Tales of Classical Perversion: Of a Type - First Two Parts

After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt.  I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life." 

Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him: 

"Papa, I have the soul of a man." 

"So why then were you born a woman?"

"Can heaven make mistakes?"

"No." 

"But I know I'm a man." 

"I've made a mistake in teaching you Torah." 

"But the Lord said to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.'"

"The Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin." 

"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man." 

"You are a woman, and shall learn no more Torah." 

On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether my father was punished for his judgement, I knew that from the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and Shiva continued until Sukkot. 

Alone on the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I took Papa's dagger and shore my hair. I dressed myself in Papa's trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I was very nearly the young man I knew within myself. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's pipe and left his house forever as I smoked. 

 It would be a terrible sin to abide assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard as mortally sinful; but requiring food for my journey, I sold my body so any sin of this journey would only be on me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses met God. 

 I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and a deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem womanly. My chest was outsize and cumbersome. Older men of Yavneh would repugnantly joke about my irrepressible endowment and the hands of no few would cheapen them with immodesty. 

Having heard only my footsteps and breath for three days, I stripped down to nakedness under the Sinai's night cover. As I shivered in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop my bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, certain I was dead; yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for remains but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand. 

It takes 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai alone that a bedouin can cross in ten. I had but eighteen days' rations upon leaving, but could not abide another day's harlottry. As a woman, there was no reliable travel partner to join, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would know my secret after my wrongly placed casabas were excised. Only alone in the desert that could I annoint my identity, and therefore I determined to sojourn with alacrity, perform the amputation at my first encounter of three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, abstain from all but the smallest rations, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the Holy One BBH for assistance. 

Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of water and food. I walked bare chested because every day it bled anew and demanded shirts used to stop my bloodflow and half my water ]to clean my wounds. It seemed the CBH was without mercy as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, and there appeared a small caravan. A traveler saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal. 

"A pregnant man..."

"What?"

"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Yes, and you're not dying." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Surely a man won't recognize the symptoms." 

"So I'm a man?" 

"No less than I..." 

"Are you a man?" 

"Of a type..." 

"What type?" 

"The type that bleeds, same as you." 

"You bleed?"

"I did." 

"Has your monthly cycle ended?" 

"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed." 

"What was severed?"

The old healer pointed to his loins.

"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"

"The babe is eight days old." 

"It's still barbaric." 

"But why would parents permit yours to be severed so late?"

"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service." 

"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?" 

"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive civil service temptations without defiling women at court." 

"Do you desire to defile women?" 

"Less than most men, but yes."

The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect. 

And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead me into an underground passage that brought us directly beneath the palace of Cleopatra - I was face to face with a synagogue minyan, and all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service. 

"And who is this Reb Moshe?" 

"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...." 

"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh." 

I had to think quickly what my name would be. 

Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name." 

"What?"

"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to work." 

"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai. Can you do a drasha?"

"Right now?... I guess..."

"So you're a khakham."

"Of a type..."

"And you are... one of us?... nu?" 

Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch. 

"And you can lain Torah?"

"Hen vaHen." 

"So you're a Rabbi?"

"Of a type." 

"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit." 

B'reishit. "In the beginning," the first part of the Torah telling when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then destroyed the world with flood. 

I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame." 

I did not know men could applaud so lustily as they. 

"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?" 

"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)

"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli rabbis, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"

"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..." 

"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai." 

----------------------------------------

Rav Yosef taught me Greek as devotedly as Papa taught me Torah. I learned just as quickly and received as much praise. I recited passages of Hesiod and Homer as though they were the Song of D'vorah. He checked out scrolls of Aristotle from the Library and I read from beginning to end his animal writings and worked my way through the densest passages of Physics and Nicomachean Ethics with the concentration Papa forced me pay to Leviticus. I learned Euclid's geometry and Pythagorus's holy ratios, I was examined weekly on how well I retained my reading on Galen and aced every examination; we studied oration and rhetoric, logic and deductive reasoning, and most exhaustively, gardening and botany and potion making. Rav Yosef even taught me rudiments of playing the lyre, because every civil servant was called upon occasion to play music for Pharaoh in moments of her distress, even Jews on Sabbath. 

Rav Moshe would inevitably come to us during his many visits to our laboratory. 

"How's he coming along?" 

"He's an illui," Rav Yosef would say to Rav Moshe almost constantly. "Once we're ready to go he can take both our positions and write his own papyrus for anything he wants besides." 

"Well, as it turns out, it's time for him to take one of them. I'm retiring; taking my golden sun dial and buying a beach house in Aqaba."

"Why not Eilat?"

"Too many Jews." 

"Oy. There are more in Egypt."

"You see the problem. What's our melamed working on?" 

"It's an experiment to see if there are more than nine geometric shapes."

"Mazel Tov, but aren't you worried he'll be punished for heresy?" 

"Feh. The priests are too busy plotting against Miss Cleo to get beyz about what a stupid rabbi's doing - slicha Yanai."

"Shayn fargessen." 

And so Rav Moshe retired, got a ceremonial Friday night dinner (kosher) at which Cleopatra and Rav Yosef spoke, along with a bunch of other palace functionaries I'd never met, then Rav Moshe accepted a small obelisk from Cleopatra that had his name and position inscribed in carving, but most of the speeches were used to pay tribute to Marc Anthony, who wasn't even there, but protocol was protocol. 

That was Friday, that Monday I went to an interview with the Pharaoh in her apartment. (description of her apartment here). 

But the Pharaoh was not in the royal revelations to which we eunuchs were accustomed, she was dressed like a male pharaoh going to war; wearing a blue cap that went up an entire cubit, wearing two satchels of bronze fastened over each arm, a blue shield on her upper body and a black tunic underneath, completing the ensemble with a golden satchel that began between her legs and went near to the floor. 

"You're Rav Yanai of Yavneh?"

"I am, your majesty." 

"Strip." 

"What?"

"Strip." 

"Why?" 

"It's not for subjects to question their Pharaoh why. Is is your ruler's pleasure to see you strip, and you shall strip." 

"I fear to do so." 

"I know what you are, now do as I say." 

And in terror I exposed myself to Cleopatra in all my truth. 

"Why did you do it?"

"Because I believe I am a man."

"Many women wish they were men, some men even wish they were women." 

"But I am a man." 

"And you were a woman before you did this?" 

"No, I was a man in a woman's body." 

"All Jewish women are men in women's bodies." 

"I don't understand." 

"What matters it that you have breasts if your people go to such lengths to cover them up?" 

"But Your Majesty, I know I have them." 

"How many Jewish women do you think would rather be men?" 

"Probably most of them." 

"How many of them want to be men so badly that they could convince themselves they are men?" 

"Probably a few." 

"So how then are they men?" 

"What matters it if they convince themselves? If they want to be men, shouldn't they be men?" 

"A-ha, you are as smart as they say. Yes they should, and we in Egypt have many ways of letting them indulge their masculine side, if only Jews got rid of all that farshtunkener repression."

"Repression, Majesty?" 

"What matters it whether Jewish women are women or men if your people don't look on women as women?" 

"We don't?" 

"Your women are wives, they're mothers, eventually daughters, unfortunate children of an unfortunate god. But if it weren't for the beards there'd be no meaningful difference between Jewish men and women. You'd all be these sexless creatures; for all we in Egypt know you reproduce by hatching out of an egg." 

"Your Majesty I assure y..." 

"I know I know, you do it on your sabbath night in the dark"

"We make love to the soul, not the body." 

"Yes, you feel everything but lust after nothing." 

"Has lust been a blessing for your people?" 

"Lack of it hasn't been a blessing for you if it makes you chop off your own breasts, which, judging by your incisions were quite a sight." 

"I did not like them." 

"Mister Yanai, I will relate you a saying we have here in Egypt. 'That which the Gods have joined together, let not man tear them asunder.' I think that has different meaning now." 

"I'm not sure I follow." 

"In Egypt, you could have been a man with breasts." 

"I could... I don't understand." 

"If you could be a man with a womb, you can be a man with breasts." 

"I... I can?" 

"Do you desire to know women? You can tell me." 

"Majesty..."

"Do you desire to copulate with women?"

"I honestly have never considered the question." 

"That's a falsehood if ever I've heard one. Do you desire to lie with women?" 

"I... well... Sometimes." 

"Do you desire women and men?" 

"Yes, yes I suppose I do." 

"Well... unlike Judea, here in Egypt you can copulate with men, fornicate with women, and marry a eunuch if that is what you so desire, and you may fuck all three at the same time if that is your wish. So long as Cleopatra is Pharaoh, no law prevents you and the majority of the population agrees with me. They will let you live as you like so long as you make a home in a liberal alley, and those who disagree can live in conservative alleys." 

"Well... I suppose I owe you thanks Majesty." 

"Don't thank me, thank the eunuchs. They run this country, not me, and many of them are Jews." 

"Your majesty is not powerful?"

"I don't need power, I AM power, but a great leader only steers the chariot while the horsespull it, and they know how to drive far better than we do. And that's why you will be my personal doctor." 

"Thank you, Majesty." 

"I am also promoting you above Rav Yosef to be Chief of Medical Research for Egypt."

"Majesty..."

"Don't worry, he'll have so much to do after what I tell you that he will thank his Yahweh he doesn't have your job. Both Yosef and Moshe said you were smarter than them both, and judging by this interview I agree." 

"You flatter me Majesty." 

"You won't be flattered when you learn what you have to do." 

"If Your Majesty orders i....." 

"She does and there is much to explain. Are you listening?"

"Certainly." 

"You've studied Aristotle yes?" 

"Yes." 

"Hippocrates?"

"Yes." 

"Euclid? Archimedes? Pythagoras?"

"Yes, yes, and yes." 

"Useless, useless, useless, useless and useless." 

"Majesty?" 

"Experiments are not an activity to prove theories. Theories are activities to prove experiments."

"I'm afraid I don't...

"...Until now, the accumulation of knowledge has been its own reward." 

"Isn't it?" 

"What reward is there if people are starving and diseased but we cannot feed them?"

"Majesty, knowledge is the greatest of all vir..." 

"Spare me androgyne. Virtue is the greatest of all virtues, and the greatest of all virtues is to save lives. The accumulation of knowledge is the only way we can learn to save them, and you, supposedly the brightest mind in Egypt, with unique knowledge of what it means to be all men, are to lead us there." 

"Your majesty this is an awesome..."

"...I know it is. Furthermore, what science there is is entirely too devoted to questions only a man would pose. Everything in war has axiom and a measurement, meanwhile, all women have wondered if their cosmetics are poisoning them for two-thousand years and no thinker has thought enough of us to answer the question. All women but Jewish women that is..."

"Majesty." 

"It's alright if you take offense but just keep listening. For as long as history's been recorded on tablet, there are proposed cures for baldness and impotence, yet an astonishing common number of women suffer from headaches that alter their sense of vision and sound, yet no man has thought to ask why that is. You must solve this in addition to finding manners that increase our food supply and prevent drought on our farms, how to best build aqueducts so we can maximize the distance of water transfer from the Nile. Do you understand?

"Yes, Majesty." 

"You will have still further responsibilities. You will supervise the building of lead pipes through Alexandria so that sewage and sepsis can be deposited in the desert."

"Yes, Majesty." 

"But among all these questions I wish for you to answer, I have one chief desire above them all. Are you listening?"

"Yes, Majesty." 

"Show me you're listening by something other than yes majesty." 

"Your Majesty I am listening as intently as a man with knowledge of all men can." 

"Childbirth is the death of a plurality of Egyptian women. It would be magnificent if you found means of contraception more reliable than an animal intestine but I will be forgiving if you can't. However, there is one thing we must determine above all. All other questions you may delegate to Rav Yosef if you have not enough time. Please, I must know if you're listening." 

"Majesty, I am praying to the Lord Most High to listen with even more intention than I already am." 

"I would like very much to make abortion a right for all Egyptian women to pursue without questions or conditions, and make all abortions state-funded. However, there are priests in the Temple of Osiris, many of them and powerful, who believe that women who abort their fetuses are committing murder because a fetus is a human life from the moment it is conceived. Your job is to discover at exactly what point during human pregnancy life begins, so that I may present the proof to the High Priest. This is the most important task of your research and administration, all the Pharaoh's treasury is at your disposal. Everything else we can cover in our meetings, but I want weekly reports sent to me on papyrus with every detail of your experiments and their findings. Do you understand everything I have said?"

"Your Majesty, I must be honest, I don't know if I..."

"...It's not your job to say what is impossible. It's your job to discover what is possible. Now go forth and spread the legs of knowledge." 

Tales of Classical Perversion - Of a Type - Still more

  After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt.  I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life." 

Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him: 

"Papa, I have the soul of a man." 

"So why then were you born a woman?"

"Can heaven make mistakes?"

"No." 

"But I know I'm a man." 

"I've made a mistake in teaching you Torah." 

"But the Lord said to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.'"

"The Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin." 

"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man." 

"You are a woman, and shall learn no more Torah." 

On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether my father was punished for his judgement, I knew that from the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and Shiva continued until Sukkot. 

Alone on the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I took Papa's dagger and shore my hair. I dressed myself in Papa's trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I was very nearly the young man I knew within myself. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's pipe and left his house forever as I smoked. 

 It would be a terrible sin to abide assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard as mortally sinful; but requiring food for my journey, I sold my body so any sin of this journey would only be on me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses met God. 

 I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and a deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem womanly. My chest was outsize and cumbersome. Older men of Yavneh would repugnantly joke about my irrepressible endowment and the hands of no few would cheapen them with immodesty. 

Having heard only my footsteps and breath for three days, I stripped down to nakedness under the Sinai's night cover. As I shivered in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop my bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, certain I was dead; yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for remains but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand. 

 Our people do not look upon women as women. They are wives, mothers, eventually our daughters, slightly unfortunate children of God, but as women? No, we go discreetly with our god and that which God joins to us, we abide with discretion. As Egypt does we indulge our base lusts, but Egypt copulates wantonly amid a day's acrid heat. Egyptians must think us next to celibate; because for us it is done in the bed chamber, on Sabbath night, by cover of darkness. Our bodies are but vessels for the wondrous, and Jews make love not to the body but the soul.  

It takes 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai alone that a bedouin can cross in ten. I had but eighteen days' rations upon leaving, but could not abide another day's harlottry. As a woman, there was no reliable travel partner to join, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would know my secret after my wrongly placed casabas were excised. Only alone in the desert that could I annoint my identity, and therefore I determined to sojourn with alacrity, perform the amputation at my first encounter of three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, abstain from all but the smallest rations, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the Holy One BBH for assistance. 

Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of water and food. I walked bare chested because every day it bled anew and demanded shirts used to stop my bloodflow and half my water ]to clean my wounds. It seemed the CBH was without mercy as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, and there appeared a small caravan. A traveler saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal. 

"A pregnant man..."

"What?"

"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Yes, and you're not dying." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Surely a man won't recognize the symptoms." 

"So I'm a man?" 

"No less than I..." 

"Are you a man?" 

"Of a type..." 

"What type?" 

"The type that bleeds, same as you." 

"You bleed?"

"I did." 

"Has your monthly cycle ended?" 

"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed." 

"What was severed?"

The old healer pointed to his loins.

"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"

"The babe is eight days old." 

"It's still barbaric." 

"But why would parents permit yours to be severed so late?"

"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service." 

"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?" 

"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive civil service temptations without defiling women at court." 

"Do you desire to defile women?" 

"Less than most men, but yes."

The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect. 

And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead me into an underground passage that brought us directly beneath the palace of Cleopatra - I was face to face with a synagogue minyan, and all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service. 

"And who is this Reb Moshe?" 

"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...." 

"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh." 

I had to think quickly what my name would be. 

Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name." 

"What?"

"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to work." 

"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai. Can you do a drasha?"

"Right now?... I guess..."

"So you're a khakham."

"Of a type..."

"And you are... one of us?... nu?" 

Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch. 

"And you can lain Torah?"

"Hen vaHen." 

"So you're a Rabbi?"

"Of a type." 

"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit." 

B'reishit. "In the beginning," the first part of the Torah telling when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then destroyed the world with flood. 

I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame." 

I did not know men could applaud so lustily as they. 

"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?" 

"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)

"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli rabbis, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"

"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..." 

"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai." 

----------------------------------------

Rav Yosef taught me Greek as devotedly as Papa taught me Torah. I learned just as quickly and received as much praise. I recited passages of Hesiod and Homer as though they were the Song of D'vorah. He checked out scrolls of Aristotle from the Library and I read from beginning to end his animal writings and worked my way through the densest passages of Physics and Nicomachean Ethics with the concentration Papa forced me pay to Leviticus. I learned Euclid's geometry and Pythagorus's holy ratios, I was examined weekly on how well I retained my reading on Galen and aced every examination; we studied oration and rhetoric, logic and deductive reasoning, and most exhaustively, gardening and botany and potion making. Rav Yosef even taught me rudiments of playing the lyre, because every civil servant was called upon occasion to play music for Pharaoh in moments of her distress, even Jews on Sabbath. 

Rav Moshe would inevitably come to us during his many visits to our laboratory. 

"How's he coming along?" 

"He's an illui," Rav Yosef would say to Rav Moshe almost constantly. "Once we're ready to go he can take both our positions and write his own papyrus for anything he wants besides." 

"Well, as it turns out, it's time for him to take one of them. I'm retiring; taking my golden sun dial and buying a beach house in Aqaba."

"Why not Eilat?"

"Too many Jews." 

"Oy. There are more in Egypt."

"You see the problem. What's our melamed working on?" 

"It's an experiment to see if there are more than nine geometric shapes."

"Mazel Tov, but aren't you worried he'll be punished for heresy?" 

"Feh. The priests are too busy plotting against Miss Cleo to get beyz about what a stupid rabbi's doing - slicha Yanai."

"Shayn fargessen." 

And so Rav Moshe retired, got a ceremonial Friday night dinner (kosher) at which Cleopatra and Rav Yosef spoke, along with a bunch of other palace functionaries I'd never met, then Rav Moshe accepted a small obelisk from Cleopatra that had his name and position inscribed in carving, but most of the speeches were used to pay tribute to Marc Anthony, who wasn't even there, but protocol was protocol. 

That was Friday, that Monday I went to an interview with the Pharaoh in her apartment. (description of her apartment here). 

But the Pharaoh was not in the royal revelations to which we eunuchs were accustomed, she was dressed like a male pharaoh going to war; wearing a blue cap that went up an entire cubit, wearing two satchels of bronze fastened over each arm, a blue shield on her upper body and a black tunic underneath, completing the ensemble with a golden satchel that began between her legs and went near to the floor. 

"You're Rav Yanai of Yavneh?"

"I am, your majesty." 

"Strip." 

"What?"

"Strip." 

"Why?" 

"It's not for subjects to question their Pharaoh why. Is is your ruler's pleasure to see you strip, and you shall strip." 

"I fear to do so." 

"I know what you are, now do as I say." 

And in terror I exposed myself to Cleopatra in all my truth. 

"How did you know, Majesty?" 

"A woman knows." 

"Yes, Majesty." 

"And you call yourself a eunuch?" 

"Of a type, Your Majesty." 

"No doubt if your fellow Rabbis knew they would create a ruling allowing an exception for you." 

"Are there exceptions for me?" 

"I don't know yet." 

"Did the Rabbis know?" 

"Rav Moshe did." 

"Well he must be at the Sinai by now, it's not worth recalling him just to punish him." 

"Am I to be punished Your Majesty?" 

"It depends on what you think is punishment. You see that lyre over there?"

"Yes."

"Play it." 

"I'm not very good." 

"All the better, I don't like it when my servants show off."  

Tales of Classical Perversion - Of a Type - First Part

 After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life." My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt. 

Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him: 

"Papa, I have the soul of a man." 

"So why then were you born a woman?"

"Can heaven make mistakes?"

"No. Never." 

"But I know I am a man." 

"It is I who've made a mistake in teaching you Torah." 

"Did not the Lord say to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart?'"

"You know the Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin." 

"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man." 

"You are a woman, and you shall learn no more Torah." 

On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether the Lord punished my father for his judgement, I knew that in the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and the shiva continued till Sukkot. 

Alone the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I dressed myself in his trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I took his dagger from the gardel and shore my hair. I was very nearly the handsome young man I knew myself to be. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's long pipe and left his house forever as I smoked. 

 I feared it was a terrible sin in the eyes of the Holy One BBH to abide my journey's assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard mortally sinful; but requiring provisions and food for my journey, I sold my body so that the sin would be only upon me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses received the Law. 

 I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem woman. My chest was irepressibly cumbersome. Some older men of Yavneh would repugnantly indicate the extent of my womanly endowment and the hands of a few would cheapen modesty upon them. 

In the Sinai, having heard not a single sound for three days but my footsteps and breath, I striped down to nakedness under night's cover, and shivering in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for their remains, but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand. 

 Our people are not even supposed to look upon women as women. They are wives, mothers, eventually our daughters, slightly unfortunate children of God, but as women? No, we go discreetly with our god, and that which God joins to us, we abide with discretion. As Egypt does we indulge our base lust, but Egypt copulates wantonly amid the day's acrid heat. Egyptians must think us next to celibate; because for us it is done in the bed chamber, on the Sabbath night, by cover of darkness. Our bodies are but vessels for the wondrous, and Jews make love not to the body but the soul.  

I was told it would take 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai but a bedouin could cross in ten; I had eighteen days' rations but I could not abide one more day's harlottry. As a woman, I could not reliably join a travel partner, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would forever know my secret after I excised those wrongly placed casabas. It was only alone in the desert that I could annoint my identity, and therefore determined to sojourn immediately, perform the amputation whenever I encountered three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, renounce desire for rations with extreme abstention, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the CBH for assistance. 

Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of food and water. I had to walk bare chested. Every day my chest bled anew so the shirts must be used to stop blood, a procedure that demanded half my water supply. It seemed the CBH was without mercy for my plight as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day when I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, there appeared a small caravan. Its travellers saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal. 

"A pregnant man..."

"What?"

"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Surely men won't recognize the symptoms." 

"So I'm a man?" 

"No less than I..." 

"Are you a man?" 

"Of a type..." 

"What type?" 

"The type that bleeds, same as you." 

"You bleed?"

"I did." 

"Has your monthly cycle ended?" 

"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed." 

"What was severed?"

The old healer pointed to his loins. 

"I too heard of those whose testicles were removed in youth, but never thought such would be so." 

"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"

"The babe is eight days old." 

"It's still barbaric." 

"But why would parents permit it?"

"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service." 

"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?" 

"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive the temptations of civil service without defiling the women at court." 

"Do you desire to defile women?" 

"Less than most men, but yes." 

The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect. 

And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead me into an underground passage beneah the ground that brought us directly underneath the palace of Cleopatra - a synagogue minyan where all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service. 

"And who is this Reb Moshe?" 

I had to think quickly what my name would be. 

"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...." 

"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh." 

Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name." 

"What?"

"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to stay and work." 

"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai." 

"Can you do a drasha?"

"Right now?... I guess..."

"So you're a khakham."

"Of a type..."

"And you are... one of us?... nu?" 

Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch. 

"And you can lain Torah?"

"Hen vaHen." 

"So you're a Rabbi?"

"Of a type." 

"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit." 

B'reishit. "In the beginning," the very first part of the Torah when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then decided to destroy the world. 

I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame." 

I did not know men could applaud so lustily as these did. 

"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?" 

"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)

"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli Ravs, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"

"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..." 

"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai." 

----------------------------------------

Suicide: Obviously not mine, don't worry

So where has your formerly faithful facebook correspondent been anyway?

He's working on a book, a looooong book, one of those books he may not live long enough to get through ten percent of. One day, if all goes according to plan (which never happens) your grandchildren will all have it on their shelves and drop it on their feet more often than they open it. What kind of book is it? Well, he just finished a chapter that begins with Cleopatra and Marc Anthony performing filthy acts upon each other, and ends with Cleopatra begging her children in her suicide letter to annihilate the Jewish people.

So this is either the kind of book you'll think you want to read and won't like a single word, or the kind of book you think you'll hate every page and love every minute of it.

But the reason he's come back momentarily may surprise you. It's because of this article by, of all people, David Brooks, the dullest, most sanctimonious, cliched commentator in America, who has about as much political insight as your once faithful facebook correspondent has into a sack of rocks.

But when Brooks writes about anything other than politics, he's surprisingly good, and never better than when talking about the suicide of his good friend.

The problem with suicide is that it's so.... final... There's no walking back from the other side to say 'y'know, I shouldn't have done that', there's no ability to stick around and wonder if things ever get better, and worst of all, there's no ability to say to friends and loved ones 'don't do what I did' in their stressful moments.

One of my closest friends sent this article to me, though I'd already read a bit of it, and the implication was extremely clear. I said to him 'Don't worry, I will never put you in this position.' and he said 'thank you.'

Of course, I have to rephrase that slightly: for well over thirty years I've endured levels of inner blackness that have killed people who've experienced less of it for shorter periods; but when part of you has been dead for well over thirty years, what the hell's the point in killing the rest? No one is more surprised I'm still here than I, and I made a promise to myself that whatever horrors to come, I would choose life as all rational people do. If it ever happens, and please understand, there's absolutely no foreseeable danger of it, it would be a decision made with complete irrationality. There is no good reason to end it. We all have things to live for, and if for no other reason, your faithful facebook correspondent wants to be alive as long as he can so he can write all the thousands of ideas percolating in his head when he's not obsessively ruminating on the things that keep him up at night. There are so many more disgusting sex scenes to write, all the moreso in this era when men writing novels with sex in it is the ultimate bad taste.

The world of woke has not thought it important to advocate for the learning disabled, the mentally imbalanced, or Jews, I suspect they never will. Any movement that fervently sincere can turn itself into a cesspool where demagogues can flourish, and I strongly suspect some powerful antisocial(ists) among them are already planning how they can all three groups to the dogs to increase the reach of their power grabs. People who consider themselves the wokest Bernie-bros in the world can begin to sound like the most intolerant Fox News yellers the moment our struggles with conditions that have already ruined our lives affect them. People who consider themselves the height of sensitivity to issues of abuse are willing to turn on anybody who exhibits a moment of turmoil with that dreaded claim. And Jews? Well, if the world is as racist as now claimed, the world is also as antisemitic, and you'd better believe some of the worst antisemites in the world are antiracists. Of all three I could tell stories over the years that would turn Shakespeare's beard white, and for the better part of thirty years, I've lived in terror of all three. Not that it matters: In the dictatorship of the mad, long-term relationships are over before they start. In the anarchy of the learning disabled, friends drop you all the time for being unreliable. In the kakistocracy of living in this world as a Jew... nobody wants to hear what I have to say, gentile or Jewish.

I had an extraordinarily memorable experience recently with a friend who lived in Israel, sadly another former friend now, whom I talked down from suicide threats... three times? Five times? Seven times?

I have reason to do so, I didn't take suicidal threats seriously from a friend ten years ago who would call me ad nauseum, and eventually I stopped taking his calls because he sent me messages that were more and more ominous sounding, as though he might not be the only person he kills - but he didn't, he was just in danger of killing himself, and six months later he jumped in front of a train.

When I was living in Israel, there was another acquaintance/neighbor who came into my room to say goodbye saying 'I'm going away, you won't see me for a long time' just before he jumped from his fifth-floor window. The rest of my time in Israel, that hallway felt haunted.

I'd lost touch with one of my closest high school friends. I was deeply in love with her and when I found out almost offhandedly that she was going to one of the two schools I'd gotten into, of course I chose that one. We barely saw each other, she disappeared into drugs, I disappeared into academic success that surprised no one more than me. We occasionally saw each other until she dropped out. I'd always wondered what happened, then I got the inevitable news: she'd dropped out of more than college.

This other 'friend' from Israel kept threatening suicide on social media; almost casually, clearly for effect, and clearly because he was desperate for some kind of attention, sympathy, companionship... it was a kind of brinksmanship with him: 'I'll do it! Oh yes! I'll do it! Don't think I won't!' I have no doubt he was suffering terribly; but he refused to go to therapy, he refused to believe he had anyone meaningful looking after him when he obviously did, and he would threaten suicide over the stupidest things, including when I pointed out to him that he was overreacting and being intolerant over stupid things. He had unfulfillably high expectations for life, and when the expectations for life are too high, you're asking yourself to be disappointed. Finally, he unfriended me over a trivial remark about something he liked that wasn't even directed at him, and well... I went off on him. I'm Evan Tucker, that's what I do... I even told him "You're so crazy you can't even commit suicide when you threaten to!" ...The next day more than half a dozen Israelis bombed my music page with a screen capture of what I said to him (though I said a lot more). I was told I'd committed abuse and a felony, and all this by the very sorts of friends he said were worthless and meaningless. Such are interactions in the kingdom of the mad.

Did I cross a line? Of course I did. I meant to and I don't regret it. This was a friend of sixteen years and he ended a friendship because of.... well I'm not really sure, I'd been a pretty damn superb friend to him, but I'm sure my sin was grave in his unreliable mind which, as of then, he had no interest in making more reliable. I wish him well, I certainly hope he doesn't do it, and I somehow have a feeling he won't...

In the meantime, there are the rest of us. I try to keep expectations for my own life as low as possible. For a 40 year old I live with a mind that yo-yos like a sine wave, and like so many whose mental illness is never alleviated, the body suffers with the mind: I live with some relatively colossal health issues. The chances I'd 'check myself out' are pretty darn low, but I'd put the actuarial odds pretty high that my body will take me out before 70, long before my mind is willing to stop enduring.

I would like to think that some amount of writing I do will be remembered well by a public larger than this dozen and change public I have here, but what most writers never understand is that however many or few the readers, if it's any good, it's not worth the colossal amount of effort it takes to get good at it. To anyone who can have a life with any relatively normal job, domesticity; take it, never look back. It's just not worth it.

Once I passed a certain age, say... 17... I never wanted to fulfill any stereotype of a tortured artist. How good can anything be that involves torture (don't ask Cleopatra...)? I just realized 'the tortured artist' route was my only option, and I might as well, in my limited way, try to get as good at it as I can. People don't 'torture themselves' to be good at art, they become good at art because they're already tortured and need respite from it. Most artists, once they find a path toward sanity, take it, and no longer spend every waking moment worrying about what they can do to improve what they're working on. Happy artists? They certainly exist, good ones too; but virtually any job is easier. They often leave because they want to remain happy.

So rationally speaking, I never wanted to be a writer, I never wanted to be a composer. I wanted to be a doctor or lawyer or teacher; go to school, get a 9-5 job, live a normal quiet life that wouldn't disappoint your grandparents. That was not in the cards for me. What was in the cards for me is writing, writing like this, writing that I'm not sure anybody will ever read, writing that is, for better or worse, as for myself as by myself.

The saddest thing about all the major depressive disorders, sadder even than the depression itself, is the uncurable nature of the thing. You can get respite, but the danger of it coming back is always gigantic. Once you're in, you're in. Managing it defines large swathes of the rest of your life, and whomever you were or would be before it happens, you have to say goodbye to that person if you ever want to feel better. The new you is no less valuable, certainly not 'worse' than the old you, but the new you is disagreeable company. He is not an organically integrated part of your natural personality, and he was formed to be in the greatest possible clash with the rest of you.

So no matter how dislikable the world finds the disagreeable side of this graphomaniac, he is going to go on, partly out of hope, partly out of love, partly out of spite.

I was formed by life to be a gadfly, a passive player, capable of doing very little but observe how others live their lives, then writing down comments on it. Surely the uniqueness of my vantage lets me see things other people don't, but uncharitable sorts call my role in life a 'troll.' Disagreeable though I may be, I think what I do is a lot harder than trollery; but at this point I know that few people care.what I think unless it resembles trolldom. So on I continue, not knowing if life is worth embracing; but whether it is or isn't, I intend to hang around long enough to find out, and will keep going until my body gives out, which may be sooner than we know..

In the meantime, those who choose to not accompany me for this ride, I pray every day that you're cursed with copious amounts of painful diarrhea. But to all who are there for me, thank you all, and I will try as best I can to do the same for you.

Amen

Humanities Rant

 I got depressed at the symphony this weekend and had to walk out. All these pompous old people who in their final years think nothing of stepping over the young in line as though you're not there, all these young people who vote with their feet and clearly believe civic institutions aren't worth supporting. It's enough to make you want to curl up into reclusion forever.

The humanities are not about snobbery or self-congratulation, they're about history, they're about an unbroken continuity going back thousands of years. There is objective quality in humanities, and anybody who says otherwise is worth shaming. The humanities are about civilization and making us aware that civilization can break down so easily, and the greatest creators are people who know exactly what it means to feel grief, terror, horror, hatred, poverty, and yet they still bet on life and love and progress. That's what it means to listen to the ninths and thirds of Beethoven and Mahler, to read Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina, to look at the later paintings of Goya and Van Gogh, to watch Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth, to even watch The Simpsons, it's even what it means to listen to Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, it's even what it means to read large parts of The Bible and the Mahabharata.. They teach us more about life than life can. It's more than just pleasure, it's more than just nerding out, they're about moral instruction, they're about our responsibility to do the hardest thing in the world: to view existence affirmatively in the worst circumstances, they're a spiritual prayer that has no need for a god.

People now say history is just a myth perpetrated by people in power. Bullshit. Stinking foul bullshit that landed us exactly here, yet again. There is objective truth in history. They can be boiled down to two.

1. Progress is imperative. The gain of rights and dignity, hearing the voices of the marginalized, the empowerment of the dispossessed, the anticipating of problems before they become existential, the wholesale embrace of people whose identity doesn't conform to your traditions. These are rights and not rewards for good behavior.

2. People are trying to take away these rights, often people who falsely think they're marginalized and consequently take others rights away. If they fight with force, they need to be met with force or else they'll succeed.

The reason the humanities is currently undergoing a thoroughly unnecessary and fanatical revolution? An older generation of complacent corruption prevents the gaining of #1, and consequently the younger generation turns into dangerous fanatics who don't see the terrors of #2, which turns the older gwneration into the same fanatics, only they have the power and the will to use it to kill off the younger generation through planetary heating, debt and deregulation. Combine it all and this is why the world now is what it is.

We have to bet on life and love and progress, but hundreds of millions of dipshits make it so very very hard.

Tales of Classical Perversion: Palestine's Colossus - Second Draft

Not 24 hours post-hoc that lethal encounter with Shammai I was ordered set sail for Rhodes to meet none other than Octavian himself, newly coronated Caesar Augustus; the implication clearer than marble etching that supplication and groveling was to elicit procurement from me at the newly Caesar's feet and, having collaborated with Augustus's greatest enemy, Anthony, Herod must beg Octavian's clemency to spare the lives of his court. The fate of Herod the Great remaining in question, though probable to my death I go. 

And yet there were augers for hope for understanding between Rome and Judea. The symbolism of meeting at Rhodes with its Colossus was clear to me: Caesar was the colossus and why would I die if had I to acknowledge the enormity of Rome's authority. And as my ship approached the ruins of Rhodes's famed Colossus, I heard charmingly vulgar talk amid two sailors, one Roman, the other Judean, showing just what understanding was possible between two peoples whom nothing in common would seem to hold them. To my best ability, my memory records the conversation as I heard: 

"When sailors sailed under it, they must have peered up. Did they... ,,, get a view of anything underneath?" "There's no phallus among the ruins if that's what you're implying." "How could there not be?!" "Well it's just not there." "It just seems unlikely to go to all that trouble to scare the bejeesus out of visitors by sailing under a statue a hundred meters tall and not give it a sch.." "..I don't know what to tell you." "Maybe you Romans should... y'know... look harder." "Are you saying the fucking Colossus of Rhodes had a small..." "I'm not saying it was small, though it had to be small enough that somebody could make it disappear without noticing." "You're fucking pazzo." "Look, all I'm saying is that something must have happened, and I bet I know what did even..." "Whatdya' think?" "I think some Jewish bronze merchant a hundred years ago said getta load'a that schvantz, and sold it to a Roman senator." "...Get the fuck outa here!" "I really do!" "You think some Yid had the balls to steal a gigantic bronze phallus from the most watched site in the world?" "I think Rome helped!" "You think the penis of the Colossus of Rhodes is in Rome?!" "I think it's standing straight up on top of the fucking Pantheon is what I think." 

And yet when we arrived, there were statues in the likeness of Herod and Antipater right next to the feet of the old Colossus, all among it which remained standing in place.

Captain: "What does this mean your majesty?" Me: "It means either I will be feted as hero, or I will be killed, my family killed, and all Judea fall to slavery just as every Roman province does." 

Upon land I embarked from the ship. And my welcome? A dozen comely slave girls, temptingly naked, who painted my face red as the Northern Mediterranean thought all gods were faced, stripped me of my clothes so they could place purple toga upon me, and placed a laurel wreath atop my head. Still I thought I may die as a Roman sacrifice to their gods. I know they didn't do human sacrifices, but among any island peoples one can never be certain. 

Thereupon was I placed on a large pulled chariot straight into a triumph through the streets of Rhodes, utterly Roman-style. Behind my chariot was a town crier continually calling out 'Hail Herod! Rome's protector in the East! Hail Herod! Vanquisher of the Hasmoneans! Hail Herod! Ensnarer of Cleopatra! Hail Herod! Rebuilder of Jerusalem!" And then I saw in front of me a hundred open wheelbarrowed caravans. First an entire armory's worth of weapons showcased - the short gladius, the long spatha, the tiny pugio, the enormous hasta, the aerodynamic pilum, the flying plumbata - a hundred of them each at least, and in front of them pulled a dozen of all matter of catapult: the onager, the ballista, the scorpio; and within them a thousand dolabras - the tool which every Roman soldier used for digging, along with a thousand helmets and shields. In between each caravan was another open chest of currency: gold and silver minted in coin and bullion: Aureus, Quinarius Aureus, Denarius, Quinarius, Sesterius, Dupondius, As, Semis, and Quadrans. And further chests containing giant jewels of pearl, jade, malachite, amethyst, carnelian, topaz, chalcedony, obsidian, olivine, and lapis lazulli! In front of all these chests were further statues and paintings and tapestries: of Herod, Antipater, Mairiam, all the Hasmonean protectors, and all the prophets of the Bible! 

Six hours later, at the end of the parade, stood Flavius Jacobus, at the foot of Rhodes's Temple of Jupiter, there to bid his old friend into the temple, who silently clasped me by the shoulder in embrace then motioned to bid me up the stairs. 

And when I entered, immediately I saw, on the center wall of the Temple, sitting upon Divine Jupiter's lap, was himself, Caesar Augustus. 

"Well, the Temple of Jupiter here is not much of a temple but it'll do for now. Rome and Rhodes bids welcome to its Protector in the East. I hope this trip is turning out as eventfully as you hoped?" 

"Well, I don't know if I hoped for such events but..."

"...Such events you now have. We have named you Rome's Protector in the East, and we trust that you will act to Rome's benefit just as you've acted to Judea's. Do you notice all the finery in front of you in your triumph?" 

"I couldn't help but.."

"..It's yours of course." 

"Well thank you, but is this a harbinger of something ominous? Isn't some slave supposed to shout in my ear to remember that I'm mortal?" 

"Probably not, and you're from Judea. Nobody in that state forgets they're mortal." 

"So this is a triumph?" 

"It's very much a triumph. Yours and mine." 

"Didn't you have a triumph of your own in Rome?"

"Come with me King, let's talk among the ruins." 

And as in suspense I walked with Augustus to inspect the Colossus's many bronze ruins, Augustus immediately launched into conversation: 

"What ruler who wants to die of natural causes ever throws himself a triumph?" 

"So this is..."

"This is my celebration as much as yours. When Divine Julius wanted to celebrate, it was to places like Rhodes he came. 'My boy, when Romans go north you work, when you go east and south, you play.'"

"Your father went to Rhodes?"

"He tried to go to Rhodes, then he was abducted by pirates, just like you were." 

"I wasn't abducted by pirates." 

"You weren't?" 

"I was shipwrecked after Cleopatra sent me to Italy to pitch something straight to you and Anthony. I honestly thought I'd be dead - either Cleopatra wanted me thrown overboard, or he sent me to Anthony so I could be killed, and if they didn't kill me, I figured you would. But instead I was shipwrecked and fell into the belly of whale where I stayed for three days."

"You mean like your prophet Jonah?..."

"How do you know about Jonah?"

"A good leader reads..."

"I swear it happened." 

"If you say it happened it did. You're a king and kings write their own histories. All sorts of things happen to me that no one would believe." 

"If you say so." 

And strange enough Augustus began to croak and ribbit like a frog, but stranger still, within forty seconds three hundred and some frogs appeared noisily atop the ruins of Rhodes's Colossus. And all the frogs did bow to us like the kings we were.

"The Gods allow some people to do some very strange things. We great men, we're not made of the same stuff." 

"In my country, I'm told there is only one god who grants such permissions." 

"I've heard you believe in two."

"How did you discover that?!" 

"A good leader also listens." 

"I don't necessarily believe in two gods. I've only heard one."

"What god is that?"

"The 'other' God."

"The other god?"

"The God who appeared to me after the destruction of my true home country, Idumea, and told me to avenge my homeland upon the Jewish people and Yahweh." 

"So it's true!" 

"What?"

"You hate your people!" 

"And you love Romans?"

"I'm ambivalent about them." 

"You fear them!" 

"Yes, very much so." 

"How much more reason have I to fear mine? They killed my family, they killed the family that birthed my family, they've been killing my family since the time of Lot and Ishmael." 

"Well, the Romans did just kill my father, but no, we don't have your prodigal patrimony. Rome is a city of immigrants, and immigrants come to new places to forget old hatreds." 

"Hatred is history's oldest motivator. Let Roman history go on long enough there will be enough hatred to power the rest of Judea's history."

"Oh yes you're probably right but you should know better than to say so. Don't forget Protector, you're still in the company of the only man in the world you can't rule." 

"My apologies your majesty."

"Don't you dare call me that. I'm no king and no emperor, my title is 'Mr. Princeps', Rome's First Citizen." 

"You really want me to call you that?"

"It's just ridiculous enough that people won't be in awe of me." 

"Whatever you say Mr. Princeps." 

"I must say, I'm more impressed than I expected to be." 

"What did you expect?" 

"The world entire knows of Herod's Odyssian cunning, but I worried I'd encounter a spoiled killer." 

"Well that's exactly whom you're meeting here. Guilty as charged." 

"We have spoiled killers everywhere in Rome, the spoiled killers kill each other and assume they can take their spoils without another spoiled killer coming to take theirs; but you're different Herod son of Antipater. I can't tell whether you're just a little spoiled or just a lot a killer, but men like you kill so freely that you either build nations or destroy them."

"What charm of mine gave it away?" 

"Don't you know? You, king of a people supposed so skilled in the arts of duplicity?"

"As I said, I'm not a Jew." 

"Of course you are, all semites are partially Jews, and you rule over them all! Were you not the most gifted among a very gifted people you'd just be another Judean prince strangled in a prison."

"I still don't understand."

"Of course you do. You're gifted enough that I'm scared just talking to you." 

"Mr. Princeps can't be scared of a vassal king." 

"I'm scared of every vassal king who knows to speak less than I do."

"Have I spoken less?"

"I don't know, but had you spoken more, it would have been impossible not to read your mind, and you'd be stunned how many vassal kings speak over me in conversation."

"Ignorance is bold. Knowledge is reserved." 

"Indeed, yet amid all this tact and polish, I hear that there is no German horde who can perpetrate all the atrocities it's said Herod's done, and it's for that reason I trust you Herod-ben-Antipater to pilot a project I hope to institute through the whole empire." 

"What project?" 

"Jew, how long did it take your people to advance from Abraham to such learning as you now have that neither the might of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Syria, nor Greece could destroy you. 

"I suppose it's been two-thousand years."

"How many men are there among the Jews like Flavius Jacobus?"

"Rich?"

"No, just uncannily scrupulous and unscrupulous whenever appropriate. You want revenge against your Jews, but Jewish skill has arrived your people at such eminence that the finance of men like Jacobus is the coin of the largest Empire the world has ever seen.

"So two thousand years was the amount of time it took you to evolve to such a state. This also was roughly the same time that Egypt and Sumeria learned to read, yes?" 

"I suppose." 

And just there, conveniently enough, we arrived upon the Colossal ruins. I would say it was a coincidence but Augustus probably knew to time it perfectly. 

"Now look at this bronze Jew. Two and half centuries ago, the might of the ancient world looked upon its work and despaired, yet just fifty years after, a mere earthquake took it down for all time. 

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Well I understand there was an earthquake none to long ago in Jerusalem?"  

"One of a few."

"Two thousand years it took from Jews to go from a desert people to work at the side of the most powerful empire the world. Prosperity never abides long in the same place, and so this, now, is a once every two millennia opportunity. The most competent nations in the world are also the most powerful." 

"I suppose I see that, but I don't understand what to do with it." 

"It will not be again unless we train the world to our standard." 

"And you truly believe you can do that?"

"I believe YOU can do that. Rome may think it wants glory for its senate and its people, but Rome must not be allowed to become a permanent empire of bread and circus! Your people are commanded to be a light unto nations? Well, be that light!" 

"I... Mr. Princeps, I think your ambition exceeds even your own power. Who am I that Herod should be the one to bring the world out of slavery? Does the world even wish to be brought freedom?" 

"The world does not know what it wishes, it does not know what it needs, but what the world needs is for all her vassal nations to be as strong as Rome herself."

"You would willingly give up your empire?"

"It was never my empire. I have neither right to it nor desire."

"Wouldn't so many strong nations cause permanent war?" 

"Not if nations were united in alliance!" 

"Mr. Princeps, you surely realize this is madness." 

"It is only the mad who change the world!" 

"And it is surely only the mad who seek the world's improvement."

"Then be mad with me Jew. Surely you've seen the augers. Jupiter is in retrograde for the next fifty years, every horoscope in the world predicts that our era borders a new age with new ways of looking at the world. Surely you see the evidence all around you." 

"The evidence is Roman power." 

"No, the evidence is change." 

"Rome IS that change."

"No. Change is Rome. Pericles built a republic in Athens, but it was a mere city-state, but it became the Delian empire during the Peloponnesian War, but once the Delian League became the Athenian empire it ruled for fifty years, then declined within in a generation. Yet for all that time, Rome's republic lasted seven-hundred years! For its Republic to survive further it must create its own league of nations!"

"Won't that create the same circumstances that caused Athens's decline?" 

"Not if we raise their strength to the full extent of Rome's." 

"How can one possibly effect affect that?" 

"By imposing new religion."

"A new religion...?"

"This is my imperial project! This is my imperial legacy!"

"So you want to export the Jewish religion throughout the empire?"

"No, though I could think of worse religions. I want a religion of liberalism." 

"What is liberalism?"

"Toleration, practical logic, knowledge and open exchange."

"Surely you know my people of all people would not accept such a god." 

"Religions can coexist with the religion I have in mind to export. All the local gods can still be worshipped, but we compel their gods to embody the principles I just elucidated." 

"I don't think people are as intelligent as you think we are." 

"Jews surely are." 

"Let me rephrase that. I don't think my people are as intelligent as you think we are.

"They can be if you educate them! Doesn't your bible encourage charity and indulgence to the poor?" 

"You can't interpret everything in the Bible literally." 

"So many of them already read, so many of them handle money; teach them our higher maths and physic!" '

"Hardly any of them read! Two in every hundred perhaps!"

"Two in every hundred is more than the one in every hundred in Rome."  

"I don't even know your higher maths and physic!" 

"It only need begin with a couple dozen. You're Herod the builder, teach your people to build so that there are a hundred Herod the builders! We'll send the engineers!" 

".... Mr. Princeps, I worry that by saying that I believe in your vision, you'll realize that I'm indulging you. So I would like to tell you a lesson my father imparted to me about his idea of the perfect government." 

"Your father was an able man." 

"The ablest. If I may speak freely?"

"Always." 

"Were he Roman he could have outfoxed your father." 

"My father said as much every time Antipater was mentioned. Nothing would delight me more than to hear your father's lesson." 

"My father said the perfect government is a government were all its subjects were slaves, but thought themselves free." 

"Don't you see Jew, that is precisely the government I seek." 

"I'm afraid I don't understand." 

"Once the world is educated, they are slaves to their reason, and they will be forever compelled to make the wise choice." 

"Sire, I will tell you what I am thinking right now. My father gave me a Greek tutor, as I'm sure your father did."

"Of course." 

"So you know your Herodotus." 

"Indeed." 

"Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this.." 

"'..to know so much and to have control over nothing.' Yes Jew, of course I know my Herodotus, I read it once every year and that is precisely the point. So long as Rome is me, Rome knows enough to surrender its hoard of knowledge to the world, and once the world has knowledge, the world's storehouse of knowledge will forever increase and it would be impossible for any man on earth to learn its full contents." 

"And you know your Thucydides." 

"He's a little drier. The limits of my intelligence. I expect you're smart enough to remember every passage."

"Only because the tutor would flay me alive if I didn't. The quote is 'Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in discovering the truth,'"

"'but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.' Yes, my father's favorite maxim. So let's make sure the first story they hear from birth is the truth. But you've also read The Republic." 

"Oh god that fucking Greek tyrant. Still worse would happen every time I didn't sufficiently commit Plato to memory." 

"So then you know this quote Jew: Either we shall find what it is we're seeking.."

(both) "..or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know." 

"Let's free these men from their caves Jew. I doubt you believe in the augers any more than I do, but the astrologers surely see the new era we all live in and predict accordingly. Let's head off this new era's ignorance and blood by creating an era of our own. You know exactly what I'm going to quote now." 

"Pericles?"

"Indeed. Recite it Jew." 

“For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples...

"Splendidus Iudaeus. Come, let's embrace on this." 

And like a nimrod I went into that embrace. He pulled me into his huge and the divine Mr. Princeps gave me the kiss of betrayal upon the lips. He thereupon took my hand in quite gently, patted it, and after three seconds, the gentle stroke became an iron grip. He produced a dagger, immediately severing the artery in my arm, I literally thought he would saw my forearm completely off. My arm spurted blood in volumes and I could not help but scream so loud the entire beach heard me. The scream turned to whimpers and I could not help but weep in front of the world's master. Caesar Augustus then whispered into my ear from half a digitus: 

"We've documented every manner in which you've ordered a subject executed. Cross me on this project Philistine and you'll watch as we use all those techniques on your children, then save a technique never yet seen in Judea for you."

Wherewith Caesar reached behind one of the ruins and produced a woolen coat.

"Come, put this on. Rhodes gets cold at night and it absorbs the blood like a bandage. No one will will even know you bleed. As Rome's protector in the East you have to sacrifice to Jupiter like us all tonight, then we'll parade you again in triumph back to your ship tomorrow. We'll give you golden armor to cover the wound."

At which point he hugged me again. 

"Come, they're waiting for us at the temple."

Leontyne Price as Bess, Cab Calloway as Sportin' Life

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zqW9ysmU-M

Talk about an extraordinary document: Porgy and Bess done in Berlin in 1952 with William Warfield as Porgy, LEONTYNE PRICE AS BESS, and CAB FUCKING CALLOWAY AS SPORTIN' LIFE!!! In the pit was the conductor of the premiere.

For as long as our current zeitgeist goes, wars over Porgy and Bess will continue to be fought. The pre-eminent voice in the wars on this work used to be the snobs complaining opera was polluted with American popular music. Now the work is declared war upon by people in the intersectional crowd who claims that Porgy is akin to minstrelsy.

I suppose to people who insist on reading things literally and banishing any trope that even resembles objectionable content, yes, Porgy probably seems like minstrelsy. But oh my god, it resembles minstrelsy because it's the fucking opposite.

The whole way in which dehumanized people become looked at with sympathy, empathy, and humanity, is by taking familiar tropes of depiction and turning them on their heads. The whole point of Porgy and Bess is that these people onstage are so much more human and dignified than they might seem at first glance, and if people in the audience assume that people like these characters are less than three dimensional and human, they have to examine whether their attitude is racist.

This is literally how human connection is made from Shakespeare onward. There's no moment of mimesis if we do not see the caricatures inherent in Shylock, Othello, and Richard III, and then observe how circumstances make them so, and in spite of their circumstances, retain a full measure of their depth of human character. Think of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, who became suicidal women shunned by society for having affairs because that was the only happiness available to them. Think of the tragic fate of the Karamazov family, and how their fates were written for them through their experience of a deadbeat abusive father.

The whole point of Porgy and Bess is that these people are put upon by the forces of American life, white American life, which deliberately humiliates people of color, and still, in spite of their hopelessly colossal suffering, they heroically persist in taking their full enjoyment of life. When Serena sings "My Man's Gone Now," how many millions in African-American women could have sung this song? This is how minds are changed. This is how people are allowed to rise up. This, so much more than another earnest theater piece about social ills, is how social change is made.

Tales of Classical Perversion: Cleopatra's Needle - Probably the Rough Draft

 Narrator: We begin with a gargle amid that bed where has been entertained so many of the great men of history. 

(Anthony empties his bladder into Cleopatra's mouth, who delightedly gargles Anthony's micturation and then swallows.)

C: I do wish you would use the other end.

A: I.... need to grow bigger balls before I do that.

C: You need to grow bigger balls? I'm the one who's begging you to shit in my mouth!

A: How can you have a taste for that?

C: There's a lot you didn't know about Julie.

A: He? Liked to, farcockt in you?

C: No! He liked me doing it to him.

A: He liked... Fuck... If that ever got out?...

C: He didn't care... 

A: And you did it too?

C: I was curious! 

A: And you liked it??

C: It's not the most disgusting thing that's ever been in me. 

A: Alright, you need to be quiet.

(Anthony puts his phallus in Cleopatra's mouth and fucks it while Cleopatra makes noises in her throat 'GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW!) 

A: I'm telling you, the Briton girls don't make noises like that.

C: (talking while phallus still in mouth) "What noises do they make? 

A: Who? 

C: The Britons. 

A: I don't they even had sex before Rome got there. 

C: What about the Gauls?

A: What about who?

C: The Gauls.

A: Oh... they make even dirtier noises. 

C: The Germans?

A: They do dirtier things than you've ever done.

C: The Slavs?

A: They're too drunk to do much of anything...

C: The Israelites?

A: Depends on if it's before or after they're married...

C: What happens after they're married?

A: Apparently you never have sex again.

C: Why is that?

A: Jews seem to have a very love/hate relationship with sex.

C: Well they do punish sodomy.

A: What? (takes phallus out of mouth) 

C: The Jews, they punish sodomy.

A: Oh... yeah I heard something about that... So... now that I can hear what you're saying you fancy a bit of that right now?

C: What?

A: Sodomy!

C: Oh! I'd love it, you first though... (Cleopatra stands up to reveal she's wearing a wooden dildus) ... (speaking to the servant in the corner of the room) "Menefer where's the shaving cream?

M: The tub's on the bed right next to your other dildii." 

(Cleopatra starts stroking the dildus up and down with shaving cream) 

C: Octavia never did this for you right?

A: Never, but she never loved me. 

C: I'm playing the world's smallest lute for you." 

(Cleopatra sticks it in) 

A: Ah... ah... AHHHHHHHH THAT'S NO LUTE!...

C: You said the other one was too small!

(Cleopatra begins premensing his anus) 

A: THIS one's Perfect!

C: HOW many ROman WHORES are THIS GIVing?

A: There's... buggery... in the love... that... can't be reckoned." 

C: (Cleopatra increases the speed) The BREAking OF so GREAT a THING should MAKE a GREATer CRACK!

A: AAAAAAAAAHHH AHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHH!" 

(Cleopatra pulls out) 

A: Not so quick my love or I very well may shit in your mouth. 

C: (Cleopatra unfastens the dildo) Why don't you take a taste of what I want you to do.

A: Does my lady so order it?

(Cleopatra shoves the dildo in Anthony's mouth and he throws up.) 

C: How was it?

A: Do it again!

(Cleopatra moves the dildo in and out of Anthony's mouth.)

C: I needed protection against the Parthians, and you were never the diplomat in this relationship. 

A: (with dildus still in mouth) "And you liked it?

C: Marcus Antonius,... what's the worst thing you've ever tasted?" 

A: (Anthony moves his head out of the way from the dildus) Probably this dish in Palestina, it's calves feet in jelly.

C: Oh! P'tcha. 

A: Yeah! That's right! Pitcha! Our accountant says the Israelites call it that because that's the noise they make after they taste it.

C: Tony, come on, seriously, is this the first time you ever vomited?

A: After half my meals!

C: Have you ever bit into rotten food?

A: When my food taster sucks...

C: Have you ever tasted mud? Dried blood? 

A: Every battle drill.

C: When you were on your vineyard, did you ever get fertilizer in you mouth?

A: Pretty disgusting, sure.

C: Have you ever bit your tongue?

A: Oh that hurts more than a sword to the stomach.

C: Have you torn your Achilles?

A: No but I've torn plenty of others'.

C: Have you passed a kidney stone?

A: No but some senators pass them all the time. The vomitorium isn't fun those days.

C: You've clearly been burned.

A: Three times in the field.

C: Have you ever had a tooth ache?

A: Thank the gods, no. I hear that's the most painful thing on earth.

C: Alright, well I've experienced things far more painful than a toothache, and after a tooth ache, excramentum in your mouth is thrilling.

A: What does it taste like?

C: It tastes like shit. That's not the point.

A: What's the point?

C: The point is that you've just eaten the most disgusting thing known to man, you live to tell about it, and even if you smell awful, you're not in pain, and that's the best feeling on earth.

A: I don't know why, but I'm turned on right now... how about something more traditional? 

(Anthony puts his phallus into Cleopatra's vaginae while putting fingers in her anus, a hand clasped with all his might over her mouth against the pillow, and biting down hard on her nipples, she screams with what seems to be pleasure). 

(It would once again seem that the fragments we have are that of a greater metanarrative. In the first fragment, it would seem that Cleopatra is written as a kind of Egyptian whore, perhaps for a satyr within a Greek bawdy house, whereas the rest is a narrative of much more lofty sentiment. One might suppose this the narrative of an extremely ambitious epician in 5th Century Byzantium, and yet, while the original text prints this fragment in Greek letters, the words they spell are the common tongue of Ancient Egypt in thoroughly idiomatic 1st Century BC grammar. This circumstance is further complicated by the fact that the Egyptian court in principle spoke Greek. It is highly to be so doubted, particularly because it contravenes so much of the historical record, but however infinitesimal, there is a possibility that the rest of this tale may be none other than the authentic last testament Cleopatra herself before suicide in a letter to her children.

Dr. Richard Westenbach - Free University Berlin, 1952)

....I had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as no singing requirement. What I really loved was drawing, and even at eight was so passionate for theater that I drew elaborate stage sets and recited Antigone's monologue for the manager of the Royal Alexandrine Theater. I knew I was good, but actors at court would train for eighteen years, yet there was the company manager telling my father the Pharaoh that I displayed once-in-a-generation's talent. I have no idea if it was an artist's eye or an actor's lie, but I can't possibly have been that good, could I? Irregardless, the company affected such faith that I acted in a production of Euripides for my father's pleasure. It was onstage that General Pompey first saw me. 

The play was The Bacchae. Queen Agave was played by a man, but in the throne room of my father, I was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. Pompey was in Egypt to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, to maintain ruse he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy the Pharaoh was paying not to attack. My father, Ptolemy XII, had been made extraordinarily rich by the investments of his court minister, Enoch-bar-Joseph, but our Egypt suffered dysfunction for a thousand years, and by the grace of Juno we are still a kingdom; but whether kingdom or fifedom, Egypt had neither the army nor the arms to fight Rome. My father, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey no less than half our fortune to refrain from attack, but Pompey refused the offer. He'd seen me onstage and what he really wanted was a weekend in my company. I was 9. 

My older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare my father shame at court, it was announced Egypt's next co-sovereign died of a chill. Thereupon was I forced at 10 to wife my older brother. Eleven months later, my father died of that same chill... While my brother-husband was stupid, I'd displayed all manner of scholastic aptitude, so it was decided that he'd go off to sport and whore every day, while I'd be ferried down the Nile to be educated amid the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls, with understanding that I'd be the one true Pharaoh when I turned eighteen in all but name. To this day, the library and its glories are my true husband. 

For six years I studied seventeen hours every day. Assignments incomplete in allotted time would result in beating. I learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. I spoke Greek with family and court and was fluent by servants in Coptic from first speech. I spoke fluent in Latin by eleven, Nubian by twelve, Aramaic by thirteen, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. I was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12 and the entire last third of the Iliad. I must have read three hundred critical commentaries from end to end.

Along with this useless literary merit, I learned the mythology of our pagan world, Grecian and Egyptian. My tutor instructed: "Think of the Gods not as beings apart but your daily company. They are the only true peers who understand the divine burdens of thronely life." He too assigned the literature of other countries: their philosophies, their sacred texts, their theologies, theogmonies, and theophanies.  

My tutor, Philostratus, was a eunuch. Yet when I was sixteen he cornered me in a library stack: "My crownest princess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." I was married already for six years, deflowered for seven, briefly a mother at twelve. Never had I known happiness conjugal nor connubial and what option had I more attractive? Philostratus was more husband to me than my brother. "But you're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can." 

My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon a course of learning which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate nor care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress for those seventeen hours a day.  This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus,  I shall not deny that sensations he imparted made me hungrily curious, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.' He was, as always, the most thorough tutor; knowledgeable and authoritative. He taught from a rare Indian textbook and approached every act as a further lesson in Archemedean mechanics and Euclidean geometry. 

It was not until eighteen when Philostartus was caught in flagrante delicto with me. My brother, for my tutor's lustful presumption, impaled Philostratus on a spike from anus to mouth. In ensuing fight between me and husband, I came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and thereon he developed a gangrenous infection; spread around his body for nine months until it killed him. Across the palace I could hear my brother's screams and it gave me more pleasure than two years with Philostratus ever could. 

Ancient custom required me to marry to marry my second brother, then the ten year old I was when I was first married. I refused custom and my refusal launched a civil war.  Many at court considered my refusal to marry my brother the worst kind of dishonor. Those tongues in opposition to me wagged that never would a Pharaohess issue such a brazen demand had not been Egyptian women so spoiled by equality and education. 

Egyptian women were first in the world in liberation, and the first to be slaughtered and raped in the civil war which followed. It is said th...

-------------------------------------------

....e I mounted the Pharaohship as sole ruler, my brother's friends at court never ceased in their toximaic comments that 'our new Pharaoh looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. As woman in a world of men, I had to cultivate that which only women have, and as I believed I had innately less than others, I had to make more of less. 

I went to the official Pharaonic tailor, Joseph-bar-David. He and his assistant, Jonathan-bar-Joseph, lived together above their office. They importuned me to let them see me naked so that they could accent all my best features. I had always worn the traditional androgyne clothing of an Egyptian heir, even after becoming queen in all but office. When gazing at me nude, they affected great gasps and temeritously told me I was hiding Babylonic features behind a uniform that was such a baggy dump. 

They began by design for a headdress of gold and slaved for six days to create it. When it was new, it was the most dazzling thing ever lain eyes upon by an Egyptian kingdom. I will not deny that at night I danced naked in the gold head dress in my obsidian mirror. It was also in view of the servants, and I made it a point of seeing if I could arouse the manservants keeping watch; those servants I found pleasing I bestowed with favors. And yet the dress weighed so heavily that my upper back and neck ached ever since as though I'm Atlas with the world on my shoulders. 

Joseph proceeded to design me a series of broad necklaces, broad so we could bedeck each with some of the largest jewels in the Pharaonic palace, each worn by a different previous Pharaoh. Every one of them cut to my skin like lacerations, and to this day, a servant every night applies spirit of camphor to my collar. 

Thereon were designed sashes around my waist of finest raiment, deliberately long and phallic, reminding my subjects they gaze upon no mere woman; each sash embroidered by a different geometric pattern to represent my educative years in Alexandria's Library. Once a day for two decades I get them caught and trip, and every subject has to pretend not to laugh, and at least once a week I have to resist the urge to bury them in sand. 

Afterward a series of capes, each the color of a different noble house. Every day I would enter with the colored cape of whatever house held my greatest favor that day. So many noblemen sacrificed their lives in attempt to gain it; some deaths were of irritants I welcomed, some were of friends I loved. 

And finally, the dresses, the gowns, the robes, the frocks; some revealing legs up to the pelvis, some revealing cleavage up to the areola; all of them hugging my form like skin. I would return every night to my apartment and the material would inevitably chafe, leaving skinmarks that peeled and rashes that itch every minute of the day for twenty years. 

And the shoes: oh Yahweh those shoes...; I'm thirty-nine now, I'd be lucky still to walk before I'm forty five. 

And finally, the makeup: the cake of foundation, the eyeliner that stretched halfway to my hair, the lengthened eyelashes,  the earings that so stretch my ears that I wear my hair long and never can braid it, the eyelids weighed down by led dye. My face has burned every day for more than twenty years, nowhere moreso than my eyes, and in recent years I've lost clarity of sight. 

Through the beginning of that redressing process, Philostratus admonished me for 'lewd ostentation', claiming that a woman sovereign particularly must be modest lest she attract envy; yet no tongue thereafter called me a witch. Yes, I was proud of how I looked. It a cynical ploy of strumpery, but it was also a manner of reminding subjects at court that indeed, their Pharaoh was woman, but she was also a goddess. No mortal could endure this regimen of beau....

---------------------------

...was Caesar who arrived when I was 20 and brokered peace between brother and sister. Caesar, having heard of Pompey's exploit, guessed from my refusal to marry the one act that would give me more pleasure than any: in an immediate private audience he requested after disembarkation, he presented me with the most splendid gift; beneath the present an engraved silver platter from Brittania, above the bounty an immaculately preserved Egyptian embroidery from the 18th dynasty; the gift was Pompey's head.

Caesar looked like a phallus. He was 51, tall and so thin he could walk through a lyre; completely bald on top with half his hair ring combed forward in a manner more absurd than British stone henges he'd recount; yet legends of female conquests were so manifold that I doubted a homely, witchy girl like me merited romantic affection; yet I felt immediately the heave of his eros - not from loins but from heart, and within fifteen seconds understood why women more beautiful than I thought him tantalizing.

Caesar was every woman's dream of a husband. Caesar was largely raised by women, whom by his fifties were all dead and he yearned to resurrect their company. What enticed us was that women felt his absolute equal. He spoke openly of his many ailments, had no fear to cry or panic in front of women, and no reservation for bequeathing all those sexual services men of high station considered degrading. Most importantly, he listened to women as complete conversational partner. He considered our insights, and while never hesitating to refute us did so with such nuance that we understood he apprehended every word we said. Upon men he imposed his full might's authority, with women he shared his vulnerability's full burden. 

He'd surely in mind to bed me from his moment of Nile embarkation, but with Caesar, women did not seduce nor he them, he simply knew his ability to converse as peer would receive reward. In his company, women learned what he'd tell no man. He'd inevitably explain he thought ambition the worst of all burdens; one pursued as joyless compulsion. Even as he chased an unsat throne atop the Roman world, he knew he concurrently chased death and martyrdom. To Caesar, empire and imperial rule were Rome's only option to save itself from dying the horrible collapse of all world powers. To save Rome, so said Caesar, he had to destroy it. Putting his name into glory and history simply was his reward for the gratitude he felt himself owed, like a doctor to a patient he saves. 

Woman's wisdom was Caesar's greatest weapon, his greatest resource, his greatest teacher. We watched powerlessly as man after man fell to Caesar. Caesar would enter land after land the conqueror, take the defeated king's wife into confidence, and she'd divulge every secret of what made her husband a mediocre king. Yet even as he loved women, he played them like a pan pipe. Everything he said was true, yet none of it was. Was he ever truly attracted to me, or was I allure to him simply because of my descent from the true love of Caesar's life: Alexander the Great? 

 Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw the gorgeous ways kings lived; the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only could a man formed by Rome's censure of luxury. He was, like all Romans, born into austerity and wanted to die drowning in frippery. He wished to be king because he knew himself the smartest of Romans, and therefore best fit to know what Rome needed, but as the smartest of Romans, he had contempt over those he ruled, and was intelligent enough to keep that contempt to himself.  Cicero also thought himself the smartest, and his contempt for those Romans for whom he spoke was shouted from Capitoline Hill into every home, and yet he inveighed against Caesar and me all the gorgeous corruption which his manner demonstrated more loudly than Caesar ever could. 

Cicero was that type of who always flourishes amid power's corruption: the liberal hypocrite - the higher the ideals, the lower the reality. The signal to locate a den of vice is to look for the loudest preacher of virtue, and even as Cicero public perorated about virtues and privately inveighed against Caesar's 'rich young slut', he combed Rome's drawing room nurseries for the youngest heiress he could find, and when he quickly realized the child wife inadequate to appreciate his magnificence, he separated from her with no more regret than the hundreds of wh....

.....Cicero determined to hate me because I would upset the balance of a world he mastered. In his mind, Caesar and Cicero was a truer partnership than Caesar and Pompey: Cicero master of the spirit; Caesar master of the corpse - but a woman who shows herself a capable in both those realms? She might as well be declared a master greater than Cicero for how greatly it upset the knowledge of a man who pontificated as though he knew all. Cicero extolled virtue as though he was virtue herself, but he was everything the Rome hated because none knew better than Romans that there was vice behind every Roman virtue he extolled. Even those who loved Cicero hated him. 

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...Caesar clearly decided from the beginning my rule and my brother a mere figurehead, and my court clearly knew it; for next morning by my entrance, Roman soldiers already subdued and arrested all my older brother-husband's advisors, all of whom fought on my younger brother's pliable side. They all had shown up to greet Caesar that morning with knives in their tunics. 

Upon my entrance, Caesar related all that had happened, and left their fates to me. Remembering the story Philostratus imparted to me of how King David pardoned enemies like Shimei, I decided to pardon them; but remembering how King Saul took it upon himself so many times to murder David, I decided to find out who lead this conspiracy. I had each of them bound, took each into a private room, and as Caesar and my brother watched I thrashed each on the back with 60 lashes, blood everywhere upon my white dress until it was a smock. Within ten lashes they each confessed the names of the organizers: Omari and Chisisi;  nevertheless, I persisted. Caesar smiled the whole time, my brother cried. I told the Romans to dispose of the leaders with their worst death, Omari and Chisisi were nailed o...

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...Was it all a play? The father of my tutor, Philostratus, was, in fact, a Judean from Yavneh named Philo. a philosopher himself who taught all his children and grandchildren. Philo was of no school nor party; he believed that all ideas were true, the truth is without end, and all ideas emanated from a totalizing celestial source stretching from the heavens to the earth, and therefore one cannot ascertain people's complete motives, either by formal ideas as Plato would have it, nor substance as Aristotle would. To assume one knows the truth in its whole is presumption to assume the role of gods. Caesar is now a god, and I therefore I know as little of Caesar's motives as my mortal self knows of my own....

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...for, you see, my dearest children, then as now, we'd birthed the new age of feminism. Women were educated for school, women could work, women could fight, women could sue at court, women could judge, and women could lead. Our empire was always the vanguard of women's progress, but the progress was accelerated by one development above all others: not the arrival of our Ptolemaic Dynasty, but the re-arrival in Egypt of Judea. 

We may be Greek, but we feel pain as Egyptians, and Pharaonic Egypt traces her decline to the Hebrew exodus, after which we no longer had our underclass for all that work which Egyptians demand such exorbitant pay; yet who in their right mind prefers the Egypt of Amenhotep and Tuthenkamen to the Egypt of the Ptolemys and Cleopatras? Rome has the soldiers but we have the books. Greece produces the scholars but they come here to teach. Antioch runs the trade but we Egyptians buy everything while Rome saves. Modern Egypt is a glory so far past that which any Pharaoh could build. The whole world is run by Rome, studied by Greece, administered by Antioch, but it pays tribute to Egypt.

Why? Because the Jews never really left. From earliest establishment of a Judean kingdom in Palestine, Kings David and Solomon re-established good relations with neighbors whose history is as shared as Isis and Osiris. Centuries of enmity, then the closest of allies: our soldiers fought the same wars, traded the same goods; heard the same musicians, watched the same theater companies; the same artists drew our courts, the same tutors taught our scholars. Egypt's had many allies, but the relationship to the Jewish people is built on stone that never moves. 

And every time there was new instability in Judea, more Jews arrived on our shores. Six centuries ago with the assassination of Governor Gedalia, ten thousand Jews arrived in Alexandria by single caravan. Ten thousand became tens of thousands, tens of thousands a hundred thousand, then two hundred, then three hundred, and finally seven-hundred fifty thousand in Alexandria alone. In Egypt they once were slaves, now they become masters, often beloved by their servants; overlords who've run the country for ten generations of predecessors and ancestors, chamberlains who ran our courts; landowners who administer our land more competently than any Egyptian taskmaster, farmers who worked twice as hard, generals willing to lead our armies' charge in combat, soldiers on our borders willing to die for Egypt twice. Where Luxor made them slaves, Alexandria made Jews free, and Jews love Egypt more than any Egyptian. 

lf Egypt stands after Macedonia and Persia fell, it's because we welcomed Jews to an extent no ancient empire did, and they repaid our welcome with prosperity so unlike that of Ancient Egypt; not the totalitarian prosperity of an overlord worshipped in cult, but equalizing, egalitarian prosperity. And from this prosperity we conceived new justice, where which liberated Egyptian women claimed all these rights we take for granted. 

And yet even now, men's prosperity against women is as bounteous as Nile banks against desert. Women are just 7% of landowners, farmers, soldiers, shepherds, policemen, local councilmen and judges. All women at court but me have inferior positions, half the women I enoble are met with court veto. And... of course... whatever the job of women, they are paid a fraction of men doing the same. Gaia herself a goddess, and not even she is honored enough that progeny in her image are allowed a fraction of men's dignitas. 

I too am a god but not even a god can raise the position of women if god is a woman herself. I am Pharaoh and daughter of Pharaoh, yet I could not shield myself from forced marriage and rape. We are so far from equality yet so very close. Who cannot believe in a limitless future for women if we do what must be done? 

Every horoscope says the same: a new era dawns now. You feel it as surely as I. Rome will rule, then decline as every empire does; but other Empires rule their corners, Rome can rule the whole sphere. Its might will unite us all: by government, by language, roads, culture, and fashion. Rome's beliefs will be the world's beliefs, Rome's dogma the world's, Rome's edicts unbreakable law; and when Rome declines, what will the world be? 

There is another side to our Jewish friends, a dreadful one that continually manifests itself in its history's long turbulence - a side that believes women mere helpmeets to men and husbands created to rule us, that believes an excellent wife rarer than jewels; that believes it better to live in the desert than a house with a quarrelsome woman. 

Jews are quick to vengeance as to mercy, they are turbulent as the jealous god to whom they bow. For centuries after liberation from us, they conquered and killed people of their homeland down to the last man, woman and child. When they finally achieved enlightened prosperity through government of the Davidic Monarchy, they cast off their Solomonic wisdom as quickly as they achieved it slowly - and all that destruction for the sake of bringing greater honor to the very god who inspired their wisdom. When our Greek siblings sought to improve Jewish life just as Jews have improved ours here, the Hasmoneans cast them out and killed anyone tempted to adapt Greek mores. 

When chaos reigns, we all turn to gods, but when Rome dissolves in chaos, we all will turn to Rome's gods; throughout the world, and for all time; but no god can ensure order as the Jewish god can: one god; eternal, omniscient, all powerful, as judgemental as the empire who imposes it and searing in his anger as men are to quarrelsome women. The higher the ideals, the lower the reality. Whomever comes after Rome will adapt the Jewish god as the god for the world, for all places at all times, a god who knows all actions and all thoughts, who can control people even within their minds. For all their contributions to Egypt and the world, the world is cursed by their presence. 

Ergo, whatever Rome does in response, it is imperative that you annihilate every Jewish person in Egypt down to the youngest infant, then march on Israel to do the same. It is worth the deaths on your conscience, it is worth the death of Egypt, it is worth the death of all humankind to prevent this future, where 99 out of every hundred men shall be lower than dirt, and therefore 99 out of every hundred women still lower. All the progress of women, just a mirage in time's sand; all rights stripped, all dignity violated. 

My great-uncle, Ptolemy Lazarus, tried to reslave the Hebrews. Everywhere in Egypt, Lazarus is thought a villain of history, but he did not go far enough. He thought Egypt could be restored to former glory, but Egypt is not the world's future. Slavery is the world's future, and worldwide slavery the Jews' revenge upon the world. 

I was weak. Jews were our friends, mentors, allies, they only seemed to mean well at court and in business.  Whether Jews will be the rulers or ruled like the rest of us is irrelevant. Their ideas must be stopped before they take hold, and it can only be stopped by their immediate deaths. Whether any of you knows it, whether any Roman knows it, whether any Jew knows it, I know it, and their god knows it. Whether Jews are the rulers or ruled like the rest of us, the world is at eternal war with all that Jews represent. 

I have raised you all to value women, to respect them always, to fear them when appropriate, and to advocate all their dignity, rights, and futures. To honor our futures, you must annihilate the Jewish people. 

May you live forever,

Your Mother, Queen Cleopatra, The Goddess, The Younger, Father Loving, and Fatherland Loving