t recognize any of the plants or animals around you.  Those memories have survived for over a million years, and perhaps even many, many millions of years.

The reason why we’re spending a whole episode rambling about proto-humans and retirement homes and mythology is because I want to try to plant this idea that we’re not that far separated from the deep past.  The past is not actually that far away.  Sure the things we wear and the way we speak have changed, but the years that separate us from the deep past are not astronomically great.  To press this home, think of a memory, an old memory that you might have.  A memory from your childhood preferably where you can actually see and smell and touch the world around you.  I’ll pick one.  It’s of a tree I climbed on my school playground.  When you’re in that memory, it doesn’t seem old, does it?  But if you look at a photo from that same year, it sure does look old!  What would a child, who wasn’t even alive during the 9/11 attacks, think when she saw that photo?  She would think you were ancient!  Perhaps it’s in black and white, or if you’re like me it’s in a very odd kind of 80s colouring with rounded edges.  Well guess what?  When we look at the pyramids, we’re just as guilty of over exaggerating age as that little child who says we’re old.  Wow, look at the pyramids… they’re so old!  Look at the art… look at the culture… it’s a fantasy world.  Let me tell you.  When I was a child looking at my father’s photos of when he was growing up, I thought the exact same thing.

The world we’re going to be exploring in the next episode is one that doesn’t have a voice.  At least not a literary voice.  It’s the Copper Age.  And yes, there was a copper age.  First there was a tin age, then there was a copper age, then someone figured out how to mix the two metals and then you have a bronze age.  And the reason why we’re going to be discussing the copper age is because the oldest known Ice Mummy in the world is from that age.  In 1991, some tourists were walking through the Alps and came upon a corpse.  They thought it was a recent death, perhaps at the latest, it was an Austrian soldier from the Great War—a couple of these soldiers were found frozen in the mountains just before this.  The authorities were called in and they brought jack hammers and picks to remove the body.  No one imagined this frozen man predated the pyramids or they might have invited some archaeologists.

I want to discuss this man because he tells us a story.  He rockets us back to an age that most of us never even think about.  This is a real human being.  He has tattoos.  He has DNA.  The last meal he ate was a species of goat-antelope still common in the area today.  This man tells us so much!  We can learn what people wore, how they made tools, where they lived, what they ate, what they felt was important enough to keep with them as they travelled.  But more importantly, this man has a face.  It is a human face from an age before civilization.  And I mean, there had never been civilization on earth before, and this man was one of the last generations of humans, out of 200,000 years of human existence, to experience a world totally void of civilization.  When you look at this man’s face, you can almost sense the last gasps of emotion.  He looks almost tired, as though the blood that had left his body from an arrow wound had exhausted him.  And this last hint of emotion, frozen on his face, is a time capsule that reminds us that the world he lived in was very, very real.  It is a world on the very cusps of massive change.  A change that leads to us in our modern world.  The Iceman, or Otzi as he’s sometimes called, is the face of our deep past.  Soon, that deep past, a past with dark forests and Neanderthals, would be gone.  And the Iceman is its last breath.

Before the Twilight Histories Podcast, I thought I would write a podcast on Ancient Greece.  It was going to follow the linear path used by Mike Duncan in his History of Rome podcast, but using a bit more narrative story telling.  I rejected this podcast style because it seemed too constricting.  I wanted the freedom to jump through time.

Enjoy,

Jordan Harbour

Greek History Podcast – Episode 1

Here we launch the first episode of Greek History, not with terror as the first Greek words come to us from the Mycenaen clay tablets baked with the heat of their burning civilization, and not with rage as the ancient bard opens his classic and the foundation of our modern world.  We launch this first episode with excitement.  This is the first episode in a journey that will take us across the ancient world and into the minds and souls of its protagonists, the Greeks, in what I hope will be a fascinating exploration, not only of who they were, but of who we are today.

But why should we even attempt to understand this little, barbaric community on the outskirts of civilization?  Their land was dry and barren, their populations miniscule, the great land empires rarely gave them even the honour of invasion, and almost never wrote of them except in passing as one of many small pirate nations that would show up on their shores and be expelled.  Why should we give such special consideration to this little people on the shores of civilization?

The answer: precisely because they were on the shores of civilization.  Should it be any wonder that the rational mind, devoid of superstition and oppressive religious institutions that were bonded inseperably to an ancient monarchy, have been nurtured in Greece?  Growing out of the dark ages as small polities, almost egalitarian, the weight of tradition could be shaken off where the backlash of thinking could lead to almost nothing more than strange looks.  The early Greek philosophers were free to gaze up at the heavens, untarnished by the awnings of religious authority, and imagine them something different than what the astrologers of Luxor and Persepolis would describe to their kings.

Because of their freedom from those greater civilizations, the Greeks set down the earliest hints of scientific methods by which we should discover how the world actually works, separate from superstition or revelation.  In Greece, it was not permitted only for priests to know the secrets of the universe.  All human beings who dared to ask the question ‘why’ could search for an answer and hope to find it through thought and experiment.  And what is most important was that it was accepted that not knowing was OK.  Socrates was awarded the title of the most wise man in Greece by the Delphic oracle for his statement ‘I know that I know not.’

From this ancient heritage of seeking knowledge through reason has come a practice of medicine in our own time that has prolonged average life expectancies to ages unimaginable had the divinations of the Hittites or Assyrians outlasted their civilizations.  It was a Greek who first looked at the world and saw atoms and not spirits.  The seedling roots of scientific enquiry has led to the combustion engine, to flight and to the exploration of the planets.  Today, we have an image of the deepest universe that could never have been dreamed of in a land that could only raise stones to the skies.

And the Greeks developed democracy.  In their small city-states, the Greeks could find their voices and see their numbers.  When the great majority of their strength could gather in a single square, one voice rising above the crowd could bring down a monarchy.  And it did.  The Greeks came to loath tyranny and fought for their freedom in some cases to the last man.

Their art too was democratized.  The highly ritualized art of the Egyptians once the dominant form in Dark Age Greece was challenged by a society that valued the human form more highly than the rituals that suppressed it.  To the Greeks, the value of humanity was not as fodder for gods, but was heroic in itself.  From the need to express this humanism came the diophoros, the discobolis and the Venus di Milo.

Theatre developed out of a highly ritualized sacrifice to the gods where conformity and sanctity suppressed the human will to express.  But then, in an explosion of daring, the first man was drawn from the chorus and spoke to the audience.  Then it became two men, then three and over time the chorus shrank into the wings, allowing actors to show the stories that would make them famous.

The theatre became the bullhorn for revolution.  It was a pendulum that swung violently one way, only to return with a devastating momentum.  It provoked war and it sought peace.  It expelled culture and enforced tradition.  The Greek play molded the very course of history.  And not just for the Greeks!  The power of the Greek play has lived on through the ages, shaping the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare and their plots can be found in almost every modern film.  Greek theatre has become a staple in our world, encompassing world culture and leading the ideas of those in Japan as in Spain.

When Nelson Mandela was in prison, he and the other inmates produced a play written out from memory on scraps of toilet paper and passed through prison bars like knife shanks ready for war.  The guards imagined the prisoners were only going to produce a simple, fun play for their annual Christmas show.  Instead, they received a powerful and dangerous message of unity and rage that would shake the guards and rock the very foundations of apartheid.  Far from a jolly Christmas show, South Africa got the Antigone.

In that ancient world where nine deaths in battle could bring a town to mourning, a single individual was permitted to rise to the greatest of his human potential, a feat not known in any of the far mightier civilizations that surrounded it.  And that small and ancient human voice written in parchment on sun baked rocks where only vines could survive, could grow exponentially through millennia to become a deafening roar capable both of crashing nations and of building them.

Unlike other podcasts that explore Greek history, I hope to offer a view of the Greeks far beyond their own borders.  They were deeply a part of the world they inhabited, yet they were on the shores of it.  Where the greatest Greek achievements of the Bronze Age formed irregular walls on the tops of hills, Bronze Age Egypt’s sentry forts could dwarf a Roman provincial capital.  The Greeks themselves were beyond the walls of civilization and lived on the scraps of culture passed through their gates.  Their world was that of pirate strongholds and they lived like chiefdoms in a barbaric, Mad Max world—a place where the Pharoah would look to only with contempt.

We will start with the great civilizations that walled themselves against the barbarity of Bronze Age Greece.  We will discover the cultures at the heart of Bronze Age civilization and learn what scraps managed to escape to the islands of the Aegean and beyond.  The Greeks began their rise as a part of the ancient world, but only as a satellite nation of loose states.  Let us start then with this in mind and explore the richer states that formed a cradle of civilization, a necklace of cultures that stretched from the Nile to the Indus and with populations far greater than that of the Pax Romana.

From here, we will delve into the fall of the Bronze Age, easily the greatest human catastrophe in world history.  The fall of the Roman Empire was a transition from abundance to poverty, from a unified state to a collection of feudal entities.  And even then, the Eastern Empire would last another thousand years beyond the ceding of the eternal city.  The fall of the Roman Empire was a dramatic event.  But it was nothing compared to the human die-off that branded the end of the Bronze Age.  Whole human populations were wiped out.  Massive migrations of rugged famine survivors would flood into the dust bowl civilizations only to destroy them, and would then starve to death themselves.  Civilization itself, was almost lost to humanity when the Bronze Age came to its dramatic close.

From the Bronze Age, we will explore the strange world that came after.  This was a world that looked much like the partially sedentary post-glacial period when irrigation was first invented.  And yet there were the odd stamps of the greater civilization dotted through their culture.   The ragged Greeks lived in the shadows of massive stone fortresses, the works of cyclopses who must have come before.  And the Greeks had heroic stories of their past when men were the sons of gods.  These were the lores of Homer that formed the bulwark of the Classical Age.

We will explore the fascinating rise of the Greeks from buildings made of wood and hide, to those of stone and marble.  As the Greeks began to sail to lands beyond their fishing grounds, they came into contact with other survivors of the Bronze Age die-off, the remnants of the Egyptians and the rising superstars, the Persians.  Greek art began to look oriental with stoic figures in Egyptian mode.  They took on the alphabet of the Phonecians, an Aramaic peoples who worshipped the Biblical demon Bal, and they learned that their olive oils would make them rich.

We will linger over the rise of the Classical period from its Archaic roots to the fall of Athens at the hand of Alexander.  We will visit the lives of Solon, Peisistratis, Aristotole and Plato.  We will examine the roots of philosophy and will delve into the institution of the phalanx.  We will uncover the story of the Parthenon, we’ll recount the heroic last stand of the Spartans at Thermopolae, and we’ll outline the disastrous war of atrician that we now call the Peloponnesian war.

Then we will chart the rise of Philip of Macedon who became the hegemon of all Greece and who bore a son that would conquer most of the known world.  Our scope once more will spread across the continents where Greek paintings would be laid over the tombs of the Egyptians, city streets would be built into the mountains of Afghanistan and the Kings Highway that ran from Persepolis to Sardis would turn from stone into a river of gold.  Even in India, the Greeks would leave their stamp.  The questions of king Olinda, the story of a Greek ruler who brought a Buddhist monk to his court, would bring the teachings of the Indus to Athens.

After the death of Alexander, the world was forever changed.  The Hellenistic age that followed left the world of democracy behind and moved into the monumental.  The cities of Hallicarnasus, Pergamon and Alexandria vied for cultural dominance by erecting massive temples, impressive theatres, statuary, gymnasia, markets and of course libraries.  At the port of Alexandria, a ship could not leave under law without handing over its books to be copied.  The scholars who lived within the walls of the library charted the stars, catalogued the works that would inspire Shakespeare, discovered the world was round and invented steam power.

This world would not last.  The Greeks were inevitably swallowed up by the more warlike peoples that surrounded them.  In his Histories, Herodotus describes the known world from the Pillars of Heracles to the far distant realms of India, from the white-capped Russian steppes down to the horn of Africa.  But he never once spoke of the Romans who would one day march through the streets of Athens and burn down Corinth.  He never spoke of the Central Asian steppe tribes that would swallow up the Greeks from the East, first with the Parthians, and finally the Turks.

During the Classical Age when Greece was germinating its greatest minds, the future destroyers of its civilization were unknown to them.  The greatest tragedy was not the burning of the Library of Alexandria.  At that time there were numerous cities with libraries just as robust.  The greatest tragedy in Greek history was the final and inexorable destruction of the very last of those great and ancient libraries, the mighty library at Constantinople.  The Turkish flag today shows the sign of the moon as it appeared the night that library was destroyed.  This was the true symbol of the end of Greece.

But just as the material of Greek civilization was destroyed, the vision of its people was re-born.  The Venitians who helped defend the great city of Constantinople emptied the library and copied its works as fast as they could.  They printed books of instruction so the people of Europe could learn Greek.  With the help of the printing press, they opened the doors to Greek learning, and the ancient world flooded into the 15^th century castles and monasteries.  As minarets were raised along the dome of the Haigha Sophia, Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides and Sophocles were raising the consciousness of those in London and Berlin.  With the fall of Constantinople, the Age of Enlightenment began in Europe.

I hope you will join me on this journey into the Greek world.  We have a road ahead of us and it is long.  The Greek story stretches from the prehistoric mists, through to the Bronze Age, the Dark Ages and the Golden Age of Antiquity.  It expands to encompass the known world under Alexander the Great and becomes a provincial backwater for Rome.  Greece was the jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire, the holder of the last great library of the ancient world and the walls against which the tsunami of Islam and the Crusades would crash.  And as the fortune of Greece dipped into Balkan poverty, its legacy came to shape the world.

We owe the Greeks this story, and although this story has been told in many ways and many times, yet I hope in this telling we can find some thrill in reliving their adventures.  Please join me for episode 2 of the Greek History Podcast where we will travel back in time, and explore the early roots of the peoples who we call the Greeks.

Episode 2: The Unquenchable ‘Why’

Welcome to Greek History Podcast, Episode 2: The Unquenchable Why.  In this episode, we leave the introductions behind and move into plot.

This is a history of the Greeks.  And as a history of the Greeks, it is also a history of the human mind and the rise towards civilization.  It is a history of that spark of genius that defines us as unique amongst the animal kingdom and most importantly, it is a history of the question ‘why?’

To understand the Greeks, we need to know what kind of a creature stood on the Ionic shores and gazed up at the night sky.  The story of this early thinking man does not begin in the age of Odysseus, nor in the age of Parmenedies, Plato or Aristotle.  To begin a history of transportation with the Ferrari would do an incredible disservice to the chariot.

Because this is a history of the Greeks and because our theme is the question ‘why’, we will begin our story at its very roots: with the human mind.

The question ‘why’ is not simply a word we use to express a thought.  The word itself is the thought without which there would be no thinking.  There could be no gazing at the stars and no wonder without the word.  It is the word itself that has the power to shape the consciousness of its user, and its invention is the greatest chicken and egg story in our history.

To understand our species, we have to understand our capacity for language.  All of the other elements that make our species gifted–our opposable thumbs, our bi-pedalism—all of these are dwarfed by our ability to connect abstract thoughts.  We would have remained an unremarkable animal without this capacity and it is probably this capacity that allowed our unfit species to survive.

There once was a university classroom and in this classroom were deaf people.  One of the students had never spoken or signed before in his life and he stood in the corner alone.  The teaching aid was interested in this boy and approached him one day.  She signed a greeting to him introducing herself.  He signed the same exact greeting right back, even using her name.  No, no, she signed, trying to explain that it was her name and not his.  But the boy didn’t get it.  He stared back at her blankly.

She tried for days to communicate with the boy.  She would point at a table and sign ‘table’.  She would point at a desk and say ‘desk’.  But even though the boy would sign right back, he couldn’t get the concept.  He would stare right back at her blankly.

She next tried to act out a conversation between the boy and her.  She would pretend to be a teacher explaining that the desk had a sign.  She would then jump up and pretend to be a student who would get it, ‘ah-ha! That’s a desk!’

Still the boy looked blank.

Exhausted, the teacher gave up.  She ignored the boy and went off to work with the other students.  The boy looked at her questioningly, perhaps even a little hurt.  And then he went off to his corner to be alone.

After a while, the boy’s face began to crumple.  He looked thoughtful.  His eyes began to dart around the room from object to object faster and faster becoming more frantic until finally the teacher looked over and saw him crying.  He pointed at the table, and the teacher gave the sign for ‘table’.  He signed back excitedly.  He then pointed at the desk and she signed ‘desk’.  He signed back, tears rolling down his face.  Everything he pointed to had a name.  The world broke open.

When we watch a child developing his linguistic abilities, we could very well be watching the film of evolution in fast motion.  To a child without language, the world is non-dualistic.  There is no sense of self and object, but every part of the world is integrated.  The child may recognize things within this pantheistic world, yet not feel them to be distinct from himself.

At an early age, before the child can even speak, he begins the slow process of defining objects in space.  A mother and child are able to communicate using a kind of baby sign language where the child recognizes and defines objects.  But these objects are like islands separated by vast seas that the child is unable to bridge.

A lab rat is placed in a large box.  On one side of the box is hidden a treat, and on the other side there is nothing.  If the rat is placed in the box on multiple occasions, it will learn which side of the box has the treat and will go to it every time.  It therefore understands the concept of left and right.  It is able to navigate itself within space.

When the box is spun around, the rat naturally has more difficulties finding the treat.  It has no frame of reference whereby it can accurately find it.  So it gets it wrong.  That’s predictable.

But the experimenter is kind and wants to help the rat.  She paints one of the sides blue and the treat is placed on the opposite side.  This should give the rat a frame of reference so that it can find the food.  Unfortunately, again it fails.  When the box is spun around at random and the rat is placed inside, it’s as if there was no blue wall at all.  The navigational cue is completely lost on the poor rat.

The reason why the rat is unable to use this navigational cue is because it is unable to connect two thoughts.  It is unable to process the idea that the treat is opposite the blue wall.  Treat—Opposite—Blue Wall.  The word ‘opposite’ is a bridge that does not exist for the lab rat.

The interesting thing is that the same rule applies to young children age 0 to 6.  When the same experiment is done on children from this age group, they are unable to use the blue wall as a navigational aid.  When they enter the box, they go to one side or the other, regardless of which side the blue wall is on.  They are also unable to bridge concepts using language.

But when the magic number 6 comes around, suddenly the children can do it.  And they do it remarkably well.  As soon as they go into the box, they get it, ‘ah, the treat is opposite the blue wall’.  Objects that formerly had names and were floating out in a vast sea are suddenly linked up.  And these bridges start to appear  everywhere.  The child is undergoing a paradigm shift from shapes to concepts and the world again is broken open.

Before 1970, there was no school for the deaf in Nicaragua.  Children who grew up deaf would be surrounded by family and friends who were unable to communicate with them other than through the most rudimentary physical gestures.  The children would see everyone around them moving their mouths in strange and rapid ways and they seemed to understand something that the deaf kids just couldn’t get.  They couldn’t know that they were missing out on language and they had no concept of sound.

Then one day in 1970, a deaf school was built for them.  All the deaf children were rounded up and put into this deaf school.  But it wasn’t very good.  They were taught Spanish poorly without the children really grasping the concept of words, and there was no sign language to communicate with them.

But one thing the kids did have that was never in their lives before was other deaf kids.  And between classes and as they gathered on the bus, they would play together and communicate.

Eventually, signs started to appear.  They were pretty simple signs.  Rather than needing to point at an object, the students could sign some of them.  Their own unique sign language began to develop within that group of children.  Language was appearing where it hadn’t existed before.

When that class graduated a new generation grew up beneath them, using the rudimentary sign language.   And they evolved it and grew it.  And then the next generation appeared and still the language evolved.

A linguist travelled to Nicaragua to see this mysterious sign language.  She knew that languages could develop from nothing, but it had never been seen before.

The linguist visited the oldest group first.  They were in their 30s.  When they communicated, their gestures were broad and expressive, using the whole body.  But they were also very limiting.  There was only one sign for thinking, for example, and that was basically just putting a finger to the temple.

Next, the linguist went to the young students.  She noticed that their signs were almost all done from the wrist up and they were quite graceful.  They had a much broader vocabulary and had 10 different words for thinking.  They could also connect complex ideas in ways that the older signers couldn’t.

The linguist wanted to go deeper.  She played a cartoon for each of the signers.  In the cartoon, a child took a toy train out of the toy box and was playing with it, not letting his friend have a try.  When he left the room, the upset friend hid the train under the bed.  The linguist stopped the video.

She asked the older group where they thought the boy would look for the train when he got back into the room.  Would it be under the bed or in the toy box?

The older signers almost unanimously said he would look under the bed, even though the boy couldn’t have predicted where the train would be.  It was as though these signers couldn’t get the concept.  There was a mental leap that they weren’t making.

When the linguist asked the same question of the younger signers with the more advanced language, they got it.  The boy would look in the toy box for the train, regardless of whether or not the train was actually there.

The conclusion of the study is this: just like with children aged 0-6 that cannot make abstract connections between islands of thought, adults without an advanced language are not able to grasp simple concepts that required leaps between islands of thought.  But those with an advanced symbolic language are.

Without language, we cannot think the way we think.  Without language we cannot wonder at things.  There can be only a very limited curiosity when there is no language to express it.  The night sky as seen by our Greek philosopher standing at the shore of the Ionic coast could not exist in the same way to a human without language.  It would appear to the languageless person as an extention of the self and not as something separate to be curious about.  The mystery of creation is a question unasked by those without language.  There is no mythology for wolves and there was no philosophy for the Astralopithicines.

But when our early ancestors began to create symbols for objects the world broke open.  These symbols might have been hand or body gestures to our early ancestors, as an infant is able to do.  Eventually, as our mouths and vocal chords evolved to allow us to create more precise sounds, symbols would have moved from the body to the face.

In time, and with the expansion of the frontal lobe in Homo Sapiens, the capacity for complex thought would have linked these symbols with verbs.  The six year old human would outthink even the most fit Homo Erectus or Neaderthal.

And it is exactly this trait that would allow Homo Sapiens to survive the greatest disaster in human history.  When the Ice Age had run its course, the humans that survived would have literally evolved over 100,000 years to be ruthlessly intelligent and bizzarly social.  They were able to survive in all climates and gather in numbers like herds.  Unlike their robust and segregated cousins the Homo Erectus, Homo Habilis and Neanderthal, humans could work together, plan and thrive under circumstances that would wipe out their less adaptable relatives.  It is no accident that humans today stand alone and that it was the human mind that triumphed.

Next week, we will delve deeper into the evolution of the human mind as it plays out through the backdrop of the Ice Age.  We will learn about the first village in human history and how people began to work together and create culture.  We will learn of the rise of ideology and the archaeology of the search for meaning.  And we will discover how the melting ice would unleash the finely tuned, highly socialized and viciously intelligent humans upon the earth.  That’s all coming up next week on the Greek History Podcast.

Greek History Podcast – Episode 3

Our eyes open and we are in the tundra, a landscape of thick moss and sprawling algae that blankets hills that only years prior were scraped bare to the rock by the glaciers that still stand like a wall, a centanal to the north.  It is spring, and the glaciers are melting in the sun as they have done so for years.  Their shores are a silent, stoic tidal wave compared to the approach of life, the moss, the birds, hares, fox, yet they are being routed by the warmth, its white-wasteland chased by a panoply of colours, red, brown, orange and even purple and yellow.  There are bees hopping from flower to flower, and grasshoppers are chirping, giving the new tundra a cozy feel that beckons us to laze into the mossy bed and gaze up at the clouds.

We hear a feighnt sound of water in the distance and intrigued, we walk towards it.  We discover a small creek leading from the glaciers.  We drink deeply from the creek and it tastes fresh and it’s ice cold.

The creek soon leads us down through the hills and we journey into valleys where other creeks combine to form rivers.  As the day passes, the rippling of the river turns into a roar of water, and finally the smashing of rapids as one great stream fastens into another, far greater and far faster.

We see a man by the river.  He is wearing an intricate costume of leather and fur.  His boots are thickly padded for walking through rocky mountain paths or over glacial hills.  His hair is long and braided in places.

The man is pushing a canoe into the river.  We holler to greet him, and he turns to us rapidly.  Somehow we understand his language.  He asks us suspiciously who we are, while pulling a stone spear from his boat.  We smile and respond with our names, opening our hands to show we have no weapons.  Walking down the hill, we ask him where he is from, and he tells us he is three days down-stream where he lives with his tribe.  He came here to hunt for river stones that are only found her, pushed up by the rapids.  He uses them to build tools, and he shows us some, a composite tool composed of sharpened microblades inserted into a carved reindeer antler, and a finely pointed hand axe used for breaking bone. He offers us dried reindeer meat from a pouch and, not knowing exactly how to return the favour, we give him a keychain with a small flashlight on it.  It may not have been the wisest gift as his eyes raise to us as though we were either gods or demons.  We ask him if he would take us in his boat downstream and he nods his consent, still unsure of whether he should trust us.

We spend three days and nights with our new guide, travelling down the river, and slowly he opens to us and offers us warm smiles and laughter.  At night, he points up at the stars and describes how the mother goddess brought animals to the earth.  He complains to us that hunting is not what it used to be.  The larger animals are disappearing and more and more he and his family are relying on fish and berries, as well as smaller animals that are more difficult to catch.  It is tough, and he has to work harder than he did in the past.  He brings out a wooden carving of a pregnant woman, the fertile earth goddess of his ancestors, and describes his family and how he is blessed with five children.  Five mouths to feed.

Our new friend asks us where we’re going, and we try to remember.  What was it?  Time travel can be so hard on the mind and the world before this ancient land seems to us like a dream.  Something about… Greece.  Yes, Greece!  We had come back in time to visit the Greeks and wanted to see that watery world at its very roots.  And so we had set the dial back 10,000 years and placed ourselves at the end of the ice age in the heart of Europe, in a tundra, hugged by the foothills of mountains that will one day be known in a language not yet invented as ‘Alps’, and the great sprawling river that finds its source in those snow caps, ‘Danube’.

But we are a long way from all that.  In our lazy wanderings, splashing through glacial creeks, floating down river valleys past mossy tundra full of bees and crickets, we have not yet seen more than a sapling in a land that will one day be so rich with sprawling trees that a squirrel would be able to hop a thousand miles without ever touching the ground.

And this river is where it all begins.

As we travel down the current, the landscape changes.  Tundra is replaced with saplings and these with a scrubby boreal forest, fast encroaching on the tundra.  Our guide tells us it is easier to hunt in the forest.  There are deer and wild boar there, not quite as plentiful as the bison and reindeer herds of his ancestors, but things are changing.  His world is changing.

Finally, we come to a bend in the river that leaves a quiet, shallow bed of water in the stream.  He pulls the boat over and he gets out.  We try to follow.

After listening to podcaster like Dan Carlin and Mike Duncan, I was inspired to write my own.  I had no idea I would write so much before I finally narrowed in on a format I could work with!  This podcast, the Discoverers, was my first attempt.  There were some good things in it, but I decided to scrap it because after an initial recording I sounded really awful.  I mean, I wasn’t using my normal voice.  I also think I was rushing the process a little too much and I thought I could write better.  So I started over.

Enjoy.  Or not.  It’s quite long.

Jordan Harbour

Discoverers

History through the eyes of great minds

Episode I

The Life and Times of Socrates: Part I

Before we begin this episode, I want to describe for you what these podcasts will be about.  Essentially, we’ll be talking about the great minds in history.  The movers and shakers.  People that moved history forward.  We’ll be talking about such as figures as Julius Caesar, Galileo, Jane Austen, JS Bach and other figures from history that in their own way made a difference—whether artistic or military, for better …or for worse.

But we’ll be telling their story in a different way than you might expect.   Rather than present a narrative outline of events – In 1937, George Orwell was wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and narrowly escaped capture – I’d like explore the deeper meaning of events.  What did this war mean to Orwell?  What was going on in his head?  What were the smells, the sights, the daily living experiences of the Spanish Civil War for George Orwell?

What we’ll be discussing is the world through one person’s eyes.  And hopefully, by exploring the tactile, visceral experiences of that person — the inner world as well as the outer world — we will gain some deeper insight into why they moved history in the way they did.

Now of course to do this, we have to exercise a little imagination.  And when we exercise imagination, we come dangerously close to the edges of what history can do.  But I think that’s what sometimes needs to be done with history.  The purpose of history is, after all, to remind us of the past.  And what better way to remind us than to relive it in the theatre of our imaginations.

So I invite you to join me on this journey.  Be prepared to expand your imagination.  Fill it with the thoughts and feelings, with the landscapes of these fantastic and sometimes strange worlds we’ll be exploring.

I’d like to start this series with a rather complex figure.  Socrates.  The reason why I have chosen Socrates is because he is a prime example, a martyr even, of the quest to move humanity forward.  He saw the ills in his society, he saw the corruption, the senseless violence, and all of these stemming from a belief in a thing that to Socrates was simply not true!  It was a common belief in, what to Socrates, were mere assumptions about life.  And he fought with the people that held these assumptions.  Every single person Socrates came into contact with, he challenged.  He smouldered them with logic and turned their deeply held beliefs into dust.

Socrates wanted nothing more than to change his society and the way it viewed the world.  He wanted to live in a wise and a just society.  And he was killed for this.

People don’t like being told… they’re wrong.

So who was Socrates?

First of all, we have to know our sources.  Almost everything we know about Socrates was written by his star pupil, Plato.  That poses a slight problem, because we see Plato using Socrates as the mouthpiece for his own later philosophies—Plato’s Philosophies.  But there are others who wrote about Socrates… Xenophon, Aristophanes… and our accounts of him co-inside with many events in history.

Socrates was born in 469 BC in Athens.  To give you an idea of what was going on during his life, when Socrates was 12 years old, Pericles began his so-called ‘golden age’ in Athens.  When he was 20, Rome, a cultural backwater at the time, first wrote down its laws.  In this same year, Herodotus wrote his histories of the known world (not even mentioning Rome, by the way).  While Herodotus was reciting his histories down in the Agora – the marketplace, the Parthenon was being constructed.  Socrates would have spent all the years of his 20s watching this iconic building going up.  When he was 38, Sparta and Athens began the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that would leave the Greek world weakened for the Macedonians to step in.  This war, in which Socrates actually fought, didn’t end until he was 57 years old.  Socrates was executed by the Athenians when he was 60.

Socrates would have met a catalogue of some of the greatest figures in history during his years in Athens.  Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Pericles, Themistocles, Phidias, Hippocrates, and of course Plato.   He was responsible for a system of thought that would predominate through the rest of the ancient world.  His torch was carried by Plato down to Aristotle who was the teacher of Alexander the Great, a man who extended the borders of Greece to India where the natives along the Indus Valley would have been instructed in Socrates’ teachings.  The lessons of Socrates continued to be taught until Plato’s Academy was finally shut down in 529 AD, over a thousand years after his death.  Socrates is still considered one of the most important minds in history.

When we think of the Ancient Greeks, the first thing that comes to our minds is knowledge, art, literature, philosophy.  The Greeks are the roots of our civilization.  And especially from 5^th century Athens, the golden age of the Parthenon, we can make the grievous mistake of assuming that’s what they were like.  In fact, the Greeks were much different.

The ancient world was not a peaceful place.  Slavery and endemic warfare were common experiences in everyone’s life.  Every generation would have sent their young men to battle, and they would have waited impatiently to see if the army that returned did so in victory, or to plunder.  It was not uncommon in the ancient world for weird barbaric things to happen, such as the male population of a city being wiped out, and the invading army taking over their families.  Imagine being a woman, watching your husband killed in the streets, and then have the man who killed him move in and raise your children!  It seems incredible, yet we hear about this kind of thing happening as if it were common place.

Or imagine living in a city where you had to give up one of your children to be burnt alive in a public ceremony along with tons of other children.  Well, that’s exactly what happened in Carthage, one of the most powerful, and one of the most modern cities from antiquity.  This was a city whose apartment buildings would rise to 6 storeys in the metropolitan centre!  Most European cities today don’t have buildings that tall!  We often think of Rome when we imagine the killing of people for sport in horrifically cruel ways.  But this is something that was common throughout the ancient world.

Violence in antiquity was a different sort of beast.  It was ruthless.  It was genocide.  And even though we’d like to think of the Greeks as a peace-loving and enlighten group of philosopher-citizens, the truth is… they weren’t.  They were every bit as savage and barbaric as their neighbours.  And as warfare moved away from skirmishes between city states, and towards a large scale international event that took many, many years and cost the participants everything they had, the stakes were raised.  And when the stakes were raised, so too was the violence.  People are much more capable of performing atrocities when they realize the price of failure is death.  And the Greeks never had a problem committing atrocities.

We might wonder why the ancient world was so violent.  But then of course we might ask the same of the 20^th century, or the 17^th, or any century during the Middle Ages… And yet there’s something unique about ancient violence.  It can sometimes seem much more like Waffen SS violence than a kind of Wellington violence, or an Eisenhower violence.  There’s something about ancient violence that seems to stem from a deeper ideology.  It comes from an almost religious conviction that violence is fundamentally good.

Consider for moment the Iliad.  The Iliad was to the Greeks as important as the Bible is to the Christians.  It was the fundamental source of their culture.  It carried in it their greatest stories, it described their values, their customs, their ancestry.  The Iliad was a compilation of who the Greeks were.  Even in the time of Socrates, a time long after it had ceased to be an oral history, a man’s merit was still judged by his ability to memorize the Iliad.   Socrates was proud of his knowledge of the Iliad and on numerous occasions would show up his challengers by out-versing them.  When an opponent would produce one or two lines, Socrates would prattle off ten.  And on any subject.

So what is the Iliad?  The Iliad is the story of the Trojan War.  Almost the entire story takes place on the fields of Troy.  And everything in this story revolves around Greece’s greatest hero, Achilles.  At the beginning of the book, Achilles is sulking in his tent.  The leader of the expedition, Agamemnon, stole a woman Achilles believed he had rightfully won in battle.  Agamemnon refused to give her back, and Achilles refused to fight until he did.

Now the rest of the Greeks begged Achilles to join the battle.  They were slowly being beaten back to their ships and they needed their hero to lead them.

Eventually, Patroklos, Achilles friend, agreed to go into battle with them.  He was killed by Tory’s great hero, Hektor.  This sent Achilles into a rage.  He put on his armour, given to him by the gods, and entered the front ranks.

A terrible violence ensued where countless Trojans lose their lives until Achilles finally caught Hektor.  He threw his spear into Hektor’s neck.   As Hektor lay dying on the ground, he begged Achilles not to spoil his body, but to return it to his parents.  Achilles refused.   The Iliad says,

“He pierced the sinews at the back of both his feet from heel to ankle and passed thongs of ox-hide through the slits he had made: thus he made the body fast to his chariot, letting the head trail upon the ground. Then when he had put the goodly armour on the chariot and had himself mounted, he lashed his horses on and they flew…”

When his rage subsided, he did eventually return Hektor’s body to his weeping father.  And thus ends the Iliad.

The lessons from the Iliad are clear.  Violence is honourable.  It is right and just to kill your enemies and to plunder their bodies.  The Iliad tells us that the honour gained from fighting in the front ranks is only matched by that gained by killing a great man and taking his possessions.

Achilles, having his plunder taken by Agamemnon, clearly had his honour tarnished.  He is in a bind.  If he fights, his honour will be diminished for he’ll have given up his prize.  But if he abstains from battle, he’ll lose face because he’s not fighting in the front ranks with the rest of the Greeks.

He must have an honourable way to get back into the war.  And he is given one.  Revenge.

All Greeks held these lessons to be the highest principals in their culture.  Honour, plunder, death in battle… these were the highest ideals.  To do good to your friends and harm to your enemies was the catch all phrase.  And here’s the thing that baffles us with our deeply inscribed Christian values.  Both sides of this equation are equal!  While we feel that it’s best to turn the other cheek in a conflict, the Greeks would do everything in their power to destroy the people they didn’t like.  It’s just as important, to the Greeks, to harm someone you don’t like, as it is to help someone you do.

Nowhere in Greece was this set of values more evident than in Sparta.  In fact, Sparta took these cultural values and institutionalized them.   Spartan society became a kind of weird experiment that saw the lessons from the Iliad taken to their natural extremes.

The Spartans had a story that sums up the whole Spartan experience.  It was a story that was passed on through the generations, and that travelled like a grass fire through Greece.  When a Greek mom wanted her child to be good, she would tell him this story and you can bet he’d be thankful he wasn’t born in the Peloponnese.   It went kind of like this.

There was once a Spartan boy who was scavenging for food.  He managed to corner a fox and wrestled it to the ground.  No sooner had he pinned the animal than his barracks leader ordered him to attention.  Fearing he would receive a terrible beating if he was caught with the fox, he hid it under his cloak.  The barracks leader stood there for a long time challenging the boy not to move.  Meanwhile, under his cloak, the fox began scratching at the boy’s stomach.  Flesh turned to innards but the boy remained firm.  Eventually, the fox crawled into his stomach and the boy collapsed, dead.

The system of enforced honour developed by the Spartans was nothing less than insane.  The violence and psychological trama inflicted upon Spartans from childhood until they died in battle was so ruthless it makes the Iliad seem like a children’s book.

When a Spartiate was born, he was not owned by his mother, but by the community.  And because of this, he had to go through some tests.   The child would first be bathed in wine.  Now we must keep in mind that Greek wine is not like our modern wine.  It was extremely strong and had to be mixed with water before drinking.  So this was like dropping a baby into a bucket of vodka to see if it could swim.

If the baby survived, it would be brought to the leaders of the community for inspection.  It was up to them to decide if the baby was worthy to be a Spartan.  If it was not, it was… discarded.  Again, if you remember the Waffen SS.  This is eugenics.  This is the creation of the Master Race.

If a baby was accepted by the leaders, it would be handed off to a community nurse who would then raise the child as best she could in Spartan values, which meant soldiering.

Boys were sent off to military school when they were only 6 or 7.  There they were drilled ruthlessly in an experience that can only be considered institutionalized child abuse, by our standards.  Always hungry, the boys were expected to survive without being fed.  Their instructors told them stealing wasn’t wrong unless they were caught.  And if they were caught, they were beaten.  The barrack leaders responsible for ‘educating’ the boys were not that much older than them and they took the role of bully quite seriously.

This was the ideal model for the rest of the Greeks.  Greek intellectuals thronged to this system.  Everyone was envious of the Spartans because they brought the treasured Greek value of honour through strength to the extreme.

And it worked!  The Spartans were the most powerful city state in Greece!  Whatever they said, happened.  The rest of the Greeks were awestruck, but also terrified of the Spartans.  They had conquered vast tracks of land in the Peloponnese and had enslaved a large population of Greeks, the Helots.  This enslaved population did everything for the Spartans which allowed them, in turn, to focus 100% of their efforts on training for battle.  It was a fantastic system, according to the rest of the Greeks.  While the Athenians had to toil in the fields for a living, the Spartans simply took whatever they wanted.  And that was truly honourable.

…

In the opening years of the 5^th century, in Socrates’ parent’s generation, the Athenians got themselves into trouble.  In a huge way!  The Islands of the Aegean decided to revolt against their Persian overlords.  And Athens promised to lend a hand.

Now let’s just look at the Persian Empire for a moment.  This was a vast empire.  The largest empire the world had ever known.  It stretched from Egypt to Russia, from Turkey to India.  This was a huge land power with immense wealth.  It owned the great cities of Babylon, Luxor, Susa and could raise an army that reached, so it’s said, into the hundreds of thousands.

When Athens lent the rebel islands 20 ships for their revolt, they, by proxy, declared war on the Persians.   And it wasn’t long before the Persians came knocking.

One by one, the Persians toppled the rebel strong holds.  In the early stages of the game, they destroyed Miletus, the source of the rebellion.  A city in modern day Turkey.  This was a great and powerful city in the Aegean world, and when news came to Athens that the Persians burnt it to the ground, enslaved the women, killed the men… they were terrified!

A playwrite in Athens put on a show that depicted the sacking of Miletus.  It was so frightening, that the people of Athens had him arrested.  They put him on trial and fined him heavily, banning him from ever touching the subject again.  Every Athenian saw the sacking of Miletus and looked around at their own city.  The Persians were coming.

Envoys from Persia arrived at Athens and demanded Land and Water.  This was the symbolic way of giving yourself to the Persians.  The Athenian diplomats who responded to this envoy refused.  The line was drawn.  And many Athenians were unhappy with this line.  A huge part of Attica wanted to simply give in to the Persian demands.  They were lucky enough the Persians were even willing to talk!  Give them land and water, dissolve the democracy and set up a Persian Satrap in Athens, they said.  They’d lose their freedom, but at least they wouldn’t lose their lives!

But it was too late.  The envoys had sailed.  Now they had to wait for the Persians to come.

Eventually, the Persians did come.  When word came they were about to land, the Athenians sent their fastest runner, Phidippides, off to Sparta to beg for help.  The Spartans hummed and hawed over the request, and finally told the runner they might show up the following week, after a religious festival.  Phidippides ran back to Athens with the bad news.  They would be on their own.

The Persians landed at Marathon on the Attic coast.  The Athenians put on their armour and went out to meet them.

I can’t help but think of Britain during the Second World War when I think about this battle.  I know the analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are, but there is a similarity in the experience the British went through when they dealt with their Persian War.  Hitler controlled a vast empire that included, along with his allies, some of the most powerful and wealthy lands in the world.  They had an absolutely massive army.  Between 1939 and 1945, Hitler fielded 16 million men from all the nations in Europe.  By comparison, at the opening stages of the war, Churchill had only 4 division defending England.  When the English asked the Americans to help them push back this massive and impossible offensive, the Americans refused, leaving Britain alone.

So there were the Athenian citizens, isolated and frightened.  They sent their hoplites off to Marathon, probably expecting they would never return.  When the Athenians got there, their greatest fears were realized.  A mass of soldiers waiting for them.  We’re told the Athenians were outnumbered about 4 to 1.

But the Athenians knew this land well, and they managed to gain the high ground.  They entrenched themselves and waited for the battle to begin.  And they waited.  The Persians lined themselves up at the bottom of the hill and amazingly refused to fight.  They saw that the Athenians had taken the high ground and decided to wait.  Their spies told them the citizens back in Athens were on the brink of revolution and that it was only a matter of hours before the gates of Athens would open to them.  The Athenians, it is true, were at their wits end and many back in the city were agitating.  But revolt they did not.

After a week of just sitting there, the Persian generals were getting antsy.  The Athenians could wait up on the hill forever, this being their land.  But the Persians had long supply chains, and every day that passed was a risk to the operation.  They had to do something.  Besides, the Great King would be furious if they did nothing.

And so, they launched themselves up the hill, directly into the line of spears pointing down at them.

In order for us to understand how it was that the rather small Athenian army was able to crush the seemingly massive horde that was rushing at them, we must understand something about ancient warfare.

Ancient battles were much more like giant rugby scrums than they were the noble single-hand combat described in the Iliad.  The men in the front ranks would be crushed up against one another.  If they died or were wounded, and they usually were, they would likely not have been able to collapse to the ground right away, the press of bodies would have been so great.  They would have remained standing for hours, pressed against the enemy that had pierced them.  If the wounded did collapse, there was no chance of sneaking off the battlefield.  They would have remained on the ground, trampled for hours by the great mass of troops.

As soon as one side broke through the other, the ancient battle was over.   And the slaughter began.  The battle itself wasn’t all that costly in terms of lives.  It was the free for all at the end of the battle when one side broke its line that the real casualties started to add up.  That’s one of the reasons why a larger army was useful.  If your side could out push the other, you could hope to break through and do the killing.  If you were the smaller army, you had to make sure you gained some tactical advantage.

The one weakness these pushing scrums had was their flanks.  These flanks had to be protected at all cost.  If the flanks were attacked, the people at the back would stop pushing.  Everyone in the middle would wonder why they weren’t being pushed anymore.  There could only be one reason, of course.  The people at the back had turned to fight.  When this happened, panic would set it.  And the slaughter would begin.

The Athenians knew that they couldn’t out push the Persians.  The Persian army was simply too massive.  The only chance they had was to beat the Persian flanks.  And they had to do this before the Persians broke their line.

So what they did was they kept their front line dangerously thin to match the Persian line, and bulked up on both their flanks.  When the Persians raced up the hill and slammed into the Greek spears, the rest of the Athenians launched a ruthless attack on both the Persians flanks.  The Persians had almost broken through the Greeks when the pressure from behind stopped.

And then it reversed.

As the Persians at the back ran for their ships, those fighting nearest to the Greeks now faced an organized and bloodthirsty killing machine.  With shields locked and spears jetting out three rows deep, the Greeks ploughed through the lightly armoured Persians.  It was a slaughter.  Over 6000 Persians lay on the field at the end of the day.  The Athenians lost about 200 men.

As the Athenians were burying their dead and plundering the bodies of the Persians — who showed up, but the Spartans.  A little late.  The Spartans could hardly believe what the Athenian generals told them.  They had beaten the Persian army?  Alone?  They asked the Athenians if they could go down to the battlefield and look.  There they found the Persian horde, slaughtered on the fields.  Most Spartans had never seen a Persian before!  Yet there they were, the beast of everyone’s nightmare, dead on the ground.  And the Athenians were the ones who had killed them.  All on their own.

The importance of the Battle of Marathon cannot be understated.  Pacifists often say that no war ever made a difference.   They’ll say that fighting under no circumstances can ever produce a just end.  This was an especially vocal opinion after World War II when everyone was fed up with war.

Marathon is the greatest proof against this belief.  With the Battle of Marathon, we see the beginnings of Athens as a great power.  It was only a second rate city before the battle, but after it, the Athenians changed.  They began to see themselves as equals with Sparta.  And with this rise in status came a Greek recognition of Athenian values.  Violence was not the number one subject taught at Athens as it was in Sparta.  Athenians were taught math, poetry, music, literacy… The fear of Sparta, and the holding of Sparta as the ideal city state began to fledge after Marathon.

The Athenians saw the victory at Marathon not just as a triumph for their city, but as a triumph for freedom.  The democracy was still in its infancy.  This was its first great test.  If the Persians had won the battle of Marathon, it is very likely that we would never have seen democracy in our modern age.  The Athenian experience of democracy was unique in the world, and it was because of its success throughout the 5^th century that it was emulated.  If it had been snuffed out before achieving greatness, there would be no model for the industrial revolution to follow.

And the Battle of Marathon was important because the Athenians were about to enter their golden age.  Losing this battle might have ended this golden age before it even began.  Let’s not forget, the Parthenon had not yet been built.  We might never have had Herodotus, or Perikles, Aescylus, or any of the other great figures from the Greek Golden Age.  It was precisely because of Marathon that we do.

Socrates is at the heart of the Greek Golden Age.  I think many would consider Socrates perhaps even its champion.  Without the Battle of Marathon, and the great freedom that it allowed the Athenians to pursue their expanding culture, it is likely that we never would have had a Socrates.  And that creates a domino effect.  Without Socrates, we would not have had Plato.  We would not have had Aristotle.  We might not have had a rational western philosophy.  And because of that, we might not have had a Renaissance.  Without Socrates, the world would be a very different place.  And we have the Battle of Marathon to thank for him.

Discoverers

History through the eyes of great minds

Episode I

Socrates: Part II

In the centre of town was a temple, and in that temple was a giant snake.  The snake was the god.  Every month, the priests would gather food and present it to the snake through a grate in the floor.  Every month, the food was eaten.  But this month, it remained where it was left, untouched.  And the people were filled with dread.  Had the god abandoned their city?

An emissary was immediately sent to the oracle to speak directly to the god, and ask what they should do–to beg the god for wisdom.  If the god had truly abandoned the city, perhaps they should too.

The emissary travelled for days before reaching the oracle.  When he arrived, he climbed the sacred way.  He was met by an image of scenic artistry.  Beautiful ionic temples hung on the hillside with the sea and islands spread before them.  But the faces he met were furtive.  Everyone moved as though the landscape were an obstacle and not a beacon of tranquility.  He moved the same way.

At the temple gates, he found a throng of merchants plying their wares.  One of them asked if he would like a beast to offer the gods.  He went with the man to his stall and inspected his animals.  He eventually chose a large cow.  Another merchant jumped in and offered garlands.  The emissary took them with some annoyance and tossed the merchant his coins.  Taking the rope in hand, he led the cow through the temple gates.

He was greeted by the priests.  They took his cow, and directed him to a spring where they ritually bathed him to purify his mind and body before entering the inner sanctum.  When he was ready, he was brought into a room where he found the cow, now properly draped in garlands.  One of the priests brought a bowl of water before the cow.  He dipped his fingers into it and sprinkled the water over the cow’s back.  The emissary held his breath.   If the animal shivered, he would be sent home without speaking to the god.

Thankfully, the test was passed.  The cow was brought before a burning altar which was the only source of light in the room.  The men held the cow’s horns while one of the priests raised a large metal hammer over its neck.  He slammed it down and the beast went limp.  The priest put a knife into its throat and the cow bled into a trough.  The priests quickly skinned the animal.  They took its fat and bones and placed them on a grill over the fire.   They chanted and the fumes that smouldered from the cooking flesh rose through a vent and up to the god.  It was a good offering.

Finally, the emissary was allowed into the inner sanctum.  In the middle of the room was a tripod, and in the tripod was a priestess, the pythia, already reeling in a trance.  She was melding with the god.  Her eyes were fluttering and she chewed an ancanthus leaf uncontrollably.  Fumes rose from a grate beneath her feet.  They smelled of potent incense and made the emissary’s head feel blurry.  He was awestruck.  Despite being well-rehersed in ceremony, he felt weak and fumbled before the pythia.  He had never been this close to a god!

One of the priests ask him to state his question.  He gulped, his mouth dry, and asked in a cracking voice, “Great god Apollo, how can we save our people?”

The pythia’s head swayed and she moaned.    The god had entered her.  She began to whisper and one of the priests moved his head towards her lips.  She writhed and mumbled into his ear and then she sank in exhaustion.  The god had spoken!

“You are to defend yourselves behind a wall of wood,” said the priest.  The emissary stood there for what seemed like a long while.  “What does that mean?” he finally asked, but the priest simply smiled and shook his head.

Back in the city, the leaders deliberated over this strange riddle.  Indeed, what did it mean?  Some of the men took it to mean that they should lock themselves in the temple and defend the god’s home.  The temple doors were wood, after all, and that should explain the riddle.  Truly, the god would help defend its own temple!  Others suggested they take to their ships and leave the city.  The ships’ wooden frames were the answer to the riddle.

Eventually, those suggesting they leave the city won the day, and the evacuation began.

It was a difficult thing to convince the people to abandon everything they had.  Most grumbled, some were hysterical, but in the end, everyone packed what few belongings they could and carried them down to the beach.  Everyone, that is, except for a handful of brave souls who boarded themselves into the temple.

The ships ferried the people to an island just off the coast.  There, they built what make-shift shelters they could and waited.

They didn’t have to wait long.  They had left just in time.  Messengers were coming in fast.  One stated that the Spartans had been masacered at Thermopolae after a heroic battle.  Another came with news that the Attic countryside had been ravaged.

The Persians had arrived.

That night, the people huddled on the beach and watched the glow of flames that seemed to almost lick the clouds.  Everyone on the beach was silent that night as they watched their bakeries, their homes, their courts, and their treasured temple on the acropolis burn to ashes.

They watched in terror as Athens was destroyed.

…

This was how the Second Persian War began.  Marathon had proven that the Athenians were a force to be reckoned with, but to the Great King, this was an annoyance to be dealt with, not a defeat.  The king’s position demanded retribution.  If one small state could show such resolve, how could he hope to keep the larger states such as Egypt and Babylon from rebelling.  And so he created an army of vast proportions and marched them, personally, into Greece.

In some strange turnabout way, the burning of Athens might actually have been a good thing for its people.  A good thing, at least, in that it shifted an immense amount of power to Athens.  It’s a strange way of viewing things, and if you were to have suggested this to the Athenians while they watched their city burn, they would probably have thought you insane.  And yet, it may be true.

When the Athenians received their riddle from the oracle, they were given a choice.  They could either fight by land or by sea.   And when they made their fated choice to fight by sea, they took their first step towards empire.

At the Battle of Salamis, Salamis being the island just off the coast where the Athenians took their refuge, the Athenians performed another miracle just as they had at Marathon.  They defeated the Persian navy.  And when the Persian navy was defeated, the land army it was supporting could no longer be supplied. Most of the army retreated back into Persia.  Only a shadow of its bulk was left in Greece, and this was mopped up by the combined forces of the Greeks led by Sparta.

The Battle of Salamis gave the Athenians much more than just a sense of victory.  It gave them the conviction that their navy was sanctioned by the gods.  At Salamis, they were outnumbered by a considerable degree, and yet the god of Delphi had told them they would be victorious.  The oracle was proven right!

As the Persians ran from Greece, the islands of the Aegean again came to Athens.  Word of the victory at Salamis brought fame to Athens and the islands begged to have her navy protect them.  The Persians had attacked them twice and each time with greater wrath.  So it was not unreasonable to assume there would be a third attack.  Having a united front with Athens at its centre would give the Persians reason for a second thought at moving against them.

So Athens became the master of the islands, and even the coastline around modern day Turkey.  Of course it wasn’t the master at first, but slipped into this role over time.  As the fear of Persia slowly ebbed, some of the islands wanted to leave the alliance.  Athens attacked them.  In some instances, they left an army on their islands to ensure they wouldn’t revolt.  At other times, they enslaved the population.  For its ‘protection’ the alliances treasury was brought from the central island of Delos to Athens.  The money from this treasury, the taxes gathered from the islands for the purpose of raising a defensive navy, was used to build the Parthenon.

The Athenians struggled with the idea of empire.  There were always debates over how they should run it, or even if they should have one.  But the champions of abandoning the empire were always a minority and the democracy was stacked with the proponents of power.

And is it any wonder?  Not only was their culture based on a belief that violence is sanctified by the gods, but the entire generation who were handed this empire had been turned into killers.

I’m reminded of the generation who fought in the First World War.  They entered the war as civilians, but those who survived the meat grinder returned with murder on their hands.  Their minds had been shaped by the experience of war, and they felt the use of force to gain power, while it might have been reviled, was understood to be effective.  When they returned from the front, many carried this belief with them.  Is it any wonder that the extremism of the Facists and Communists who used force became attractive to these people?  We think of the phrase ‘Never Again’ when we imagine those returning from the trenches.  But once an animal has tasted blood, it can rarely be domesticated.

Socrates lived in a society of killers.  Almost everyone who lived in Athens had experienced war, either at sea or on land, and the stories of heroic killings were told and re-told.  Think of the amputees and the scars that would have filled the marketplace.  Imagine the burnt ruins that still filled Athens as a reminder of war.  The new generation that Socrates found himself in would have been raised by an entire culture that had experienced first-hand the trama of violence, and the glory of victory.   These are two absolute extremes of the human experience.  One is an immense suffering, and the other is a validation of greatness.  The nightmares of violence mixed generously with glory.

Socrates was tormented by the question of justice.  What was justice?  What was good?  The state had to wield power, Socrates believed, but what was the most effective way to distribute it?  He often found himself in confrontation with other citizens over these questions.

On one occasion, Socrates was said to have taken a walk with some of his friends down to the Piraeus, Athens’ port city.  It was here that he would have seen the gambit of Athens’ navy laid out before him.  Athens had around 200 ships at this time, the jet fighters of antiquity.  They were immensely expensive, they were slick, masterfully crafted for speed and manuverability, and capable of sinking an envoy of merchant vessels in minutes.  They could cover the length of the Empire in mere days, bringing with them troops and supplies.  They could harass an enemy by landing marines who could pillage and destroy and leave long before the opposing army would even hear of the raid.  These ships were at the centre of Athenian power, and within a 20 minute walk, Socrates could have touched the hulls of every one of them.  At least those that weren’t at sea.

And is it any wonder that Socrates would have met Thrasymachus under the shadow of these vessels?  Socrates was having a lively discussion with his friends about the nature of justice and empire when Thrasymuchus, a large and imposing figure with a booming voice, came upon them.  The conversation would have gone something like this, as narrated by Socrates:

He roared out to the whole company: What folly! Socrates, has taken possession of you all!  I will not have you say that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or interest, for this sort of nonsense will not do for me; I must have clearness and accuracy.

I was panic-stricken at his words, and could not look at him without trembling. Indeed I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I gathered some strength, and replied.

Thrasymachus, I said, with a quiver, don’t be hard on us. Polemarchus and I may have been guilty of a little mistake in the argument, but I can assure you that the error was not intentional. And why, when we are seeking for justice, a thing more precious than gold, do you say that we are not doing our utmost to get at the truth?

Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse?

Why do you ask such a question, I said?

Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep.

What makes you say that? I replied.
Because you fancy that the shepherd fattens the sheep for their own good and not for the good of the shepherd; and you further imagine that the rulers of states never think of their subjects as sheep, and that they are not studying how to exploit them day and night. The unjust is lord: he is the stronger, and his subjects do whatever he wants, and minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their own.  Most foolish Socrates, the just is always a loser in comparison with the unjust.

Thrasymachus, when he had thus spoken, having, like a bathman, deluged our ears with his words, turned to leave. But the company would not let him; they insisted that he should defend his position; and I myself added my own humble request that he stay.

Thrasymachus, I said to him, excellent man, how suggestive are your remarks! And are you going to run away before you have fairly taught or learned if they are true?

He turned towards me like a beast about to pounce on its prey.  I took heart and began.
Well, then, Thrasymachus, I said, suppose you start at the beginning and answer me. Do you say that perfect injustice is more gainful than perfect justice?

Yes, that is what I say, and I have given you my reasons.
And what is your view about them? Would you call one of them virtue and the other vice?

Certainly.
I suppose that you would call justice virtue and injustice vice?
What a charming notion, Socrates!
And do the unjust appear to you to be wise and good?
Yes, he said; at any rate those of them who are able to be perfectly unjust, and who have the power of subduing states and nations.
Thrasymachus, I replied; I cannot hear without amazement that you class injustice with wisdom and virtue, and justice with the opposite.

Yet that is how it is.

You would not deny that a state may be unjust and attempting to enslave other states, and may be holding many of them in subjection?

I would not, he replied; and I will add that the best and perfectly unjust state will be most likely to do so.

I know, I said, that such was your position; but what I would further consider is, whether this power which is possessed by the superior state can exist without justice.

If you are right in your view, then only with justice; but if I am right, then without.

I am delighted, Thrasymachus, to see you not only nodding assent and dissent, but making answers which are quite excellent.

That is out of civility to you, he replied.
You are very kind, I said; and would you have the goodness also to inform me, whether you think that a state, or an army, or a band of robbers and thieves, or any other gang of evil-doers could act at all if they injured one another?

Of course not, he snapped.
But if they abstained from injuring one another, then they might act together in harmony?

Yes.
And this is because injustice creates divisions and hatreds and fighting, and justice imparts harmony and friendship; is not that true, Thrasymachus?

I agree, he said, because I do not wish to quarrel with you.
How good of you, I said; but I should like to know also whether injustice, having this tendency to arouse hatred, wherever existing, among slaves or among freemen, will not make them hate one another and set them at variance and render them incapable of common action?

Certainly.
And even if injustice be found in only two, say, ah, will they not quarrel and fight, and become enemies to one another?

They will.
And is not injustice equally fatal when existing in a single person, rendering him incapable of action because he is not at unity with himself? Is that not true, Thrasymachus?

Yes.
And O my friend, I said, surely the gods are just?
Granted that they are.
But if so, the unjust will be the enemy of the gods, and the just will be their friend?

Feast away in triumph, and take your fill of the argument; I will not oppose you, lest I should displease the company.

Well then, we have shown that the unjust are incapable of common action.  But whether the just have a better and happier life is a much more important question. I think that they have, but still I should like to examine it further, for no light matter is at stake, nothing less than the rule of human life.  Would you examine this with me, Thrasymachus?

He was angry at having been refuted, but the others would not let him leave.

I will proceed by asking a question: Can you see, except with the eye?
Certainly not.
Or hear, except with the ear?
No.
This hearing and seeing then may be said to be the ends of these organs—the reasons for them?
They may.
.
And that which has an end also has an excellence?

It has.
And has not the eye an excellence?
Yes.
And the ear has an end and an excellence also?
True.
And the same is true of all things; they each have an end and a special excellence?

That is so.
Well, and can the eyes fulfil their end if they have a defect?

How can they, he said,

Can I say the same of the ears?  When deprived of their own proper excellence they cannot fulfil their end?

They cannot.
And the same observation will apply to all other things?
I agree.
And has not the soul an excellence also?
Yes.
And can it fulfil its own end when deprived of that excellence?

It cannot.
Then an evil soul must necessarily be an evil ruler, and the good soul a good ruler?

Yes, necessarily.
And have we admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and injustice the defect of the soul?

That has been admitted.
Then the just soul and the just man will live well, and the unjust man will live ill?

That is what your argument proves.
And he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who lives ill the reverse of happy?

Certainly.
Then the just is happy, and the unjust miserable?
So be it.
But happiness and not misery is profitable.
Of course.
Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice can never be more profitable than justice.

As for what justice actually was, Socrates was a little more hesitant to put his foot forward.  What he knew was that to live by the whims of power where the strong imposed their will upon the weak was inherently an unjust system.  To Socrates, the sole purpose of the ruler was to lead for the sake of his people.  He was to bring justice to them, and it was justice that brought peace and harmony.  Justice led to a good life.

The debate as to how Athens should administer justice was expressed no clearer than when they were faced with a crisis.  A small city-state outside their empire sought to annex one of the cities ruled by Athens.  This was a great crisis because Mytilene had until this time been a great friend of Athens.  It troubled the Athenians to wage war against one of their trusted allies.  When it was discovered that the Mytilineans had asked Sparta to help them the Athenians were furious.  This was a gross betrayal and when the Mytilineans were finally starved into submission, the heavy hand of mob justice overtook the assembly at Athens.

Speeches were made and the clammer of booing, hissing and cheering resounded through the assembled masses.  This was one of the largest assemblies the Athenians had witnessed, and one of the most vocal.  Demagogues riled up the mob with empassioned speeches announcing the destruction of the city.  The Myilineans begged for their survival with an eloquence that was lost on the mob.  By the end of the session, one of Athens’ fastest ships was sent to the island with the message that every man was to be executed.  Every woman and child was to be enslaved.

Socrates must have been at this assembly.  It is certain that eyes would have looked to him, and when they saw his brow furroughed to their decision, they must have been repulsed.  It would have been dangerous for Socrates to walk home without his friends in escort.

The following morning, the Mytilineans made one more desperate plea to the magistrates, and they agreed to hold a second debate.  The Athenians who gathered on this morning did so with some humility.  Perhaps even regret.  They would have gone to their homes the night before where they would have had dinner with their wives and children.  Perhaps they would have looked at their families and thought that at that very moment a ship was speedily crossing the Aegean to destroy the families of their friends.  And it was their decision to end those happy lives.

And so, the Athenians gathered on this morning, somberly and with heavy hearts.

Cleon, one of the stronger speakers, chastised the Athenians for their weakness.  He said in a speech that could have been made to Socrates:

“I have remarked again and again that a democracy cannot manage an empire, but never more than now, when I see you regretting your condemnation of the Mytilenaeans. Having no fear or suspicion of one another in daily life,²⁰ you deal with your allies upon the same principle, and you do not consider that whenever you yield to them out of pity or are misled by their specious tales, you are guilty of a weakness dangerous to yourselves, and receive no thanks from them. You should remember that your empire is a despotism²¹ exercised over unwilling subjects, who are always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but in so far as you are their masters; they have no love of you, but they are held down by force. Besides, what can be more detestable than to be perpetually changing our minds? We forget that a state in which the laws, though imperfect, are inviolable, is better off than one in which the laws are good but ineffective.²² Dullness and modesty are a more useful combination than cleverness and licence; and the more simple sort generally make better citizens than the more astute. For the latter desire to be thought wiser than the laws;²³ they want to be always getting their own way in public discussions; they think that they can nowhere have a finer opportunity of displaying their intelligence,²⁴ and their folly generally ends in the ruin of their country; whereas the others, mistrusting their own capacity, admit that the laws are wiser than themselves: they do not pretend to criticise the arguments of a great speaker; and being impartial judges, not ambitious rivals, they hit the mark. That is the spirit in which we should act; not suffering ourselves to be so excited by our own cleverness in a war of wits as to advise the Athenian people contrary to our own better judgment.”

Cleon hoped to convince the Athenians that justice was blind.  Though their decision the day before was harsh, it was one that would ensure the safety of the empire.  Machiavelli surely read this passage from Thucydides as he was well versed in the Classics.  It seems to speak to the heart of what it means to be sovergn when one is also tyrannical.

Cleon did not carry the day.  Although his speech was moving, all the Athenians needed was a man who would voice their hearts and the judgment would be revoked.  This came, and a second ship was launched from the Pireasus.  This one was given the assurance that if they caught up to the first ship, they would be rewarded handsomely.  The Athenians then waited with an impatience that was only surmounted by the Mytilenian envoys.

They didn’t have to wait long.  Within days, the ship returned.  They had landed at Mytilene just as the harsher judgment was being announced.  The new proclamation was carried out with swiftness and only a thousand Mytilenians were put to the sword.

In next week’s episode, we will end our exploration of the life of Socrates.  The great Sicilian expedition, war with Sparta, philosophers from the east and the death of Socrates are all on the plate.

While you’re waiting for the next episode, visit Audiobard.com to join in the discussion.  I’m enthusiastic to talk with you about any of these podcasts and I hope we can fill in some of the gaps that I simply can’t speak to in the time I have.

I’m Jordan Harbour.  Thanks again for listening to, the Discoverers.

Discoverers

History through the eyes of great minds

Socrates: Part III

The tavern doors swung open and the Aegean sun burst through the shadows with the sound of gulls and the bustle of the Piraeus.  The silhouette that stood in the entrance was unbelievably thin.  The man stumbled into the room, limping when he wasn’t holding a wall.  His beard was tangled and unkept.  He sat at a table alone and hunched over it.  All conversation in the tavern stopped.  The barkeep walked up to him and with arms crossed asked if he wanted service.

“Food,” said the man with a dry whisper, “and wine.”

“Will you be paying for that,” asked the bar keep, looking the man up and down and waving his bar rag as if to make a point about his hygiene.  This was something, even in the port city of Athens.

The man swayed back and forth in his chair and repeated his plea, “food… and wine.”

“Away, you swine,” shooed the bar keep.  He was about to get physical when a merchant sailor at the next table, obviously well into his drink, called out to the bar tender, “Give him what he wants and I’ll see you’re paid.”  He got up and walked over to the withered man’s table.  “Hey, where you from, friend?”

“Athens,” came the response.

“Athens, eh?  So what are you, slave?  Metic?”

“No… I’m a… citizen.”

“Really?  …you’re a citizen.  Of Athens.”  The merchant turned a chair around and sat non-challantly before him.   The withered man kept swaying back and forth, never looking up.  His eyes were someplace else.

“Alright… citizen.  I’m buying your lunch so you might as well give me your story.”  The withered man frowned, lost in a different world.  The other sailors from the merchant’s table called to their friend.  He hit the table with a grunt and began to rise.

“Sicily,” said the withered man, looking up at the merchant for the first time.  There were tears in his eyes, “I just came from… Sicily.”

The merchant froze.  His eyes were as open as his mouth.  He slowly sank back into the chair.  “Sicily,” repeated the merchant.  “…you were…”

“…a hoplite, yes.  Under Nicias.  That was before… well, there have been a lot of deaths.”

“Get this man some food and wine!  Right away!  Agathon, give me your plate!”

The merchant reached over and grabbed a plate of half eaten mutton drizzled in lemon and herbs and pushed his own cup of wine before the man.  The haggard soldier took the mutton and devoured it while the merchant watched.  “What’s been going on over there?” said the merchant.

“We were outnumbered on land.  Our allies… deserted us.  The entire island turned against us.  The ships were defeated so our supply lines… were also gone.  We marched inland.  There was nowhere else to go!”  The soldier took a long draft of wine.  “Go on,” said the merchant.  The others were now crowded around, and even the bar tender peeped his head over their shoulders.

“Well, I was under Nicias, as I said.  Demosthenes was the other general.  We were split up from him somehow.  I met some of the survivors later on.  They had a terrible fight.”

“Demosthenes’ army was destroyed?” barked in one of the sailors.

“Yes… we all were.”

“What about the navy?”

“Let him finish.”

“It’s OK, the navy, as I said, was destroyed.”

“All 200 ships?”

“Ah, so I heard.  …that’s what everyone was saying, at least.  That’s why we had to march inland.”

“That would make sense, since we haven’t heard anything about this yet.”

“Alright, shut yer trap and let him finish!  Go ahead.  So you were split from Demosthenes…”

“Yes, split from Demosthenes… we had no food or water.  We were exhausted.  The heat!  We… were under constant attack from Syracuse.  Javelines, arrows… they wouldn’t engage us.  We kept losing men without fighting.

“Finally, we came to a river and that’s when it all fell apart.  We lost ranks, even though Nicias was growing horse from screaming at us.  We were so thirsty!  You have to understand, we were dying while we stood, exhausted.  So we ran to the river.  Some hoplites were trampled and some even drowned as we kept piling on top of one another, everyone trying to get at the water.

“But it was a trap.  All along the banks of the river, the Sicilians threw missiles at us, killing us as we drank from the water.  Still, we drank… blood mixed with mud churned up from the river bottom.  Then the Spartans appeared over the crest.  I didn’t see them at first.  Everyone was panicking, trying to either drink, or run downstream, or even run up into the Sicilians.  A bad idea, but we were all scared and confused.  The Spartans took no mercy.  They hacked through us.  They killed most of us.”

The soldier paused for a moment and looked down, choking back his tears.  His hand was shaking on his cup, and his eyes shifted back and forth as if recounting the massacre down at the river.  The barkeep filled his glass with fresh wine.

“What happened to Nicias?” whispered one of the sailors through the silence.  The soldier looked up.

“He pleaded for our lives.  The Spartans accepted his surrender and stopped killing us.  They remembered him.”  Everyone nodded and sighed relief.  Nicias was spared.  The Spartans would have remembered his good will when he convinced the Athenians to return 500 captured Spartiates in return for peace when everyone else had wanted to kill them.  It seems the Spartans had returned the favour.

“They took us to a rock quarry, and that’s where we found the remains of Demosthene’s army.  The Sicilians forced us to quarry the stone.  They gave us no rest and many of us died.  Um, and Demosthenes and Nicias… we heard the Spartans wanted to take them back to the Pelopnnes as trophies, but the Sicilians refused to give them back.  There wasn’t much the Spartans could do about that.  They were outnumbered and a long way from home.  The Sicilians put them both to the sword.  As for me, I worked the quarry for some weeks.  I escaped by night  with some other soldiers.  The others were killed.  I made my way to Catana and found a boat to take me back here.”

A hush fell over the group.  The men all sat down.  They knew what this meant.  The Athenians had put all their hopes into this war with Sicily.  Everything they had, they used to build the largest naval and land force that had ever been constructed in Greece.  The Parthenon itself would not have covered the cost of this massive invasion force.  Now, the whole Greek world would see how weak the Athenians were.  They would lose their empire.

“Curse Alcibiades!”  stammered one of the sailors, “curse him and his wretched treason.”

“It’s not his fault,” joined in one of the others.

“Curse you too, it is!  He’s the one who… sweet tongued us into thinking this war was a good idea.”

“He’s a dirty sophist, that’s what he is,” chimed in another sailors.  “If he ever raises his head over the walls of Athens, he’ll tumble back over without one!  And I’ll piss on his corpse!”

“Enough of your raving!” shouted the merchant.  “Take this man.  We’ve got to tell the assembly!”

And so ended the great Sicilian Expedition.  Once deemed a fantastic conquest and an addition to the Empire that would bare the jewel in the crown, it instead marked the first step towards decline.  The Athenians had managed to rise out of disasters before, but this was a loss on a scale that was crippling.  The cream of the Athenian citizenry was whipped out.  Her navy was completely destroyed.  Athens might hope to build more ships, and if she taxed her citizens and stripped the temples she was capable of doing so, but she could not replace the thousands of experienced and loyal Athenian oarsmen who were now at the bottom of the Mediteranian.  The disaster of the Sicilian Expedition was such a massive blow that it amazed Athens’ rivals, and not just because of the sheer quantity of the destruction, but because Athens managed to survive another decade of war after this loss.

The reason why this expedition even happened was because the majority of the Athenians were persuaded it would be a great investment.  The idea of the conquest got into their heads and once it was there, the excitement over Sicily spread like a fever.

But Sicily was a long way from Athens, and the island was massive.  By similar standards, you might imagine the British going off to conquer India.  It was a continent of a prodigious distance from England, and the population outmatched the red coats by a vast degree.  But it was fat and rich and everyone wanted to go to India.  The main difference is, Britain actually won.

There were many voices who shouted under the banner of conquest, but few more so than Alcibiades.  He was a young and dashing nobleman, attractive, charismatic and loved by the hoplites and oarsmen alike.  In Alcibiades, they saw a walking statue of Victory, and all wished to follow this statue to wherever it pointed its spear.

But Alcibiades did not gain his reputation by accident.  He was trained, as were all the best and the richest Athenians, in the one art that truly defined Athenian higher education.  Alcibiades was trained in the art of oration.

Oration was so important in Athens because with it, you could build a vast wealth.  Without it, you could lose everything you had, even your life.  In a tyranny, oratory skills are not necessarily important to the majority of citizens.  Even the tyrant can get away without knowing how to inflect his voice or win an argument.  He simply has to rule effectively.  Stalin, for instance, was a terrible orator, yet one of the most effective despots that ever lived.

In an oligarchy, some oratory is needed to persuade the other aristocrats of your opinion.  But for the rest of the people, they could get along just fine without the art of fine speech.

In a democracy, things were different.  And in a radical democracy such as was at Athens, oratory was a matter of life and death.  Every decision, whether it was to fight a war, or prosecute a fish merchant, went before the people.  It was the people that would decide the outcome and not a judge or magistrate.  And the people could be swayed by effective speech.

Alcibiades wanted to go to Sicily.  His reasons for doing so were glory, fame and wealth.  He wanted to be a great general, and he wanted to conquer a vast and fat land.  Sicily provided him with this opportunity and he used every oratory trick to persuade the Athenians to support him.

Nicias, our fated hero, fought bitterly with Alcibiades in the assembly to change the Athenians’ minds.  He argued that it was foolish to risk so much.  Athens struggled just to keep the islands around her under subjugation.  Conquoring and then holding a massive island that was half way across the Mediterannian would be foolhardy.

Alcibiades pegged Nicias as a fearful and cautious man who did not appreciate Athens’ power.  He painted with words the riches they would encounter.  The hoplites and oarsmen at the assembly had their imaginations filled with glory and plunder, tens of thousands of slaves would be theirs, wheat fields that stretched for hundreds of miles, marble quarries, cities, trade… a fat and undefended land on the outskirts of civilization would be brought within the folds of the empire.

Although oration was a part of the democracy from the beginning, it wasn’t until the sophist movement that it became a finely tuned craft.  Protagoris, one of the first sophists to use this title, came to Athens from the islands.  He brought with him a mind that was full of the rational philosophy being developed in the Aegean.  If you’ve heard the saying, “man is the measure of all things,” it was Protagoris that first coined this phrase.

Protagoris believed that every individual experienced his world uniquely.  Everything was relative, and every opinion was valid.  If you dipped your hand into a bowl of water and you experienced the sensation of ‘cold’ and another dipped his hand into the same bowl and experienced ‘hot’, according to Protagoris, you would both be correct.  What this meant was that there was no right or wrong answer to anything, but your opinion made it so.

This was great news to anyone who wished to get into politics.  It gave the Politian the tools he needed to sway his audience.  If there was no right or wrong answer, all he had to do was take the argument that would best serve his purpose.  And Protagoris and other sophists developed a great way to do this.

They would school their students to practice arguing from the weaker point of view.  This would allow them to turn an argument against an opponent no matter how terrible his position.

“Helen,” they would say, “ran off with Paris when he came to Greece on a diplomatic mission.  She left her husband, a powerful and well respected king, to become the consort of an oriental prince.  It was because of her that the Greeks went to war against the Trojans, a war that caused the deaths of countless people.  Helen,” they would say, “is a whore.  Now convince us that she is not.”

“Well,” would say the student, “you all know that Aphrodite chose Helen to be the consort of Paris.  You know that Aphrodite filled her heart with a divine love that came directly from the god.  You are all grown men, warriors and nobles, would you be able to resist the will of a god?  Hah!  I think not.  Now imagine yourself Helen, a young girl, weak and cowed.  How much better could you resist a god’s instructions now?  But a god was not all Helen had to face.  She was also faced with cunning words.  Paris was a nobleman and well trained in oratory.  His words would have been as luring as a flower is to a bee.  And even then, when Helen tried to resist the man and the god and her heart brimming with a divine love, Paris had to physically take her to his ship.  You called Helen a whore just a moment ago, but I think now you must see that she was powerless.”

The sophists were much like our modern day lawyers.  They were highly paid for their skills in oratory and their ability to convert a jury to any opinion they held.  But they were also reviled for the same reason.  The sophist was seen to have an almost mystical ability.  Whole assemblies would be swayed to do things that later they regretted.  In the case of the Sicilian Expedition, a sophist argument lost them not only their empire, but their lives.

Is it any wonder then that Socrates was viewed as a sophist and reviled for it?  He would always take the weaker argument and turn it on them.  No matter what their beliefs, Socrates seemed to refute them.  He was the champion.  The title belt holder.  Not even the greatest of the sophists could beat him in debate.  The tide was quickly turning on the sophists and it was difficult for people to distinguish Socrates from them.

Aristophanes might not have banged the nail into Socrates’ coffin, but he certainly placed the lid on it.  In his play, the Clouds, Aristophanes gave Socrates his first trial.  It was a trial he never recovered from.  The defamation was so great that it left him struggling to re-patch his image for the rest of his life.  Not only did this play throw Socrates firmly in the sophist camp, but it played on every fear the Athenians could possibly have about them.  The play went much further than simply jesting at his expense.  It cut deeply.  It would have left the Athenians with the conviction that only one path was left to them.  They must destroy Socrates.

The play starts out with enough low brow humour to keep the masses chuckling.  Endless fart jokes and a bumbling father who can’t control his son give a light hearted air.  The father, Strepsiedes, is in debt.  He married a city girl, the daughter of a noble, who wants more for her son than he can provide.  And the son, Pheidippides, is quite happy to take what he can get.  He loves horses.  He loves chariot racing and grows his hair long like the mane of a horse.  All these horses cost Strepsiedes a fortune and he groans as his son sleeps that he can’t afford to pay his debtors.

He gets the idea that he must learn to speak.  He must learn how to craft a fine speech so that he can weasel out of paying his debts.  For this, he goes to ‘the Thinkery’, Socrates’ school.  At this school, he discovers some bizzar and strange images.  The students are pale and hunched over, some staring at the sky, others at the ground.  His guide tells him they are thinking, trying to learn how the world really works.

Eventually, he is brought before Socrates.  He is staring at the clouds.  Strepsiedes asks him what he is doing.  This brings them to a discussion about the gods.  Socrates says there are no gods.  But who brings the rain?  The clouds.  And does thunder come from them as well—they’re just mist and vapour.  When a cloud gets too full, says Socrates it rumbles just as your stomach rumbles when you’re too full.  And what happens when you’re so full you need to pass air?  That is all that thunder is.

Strepseides is convinced there are no gods.  Zeus’s might is reduced to a passing of wind.

Socrates asks what he wants from the school.  Strepseides says he needs to escape his debtors, so he must learn to out speak them in court.  Socrates tells him he will never have a problem with his debtors again.

Unfortunately, in comic style, Strepsiedes turns out to be a terrible student.  He forgets his lessons before he even remembers them.  Socrates complains that he’s hopeless and asks for his son instead.  Strepsiedes runs home and gets his noble son.

Phideppedes really doesn’t want to go, but his father threatens to kick him out of the house, so reluctantly, he goes over to the Thinkery.

Time passes and Strepsiedes returns to pick up his son.  Phidipedes, once a strong and handsome youth, is now pale and hunched like the other students.  When Strepsiedes speaks to him, Phidipedes counters all that he says with brilliant arguments.  He is thrilled, but only the chorus spells doom.

The creditors start knocking at Strepsiedes’ door.  He insults them and refuses to pay.  They, in turn are furious and say they will sue him.  Strepsiedes wants nothing more than to face them in court, now that he has a son who can out speak anyone.

He has dinner with his son and asks him to sing some poetry to celebrate.  The son thumbs his nose at all the classics, saying they are antiquated.   Strepsiedes is annoyed, but asks him to instead sing some poetry that he likes.  Phidippedes sings some lude songs about incest.  Strepsiedes is furious and smacks his son.  Phidippedes attacks his father and beats him.

This is where it begins to cross the line.  The play is no longer a comedy.  Strepsiedes screams at his boy to stop beating him, but he refuses.   Phidepedes says if he can win an argument he will stop.  The argument is why a son should beat his father.  Strepsiedes agrees and tells his son that it is a deeply held tradition that sons should always honor their fathers, and must never do them harm.  Strepsiedes rebukes him, saying that he was hit as a boy, and since old age is like a second childhood, a son should beat his father like a child.  He goes further, and says that he will also beat his mother.

Strepsiedes realizes that Socrates has created a monster out of his son.  He laments not only for his family which he knows will disintegrate, but for his entire culture.  If Socrates continues to corrupt other youths as he did his son, all of Athens will collapse in degeneracy.

He escapes the clutches of his son and runs to the Thinkery.  He bars the doors and sets the building on fire.  All inside scream for help, but he takes no pity on them.  None of them will survive.

We’ve all seen it happen before.  A celebrity or politician is accused of a crime.  He goes to court.  He wins his case.  But he never regains his damaged image.  This is what happened to Socrates after the Clouds was performed in Athens.  It was worse than a lampooning.  It was a call to action.  And the action was death.  It was a trial, but without a court.  There was no evidence.  There was no defense.  It was a simple prosecution and jury.  It would be many years before Socrates actually stood trial, but the implications of this play never waned.

Athens was finally defeated by the combined forces of all the rest of Greece in 404 BC.  Her walls were torn down.  Her navy taken.  The democracy was dissolved and a Spartan puppet government was set up.  A reign of terror insued that brought murder and destruction to the city.  Dissenters were purged.  Land was confiscated.

A rebellion at the Pireaus spread to Athens and the tyrants were deposed.  The new democracy was a virulent one.  The strength of Athens had been crushed, her traditions destroyed.  This was a time for setting things straight.  The Athenians were set on a course of re-building their culture and power.  Socrates was in their way.

A charge was brought against Socrates by a group of Athenians.  He was accused of aetheism and of corrupting the youth.  Socrates fought bitterly to turn these accusations over, but it was in vain.  The end had come.  He was put into a holding cell where his friends came to meet him one last time.  At first, some young nobles angrily told him that it was an unjust verdict and that he should escape with their help.  But Socrates told them he would abide by the laws of his state.  He comforted them as best he could, then took the bowl of hemlock in his hands.

Within moments, it was over.

If I were to sum up Socrates’ life, I would do so with a story that he told.  It’s a story of a man who discovers that things are not as they seem–that all his assumptions are wrong, and the only way to live with this realization is to either abandon all reason, or to quest for the truth.  Socrates took the latter course.

The story begins in a cave.  A man is in the company of his friends.  They are sitting together on the floor, watching the wall.  There is a light that flickers on the wall, and shadows move about this way and that.  The man enjoys these shadows, and he and his friends pride themselves on their ability to recognize and name them.

But the man eventually grows weary of this game.  The shadows no longer please him and he finds the naming game tedious.  Agitated, he turns around.  And when he does his life is forever changed.  For behind him, he sees a fire, the source of the light that is flickering on the walls.  And in front of the fire are puppets, dancing away and casting their shadows against the wall.

The man is amazed by this site and with excitement he turns and tells his friends about it.  But they scoff at him, and tell him to sit back down.  It seems impossible.  He tries in every way he can to explain to those around him that what they are seeing is not real.  But the more he argues, the more entrenched them become in their own beliefs.

The man sits in utter frustration.  He tries to watch the shadows on the wall, but there is no joy in this.  He feels alone amongst his friends.  There is something greater out there, yet this knowledge seems a curse to him.

The others are relieved when he finally gets up and walks into the darkness.

The fire grows dimmer behind him, and for a time, the man wanders in an inky pitch black.  He is alone and miserable.  Half way between his culture and the truth, he feels the heartache of loss.

But then he sees a pinpoint of light.  It is so small he could pinch it between his fingers.  He reaches his hand out to it, but it can’t be grasped.  He moves his legs, walking towards the light, and as he does so, the light grows larger and ever larger, blinding his eyes.  He has never seen a light this pure and bright before!

Soon, he finds himself crawling up towards the light, struggling against the rock walls.  And then it happens.  He finds the mouth of the cave.  Light explodes all around him!  It is the pure light of the sun.  Birds, trees, and vast open sky fill his vision and are matched by the scents of flowers and the sea air.  He has escaped the cave of ignorance, and has felt the fresh breeze that is the truth.

I like to wonder, when Socrates was sitting in the dark cave of his prison and he closed his eyes for the last time, was he finally enveloped in that comforting light of truth he spent his whole life searching for?

Thank you for listening.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast series on Socrates.  Next week, we’ll be exploring a different figure from history, Sir Francis Drake.  Called El Drako, the pirate, by the Spanish, and heralded as one of England’s greatest heros, Sir Francis Drake plundered the caribean, circumnavigated the world and destroyed the Spanish armada.

In the meantime, why not check out our website at audiobard.com and join in the discussion?  I’d be happy to hear from you and maybe fill in any gaps I couldn’t cover in this last series.

I’m Jordan Harbour.  Thanks for listening to the Discoverers.