Aleksander Strikes Back!

There have been scores of books on the topic of Herod. Is there any reason to have another one?

Oh, yes! 

First of all, no other biography of Herod situates him within the Graeco-Roman milieu like this book does. For whatever reason, all books on Herod are somehow near-sighted. Somewhere on the periphery of the action appear large-looming figures--Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Antony, the Parthians. Their motivations are unclear; why they should care for Palestine and Judea is uncertain; how and why Herod has to maneuver is a mystery. This book gives us the global perspective we need to understand the man and his works. It also explains how and why what happened in provincial little Palestine impacted the grand politics of Rome.

Second, in beautiful and vivid language, this book evokes the harsh geographic realities of Palestine. Why was Jericho important? Why did the separate national identity of Samaria matter? Who were the Nabateans? What was the significance of the port of Caesarea?What was it like to be there then?

Finally, there is the old Krawczuk touch: an easygoing and yet profound reflection on the biography of a politician and his posthumous reputation; and the fate of a small nation buffeted by the ambitions of great empires and the seemingly irresistible force of globalization.

Not an Italian, yet is Aleksander a master of the sprezzatura--the artful "off-the-cuffness" hiding surprising depths within a seemingly throwaway comment. As Rameau would have put it, hiding art with art.

And then there is the prose. Just hear this:

THE SHADOWS OF TWILIGHT

PROLOGUE TO THE TRAGEDY

Speaks Ecclesiastes

"I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits; I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees: I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me. I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces. I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labor: and this was my portion of all my labor.

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."[1]

Tradition ascribes these words to King Solomon. In reality, this book of sadness was composed no more than two centuries before Herod. Its Hebrew title is Kohelet, meaning “The Preacher.” It quickly gained popularity and is still one of the best-known books of the Bible, perhaps because in every person’s life, there comes a moment when she or he will agree with the words of The Preacher: “Oh, vanity of vanities! And all is vanity!”

Herod probably heard this chapter often: it seemed written for him. Who knows if, upon hearing it, the king did not object: Why should I consider my deeds vain and futile? Here they are! They will last forever!

And yet, his time was coming to an end.

[1] Ecclesiastes 2:4-11

More fun with Arkady Fiedler!

By the time we arrived, the mukuari had been in full swing for several hours. It had little to do with the usual ceremonial dances, and although the participants performed dance movements to the loud rhythm of the drums, the essence of the ceremony consisted not in dancing but in something else: in mutual flogging. All the dancers wore various hideous masks, and as they danced, they dealt each other painful blows with barbed rods.

The purpose of the rite seemed clear: first, to appease the soul of the deceased by showing him what suffering his death had caused to the living, and, secondly, to drive his soul away with a display of ferocious violence. All adult men were required to take part in the dance, and it was to last non-stop for twenty-four hours.

Looking at the dancers in their terrifying masks, yelling and howling, and incessantly flogging each other, and hearing the powerful rhythm of drums made a huge impression. The whole performance seemed to draw everyone into a kind of whirlpool, overpower the soul, impose a strange hypnotic trance: everyone seemed to be as if under a spell.

After watching the dance for a while, I asked Manauri who was sitting next to me:

“Do all men take part in the mukuari? Is there no exception?”

“No. There is no exception. All adult men must dance. I danced in the morning, at the very beginning.”

And he showed me where the barbed rods had torn his skin.

“And I?”

“You, Yan?” he echoed my question and fell deep in thought.

Several elders sat under the toldo along with us: Mabukuli, the chief of the Turtles, Yaki, the head of the Arakanga, and Konauro of the Caimans. They now debated amongst themselves whether I should participate in the rite but did not come to a clear judgment: the deceased sorcerer had had a powerful spirit and strained himself greatly to destroy me, yet my magic had proven stronger than his and I had defeated him. Was the sorcerer’s soul even capable of threatening me now?

“Most certainly not,” replied some leaders, convinced of my magic power, while others shook their heads doubtfully.

Lasana, sat behind me and listened to the debate with wrapped attention without saying a single word. I looked at her:

“And you, Lasana, what do you say to this?”

“I think you should dance,” she replied without the slightest hesitation.

“Do you think Carapana can still harm me?” I asked surprised.

“No. You have defeated his evil spirit and he cannot harm you anymore.”

“Then why dance?”

“In order to…” she began and hesitated searching for the correct expression. “To show that you are with us in body and soul.”

Her words elicited a murmur of appreciation among the chiefs.

“A smart woman,” someone said.

“Very well then,” I said and I ordered Lasana to bring me my jaguar skin. If my fellow Arawaks were going to whack me with those barbed rods, I was not going among them without some protection.

When she returned, I threw the skin over my head and back and tied a liana around my waist, to make sure the thing would not flap around as I danced. The beast had been a monster and my head fit completely into its skull so that I looked out through the beast’s eye sockets. Someone gave me a stout rod, but I demanded another for my left hand. If those fellows were going to whip me, I was not going to take it lying down.

“Very well, take two rods,” Manauri agreed, admonishing me at the same time: “But remember, the more heavily you lay your rod on someone, the more respect and honor you show him.”

Apparently, the dancers reserved the most respect and honor for me, because as soon as I jumped into their midst and they recognized me by the jaguar skin and my height, they began to lay about me with gusto. I was not amiss in showing my own honor and respect to them. The skin of the jaguar reached only to my calves, and my legs were bare below, so my companions quickly discovered my weak point and went for my shins and calves mercilessly. In order to protect myself, I jumped in all directions while trying not to fall out of the rhythm imposed on us by the drums, but for all my dodging, I still I got a pretty good whipping.

The dance, though apparently chaotic and confused, nevertheless followed a certain order: namely, the dancers moved about in a circle about thirty paces in diameter. To complete the ritual, it was enough to complete one circumambulation. So, by the time I finally found myself again opposite the toldo, I had done duty: I dealt with fury the last blows to right and left and jumped out of the circle.

The drums, as if to honor my departure, went into a deafening coda, then went back to normal tempo, and I went back to my seat among the elders. Everyone expressed polite appreciation for my performance.

Come and get it!

The most censored book ever

Amazon has put Naso the Poet by JacekBocheński on sale. Get it here.

Like many young men who experienced World War II under the German rather than Russian (“Soviet”) occupation, Jacek Bocheński (born 1926) experienced an early enthusiasm for the “communist” political system installed in Poland by the conquering Russian (“Soviet”) armies. And, like most such young men, by 1960, he finally realized that what had been promised by the regime to be “just a temporary phase of proletarian dictatorship” was really intended to be a permanent feature of the system and a return to democratic principles of governance was not really part of the communist plan. Disillusioned, he decided to disengage politically. He turned in his work to something that he thought would be completely apolitical: the writing of commentaries on ancient Roman classics.

Alas, the first book he wrote on the topic, Divine Julius, documenting the rise to power of Julius Caesar and the corrupt, craven, and cowardly response to it by the Roman elites (which made that rise possible), attracted the communist censor’s ire: the communist party perceived this picture of how a dictatorial regime might choose to mascarade as a republic to be a form of veiled criticism of itself. The book, published to resounding critical and commercial success in 1961, was promptly banned, and Bocheński himself found himself under a publishing interdict.

Paradoxically, the popular protests of 1968 and their violent suppression by the communist party opened a chance for Bocheński’s books to be published in Poland again. In fact, the publication of Naso the Poet became politically unavoidable: the Communist Party was eager to prove that the period of repression was over and Poland was once again the land of the free (and merely lovingly guided by the fatherly party). Yet, given the brouhaha around the publication of Divine Julius, the censorship office of the Polish People's Republic was bound to go over Naso the Poet with a very fine tooth comb. They did. They made several thousand cuts and corrections in the text.

The censors adopted a seemingly rational attitude: unlike Divine Julius, which got in trouble precisely because readers found in the Roman story numerous allusions to the Communist present (such as the fake pretense of preserving the institutions of a Republic or members of the elites cravenly propagating the Big Lie—i.e., that pretending that they believed the system to be democratic), Naso was going to contain no such references.

Some interventions were understandable—a book about ancient Rome should not contain references to Warsaw (as the original text did); nor should one read in it direct quotations of the Polish communist leadership put in the mouth of Emperor Augustus; but others verged on the paranoid. For example, in a sentence in which Naso says, “My books have been banned,” the word “book” had to be replaced with “scrolls.” Obviously, said the censors, there were no books in Rome in 22 A.D. and therefore no books could have been removed from Roman state libraries.

A long period of negotiations followed between the publisher and the censorship office, during which many “interventions” had been reversed—sufficiently many for the author to allow the book's publication in its new, emasculated form.

Interestingly when, following Poland's independence (1991) and the abolition of the office of the censor, Bocheński sat about preparing Naso for the first uncensored publication of the work, he found to his surprise, that a few of the edits undertaken under pressure, turned out better than the original phrasing. This only applied to a minority of the “interventions” and yet illustrated an interesting point: that a very careful reader does force the author to improve his craft.

The text you are about to read follows the text of the first post-communist edition of the book, removing most of the censor’s edits, but retaining those the author decided to be advantageous.

Tom Pinch

Ardennes National Park

Luxembourg