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+{"text":" \nTHE HELVETIAN AFFAIR\n**Also by Ray Gleason:**\n\nThe Gaius Marius Chronicle\n\n_De Re Gabiniana: The Gabinian Affair_\n\n_A Grunt Speaks: A Devil's Dictionary of Vietnam Infantry Terms_\n\n_The Violent Season_\nTHE GAIUS MARIUS CHRONICLE\n\nBOOK II\n\nTHE\n\nHELVETIAN\n\nAFFAIR\n\n_De Re Helvetian_\n\nRay Gleason\n\nTHE GAIUS MARIUS CHRONICLE BOOK II\n\nTHE HELVETIAN AFFAIR\n\n_De Re Helvetian_\n\n\u00a9 2016 RAY GLEASON.\n\nAll rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means\u2014electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other\u2014except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.\n\nPublished in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing. Morgan James and The Entrepreneurial Publisher are trademarks of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com\n\nThe Morgan James Speakers Group can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event visit The Morgan James Speakers Group at www.TheMorganJamesSpeakersGroup.com.\n\n  | ISBN 978-1-63047-702-8 paperback\n\nISBN 978-1-63047-703-5 eBook\n\nLibrary of Congress Control Number: 2015911276\n\n**Cover Design by:**  \nRachel Lopez\n\nwww.r2cdesign.com\n\n**Interior Design by:**  \nBonnie Bushman\n\nThe Whole Caboodle Graphic Design\n\n---|---\n\nIn an effort to support local communities and raise awareness and funds, Morgan James Publishing donates a percentage of all book sales for the life of each book to Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg.\n\n  | Get involved today, visit  \nwww.MorganJamesBuilds.com |\n\n---|---|---\nTo BJ Rahn\n\nTeacher, Mentor, Friend\n\n_\"Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.\"_  \n\u2014 **John Milton**\n\n## DRAMATIS PERSONAE\n\n**Gaius Marius Insubrecus Tertius** , our hero, known variously as follows:\n\n  * Arth Bek: \"Little Bear,\" by his grandpa\n  * _Pagane_ : \"The Hick,\" by his Roman army mates\n  * Gai: by his family, close friends, and his few girlfriends\n  * Insubrecus: by his army colleagues and casual associates\n  * _Blatta \/ Vermiculus \/ Bestiola_ : \"Cockroach \/ Maggot \/ Insect,\" by Strabo, his training officer\n  * _Prime_ : \"Top,\" but that's much later in his military career\n\n**The Basic Training Squad:**\n\n**Cossus Lollius Strabo, \"Squinty,\"** an Eighth Legion _optio_ , the training officer, later promoted to centurion in the Tenth Legion\n\n**The _Veterani_ , \"Old Men\":**\n\n**Lucius Bantus** , acting _decanus_ , squad leader\n\n**Tullius Norbanus, \"Tulli,\"** assistant squad leader\n\n**The** _Tirones_ , **\"Rookies\":**\n\n**Mollis** , \"Softy\"\n\n**Rufus** , \"Red\"\n\n**Pustula** , \"Zits\"\n\n**Minutus** , \"Tiny\"\n\n**Loquax** , \"Gabby\"\n\n**Lentulus** , \"Slow Poke\"\n\n**Felix** , \"Lucky\"\n\n**Gaius Iulius Caesar** , _Imperator_ and commander of the Roman legions in Gaul; proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul, Transalpine Gaul, and Illyricum; ex-consul of the Roman Repubulic and _Triumvir_ with Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus; _Patronus_ of our hero, Gaius Marius Insubrecus\n\n**Caesar's Legates in Gaul:**\n\n**Titus Labienus** , a professional soldier and Caesar's right-hand man; second in command of the army; saves Caesar's bacon at Bibracte\n\n**Caius Claudius Pulcher** , \"Pretty Boy,\" a self-conscious Patrician and no fan of Caesar; he would probably have been involved in the plot against Caesar\u2014had he the brains or the energy\n\n**Publius Licinius Crassus** , one of the two sons of Caesar's colleague and fellow _triumvir_ , Marcus Licinius Crassus; appointed to Caesar's staff as a favor to his father and sent to Gaul by his father to keep an eye on his partner, Caesar\n\n**Quintus Pedius** , Caesar's nephew\u2014need I say more?\n\n**Servius Sulpicius Rufus** , a lawyer in armor; every army has a few of these, unfortunately\n\n**Publius Vatinius** , served Caesar in Rome as his pet tribune of the Plebs, a political appointment\n\n**Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta** , serving in Gaul seems to have been his only claim to fame\n\n**Caesar's Military Tribunes:**\n\n**Lucius Vipsanius Agrippa** , an Italian from Asisium; an equestrian; a social and political nobody, but a good officer; his kid brother, Marcus, will eventually make it big\n\n**Tertius Nigidius Caecina** , an _angusticlavus_ , a junior tribune; a Roman and the nephew of Senator Publius Nigidius Figulus, on whose support Caesar depends\n\n**Publius Considius** , been around in the army since Romulus was a corporal; in bad need of a pair of specs, but they haven't been invented yet\n\n**Fabius** , a _laticlavus_ , a broad-striper; a senior tribune assigned to the Eleventh Legion\n\n**_The Centurions_ :**\n\n**Decius Minatius Gemellus** , _praefectus castrorum_ , the prefect of camps of Caesar's army\n\n**Tertius Piscius Malleus, \"The Hammer,\"** _centurio primus pilus_ of the Tenth Legion\n\n**Mamercus Tertinius Gelasius** , _centurio prior pilus_ , commander of the Tenth Cohort of the Tenth Legion and officer in charge of recruit training\n\n**Nerva** , _primus pilus_ of the Twelfth Legion\n\n**Sanga** , _centurio prior pilus_ , commander of the Third Cohort of the Twelfth Legion\n\n**Mettius Atius Lupinus, \"Lotium,\"** commander of the Third Century, Second Cohort, Tenth Legion; no one dares call him _Lotium_ to his face\n\n**Spurius Hosidius Quiricus, \"The Oak,\"** _centurio primus pilus_ of the Ninth Legion\n\n**Marcus Sestius, \"Iudaeus,\"** _centurio primus pilus_ of the Eleventh Legion; his nickname has nothing to do with his religious affiliation, but rather a wound he received in a rather awkward spot\n\n**_Other Roman Officers_ :**\n\n**Decimus Lampronius Valgus, \"Bowlegs,\"** _decurio_ in command of the cavalry of Caesar's Praetorian Guard\n\n**Rubigo, \"Rusty,\"** _decurio_ in the legionary cavalry of the Tenth Legion\n\n**Flavus, \"Whitey,\"** a Roman soldier from Cisalpine Gaul serving in the Twelfth Legion and briefly assigned to the Sequani Cavalry under Agrippa\nTABLE OF CONTENTS\n\n[_De Hospe Subito Praefatio_  \nPreface: An Unexpected Visitor](preface.html)\n\n[I. _De Spatio in Tartaro_  \nTime in Hell](chapter01.html)\n\n[II. _Hostes apud Amicos_  \nEnemies among Friends](chapter02.html)\n\n[III. _Ego Miles Romanus_  \nI Become a Soldier of Rome](chapter03.html)\n\n[IV. _De Itinere inter Alpes_  \nWe March across the Alps](chapter04.html)\n\n[V. _Sub Patrocinio Caesaris_  \nUnder Caesar's Patronage](chapter05.html)\n\n[VI. _De Consequente Helvetiorum_  \nPursuit of the Helvetians](chapter06.html)\n\n[VII. _De Clementia Caesaris et Offensione Antiqua_  \nCaesar's Clemency and an Ancient Provocation](chapter07.html)\n\n[VIII. _De Calamitate Prima_  \nThe First Debacle](chapter08.html)\n\n[IX. _Lente Festinamus_  \nWe Hurry Slowly](chapter09.html)\n\n[X. _Scaena Caesaris_  \nCaesar's Drama](chapter10.html)\n\n[XI. _Calamitas Itera_  \nAnother Disaster](chapter11.html)\n\n[XII. _Bibracte_  \nBibracte](chapter12.html)\n\nPost Scriptum\n\nMilitary Latin\n\n## GAH'ELA, THE GAULS\n\n**The Aedui, the _Aineduai_ , the \"Dark Moon\" People:**\n\n**Duuhruhda mab Clethguuhno** , _uucharix_ , tribal king of the Aedui, and _pobl'rix_ , clan leader of the _Wuhr Blath_ , the Wolf Clan of the Aineduai; known to the Romans as Diviciacus\n\n**Deluuhnu mab Clethguuhno** , brother of Duuhruhda, _dunorix_ of the Aedui, commander of the garrison of Bibracte; known to the Romans as Dumnorix\n\n**Cuhnetha mab Cluhweluhno** , _buch'rix_ , \"cattle king\" of a small settlement east of Bibracte; _pobl'rix_ , clan leader of the _Wuhr Tuurch_ , the Boar Clan of the Aedui; pretender to the throne\n\n**Rhonwen** , niece of Cuhnetha, a sassy redhead who catches Insubrecus' eye\n\n**The Sequani, the _Soucanai_ , People of the River Goddess Soucana:**\n\n**Madog mab Guuhn** , _pobl'rix_ , _rex gentium_ , clan leader of the _Wuhr Wuhn_ , the White Clan of the Soucanai, and commander of the Auxiliary Sequani Cavalry; known as Madocus _Dux_ to the Romans\n\n**Athauhnu mab Hergest** , _pencefhul_ , \"leader of a hundred,\" _ala_ commander in the Auxiliary Sequani Cavalry commanded by Madog mab Guuhn; known as Adonus _Decurio_ to the Romans\n\n**Emlun** , Athauhnu's nephew\n\n**Guithiru** , one of Athauhnu's veteran warriors\n\n**Alaw** , one of the scouts\n\n**Rhodri** , Alaw's companion\n\n**Ci, \"The Hound,\"** a veteran warrior and troop commander in Madog's cavalry\n\n**Idwal** , a friend of Emlun; a rider in Athauhnu's troop\n\n**_Dramatis Personae Aliae_ , the Other Players:**\n\n**Aulus Gabinius** , a senatorial mid-bencher who does well and is elected consul\n\n**Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus** , a _triumvir_ , a partner of Caesar and an _eminence grise_ in this tale\n\n**Marcus Licinius Crassus** , a _triumvir_ , a political partner of Caesar; too intent on going off and conquering Parthia to pay much attention to what Caesar's doing in Gaul\n\n**Ebrius, \"Drunk,\"** Caesar's head military clerk and self-appointed taster of Caesar's wine and _posca_ collection\n\n**Clamriu** , a horse\n\n**Gennadios the Trader** , a Greek merchant from Massalia who introduces our hero to retsina\n\n**Evra** , Gennadios' woman from a mysterious island west of Britannia\u2014not a redhead, but formidable nonetheless\nDe Bello Contra Helvetios Tabula\n\n**Map of the Helvetian Campaign**\n\n# _De Hospe Subito Praefatio_\n\n## PREFACE: AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR\n\nI broke my narrative to welcome a surprise visitor up from _Italia_ , my former commander and comrade in the Gallic campaigns, Lucius Vipsanius Agrippa.\n\nHe is certainly grayer and a bit heavier than I remember him from our soldiering days, which is one of the reasons I have always refused ever to bring one of those _speculum_ mirrors from the East into my home. If I do not have to see the physical evidence of my aging, I can still pretend that I am the same man I was when I was marching with the legions.\n\nThat is, until I have to move too quickly and my heart jumps up into my throat, or I try to leap a watery ditch and miss my stride by almost half a _pes_. My mind has not yet accepted the reality of my actual physical state.\n\nBesides the physical changes, Agrippa was still the same good comrade I remember from our youth, just packaged in a somewhat rounder form. He even managed to charm Rhonwen, my darlin' wife\u2014or Flavia, as she is now called since becoming a Roman and moving down to this side of the Alps.\n\nCharming Rhonwen! When Agrippa showed up on her doorstep unexpectedly with an entourage that included two bodyguards, a half-dozen slaves with livestock, and baggage, gaining her favor was no easy task. But, Rhonwen is still in many ways a Gah'el and understands her duties to the gods to offer hearth, bread, and salt to guests. Besides, Agrippa managed to say to her, in his halting Gah'el, \" _Festres uh bendit'ian uh duwiau uh bawb in uh ti hoon_ \"\u2014\"The blessings of the gods to all in this house, Missus.\" He said this as he tousled our son's hair, announcing that he looked exactly as I did at that age\u2014except better looking\u2014and thus, he had Rhonwen eating right out of his hand.\n\nThe fact that Agrippa put his entire _comitatus_ up at an inn just off the forum at his own expense certainly enhanced Rhonwen's opinion of him.\n\nAgrippa rarely leaves his family estate in Asisium these days. He broke with Caesar during the first civil war against the senatorial _Optimates_. Agrippa couldn't stomach Pompey, but Agrippa's Rome was the idealized republic of Cicero and Cato. After the war, Caesar pardoned him along with most of the junior officers who fought against him. Agrippa then retired to his farm, whether to avoid being placed on a proscription list or to shut himself off from what his Rome had become is anyone's guess.\n\nAgrippa didn't leave his cloistered life\u2014even after his younger brother, Marcus, went off to fight with Caesar's adopted son and heir, Octavius, first against the \"Liberators\" at Phillipi, then against Pompey's brat, Sextus, and finally against Antonius. Many believe that Octavius' victory at Actium was achieved by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, but stating such publically is at best risky when the Roman state is ruled by one who styles himself the _princeps civitatis_ , the savior of the nation, the second Romulus, _Augustus_ , the \"exalted one.\"\n\nIn my military career, I have served with all four men: Caesar, Lucius, Marcus, and Octavius.\n\nMarcus was by far the best general; Lucius the best soldier and comrade.\n\nOctavius was no soldier at all.\n\nOctavius was always a politician, a negotiator, a maker of deals. Despite my assessment of him as a soldier, and even as a human being, my _pietas_ to the state demands I recognize him as the only man who can control those self-serving idiots down in Rome and prevent Roman armies from slaughtering each other as they did so many times during my lifetime.\n\nSo, if Octavius wishes to be called Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus, _filius Iuli divi_ , _Augustus_ , _Pater Patriae_ , the Second Founder of Rome, or whatever titles those senatorial boot-licks down in Rome come up with, it's a small price to pay for lasting peace.\n\nNone of them are worth the mule shit that spattered Caesar's cloak when he marched the legions north of the Rhodanus in pursuit of the Helvetii, into Belgica against the Nervii, across the Rhenus into the forests of Germania, across _Oceanus_ into the land of the Britanni, across the Rubico, the river of blood, to set things right in Rome.\n\nHad he lived, peace with Parthia would have been bought with steel, not gold.\n\nHad he lived, had only I insisted on accompanying him to the Senate meeting at Pompey's theater that day!\n\nI'm not sure that Caesar's _lemur_ is at peace, despite the apparent success of his \"son\" and \"heir\" down in Roma. Or, it may just be my sense of guilt at not having been there when Caesar, _patronus me'_ , needed my strong arm protecting his _latus apertum_ , his unprotected side.\n\nObviously, Agrippa's sudden appearance stirred up many things for me.\n\nAgrippa said that he had come to me with a request from Octavius, which was passed to him through his brother, Marcus. Octavius is now my _patronus_ , so a _request_ from him is not quite a request. The fact that he used my old comrade from Gaul, Agrippa, as his messenger, is a sign that Octavius expects my concurrence in this matter.\n\nBut, more about that later.\n\nAgrippa's appearance reminded me of when we first met during Caesar's campaign against the Helvetii. For both of us, it was our first military campaign. We were _virgines_ , \"cherries\" as we say in the legions. He had just been assigned to the Tenth Legion as an _angusticlavus_ , a narrow-striper, a junior tribune, and I had just finished my basic military training in Aquileia. As soldiers, we were green as grass; we still smelled of the farm. Real _pagani_.\n\nReviewing my notes, I see that I had broken my narrative just after I had run off to the legions in order to escape being arrested by Consul Aulus Gabinius on the charge of _sacrilegium_ against a Roman magistrate and for an insult to his family's _auctoritas_ \u2014charges which I was unlikely to survive. This, of course, was all a smoke screen to obscure the fact that I had severely injured his son, Aulus Iunior, in a fight to protect myself from his bungled attempt to murder me. Iunior thought I had been the lover of his sister, Gabi, a pleasure which I had missed, despite my best bumbling efforts. So, he had decided to decorate the _rostra_ in the _forum Romanum_ with my _coleones_ to recoup his family's _dignitas_.\n\nI joined a little band of returning veterans and legionary recruits and trudged through the winter landscape of the Padus Valley. We arrived at the legionary camps around Aquileia on the day before the Ides of _Februarius_ , during the consulship of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus and Aulus Gabinius, the winter of my sixteenth year.\n\nCossus Lollius Strabo, our officer, an _optio_ returning from leave to the Eighth Legion, brought us to the _castrum_ of the Tenth Legion, to which we were assigned. After some confusion over the daily password and Strabo's authority as an officer, which the soldiers of the Tenth Legion seemed somewhat reluctant to grant to an _optio_ of the Eighth Legion, we were escorted to the _principia_ the military headquarters of Gaius Iulius Caesar, the army commander and proconsul of the province.\n\n# I.\n\n# _De Spatio in Tartaro_\n\n# TIME IN HELL\n\nHe were ushered into the _principia_ tent, where a soldier in a brickred tunic was sitting behind a small field desk working with a pile of _tabulae_ , wax slates. He looked up and told Strabo, \"You may pass through, _Optio_.\"\n\nWe passed into a large compartment behind the clerk. There were a couple of braziers warming the area and lamps illuminating maps hanging from the walls. A soldier with short, graying hair was briefing two younger soldiers while gesturing at one of the hanging maps. A fourth soldier seemed to be taking notes with a _stylus_ in a hinged, diptych _tabula_. The older soldier looked over when we entered and snapped, \"I will be with you presently, _Optio. Laxa_! Stand at ease!\"\n\nStrabo bunched us into a dark corner, out of the way. \"The _praefectus castrorum_ ,\" Tulli, one of the _veterani_ who had reenlisted, hissed into my ear.\n\nFinally, I heard the older soldier ask, \"Any questions?\"\n\nBoth younger men came to the position of attention and each responded, \" _N'abeo, Praefecte_!\"\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Then, the _praefectus castrorum_ instructed, \"Have your cohorts ready to march by the end of the fourth watch . . . the Fifth Cohort assembled in full marching kit outside the _Porta Dextra_ , the right-hand gate, and the Seventh outside the _Porta Decumana_ , the rear gate. I want you to move out at the signal for the end of watch. Dismissed!\"\n\nBoth men nodded to the _praefectus_ , executed an about-face, and marched out of the tent.\n\nThen, the man walked over to our group. Strabo and both our _veterani_ stiffened noticeably as he approached.\n\n\"What have we here, _Optio_? They call you Strabo . . . \"Squinty\" . . . right?\" he asked.\n\n\" _Praefecte_ ,\" Strabo announced, \"Cossus Lollius, _optio_ of the Eighth Legion, reports with a detail of two _veterani_ and eight _tirones_ for the Tenth Legion!\"\n\n_\"Laxa, Optio_!\" the _praefectus_ directed.\n\nThen he turned to us. \"Men, I am Decius Minatius Gemellus, _praefectus castrorum_ of this army and, until Caesar _Imperator_ assigns a _legatus_ , the commander of the Tenth Legion. That means, as far as you're concerned, I'm a god. I have the power of life and death over you. You do not want to piss me off or even disappoint me. You _veterani_ , I welcome you back to the eagles. You will undergo the first weeks of conditioning training with the recruits. My cadre will then assess your skills with _gladius, pilum_ , and _scutum_. If you show us you haven't forgotten the fighting skills of a Roman soldier, you'll be assigned to a century in one of the second-line cohorts until we know what you have. You _tirones_ , a word of advice! Although you have raised your hand in the _sacramentum_ , do not consider yourselves _milites_ , or members of my legion. You have yet to prove your worth for such an honor! But, you will soon have the opportunity to do so! Over the next eight weeks, we will make soldiers out of you\u2014or we will break you and send you back to whatever civilian shit-hole you crawled out of. You will demonstrate to me, with your sweat and your blood, that you are worthy of this legion and worthy of the honor of serving the Roman people!\"\n\nThen, Gemellus demanded, _\"Scriba_!\"\n\nThe soldier we had seen outside burst into the room and assumed the position of attention, \" _Praefecte_!\"\n\n\"Get the records these men are carrying! Enter them on the legion roles; then send them down to supply for initial issue!\"\n\nBefore the clerk could respond, Strabo said, _\"Praefecte_! There is one thing.\"\n\nGemellus responded, \"What is it, Strabo?\"\n\n_\"Praefecte_! One of the recruits needs to see a _medicus_ ,\" Strabo answered.\n\n\"A doctor?\" Gemellus questioned. \"Is he injured?\"\n\n\"No, _Praefecte_!\" Strabo continued. \"It's his . . . well\u2014\"\n\n\"Spit it out, Strabo!\" Gemellus ordered. \"Straightforward report, like a Roman officer!\"\n\n\"His feet are flat, _Praefecte_ ,\" Strabo reported. \"I don't think he can stand up to the marching.\"\n\nGemellus snorted, \"Flat feet, is it? This is what those _podices_ in recruiting are sending us for soldiers? Very well . . . _Scriba . . ._ get one of the orderlies up here from the medical section to take . . . uh . . . which one is it, Strabo?\"\n\n\"Mollis . . . I mean . . . _Tiro_ Tertius Melonius, _Praefecte_ ,\" Strabo corrected himself.\n\n\"Send _Tiro_ Tertius Melonius to be examined by the chief medical officer,\" Gemellus instructed his clerk. \"And, Strabo! You stay behind when I dismiss the others. You and I need to talk. . . . The rest of you get out of my sight. . . . Move!\"\n\nWe got out of the _praefectus'_ office as quickly as we could, the _veterani_ leading the way. When we reached the anteroom, the clerk collected our records and directed us to wait in a corner, \"out of his way.\" Then, he sent a runner over to the medics to collect Mollis and another to the supply tent to collect us.\n\nAs we were waiting, Strabo rejoined us. \"Looks like we're going to be stuck with each other a little longer,\" he announced to us. \"The Eighth's already over the Alps, and the passes are closed. So, I've been seconded to the Tenth and assigned as your training officer.\"\n\nHe turned to the _praefectus'_ clerk, \"Supply, where is it supposed to be?\"\n\nThe man replied, looking up from one of his wax _tabulae_ , \"Behind the _praetorium, Optio_ , right across from grain storage. I've already sent a runner.\"\n\n\"And, I'm sure your supply sergeant will jump right on that,\" Strabo sneered. \"You done with this bunch?\"\n\n_\"Perfeci, Optio_!\" the clerk started.\n\n\"Bene!\" Strabo interrupted. \" _Exeamus nos_! I'll get you people kitted up and settled in! Mollis! You wait here for the medics!\"\n\nThat was the beginning of my eight weeks in hell.\n\nStrabo organized us into a _contubernium_ , a tent group, and put Bantus in charge as our acting _decanus_ , our squad leader.\n\nGetting \"kitted out\" was a process in which we were stripped of all our civilian clothes and equipment and issued a mattress, a blanket, three shortsleeved military tunics, a wide leather belt, a pair of hobnailed boots called _caligae_ , a small satchel called a _loculus_ , a mess tin, and a battered, tarnished bronze _galea_ helmet. For the group, we were issued a \"cooking kit, one each, _contubernium_ ,\" which Bantus handed over to one of the _tirones_. Each piece of equipment that was issued was notated against our names, and an officer in the supply section informed us that if we lost any of it, we would have to pay to replace it.\n\nI was allowed to keep my own belt, _pugio_ , and _sagum_ cloak because they \"adhered to military specifications,\" but I was warned that I would have to get the _sagum_ dyed the appropriate shade of _carinus_ , the dark, reddish-brown, that was authorized for the Tenth Legion. Tulli remarked that, in this way, the cloak wouldn't show blood stains\u2014something I didn't need to hear just then.\n\nStrabo then herded us, balancing our teetering piles of clothing and equipment, toward the back of the camp where we were assigned to a tent. He then told us to \"drop our stuff and get into proper uniform.\" Bantus and Tulli helped us figure out what that meant. I noticed that we _tirones_ had been issued undyed, woolen tunics, while the _veterani_ wore red. I asked Tulli about this, and he told me that the white tunics identified us as _tirones_. When we were \"accepted\" by the legion, we would be issued red tunics like the legionaries who were considered \"qualified\" to take their places in the line of battle.\n\nStrabo had been gone no more than half an hour when we heard his voice outside the tent yelling, _\"Ad signam_! Fall in, you lazy, worthless maggots! Get out here on the street!\"\n\nWe were looking at each other, wondering who Strabo was yelling at and what \"fall in\" meant, when Bantus and Tulli started herding us out of the tent, \"Move! Move! Move! Grab your helmets! Insubrecus! Get your belt on! Let's go! Move!\"\n\nWhen we got outside the tent, the sight of Strabo stopped us dead in our tracks. He was in a full legionary combat rig. A highly polished, bronze _galea_ , an infantry helmet with red horsehair plumes, was tied tightly under his cleanshaven chin beneath the shining cheek guards. A blood red _sudarium_ , a military scarf, was wrapped around his neck and tucked beneath a shining chainmail _lorica_ , which reached halfway down his thighs. A highly polished leather _balteus_ , a sword belt, studded with shining bronze plates, was hanging from his left shoulder and passed across his chest down to his right side. From there was suspended a _gladius_ , encased in a red leather _vagina_ , and a scabbard, reinforced with brightly polished bronze cladding. A thick leather military belt, a _cingulum_ , was tightly fastened around his waist and held his _gladius_ in place on his right side. A _pugio_ in a scabbard hung on the left. From beneath his _lorica_ hung a skirt of thick, red leather strips, _pteruges_ , each one ending in a polished bronze tab, on which was stamped the visage of the god of war, Mars.\n\nDespite the winter cold, his legs were bare to his ankles, which were enclosed by the thick leather straps of his black, military _caligae_ , infantry hobnail boots. Over both shoulders, but pulled back to keep his weapons free, he wore the military cloak of the Tenth Legion, a blood-brown woolen _sagum_ , which was fastened at his left shoulder by a shining bronze _fibula_ , a brooch pin in the shape of a bull's head. His right hand tightly grasped the leather-wrapped hilt of his _gladius;_ in his left, instead of the accustomed _scutum_ or _pilum_ , the infantry shield and javelin, he held a long, thick wooden staff topped with a polished steel globe, the _hastile_ of an _optio centuriae_ , the \"chosen one,\" the second in command of a legionary century of eighty men. He was now our training officer and would help us become Roman soldiers.\n\n\"Bantus! Get this goat-rope straightened out!\" he screamed. \"I want two ranks right here! One behind the other! Move it!\"\n\nBantus and Tulli got us lined up in two ranks facing Strabo. As they positioned each of us, they whispered, \"Position of attention . . . Feet one _pes_ apart . . . Hands and arms at your sides . . . Stand up straight.\" Tulli tried to straighten out our helmets, which were wandering all around our heads, and to dress our tunics down through our military belts. Finally, Bantus took a position in front of our formation facing the apparition who was once our traveling companion, Strabo, and reported, \"Training detail all present, _Optio_!\"\n\nStrabo announced, \" _Contubernium_! _Lax . . . ATE_!\"\n\nBantus slid his right foot straight back, toe to heel, and clasped his hands in front of him. We tried to emulate him. My helmet immediately slipped down in front of my eyes. When I attempted to adjust it, Strabo screamed, \"Who gave you permission to move, _Tiro_ Gaius Marius Insubrecus? You're supposed to be a shaggin' Roman soldier! Stop fidgeting like a _paganus Gallicus_ waiting for his turn at the public latrine!\"\n\nAnd, there it was! From that moment on, my buddies in the Tenth Legion knew me as Gaius Marius _Paganus_ . . . Gaius Marius, \"The Hick.\"\n\nStrabo continued, \"The rest of you miserable _vermiculi_ , freeze! Don't move! Don't even breathe without my permission! This cluster has got to be the sorriest excuse for a military formation I have ever seen in my entire military career!\"\n\nStrabo began strutting across our front rank. \"I do not know what I could have possibly done to offend the immortal gods so badly that they would send the Furies out of the depths of Tartarus to inflict this on me! You are the sorriest excuse for Roman soldiers I have ever seen!\"\n\nSuddenly, the domed end of Strabo's _hastile_ staff shot out into the stomach of a recruit in the first rank. The breath exploded out of the man and he doubled over. \"Suck in that gut, Tiro!\" Strabo ordered. \"Stand up straight when standing in the presence of a superior officer!\"\n\nThe man struggled to regain his composure as Strabo continued his tirade. \"You are _tirones Romani_ , the lowest things on earth! You are lower than sailors' shit in the ocean! You are so low that you have to call the mules ' _sir_!' You will speak only when spoken to! And, your only authorized responses are, 'Yes, sir!', 'No, sir!', 'I do not understand, sir!', and 'No excuse, sir!' Do you pieces of fly shit understand me?\"\n\nThere was a ragged chorus of \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\"What?\" Strabo yelled dramatically cupping his ear. \"I can't hear you! Do you _understand_ me?\"\n\nStronger this time, \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\"What in the name of _Martis_ is going on here?\" Strabo screamed into our faces. \"Did the recruiters send a bunch of _puellulae_ , little girls, to this legion? Do you understand me?\"\n\n\"YES, SIR!\"\n\nStrabo stepped back. \"Bantus! Prepare the detail for inspection!\" he ordered.\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu_ ',\" Bantus snapped.\n\nBantus executed a smart about-face and said to us in a low voice, \"First, I'm going to call you to attention with the command, ' _Contubernium . . . Stat_!' Then, I will give the command, ' _Ordines extendit_! Open ranks!' At the command of execution, 'it,' the first rank takes one pace . . . that's two steps forward for you civilians. . . . The second rank stands fast . . . Ready now.\"\n\nThen, he said in a loud voice, \" _Contubernium . . . Stat_!\"\n\nWe assumed a fairly recognizable position of attention.\n\nThen, Bantus yelled, \" _Ordines_! _Extend . . ._ _IT'_!\"\n\nThose of us in the first rank managed to stumble forward the required distance and stop. Again, my helmet rearranged itself over my eyes, but this time I didn't dare adjust it.\n\nStrabo, trailed by Bantus, was walking down the first rank, reeling off criticisms, _\"Caligae_ improperly secured . . . helmet tarnished . . . unshaven . . . belt improperly adjusted.\" Behind me, I heard Tulli whisper, \"Second rank . . . stand at ease!\" I then heard the rear rankers rustle then go silent.\n\nStrabo stopped in front of me and demanded, \"Pugio!\"\n\nWhen I didn't react, Bantus said in a low voice, \" _Tiro_! Present your dagger to the optio!\" Then, he reached over and adjusted my helmet off my eyes.\n\nI removed my _pugio_ from its scabbard and handed it to Strabo.\n\n\"Sharp . . . no rust... Good job, _Tiro_ ,\" Strabo announced, then handed me back my knife. As Bantus followed Strabo down the rank, he gave me a quick wink.\n\nAs Strabo and Bantus arrived at the second rank, he commanded, \"Second rank . . . attention! First rank . . . stand at ease!\"\n\nWe assumed the position, right foot to the rear, hands clasped in front of us, while Strabo and Bantus reviewed the second rank to Strabo's mantra, \"Helmet tarnished . . . _caligae_ improperly secured . . . haircut . . . belt improperly adjusted.\"\n\nFinally, as Strabo and Bantus circled back to the front of the formation, Bantus ordered, \" _Contubernium_ . . . _STATE_!\"\n\nAfter we managed to close ranks, Strabo told us, \"You people have a long way to go before you even start looking like soldiers! When you get back to your quarters, you will start working on those bronze chamber pots sitting on top of your heads. By the tenth hour, I want them shined and polished so that I can see my face in them! Do you rat turds understand me?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\"Detail! _Ad dex' . . . VERT_! Right . . . FACE!\" Strabo ordered.\n\nWe all managed to shuffle about in the right direction. Bantus and Tulli positioned themselves at the head of our two files.\n\n_\"Promov . . . ET'_! Forward . . . MARCH!\" Strabo shouted, keeping a station to the left of our files, counting cadence, _\"Dex' . . . Dex' . . . Dex', Sin', Dex'_.\"\n\nAs soon as we were all moving together in the right direction, Strabo ordered, \" _Gradus . . . bis_! . . . _Mov . . . ET'_!\"\n\nWith helmets going one way and heads another at the double-time, we started bouncing back up toward the _Via Principalis_. As we ran, Strabo shouted, _\"Tirones_ , always move at the double-time! Every place you go, you run! _Vos vermiculi_ , got that?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\"\n\nWe spent the next two hours queuing up outside of various tents in the headquarters section. At one, our heads were shaved; at another, we were poked and prodded by various members of the medical staff; then, we were inspected for any undesirable critters in our body hair; at the camp bathhouse, we were dunked and scrubbed; and finally, we were allowed a meal of bread, oil, something cheese like, and water.\n\nWhen we got back to our tent, Bantus set us to work on shining our helmets with oil, sand, and rags. Tulli disappeared for a while and returned with a sack from which he distributed what looked like a _pilleum_ , the cap of a freed slave, but thicker. He told us to wear the cap underneath the helmet and tie the chin straps tight to keep them stable. If we needed more cushioning, we would have to double up on the _pilleum_ or stuff a piece of cloth between the cap and the helmet.\n\nWhile we were scrubbing and scraping our helmets, Bantus gave us our first lesson in how a legion was organized.\n\n\"Roman soldiers fight in pairs,\" he told us. \"Each legionary has a _geminus_ , a companion, a brother, a twin, who stands with him in the line battles.\"\n\n\"How can that be?\" I asked. \"I thought the legion formed a line to face the enemy.\"\n\n\"Three lines actually,\" Bantus replied. \"One behind the other, eight men deep, if the terrain permits. But, individual soldiers fight in pairs. One engages the enemy on the battle line, while the other protects his flanks, supports his companion against a determined enemy rush, and relieves him when he's exhausted, hurt, or wounded. If a soldier is wounded, his _geminus_ protects him and gives him medical assistance until he can be withdrawn from the line of battle.\"\n\n\"How does a soldier get his _geminus_?\" asked a big, lunking farm boy we called _Minutus_ , \"Tiny.\"\n\n\"Strabo will start pairing you off in training once he gets a feel for you,\" Bantus said. \"But once you're together, there's no stronger human bond\u2014not brother with brother, not father with son\u2014than the bond between legionary _gemini_. It's rare, almost shameful, for one to die in battle and the other to live.\"\n\n\"But, how's the legion organized?\" asked Rufus, a tall, lanky, redheaded _tiro_.\n\n\"Simply put, a legion consists of a headquarters and ten _cohortes_ ,\" Bantus explained. \"Each _cohors_ has six _centuriae_ ; each _centuria_ , ten _contubernia_ ; each _contubernium_ , eight _muli_. At full strength, that's 4,800 _pedes_ , infantry legs, plus the officers, but legions are rarely at full strength.\"\n\n\"So, we're pretty much a . . . what did you call it . . . a _contubernium_?\" I asked.\n\n\"Recte!\" Bantus replied. \"Correct! Strabo's got you organized into a _contubernium_. That's a basic tent squad of eight _muli. Contubernales_ live together in the same tent; they mess together in the field; they fight together in battle. This is a soldier's family within the legion . . . Hey, _Pustula_!\" Bantus suddenly called over to one of our group, a kid with a bad case of acne. \"Rub the sand in a circle, or you'll scratch the helmet, and Strabo'll have your ass!\"\n\nBantus continued, \"When your training's over and you get your red tunics, you'll be assigned to a _centuria_ , probably in one of the _cohortes ordinis secundi_.\"\n\n\"Our red tunics!\" Minutus piped up. \"Then we'll be _veterani_ like you, Bantus?\"\n\n\" _Veterani_?\" Bantus corrected him. \"No, you'll be a _miles_. You won't be considered a _veteranus_ until you're blooded in battle.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by a ' _cohors ordinis secundi_ '?\" I asked.\n\n\"A _cohors_ of the second rank,\" Bantus started, then called over, \"Hey, Tulli! Will you show Pustula over there how to rub the sand in before he carves a hole in that helmet?\"\n\nThen Bantus addressed my question. \"The legion lines up for battle in three _ordines_ , ranks. Cohorts one, two, three, and four are in the front; five, six, and seven in the middle; and eight, nine, and ten in the rear.\"\n\n\"What's the difference?\" I asked.\n\n\"Since the first rank makes contact with the enemy,\" Bantus explained, \"that's where you want your best soldiers . . . the big guys . . . guys who don't break. . . . In fact, the First Cohort is always on the legion's right flank. . . . When the legion advances, their job is to turn the enemy's flank . . . So the First Cohort guys are always your biggest and your fastest . . . the best guys to have in a scrum. . . . In most legions, the First Cohort gets extra pay and is immune from most details. At the end of a day's march, while you _muli_ are humping to dig a marching camp, they're out in front providing security.\"\n\n\"So, that's where we want to be,\" Rufus interrupted. \"More money, less work!\"\n\nBantus snorted, \"You're goin' to have to grow a bit before you get a chance at that, Red! But, remember, those guys earn their money! You can spend your entire military career in the third rank and never see a living enemy soldier, never get a scratch on you, but those guys in the front rank always make contact. If you're in the First Cohort, you better be good, or you're _perfututus_ , completely screwed!\"\n\nBantus grabbed my helmet and inspected it. \"That's a good job, _Pagane_ ,\" he said. \"Now, once you get all the tarnish off, buff it with one of the softer cloths. In fact, fog it with your breath, then polish it up, like this.\" Bantus demonstrated what he was talking about.\n\n_\"M'audite, infantes_!\" he addressed the group of us. \"Once you get these pots polished up, don't touch them with your fingers. It'll smudge the shine, and Strabo will write you up for it! Always keep a cleaning cloth with you for inspection. You can stuff it under your helmet on top of your _pilleum_. The damn pot'll fit your head better that way.\"\n\n\"That reminds me,\" Tulli butted in. \"You guys owe me a _minerva_ each for those caps.\"\n\nSuddenly, one of our squad, a guy who had not said much to any of us all the way up from Mediolanum, so of course we called him _Loquax_ , \"Gabby,\" asked, \"What about the officers, Bantus? Don't we have to watch out for them?\"\n\n\"Officers?\" Bantus snorted. \" _Cacat_! You're _tirones_ . . . and everybody knows it because of those white, vestal-virgin dresses you're wearing. . . . Everybody in this camp outranks you . . . even the shaggin' cockroaches . . . But you got a point, Loquax . . . Until you guys have your shit together, you want to avoid the centurions.\"\n\n\"Centurions?\" a _tiro_ we called _Felix_ , \"Lucky,\" piped up from the rear of the tent. \"There was this guy who had a small farm a couple miles from my village . . . Used to come into my dad's _caupona_ and get himself drunk a couple of times a month . . . Said he was a retired centurion . . . a real hard case.\"\n\n\"Durus,\" Tulli nodded, while trying to adjust the straps on Minutus' helmet so it would fit on his melon-sized head. \"That's as good a description for a centurion as you can get . . . hard as a boot nail on a forced march . . . and just as sharp.\"\n\n\"Centurions command the centuries,\" Bantus nodded. \"That means there's sixty in the legion, plus the _praefectus castrorum_ , the camp prefect\u2014that hard case we met this morning. My advice to you _tirones_ is to stay out of their way. Compared to one of those guys, Strabo's a pussycat.\"\n\n\"How can we recognize them to avoid them?\" I asked Bantus.\n\n\"They carry a _vitis_ , a cudgel made of vine wood,\" Bantus told me. \"If a centurion doesn't like what you're doing . . . or if he just doesn't like your face . . . he'll let you have it . . . across your back . . . on your shoulder . . . across the back of your legs . . . or right down on your head. . . . You spot a soldier carrying a _vitis_ , you better decide you have business in the other direction. . . . There's nothing to be gained by getting involved with a centurion.\"\n\nBantus seemed to be talking from experience.\n\nStrabo suddenly burst into the tent.\n\n\" _Contubernium! STATE!_ \" yelled Bantus.\n\nWe all jumped to our feet and assumed the position. Somewhere behind me I heard a helmet hit the ground.\n\n\"I need three volunteers for a detail,\" Strabo directed. \"You . . . you . . . and you!\"\n\nHe pointed to Minutus, Felix, and me. \"Helmets, belts, and boots!\" he ordered. \"Tulli! You take charge of these men and report to the mess tent. Move it! You . . . Pustula . . . pick up that helmet . . . The rest of you . . . I'm looking at this shaggin' pigsty you call a tent, and I'm not liking what I see!\"\n\nThe three of us spent the rest of the day working in the legion's mess tent, assisting the cooks, scrubbing the pots and cooking utensils, hauling water from the camp water point, serving the food, cleaning up after the meal, and then scrubbing the pots and cooking utensils all over again.\n\nWe didn't get back to the tent until halfway through the first watch of the night. When we arrived, we saw Loquax and Pustula standing guard at the entrance. No sooner were we three paces from the entrance when Loquax challenged us.\n\n\" _Consistite_! _Quis_ est?\" he called.\n\nWe stopped, more from surprise than obedience. Felix responded, \"Cut the shit, Loquax! You know who we are!\"\n\nThere were a few heartbeats of silence before Loquax said, \"Advance one to be recognized!\"\n\n\" _Cacat_!\" Felix said and walked forward.\n\nWhen Felix was about a pace away, Loquax said loudly, _\"Consiste_!\" Then, he said softly, \" _Palus_!\"\n\nFelix stopped and said to him, \" _Palus_? Swamp? What are you talkin' about? Swamp? We're tired! We want to get some sleep. Will you cut this shit out?\"\n\nBy this time, Tulli had come out of the tent. \"Will you two keep it down?\" he hissed.\n\nThen, he turned to Felix. \"This is a guard mount, _Tiro_! He's just given you the sign. If you want to pass, you have to give him the countersign.\"\n\n\"Sign? Countersign?\" Felix spat. \"Tulli! I don't know what you're talkin' about!\"\n\nTulli nodded. \"The countersign's _'cygnus.'_ When the guard challenges you with the sign _palus_ , you're supposed to respond with _cygnus_ , swan. If you don't, he's supposed to put a _pilum_ through your chest. Then, you can sleep forever, you stupid _mentula_!\"\n\nThen, Tulli called out to us, \"Bring it in here! You can relax, Loquax. I'll handle this.\"\n\nWhen we were around him, Tulli said, \"Strabo's established a guard mount around the tent at night. Each of you will pull one or two guard watches here each night, depending on the duty roster. In fact, you better get inside and get some sleep. Pagane, you and loudmouth here got third watch tonight. Minutus, you're on second watch with Rufus. I'm your _tesserarius_ , sergeant of the guard. I rouse you up and brief you when it's your turn. But, remember, if you got to leave the tent to go to the latrine, the sign-countersign tonight is _'palus-cygnus.'_ Repeat that!\"\n\nWe did.\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Tulli said. \"Now, get in your bunks, and get some sleep! We eat chow at first call tomorrow, and I'm sure Strabo has a busy day planned for you boys.\"\n\nAnd, that was the start of many \"busy\" days for us. We roused up just before the horn signaling the end of the fourth watch. We were double-timed to the mess tent for some bread and watered-down _posca_. Then, Strabo led us on a twenty thousand pace trudge into the hills, partly marching, partly double-timing, and sometimes outright running. We were back in camp by the seventh hour where we were fed some kind of hot porridge, boiled vegetables, bread, and more _posca_. After about an hour's rest, Bantus and Tulli trained us in close-order drill, marching, and formations. Then, Strabo was back with more physical conditioning.\n\nOne of Strabo's favorite drills was what he called _situlae_ , buckets. Each of us would grab two empty buckets from the mess tent. Then, we would double-time out to the water point about a thousand paces west of the camp, fill the buckets, double-time back, and empty the water into the mess-tent troughs. Sometimes, Strabo would have us carry the filled buckets at our sides until our shoulders seemed like they were on fire; then, we'd shift them in front until our biceps were almost bursting, then behind us until our triceps burned. Sometimes our hands were under the bucket handles and sometimes on top, so our forearms got a work out.\n\nOf all Strabo's dirty little tricks, _situlae_ was the worst. I even saw Minutus, despite his size, weeping one day because of the pain in his shoulders and arms. But, Strabo kept driving us, shouting at us to move faster and to keep our buckets up, saying that in order to wield the infantryman's weapons in battle\u2014 the _gladius, scutum_ , and _pilum_ \u2014we needed upper-body strength.\n\nThere were nights, as I hit my cot, I couldn't feel my arms and shoulders at all, and my legs ached like a bad tooth. And, the nights when I could hit my cot were the best ones. Every night, we each pulled a guard watch, sometimes two. Despite our exhaustion, we didn't dare fall asleep on guard. Bantus told us that sleeping on guard was punishable by death; it endangered everyone in the camp. An offender was cudgeled to death in front of the entire legion by his tent mates. We didn't question whether this applied to us guarding a tent full of recruits in the middle of a legionary camp; none of us wanted to find out\u2014especially after what happened to Rufus.\n\nWe were running buckets one afternoon. We had all learned the trick of not filling the buckets up to the top to lessen the weight. We had to be careful because Strabo was wise to most soldiers' tricks, but as long as we didn't overdo it, we could usually get away with a few _ligulae_ less than a full bucket. That day, Rufus was having some problems. He had hurt his back earlier in the week when he had stumbled during one of the conditioning marches, but Strabo had refused to send him to the medics, telling him he was a _puella_ for even asking. So, instead of spilling a few _ligulae_ of water out of his bucket, he spilled most of it. Strabo caught him. We all thought it was a joke, part of the game.\n\nStrabo decided to use Rufus to demonstrate what happens when a \"Roman soldier fails in his assigned duty,\" as Strabo stated the charge.\n\nNext morning, before chow, Strabo lined us up in a small drill field near the _praetorium_. He marched Rufus out in front of the formation and announced that for failing in his duties, Rufus would suffer a _castigatio_ of ten blows with the _optio's_ staff. Rufus removed his helmet and cap, unbuckled his soldier's belt, stripped off his recruit tunic, and while Bantus held his wrists, Strabo inflicted the _castigatio_.\n\nTo his credit, Rufus did not once cry out\u2014despite the fact that we could see each blow smack across his shoulders and drive the breath out of his body. At one point, Rufus seemed to stumble forward into Bantus, who straightened him up and urged him to take his correction like a Roman. When it was over, Strabo was sweating from the exertion, and Rufus' back was striped crimson and white from the beating. Rufus slowly put his tunic back on and rebuckled the belt around his waist. He winced as he lifted his arms to pull his _pilleum_ cap down on his head but managed to regain control of himself. He tied his helmet straps under his chin and took his place back in our formation.\n\nStrabo announced to us that the _castigatio_ we had just witnessed, a beating with an _optio's hastile_ staff, was one of the mildest forms of discipline in the legion. Had Rufus failed in his duty in the presence of or in contact with the enemy, he would have been beaten to death. Having said that, Strabo led us out of camp on our conditioning march.\n\nAfter three weeks, we lost Bantus and Tulli. They were assigned to a _centuria_ in the Fifth Cohort. Tulli was pleased. He said that was far enough forward in the battle line to have honor and far enough back not to be _semper immerda_. Strabo named Minutus as our acting _decanus_ because he had kept his nose clean, and he was the biggest guy in our _contubernium_ \u2014far too big for us to say no to easily. I replaced Tulli as acting _tesserarius_ , but this was no break for me. I still had to take my turn on the sentry duty roster, and I also had to ensure that every relief was made throughout the night. I soon learned to sleep in two- to three-hour snatches. Strabo said that was good training.\n\nDuring the fourth week, we began our weapons training. Strabo lined us up and marched us over to supply to draw our combat armor. There was no point in doing weapons practice in our tunics, he told us. That was not the way we would actually fight.\n\n\"Train the way you fight; fight the way you train,\" he said. \"That's the Roman way!\"\n\nFirst, we turned in our training helmets for the newer models that we would actually wear in combat. They were heavier, but they had better protection, a rear neck guard, wider cheek guards, and a reinforced \"brow\" above the eyes. Strabo inspected each of our helmets to be sure that they weren't rejects that the supply people were trying to fob off on us. He said the metal had to be of a uniform thickness, with reinforcement over the crown of the head and no sign of repair welds.\n\nLoquax, noticing the socket on top of the helmet, asked when we were going to get our red infantry crests.\n\n\"When you've earned it, _Tiro_!\" Strabo snapped.\n\nAt the next station, we were issued our body armor, a coat of chainmail called _lorica hamata_. When we got outside the tent, Strabo had us lay our _loricae_ out for his inspection. He talked us through what he was doing so we would eventually be able to do it ourselves. First, he told us to be sure the _lorica_ is iron, not brass. Iron rusts and is a pain to keep clean, but it's much stronger than brass, and that might be the difference between just getting the wind knocked out of us when some Kraut _podex_ tries to stick a sword through us and having the _medicus_ try to reassemble our guts so we look neat on the funeral pyre.\n\nNext, Strabo instructed us to check the size of the rings\u2014smaller is stronger than bigger\u2014and to check how the rings are entwined with each other. Each ring should be entwined with a minimum of four other rings. The more connections, the more protection. There should be no broken rings and no rings missing rivets. If we found any of these, we should take the _lorica_ back to supply and draw a new one.\n\nWe had to make sure the leather closure straps were present and not frayed. We didn't want a strap breaking in combat and our armor falling off. \"Very embarrassing and usually quite fatal,\" Strabo quipped.\n\nNext, we should check the shoulder straps for fraying. That's where we would be attaching an additional layer of mail to protect us from slashing attacks and ax blows coming down over the top of the _scutum_ , a favorite trick of those long-haired Gauls on the other side of the Alps. That shoulder armor was something else we didn't want falling off when it was needed.\n\nNext, we had to check the fit. For this, Strabo went back into the supply tent and returned with a pile of what looked like padded red jackets and a bunch of red rags.\n\n\"Take off your belts and put these on over your tunics,\" he told us, handing out the jackets. \"This is your _subarmalis_. It gives your shoulders and body some padding from the chainmail.\"\n\nWe put the _subarmales_ on and closed them with lacings up the front. When he was done, Minutus, who had struggled to close the jacket, looked a bit like a giant red sausage. Short leather straps sewn on both sleeves covered the upper arms, and a skirt of leather straps covered the crotch and upper legs.\n\nPustula started strapping his belt back on over the _subarmalis_ , but Strabo stopped him. The belt went over the _lorica_.\n\nWhen we all had our _subarmales_ on, Strabo took one of the red rags and called Felix over to him. He threw the rag around Felix's neck, and just as we were convinced Strabo was going to strangle him, he said, \"This is your _sudarium_ , your infantry scarf. It's good for a lot of things: rubbing the sweat out of your eyes on the march, wiping the snot off your noses on a cold day, or plugging holes in a buddy; but its customary use is to pad the neck to keep it from being torn to shreds by the iron rings of your _lorica_. You tie it like this.\"\n\nStrabo tied the _sudarium_ around Felix's neck, saying, \"Tie it this way so some _podex_ doesn't grab hold of it in a fight and strangle you with it.\"\n\nWe each picked one out of the pile, and we tied them around our necks like we had been shown.\n\nFinally, Strabo told us to strap on our _loricae_. This was a two-man job. Felix held up my _lorica_ in front of me, and I put my arms through the sleeves in the chainmail jacket and moved forward until it rested on my shoulders. Then, Felix moved behind me and pulled the _lorica_ tight across my body.\n\n\"How's that feel, Pagane?\" I heard Strabo's voice behind me. \"Should be tight enough to give you protection, but loose enough for you to breathe.\"\n\nFelix adjusted my straps, then handed me the ends of my belt. Before I could buckle it, Strabo stopped me.\n\n\"Look over here, boys!\" he called. \"I want to show you a little infantryman's trick with these belts.\"\n\nStrabo grabbed my _lorica_ just below where my belt would ride and pulled it up a bit. Then, he told me to buckle my belt. When I did, he let the resulting fold of the _lorica_ fall into place on top of my belt.\n\n\"Look here!\" he said. \"If you adjust the _lorica_ over the belt like this, the belt takes some of the weight off your shoulders. That way, your _gladius_ and _scutum_ can move more quickly in combat. That could be the difference between walking back from a fight and being carried back.\"\n\nThen, using my _lorica_ as an example, he said, \"Be sure the ends of the coat overlap by at least two palms in the back and extend at least three palms below your balls.\"\n\n\"Now, jump up and down, Pagane!\"\n\n_\"Qui' vis m'agere_?\" I challenged, thinking he was putting me on.\n\n\"Jump up and down, Maggot!\" Strabo ordered.\n\nI did. The _lorica_ moved a bit but stayed on.\n\n\"Always test your fit,\" Strabo said. \"When you are moving quickly, you don't want this thing shifting and exposing nice, tempting targets to your enemy, like your throat, crotch, or armpits. Now, the rest of you cockroaches suit up!\"\n\nWhile I was helping Felix into his rig, Strabo went back into the supply tent. I just about had Felix squared away when Strabo returned, followed by a couple of the supply clerks carrying what looked like wide strips of chainmail. They piled these on a piece of canvas lying on the ground in front of us.\n\nWhen they had gone back into the supply tent, Strabo called, \"Gather around me, blattae!\"\n\nWe did, and Strabo held up one of the chainmail stoles. We then noticed it had leather straps. \"These are your _chlamys_ , your shoulder-armor rigs. You inspect the chainmail the same way that I showed you with the _loricae_. It attaches like this . . . Get over here, Pagane!\"\n\nI walked over, and Strabo adjusted a _chlamys_ around my neck and over both my shoulders. \"You attach the _chlamys_ to the back of the _lorica_ with these two straps first,\" Strabo instructed, strapping my shoulder armor down. \"Then you close it with these straps. Be sure the _sudarium_ is up above the edge so the chainmail doesn't chafe your neck while you're moving, which, for a Roman soldier, is always. Then, come around front and attach these three straps . . . _Bene_! Pagane! Sali!\"\n\nThis time, I didn't question Strabo. The chainmail rig moved a bit as I jumped, but settled back smoothly on my upper body.\n\nStrabo continued, \"That's how a well-adjusted _lorica_ should move on your body . . . smooth . . . no gaps . . . Stop jumping, Pagane! Now, there's a hook here on the front of the _chlamys_ . . . It should be positioned about the middle of your chest . . . This is to hang your _galea_ , your helmet, when the centurion lets you remove it during the march.\"\n\nStrabo bent over, picked up one of our helmets, and hung it on my rig.\n\n\"Fits like that!\" Strabo said. \"Any questions?\"\n\nThere were none, so Strabo said, \"Bene! Get yourselves rigged out in these _chlamydes_ , then helmets on and strapped!\"\n\nWhen we were all in our _loricae_ and lined up in our two files, Strabo announced, \"You're beginning to _look_ like Roman soldiers, but you're not there yet . . . not by a long shot . . . But from now on, you will _act_ like Roman soldiers . . . That means you're in your _loricae_ and _galeae_ from first trumpet in the morning until seventh hour every duty day . . . longer when there's an enemy near . . . _Bene_! It's still early . . . We can get at least a ten thousand-pace march in before chow!\"\n\nStrabo shouted, \" _Contubernium . . . STATE'_!\"\n\n\" _Ad dex' . . . VERT'_!\"\n\n_\"Promov . . . ET'_!\"\n\n\" _Gradus . . . Bis . . . mov . . . ET_ '!\"\n\nOff we clinked and clanked at the double toward the _Porta Decumana_ at the rear of the camp. And, Strabo was good to his word. From that day, we did everything like Roman soldiers, in full armored rig: conditioning marches; weapons training; even \"buckets.\"\n\nOur first phase of weapons training was with the infantry sword. Strabo double-timed us to a training field along the _Via Principalia_ near the _Porta Dextra_ of the camp. From Macro's drills with the _pugio_ , I immediately recognized the _palus_ erected in the ground. Those drills, although only six months earlier, seemed a different world to me. Strabo gathered us at the edge of the field and drew his sword from the scabbard on his right hip.\n\n_\"Audit' me, vermiculi!_ \" he yelled holding up the sword to us. This is the _gladius hispaniensis_ , the Spanish short sword, the basic weapon, best friend, and only true and faithful lover of a _pedes Romanus_. Like a good woman, if you take care of her, she'll take care of you! The _gladius_ is a carbon steel, double-edged sword with a tapered point for stabbing during combat. The blade is nine palms in length and one palm wide at its widest point. The gladius weighs just less than three _librae_ . . . Pustula! You cockroach! Listen up! . . . The _gladius_ possesses a solid grip provided by a ridged, wooden hilt wrapped in leather and secured by metal wire. It has a knobbed hilt which prevents your hand from sliding forward onto the blade\u2014regardless of how much guts and blood has slicked your sword hand. It also has a knobbed pommel, which prevents the sword from being ripped from your hand when the blade gets stuck in the bone and gristle of some hairbag _mentula_ you have dispatched to the ferryman. The pommel is also weighted, to give the _gladius_ perfect balance, which, when you sorry excuses for Roman soldiers are properly conditioned and trained, will make the _gladius_ feel weightless in combat. This sword in the hands of a trained and motivated Roman legionary\u2014which you maggots-in-chainmail are not\u2014is the finest weapon ever to be introduced onto the field of battle. Had Alexander the Great and his armies had these swords, we'd all be speaking Greek today. Do you _bestiolae_ have any questions?\"\n\n\" _N'abemus, Optio_!\" we answered in unison.\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Strabo continued. \"The _gladius hispaniensis_ is a stabbing sword, not a slashing sword. Barbarians, cavalrymen, and pissed-off wives slash. Roman soldiers stab. In this field, you will learn the proper technique for using a legionary's _gladius_ on the field of battle. However, until you maggots prove to me that you are worthy of the title _milites Romani_ , you will not put your meat hooks on real steel!\"\n\nStrabo dramatically sheathed his sword. He bent over and picked up a wooden replica of the _gladius_ , which he held up for us to see.\n\n\"You will be learning your combat sword techniques using a _rudis_ ,\" Strabo announced. \"The _rudis_ is made in the exact dimensions of a _gladius_ , but it's heavier than the real thing by almost two _librae_. This is to condition your arms and shoulders so that when the army finally has enough confidence in you maggots to give you real swords, they will feel like feathers in your hands. Before we start, each of you will file through the tent to my rear, where you will be issued your training swords. You will keep these _rudes_ with you at all times. Awake! Asleep! Coming! Going! Walking! Running! Your _rudis_ will either be in your hands or in your belts. They will be so much a part of you that, if some night you dream that a five-headed hydra pounced on you from out of your mommy's closet, you will be able to kill that scaly, slimy maggot with your _rudis_. If I ever see any of you without your little wooden swords, you will be cleaning _merda_ out of latrines until you begin to enjoy it. Do you have any questions, _me' blattulae_?\"\n\n\" _N'abemus, Optio_!\" we shouted.\n\nSo, we began our _gladius_ training. Strabo abbreviated the daily conditioning marches to ten thousand paces, but we were now doing them in armor and double-timing at least half the distance. We were back in camp by the fourth hour and on the stakes until the sixth. Chow. Rest and cleaning. By the eighth hour, back on the stakes, where we remained until the tenth\u2014eleventh if Strabo didn't think we were \"motivated\" enough. The training was familiar to me. I'd been through it already with Macro. The only difference was the size and weight of the _rudis_.\n\nStrabo was true to his word, and we always kept our practice swords with us. Lentulus left his on his bunk at the end of the day when he went to take a shit. When he got back to the tent, Strabo was waiting for him. As Strabo was beating Lentulus on the shoulders and upper arms with his discarded practice sword, he reminded Lentulus that a real soldier never walks away from his sword. Then, Strabo put Lentulus on latrine-cleaning duty. But, so that Lentulus wouldn't miss any training, or burden his _contubernales_ by missing his guard shifts, he had to clean the shitters at night, when everyone else was sleeping. I remember the morning Lentulus stumbled back into our tent, less than an hour before the end of the fourth watch and the beginning of our training day, smelling like the _merda_ he'd been scraping out of the latrines all night.\n\nStrabo didn't spare the rest of us either. He told us no _contubernalis_ would ever let a mate walk away from his sword. That endangers the man and the unit. He had us suit up in our armor, and until the end of the first watch, we had to double-time around the _intervallum_ , the open space between the camp's wall and the soldiers' living quarters.\n\nAfter two weeks of sword training, Strabo introduced us to the second basic legionary weapon, the _scutum_. Since we were _tirones_ , we were not given the real thing, but a weighted wicker shield Strabo called the _vimen_ , the \"basket.\"\n\nTo my surprise, in the hands of a trained Roman soldier, the _scutum_ was as much an offensive weapon as it was a defensive one. Using a _palus_ , from which hung a sack of sand, Strabo taught us to \"punch\" an enemy with the _umbo_ , the iron boss of the shield, a fighting technique he called _percussus_. On one of the padded training stakes, Strabo demonstrated how the left hand grasped a padded, metal handle welded to the back side of the _umbo_ , and turning through the hips and shoulders, smashed the iron boss into an opponent. After striking the bag of sand a few times, Strabo \"asked\" for a volunteer to attempt the technique and immediately pointed to Minutus, \"Tiny.\"\n\nThe weighted _vimen_ looked like a dinner tray in Minutus' mitt, and the first time he attempted the _percussus_ , the training pole seemed to shift a bit in the ground.\n\nBut, that didn't satisfy Strabo. \"Is that all you got, _tu puella_?\" he shouted at Minutus. \"You little girl! Hit that pole like you have a pair!\"\n\nMinutus' face reddened a bit, but he hit the _palus_ again, harder this time. I heard him grunt and thought I heard the stake crack.\n\n\"My baby sister hits harder than that!\" Strabo taunted. \"Hit it again, _me' puella_!\"\n\nMinutus looked hard at Strabo. For a second, I wasn't sure whether his next _percussus_ was going into the stake or into our training officer. The stake lost. Minutus smashed it with a grunting shout and the stake split at ground level; its shattered fragments flew back at least three paces.\n\nWe were stunned. Even Strabo was rendered speechless for a few heartbeats.\n\nFinally, Strabo announced, \"That's the way a Roman soldier executes a _percussus_!\"\n\nHe took the _vimen_ from Minutus. We could all see that its iron _umbo_ was crushed. Then, something happened that we had never seen in all our training. Strabo, staring down at the crushed iron boss, finally looked up at Minutus, who was panting a bit and standing next to the shattered _palus_ , and said, \"Minutus! Return to quarters! You have the rest of the afternoon off!\"\n\nAs Minutus double-timed down the camp street, Strabo turned to us, the shattered _vimen_ still in his hand, and shouted, \"What are you maggots staring at? Pick up your baskets! Find a pole! Get to work!\"\n\nWe spent the rest of that day, until well past the tenth hour, punching sandbags with our training shields. Despite Strabo's shouts of \"encouragement,\" none of our repeated blows as much as shifted the training stakes. When we finally got back to the tent, our shoulders and arms had no feeling left in them at all.\n\nMinutus was on his cot, sleeping like a baby.\n\n# II.\n\n# _Hostes apud Amicos_\n\n# ENEMIES AMONG FRIENDS\n\nM _ensis Martis_ , the month of the god of war, Mars, arrived, and activity in the _castrum_ of the Tenth Legion picked up. Rumors had it that the tribes up in _Gallia Comata_ , long-haired Gaul, were again on the move. The snow would soon be melting in the Alpine passes, and Caesar _Imperator_ would be summoning his legions for a summer campaign against them.\n\nThe regular infantry _cohortes_ of the legion were now regularly in the field on conditioning marches and training exercises. The _immunes_ , soldiers with special skills who were exempted from fatigue details, remained in camp and worked daily, cleaning and repairing equipment for the expected campaign.\n\nStrabo was pushing us hard to be ready. Our training day rarely ended before the eleventh hour, and with the change of season lengthening the hours, we tumbled into our cots every night totally exhausted, only to be roused in a matter of hours for a tour of guard duty.\n\nIn a practice field just outside the _Porta Sinistra_ , Strabo had us working daily on combat techniques for the battle line with our _rudes_ and _vimenes_. He constantly drilled us in two techniques: the close-order defense and the open-order advance.\n\nThe basic infantry combat formation of the _centuria_ was a column of _contubernia_ , one squaddie behind another, with each _contubernium_ in the _centuria_ lined next to each other. Typically, the distance of one _gradus_ , a little less than three _pedes_ , separated one soldier from another, so sword and shield were unencumbered. Soldiers typically measured the distance as an arm's length between men across the front line. The exception to the \"three-pedes rule\" was the _gemini_ pairs. The partner of the man on the front line positioned himself at a distance to support his _geminus_. Because we didn't make up a full eighty-man _centuria_ formation, we simulated with a four-man front line in _gemini_ pairs. For most of our training, I was paired with Loquax. At times, I was on in front; at other times, he was.\n\nThe close-order defense, or the _murus scutorum_ , \"the shield wall,\" as the _veterani_ called it, was used when defending against a determined assault from a numerically superior enemy. The goal of the _murus_ was to hold a position or to relinquish ground as slowly as possible. In this formation, the _contubernia_ were aligned in \"close order,\" about half a _gradus_ between men across the front line\u2014so close that shields could be interlocked, forming a wall facing the enemy.\n\nInitially, the primary role of the _geminus_ of the front-line man was to place his shoulder into his partner's side and dig his hobnails into the turf so his mate isn't bowled over by the initial impact of the enemy assault. Then, as the front-line squaddies stabilized and sustained the shield wall, the _geminus_ ensured that no one got to the front-line man by stabbing at him over or under his shield.\n\nTo practice this, Strabo detailed about a score of legionary slaves to charge at us, usually down a hill with us at the bottom. If Strabo was in a really perverse mood, he'd find a nice patch of mud for us to form our _murus_ in. Half the slaves would be carrying sacks of sand to give their charge some momentum and produce a significant shock when they hit our shields. The others would carry blunted stakes. After the first wave of slaves crashed into our wall with their sand bags, the ones with the stakes would keep our back-line boys busy defending as they poked at us over the shield wall.\n\nThe first time we practiced the _murus_ , Strabo had us formed in the mud at the bottom of a ridgeline. When the first wave of slaves, the ones with the sandbags, hit our shield wall, the feet of our first-line men went out from under them, and they went down, taking the second line, the _gemini_ , with them. The first wave of slaves followed their own momentum over our falling bodies and ended up in the mud with us. The second line of slaves, the ones with the poles, tried to stop, but had too much momentum from charging down the slope, and with no footing on the slick muddy ground, they piled on top of the already struggling scrum.\n\nStrabo watched this muddy pile of arms and legs for a while to see if we could extricate ourselves. Finally, he began dragging individual bodies out of the pile by their muddy arms and legs. When he eventually had us untangled and back in some semblance of a military formation, he congratulated us for being the first Roman military unit ever overrun by a pack of slaves armed with sandbags and sticks. He then double-timed us back to our tent, telling us we had one hour to prepare for a complete inspection of our kit, living quarters, and persons\u2014and we would not be permitted to eat, sleep, or drink anything until he could not find one speck of mud or dirt anywhere.\n\nFinally about halfway through the second watch of the night, we were permitted to sleep\u2014at least those of us who weren't on guard duty.\n\nThe slaves got a charge out of knocking us flat. Typically, legionary slaves were good eggs; serving with a legion was a good deal for them. Although they were the property of the _res publica_ , they got plenty to eat and were worked no harder than the soldiers were. After twenty years of service, they were freed, given a _pilleum_ , the \"liberty cap,\" and the franchise. In many ways, they were better off than most citizens, and they knew it. But, there was one rule they were never allowed to break. Ever since the slave insurrections down in Sicilia and Italia, no slave was allowed to hold a weapon. The penalty was crucifixion.\n\nThere was an old war story that went around the camp about a fight in which the enemy had breached the Roman line. A squad of legionaries from the _tertius ordo_ , the \"forlorn hope\" of any legion, was the only thing keeping the barbarians from breaking through to the rear of the Roman formation. A _contubernium_ fought alone until there were none left standing; every squaddie was either killed or wounded. That was when an army slave picked up the _gladius_ of a wounded legionary and fought the enemy. He not only saved the lives of his wounded comrades, but he saved the army as well. After the battle, the _legatus legionis_ , the commander of the legion, awarded the slave the Civic Crown for saving the lives of Roman citizens and standing his ground against overwhelming odds. He then immediately ordered the slave to be crucified for daring to take up arms.\n\nEven Strabo snorted at that story. He said the Civic Crown would never be awarded to a slave. Besides, if it were true what the slave had done, single-handedly stopping the enemy and saving the lives of Roman soldiers, the legion would not tolerate his being executed\u2014even if some pumped-up, patrician _legatus_ ordered it.\n\nThe other formation that Strabo drilled was the open-rank advance, which was used against a numerically inferior enemy or one whose battle line had been broken but was not yet fleeing. The purpose of the open-rank advance was to gain ground quickly without losing the integrity of the legionary battle line. For this, our battle line assumed an \"open\" formation, double spacing between each man in the front line. To measure this, we'd raise our arms and align ourselves fingertip to fingertip with the men on either side. The second pair in each _contubernium_ would maintain the same interval but would align themselves in the gaps between the front-line pairs. So, the _centuria_ would advance in what looked like a checkerboard pattern, _in quincuncem dispositi_ , deployed in the oblique, Strabo called it.\n\nThe individual combat technique used in the advance was what Strabo called the \"Roman one-two punch,\" a combination of a forward _percussus_ with the _scutum_ followed by a full forward thrust with the _gladius_. The movement started with the right foot forward, facing the enemy. The _percussus_ was executed when the legionary stepped forward with the left foot, punching the shield's _umbo_ into the enemy's head, face, or chest. This was immediately followed by stepping forward with the right foot, stabbing forward into the enemy's throat, abdomen, or groin with the short sword. The _mulus_ repeated the technique until the advance was halted or he was relieved by his _geminus_ or there was no one left in front of him to kill.\n\nThis technique left the front-line man horribly exposed. In stabbing forward with the _gladius_ , the soldier's entire right side, his _latus apertum_ , his \"open side,\" was exposed. His partner's main concern was to keep the enemy from sneaking in on that side when the front-line man's sword was fully extended. While there was also some vulnerability on the soldier's _latus opertum_ , the left side, when he delivered the _percussus_ , it was significantly less than on the sword side, so the forward man's _geminus_ tended to hover on his right side during the advance. The _geminus_ ' other task was to relieve his partner when he became exhausted.\n\nStrabo used the open-rank advance drill for conditioning. After lining us up in a four-man front in full kit with training swords and \"baskets,\" he would have us advance across an open field with no opposition: step, punch, step, thrust, withdraw, step, punch, step, thrust, withdraw. The whole time, he was screaming at us:\n\n\"My sister hits harder than that, Loquax!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Stay aligned! Stay aligned!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Harder, Rufus, you little girl!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"You hit like that, Pustula, and the only way you'll kill a barbarian is if he laughs himself to death!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Lentulus! You're falling behind! Move it!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\nAnd, so it continued until we were ready to puke our guts up\u2014or until after one of us _had_ puked his guts up.\n\nTo give us the real feel of the technique, Strabo again brought in a detail of slaves with sandbags. He aligned us in a four-man front\u2014each front-line man with a trailing _geminus_ \u2014and had us advance up a ridgeline against the sandbagwielding slaves.\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Stay aligned!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Cover Loquax's open side, Pagane!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Hit harder, Loquax! Make that man grunt!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"You puke on my grass, Minutus, and I'll have you for breakfast!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\nAbout halfway up the ridge, Strabo had us execute a relief where the trailing _geminus_ replaced the lead man on the front line without breaking the momentum of the advance. To do this, the trailing man swung around the open side of the lead man as he was delivering the forward thrust with his _gladius_. The trailing man would come through the gap, while delivering a _percussus_ with his _scutum_. The man who had been relieved would then take up the trailing position by moving around to the open side of his partner by the time he delivered his first sword thrust. The advance continued, uninterrupted, with Strabo shouting directions:\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Get your alignment back, you maggots!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Hit harder, Pustula, you cockroach!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Loquax, cover Pagane!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\nWhen we reached the top of the ridgeline, Strabo let us briefly celebrate our victory over the twelve withdrawing slaves with sandbags. Then, he ran us back down the slope to do it again.\n\nIt was a couple of days past the _Ides Martis_. The weather had finally broken, and we could feel the warmth of the returning sun on our faces, necks, forearms, and legs when we trained outside. There was now plenty of mud in the camp and in the surrounding fields for Strabo to make our training \"interesting.\"\n\nThe Tenth Legion was in a frenzy of preparation for the campaign season. Entire _cohortes_ of the legion were playing war games and staging mock battles against each other in the training fields around Aquileia.\n\nAt our morning training formation, Strabo told us that he had heard a rumor in the officers' mess that there was a crisis brewing in the north. A Gallic tribe, the Helvetii, had overthrown their Senate and leaders, and their warriors were on the move toward our _provincia_. The last time the Helvetii had moved south was during the great Cimbri invasions in Marius' time. Then, they allied with the Krauts, killed a Roman consul, and forced an entire Roman army to pass under the yoke. Caesar _Imperator_ , our proconsul and commander, had rushed north from Rome to Gennava, an _oppidum_ , a fortified trading town of a Gallic tribe called the Allobroges, _socii Populi Romani_ , an ally of Rome, at the farthest extent of our _imperium_ in Gaul. Gennava guarded a bridge near the mouth of the River Rhodanus where it flowed down from a great lake called Lammanus. The Helvetii wanted to seize the bridge in order to invade our lands and those of our allies. Caesar intended to stop them.\n\nCaesar had no confidence in these Allobroges. He doubted they would stand with us and was sure they would not stand alone against the Helvetii. But, Caesar had only one legion north of the Alps, Strabo's Eighth. The Seventh, Ninth, and our Tenth, all veteran legions, and two newly recruited legions, the Eleventh and Twelfth, were encamped around Aquileia. Caesar had dispatched one of his _legates_ , his senior commanders, from Rome to take command of these five legions and get them ready to march. As soon as the passes across the Alps were open, they were to move into _Gallia Transalpina_ to reinforce the Eighth at Gennava before the Helvetii overran them. If the Helvetii were to succeed, the lands of our allies, the Allobroges, and the entire Roman _provincia_ in Gaul would be ravaged by these barbarians.\n\nOur training took on a new sense of urgency. We had to be ready to stand in the battle line by the time our legion moved out. So, as the sun was just beginning to pink the eastern sky, Strabo double-timed us down through the _Porta Decumana_ , through the civilian _vicus_ , and out into a large, flat, grassy field, where about a dozen legionary slaves were waiting for us with their sandbags.\n\nStrabo lined us up for the open-order advance. I was on the front line for the first run-through. Minutus was my _geminus_.\n\nThat was what saved my life.\n\nThe slaves lined up opposite us with their sandbags, acting as targets for our weighted training shields and swords. We began the drill.\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Get your head in it, Felix!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\n\"Hit that bag like you mean it, Pustula! That slave's laughing at you!\"\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\nAfter about four or five repetitions, as I made my sword thrust, thus exposing my side and sword arm, I felt a blow on my forearm. I didn't think anything of it and continued the drill.\n\n\"Step! Punch! Step! Thrust! Withdraw!\"\n\nThen, I heard Minutus gasp, \"Pagane! You're bleeding!\"\n\nI looked down at my sword arm, still extended in my thrust, and noticed a red, dripping rent near the top of my forearm. I froze. I noticed that the slave in front of me had dropped his bag and was moving in on my open side. There was something shining in his right hand.\n\nBefore I could react, I sensed a blurred motion from my right rear. I saw Minutus' arm shoot out and his weighted _vimen_ hit the charging slave full in the face. The man crumbled like a puppet whose strings were suddenly cut. Minutus followed up his _percussus_ by stabbing the supine slave in the throat with his wooden _rudis_.\n\nIt was textbook. I knew the man was dead.\n\nThen, I heard Strabo yell, \"What, in the name of _coleones Martis_ , are you two doing?\"\n\nThen, the pain hit.\n\nIt shot up my arm into my brain, like a hot, red wave. I looked and saw my arm dripping with blood below the elbow. My brain vaguely registered that the blood had flowed down over my hand and onto my wooden practice sword, and I was fleetingly worried how I was going to get it cleaned up for inspection. I fell to my knees, dropping my basket. Another demerit, my foggy mind registered.\n\nThen, Strabo was there with me. He was pulling my red _sudarium_ , my infantry scarf, off my neck and stuffing it into the hole in my arm.\n\nI heard him saying, \"It's dripping, not spurting . . . That's good . . . It's a scratch . . . You'll be fine . . . Can you move your fingers?\"\n\nI wondered what my fingers had to do with anything, yet I willed them to move. It seemed to take a long time, but finally they did move for me.\n\nAgain, Strabo, \"Good . . . That's good . . . That _cunnus_ didn't slice any of the tendons . . . Minutus! Give me your _sudarium_ here!\"\n\nI felt something tighten around my arm over the wound.\n\nThen I heard Felix's voice, \"He had this, _Optio_!\"\n\nStrabo, \"A _sica_! How did that _podex_ get hold of a _sica?_ Is he dead?\"\n\nRufus, \"As a doornail, _Optio_ . . . Minutus just about took his head off . . . not much left of the face.\"\n\nStrabo was untying my _galea_. He let it drop to the ground. More demerits for inspection, my foggy mind registered.\n\n\"Get the head slave over here!\" Strabo shouted.\n\nThen, to me, \"You keep your head down till it clears . . . It's a scratch . . . You'll be fine . . . Lentulus! Keep an eye on Pagane here!\"\n\nStrabo left me as Lentulus moved in.\n\nThen, I heard Strabo, \"Who is that, Demetri?\"\n\n_\"Illum non cognosco, Domine_! Don't recognize him, Lord! He's new. He just joined our _domus_ this morning,\" responded the one called Demetri.\n\nStrabo, \"You know if he killed a soldier, your whole _domus_ would be crucified?\"\n\nDemetri, \"Yes, _Domine_ . . . The man's new . . . I don't know him . . . The only thing I can tell you is he spoke Latin like a Roman.\"\n\nStrabo, \"Like a Roman? That's odd . . . a slave from Rome . . . That makes no sense! Demetri, get your boys to police-up the body . . . Drop it off with the medics . . . Tell them _Optio_ Strabo doesn't want them to touch it or lose it . . . Then you get back to your _stabulum_ . . . Stay there until someone comes for you . . . You're restricted until further notice . . . _Compre'endis_ _tu_?\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Domine_!\" Demetri responded.\n\nStrabo walked over to where I was kneeling. \"You think you can stand up, Pagane?\" he asked.\n\n_\"Possum, Optio_ ,\" I answered.\n\nThe fact that Strabo didn't just order me to my feet indicated his concern. Slowly, I got up, leaning on Lentulus.\n\nThen, I remembered my helmet and equipment on the ground. I made to pick them up, but Strabo stopped me. \"Don't worry about your gear, Pagane. Your mates'll take care of it for you. Minutus!\"\n\n\"Yes, _Optio_ ,\" my _geminus_ responded.\n\n\"Good job taking out that _podex_ that tried to stick Pagane. That's how this _geminus_ shit's supposed to work in combat! Next time, don't waste a sword thrust on a dead man! Other than that . . . _bene gestum_ . . . _good job_! Now, I want you and Lentulus here to get Pagane over to the medics . . . Keep an eye on him . . . Something's going on here that doesn't smell right . . . A _new_ slave with a _Roman_ accent? . . . Stick with Pagane till I send for you . . . Got it?\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Optio_ ,\" Minutus responded. Then, I felt his hand under my shoulder, gently turning me back toward the gate of our _castrum_.\n\nMinutus and Lentulus walked me back to the medical station in camp. When we got there, a fair number of legionaries were waiting on sick call. The legion was training hard, so it was producing its fair share of bruises and strains. Since I was bleeding, I was seen immediately by one of our assistant _medici_ , a jovial chap with black hair, olive skin, and an accent that would be right at home in the depths of the _subura_. He tried to send Minutus and Lentulus away, but they insisted they had been ordered by our _optio_ to stay close to me.\n\n\"I outrank yaw _optio_ ,\" the doc told them, \"but if ya wanna stay, just make shoowah ya don't puke on my nice clean floor hee'ah. Dere's a bucket ovah dere fer dat!\"\n\n\"Now, let's see whadawegot hee'ah,\" he said, unwrapping the infantry scarves around my forearm. He handed the sodden _sudaria_ to Minutus, who went a bit pale when he felt the damp cloth hit his hands.\n\nThe doc looked at my arm and whistled, \"Dat's some cut ya got hee'ah on y'arm! How'd dat happen?\"\n\n\"Uhhh . . . training accident . . . uhh . . . _Medice_ ,\" I said, not quite sure what the military protocol was.\n\n\"Just cawl me Spina. Everybody else 'round hee'ah does,\" the doc said. \"Training accident, huh? Looks like ya was in a knife fight in some wine dive in town. . . . I know cuts like dis . . . looks like a _sica_. Wiggle you fingahs for me!\"\n\nAgain, I wiggled them.\n\n\"Dat's good . . . Can ya make a fist?\" Spina asked.\n\nI did, but I winced as pain shot through my arm.\n\n\"Dat's good,\" Spina said again. \"Stings dough, don't it? Now, I want yas to make a fist atta one fingah atta time.\"\n\nI did. Each finger seemed to work.\n\n\"Dat's good,\" Spina said. \"Doesn't seem to be anyding wrong wid ya tendons. We get dis ding closed up and it don't festah, ya should be back to work in a couple a weeks . . . tops . . . Mahcus! Get in hee'ah! Bring a bucket of dat boiled wawdah and some wine!\"\n\nI looked over and saw Minutus still holding the sodden scarves, not quite sure how to get rid of them. Soon, Spina's attendant, Marcus, entered the _cubiculum_ with a bucket of water and a pitcher of wine.\n\nSpina took the wine from him, sniffed it, and said to Marcus, \"Clean up de wound and de ahm.\"\n\nSpina sipped the wine while Marcus worked.\n\n\"Why boiled water?\" I asked Spina.\n\n\"When I was a novice, my _praeceptor_ swaw on it,\" Spina said putting down the wine pitcher. \"Don't know why, but when ya boil de wawdah, dere's less infection. Greeks say it chases the _daimones_ outta de wawdah. I think dat's a load a crap, but it woiks, 'n' I can't argue wid dat.\"\n\nWhen Marcus was done, Spina inspected his job. Satisfied, he told me to hold my arm over the bucket. Marcus grabbed onto my wrist.\n\nSpina looked at me and said with a wink, \"Dis is gonna sting a liddle!\"\n\nThen, he picked up the pitcher and poured the wine over my wound.\n\nIt felt like he had set my arm on fire. I tried not to make a sound, but a gasp escaped. \"Cacat!\"\n\n\"Shit, Indeed!\" Spina echoed, draining the last drops of wine from the pitcher into his mouth. \"Dah wine also chases de _daimones_ outta yaw arm, so de Greeks say . . . and dat woiks, too!\"\n\nThe pain subsided, but I noticed that Marcus had not let go of my wrist. Spina was removing something from his medical kit. When he turned around, I noticed he had what looked like a curved needle attached to a length of brownish-black lumpy thread.\n\nSpina saw me looking. \"Cat gut,\" he said. \"It's miraculous, really. We get de stuff all de way from Egypt. I'm gonna sew yaw arm muscle back together, and yaw body'll absorb de stitches by itself. Dah Greeks're amazing with what dey come up wid . . . Oh . . . yaw not gonna like dis part.\"\n\nSpina was right. I didn't like that part at all. By the time he was done, Marcus' fingers had bruised my wrist, and there were tears rolling down my cheeks. I also noticed Minutus and Lentulus had gone out in search of a puke bucket.\n\n\"Bene,\" Spina said, examining his handy work. \"Woist part's ovah! Now, I just gotta close you up. Den Mahcus hee'ah can bandage y'arm and yaw on yaw way.\"\n\nBy the time Marcus was finishing my bandages, there was a commotion outside the _cubiculum_. A soldier burst into the room. He was in full kit, under arms without shield, and wore the thin purple sash of the praetorian detail around his waist.\n\n\"Are you _Tiro_ Gaius Marius Insubrecus?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Uhhh . . . yes . . . uhhh . . . sir,\" I stammered.\n\n\"You are to come with me to report to the _praefectus castrorum_ , forthwith!\" he ordered.\n\nSpina interrupted, \"If 'fort'wid' means when I'm done wid 'im, _Praetoriane_ , then we got no problem.\"\n\nThe praetorian winced at Spina's use of the Latin language.\n\n\"Of course, _Medice_ ,\" he responded. \"Are you the doctor in charge of this case?\"\n\n\"Dat's me!\" Spina agreed.\n\n\"Then, my compliments, sir,\" the guard continued. \"The _praefectus_ requests that you examine the body of the dead slave and report to him your findings at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\"My earliest convenience,\" Spina repeated. \"Dat's officah tawk for fort'wid, right?\"\n\nThe praetorian didn't answer that question.\n\n_\"Bene_ ,\" Spina continued. \"Let me finish up wid dis one hee'ah, and I'll examine yaw dead slave. Then, I'll be along fort'wid.\"\n\nSpina had Marcus make me up a sling, and he told me to keep my arm in it until he examined my wound again in three days. Meanwhile, I was on restricted duties: no using the arm, no double-timing, and stay away from filth\u2014so no latrine duty.\n\n\"And, diss is impaw'ent,\" Spina warned. \"Ya should see some dischahge from de wound, looks like wawdery blood, and you will probably have a little fevah tonight, but if ya see any white, milky discharge, aw yaw fevah doesn't go away by the mawnin' or ya see red lines goin' up yaw ahm or the wound gets puffy and starts to stink, get right back hee'ah! And, just drink plenty of wawdah!\"\n\n\"What if any of that stuff happens?\" I asked.\n\n\"If yaw lucky,\" Spina said, \"people'll be callin' you Lefty for de rest of yaw life . . . If not . . . well . . . let's just hope for de best . . . eh?\"\n\nWe left the medical station and the praetorian escorted Minutus, Lentulus, and me to the _praetorium_ , where we had reported weeks ago when we first arrived at the _castrum_. This time we were ushered straight into the prefect's _cubiculum_. Strabo was already there with the prefect, whose name I recalled was Decius Minatius Gemellus.\n\nWhen we entered, Gemellus told us to stand at ease. Then he asked me, \"Do you want to sit, _Tiro_?\"\n\n_\"Nolo, Praefecte_ ,\" I said snapping to attention.\n\n\"Don't be an idiot, _Tiro_ ,\" he snapped. \"You look as pale as a _lemur_ with a hangover. . . _Scriba_!\"\n\n\" _Praefecte_!\" the voice of his clerk from the outer room.\n\nThe clerk brought in a camp chair, and I did sit down, but in the presence of the _praefectus castrorum_ of at least five legions, my back never touched the chair.\n\nI then noticed that there were two other officers in the room. Each had his sword strapped on his left side and a _vitis_ in his belt\u2014centurions! As I straightened up further in the chair, the clerk reentered the room with a double wax tabula and stylus.\n\nThe prefect nodded toward one of the centurions. \"This is Tertius Piscius Malleus, known as the 'The Hammer,' _centurio Primi Ordinis_ , commander of the First Cohort and _primus pilus_ of the Tenth Legion. The other officer on his left is Mamercus Tertinius Gelasius, _centurio Tertii Ordinis_ and officer in charge of recruit training. They are here to witness your statements and to interrogate you further concerning today's events.\"\n\nThe prefect paused, so I said \" _Compre'endo, Praefecte_!\"\n\n\" _Bene_!\" He continued, \"Your officer here, _Optio_ Strabo, has already made his statement. Now, I'd like you to tell us what happened.\"\n\nI related the story as best as I could. No one interrupted my narrative, but when I was done, the prefect asked, \"Your _geminus_ . . . the one who killed the slave . . . is that this big fellow here?\"\n\n\"I'm called Minutus, _Praefecte_!\" Minutus confirmed.\n\n\"Minutus,\" the prefect chuckled, \"Tiny . . . eh? I don't know why the fathers of Roman soldiers bother naming their sons when they put on the _toga virilis_ . . . They're not men until their mates in the legions name them. . . . So . . . Minutus . . . do you have anything to add to _Tiro_ Insubrecus' account?\"\n\n_\"N'abeo, Praefecte_ ,\" Minutus responded.\n\nGemellus turned to the other two officers. \"Do you have any questions for these men?\" he invited.\n\nMalleus, the _primus pilus_ , spoke, \"Have either of you ever seen the slave who attacked _Tiro_ Insubrecus before?\"\n\n_\"Illum non vidi, Prime_ ,\" Minutus and I answered in unison.\n\n\"Do either of you have any idea why this man would want to kill you?\" he asked.\n\n_\"No' scio, Prime!_ \" Minutus snapped.\n\nI remained silent while I thought about what I should say.\n\nMalleus picked up on my silence immediately. \"You have something to add, _Tiro_ Insubrecus?\"\n\nI thought about it for a few heartbeats. Telling the _praefectus castrorum_ of Caesar's legions and the _primus pilus_ of the veteran Tenth Legion that I was possibly a fugitive, wanted by the consul of the Republic, had a bit of risk attached to it. But, even in the midst of Caesar's army, I obviously wasn't safe. So, I told them everything: Gabinia in the arbor, the attack on the road to my parents' farm, Gabinius Iunior and his gladiators, the threat of Gabinius Senior's arrest warrant, my flight, and the gangsters in Mediolanum. I did leave out a few details about Rufia's operation. I had enough enemies as it was, and I planned to go back home to Mediolanum in about six years' time if I didn't get skewered by some foaming-at-the-mouth, seven-foot-tall, hairy, Roman-eating German tribesman.\n\nIt was rare indeed to see a look of utter astonishment on the face of a Roman officer as senior and as experienced as a _praefectus castrorum_. This was one of those times.\n\nGemellus burst out laughing\u2014another rarity. \"You mean to tell me that _Rufia_ . . . _Rufia_ of Mediolanum . . . _Rufia_ , with the blue, Venus-door . . . hid you out in one of her private suites?\"\n\n_\"Recte, Praefecte_ ,\" I stammered out.\n\n\"I know senior officers . . . purple-stripers . . . who'd piss away their entire purse to have been in your shoes!\" Gemellus continued to laugh. \"Rufia of Mediolanum . . . and she's sweet on a clapped-out _optio_ from Asia . . . No offense, Strabo . . . _Mammis Veneris_ . . . that's rich!\"\n\n\"Sir,\" Malleus beckoned.\n\n\"Yes . . . Yes,\" Gemellus chuckled, getting back on track. \"I think we can rule out the consul. If he wanted you, all he'd have to do is send a warrant up here for your arrest. If he wanted you dead, he could just make sure you never made it back to Rome. Of course, Caesar as proconsul of the province and commander of the army would have to approve.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" I ventured.\n\n\"What is it, _Tiro_?\" the prefect said, a bit surprised at being interrupted by a recruit. \"Don't tell me that you have a passel of Athenian _hetairai_ in the _vicus_ who clean your underwear.\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" I assured him. \"But, there is something about my family's relationship with Caesar _Imperator_ that may have some relevance.\"\n\nI told him about my gran'pa, Marius and Gaius Senior, how we got our farm, and how we are technically Caesar's clients.\n\n_\"Cacat_ ,\" Gemellus said. \"That explains the name, 'Gaius Marius,' at least . . . I doubt the _imperator_ even knows you or your family exist . . . But you're correct . . . Technically, you're _cliens genti Iuliae_ , and therefore, entitled to his _patrocinium_ . . . his protection. . . . He will have to be informed.\"\n\nThere was a commotion in the outer tent. Another of the prefect's clerks stuck his head in and announced that the _medicus_ had arrived to give his report on the dead slave.\n\n\"About time!\" the Prefect responded. \"Get him in here!\"\n\nSpina entered the room and reported.\n\n\"What can you tell us about the dead slave, _Medice_?\" the prefect demanded.\n\n\"Dead slave?\" Spina repeated. \"First, I can confirm he's crossed the river . . . Either de broken neck aw de damage to his head did 'im.\"\n\n\"How can you be so sure, Spina?\" Gelasius spoke up for the first time. \"He was also stabbed through the throat.\"\n\nSpina looked over at the centurion. \"Gelasius! Didn't see ya standin' back dere. How do I know? Easy! Dah stabbing wound to his throat pierced dee aorta. If his heart was beatin' when dat happen'd, dere would a been a fountain a blood. But dis wound hardly bled . . . _Ergo . . ._ he was dead when it happened.\"\n\nGelasius grunted in the affirmative.\n\n\"Continue, Doctor!\" Gemellus prompted.\n\n\"Dah second part of yaw question about a dead slave raises a problem, _Praefecte_ ,\" Spina continued. \"Dis guy wasn't a slave.\"\n\n\"What?\" Gemellus shot. \"Wasn't a slave? How can you be so sure?\"\n\n\"Coupl'a dings, _Praefecte_ ,\" Spina explained. \"First, his hair, or what was left of it, wasn't regulation cut. Second, he had no 'SPQR' tattoo on his left shoulder blade like de rest a de government slaves around hee'ah. T'ird, his hands weren't callused like a slave's . . . A _sicarius_ , a hit man, yeah . . . a slave, no. Fourt', I cut 'im open and his last meal included _garum_ and eggs, not de barley porridge de slaves eat for breakfast. Finally, he had a tattoo of a _sica_ and skull on his left shoulder. I've seen marks like dat when I was a kid growin' up on the Aventine . . . It's a _collegium_ mark . . . Dis guy was a _grassator_ . . . a gangster . . . probably a _percussor_ . . . a hitter up hee'ah from Rome . . . That explains the report of his Roman accent.\"\n\n\"Are you sure about this, Spina?\" Malleus asked. \"Seems a little flimsy to me.\"\n\n\"Any one a dem, _Prime_ , yeah . . . It'd be pretty flimsy, like ya said,\" Spina responded. \"But, all togedder . . . no . . . Dis guy was a ringer . . . a hitter . . . He was up hee'ah to wack de kid . . . I'm shoo-a-wit.\"\n\n\"'Shoo-a-wit',\" Gemellus said absently. \"Oh . . . 'sure of it' . . . Yes . . . I agree . . . _Bene gestum, Medice_ . . . Anything else?\"\n\n\"Yeah, _Praefecte_ ,\" Spina continued. \"I took a look at dis guy's knife . . . It's a straight-bladed _sica_ . . . I seen a lot of dese back on de Aventine . . . The boys on de hill like 'em cause dere easy to conceal . . . Dis one's razor shawp . . . well taken care a . . . and expensive . . . Got an ivory grip . . . matches the scabbard I found strapped to de guy's forearm . . . But dis is de ding . . . On the blade was engraved DON MILONE SUM, 'I'm a gift from Milo.' Not only we got a hitter heah, we got one of Milo's top boys. He don't give away knives like dat to schleps!\"\n\n\"Schleps?\" Gelasius questioned.\n\n\"Schleps,\" Spina clarified. \"It's a word we used back on de hill for guys who ain't too impaw'int or too bright, so they get the worst jobs . . . like a . . . like a . . . _ianitor_ . . . a _baiulus_ . . . only dumber.\"\n\n\"Yes! Yes! Very good,\" the Prefect interrupted. \"Do get on with it, Spina!\"\n\n\"Yeah . . . of course, _Praefecte_ ,\" Spina said. \"Like I said, dis guy was good at what he did . . . so he had to have an escape plan after he did the kid hee'ah . . . Dat means a quick change a clothes outta de slave tunic . . . So, somewhere neah wheah he slashed de kid hee'ah, he hid 'is stuff . . . So, if ya send a few a de boys out on police call, you should find 'em . . . Maybe tell you somethin' maw 'bout dis guy.\"\n\nIt took Gemellus a couple of heartbeats to translate Spina's west-slope-of-the-Aventine Latin, but when he finally did, he grunted his approval, \" _Bene_ . . . Good thinking, Spina . . . Anything else?\"\n\n\"Yeah, _Praefecte_ . . . couple things,\" Spina continued. \"I inspected dis knife real close . . . It's been shawpened recently . . . Looks like a professional job . . . Best knife-grinder 'round hee'ah is a Gaul named Aeddan. I use 'im myself to sharpen my instruments . . . First rate job he does . . . He's got a booth out in the _vicus_ behind de Ninth's _castrum_. I'll bet dat's where aw boy shawpened his fancy _sica_. Doubt yaw gonna get much . . . Dis guy's too good . . . but it's worth a try.\"\n\n\"You said 'couple things,' Medice?\" Gemellus prompted.\n\n\"Yeah, _Praefecte_ ,\" Spina continued. \"The garum and eggs aw boy had for 'is last breakfast . . . Dat's a pretty fancy meal . . . He didn't get it in some _vicus_ flop . . . My bet's he stayed at some fancy joint, a _deversorium_ up in de town . . . Best place I know up deah is the _Anser Volans_ , the Flying Goose . . . It's on de main drag neah de west gate . . . Run by a retired legionary named Macer . . . Dey'd have garum and eggs, fer shoowaw.\"\n\n\"Macer . . . Flying Goose . . . Aeddan,\" Gemellus repeated, \"You know any of these places, Malleus?\"\n\n\"I know the Goose, _Praefecte_ ,\" the _primus pilus_ responded.\n\n\"Bene! Send a couple of your _prima centuria_ boys up there to talk to this Macer,\" Gemellus instructed. \"He used to be one of us, so I assume he'll cooperate. As far as this Gaul is concerned, this Aeddan, send a _contubernium_ in full rig . . . shields and swords . . . just in case he decides to play it cute.\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Praefecte_ ,\" Malleus responded.\n\nGemellus turned to the doctor, \"Anything else for us, _Medice_?\"\n\n_\"N'abeo, Praefecte_ ,\" Spina responded.\n\n_\"Bene_! You may return to your duties,\" Gemellus instructed.\n\nSpina inclined his head to the three centuriate officers in the room and left.\n\nAfter Spina had gone, Malleus asked, _\"Praefecte_! What about the slaves, the real ones, I mean?\"\n\n\"The slaves?\" Gemellus asked. \"What do you mean, Malleus?\"\n\n\"Do you want them interrogated?\" the _primus pilus_ inquired. \"This . . . this 'hitter,' as the doctor calls him, may have bribed them to get them to conceal his presence within their _domus_.\"\n\n\"Hmmm . . . I see what you mean,\" Gemellus considered. \"Are you suggesting we put them to the _interrogatio?_ That means torture for slaves.\"\n\n\"That is the custom, _Praefecte_ ,\" Malleus confirmed.\n\n\"I see,\" the prefect reflected. \"No . . . I don't think so . . . It's bad for morale, and we're less than two weeks from going into combat . . . The Tenth's _stabulum_ of slaves are veterans . . . Most of them been with us for years . . . I don't think any of them would risk _manumissio_ , their emancipation, for a few denarii . . . No . . . But, Gelasius . . . I have a job for you.\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Praefecte_ ,\" the Tenth Cohort commander snapped.\n\n\"Send a couple of your boys over to Spina and tell him to sew his patient up,\" Gemellus instructed, \"Then, take the body out to the field where he attacked _Tiro_ Insubrecus and crucify him. If he wanted to disguise himself as a slave, he can end up like one, feeding the crows on a cross.\"\n\n_\"Stat', Paefecte_!\" Gelasius confirmed.\n\n\"Be sure to hang him up in his slave tunic,\" the Prefect continued. \"Hang a sign on him, something like, 'Attacked a Roman Soldier.' Then, after last call this evening, when training's over, take the slaves out to that field, the entire _stabulum_ , and file them by the cross. That should take care of any thoughts they _might_ have about taking bribes from outsiders. Got it, Gelasius?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Praefecte_!\"\n\n\"Strabo,\" Gemellus turned his attention to our training officer. \"Will your _tirones_ be ready to participate in the _significatio_ next week?\"\n\n_\"Parati, Praefecte_ ,\" Strabo snapped.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Gemellus said. \"This army will be moving out over the Alps as soon as the _imperator_ summons us. So, with the Helvetii on the move, we must be sure we are all _parati. Tiro_ Insubrecus, you are excused from all training exercises and fatigue details until further notice! I will be notifying your _patronus_ , Caesar _Imperator_ , of this event. This affects his _dignitas_. As far as the rest of this legion is concerned, this was just the work of a renegade slave. _Compre'enditis vos toti?_ \"\n\nA chorus of _\"Compre'endo, Praefecte_!\" ensued.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Gemellus concluded. \" _Optio_ Strabo, you will remain behind. We have something to discuss with you. _Tirones, miss'est_!\"\n\n# III.\n\n# _Ego Miles Romanus_\n\n# I BECOME A SOLDIER OF ROME\n\nSo, I spent most of my last weeks as a legionary _tiro_ restricted to barracks. None of Spina's dire fears about my arm materialized. When I reported to him at the medical station three days later, he was quite pleased with his handiwork and my progress\u2014pretty much in that order. He had me flex my fingers a couple of times; then he told Marcus, his orderly, to wash the wound with wine\u2014after Spina had personally tested the brew for potency\u2014and change my bandages. Spina sent me back to barracks with the advice to learn to use my left hand as it was good military practice. I wasn't sure what he meant, but he seemed to have amused himself.\n\nStrabo had a surprise for us. When he returned to collect us the first morning after the meeting with the prefect, he had his sword hung on his left hip and a _vitis_ in his right hand. He announced in formation that he had been granted a temporary appointment in the Tenth Legion as a _centurio tertii ordinis_ and was in command of the Fourth _Centuria_ of the Tenth _Cohors_ , where the legion assigned its trainees. He then announced that he had selected our old friend Bantus as his \"chosen one\"; the _optio_ of the Fourth _Centuria_ was our new training officer. He then sent me back to quarters while he put the rest of our _contubernium_ through its daily ten thousand-pace conditioning march.\n\nRumors about what was happening on the other side of the Alps continued to swirl through the camp.\n\nThe Germans had crossed the Rhenus. The Helvetii had stormed the bridge over the Rhodanus and had burned Gennava. Roman citizens were being massacred, and the Eighth Legion had been pushed back into our _provincia_. Roman auxiliary units had mutinied and gone over to the barbarians. Massalia had locked its gates against us, and the entire Roman army north of the Alps was being pushed back into the _Mare Nostrum_ , the Middle Sea.\n\nThe Tenth Legion continued to train and prepare to move out over the Alps. It was now participating in army-level training exercises, maneuvering with, and against, the other legions of the army. Our senior officers\u2014legates and tribunes\u2014were arriving from Rome. But, still no word had come from Caesar _Imperator_.\n\nFinally, on the _Nones Aprilis_ , Strabo announced to us that word had been received from the proconsul in Gennava, which apparently the barbarians had not burned, that the army must be ready to march on the _Ides_. Therefore, our _significatio_ would be held five days before the _Ides_ so that we would be ready to march with our legion. Strabo then asked if we had any questions.\n\n\" _Quaestionem 'abeo, Opt_ . . . uh . . . _Centurio_ ,\" Loquax popped up.\n\n\"Roga,\" Strabo responded. \"Go ahead!\"\n\n_\"Centurio_ , what is a _significatio_?\" Loquax asked.\n\nStrabo stared at Loquax for a few heartbeats, trying to decide whether the _tiro_ was putting him on. He decided he was not.\n\n\"Good question, _Tiro_ Loquax,\" Strabo responded. We would come to notice that after his promotion, Strabo was more refined, more observant of proper military protocol and courtesy. He hardly ever called us maggots or cockroaches anymore.\n\n\"The _significatio_ is a ceremony in which the legion demonstrates to Father Iove that you are now part of it,\" Strabo explained. \"In front of the legion's _aquila_ , the _primus pilus_ asks the assembled legion whether it accepts you, and the soldiers acclaim their acceptance. Then, you are invested in the red tunic of a soldier, given the shield of the Tenth Legion, and awarded your _gladius_ , your infantry sword. You renew your _sacramentum_ in front of your comrades and swear you would die before you would shame our standards or let the legion down. Then, the legion acclaims you as a _miles_ , one of their number. Any other questions, _Tirones_?\"\n\nWe had none, so Strabo said, \" _Optio_ Bantus! Take charge of the training detail. Move them out to the _pilum_ range . . . at the double . . . Pagane . . . you will remain in quarters!\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Centurio_!\" Bantus snapped and took his position in front of our formation.\n\n\" _Contubernium . . . STATE!_ \"\n\n_\"Pagane! Miss'est_ . . . _A signis!_ \"\n\n\" _Contubernium_ . . . _Ad Dex' . . . VERT'_!\"\n\n_\"Prov . . . ET'_!\"\n\n\" _Gradus bis mov . . . ET'_!\"\n\nThe day of our _significatio_ , our acceptance into the Roman army, would be the fifth day before the _Ides Aprilis_ , a day that was considered _fastus_ , auspicious, and _comitialis_ , a day on which the Roman people could assemble to conduct business.\n\nA few days prior, Bantus had our acting _decanus_ , Minutus, collect our white trainee tunics, leaving us one each to train in, and had Moelwyn, our newly-assigned _contubernium_ slave, take them down to the civilian _vicus_ just outside the _Porta Decumana_ to be dyed infantry red. The process took two days. When Moelwyn returned from the _vicus_ with them, we were excited by the prospect of finally donning them. I remember sitting on my cot, running my hands over the red fabric. Bantus told us not to try to outrun our own chariot horses, but to store them away until we had been invested.\n\nThree days before the _significatio_ , Spina had his aid, Marcus, remove the exposed stitches from my injured arm. This time Spina sampled his medicinal wine and didn't use it for washing my wound. He examined my injury and congratulated himself on a \"jawb well dun.\" Then, he congratulated me on acquiring the first \"noble scah\" of my military career. He then warned me to keep the arm bandaged and go easy with it for the next few days, \"No sword practice and no _pilum_ chucking!\"\n\nThen, Spina offered me a swig of his pitcher.\n\nI got back to our tent around the seventh hour. Moelwyn was outside working on a harness. I greeted him in _Gah'el_.\n\n\"Please speak Latin, _Domine_ ,\" he answered me in Latin. \"That is the language of the legions.\"\n\nI sat down next to him and started examining the harness he was working on. I recognized it from the time I worked in Gabinius' stable.\n\n\"What's all this for?\" I asked Moelwyn.\n\n\"The _contubernium_ mule, _Domine_ ,\" he answered me.\n\n\"We have a mule?\" I blurted. \"What for?\"\n\n\"Every _contubernium_ has a mule, _Domine_ ,\" Moelwyn answered. \"It's used to carry things that are not essential for a legionary to carry on his _furca_ , his pack pole. In this legion, the mule carries the tent, tent poles, and pegs, eight _sudes_ , the sharpened wooden stakes to fortify the daily marching camp, extra rations, water, _et cetera_.\n\nI realized that Moelwyn had been with the army much longer than I had. \"How long have you been with the legions?\" I interrupted.\n\n\"Me, _Domine_?\" he responded. \"Eight years this month.\"\n\n\"Eight years!\" I repeated. \"You're almost halfway there.\"\n\n\"Yes, _Domine_! Halfway there, as you say,\" he agreed. Then he continued, \"It's not good to talk about . . . . _Domina Fortuna_ does not like mortals to boast of her gifts to them.\"\n\nRealizing that soon we would all be marching through the Alps to face hordes of rampaging Helvetii, I nodded in agreement, then rubbed my _Bona Fortuna_ amulet, and spat toward the north.\n\nThe mule's rig seemed to be in good shape. I wondered briefly if the metal fittings on it had come from my _Avus_ Lucius' forges down in Mediolanum. Then, I asked Moelwyn, \"Were you brought down from _Gallia comata_?\"\n\n\"Me, _Domine_?\" He seemed a bit startled by the question. \" _Gallia comata_ . . . No, _Domine_ . . . Never been there . . . I joined this legion in the _provincia_ and went with them into _Hispania_ . . . I was born a couple hundred miles from here, up in the foothills of the mountains to the north . . . near a great lake . . . My village is called Sarnis.\"\n\n\"You joined? But you're a . . . a,\" I stammered.\n\n\"A slave, _Domine_?\" Moelwyn finished my question. \"Most of us in the legions serve _voluntate ipsius_. We are voluntary slaves . . . We sold ourselves to the _res publica_.\"\n\n\"Why would you do that?\" I blurted, not understanding why anyone would voluntarily become a slave.\n\nMoelwyn shrugged and said, \"In my village, all we could grow were rocks . . . I was starving . . . When I was fourteen, I left my family and wandered down into the valley, looking for work and food . . . The only thing I knew how to do was herd goats . . . but small farmers did that for themselves, and large farmers used slaves . . . and even they were eating better than I was . . . Then a Roman told me that I could sell myself to the state . . . serve in the army . . . Three squares a day, a roof over my head, and the work wasn't all that hard . . . After twenty years, if I did my job and kept my nose clean, I'd be released and be granted Roman citizenship . . . What did I have to lose? I wasn't a citizen . . . I had no rights . . . I was starving . . . So I did it . . . The army's even holding my purchase price . . . I get it when I'm freed . . . I've had to take a few beatings over the years, but most of the soldiers are pretty straight . . . As long as I do what I'm told . . . be respectful... they leave me alone . . . All in all, it was a good choice . . . I got no regrets . . . In twelve years, I'm free.\"\n\nMoelwyn spat toward the north to ward off any misfortune.\n\nLater that day, during the tenth hour, our new _optio_ , Bantus, examined my arm and decided that I could rejoin the training, except for sword and _pilum_ drills. He agreed with Spina that I'd have a nice scar to impress the _caupona_ girls with, demonstrating what a _miles gloriosus_ I was.\n\nBantus' training for us that evening was on packing the _sarcina_ , the legionary marching pack. He had Moelwyn distribute two wooden poles to each of us: one about four _pedes_ in length; the other shorter, about two _pedes_. Each pole was about a _palmus maior_ in circumference, about three fingers short of a foot. Then, Bantus gave each of us a length of rawhide lashing.\n\n\" _M'audite, Tirones_ ,\" he called out over the noise we were making, talking about what to do with the wooden poles. \"I'm going to show you how to construct a _furca_.\"\n\nWhen we finally settled down and he had our attention, he continued, \"The _furca_ is a forked pole that carries your pack and equipment while you're marching _impeditus_ , or as the _veterani_ call it, _mulare_ , muling it. I'm going to show you how to construct one.\"\n\nBantus grabbed Rufus' poles. \"The _furca's_ made from a thick staff about four _pedes_ in length,\" he said, holding up the longer staff.\n\n\"A shorter cross piece is fixed about a _pes_ , a foot, from the top of the long stake.\" Bantus demonstrated, making what seemed to be a cross from the two stakes.\n\n\"To attach them, you carve a notch in each . . . You interlock them . . . like this . . . Then you lash them together with the rawhide bindings. . . Any questions so far?\" he asked holding up the cross in one hand and a set of rawhide bindings in the other.\n\nThere were scattered mutterings of \" _n_ ' _abeo_ \" around the tent.\n\nThen, still holding up the crossed stakes, Bantus joked with us by asking if we knew the difference between a criminal's cross and a legionary's _furca_. When we didn't answer, he said, \"A cross carries a criminal till he's dead. The legionary carries his _furca_ till he wishes he was dead.\"\n\nWe didn't get it, but Bantus just laughed and muttered, \"Infantry humor.\" Later we would know what he meant. By the time we got over the Alps and chased the Helvetii halfway across Gallia, we all knew the difference between a _furca_ and a cross, and I think some of us would have preferred the cross.\n\nBut, Bantus continued, \"First, notch your stakes, the shorter one in the center, the longer about one _pes_ from the top. Don't go any deeper than about halfway . . . a little less is better . . . The cut's no longer than the diameter of the stake . . . Remember the stakes have to fit together . . . so use them to measure your cut . . . Go ahead... Get to work.\"\n\nI pulled out my _pugio_ , the knife Macro had given me for my sixteenth birthday, seemingly a lifetime ago, and laid the shorter stick across the longer in the correct position, about a _pes_ from the top, centered. Using the opposing stakes, I scratched cut lines on each to mark the width of the cut and started whittling out the notches.\n\nBantus walked around the tent, inspecting our work. Moelwyn assisted him. \" _Bene_ . . . _bene_ ,\" I heard him saying to my mates as they worked. \"No, Lentulus . . . Go look at how Pagane's doin' it . . . He's got it right.\"\n\nFinally, we had our stakes notched and fitted. I looked worriedly at the pile of sawdust and wood chips around our bunks. We would have to get that swept up before evening inspection.\n\nBantus was talking, \"Before I show you how to lash the poles together, I want you to wet and stretch the rawhide bindings.\" As he spoke, Moelwyn brought in a bucket of water.\n\n_Optio . . . ad quam rationem_ ,\" Loquax started. \"Sir . . . why\u2014\"\n\nBantus seemed to have anticipated the question. \"You wet and stretch the rawhide because it will shrink when it dries . . . That way you get a tight binding of the two poles . . . If you fasten your _furca_ with dry rawhide and it gets wet . . . and I assure you, it will . . . the bindings will loosen, and the _furca_ will come apart . . . You'll be trying to march while balancing all your shit in your arms . . . That's a real rookie mistake, boys . . . Soldiers I train don't make those kind of mistakes . . . So, wet the bindings in the bucket . . . Stretch 'em out good . . . and I'll show you how to lash the _furca_ together.\"\n\nWe did as Bantus instructed, and he showed us how to lash the _furca_ poles together. Bantus went around, inspecting the bindings and their tightness. Finally, when he was satisfied with our work, he continued.\n\n\"The _sarcina_ , the infantry marching pack, is constructed by strapping the _loculus_ , your leather satchel, to the cross piece of the _furca_ ,\" he told us. \"The _loculus_ is primarily for carrying your marching rations . . . _buccellatum_ , your hardtack . . . salt meat . . . pork and mutton usually . . . Sometimes we get some beef . . . If you can scrounge any cheese, fresh fruits, or vegetables along the way, toss them in there too . . . This way, your food's accessible to you during rest breaks . . . Wrap any cheese you get in a damp cloth . . . That helps keep it soft . . . soft enough to chew, anyway . . . What is it, Felix?\"\n\n_\"Optio_ , do we get rest breaks on the march?\"\n\n\"Usually,\" Bantus responded. \"When it's not a forced march or when we're not in proximate contact with the enemy, the legion takes about a quarter-hour rest break every five thousand _passus_ or so. It's a good time to get the _furca_ off your shoulder . . . grab a piece of _buccellatum_ . . . maybe a hunk of cheese, if you got it . . . wash it all down with a swig of _posca_ or water . . . Stretch 'em out . . . Then we're off again . . . Back to this _sarcina_ . . . your marching pack . . . You tie your _patera_ , your mess kit, and your _cochleare_ , your eating spoon, to the cross piece like this . . . Some guys like to put their spoons in the _loculus_ . . . Keeps it cleaner . . . It's up to you. Balance the mess kit with your _lagoena_ , your water bottle . . . What is it, Loquax?\"\n\n_\"Optio_! Do we carry water on the march? I thought that was carried in the baggage train.\"\n\n\"Always carry some water with you, Loquax,\" Bantus told him. \"Sometimes we get separated from our supplies, and we can't find a good source of potable water at the end of the day . . . A soldier can go for a few days without food, but won't last a short summer's day without water . . . Some guys carry two water bottles, just in case . . . Keep 'em filled . . . You can carry water or _posca_ . . . I recommend the water . . . Load a skin or two of _posca_ on the mule for the end of the day . . . Now, back to the _sarcina_ . . . In this legion, soldiers carry their _dolabrae_ , their digging picks . . . You can tie them here on the _furca_ and not unbalance it . . . Always tie the _dolabra_ high on the _furca_ . . . You don't want it digging into your back or shoulders on the march . . . The digging baskets go on the mule . . . I get that right, Moelwyn?\"\n\n\" _Recte, Domine_ ,\" Moelwyn's voice sounded from the back of the tent. \"The entrenching baskets go on the mule in the Tenth . . . with the _rutra_ , the shovels.\"\n\nBantus chuckled. \"In the field, a good _mulio_ , a teamster, is worth a month's pay . . . Makes sure everything's packed right . . . Keeps the mule healthy . . . Make sure you treat 'em right . . . You don't want to be carrying all that stuff yourself . . . _Bene_ . . . Your field cloaks . . . some guys like to roll them up and put 'em in a _saccus_ , a cloak bag, and tie the bag to the cross piece . . . I'll let you in on a little trick . . . Wrap your cloak around the upright of the _furca_ , right where it sits on your shoulder . . . That way, it'll cushion your shoulder a bit . . . Save the cloak bag for whatever fresh food you can scrounge, or if we get lucky, any swag we can pick up . . . While I'm thinking about it . . . even cushioned with a cloak, the _furca's_ going to press the chainmail of your _lorica_ down into your shoulder . . . After a couple of days on the march, you'll be in agony . . . So, when you're suiting up in the morning, slip some cloth, a towel if you got one, between the _lorica_ and your _subarmalis_ jacket on your left shoulder . . . What is it, Felix?\"\n\n\" _Optio_! Why the left shoulder?\"\n\n\"On the march, the _furca_ ' _s_ carried on your left shoulder. You'll hang your helmet on your lorica . . . You'll be carrying a _pilum_ or two in your right hand,\" Bantus explained. \"You guys are lucky . . . The Tenth marches light . . . In my old outfit, we each carried two _pila_ and an entrenching stake on our right shoulders and had to strap our unit mess gear, digging baskets, and even extra darts for the _ballista_ on our _furcae_ . . . We were humping more stuff than the mules . . . That's why we were called _muli Marii_ . . . Marius' mules. . . Your namesake invented the _furca_ , Pagane.\"\n\n_\"Intelligo, Optio_ ,\" I said, not really knowing how to respond.\n\n_\"Bene_ ,\" Bantus concluded. \"For our conditioning march tomorrow . . . ten thousand _passus_ at first light . . . You'll march _impediti_ . . . Fall in with your _furcae_ packed and ready to go . . . We march under full kit . . . _lorica_ and _galea_ . . . but without shields and swords . . . We'll swing by the range on our way out, and each of you will pick up two practice _pila_ . . . And remember to pad your left shoulders . . . We're in the field soon, and you don't want to start a campaign with a bum shoulder . . . It won't get any better . . . Any questions?\"\n\nScattered responses of \"n' _abeo_.\"\n\n_\"Bene_ ,\" Bantus started. \"Before I forget . . . another piece of _veterani_ lore for you rookies . . . We'll be marching over the Alpine passes in a few days . . . It's still winter up there . . . colder than a centurion's heart . . . And the sun shining on the snow'll blind you . . . Scrounge yourself up a couple of extra _sudaria_ . . . Use one to wrap around your head and ears . . . The cold up in them mountains'll freeze your ears off . . . I swear . . . Use the other scarf as a mask . . . Cut some narrow eye-holes in it . . . It'll keep you from going snow blind . . . Grease helps too . . . Rub some on your face and lips . . . It'll keep 'em from chapping . . . You guys getting this?\"\n\nScattered mutterings of \" _compre'endo_.\"\n\n_\"Bene_ ,\" Bantus continued. \"Collect up some money among yourselves and send Moelwyn down into the _vicus_ . . . Have him buy you some woolen socks and some _manicae_ , gloves, if there are any left to buy . . . If he can't get the gloves, you can cut finger holes in an extra pair of socks . . . Wear socks under your _caligae_ . . . I've seen guys lose fingers and toes up in them high mountains . . . And each of you get a good, sturdy pair of leather _bracae_ to wear underneath your tunics . . . What is it, Rufus?\"\n\n_\"Optio_ , are _bracae_ authorized? They're _inromanitas_ , un-Roman,\" protested Rufus.\n\nBantus chuckled, \"Having your balls freeze off is un-Roman too, Rufus . . . We all wear 'em when it's cold . . . Only the patrician snobs, the purple-stripers up from Rome, worry about that being 'un-Roman' shit . . . Most of 'em have no balls to freeze off anyway . . . Their wives've already removed them . . . Get yourself each a good, solid pair of _bracae_ . . . None of that Gallic wool shit with the colors and plaids . . . leather . . . They'll keep you warm up there in those passes . . . Any more questions?\"\n\nWe had none.\n\n_\"Bene_ ,\" Bantus said getting up and looking around our tent. \"This place looks like some drunken carpenter's workshop! Get it cleaned up before the start of the first watch! I'll be back to inspect.\"\n\nI was lucky. The quartermaster still had the _bracae_ , gloves, and socks I had turned in when I received my clothing issue. For a couple of _minervae_ , Moelwyn was able to get them back for me through one of the slaves that worked in the supply tent. The rest of the guys had to compete with over four thousand other _muli_ for the limited supply of leather trousers and woolen socks to be had in the _vicus_ and in the town. Luckily, the civilians seemed to know months in advance where we'd be going and what we'd need to get there, so they had had some time to lay in a good supply\u2014with which they were now happy to part for a prime price.\n\nThe evening before the _significatio_ , the legionary _haruspex_ pulled the liver out of a healthy, black goat and declared that its appearance indicated that the gods favored the acceptance of the trainees into the legion. Strabo could hardly conceal his skepticism and contempt when he told us this news. Bantus seemed more terrified by his centurion's irreverence than relieved by the propitious omens.\n\nOur _haruspex_ was an _immunis_ soldier from the Second _Centuria_ of our own _cohors_ , whose only qualification for the job seemed to be that he was born in a barn just outside the town of Veii and had black, curly hair like a genuine Etruscan. So, of course, everyone called him Crispus, \"Curly.\"\n\nThe _haruspex_ ' job certainly did have its perks. He pulled down extra pay. On top of that, Crispus was not only exempt from all fatigue details, but he and his mates also got to keep most of the meat from the sacrificial animals. I later found out that Crispus had a healthy side business with the purple-stripers, who were known to slip him a _quadriga_ or two so that he might claim to see propitious things in the entrails of chickens or the viscera of goats.\n\nStrabo wondered out loud whether a cow farting in a northerly direction during the dark of the moon meant the gods were against long sea voyages. That made Bantus go pale. I rubbed my _Bona Fortuna_ and spat. I made a note to myself that if we ever went into battle, I wouldn't stand too close to Strabo. I should have spat twice.\n\nBut, Strabo reported that the goat's liver was a healthy pink with a well-formed right lobe that was larger than the left lobe. So, the gods must be happy with what we had planned for the next day. That night, we anticipated our induction into the Tenth Legion and salivated over the aroma of roasted goat wafting over from a tent in the Second _Centuria_.\n\nBantus roused us before first light. He had us dress in our white trainee tunics, without belts. Carrying our newly dyed red tunics under our arms, he marched us toward the _Porta Principalis Dextra_ of the camp. We were assembled just inside the gate in the _intervallum_. We were surprised to discover that we weren't the only ones being integrated into the legion that day. Organized into four _contubernia_ , there stood almost thirty other _tirones_ in white tunics. Although we could see nothing outside the walls of the camp, we could hear the stirrings and murmurings of a large gathering. When Bantus stood us at ease, I realized that, except for the guard detail manning the ramparts, the camp of the Tenth Legion was deserted. Bantus collected the red tunics from us and handed them over to a soldier who carried them out through the gate.\n\nAs the first glimmers of the sun began to glow faintly beyond the camp walls, a trumpet sounded in the field beyond. All movement outside the wall ceased. We heard commands shouted, the sound of metal and movement in unison, then silence. We were then called to attention by our officers and filed through the gate of the camp.\n\nThe sight that greeted us there is one I have never forgotten even to this very day.\n\nTo our right, the entire Tenth Legion was assembled in parade formation in full-dress kit. Ten cohorts formed a single rank, stretching off into the paling horizon, their centuries assembled in columns behind them. My first impression was of ranks upon ranks of ghostly Roman soldiers waiting for us to join them in the shadows. Nothing moved. Even the scarlet plumes on the legionaries' helmets were still in the darkling airs. From beneath the overhanging brows of bronze helmets, I felt the eyes of the over four thousand soldiers assembled on that silent plain, boring into us, measuring us, and assessing our worthiness to join their ranks.\n\nIn front of each cohort, a _centurio pilus prior_ stood at attention. Their transverse crests radiated from polished bronze _galeae_ like fiery red nimbuses. Combat decorations, suspended by leather harnesses on polished breastplates, caught the first faint glimmers of the new sun: gold and silver _torcs;_ gold, silver, and bronze _phalerae_ disks; and silver _hastae purae_ , awarded to those who have blooded an enemy of Rome.\n\nTo the left of each centurion stood the cohort's signifer, a wolf's head pulled over a shining bronze _galea_. The _signum_ of the cohort, an open, silver hand paying perpetual tribute to Father Iove, was held upright above the heads of the assembled soldiers.\n\nBehind the command groups, the soldiers themselves stood silently behind a low wall of red shields, their bronzed bosses polished to a mirror finish, from which radiated the golden-yellow winged thunderbolts of Father Iove. Each shield displayed a rampant boar, the symbol of the Tenth Legion.\n\nTo our left, on a low, wooden platform, stood the golden _aquila_ of the legion, the sign of Father Iove, the totem of the legion, the spirit of its resolve. Beneath the golden eagle, the _vexillium rubrum_ , the red flag of the legion, hung in the still air. I could clearly see the image of the rampant boar and the symbols LEG X.\n\nTo the eagle's right, the _aquilifer_ , the legionary entrusted with the _anima_ of the legion, its very spirit, stood as a silent sentinel. Next to him, I recognized Tertius Piscius Malleus, \"The Hammer,\" _primus pilus_ of the Tenth Legion, with the leaves of a Civic Crown, the highest award for valor bestowed by the Roman nation, entwined into the red traverse crest of his helmet.\n\nIn front of the platform was set a row of legionary _scuta_ , red oval shields identical to those held by the soldiers of the legion. Against each leaned a sheathed _gladius_ , the infantry sword, with its baldric draped over the shield. In front of each of these was a folded, red tunic.\n\nBefore the _aquila_ , praying over a sensor that misted the golden standard and the red pennant of the legion in clouds of sweet-smelling incense, stood a man, his pure white toga covering his head.\n\nAs we drew closer, the words of his chant became clear to me:\n\n_Divum empta cante_ ,\n\n_Divum deo supplicate_ ,\n\n_Cume tonas, Leucesie_ ,\n\n_Prae tet tremonti_.\n\nI remembered the _magister_ telling me that Roman priests spoke to the gods in an obscure tongue, an archaic Latin, a language no one now understood. The priests had to recite these chants verbatim, without error, or a terrible curse would be incurred.\n\n_Quot ibet etinei de is_ ,\n\n_Cum tonarem osculo dolori ero_ ,\n\n_Omnia vero adpatula coemisse_.\n\nWe were filed before the standing shields to face the priest hovering above us on the platform. The commands of our officers were hushed, awed. The incense began to swirl around us. Behind us, I could feel the presence of thousands of silent men, watching.\n\nIan cusianes duonus,\n\nCeruses dunus Ianusve,\n\nVet pom melios eum recum.\n\nThe hooded priest in the white toga raised his hands to the sky, speaking in a loud voice:\n\nCume tonas, Leucesie,\n\nPrae tet tremonti\n\nQuom tibi cunei\n\nDecstumum tonaront.\n\nHe bent over the brazier and whispered something I could not hear.\n\nThen, the priest turned toward the assembled legion and removed the hood from his head. In a loud voice, he proclaimed, \"Father Iove has heard the prayer, has heard it sanctified in the sacred name of Rome, and accepts your petition! Let these acolytes join your ranks as his soldiers!\"\n\nFrom behind us, thousands thundered in one voice, _\"Fiat_! _Fiat_! _Fiat_! Let it be!\"\n\nI looked up at the priest. He wasn't that tall, but his long, slender body gave the impression of height. The hair behind his receding hairline was sandy brown, sparse, and graying. His forehead was broad, descending into thin eyebrows. His eyes were blue, piercing, and cold. His nose was thin and prominent. His mouth a black line slashed across his face. His appearance gave the impression of a dangerous weapon: a slender, razor-sharp _sica_.\n\nMalleus, the first spear, stepped forward to the edge of the platform and commanded, \" _Legio_!\"\n\nBehind me, I heard echoing commands, \" _Cohors_!\"\n\nThen Malleus, \" _Imperatorem . . . Adclamate_!\"\n\nThunder from behind me, _\"Ave, Imperator_! _Ave, Imperator_! _Ave, Imperator_!\"\n\n_\"Ave, Imperator_?\" This priest was Caesar himself! Our commander! The _pontifex maximus_ of the Roman nation.\n\nCaesar inclined his head slightly in response to the legion's acclamation. He turned, nodded to Malleus, and left the platform.\n\nMalleus waited while Caesar mounted a white horse that was being held by a legionary behind the platform. Then, he rode off toward the town. After that, the _primus pilus_ , in a theatrically loud voice, asked Strabo, who was standing behind our file, \" _Centurio_! Do you attest before the eagle that these _tirones_ have successfully completed their training and are ready to be welcomed into the ranks of this legion as _milites Romani_?\"\n\n\" _Confirmo_!\" I heard Strabo's voice from behind our rank.\n\n\"Legio!\" the Primus Pilus continued. \"These _tirones_ have completed their training. Will you accept them into your ranks as soldiers of Rome?\"\n\n\" _Fiat_!\" thundered the voice of the legion.\n\n\" _Tirones_!\" the Hammer addressed us. \"Remove the white tunic of the acolyte and assume the red tunic of a soldier of Rome.\"\n\nWe hesitated, not sure what to do. I heard Bantus' voice hiss, \"Strip!\" We did, down to our loincloths.\n\nAgain, I heard Bantus: \"Put on the red tunics!\"\n\nI stepped forward, picked up the tunic in front of me, and threw it on over my head. After a few heartbeats, our entire file settled down.\n\n\"Milites,\" Malleus continued, \"assume the weapons of a Roman soldier!\"\n\nAgain, I stepped forward. I picked up the sword. I threw the baldric over my head and put my right arm through it so the sword was positioned on my right hip. Then, I picked up the shield, threading my left forearm through the leather support strap and grasping the leather grip. I stepped back into line with the rest of my _contubernales_. For the first time, I could feel the weight of the sword pressing on my shoulder and against my hip, and I could smell the fresh leather from the bands of my new shield. I grasped the pommel of the sword with my right hand.\n\nMalleus told us, \" _Milites_! Raise your right hands open to the eagle and repeat after me.\"\n\nI did, and again I repeated the words of the _sacramentum_ in front of my new comrades:\n\nI, Gaius Marius Insubrecus Tertius, do solemnly swear by Father Iove, greatest and all powerful, whose eagle I now follow, and by all the gods, that I will defend and serve the Roman nation. I will obey the will of the Senate, the people of Rome, and the officers empowered by the Senate over me, and my general, Gaius Iulius Caesar, _Imperator_. I swear that I am a free man, able to take this oath, and obligated by bond or debt to no Roman. I will remain faithful to the Roman people, the Senate, to the officers empowered over me, to the army of Rome, and to the Tenth Legion until legally discharged by my time of service, by the will of the Senate and People of Rome, by the will of my general, Gaius Iulius Caesar, _Imperator_ , or by my death. I offer my life as the surety of my oath.\n\nThen, the _primus pilus_ commanded, _\"Milites_! _Contra . . . VERT_ '!\"\n\nWhen we were facing the legion, Malleus acclaimed, \" _Infantes_! _Salvete novos_!\"\n\nThe legion thundered, \" _Salvete_! _Salvete_! _Salvete_!\"\n\nWhen the echoes of the acclamation had died, Malleus commanded, _\"Centurio Strabo_! _Miss'est_!\"\n\nStrabo ordered:\n\n_\"Ad Dex' . . . VERT_ '!\"\n\n_\"Promov . . . ET_ '!\"\n\n_\"Dex' . . . Dex' . . . Dex', Sin', Dex_ '!\"\n\n\"Pick up your feet, Pagane!\"\n\n\"Right . . . Right . . . Right, Left, Right!\"\n\n\"Get in step, Lentulus!\"\n\n_\"Dex' . . . Dex_ '!\"\n\nWhen we got back to our tent, we were energized by the ceremony, our _significatio_. The cry of \" _salvete_ \" by the thousands of our new comrades rang in our ears. And, Caesar _Imperator_ was here among us. Caesar himself! Something was about to happen, something big. We were part of it; we were finally wearing the red infantry tunics of the Tenth Legion. We were soldiers of Rome.\n\nI sat on the edge of my bunk, my new _gladius_ across my knees. I loved the substantial feel of its weight in my hands. I pulled it partially out of its sheath; it slid out smoothly and silently. For a moment, I felt I was violating it. As the light coming in through the tent flap enflamed its edges to glowing white, I knew it had been honed razor sharp, and it was mine. _Miles Romanus_ , a _mulus_ , a grunt in the Tenth Legion, the best legion in Caesar's army\u2014in any army\u2014and I was part of it.\n\nBantus burst into our tent. Loquax saw him and tried to call us to attention, _\"Ad, Pedes_!\"\n\nBantus told us to be at ease, _laxate_ , \"You're soldiers . . . You don't have to bounce to your feet for an optio.\"\n\n\"Boys, I got some good news for you and some other news, so listen up,\" he started. \"Let me give you the good news first! As soon as you get your quarters squared away, you have a pass to leave the camp . . . Go up to the town, have a few drinks, celebrate your _significatio_ . . . You worked hard . . . You deserve it. Uniform's tunics and belts . . . Wear your _pugiones_ . . . That's so these sorry civilians know you're Roman soldiers . . . Be back here by the first call for night watch . . . Other than that . . . go relax for a couple hours . . . Enjoy yourselves!\"\n\nWe all sat there stunned, silent. Since we had reported over two months before, we had not had a moment off, had not been outside the camp walls, except for training. \"Have a few drinks . . . Celebrate . . . You deserve it.\" Bantus could have said it in Greek, and it wouldn't have sounded more foreign to us.\n\nFinally, Rufus broke the silence, _\"Mammis Veneris_! It's about time!\"\n\nI snapped him with the end of my _sudarium_ before he could continue.\n\n\" _Tacet_ '! _Tacet_ '!\" Bantus interrupted. \"Settle down! Let me tell you the other news before the celebrations begin.\"\n\nWe settled down to listen.\n\n_\"Bene_.\" Bantus continued, \"We have orders to break camp and move out the day after tomorrow. We're headed for _Gallia_ with the army.\"\n\nMutterings around the squad bay: \"Mercule!\" \" _Cacat_!\"\n\n\"Settle down!\" Bantus continued. \"There's been a fight up near Gennava . . . The Eighth held the barbarians off, and they retreated back over the Rhodanus . . . The general wants us up there quick . . . so he'll be running our asses off to get there . . . You guys are goin' to stay together as a _contubernium_ in the Tenth Cohort\u2014at least until we get over to _Gallia Transalpina_ , Gaul-Over-The-Alps . . . We're bringing Tulli back to be your _decanus_ . . . He'll be moving in with you guys tonight.\"\n\nWe were a bit shocked: a fight near Gennava; got to get up there quick. It was starting to hit us that we were going into combat, going up into _Gallia comata_ , a place of nightmares and cold, dark forests, with giant savages screaming for Roman blood. I felt my hand tightening on the hilt of my new sword. Somehow it didn't seem as substantial as it had only moments before.\n\nBantus was talking, \"Before you guys head to town, go by supply and draw your _tegimenta_ , your shield covers . . . Got to keep those nice, new shields bright and shiny to impress those hordes of hairy barbarians you'll be meeting soon . . . Get this place squared away before you leave . . . Oh, yeah . . . before I forget . . . Scratch your initials or your sign somewhere on your sword hilt or near the bottom of the blade . . . They all look alike after a while.\"\n\n# IV.\n\n# De Itinere interAlpes\n\n## WE MARCH ACROSS THE ALPS\n\nBantus was wrong. We didn't leave camp the next day, the day of Mars, or even the day after that, Mercury's day. It was Iove's day before the _augur_ , the _haruspex_ , and priest all agreed it was _faustus_ , propitious to march. Rumor had it that Caesar _Imperator_ was fuming, but as superstitious as soldiers are, even he did not dare to initiate a campaign without the favor of the gods. Rumor also had it that the delay had something to do with Crispus' girlfriend in the town.\n\nBantus just shrugged and repeated the age-old wisdom of the Roman army: \" _Festina lente_ . . . Hurry up and wait!\"\n\nWhen we did leave, the general had us hotfooting down the road at the double, thirty to forty thousand _passus_ a day, _impedimenti_ , loaded down like the _muli_ we were. Bantus told us the mountain passes would slow us down, and we might have some trouble with the highland tribes, a bunch of thieving brigands who notoriously showed no respect for the Roman _imperium_ , so we had to go as fast as we could while we were on flat ground in \"friendly\" territory. Although the march to _Gallia_ normally took an army marching _expediti_ , unburdened with a supply train, over thirty days, the general was determined to have us in position along the Rhodanus in less than twenty.\n\nThe first day out we passed through Patavis; by the second, Vicetia had seen our backs; the third day, we marched around Verona, where we had been snowed in last _Ianuarius_.\n\nDespite being in \"friendly\" territory within the _Imperium Romanum_ , each night we dug a marching camp. Most of our mates in the _centuria_ were _immunes_ , exempt from fatigue details, so they went off to perform whatever duties they had, while the rest of us dug and piled dirt. Our assignment was a portion of the _fossa et vallum_ , the ditch and the rampart, to the right of the _Porta Decumana_ , the rear portal of the camp. By the time we were done and the _sudes_ , the entrenching stakes, were lashed together and in place, the baggage train was pulling in through the gate we had just constructed.\n\nMoelwyn had our tent erected in its assigned place, but we had little time for it. Our _contubernium_ was assigned sentry duty on the rampart to the right of the gate, and since most of our mates were exempt from that too, we had one watch on, one watch off, through the night. At the first glimmer of dawn, we pulled everything down. The entrenching stakes went back on the mule, and the dirt ramparts were pulled down into the ditch, filling it. Entrenching baskets went back on the mule with the squad tent Moelwyn had pulled down. _Dolabrae_ , our entrenching tools, were cleaned and strapped to our _furcae_. Then, back on the road, double-time, we truly understood what it meant to be a _mulus Romanus_.\n\nAlong the paved military roads, we marched four abreast at the rear of our cohort, which marched at the rear of the legion. So, _furca_ on the left shoulder, _pilum_ in the right hand, we ate the dust stirred up by over four thousand pairs of _caligae_ and a few hundred horses and mules. About every five or six thousand _passus_ , we got a break and a couple of mouthfuls of water to wash down a piece of _buccellatum_. Then, back on the road, double-time, about a thousand _passus_ , regular pace for a thousand more, and then back to the double.\n\nWe double-timed through Brixia, camped near Bergomum, and passed north of Mediolanum. I remember looking to the south. There was a slight smudge of smoke marking where the city lay. I wondered briefly what Mama was doing at that very moment, whether she was thinking of me.\n\nIn camp that evening, Tulli told us that we'd cross the mountains near a tiny piss-ant town called Ocelum, where the pass opened that would bring us through to _Gallia_ , south of Gennava. Rufus and I were boiling up some porridge. We didn't have to be on the ramparts until second watch. We hoped to fill our bellies and get a couple of hours of sleep before that. Despite the extra padding where I carried the _furca_ , my shoulder was aching. I hoped it wouldn't keep me awake, but after humping over thirty-five thousand _passus_ that day, once I wrapped myself up in my woolen cloak, I doubted Hannibal and all his elephants could keep me awake.\n\nTulli had told us that once we got up into the mountain passes, all bets were off as to how many _passus_ we made each day. Snow drifts, avalanches, bandits\u2014 we'd have to get through all that _merda_ to get to _Gallia_. In the mountains, our cohort would be detailed with securing the _impedimenta_ , the baggage train. The good news was that we could dump our packs in a wagon and march _expediti_ , with just combat gear. The other news was that if the wagons got stuck, we were expected to \"unstick\" them, so we'd better keep our shovels and digging picks handy. The bad news was that the baggage train attracted bandits like a tavern attracts drunks. So, we'd better keep our shields, swords, and _pila_ close at hand\u2014 even when we were digging some teamster out of a snow drift.\n\nWe pulled into Ocelum during the fifth hour of the sixth day of the march. It wasn't much of a place, more goats than people. The Seventh and Ninth Legions were already encamped in the valley. The Eleventh and Twelfth were strung out a couple of hours behind us. The Alps stood before us like a wall of snow-covered granite. As we were marching down into the valley where we would dig our marching camp, I shivered as I noticed the looming mountains still covered with snow.\n\nAfter we dug our _castrum_ , we spent most of the afternoon on our butts. When Bantus arrived at our tent, we were blissfully racked out, bellies full. He roused us for a quick briefing.\n\nThings over in _Gallia Transalpina_ were developing quickly. After being repulsed at Gennava by the Eighth Legion, the Helvetii withdrew west, down the Rhodanus through some narrow passes in the Iura mountains. Roman allies in _Gallia_ , tribes called the Sequani and the Aedui, were now directly in the path of the Helvetian horde. That, and the Helvetii being such a threat to the most fertile lands of the Roman _provincia_ just across the river, was unacceptable to Caesar _Imperator_. Our objective, then, was to stop the Helvetii and force them to return to their homeland, where they would continue to serve as a buffer between _Gallia_ , our _provincia_ , and the German barbarians east of the Rhenus.\n\nThe goal of our march was no longer just to reach Gennava, but our goal was to reach the Helvetii themselves.\n\nLater that afternoon, Strabo called the _centuria_ together to give us our marching orders. There were only about fifty of us assembled. Many of our _immunes_ soldiers were off on various details around the _castrum_.\n\n\"The army'll move out tomorrow morning at the second hour and pass through the Alps in a column of legions,\" Strabo began. \"Caesar _Imperator_ is interspacing the new legions with the veterans. The Seventh will lead out, followed by the Eleventh . . . then the Ninth, followed by the Twelfth . . . We'll take up the rear.\"\n\nStrabo paused to see if there were any questions. There were none, so he continued, \"The Seventh will move out at the second hour, but the Eleventh won't follow until the fourth hour . . . Yeah . . . What it is?\"\n\nI heard a voice from the back of the formation ask why the delay for the Eleventh.\n\nStrabo responded, \"The Seventh will have to do most of the route clearance through the passes, and if any of those mountain tribes decide to kick up a fuss, the boys in the Seventh will have that to take care of, too. So, there'll be delays . . . stop and go . . . especially in the narrow passes . . . The general doesn't want us to bunch up . . . The Eleventh will probably catch up to the Seventh anyway . . . The general wants them far enough back so both legions won't be caught in the same ambush, but close enough so they can support each other . . . Besides, the Seventh is marching _expediti_ . . . light and ready for combat . . . Their baggage train'll be moving with the Eleventh . . . Any other questions?\"\n\nWhen Strabo mentioned ambushes and marching \"combat ready,\" I felt a stirring in my belly, almost a weakness in my legs. That was it; we were going into a fight.\n\nStrabo continued, \"After the Eleventh moves out, the rest of the legions will depart at one-hour intervals . . . The Ninth at the fifth hour . . . the Twelfth at the sixth . . . then us at the seventh. The _equites_ , the legionary cavalry, will be positioned between the legions so it can coordinate communication and maintain the marching intervals . . . I doubt those horses'll be much use in the high passes . . . Their mobility will be limited . . . A real shame, cavalry having to walk . . . We should anticipate delays during the march . . . stop and go as we move through the mountains. The cavalry's supposed to coordinate our spacing so we don't bunch up or get too far behind.\"\n\nStrabo repeated that our departure time was the seventh hour the next day. Then, he concluded, \"We'll march in a column of cohorts . . . The first-line cohorts, the First through the Fourth, will be our _primum agmen_ , the vanguard . . . The Fifth and Sixth Cohorts, from the second line, will act as our _novissimum agmen_ , the rear guard. Our cohort is detailed to guard the legion's baggage train, which'll follow the Ninth cohort out.\"\n\nStill no questions, so Strabo continued, \"Caesar _Imperator_ , will be marching with the point legion, the Seventh, along with most of his party. The _primus pilus_ , Malleus, is commanding our legion on this march. He'll be with his _centuria_ in the First Cohort. The general hasn't assigned a _legatus legionis_ , a legionary commander, to us yet, and we won't be dragging any wet-behind-the-ears, somebody's-wife's-cousin, Patrician brats as military tribunes with us.\" Some snickers come from the back of the formation. \"So, the good news, we don't have to drag wagons full of their useless shit over the Alps.\" Some guffaws this time. \"The other news is we can't help ourselves to their wine and _garum_ supplies.\" Some theater groans. \"So that's about it . . . Any questions?\"\n\nThere were none, so Strabo dismissed us back to our tents.\n\nWe didn't have any duties until guard mount that evening. Since we weren't going to drag any livestock over the Alps with us, except for the _contubernium_ mules and the cavalry horses, Malleus had ordered the cooks to brew up a feast for us. We could smell the aroma of the roasting meat and baking bread wafting over from the cook tents in the middle of the _castrum_. Meanwhile, in the age-old tradition of the Roman infantry, we decided to crap out until chow time.\n\nTulli, our _decanus_ , seemed determined to talk to us, however.\n\n\"We caught a break on this one, guys!\" he started.\n\n\" _Quo'mo'?_ \" Rufus mumbled, half-asleep.\n\n\"Think about it,\" Tulli lectured. \"The Seventh has to do all the heavy lifting on this one . . . clearing the passes and taking care of any barbarians stupid enough to get in our way . . . By the time we go through the passes, the route'll be clear, and there won't be a single, living _podex_ for miles to mess with us.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" Loquax mumbled from somewhere deep in his woolen cloak.\n\n\"Sure it does,\" continued Tulli, not wanting to let go of it. \"And, we get to march with the baggage train . . . That means no faster than the slowest cart . . . and we march _expediti_ . . . just swords, shields, and one _pilum_ each . . . The rest of our equipment can go on one of the carts . . . Except for the cold and having to push a cart or two up a steep incline, this'll be a piece of cake.\"\n\nTulli was begging _Fortuna_ to screw us. I should have rubbed my amulet and spit, but I decided just to turn over and go to sleep instead.\n\nThe next day, getting the army moving was a complete cluster, and we didn't cross the line of departure until well into the eighth hour. Tulli's assessment seemed right, though. We were marching light, with troops in front of us and to our rear. The oxen pulling the supply carts didn't seem to be in any hurry to get up into the mountain passes. Tulli said when we get over into _Gallia_ , the baggage will move independently of the legions, so we can move quickly. But, if we tried that up in the passes, the mountain tribes would steal the hooves off the horses.\n\nThat first day the climb wasn't bad, but we only made about ten thousand _passus_. We camped next to a small mountain river in a narrow, ascending valley. By the time we pulled in with the _impedimenta_ , the camp was already constructed\u2014 another benefit, Tulli winked\u2014so all we had to do was settle the baggage in and pull our guard shifts that first night.\n\nThe next morning, the legion was up and moving before the fourth watch was over. We continued to climb. By the fourth hour, we passed through some piss-ant village of stone and lumber huts. It was abandoned. No fires burning.\n\nEven the livestock was gone. By the sixth hour, we swung west and north, still following a mountain river upwards. Four more hours found us at the junction of two streams: one flowing down from the north; the other, the one we seemed to be following, still led toward the northwest.\n\nWe halted there. When we realized that this wasn't just a break from the march, our _centurio pilus prior_ , Gelasius, the cohort commander, deployed four of our _centuriae_ on the uphill side of the baggage train, and the remaining two, including us, on the downhill side. Eventually, the word came down that there was some sort of delay up ahead. After being in position for almost an hour, we even began to imagine that we'd spend the night there. No sooner had we entertained that hope than the column started moving again.\n\nWe continued to climb. The twelfth hour came and went. I estimated we had at least thirty thousand _passus_ under our boots. The sun went down, and we still continued to climb. We stumbled up the incline, starting, stopping, and starting again. Finally, the word came down we were staying put where we were for the night. No camp. Since we were headed uphill, Gelasius deployed two centuries forward, one century to the rear, and split the rest of us equally on both sides of the baggage. He ordered \"half and half\" for the night\u2014one man slept while the other kept watch. Strabo broke us down into shifts by _contubernia_.\n\nIt was starting to get cold in the passes. Gelasius forbade the building of fires. He said it would silhouette our positions for any enemies up in the hills. He had a bit of difficulty convincing some of the civilian teamsters. But, after he emphasized his orders with a liberal application of his _vitis_ , the centurion's vine cudgel, the rest fell quickly into line. Most of us had broken out our _bracae_ trousers and woolen socks. Still, I was shivering so hard, it was difficult getting to sleep. I was almost grateful when I was roused up for guard duty because it gave me a chance to move around and warm up a bit.\n\nWe were moving before sunrise the next morning. When the sun finally came up, I could see we were marching directly up toward a huge mountain. The rising sun behind our backs was changing the snow on the mountain's flanks from a glowing blue to a pale white.\n\nTulli caught up with me. \"That's _Alba Magna_ ,\" he said. \"Don't look at it. You'll go blind. Here!\" He offered me what seemed to be a burned-out lamp.\n\n\"Rub the soot around your eyes and on your cheekbones . . . It'll cut down the glare.\"\n\nI had no idea how a snow-covered mountain could make me blind, but I did as Tulli suggested. \"If that doesn't seem to help . . . if you feel your eyes get dry or they start to hurt . . . tie a _sudarium_ around your face like a mask . . . In a couple of hours, we'll be turning south, so the mountain will be over your shoulder.\"\n\nAs we continued to climb toward _Alba Magna_ , the sun rising behind us set the mountain ablaze like a brilliant, white flame. I found that even with the lamp soot around my eyes and the scarf tied up around my face, I couldn't look at it. I grabbed the tailgate of one of our carts and let it lead me up the pass while I kept my eyes fixed on the ground to keep from tripping.\n\nTulli was right about one thing. The legions marching ahead of us had cleared the passes. Our path was free of snow and rubble. We hadn't seen a native since we left Eporedia.\n\nBy the fifth hour, I thought we had reached the top of the pass at the foot of _Alba Magna_ , but we turned south and continued to climb. The mountain was now on our flank, and the sun was no longer at our backs. I was able to see again. My eyes felt like they were full of sand\u2014a bit achy, but I was able to see.\n\nThe air in the pass was still, but frigid. It was colder up here in _Aprilis_ than it was down in the valley in the middle of winter. My breath steamed out of my mouth and nostrils like mama's kettle on a cold morning. We were allowed to march without our helmets, so I had the hood of my cloak up over my head and a _sudarium_ wrapped around my ears. I had pulled my woolen socks up and stuffed the bottoms of my leather _bracae_ down into them, so no part of my legs was exposed.\n\nStill we climbed; still it seemed to get colder.\n\nWe topped the pass by the seventh hour. I could swear we had twenty thousand _passus_ of climbing under our belts since we started out before dawn. But, I was glad to be moving in that cold. Now that we seemed to be on the downhill side and headed into warmer temperatures, I was happy that we were pushing on.\n\nBantus, our _optio_ , came down the line of march. \"Another ten thousand _passus_ before our day's done, boys,\" he announced. \"The valley opens up down below . . . That's where we'll spend the night . . . The First Cohort boys should have the camp all set up for us by the time we get there . . . hot chow and a warm tent . . . It's all downhill . . . so hang in.\"\n\nWe made it into camp after nightfall. The little valley seemed more like a hole that the gods had blasted between the mountains. There was high ground all around us. It was warmer than the pass, but not much. Since we were in a fortified camp, we were allowed to build fires. Somehow, the first cohorts in camp had managed some hot chow and warmed _posca_ , which was waiting for us when we corralled the baggage train. I couldn't remember ever drinking anything as comforting as that steaming cup of _posca_.\n\nLater that night, when I took my turn on the ramparts, a cold wind was blowing down out of the pass from the northeast, the frigid breath of _Alba Magna_. I saw some fires glowing about two thousand paces across the valley to the southwest. When I asked about it, I was told that it was the camp of the Eleventh Legion. Where the rest of the army was that night, we had no idea.\n\nThe next morning, we didn't move out until the first hour of the day. Malleus had decided to give the Eleventh a head start down the next pass. But soon, we too were descending down the narrow valley behind them. Tulli was still feeling good about the whole thing. A few more zigs and zags, but it was all downhill from here, as far as he was concerned.\n\nThat day's march seemed to prove him right. The passes and gorges were narrow, but the leading legions had done a good job clearing the route of the march. We did over thirty thousand _passus_ and arrived in another little valley at nightfall. There, we got our first indication that things would be different on this side of the Alps. There had been a village near the intersection of two small rivers. What people did to stay alive so far up in the mountains was anybody's guess, but whatever it was, it was no longer a concern for the people who had lived here. The village was destroyed, burned out. When we arrived, the ashes were cold, but we could still smell the odor of wet, burnt lumber and thatch. There were no bodies. Perhaps whoever had lived here had escaped.\n\n\"My guess is this is the work of the boys in the Seventh,\" Tulli said as we marched past.\n\n\"Why'd they do it?\" I asked.\n\n\"Who knows?\" Tulli answered with a shrug. \"Don't see any bodies, so I guess most of them are up in the hills. They must have done something to piss off the general.\"\n\nThe next morning, we followed a river descending toward the northwest. Around the third hour, we passed another burned-out village. Again, the fires were long out and the ashes cold.\n\nWe were about two thousand _passus_ beyond the village when the column came to sudden halt. We didn't think too much of it until we heard a _cornu_ , a signaling trumpet at the head of our column, calling, \"Ad _Signa_!\" I immediately heard Strabo's voice repeating the call to fall in and spotted our century's standard raised on the other side of the baggage train. We quickly assembled around the standard, and Strabo called us to attention. We waited, but there were no more trumpet calls. Strabo had us stand easy and check our combat equipment.\n\nI was just deciding that this was some kind of drill, when Gelasius, our cohort commander, arrived to brief Strabo. After the two centurions finished talking, Strabo came over to talk to us.\n\n\"Seems there's a roadblock set up in front of the column,\" Strabo said. \"Must've gone up after the Eleventh passed through and before we arrived, so it's deliberate . . . Not sure what's going on . . . The natives are probably trying to pick off a wagon or two . . . The valley opens up about two thousand _passus_ farther down the road, so this is their last chance to get to us . . . The First Cohort's clearing the road, and then we'll be moving . . . Meanwhile, we're going to move straight toward that line of spruce and pine trees to see if any of them _mentulae_ are hiding in there . . . The Third Century will stay close to the _impedimenta_ and support us if we need it.\"\n\nWe had already assembled in the basic combat formation, a ten-man front at normal intervals with the _contubernia_ in column, so Strabo marched us straight forward, toward the tree line. I was positioned in the front rank with Minutus behind me as my _geminus_. The rest of our _contubernium_ was in file behind us. I could see Strabo and our _signifer_ marching on the right flank of our first rank. I knew Bantus and our _tesserarius_ , a legionary everybody called Brevis because he was almost six _pedes_ tall, would be to our rear.\n\nAs we got closer, I noticed that the trees to our immediate front receded a bit and the ground in front of them dipped, creating the semblance of an amphitheater with the evergreen forest on three sides. Strabo halted us before we entered the low ground. There didn't seem to be any movement in the trees. Despite that, Strabo decided to gain width and sacrifice depth. He ordered us to open our intervals, and he doubled the _contubernia_ front. Now I had Tulli, our _decanus_ , on my left, with Rufus backing him up. The _centuria_ now had a twentyman front, but we were only four men deep.\n\nStrabo ordered us to stand at ease.\n\nWe waited. Nothing happened. No enemy appeared to our front. No recall back to the line of march sounded.\n\nI heard someone behind me mutter, \"Another goat rope!\" A few guys guffawed at that. Strabo must have heard, but he said nothing.\n\nSuddenly, we heard a _cornu_ at the head of the column signal, \"First Cohort,\" then, \"Advance!\"\n\nThen we heard calls for the Fifth and Sixth Cohorts at the rear of the column.\n\nStill we waited. But, nothing for us.\n\nThen, one of our guys near the left flank yelled, \" _Centurio_! Movement in the trees!\"\n\nI looked down the column and saw the man pointing with his _pilum_. I looked toward where he was pointing. At first I saw nothing. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom under the evergreens, I saw movement. Men. Dozens of them. They began to come out of the forest in front of us. They weren't armored like us. Most of them seemed wrapped in animal firs. I could see no swords, no spears. I couldn't understand how such a rabble could be any threat to us.\n\nStrabo was walking across our front, slightly down the incline. Without taking his eyes off the enemy, he called us to attention, \" _Centurio . . . State_!\"\n\nThe enemy remained well out of _pilum_ range. There was now a mass of a couple of hundred of them, standing just outside the tree line. They made no attempt to advance on us. Then, a few dozen of them ran forward, twirling something over their heads.\n\nStrabo screamed, \" _Scuta . . . Erigit'_!\"\n\nNo sooner did we raise our shields to cover our heads and bodies, than slingbullets rained down on us. We had taken two or three volleys to no effect when one of the legionaries on the left shouted a warning, \" _Centurio_! Flank! Left!\"\n\nI stole a peek around my shield and saw the enemy working their way through the trees on our left flank. Then, from our right, I heard, \" _Centurio_! _Hostes a' dex_ '!\"\n\nThe slingers were trying to hold us in place while their mates got around our flanks. If they got some slingers on our right, our open side, they could do some damage.\n\nStrabo had to pull the _centuria_ back. If he pulled back quickly, he would expose us to the slingers to our front. If he withdrew slowly, the enemy might get around on our exposed flank.\n\n\" _Centurio_! _Ad testudinem_! Form the turtle!\" Strabo commanded.\n\nThe extended ranks withdrew backward, shields up, and fell in at the rear of their _contubernia_. The _contubernia_ side-stepped to a close interval. Front and flank shields came up and interlocked, forming a wall around three sides of the century. The legionaries in the interior of the formation lifted their shields over their heads and locked them to form a roof.\n\nWe waited. The command to withdraw didn't come.\n\nWhere was Strabo?\n\nI peeked around my shield. He was down! He was on his hands and knees in the grass. His helmet was off. He was bleeding from his nose and from his head.\n\n\"Centurion down!\" I shouted.\n\nI heard Bantus' voice from the rear, \" _Centuria_ . . . take my command! _Ad tergum . . . It'_! Backstep . . . MARCH!\"\n\nAs we began to backstep out of the trap, I again looked and saw about six of the enemy running across the field toward Strabo.\n\nWithout thinking, I broke the formation and ran down into the bowl toward my centurion. When I reached him, the first of the barbarians was well within _pilum_ range. I let loose! The weighted spear hurtled forward, taking the man full in the face. I drew my sword. I sensed another _pilum_ fly from behind me and saw it bury itself in a barbarian's chest. I glanced back quickly to see that my _geminus_ , Minutus, had followed me.\n\nThe four remaining enemy were almost on top of us. The closest raised a knife. Without thinking, I stepped forward and delivered a _percussus_ with the boss of my shield. My _umbo_ made contact. I heard the man's neck break. I stepped forward with a sword thrust, and the next man impaled himself on my _gladius_. His momentum pushed me back. I couldn't withdraw my sword from his abdomen. Minutus moved around my right side. He took the next barbarian with his shield. The man literally flew backward as the _umbo_ of Minutus' shield smashed into his head.\n\nThen, it was over.\n\nThe sixth man, seeing his five mates killed so quickly, was having none of it. He fled back to the mass of barbarians at the edge of the forest. They seemed to hover there for a few heartbeats. Then, they began to melt back into the trees.\n\nFor a few heartbeats, all I could hear was the sound of my own breathing. I looked around me. Two barbarians lay dead, pinned to the grass with our _pila_. Another man lay in front of me, his head at an impossible angle. Another had a face that was a mass of blood and shattered bone. A fifth man was on the ground, screaming and trying to keep his guts from pouring out of his belly. Minutus relieved him of his agony with a quick thrust into his throat.\n\nI could still hear moaning. Then, I remembered. Strabo! The centurion was sitting upright on the ground, holding his head. Blood was pouring down his head over his right ear. I spotted his helmet on the ground next to him. There was a dimple, the size of a baby's fist, above the right cheek guard.\n\nOur _centuria_ had halted about a fifty paces away. They were out of the turtle and standing in the standard formation.\n\n\" _Capsarius_!\" I shouted. \"I need a medic! Man down!\"\n\nMinutus walked up and dropped our two _pila_ on the ground. \"Not even bent,\" he observed.\n\nI looked up toward our _centuria_. They were still stationary, but Bantus was striding toward us. I imagined for a moment that he was going to congratulate me, maybe I'd get a decoration\u2014at least a silver torc.\n\nWhen he got to where I was standing, he said, \" _Miles_! Remove your helmet!\"\n\nI didn't know what he meant.\n\nAgain, he ordered, \"I told you to take off your shaggin' helmet, _Podex_!\"\n\nQuickly, I fumbled with the bindings under my chin. I removed my _galea_.\n\nNo sooner did I have it off than Bantus slugged me on the jaw. I fell on my ass next to Strabo.\n\n\" _Sta, miles_!\" Bantus shouted at me. \"Get back up on your feet, soldier! Get your helmet back on!\"\n\nWhile I was sitting on the ground, searching for my helmet, the _capsarius_ arrived. He looked at the two legionaries sitting on the ground and asked, \"We got two casualties?\"\n\n\"Just the centurion!\" Bantus snapped. \"Get on your feet, Insubrecus!\"\n\nI got up and put my helmet back on and laced it up. Bantus wasn't done with me.\n\n\"You stupid son of a whore! You never break formation!!\" He continued to shout in my face, \"Never! For no reason! You break formation, you endanger your mates . . . the entire _centuria_ . . . I don't care if your mother's being raped by a cohort of hairy Krauts right in front of you! You _do not break formation_! Do you understand me, you shit?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Optio_!\" I snapped.\n\nWhile Bantus was ripping me to shreds, Spina, the _medicus_ , arrived on the scene. He bent down over Strabo and ran his fingers over the centurion's skull. \" _Bene_ ,\" he muttered to himself. \"Skull's in one piece.\"\n\n\"Centurion! What day is it?\" Spina asked Strabo.\n\nStrabo just stared up at Spina.\n\nMeanwhile, Bantus was \"fixing\" me: \"Breaking formation in contact with the enemy . . . You could suffer _fustuarium_ for that . . . Do you want to be beaten to death? Did you know that, _stulte?_ What you got going for you is only that you ran _toward_ the enemy and gutted three of the bastards! And, you may have saved your officer's life . . . but that's no excuse for what you did . . . _Compre'endis me, miles?_ \"\n\n\"Excuse me, _Optio_ ,\" Spina interrupted.\n\n\" _Qui' vis tu, Medice?_ \" Bantus turned.\n\n\"I need tah move dah centurion hee'ah back to my wagon, so's I can treat'im,\" Spina explained. \"Could I borrow a couple a ya guys hee'ah to help?\"\n\n\"Of course, _Medice_ ,\" Bantus responded. \"Brevis! Detail a couple of the boys to help the doctor here!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Optio_!\" I heard Brevis respond.\n\nSuddenly, Gelasius, our cohort commander, arrived on the scene. He saw Strabo on the ground and the _capsarius_ bandaging his head. Then, he looked at the dead barbarians lying in the grass.\n\nIgnoring Spina and me, he asked, \"What's going on, Bantus?\"\n\n\" _Centurio_!\" Bantus reported. \"This bunch of _mentulae_ tried to rush the wagons . . . We stopped them . . . Strabo was hit by a sling-bullet.\"\n\n\" _Tota?_ \" Gelasius asked examining the reddening welt on my jaw. \"That it?\"\n\nBantus hesitated for a few heartbeats, then said, \" _Tota, Centurio_!\"\n\nGelasius gave him a long look. Then he turned to ask Spina, \"How's Strabo, _Medice_?\"\n\n\"Don' know, Centurion,\" Spina answered. \"May just be a _concussus_ , but head injuries aw tricky. I wanna get 'im back to my wagon.\"\n\nGelasius grunted and said, \"Carry on, _Medice_!\"\n\nHe took one last look at the dead raiders and turned to Bantus, \" _Bene gesta, Optio_! I'll need your after-action report when we get into camp tonight. You have the _centuria_ until Strabo gets back on his feet!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Centurio_ ,\" Bantus responded.\n\nAs soon as Gelasius was out of hearing range, Bantus hissed at me, \"I just saved you, Pagane! Don't forget it! You saved Strabo's bacon . . . a life for a life, eh . . . And don't forget what I told you about breaking formation . . . You try that shit again, and I'll beat you to death myself . . . Now get your sorry ass out of my sight!\"\n\nI double-timed back to the _centuria_ with Minutus in my wake.\n\nThe column started moving again at the sixth hour. Soon, we turned southwest down a wide, fertile valley. Here, there was no sign of war. There was a town at the head of the valley, rather large and prosperous for the region, totally unfortified. In the fields there were cattle, who watched us pass with total indifference. We saw some people, too. None of them seemed the least concerned by the presence of a Roman legion in their valley.\n\nWe moved into camp at the eleventh hour. The legion had hot rations waiting for us: a hot stew of pork and vegetables with fresh bread and plenty of _posca_. Before the first watch of the night, Bantus briefed us that this was the valley of a Gallic tribe called the Vocontii, a people at least nominally under the Roman _imperium_. Since they grow fat on money extorted from Roman merchants in tolls, protection, and \"hospitality,\" they were quite content with Roman rule. The general had passed down the word that the natives were not to be harassed in any way: no stealing crops, livestock, or anything else not nailed down, and leave the women alone!\n\nWe were going to consolidate with the rest of the army the following day. The other legions were camped near a Gallic town called Leminco, about fifteen thousand _passus_ down the valley.\n\nAs Bantus left us, he announced, \" _A' Galliam comatam beneventi, infantes_! Welcome to long-haired Gaul, guys!\"\n\n# V.\n\n# Sub Patrocinio Caesaris\n\n## UNDER CAESAR'S PATRONAGE\n\nHe pulled into Leminco by the sixth hour on the next day. It was an easy march down the valley of the Vocontii, more of a parade than a march. In fact, as we marched, children and civilians looked up from their work in the fields and waved as we went by. About two thousand _passus_ out, Malleus, our _primus pilus_ , pulled us off baggage train duty and lined us up with the rest of the legion. We marched into the valley where the rest of the army was camped as if it were a military parade and not the end of a trek over the Alps. Caesar _Imperator_ , along with his entire staff, met us as we marched down into the encampment. Mounted on a white stallion, Caesar was bareheaded and draped in a _sagum rubrum_ , a bright red general's cloak. We passed in review before him.\n\nWe were guided to a section of the valley where we were to camp, and there we began to dig in. By the ninth hour, we had the _fossum_ dug and the _vallum_ erected for our marching camp. Although we were surrounded by the other legions of the army, we still had our _sudes_ lashed and positioned in our section of the ditch.\n\nAs usual, our _centuria_ was billeted near the rear gate, just to the left of the _Via Praetoria_ , Headquarters Street. When we arrived, Moelwyn had our _contubernium_ tent set up. When we arrived, he wasn't about, so we assumed that he was off tending to our mule. Tulli went to find Bantus to learn where the bath point was, when it would be our turn to wash up, and what the arrangements were for chow. The rest of us decided to take advantage of the lull and crap out for a while.\n\nAnyway, that was the plan.\n\nI was about halfway down a deep, dark hole, on my journey to the realm of Morpheus, when a _caliga_ nudged my shoulder. I opened my eyes expecting to see Tulli, but then I realized I was looking up at a soldier wearing the purple waist-ribbon of a praetorian.\n\n\" _Gaius Marius Insubrecus, miles, es tu_?\" he demanded. \"Are you Trooper Gaius Marius Insubrecus?\"\n\n\" _Sum_!\" I answered getting to my feet. \"I am!\"\n\n\"You are to accompany me to the _praetorium_ ,\" he stated. \" _Stat'_!\"\n\n\"Uniform?\" I asked.\n\n\"Full kit! Sword, no _scutum_ , no _pilum_!\" he again stated flatly. \"I will wait for you outside the tent.\"\n\n_What was this about?_ I wondered. _Did Bantus rat me out in his report and say that I broke formation?_ I was carrying my own sword, and the praetorian was waiting outside for me. At least I wasn't under arrest.\n\nI had to wake Rufus up to get back into my _lorica_. He wasn't too pleased about having his siesta disturbed, but was glad it was me being dragged over to headquarters and not him. As I left the tent, I told him to let Tulli know where I was. I doubt he heard me over his own snoring.\n\nAs soon as I emerged from the tent, without a word to me, my escort turned and began marching toward the _Via Praetoria_. As expected, he turned right on the main street of the camp toward the _praetorium_. Then, surprisingly, he walked right by our legionary headquarters and continued toward the main gate of the camp. He passed through with barely a nod to the sentry on duty.\n\nWe marched west across a field to another of the legionary _castra_ in the valley. When he approached the gate, the sentry challenged him with the sign, _malus_ , apple. He responded immediately with the countersign, _quercus_ , oak, and without stopping, he stated, \"He's with me.\"\n\nWhen we turned through the portal and entered the camp, I realized that we were on the _Via Principalis_ , the main street of the camp. The _praetorium_ of that camp was straight ahead, but I had no idea why I was being summoned to the headquarters of another legion.\n\nWhen we arrived at the headquarters tent, my escort pointed to a spot on the ground and said, \"Wait here until you're summoned.\" Then, he entered the tent.\n\nI didn't know how literal the praetorian was being, but I didn't wander far from the spot on the ground he had indicated.\n\nIt was a good thing I was away from the entrance. Soldiers with the thin, red sashes of the general's staff bustled in and out. Runners, I assumed. Periodically, senior officers, _tribuni angusticlavi;_ junior, \"narrow-band\" tribunes; and even a _legatus legionis_ , a legionary commander passed me by. But, to these men, I was invisible, just another _mulus_ among thousands. That was fine with me. I had nothing to gain from being noticed by senior officers\u2014and much to lose.\n\nFinally, a clerk on the general's staff stuck his head out. \"You Insubrecus?\" he asked.\n\n\" _Sum_!\" I answered.\n\n\" _Bene_! Get in here!\" he demanded.\n\nI entered the headquarters tent, still with no idea what was going on. I was hoping it was all just some mix-up, but they seemed to have my name. And, if this had anything to do with my breaking ranks to save Strabo's bacon, this seemed to be the place where death sentences were passed.\n\nWhen my eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the tent, the _scriba_ who had summoned me pointed to a cubicle on the right and said, \"Report to the legate, Insubrecus!\"\n\n_The legate_ , my mind screamed! This was worse than I had imagined. A shaggin' legate?\n\nI entered the _cubiculum_ and reported to a man seated behind a field desk, \" _Legatus_ , Gaius Marius Insubrecus, _miles_ , reports as ordered.\"\n\nThe man looked up from some _tabulae_ he was scanning and gave me a long look. He didn't look like a legate to me. He looked more like a guy you didn't want to mess with in a cheap _caupona_ in a bad neighborhood after drinking half the night. He had short, curly black hair, which matched his bushy eyebrows. His eyes were deeply brown, but alive, the kind of eyes that see everything, assess it, and find it amusingly lacking. He had a couple of days' worth of dark stubble on his chin and jowls. He had discarded his officer's _lorica_ , which was lying against the side of the tent. His sword and his helmet were deposited on top of it. He wore the faded, red tunic of an infantry _mulus_.\n\nWhen he stood up, I was again surprised. He was half a head shorter than I was.\n\n\"I'm Labienus,\" he told me, \"the old man's _legatus ad manum_ , his chief of staff. Let me take a look at you.\"\n\nHe inspected my uniform and equipment, adjusting invisible defects and centering my belt.\n\n\"Let me see your _gladius_!\" he demanded.\n\nI unsheathed my sword and handed it to him. He inspected the blade, grunted, and handed it back to me.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" he continued. \"When you report to the _imperator_ , don't mumble . . . Speak up like a man . . . The old man hates it when people mumble . . . And look the old man right in the eye when he talks to you . . . Don't look down . . . Roman soldiers never look down . . . Speak when spoken to . . . Be short and to the point: 'Yes, sir,' 'No, sir.' No explanations unless the old man asks you . . . Got it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" I answered.\n\n\"And, this is very important,\" Labienus continued. \"Don't stare at the old man's hairline . . . He's very sensitive about that . . . _Compre'endis tu_?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Legate_!\" I replied.\n\n\" _Bene_ . . . Let's get this over with . . . Any questions?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" I said.\n\nLabienus waited a few heartbeats and said, \"Are you going to ask it or just leave me here guessing?\"\n\n\"Sir! To whom am I reporting?\" I asked.\n\nLabienus gave me a long, quizzical look, then snorted. \"Son, you are about to meet the proconsul of all the Gauls, the commander of this army, and the great-great grandbaby of the goddess Venus herself. You are about to meet Gaius Iulius Caesar.\"\n\nLabienus made an overly dramatic gesture toward a doorway in the rear of his cubicle. I marched through.\n\nI entered a larger area of the tent. Most of the tent walls were covered by maps with various military symbols etched in chalk over the representations of the terrain. There were soldiers dressed only in their red tunics fussing over them. A tall, thin man in a white tunic with the thin, purple stripes of an Equestrian seemed to be supervising them. I began to walk toward him when Labienus put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the back of the tent.\n\nThere was another partition there and behind it, a man, the same man I had seen acting as the priest during my _significatio_. He sat reviewing stacks of _tabulae_ arranged before him on an oversized field desk. A _scriba_ stood in attendance at the man's left shoulder. When the man saw me approach, he sighed.\n\nHe closed the tabula he had been reading, passed it to the clerk, and said, \"Ebrius, inform the quartermaster that it is my decision that we will not wait for the supply train from Massalia to reach us. We will pursue the enemy as the situation demands. We will draw supplies from our Gallic allies if necessary.\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_ ,\" the clerk snapped, taking the _tabula_. Then, he posted out of the tent.\n\nThe way was now open. _My turn_ , I thought.\n\n\" _Imperator_! Gaius Marius Insubrecus, _miles_ , reports as ordered!\" I snapped. I felt Labienus hovering behind my right shoulder.\n\nWhile Caesar began to search through the _tabulae_ on his desk, he said, \" _Laxa_ , Insubrecus!\"\n\nI willed myself to unstiffen a bit, but I was hardly \"at ease.\"\n\nFinally, he drew two _tabulae_ before him. He opened the first and said, \"This is the daily operations log of the Tenth Legion that reports a slave attacked a soldier . . . you, as a matter of fact . . . during a training exercise . . . The slave was killed, and you suffered a minor cut to your right arm.\"\n\nCaesar had not asked me a question, so I did not respond.\n\nHe took the second _tabula_ and opened it. \"This is a confidential command report to me from my _praefectus castrorum_ . . . very curious . . . It says the slave was not a slave, but a Roman _grassator_ , a street gangster . . . one of Milo's _collegium_ . . . Milo's a major player in the Roman underworld . . . What could a legionary grunt in _Gallia Cisalpina_ have done to get such attention from a Roman gangster? . . . Do you have any idea, Insubrecus?\"\n\nI didn't know how to respond. Labienus warned me against talking too much. The question was straightforward, so I just said, \" _Non cognosco_ , _Imperator_!\"\n\nCaesar nodded slightly and kept reading. \"There's some nonsense here about the involvement of the consul's family . . . Hmmm . . . ah . . . Here it is . . . This has been sent to me because you claim to be a client of my family, the _gens Iulia_ . . . Would you be so kind as to explain that, Insubrecus?\"\n\nI did. I explained my grandfather's involvement with Gaius Marius, the granting of citizenship, the awarding of the farm, and Caesar Senior explaining to my grandfather that Marius' _patrocinium_ had reverted to his family, the _gens Iulia_.\n\nCaesar listened and said, \"Yes . . . I do recall some stories about Marius and your grandfather . . . He was a Gallic cavalryman . . . quite colorful, if the stories are accurate . . . practically a part of Marius' _familia_ . . . Marius swore _Bona Fortuna_ always smiled on the man . . . So . . . you're his grandson?\"\n\nCaesar looked over at Labienus, \"We have anything for this trooper on the staff?\"\n\nLabienus asked me, \"Can you ride, soldier?\"\n\n\" _Possum_!\" I responded without turning my head away from Caesar.\n\n\"We could mount him as part of the mounted praetorian detail, Caesar,\" Labienus stated.\n\n\"Yes . . . we could,\" Caesar started. Then, he asked me, \"Can you read and write Latin, Insubrecus?\"\n\n\" _Possum, Imperator_ ,\" I responded.\n\n\"M\u03c0o\u03c1\u03b5\u03af\u03c4\u03b5 V\u03b1 \u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03b2\u03ac\u03c3\u03b5\u03c4\u03b5 E\u03bb\u03bb\u03b7V\u03b9K\u03ac?\" Caesar asked abruptly.\n\nIt took my mind a heartbeat to adjust. He was asking if I could read Greek. \"\u2206\u03b9\u03b1\u03b2\u03ac, \u03c3\u03c4\u03c1\u03b1\u03c4\u03b7\u03b3\u03b5,\" I stammered. \"Yes, General!\"\n\n\"Interesting . . . Do you have any more hidden talents I should know about, Insubrecus?\" Caesar asked.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" I responded. \"I speak Gah'el, I mean, _lingua Gallorum_.\"\n\nCaesar spoke to his aide, \"Labienus, I think we have more here than just another sword on a horse . . . Go ahead and assign him to my praetorian cavalry _turma_ for administrative purposes, but I think I may have a further use for this young man here . . . When are those Gallic chiefs supposed to get here?\"\n\n\"They're already here, Caesar,\" Labienus responded. \"I have them cooling their heels, waiting for an audience. I like to build up the anticipation a bit . . . Good theater . . . even better politics.\"\n\n\"Splendid!\" Caesar said. \"Erect an audience tent just outside the _Porta Praetoria_. I will receive these petitioners tomorrow at the first hour, the time when clients traditionally pay their obligatory call on their patron. I hope they understand the significance.\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Caesar_ ,\" Labienus nodded. \"Refreshments?\"\n\n\"No . . . I don't think so,\" Caesar stated. \"I don't want them feeling too comfortable . . . Not yet, anyway . . . And you, Insubrecus . . . you will be part of my security detail at that meeting . . . No one knows you understand . . . what did you call it . . . 'Gah El'? See what you can pick up.\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" I snapped.\n\n\"As far as this other issue is concerned,\" Caesar continued, \"I doubt this attack was aimed at me. Our connection is too remote. But, one can never be too careful. You are now _sub patrocinio Caesaris_. Outside this tent, you will address me with full military courtesy, but here you may address me as _patrone_. Understood?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Imper . . . Patrone_!\" I corrected myself.\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Caesar concluded. \"Let's see how this encounter works out tomorrow. I may have a special task for you, Insubrecus. But, for now, let me get back to this pile of administrative _merda_ that's piled up on my desk. Labienus! Get young Insubrecus squared away.\"\n\nThe interview was concluded. I had no idea at the time, but that was one of the most significant moments in my life. From that moment on, I have been _sub patrocinio gentium Iuliarum Caesarum_ \u2014 _pro bono et pro malo_ , for the good and for the bad.\n\n# VI.\n\n# _De Consequente Helvetiorum_\n\n## PURSUIT OF THE HELVETIANS\n\n_Helvetii iam per angustias et fines Sequanorum suas copias traduxerant et in Haeduorum fines pervenerant eorumque agros populabantur Haedui cum se suaque ab iis defendere non possent legatos ad Caesarem mittunt rogatum auxilium_.\n\n\"The Helvetians had already led their forces through the defile and into the territory of the Sequani. They then invaded the territory of the Aedui and were ravaging their lands. Since the Aedui could not defend themselves and their possessions from the Helvetians, they sent envoys to Caesar and requested assistance.\"\n\n\u2014(from Gaius Marius Insubrecus' notebook of Caesar's journal)\n\nThen I got back to my _contubernium_ in the Tenth Legion, I quickly found out I had no unit to leave. Bantus informed me that our tent squad was to be broken up and assigned around the legion as individual replacements. When I informed Bantus of what had happened to me, he shook my hand and wished me well. He promised that our _signifer_ would forward my pay records and allotments to my new unit.\n\nBantus then shared with me that Strabo was recovering. Bantus had been over to the medics, and Spina had assured him that, under his professional and expert care, our centurion was going to make a full recovery and would be back on duty in less than a week.\n\nBantus had told Strabo what I had done. After making sure that Bantus had disciplined me for breaking ranks, Strabo said, \"Tell the kid thanks. I owe him.\"\n\nI packed my personal gear up, shook hands all around, strapped my shield to my back, threw my _furca_ over my shoulder, and trudged back to the camp of the Seventh Legion to report to Labienus.\n\nWhen I got back to Caesar's headquarters, one of Labienus' assistants walked me over to where the praetorian _turma_ , the cavalry troop, was housed. I was shown a bunk to dump off my kit. Then, I was taken over to report to my new officer, a _decurio_ named Decimus Lampronius, who had been in the cavalry so long that everyone called him _Valgus_ , \"Bow Legs.\"\n\nValgus looked me up and down, then asked, \"Can you ride?\"\n\nWhen I answered yes, Valgus just grunted and said, \"We'll see. Get that infantry gear off, and I'll take you down to the horse line.\"\n\nI dropped my _gladius_ and _galea_ , and Valgus helped me out of my _lorica_. We walked down to the horse line, and Valgus picked out a horse for me, a black mare with a white snip. The stable slave bridled and saddled the horse for me.\n\n\"The old man likes his praetorian escort all mounted on black horses . . . looks smart,\" Valgus explained. \"Mount up, and walk him around the corral a couple of times . . . Get him warmed up.\"\n\nI hopped up and walked the horse around the corral. Valgus had me execute some turns. Then, he called out, \"Trot!\"\n\nI dug my heels into the horse's sides, and it responded immediately. Valgus watched us for a while, then commanded, \"Canter!\"\n\nWe picked up speed, making a few circuits around the corral until Valgus called, \"Come on over here, Insubrecus!\"\n\nI complied and dismounted in front of him.\n\n\"You got a good seat,\" Valgus told me. \"I'm going to have you work with our training officer until he's satisfied that you're ready for tactical training with the _turma_. My understanding is that you're on _immunis_ status to the old man's headquarters, so that will have to take priority. Meanwhile, I'll walk you over to the armory to draw a _spatha_ , a cavalry sword. It's longer than that infantry pigsticker you have now. Keep both. The _gladius_ comes in handy if we have to fight dismounted. Most guys hang the _spatha_ from the horn on their saddle and keep the _gladius_ on their bodies. If you take a tumble, it's nice to know one of your swords stays attached to you. We also have to get you a _parma_ , a cavalry shield. We'll send that table top you're carrying back to your former legion. I see you already have one of the new _galea_ with the long neck guard . . . That'll work just fine in the cavalry . . . so keep that.\"\n\nValgus and I walked back to the headquarters tent of the praetorian detail. Before he dismissed me, Valgus handed me a _cingulum purpureum_ , a thin, purple sash.\n\n\"Tie that around your waist,\" he said. \"Wear it outside your _lorica_ when you're on duty . . . It indicates who you work for . . . Even centurions won't screw around with you when they see that sash.\"\n\nWhen I got back to my tent, I discovered one of the benefits of being an _immunis_ praetorian. No guard duty. For the first time since I joined the army, I slept through the entire night.\n\nI was awakened in the dark by someone kicking my cot. I grunted, \" _Qu'accidit_?\" I then heard a voice out of the darkness, \"You, Insubrecus?\"\n\n\"Yeah . . . that's me,\" I answered, sitting up.\n\n\"You're on the general's security detail this morning,\" the voice explained. \"You need to report to _il'capu, stat'_.\"\n\n\" _Il'capu_?\" I questioned.\n\n\" _Il'capu_ . . . the boss . . . Labienus _Legatus_ ,\" came the answer out of the gloom. \" _Stat'_!\"\n\nI got to the _praetorium_ just as the trumpet signaling the end of the fourth watch sounded. Labienus was standing in the outer area in full kit\u2014officer's _lorica_ , plumed helmet under his arm.\n\nWhen Labienus saw me, he said, \"Ah, Insubrecus . . . _bene_!\"\n\nHe put his arm around my shoulders and guided me to a quiet corner. \"Your job this morning isn't security . . . We have enough goons in purple sashes to take care of that . . . When these Gauls show up, just watch and listen . . . See what you can pick up . . . anything to help the general understand what these people are really up to . . . Got it?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Legate_ ,\" I told him.\n\n\"Good lad,\" he said, patting my back. \" _Bene_! Let's get this circus started, boys!\"\n\nLabienus ducked into his cubicle. I could hear some muffled conversation back there. Then, Caesar _Imperator_ appeared in full regalia, with a bright red _sagum_ over his shoulders. Someone called the room to attention, but Caesar immediately put us at ease.\n\n\" _Bene_! We're ready,\" he stated. \"Let's move out, Labienus, and see what these Gauls want.\"\n\nWhen Caesar spotted me, he gestured me over to him. \"Ah . . . Insubrecus . . . Walk with me.\"\n\nWe proceeded up the _Via Principalis_ toward the _Porta Principalis Sinistra_. I was surprised how some of the legionary squaddies treated the general with calls like, \"Give 'im hell, _Calve_ , Baldy!\" and \"Remember, you get the gold, and we get the women, Boss!\" Caesar just smiled, nodded at some of the callers, and even waved at a few.\n\n\"This may sound strange to you, Insubrecus,\" he shared with me, \"but this is how the boys show they like me. If they said nothing as I passed . . . just stayed silent and sullen . . . I'd be in big trouble.\"\n\nWhen we finally wound our way through the gate, I saw a large pavilion erected in the field. Underneath the tent, Caesar's _sella curulis_ , his curule seat, indicating his possession of the _imperium_ of the Senate and the Roman people as the proconsul of the _provincia_ , stood alone. In the field beyond the pavilion, I could see a group of men and horses being guarded by a detail of praetorians.\n\nOur guests had already arrived.\n\nI heard Caesar say to Labienus, \"They're on time . . . They must consider their business with me urgent . . . _Bene_ . . . Let's take our time with this . . . Delay is to our advantage . . . whoever seems to have the least to lose, wins.\"\n\nCaesar walked slowly to his chair and carefully arranged his red cloak as he took the seat. He inclined his head in my direction and whispered, \" _Observa et ausculta_! Anything you can pick up will be helpful.\"\n\nCaesar then inclined his head toward the commander of the security detail and gestured that he should let the Gallic delegation approach.\n\nTo me, these approaching Gauls were like Gallic warrior-heroes, emerging from one of Gran'pa's tales of our heroic past. They were huge men, giants, each well over six _pedes_ in height, barrel chested, and broad shouldered with heavily muscled arms. They seemed to overshadow the members of Caesar's security detail, who themselves were selected for their intimidating physical presence. Most of the praetorians barely measured up to shoulder height on these men. How could we Romans fight such men? They had the stature of gods.\n\nThey approached the seat of Caesar with long, confident strides. They all wore luxuriant, thick moustaches reaching down to their chins: some red, some blond, others black. They approached Caesar's seat bareheaded. Some kept their long hair wild and unbound; others had braids interwoven with brightly colored ribbons reaching down their backs. Under his left arm, each warrior carried a bronze helmet, brightly plumed with horsehair and feathers.\n\nThey walked in a flurry of colors, with capes, sashes, and trousers of garish red, verdant green, and deep blue. On their left shoulders, the men wore large, ornate, golden _fibula_ pins that secured the brightly colored cloaks, which seemed to flutter behind them as they strode forward. Around their necks, the warriors wore thick, golden torcs. I remembered Gran'pa telling me that the kings and chiefs of the Gah'el wore their wealth into battle to attract worthy opponents to combat.\n\nTheir bright chainmail cuirasses reached down to their knees and were secured by wide leather belts adorned with gold and silver decorations. On their left sides, they wore long, Gallic swords suspended from ornately embellished baldrics.\n\nTheir groupings and tartan designs indicated three distinct factions approaching Caesar's chair. When they were about three paces from the pavilion, they stopped. The leading warrior from a group of four men in blue and green plaid livery stepped forward to address the general. He held up an ornately carved wand of white wood for Caesar to see. From Gran'pa's stories, I knew it to be a wand of negotiation. It indicated that the warrior came to speak, not to fight. It held the holder inviolate at the cost of five times his head price.\n\n\" _Ave_ , Caesar,\" the speaker began in accented Latin, \"I am Duuhruhda mab Clethguuhno, tribal king of the People of the Goddess of the Dark Moon, Aine Du, the Aedui to you Romans.\"\n\nAs the king spoke, I examined his entourage. Each man carried the white wand to indicate his diplomatic status. One, by his bearing and the richness of his equipment, was obviously a noble of some standing within the tribe. He had a natural sneer to his smile, and his eyes were what Mama would call \"shifty.\" There was something about him that screamed deceit. I took an instant dislike to the man. The other men carried wooden staffs. These were the king's _drui_ , I realized, one for the laws of the gods and the other for the laws of the people.\n\nThe king was addressing Caesar, reminding him of the bonds of friendship that existed between the Aedui and the Roman people and of how Caesar's refusal to let the Helvetii cross the Rhodanus at Gennava had sent the Helvetii into the lands of the Aedui and of how hordes of Helvetii were now stripping the fields and storehouses of the Aedui.\n\nI decided there was nothing to be gleaned by my listening to a set diplomatic speech in halting Latin, so I eased over to where the Gauls had left their horses. There, the entourage of the Gallic chiefs was gathered. They were the bodyguards of the kings, the _gwarchodourai_. They weren't listening to the king's speech. I doubt any of them understood Latin. I got as close as I could without arousing their suspicion. Surprisingly, I could follow most of what they were saying to each other.\n\nMost were joking about the Romans in Caesar's security detail: Romans wore skirts like women; they looked like beardless boys; such small men could never satisfy a woman.\n\nThen, I heard one comment on how the king of the Aedui went on and on with his speech like a woman complaining to her neighbors about her monthly cramps.\n\nHis companion, one of the Aedui by his tartan, added that the king was trying to lure the Romans across the river.\n\nHis companion asked why, what purpose did having Romans in lands of the Aedui serve?\n\nThe Aeduan snorted, \"The enemy of our enemy is our friend! If the Romans fight the Helvetii, regardless of who wins, there will be fewer Romans and fewer Helvetii for the Aedui to kill.\"\n\nThen, another of the Aedui said, \"This 'Caisar' of the Romans . . . his own people hate him . . . They have paid our king handsomely . . . in Roman gold and silver . . . to lure him to his destruction beyond the lands of the Romans.\"\n\nThe first Aeduan hushed his companion. Then, he looked around and spotted me hovering close by. That was enough to silence the men. I knew I would get no more from them.\n\nWhen I wandered back to where I could hear the deputation, one of the warriors, a dark-haired man in a red tartan was saying, \"Our fields should not be destroyed; our children should not be carried off into slavery; and our towns should not be assaulted when your army is within our sight. It is not possible for us to defend our people from the onslaught of so large a host. Soon, we will have nothing left except the dust of our fields.\"\n\nWhen the warrior was finished speaking, Caesar rose from his _sella curulis_ and addressed the assembly, \"Caesar has heard the complaints and the entreaties of the allies and friends of the Roman people. You will have my answer in the morning!\"\n\nWith that, Caesar turned and walked back toward the gate of the _castrum_. Labienus and I fell in behind him. We followed him back to his quarters in the _praetorium_. He tossed his helmet on his table and ordered his body slave to assist him in removing his cuirass.\n\nWhile this was happening, he asked Labienus, \"Where do our _exploratores_ place the enemy?\"\n\nLabienus walked over to one of the maps and pointed to a spot near a squiggly blue line. \"They're here, moving west toward this river, the Arar, and taking their time about it. The scouts say that at these points, they're crossing the river on boats and rafts.\"\n\nCaesar, now free of his armor, walked over to the map and asked, \"How long before they get across the river?\"\n\n\"Late tomorrow . . . maybe the next day,\" Labienus shrugged.\n\n\"What's here?\" Caesar asked, pointing to where two blue lines converged.\n\n\"That's the confluence of the Arar and the Rhodanus,\" Labienus answered. \"There's a settlement there on our side of the river . . . an _oppidum_ . . . a fortified town of the _Sequani_ . . . This symbol indicates that there's a bridge across the Rhodanus at this point . . . Looks to be no more than four, maybe five, thousand _passus_ south of where the Helvetii are crossing the Arar.\"\n\n\"Perfect!\" Caesar said. \"Absolutely perfect . . . issue orders . . . three legions . . . the Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth . . . We pull out at midnight . . . We march straight for that bridge . . . Then, we move to catch the enemy at those fords . . . We should catch them divided by the river . . . We can chew up their rear guard, and the rest won't be able to support them . . . Send out an engineering detail with cavalry support to check that bridge . . . I want it capable of supporting our crossing when we get there . . . What is it, Labienus?\"\n\n\"Caesar, when you cross the Rhodanus, you leave the _imperium Romanum_ . . . Without the authorization of the Senate, your command does not reach into _Gallia_ ,\" Labienus cautioned.\n\n\"Don't be such an old lady, Labienus,\" Caesar dismissed his counsel. \" _Audacibus favet Fortuna_! . . . Fortune favors the bold! You keep this up, and I'll have to appoint you to the Senate with the rest of those old women . . . The Helvetii are a clear and imminent threat to our _provincia_ , and our _pietas_ demands that we support our friends and allies on the other side of that river . . . We may not get another opportunity like this.\"\n\n\"Yes, Caesar,\" Labienus conceded.\n\n\" _Bene_! Issue the orders!\" Caesar continued. \"Have the _quaester_ visit our Gallic friends in the morning, after we've pulled out . . . We will be out-marching our supplies . . . We'll have them feed our army while we're destroying their enemies . . . Fair trade, I think.\"\n\nI saw a thought flitter across Caesar's eyes. He looked over to where I was standing. \"Insubrecus . . . _veni_!\"\n\n\"Yes, _Patrone_ ,\" I responded.\n\n\"I saw you near that Gallic bunch over by the horses,\" he said. \"Did you pick up anything useful?\"\n\n\"The Aedui want us to exhaust ourselves against the Helvetii so they will have an easier time dealing with us,\" I offered.\n\n\"That makes sense,\" Caesar agreed. \"Anything else?\"\n\nI thought of how best to tell Caesar the other news. Then, I remembered Labienus' advice: be direct. \" _Patrone_ , they were saying that Romans paid their king to entice you to go over the Rhodanus. They want the Helvetii to destroy you and this army.\"\n\nCaesar looked at me for a few heartbeats, then asked, \"Are you sure you heard that part correctly?\"\n\n\" _Recte audivi, Patrone_ ,\" I answered. \"Yes, I did!\"\n\nCaesar shrugged, \"No matter . . . The Helvetii are not going to destroy this army . . . _Bene gesta_ . . . Well done, Insubrecus.\" He patted me on the shoulder.\n\nThen, he turned to Labienus, \"Issue the orders . . . We move out at midnight . . . three legions!\"\n\nWe did move out at midnight. My legion, the Tenth, was the vanguard, followed by the Seventh, then the Ninth. I rode with Caesar's praetorian detail near the head of the column. Valgus, my _decurio_ , still had no confidence in my riding abilities and told me just to stay close to him during the march.\n\nOnce we cleared the hills around Leminco, our progress was swift. Caesar wanted to reach the bridge at the Rhodanus as quickly as possible, but he didn't want to exhaust the troops doing it. He expected a battle at the end of the march.\n\nBy dawn, the army had fourteen thousand _passus_ under its boots, and it was marching down a valley past a village called Laviscone. With the sun up, we picked up the pace. To keep them fresh along the route of the march, Valgus had us walking the horses for a thousand _passus_ , then riding for a thousand.\n\nWe turned north. By the fifth hour, we were another fifteen thousand _passus_ down the road, passing a pisshole of a place with the grandiose name of Aosta Salassorum, Aosta of the Salassi tribe, where we turned west and followed a river up another valley.\n\nBy the ninth hour, we were close to forty thousand _passus_ out of Leminco, about five thousand _passus_ east of Bergusium. Despite wanting to press on, even Caesar realized he had to halt or his army would be too clapped out to fight.\n\nWhen he ordered the halt, the Tenth Legion, the First Cohort boys in the van, started chanting, \"Ten thousand more! Ten thousand more!\"\n\nBut, the general yelled back, \"Save some of that for the barbarians!\"\n\n\"We got plenty!\" the boys in the Tenth yelled back.\n\n\"I'm sure you do, _m'infantes_!\" Caesar answered them. \"But, I'm an old man and need my rest!\"\n\n\"Then, we'll stop for you, Calve!\" some wag yelled back.\n\nCaesar rendered a dramatic gesture of thanks to the men in the vanguard. Then, I heard him say to Labienus, \"Bring those _exploratores_ to me . . . _stat'_!\"\n\nCaesar called, \"Insubrecus! With me!\" Then, he rode to where a group of legionary slaves were already erecting his headquarters tent.\n\nWhen we dismounted, I saw Labienus leading a motley group of Gallic horsemen to Caesar. Caesar said, \"Insubrecus . . . talk to those people . . . Find out where the enemy is.\"\n\nI approached the group and spoke in Gallic to the one I took to be their leader, \" _Uh prif duhmuno gweebod bleh mae'r Helvetii uhn cael eu_?\"\n\nI saw a look of surprise pass across the face of the rider I approached. \"The Roman puppy speaks our tongue!\" he said.\n\n\"Puppies don't kill. I have,\" I told him. \"Now, answer the question!\"\n\nThe man gave me a long stare, then said, \"You are right. I am being rude. I am Athauhnu mab Hergest of the People of Soucana, a Leader of Ten. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?\"\n\n\"The Romans call me Gai,\" I answered him. \"Among my people, the Insubreci, I am called Arth Bek, Wuhr Cunorud, _mae milour Rhufeinig_ , a soldier of Rome.\"\n\n\"Well, Arth Bek, Grandson of the Red Hound,\" Athauhnu continued, \"the Helvetii dogs have reached Soucana's river at the valley of the white pines. That is half a day's ride north from the Dun of Lugus. There are no fords in that place, so they are crossing on boats.\"\n\nI turned to Caesar, \"The enemy has reached the Arar about fifteen thousand _passus_ north of a place called Lugdunum . . . They have begun to cross on boats.\"\n\n\"Ask him how long it will take the Helvetii to cross!\" Caesar snapped.\n\n\" _Pah mor hir uh buhth uhn ei guhmruhd ar guhfer uh Helvetii i groesi'r afon_?\" I translated.\n\nI watched Athauhnu calculate in his head. \"Three . . . maybe four days,\" he guessed. \"They have women and children . . . and much baggage.\"\n\n\"They're loaded down,\" I told Caesar. \"He estimates three or four days.\"\n\nThen, Athauhnu said, \"Tell the Roman chief that their foraging parties are across the Rotonos, and they have _Almaenwuhra_ with them.\"\n\nCaesar caught the word _Rotonos_ , and asked, \"What did he say about the Rhodanus?\"\n\n\"There are Helvetian raiding parties on our side of the river,\" I told him. \"And, he says they have Germans with them.\"\n\n\"Germans?\" Caesar said. \"How many?\"\n\n\" _Faint o Almaenwuhra_?\" I asked.\n\nAthauhnu shrugged, \"Not many . . . not few.\"\n\n\"He doesn't know,\" I told Caesar.\n\nI saw Caesar considering this response. He decided not to press it. \"Tell him thanks, Insubrecus. Tell him he's welcome to food\u2014and water and feed for his horses.\"\n\nI passed on Caesar's gratitude, but then Athauhnu asked me, \"Does the Roman chief intend to continue on the Roman road all the way to the dun of the Allobroges on the Rotonos?\"\n\nI wasn't sure that I should share our route of march with the man, so I asked, \"Why do you want to know that?\"\n\n\"The Helvetii are burning our farms, raping our women, and murdering our children,\" he said. \"If the Roman chief marches on the Roman road to the Rotonos, he is going out of his way . . . He is giving those Helvetian pigs more time to kill my people . . . There is a shorter route direct to the Dun of Lugus . . . The road is not as good . . . but it will cut almost a day out of the journey.\"\n\n\" _Imperator_ ,\" I called to Caesar, \"this man says he knows a shorter route to the bridge over the Rhodanus at Lugdunum than through Vigenna . . . He says our army can pass over it, and it will cut almost a day out of the march.\"\n\nThis immediately got Caesar's attention. \"This man is familiar with this road?\" he asked me.\n\n\" _Noscit, Imperator_ ,\" I replied. \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Caesar said. Then, \"Labienus . . . the Tenth's cavalry is up with us . . . Tell their _primus pilus_ I need a _turma_ for a route reconnaissance . . . _Stat'_!\"\n\nThen to me, \"Insubrecus, ask your man there if he will show us the way.\"\n\n\" _Uhn eich arwain ein marchoglu dros uh fhorth_?\" I asked Athauhnu.\n\nAthauhnu shrugged, \"Yes . . . of course . . . just give us some time to rest and water our horses.\"\n\n\"As soon as their horses are ready, _Imperator_ ,\" I told Caesar.\n\nWe were on the road by the eleventh hour. Caesar sent me along with the _turma_ from the Tenth Legion because none of the Romans spoke Gallic. There were twenty-five Roman cavalry troopers commanded by a _decurio_ called Rubigo, \"Rusty,\" because of his red hair.\n\nAbout a thousand _passus_ east of Bergusium, Athauhnu led us north and west away from the Roman road. We rode almost two thousand _passus_ , passed through a narrow valley, and then found ourselves following a small river down a broad valley that the army would have no problem marching through.\n\nAround sundown, we had to climb up through a narrow pass from the valley floor. At worst, the army could pass through it marching two abreast. When we climbed the valley, we found ourselves riding across a broad plain, which would offer no obstacle to our march.\n\nWe rode for what seemed like hours. The young moon rose, dimly lighting our way. Soon, off to the north and east, we could see what seemed to be bonfires burning in the night.\n\nAthauhnu halted our march.\n\n\"It's worse now,\" he told me. \"Those are the settlements of my people . . . The Helvetii and those German pigs are burning everything.\"\n\n\"Ask him how much farther!\" Rubigo interrupted.\n\nI translated for Athauhnu. He shrugged, \"Not much farther. The south branch of the Rotonos is to our front. The bridge your Caisar wants is to the northwest . . . It is downstream from where the branches of the river join together and just below the bluff where the dun of my people sits.\"\n\n\"It's not much farther to the northwest,\" I told Rubigo.\n\n\"All that jabber to say 'not much farther'?\" the _decurio_ complained. \"These bloody wogs love the sound of their own voices.\"\n\nI didn't think it appropriate to point out to Rubigo that I was one of those \"wogs.\"\n\n\" _Da_!\" I told Athauhnu. \"Good! Let's go!\"\n\nIn less than an hour, we were on a hill overlooking the Rhodanus. Below us, we could make out the bridge spanning the river and the fires of the Roman engineers Caesar had sent out to strengthen it. On the other side of the Rhodanus, on a facing bluff, the torches set on the ramparts of the Dun of Lugus, the seat of the Sequani, were visible.\n\n\"We rest the horses,\" Rubigo said. \"Then, we get back to the army. The wog's right. We can be on the banks of the river by tomorrow night.\"\n\n\" _Beth a wnaeth uh un coch uhn ei thweud?_ \" Athauhnu asked. \"What did the Red One say?\"\n\n\"He said thanks,\" I told Athauhnu.\n\n\"So many words to say thanks,\" Athauhnu commented shaking his head. \"These Romans wag their tongues like old women.\"\n\nWe rode as hard as our tired horses could tolerate to get back to the army. The fires in the north and east seemed to have gone out, leading me to hope that the enemy had withdrawn its raiding parties back across the river.\n\n_Erratum_. I was wrong.\n\nWe were no more than ten thousand _passus_ back from the hilltop where we saw the bridge when we literally collided with another group of horsemen in the dark. A rider, no more than a pace or two to my left, grunted, \" _Hwa gange \u00f0\u00e6r_?\"\n\nI didn't understand what he said, but immediately the image of a blond giant guarding the blue doorway of a _lupinarium_ in Mediolanum appeared in my mind.\n\n\" _Germani_!\" I yelled drawing my gladius. \"Germans!\"\n\nI pulled my horse's head hard to the left into the German rider. He was slower to react than I was. I felt my gladius bite home; where, I wasn't sure. The rider grunted and went down.\n\nThe rest of the fight was a mad free-for-all in the dark. I could sense, more than see, figures swirling around me; I heard the sounds of steel on steel, the grunts of the wounded. Then, there was silence\u2014silence except for the sound of a woman weeping somewhere in the dark.\n\nI heard Rubigo call, \"Insubrecus! _Ub'es tu?_ \"\n\n\" _Adsum_!\" I responded.\n\nI felt him ride up next to me. \"Thank the gods! The general would have my hide if those Krauts got to you.\"\n\n\"I hear someone crying,\" I said.\n\n\"Prisoners,\" Rubigo explained. \"Those Kraut _mentulae_ were dragging their captives along with them. Your wog buddies are seeing to them. Tell them to hurry. We have to get back to the army.\"\n\nI dismounted and found Athauhnu. He was with a cluster of his men and the freed captives.\n\n\"Young women and a few young boys,\" he spat. \"They're from a settlement near the south branch of the Rotonos. The German pigs burned everything... killed everyone else except these few... they have value as slaves...\"\n\n\"The Red One wants to get back to the Romans,\" I said. \"How soon can you move?\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Athauhnu agreed. \"The faster the Caisar arrives with his warriors, the faster these pigs will flee from our lands... I will send two of my men to bring these captives to the Dun of Lugus... then we will go find your army.\"\n\nWe were quickly back on the road. We arrived at the site of the Roman _castra_ during the fourth watch, about an hour before dawn. The army was already awake and pulling down their fortifications. We found Caesar and the command group with the Tenth Legion.\n\nRubigo reported to the _Imperator_. \"The route is open all the way to the bridge at Lugdunum, maybe twenty, twenty-one-thousand _passus_ ,\" he said. \"One narrow spot along the way but the rest is wide open, dry and fairly flat. The enemy has patrols and raiding parties in the area, nothing big enough to threaten the army.\"\n\nCaesar was silent for a few heartbeats. Then, he responded, \" _Bene gestum_ , _Decurio_! Well done! Stand your men down until the third hour, then follow the army through to the bridge.\"\n\nCaesar turned to Labienus, \"Titus, collect two _turmae_ of cavalry from the Seventh and Ninth and one from the Tenth and have them report here at the head of the column!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_ ,\" Labienus responded. \"Yes, General.\"\n\n\"Rubigo, I have a favor to ask of you,\" Caesar said to the cavalry _decurio_.\n\n\"Anything, General,\" Rubigo responded.\n\n\"I know you're tired, lad, but you know the route up to the bridge,\" Caesar told him. \"So, I need you to get a fresh horse and guide my cavalry detail along the route ahead of the army.\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" Rubigo snapped.\n\nThen Caesar called over to a group of officers clustered about three paces off, \"Pulcher! I need you!\"\n\n\" _Quid vis tu, Caesar_?\" the man responded walking over to where we were. \"What do you want, Caesar?\"\n\n\"Pulcher, I'm giving you command of five _turmae_ of legionary cavalry,\" Caesar instructed the officer. \"Your mission is twofold. First, mark the route of march for the army. Have your troopers collect some of the markers the engineers use to survey the marching camps, and use them to mark the route. Is that clear?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo_!\" Pulcher responded.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Caesar continued. \"The redheaded _decurio_ from the Tenth . . . Rubigo's his name . . . he knows the route. Second, I want you to screen our route of march . . . Keep those barbarian _cunni_ off our tails as we move up to the river . . . The threat is basically from the north and east along the route, but don't be surprised if you run into stragglers . . . Grab two _tribuni_ to assist you\u2014a couple of those fuzz-faced _angusticlavi_ attached to the Tenth who don't seem to know what to do with themselves . . . I doubt the men will miss them . . . Any questions?\"\n\n\" _N'abeo_ ,\" Pulcher answered.\n\n\"Good man!\" Caesar encouraged him. \"As soon as the cavalry _turmae_ are assembled, brief them, and get on the road!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Caesar_ ,\" Pulcher said and walked over to where Labienus was assembling the cavalry detail.\n\nI heard Caesar mutter at the man's back, \"'Caesar,' he calls me . . . in front of the troops . . . like we were a couple of housewives discussing the price of fish in the middle of the forum . . . _Iste pedans mentula Claudianarum_!\"\n\nThen, he noticed me standing there, \"Ah! Insubrecus! Enjoy the ride?\"\n\n\"Yes, _Imperator_ ,\" I started, \"at least most of it. We ran into a German raiding party on the way back.\"\n\n\"Germans?\" Caesar questioned. \"How many? How'd you know they were Krauts?\"\n\n\"They spoke German, _Imperator_ ,\" I explained. \"We counted eight bodies when we were done . . . Don't think any of them got away.\"\n\n\"Germans on this side of the Rhenus?\" Caesar mused. \"Not good . . . not good at all . . . What do you make of our Gallic friends?\"\n\n\"They're on our side as long as we're fighting their enemies,\" I told him. \" _Hostes hostium meorum\u2014_ \"\n\n\" _Amici mei_ ,\" Caesar finished my sentence. \"The enemies of my enemies are my friends. . . . Best we could hope for . . . As long as we can, keep the tribes divided _\u2014_ \" Caesar stopped himself from continuing that thought, then asked me, \"Think you can stay in the saddle for another day?\"\n\n\" _Possum_ , _Imperator_ ,\" I agreed.\n\n\"Good lad!\" Caesar said. \"Have Valgus find you a fresh horse. I want to be on the Rhodanus before nightfall.\"\n\nAnd, we were. The van of our army was on the river and digging in by the seventh hour. Our engineers had reinforced and widened the bridge so that we could cross quickly at any time.\n\nA delegation of brightly attired Sequani crossed the bridge from Lugdunum. We were quickly informed that the main body of the Helvetii were still crossing the Arar about fifteen thousand _passus_ to the north. The Sequani offered to lead us to the site.\n\nI believe Caesar was tempted to move the army right out, but he knew that the soldiers would be too exhausted to give battle when they arrived. So, he decided to rest them in the relative security offered by the bluffs on the south side of the Rhodanus. He did send a detachment of legionary cavalry ahead with the Sequani to locate the enemy, survey the ground, and find a route of march for the infantry.\n\nI was so exhausted that my body ached. As soon as I could square away my mount at the horse stables, I found a quiet place in the back of the praetorians' tent to sleep. I felt as if I had just shut my eyes when I felt someone kicking my foot.\n\n\"Whaa . . . _qu'accidit_?\" I mumbled still half asleep.\n\n\"Rise and shine, sunshine!\" It was Valgus. \"We're moving out.\"\n\n\" _Quot'orarum?_ \" I mumbled.\n\n\"Midnight,\" Valgus said, \"signal for the third watch just sounded . . . Move it, Insubrecus . . . The old man's looking for you!\"\n\nI dragged myself up to a sitting position. I felt as if I had taken a beating. Every muscle and joint in my body was screaming. Outside, I could hear the activity of an entire legion in motion. I knew any minute the tent I was in would be coming down on top of me. Still, I searched for my boots in the dark before I realized I hadn't taken them off before I fell asleep.\n\nWhen I finally stumbled over to where the _praetorium_ should have been, the tent was already down, but I soon spotted Labienus briefing some _angusticlavi_ tribunes. They looked like boys; I was beginning to have difficulty remembering that I was only sixteen myself.\n\nWhen Labienus saw me, he said, \"Give me a little time here, Insubrecus, and I'll be with you.\"\n\nThe meeting finally broke up with a mixed, \" _A'mperi'tu', Legate_ ,\" and Labienus walked over to where I was waiting. He threw his arm around my shoulder and steered me toward the horse lines.\n\n\"Big doin', Insubrecus!\" he started. \"Our _exploratores_ got back about an hour ago. The Helvetii left one of their septs . . . a subtribe really . . . stranded on the east side of the Arar. But, that's not the big news . . . The bunch they stranded are the Tigurini . . . You got any idea what that means?\"\n\n\" _Non cognosco_ , _Legate_ ,\" I answered.\n\n\"Didn't think so,\" Labienus continued. \"The old man . . . and every Roman in this army, for that matter . . . has a score to settle with those _cunni_ . . . About fifty years back, they slaughtered a Roman army . . . killed a consul . . . one of his legates, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus . . . The old man is related to him through his wife . . . so this is personal . . . Caesar's _pietas_ demands he avenge Calpurnius and all those poor Roman _muli_ who were massacred by those long-haired Gauls. . . He pulls this off, and they'll be shouting Caesar's name in the forum for months!\"\n\nI wasn't sure how to react to this. _Pietas_. That was the same reason some Senator's brat was trying to have me killed. In this case, it meant an entire Roman army was crossing the Rhodanus to catch a bunch of Helvetii trapped on the wrong side of the Arar.\n\nWe arrived at the horse lines to find Caesar briefing his legates.\n\n\"Pulcher, you'll remain in command of the cavalry,\" Caesar was saying, \"three _turmae_ of legionary cavalry and a bunch of Sequani . . . They know the ground, so let them take the lead . . . You're to open the way for the infantry . . . Find a good place to engage the enemy . . . There's a lot of broken ground north of the river . . . forests . . . Find a place where I can deploy three legions . . . _acies triplex_ , if possible . . . the standard triple battle line . . . But do not allow yourself to become decisively engaged with the enemy . . . Is that clear?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Imperator_ ,\" I heard Pulcher reply.\n\nI noted that he had used the title _imperator_. Caesar must have had a talk with \"that bloody Claudian mentula.\"\n\n\"Bene,\" Caesar continued, \"Cotta, you're commanding the Tenth Legion, the vanguard; Vatinius, the Seventh; Pedius, the Ninth. Crassus, you will continue to act as the army's _quaestor_. You will remain here until the rest of the army has come up with the supply train. Keep that bridge over the Rhodanus open in case the army needs it to withdraw south. Any questions, gentlemen?\"\n\nThere were none. Caesar spotted Labienus and me standing to the side.\n\n\"Get enough sleep, Insubrecus?\" he asked.\n\n\" _Satis superque, Imperator_ ,\" I lied. \"More than enough, sir!\" There is never enough sleep for a soldier.\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Caesar clapped me on the shoulder. \"I'm detailing you to Pulcher . . . He has about a hundred Sequani horsemen under his command and doesn't speak a word of their language. . . . You're to act as his liaison with the Gauls.\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" I responded.\n\n\"Good lad!\" Caesar continued. \"Pulcher can be . . . well . . . a bit difficult. . . . He's real red-boot Patrician . . . and what's worse, a Claudian, and wants everyone to know it . . . I've let him know that you are _sub patrocinio meo_ . . . That should account for something. . . . I've given some thought to what you told me about the Gauls saying there are Romans working against me here . . . so I want you to watch and listen.\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" I responded again.\n\n\"Good lad!\" Caesar said clapping me on the shoulder. Then, he was off to whatever needed his attention.\n\n\"My advice is to stay clear of Pulcher as much as possible,\" Labienus was saying. \"Even for a patrician, he's a right bastard and there's history between his clan and the _gens Iulia_ . . . But right now, Caesar needs the good will of his brother, Appius, in the Senate down in Rome. . . . If anyone were working to undermine the old man out here, he'd be my lead suspect.\"\n\nI had no idea what Labienus was talking about, other than Pulcher was a _podex_ , but a _podex_ whose goodwill Caesar wanted to maintain, and as Caesar's client, I shouldn't rock the boat.\n\nI found that one of the stable slaves had saddled my horse; it was the black with the white snip that Valgus had me ride previously. I checked the saddle and bridle. Then, I tied down my _spatha_ to the left side of my saddle and my _loculus_ , the leather bag with my field rations, to the rear. I tied down my woolen cloak to the front of my saddle. I didn't know if we would have to sleep rough. I mounted and adjusted my _parma_ , so it hung comfortably on my back. I walked my horse a bit, just to check the saddle again, then went off to find Pulcher and the command group.\n\nThey were gathering outside the camp's _fossa_. There were two groups, the Roman legionary cavalry and a group of Sequani horsemen who remained detached from the Romans. I spotted a group of Roman officers in the vicinity of Pulcher and rode toward them. Pulcher seemed remote, distant even, from his own officers; none of them seemed to be willing to get any closer to the patrician than ten _pedes_.\n\nI rode up to him and reported, \"Gaius Marius Insubrecus, _miles_ , reporting to the _legatus_ as ordered!\"\n\nPulcher gave me a long stare. His blue eyes were as cold as a frozen pond in _Ianuarius_ ; his face looked as if he had unexpectedly gotten a whiff of an overused latrine.\n\n\"Insubrecus,\" he said, seemingly without moving his thin, bloodless lips, \"you're Caesar's boy . . . the little Gaul he picked up.\"\n\nThen, Pulcher turned his head and called over to his officers, \"Agrippa! _A'veni_!\"\n\nA mounted tribune separated himself from the group and road over to us. \" _Ti' adsum, Legate_?\"\n\n\"Agrippa,\" Pulcher said, as if he were already bored with having to talk to underlings, \"this is Caesar's . . . Caesar's interpreter for the barbarians . . . Collect him up, and take your post.\"\n\nI noticed the narrow, purple stripe on Agrippa's tunic. He was an equestrian, an _angusticlavus_ , a narrow-striper.\n\nPulcher pulled his horse's head around abruptly, as if to escape the stench of social inferiors, and joined the knot of Roman officers. The tribune who rode up to me seemed to have an open, honest face, the kind which is trusted implicitly. He leaned out from his saddle and extended his right hand to me. \"Lucius Vipsanius Agrippa,\" he announced, \"just call me Agrippa. And, you are?\"\n\nHe spoke Latin with a wide, country twang, which told me he wasn't from Rome\u2014not the city anyway. I took his offered hand, \"Gaius Marius Insubrecus, _Trib_ . . . I mean, Agrippa.\"\n\nWe rode over to where the Gauls had congregated. Agrippa said, \"I'm a bit anxious about all this . . . Pulcher expects me to command this group . . . I don't expect they'll welcome my . . . my involvement.\"\n\n\"Let's see what mood they're in,\" I started. Then, I saw Athauhnu among the riders.\n\n\"Athauhnu,\" I greeted him in Gallic, \"it is good to see you again, my friend!\"\n\n\"Ah . . . Arth Bek,\" he responded sourly, \"did the Caisar send you and this other one to ensure that the people of Soucana would behave themselves in their own lands?\"\n\n\"No, my friend,\" I hedged, \"we are here solely to help with communication between the people of Soucana and their Roman allies.\"\n\nAthauhnu snorted at that response.\n\n\"What is he saying, Insubrecus?\" Agrippa tried to interrupt, but I held my hand up asking for his silence.\n\nAthauhnu continued, \"My people can be great liars when they feel the need, but none can equal you Romans . . . Come . . . You will need to speak to the _penn uh marchoglu_.\"\n\n\" _Penn uh marchoglu_?\" I stumbled. \"Oh . . . the troop commander . . . Yes . . . lead on, Athauhnu.\"\n\nAs Athauhnu turned to lead us, I said to Agrippa, \"He's taking us to their commander.\"\n\nAthauhnu led us to another rider. By his armor, equipment, and trappings, I assumed he was of the Sequani nobility.\n\nAthauhnu said merely, \"These are _our_ Romans!\"\n\nThe man gave us a long look, then responded in accented Latin, \" _Salvete_! I am Madog mab Guuhn. I am _rex gentium_ . . . people-king of Sequani . . . I am also _dux_ , leader of cavalry.\"\n\nI did not respond, but nodded to Agrippa, who said, \" _Salve_ , _Dux_. I am called Agrippa. I am the tribune of the Roman legate, Pulcher, the leader of the Roman cavalry.\"\n\nMadog nodded at Agrippa, then asked, \"And who is other with you?\"\n\n\"This is _contubernalis meus_ ,\" Agrippa responded. \"He is called Insubrecus.\"\n\nMadog said to me in Gallic, \"You speak our language. Of what people are you?\"\n\n\"I am of the Insubres, from over the Alps,\" I answered in Gallic. Then I repeated myself in Latin for Agrippa: \" _De Insubrecis trans Alpes_.\"\n\nMadog nodded. Then, Agrippa stated, \"The legate Pulcher requests that you lead us to the Helvetii.\"\n\nMadog seemed to have some difficulty following Agrippa, and I couldn't imagine Pulcher _requesting_ anything of a Gaul _\u2014_ or a Roman, for that matter. I was just about to translate, when Madog said, \"We go! But, I show you something . . . interest of Romans?\"\n\nMadog reached into his saddlebag, pulled something out, and offered it to Agrippa. Agrippa took it, examined it for a heartbeat, and handed it to me. It was a _quadriga_ , a denarius coin, a new one, hardly used, no nicks or shavings. It had a small hole driven through it.\n\n\"Madog,\" Agrippa asked, \"where did you get this?\"\n\n\"Helvetii,\" Madog responded. \"A dux of cavalry . . . He wear ten on neck . . . How do you say?\" Madog looked over to me and asked, \" _Sut ur udych uhn dwed 'muclis' un Ladine_?\"\n\n\" _Monile_ ,\" I told him. \"Necklace.\"\n\nMadog grunted, \"He wear necklace . . . I kill him . . . I take necklace.\"\n\nI looked closely at the coin. The one side had the expected image of the _quadrigae_ , the chariot team of four horses. I flipped it over and saw the image of the goddess Venus, the patroness of _gens Iulia_. Then, I realized that the coin was minted only last year, while Caesar was consul. How would a minor Helvetian chief have ten new denarii?\n\nI asked Madog, \"May I keep this?\"\n\nMadog shrugged, \"I gift you . . . We friends . . . I have more.\"\n\n\"Is this significant?\" Agrippa asked me.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" I answered. \"It may fit in with something I overheard.\"\n\nJust then we heard Pulcher's voice, \"Agrippa . . . are you going to get those barbarians moving, or are you planning a state breakfast for them?\"\n\nMadog gave no sign that he understood what Pulcher said. Agrippa said to him, \" _Eamus, Dux_! Let's get going, Chief!\"\n\nMadog grunted and started shouting orders to his troop. As they began to move off into the night, Agrippa asked me, \"This Madog . . . he's king of the Sequani?\"\n\n\"King of the Sequani?\" I repeated. \"No . . . he's one of their _brena leygo_ . . . a leader of a community . . . The Gauls call their leaders _brena_ . . . ' _rex_ ' in Latin . . . Technically, my father's a _brena qwartego_ . . . _rex pecoris_. . . a 'cattle king' because he owns a herd.\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo_ ,\" Agrippa muttered. I doubt that he did.\n\nOur approach to the enemy was uneventful. They didn't bother screening their position at all. By the end of the fourth watch, when the sun was still below the horizon but there was already enough light to see over short distances, we were on a wooded ridge overlooking the encampment of the Tigurini. There were no signs of any security or fortifications around their encampment. The night fires were smoldering heaps, and nothing in the camp seemed to be stirring except some hungry dogs. We watched as a man sleepily stumbled out of a lean-to tent, urinated just beyond its exit, and then reentered, presumably to go back to sleep.\n\nMadog grunted at us, \"They pigs . . . Helvetii . . . They dirt my sword to kill.\"\n\nBy the end of the first hour, Caesar and his command group joined us on the ridge. He quickly surveyed his objective. There still wasn't much activity in the valley below. Some of the Tigurini were milling about on the river's edge where they had tied up some boats and barges. But, their ferrying operation had yet to start. We could see no sign of any activity on the far side of the Arar. The rest of the Helvetii had apparently moved on and expected this bunch to catch up.\n\nCaesar quickly surveyed the ground and assessed the capabilities of the enemy.\n\n\"We'll attack on a narrow front from our route of march, straight up the river valley from the south,\" he was saying to Labienus. \"One legion, I think . . . The Tenth is in the van . . . so they go in . . . _acies triplex_ . . . four cohorts in the front rank, then three and three . . . We'll use the cavalry to screen the right flank . . . The river will seal the left.\"\n\n\"That will leave the enemy's rear open,\" Labienus pointed out. \"Do you want to move some of our troops around to seal it?\"\n\nCaesar thought about that, then said, \"No . . . that will take time, and the enemy might detect the maneuver . . . Besides, even a rat is dangerous when it's trapped . . . I _want_ them to be able to escape . . . As soon as we hit them, half their troops will run if they believe they can escape . . . The rest will break as soon as they know the women and children are safe . . . I want to break this bunch, not annihilate them.\"\n\nLabienus nodded, and said, \" _Compre'endo, Imperator_.\"\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Caesar concluded. \"We'll keep the Seventh and Ninth in reserve behind the Tenth. Issue the orders to the legates. I want to know immediately when the Tenth is in position.\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" Labienus said.\n\nLabienus retreated back into the woodline. Caesar remained on the ridge, surveying the enemy in the valley below. Then, he spotted Agrippa and me.\n\n\"Ah . . . Insubrecus!\" he started. \"How did you enjoy your midnight ride? And you are . . . Agrippa . . . Lucius Vipsanius Agrippa? . . . You're one of the new _angusticlavi tribuni_ attached to the Tenth? You're an Umbrian . . . from Asisium, I believe?\"\n\n\" _Recte, Imperator_!\" Agrippa snapped. \"I am privileged that the _imperator_ knows my name!\"\n\n\"Privileged?\" Caesar repeated the word. \"It's the duty of a commander to know his officers, Agrippa . . . Remember that if you're ever given a command . . . Know all your officers . . . and all your men for that matter.\"\n\n\" _His meminero, Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa agreed.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Caesar muttered, then seemed to retreat into his own thoughts as he watched the doomed Tigurini in the valley below.\n\n\" _Imperator_ , a word?\" I interrupted his musing.\n\n\" _Quid vis tu?_ \" he responded.\n\nI handed him the coin. \"Madog, the chief of the Sequani cavalry, gave this to me.\"\n\n\"It's a _denarius_ ,\" he said. Then, he flipped it over. \"One of mine . . . What's the point, Insubrecus?\"\n\n\"Madog took it from a dead Helvetian . . . a minor officer . . . but the man had ten of these, _Imperator_ ,\" I began to explain.\n\n\"So, what you're saying is that if a minor officer of the Helvetii had ten of these, then the enemy possesses quite a few more?\" Caesar interrupted. \"And, they're of a new minting . . . one of mine, ironically . . . so the Helvetii came into possession of these recently.\"\n\n\" _Certe, Imperator_ ,\" I agreed.\n\nCaesar continued, \"And, you believe this is consistent with the rumors of Roman influence on the Helvetii and a possible conspiracy by Romans against me and this army?\"\n\n\" _Credo, Imperator_!\" I again agreed.\n\nCaesar stared silently at the coin in his hand. Then, he flipped it back to me, saying, \"You may be right about this, Insubrecus. I'm not completely convinced, but I am intrigued . . . Keep your eyes and ears open . . . Let me know immediately if you discover anything relevant.\"\n\nI was just about to respond when we heard a bugle signal from the valley below. We watched the Tigurini freeze.\n\n\" _Al'iact'est_ ,\" Caesar stated. \"The die is thrown, Insubrecus! _Cornucen_!\"\n\nA bugler appeared from out of the woodline.\n\n\"Signal 'Tenth Legion' and 'Attack'!\" Caesar ordered.\n\nAs the man complied, Caesar shouted, \"Horse!\"\n\nA member of the praetorian detail came forward with Caesar's white stallion. Caesar quickly removed his red cloak from the saddle and draped it over his shoulders. Then, he leaped up on the horse.\n\n\"The men should know their general is watching them, Insubrecus,\" he said to me. Then, he rode forward to the edge of the ridge.\n\nBy this time, the encampment of the Tigurini in the valley below was swirling in chaos as if someone had kicked a beehive. To my left, I saw the first ranks of the Tenth Legion clear the woodline. At first, there were only two cohorts on line. The left-most cohort had its flank anchored on the riverbank. As the Roman line moved forward into the widening valley, a third cohort swung on line around the right flank of the advancing legion.\n\n\"Malleus knows how to maneuver men according to the terrain,\" Caesar said to no one in particular.\n\nThere was some order emerging in the Tigurini camp. I could see warriors beginning to form a battle line on the southern edge of the encampment, facing the advancing legion. Others _\u2014_ men, women, and children _\u2014_ were fleeing toward the woods to the north.\n\nI heard Labienus say to Caesar, \"We have an audience!\" He was pointing across the Arar.\n\nI looked where Labienus was pointing and saw a group of Gallic horsemen.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Caesar grunted. \"Let them report what they see to the rest, and we may finish this campaign before the new crops break through the soil.\"\n\nThe Tenth already had four cohorts on line, facing the enemy. The second line had also emerged from the woodline. The front line advanced to within twenty paces of the Tigurini warriors. Then, the first two men across the entire Roman front launched their _pila_ at the enemy. Then, the next two, then the next! Before the third volley of _pila_ had hit, the Roman front ranks, their _gladii_ bared, were charging into the enemy.\n\nIt wasn't much of a battle. The legionaries mowed through the ill-prepared Tigurini. Even from where I stood, I could see the legionaries advance through the enemy ranks with a combination of punching shields and stabbing short swords. Isolated knots of Tigurini warriors would temporarily hold out against the relentless advance of the Roman battle line, only to be surrounded and overwhelmed. The cohorts had pushed the barbarians about a third of the way across their encampment before they finally broke and began fleeing for the safety of the wooded hills to their rear.\n\nWhen this happened, Caesar again summoned his _cornucen_ and commanded, \"Signal 'Tenth Legion' and 'Halt'!\"\n\nThe troops in the valley below executed Caesar's order. I could hear them cheering across the battle line.\n\nCaesar called for Pulcher. \" _Legate_ , take your cavalry and seal the enemy in from the north and west . . . Do not engage unless you're attacked, but do not become decisively engaged . . . Withdraw and send back for infantry reinforcement if they attempt to punch through you . . . I just want them contained!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" Pulcher's grasp of military courtesy seemed to be steadily improving.\n\n\"Labienus!\" Caesar summoned. \"Detail the _fabricatores_ , the engineers of all three legions, to bridge the Arar! I want this army across by sundown!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\"\n\n\"Agrippa! Are you still here?\" Caesar demanded.\n\n\" _Adsum, Imperator_!\" Agrippa responded.\n\nCaesar ordered, \"Get down there to the Tenth . . . Find Malleus, the _primus pilus_ . . . Tell him I want his second-line cohorts, all three of them, across the river to screen the bridge building . . . They can use the Tigurini's boats to get themselves across . . . You're in command of that detail . . . Questions?\"\n\n\" _N'abeo, Imperator_!\" Agrippa snapped.\n\n\"Good lad!\" Caesar encouraged. \"Get it done! Insubrecus!\"\n\n\" _Adsum ti', Imperator_!\" I responded.\n\n\"You stay with me,\" Caesar directed. \"Pulcher should be bringing in some prisoners soon, and I want to be sure they understand my will.\"\n\n# VII.\n\n# _De Clementia Caesaris et Offensione Antigua_\n\n# CAESAR'S CLEMENCY AND AN ANCIENT PROVOCATION\n\n_Divico respondit ita Helvetios a maioribus suis institutos esse uti obsides accipere non dare consuerint_.\n\n\"Divico answers that from the time of their ancestors, the Helvetians have been accustomed to take, not give, hostages.\"\n\n(from Gaius Marius Insubrecus' notebook of Caesar's journal)\n\nCaesar had the bridges built and three legions across the Arar by nightfall. At the first hour of the next day, he dispatched a strong cavalry scout west under Labienus to locate the main body of the Helvetii, and by the fourth hour, the rest of the army came up from the Rhodanus and began crossing the Arar.\n\nThe first Gallic embassy appeared at the sixth hour while Caesar was supervising the deployment of his trailing legions west of the Arar. A rider from Pulcher's cavalry detachment, a _tribunus angusticlavus_ , approached Caesar.\n\n_\"Ave, Imperator_!\" the tribune saluted Caesar, \"The legate, Caius Claudius Pulcher, sends greetings and reports that a delegation of nobles from the Tigurini tribe is requesting an audience with the _imperator_. The legate believes they have come to surrender and wish to beg for clemency.\"\n\n\"You're Tertius Nigidius Caecina, nephew of the Senator, Publius Nigidius Figulus, are you not?\" Caesar responded.\n\n\" _Sum, Imperator_!\" the man responded.\n\n\"I've read your uncle's _Commentarii_ . . . Quite impressive . . . Is he still dabbling in Etruscan augury?\" Caesar asked.\n\n\"Yes, _Imperator_ ,\" Caecina answered with a laugh. \"My aunt is always complaining of the stinking sheep livers he constantly drags home from the gods know where to stink up the house.\"\n\n_\"Foro viri, foco mulieres regnant_ ,\" Caesar chuckled. \"Men rule in the forum, women in the home . . . Please convey my compliments to the legate, and ask him to deliver the Tigurini delegation to me at the site of their former camp.\"\n\nCaecina rode off to deliver Caesar's message. Caesar then turned to Valgus, who was commanding his mounted praetorian detachment, and said, \"Post a man on this side of the river where he can see the delegation arriving from the north. When the Gauls appear, he is to alert me.\"\n\nValgus complied while Caesar continued supervising the crossing and quartering of the army. No more than half the hour had passed before the praetorian returned to report the approaching delegation.\n\nAgain, Caesar summoned Valgus. \" _Decurio_ , take twenty men and cross the Arar. I want you to take up a position just south of where yesterday's battle was fought, so the Gauls will have to ride past it,\" Caesar instructed. \"Then, wait for me there.\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" Valgus snapped.\n\nCaesar dawdled on the west side of the Arar for a while longer, then finally crossed the bridge to receive the Gallic legation. As we rode to where Valgus had established himself, we realized that we were far enough away from yesterday's battlefield that the flies, now feasting on the bodies of the dead Tigurini, would not be a great nuisance. We could see the Gallic embassy and their Roman escort waiting some fifty paces away. They also didn't seem too eager to get close to yesterday's butchery of their comrades.\n\nCaesar halted about twenty paces away from the Gauls. He turned his head in my direction, and asked, \"What should I expect, Insubrecus?\"\n\nI thought about the question for a few heartbeats, then responded, \"If they ride up to you, they expect to negotiate with you as equals. If they dismount and walk to you, they're surrendering.\"\n\nNo sooner had I said that than the leader of the delegation, a tall warrior, with gray streaked through his black hair, dismounted, removed his helmet, and held up his wand of negotiation for all to see. Then, he strode forward to where Caesar remained seated on his horse.\n\n_\"Rwy'n cuhfarch uh Caisaro meoun hedouch_ ,\" the warrior said.\n\nCaesar recognized his own name and asked, \"Why does this man address me by my name?\"\n\n\"He means no disrespect, _Imperator_ ,\" I cautioned. \"He said _uh Caisaro_ . . . He thinks that 'Caesar' is your title.\"\n\nCaesar grunted, then said, \"Tell him Caesar welcomes him. Ask him what he wants.\"\n\nI translated this for the man, who then launched himself into a long, rambling Gallic oration. I kept up as best I could. The man was an under-chief of the Tigurini, but now found himself in command of the entire host since both the high-chief and his _etifeto_ , his heir, fell in yesterday's battle defending their people. He understood that there was a debt of blood between his people and the Romans, since the Tigurini had destroyed a Roman army almost a generation ago. The man suggested that yesterday's battle had satisfied that debt, and now the Tigurini and the Romans should live in peace. He offered to obey the Roman Caesar and do whatever the Roman Caesar now requested of him. Then, there would be peace between their people.\"\n\nCaesar thought about what the man had said, then said to me, \"Tell me . . . What is his name, Insubrecus?\"\n\nI asked the Gaul, _\"Mae Caisaro uhn gofun bet uhou eich enou, Prifo_?\"\n\nThe man responded, \"Please, tell the Caisar that I beg his pardon for my discourtesy. I am Tewdour mab Owain.\"\n\nI told this to Caesar. He responded, \"Tell Tudurmapowin this: First, he is to return his people to this place. Second, they are to bury their dead. Third, they are to return to their homeland. This is the Caisar's wish. Then, the _lemures_ of our dead and his dead will rest, and there will be peace between our people.\"\n\nI told this to the chief. The look of relief was apparent on his face. He had anticipated humiliation, decimation, and slavery for his people. Caesar's terms were more than generous.\n\nWe were just about to terminate the negotiation when Tewdour raised his wand of negotiation to get our attention.\n\n\"The Caisar's clemency is great!\" he began. \"Let me grant him a gift in return. Tell the Caisar that the People of the Dark Moon are not his friends, although they pretend to be. Their desire is his destruction. It was they who invited the Helvetii to migrate into their lands. It was they who encouraged the Helvetii to devastate the lands of their enemies, the People of Soucana. It was they who invited the Germans over the Rhenus with promises of fertile land and loot. Also, tell the Caisar, when the People of the Dark Moon first came among the Helvetii, in the time when Owain mab Aflon was the _orgorix_ , Romans came with them, Romans bearing silver for the war chief of the Helvetii.\"\n\nI translated this for Caesar. He showed little surprise at this information. \"The _orgorix_ ,\" he mused. \"That must be the one we call Orgetorix . . . That would have been back when Messala and Piso were consuls . . . Piso has connections to the Claudii.\"\n\nThen Caesar said, \"Can he describe these Romans?\"\n\nI conveyed Caesar's question to Tewdour, but he just shrugged his shoulders. Then, I spotted the tribune, Caecina, waiting in the distance with the Roman cavalry escort.\n\n\"I have an idea,\" I told Caesar. \"Would you ask Caecina to join us?\"\n\nCaesar shrugged, then called, \" _Caecina_! _Ad me venias_!\"\n\nThe legate joined our group. When he was next to me, I slapped my chainmail _lorica_ then his plate _lorica_ , and asked Tewdour, \"Can you tell me what armor the Romans wore?\"\n\nTewdour said, \"Most wore armor like yours . . . good ringed iron . . . but one wore a breastplate like the other . . . hammered bronze.\"\n\nI reached out and grabbed the bottom of Caecina's tunic, and asked, \"The one in bronze . . . was his tunic like this one?\"\n\n\"Like that,\" Tewdour affirmed, \"but the stripe was wider.\"\n\nI told Caesar, \"There was a Roman officer with the group, a _laticlavus_ , a wide-striper.\"\n\nAgain, Caesar grunted. \"A senior tribune . . . a senatorial . . . Ask him how the Orgetorix died.\"\n\nWhen I did, Tewdour just shrugged and said, \"He just died.\"\n\nWhen I translated the response for Caesar, he just shook his head. \"Sometimes men just die . . . It is their fate . . . Tell him we are done here . . . I expect to see his people gathered in this place by sundown.\"\n\nI told Tewdour Caesar's wishes. He made no move to depart.\n\n\"Why isn't he going about his business?\" Caesar asked me.\n\n\"He doesn't want to be rude,\" I told Caesar. \"You have precedence here. It is for you to depart first.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Caesar said and pulled the head of his horse around toward the bridges on the Arar. \"Caecina, with me!\" he called over his shoulder.\n\nWhen we were a few paces away, Caesar instructed Caecina, \"The Twelfth Legion is approaching the crossing. Go to their _primus pilus_ . . . Nerva is his name . . . Tell him to detail four cohorts to remain on this side of the river and guard the Tigurini . . . I will give them two days to bury their dead and rest . . . Then, I want them heading east, back to their homeland . . . The four cohorts from the Twelfth and two _alae_ of their cavalry will form a _vexillatio_ , an independent detachment, to escort them . . . You will command it.\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" Caecina responded, obviously pleased about being given his first independent command.\n\n\"And, Caecina,\" Caesar continued, \"the Twelfth is a new legion . . . Most of the men haven't been blooded . . . Tell Nerva to detail one of his more experienced centurions to you . . . Sanga, I think . . . the _pilus prior_ of the Third Cohort . . . Yes . . . Sanga will fit the bill nicely.\"\n\nCaecina rode off to find Nerva and the Twelfth Legion. Caesar led us back toward the bridge. As we rode, he asked me, \"Are you surprised by my treatment of the Tigurini?\"\n\n\"I can't say I understand it, _Patrone_ ,\" I answered.\n\n\"Why force a man to do what you want when you can convince him it's what he wants?\" Caesar answered.\n\n\"I'm still not sure I understand,\" I admitted.\n\n\"With a large enemy force ahead of us, it makes no sense tactically to have another large enemy force in our rear,\" Caesar lectured. \"And, I don't have the time or the manpower to police them all. Even if I were to do that, logistically speaking, what would I do with all those prisoners until I could unload them on the slave traders? No . . . better to be done with them . . . The real threat is still ahead of us.\"\n\nCaesar didn't wait for my response, but continued, \"Strategically speaking, the only way to secure the _imperium_ is to keep the Germans east of the Rhenus . . . and the best way to do that is to maintain an alliance of strong Gallic tribes along the river . . . Even if they are not especially well-disposed towards Rome, they will not allow the Germans to cross and steal their lands . . . Rome needs the Tigurini back on the Rhenus and needs them strong enough to resist German incursions.\"\n\nAt the time, I had no idea why Caesar was sharing these thoughts with me. I have since learned that great men often make decisions based on instinct, and only later do they try to understand why they did what they did. Weak men fail to act and claim the issue was too complex.\n\nWhen we crossed one of the bridges to the west side of the Arar, we encountered Labienus, back from his reconnaissance of the Helvetii.\n\n\"Ah, Labienus!\" Caesar greeted him. \"What news?\"\n\n\"The main body of the enemy is no more than five thousand _passus_ to the west,\" Labienus reported.\n\n\"Five thousand _passus_?\" Caesar repeated. \"They are certainly in no hurry to escape.\"\n\nLabienus almost sighed, \" _Imperator_ , I don't think they see the need to escape . . . We couldn't get an accurate count, but there must be tens of thousands of them on the march . . . They fear us no more than an elephant fears a gnat.\"\n\nCaesar did some quick calculations, \"A hundred thousand Gauls . . . Fifty thousand are male . . . Twenty to twenty-five thousand of fighting age . . . No more than ten thousand warriors . . . The rest are just _pagani_ with sharp sticks . . . We have six Roman legions . . . I have almost twenty-seven thousand troops in the field, according to this morning's strength report . . . What need do I have for caution?\"\n\n\"There may be more than one hundred thousand out there on the march . . . many more,\" Labienus answered. \"We need to get an accurate strength assessment before we decide to be too aggressive.\"\n\nCaesar seemed to mull that over for a few heartbeats. \"Recte,\" he acceded. \"With that many out there, we're not about to lose them . . . and at their rate of march, they will not outrun us . . . We will follow at a safe distance until we have a clear idea of their intention and strength . . . Hopefully, we can entice them to attack us on terrain of our choosing.\"\n\nLabienus nodded, then said, \"We detected a small band of them heading back in our direction. We think it's some sort of delegation.\"\n\nCaesar looked at me questioningly.\n\n\"If they want to talk, they'll be carrying the truce wands like the others,\" I told him.\n\nCaesar looked over to Labienus, who just shrugged. \"We didn't get that close, _Imperator_ ,\" he said.\n\nCaesar grunted in response. \"We'll see what they have to say, Titus,\" he said to Labienus. \"Perhaps we can finish this thing here and now, the way we convinced the Tigurini to return to their lands on the Rhenus. When they arrive, lead them to a spot where they can see what we are doing here . . . There's a small hillock between the _castra_ of the Tenth and the Seventh Legions . . . That would be perfect . . . I will meet their delegation there . . . Perhaps the sight of Roman power and competence will convince them to return to their homeland.\"\n\nThe Helvetii delegation arrived at the ninth hour. This time, Caesar remained mounted, waiting for them on the hillock, overlooking his legions on the west side of the river. The Helvetii could also see the bridges over the Arar and beyond the river, the remnants of the defeated Tigurini. The message was clear: in one day we defeated one of your tribes and accomplished a river crossing that took you weeks.\n\nThe leader of the Helvetian delegation was a giant of a man on a black stallion. His long, flowing gray hair hung freely from his bare head; his long, gray chin-length mustachios seemed to bristle with pride and defiance. As he waved his wand of negotiation negligently in our direction, the sun glinted off the golden armbands that circled his bulging biceps.\n\nHe rode directly at Caesar. At two paces away, he pulled his horse's head abruptly to the right; the animal reared a bit and exposed the warrior's long, Gallic sword in a gold-wired scabbard hanging down his left side. He stilled his mount and stared directly at Caesar with cold, piercing blue eyes for a few heartbeats.\n\nIt was then I realized that over his chainmail _lorica_ , his chest was festooned with Roman _phalerae_ \u2014gold and silver sculpted disks awarded to centurions and rankers for acts of valor. No legionary would willingly surrender such treasures. They were trophies taken from Roman dead.\n\n\"So, Roman, you are the one called Caesar?\" he said in Latin.\n\nCaesar remained silent, perfectly still.\n\n\"Are you surprised I speak your language?\" the warrior continued. \"I learned it from my slaves, who were once soldiers in the army you sent against us many years ago, when we killed your chief, the one you called 'consul.'\"\n\nI heard Labienus suck in his breath when the warrior said that. This was not a negotiation, I realized. This man had come to challenge Caesar, to provoke him into combat.\n\n\"I am Dewi mab Coel . . . Divico to you Romans . . . Know that it was I who was _orgorix_ of the Helvetii the day we slaughtered the Romans and took ten thousand heads.\"\n\n\" _Orgorix_?\" Labienus whispered to me.\n\n\"Slaughter-king,\" I translated for him. \"War chief.\"\n\n\" _Podex_ ,\" Labienus hissed and spit on the ground.\n\n\"The whitened skulls of Roman dead decorate our feasting halls and lodges to this day . . . And now you have the temerity to attack us? Know you, Roman, the fact that you were able to ambush and slaughter one of our minor clans, while they were trapped against a river and burdened with women and children, does not impress us . . . Roman deception and cruelty has been known to us for many generations . . . We will offer you this . . . The valleys of the Rhodanus are wide and fertile . . . We will accept any of them and settle there . . . Know you, Roman, the Helvetii have learned from their ancestors to rely on valor and strength, not on deceit and ambush . . . Unless you want to make of this ground, on which we now stand, another monument to Roman defeat and shame, you will give us the land we demand and withdraw your soldiers across the Rhodanus . . . Then, there will be peace between our nations.\"\n\n\"Quite an oration,\" Labienus hissed. \"He couldn't provoke Caesar more if he tried.\"\n\nI looked over toward Caesar. His face was as white as a candidate's toga. His lower jaw was set slightly forward, and his thin lips were drawn tightly across his face like a knife scar. I later learned that this expression was the only telltale sign of his rage. Caesar was too controlled ever to demonstrate it, especially when facing an adversary.\n\nFinally, Caesar spoke, \"Well, do I remember that of which you speak. No Roman will ever forget the tragedy that befell our nation and the army of Lucius Cassius Longinus . . . Many families still mourn that day . . . Many still desire blood vengeance to appease the restless _lemures_ of their murdered ancestors . . . You say that the Helvetii are a people of valor and courage . . . I tell you that you are a liar . . . You defeated Longinus only by deceit and ambush . . . You feigned friendship with the Roman people and delivered treachery at the end of a spear . . . Know you, Divico of the Helvetii, that, although members of my own _familia_ lost their lives on that fateful day, I, Gaius Iulius Caesar, proconsul of the Roman people, commander of this army, offer you these terms for peace . . . First, you will return to the lands you abandoned on the Rhenus . . . Second, you will give restitution to the allies of the Roman people whose lands you have pillaged and destroyed . . . Third, you will surrender hostages to me to ensure your submission and good behavior . . . Only then am I willing to let the Helvetii leave this place in peace . . . And also know this, Divico of the Helvetii . . . The gods despise hubris . . . They do seem, at times, to grant their favor, but they do so only to heighten despair when they withdraw it. What is your answer, Divico?\"\n\nDivico's eyes glared at Caesar like burning blue embers. \"Roman! Since the time of our ancestors, the Helvetii are accustomed to taking hostages, not surrendering them!\"\n\nHe held up the wand of negotiation, broke it in two, spit on the pieces, and threw them at the feet of Caesar's horse. He pulled back on his reins, causing his black stallion to rear and turn, then galloped off the hillock, followed by his entourage.\n\nCaesar calmly watched Divico ride off. Then, he turned to Labienus and said, \"It appears that our negotiation with the Helvetii has ended. Come with me. We have work to do.\" Then, he rode off toward the _castrum_ of the Tenth Legion.\n\nCaesar had established his _praetorium_ with the Tenth Legion. When we arrived at the headquarters tent, Caesar said, \"Accompany me, Insubrecus!\"\n\nWe entered Caesar's operations area; the maps were already hung, and soldiers were busy making notations. I could easily see the location of our army on the left side of a squiggly blue line that ran down from the top of the map. The Arar, I assumed. It led downward to another, thicker blue line that seemed to plunge toward the bottom left corner of the map: the Rhodanus. About a _cubitus_ to the left of our location was a large red marker: the Helvetii.\n\nWhile Caesar's body slave was helping him out of his armor, he was talking to Labienus. \"That was the best theater I've seen since I left Rome! Divico! He could easily upstage Plautus' braggart. Did you see the size of that sword? How does the man walk without tripping?\"\n\nLabienus, his helmet under his arm, answered, \"Could he have really been the Helvetian commander when they ambushed Longinus? That would make him what . . . sixty, if he's a day? No one could look like that at sixty.\"\n\n\"What did you think of that act, Insubrecus?\" Caesar asked me.\n\n\"He was trying to provoke you, _Patrone_ ,\" I said stiffly.\n\n\"Of course he was,\" Caesar answered. \"I sometimes forget how young you are, Gaius . . . You haven't had time to develop a sense of irony yet.\"\n\nI too was beginning to forget how young I was.\n\nCaesar stood staring at the situation map. \"I feel a bit like that boy in the children's story . . . the one who thinks he's captured a lion because he has ahold of its tail,\" he was saying. \"I can neither let go nor continue to hold on.\"\n\nAt his side, Labienus just grunted his consent.\n\nCaesar continued, \"Our first priority is to assess the enemy's intention. I assume they will continue moving west across Aeduan territory, but if they were to turn and attack us with our backs to the river, it could get messy. So, let's get a strong cavalry screen between us and them.\"\n\nAgain, Labienus nodded his agreement.\n\n\"Second, we need to assess their fighting strength,\" Caesar said. \"That's going to take some aggressive reconnaissance. Do we have enough cavalry?\"\n\n\"We have the legionary cavalry,\" Labienus calculated. \"That gives us fifteen _turmae_ , about 450 troopers . . . There is a scattering of native cavalry . . . They come and go as they please . . . I can only estimate their numbers.\"\n\n\"Are there any auxiliary cohorts available?\" Caesar asked.\n\n\"The _Prima Gallica_ is still near Gennava,\" Labienus estimated. \"And, there's a Syrian outfit down near Massalia.\"\n\n\"Leave the _Prima Gallica_ where it is,\" Caesar instructed. \"The Allobroges are not reliable. I want an effective Roman force sitting on them while we're tied down with the Helvetii. Send down to the Syrian unit. Have them send up their cavalry cohort . . . _stat'_ . . . What about that native cavalry?\"\n\nLabienus rubbed his chin. \"It's difficult to give an exact count . . . Between the Aedui and the Sequani, there must be at least three hundred mounted troops.\"\n\n\"Insubrecus! Will the Gauls submit to Roman military authority?\" Caesar asked.\n\nI shrugged, \"As long as they fear the Helvetii more than they resent us . . . they'll cooperate . . . How much _authority_ they'll accept . . . that's difficult to say.\"\n\nCaesar addressed Labienus, \"Organize the natives into _turmae_ , according to tribe . . . say, three _alae_ each . . . We'll assign an experienced Roman tribune to each cohort . . . Who do we have available for senior commanders?\"\n\nLabienus stared at the ceiling of the tent, thinking. \"There's certainly Publius Considius\u2014\"\n\nCaesar interrupted, \"He's not senior enough for overall command of the cavalry . . . plenty of experience, but not of _laticlavus_ standing . . . And he's getting a bit long in the tooth! _Verpa Martis_! The man served under Sulla! I'm thinking Crassus as my cavalry legate . . . I'm sure he's fed up with pushing mules.\"\n\nLabienus' eyebrow shot up. \"Publius Licinius Crassus?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Caesar confirmed, \"let's see if the boy has some grit hiding below all that flash . . . He's proven a competent enough _quaester_ . . . We'll assign Considius to him and . . . what was the name of that _angusticlavus_ from the Tenth who commanded the advance party across the Arar? . . . Agrippa . . . yes . . . Assign Lucius Vipsanius Agrippa to him, too.\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu',\"_ Labienus agreed. \"And, who replaces Crassus as quartermaster?\"\n\n\"Pulcher,\" Caesar said without hesitation. \"I think a healthy dose of mule shit is just what that Claudian twit deserves . . . Yes . . . Pulcher is perfect for pushing the baggage . . . Insubrecus!\"\n\n\"Yes, _Patrone_?\" I responded.\n\n\"You get along with Agrippa, do you not?\" Caesar asked.\n\n\"Yes, _Patrone_.\"\n\n\"How long have you been _sub aquilis?\"_ Caesar asked.\n\nI had to think. I was beginning to feel as if I had always been a soldier. \"Just over three months, _Patrone_.\"\n\n\"Just over three months,\" Caesar mused a bit and seemed to chuckle. Then, he said, \"I'm appointing you to the rank of _decurio_ . . . at least while you're assigned to Crassus' command . . . Do a good job, and you can keep the appointment.\"\n\nLabienus slapped me on the back, \"Congratulations, _Decurio_!\"\n\n\"I'm parched . . . Being scared to death by a blowhard Gallic giant is thirsty work,\" Caesar announced. _\"Scriba!\"_\n\nI heard a voice from the other side of the partition, _\"Quid vis tu, Imperator_?\"\n\n\"Vinum!\" Caesar ordered.\n\n\"Merum?\" the voice called. \"Straight up?\"\n\n\"No . . . _mixtum_ . . . bring a pitcher of water,\" Caesar instructed. \"We still have work to do,\" he said to us and winked.\n\n\"Back to our discussion . . . the cavalry . . . The Eleventh and Twelfth are mostly Gallic units . . . Let's send over to the _primus pilus_ of each . . . We need Gallic speakers who can ride . . . like Insubrecus here . . . good troopers who are considered promotable . . . We'll make them _decuriones_ and assign one to each of the native turmae.\"\n\nI heard Labienus mumble, \" _A'mperi'tu'!\"_ I looked over at him. He was scribbling notes on a _tabula_.\n\nCaesar continued, \"Enemy intention and strength are our first two priorities. I need to know whether to avoid contact with the Helvetii or provoke it. We can establish our main supply depot at Lugdunum . . . That will give us access to both rivers . . . But my fear is that the Helvetii are going to move straight across country, away from the navigable rivers. That will stretch our supply lines . . . We may need to draw rations and fodder from our allies.\"\n\n\"That could prove a problem, Caesar,\" Labienus cautioned. \"This far north, it's the beginning of planting season, and I doubt the Gauls have a great store of food left over after the winter.\"\n\nCaesar seemed to think about that for a moment, then shrugged, \"It doesn't matter . . . If the enemy moves into the hills, we can have each man carry five-day's rations . . . jerky, _buccellatum_ , grain . . . same rations for the officers . . . I'm not burdening the supply train with their luxuries . . . We need the mules and wagons to carry rations, fodder, and the legionary artillery . . . Leave our siege equipment at Lugdunum . . . At least five-days' rations for each man on the legionary mules . . . The fodder's going to be more of a problem . . . The fields cannot yet support our mounts . . . The Gauls must be supplying their own people . . . They can supply us as well.\"\n\nCaesar's slave entered with the wine and water. Caesar looked up. \"Ah . . . _bene_ . . . Go ahead and leave it . . . We'll pour ourselves.\"\n\nThen, he noticed me standing there. \"You look like you're on parade, Insubrecus . . . Sit down . . . Relax . . . My man will help you with your _lorica_.\"\n\nCaesar poured the wine and left us to mix our own water. \"Where was I?\" he began. \"Yes . . . supply . . . Pulcher's first priority will be to arrange grain and fodder from the Aedui as we move across their territory . . . Until we have a clear idea of enemy strength and intention, we will not draw any closer to them than five thousand _passus_ . . . Another mission for the cavalry is identifying defensible terrain for the daily marching camps and identifying battle sites should I decide to provoke battle . . . a ridge . . . maximum four-legion front, _acies triplex_ . . . good flank security . . . sun in the enemy's eyes . . . wind at our backs . . . You know the drill, Labienus . . . We'll keep the Eleventh and Twelfth in tactical reserve until they get some seasoning.\"\n\nLabienus looked up from his notes, \"Do you want me to assemble the commanders for a briefing?\"\n\nCaesar took a long draft of wine. \"Yes . . . the _legati_ , of course . . . all the _tribuni laticlavi . . ._ and the _primus pilus_ of each legion . . . We'll be dependent on our centurions for tactical leadership and control until our senior officers have more experience.\"\n\nLabienus wrote on his _tabula. \"Quot'orarum?\"_ he asked.\n\n\"Eleventh hour,\" Caesar said. \"I want the officers back with their units by nightfall . . . We'll maintain full alert for the first and fourth watches . . . Keep a strong cavalry screen between the Helvetii and us . . . Having my back to the river is making me a bit nervous.\"\n\nWith that, Caesar dismissed Labienus, but requested that I stay behind. I waited while Caesar poured himself another cup of wine.\n\nThen, he began, \"Insubrecus . . . your mission with the native cavalry is to be my eyes and ears for our . . . what shall we call them . . . _socii nostri_ . . . our allies. . . . I want to know their attitudes toward us . . . our presence here, north of the Rhodanus . . . and how they react to our officers. . . . If there're any problems, I need to know right away. . . . We're swimming in a sea full of dangerous and unreliable creatures . . . I don't want the Aedui suddenly deciding we're less welcome than the Helvetii and turning on us . . . I need someone who understands the Gauls . . . someone I can trust.\"\n\n\" _Ut vis tu, Patrone_ ,\" I answered.\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Caesar responded. \"And, don't think I'm ignoring the information you've already brought me . . . about Romans influencing the Helvetii and the other Gauls . . . To imagine there was no influence would border on delusion . . . but assuming there's some plot against this army would be a bit paranoid . . . So, keep your eyes and ears open for any indication of Roman influence among the tribes . . . You can trust Labienus, but besides him, you speak only to me about this matter . . . Understand?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Patrone_ ,\" I responded.\n\nCaesar got up from his camp chair and walked over to a wooden chest next to his field desk. \" _Adveni, Insubrece_ ,\" he said, unlocking the chest. \"I want to show you something.\"\n\nI walked over to Caesar, and he showed me a collection of _tabulae_. \"These are my notes on the campaign so far,\" he said, handing me one of the _tabulae_. I opened it and saw the first line, _\"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres . . ._ \"\n\n\"That one's mostly a paraphrase of the Greeks . . . the geographies,\" Caesar explained. \"My concept was to keep a journal of the campaign and periodically send the entries down to Rome to be read out to the people in the forum . . . This would be in addition to the official reports, which are prepared by my staff and sent down to the Senate . . . The journals for the people would need to be written in a simple, straightforward style . . . a blunt military report of what we are doing up here . . . That way, if there is some resistance by the _Optimates_ . . . the aristocratic faction in the Senate . . . I'd still have the people behind me . . . So, these reports would have to be written in the people's Latin . . . I simply do not have the time to command this army and do justice to these journals . . . So, I'd like you to serve as my _ad manum_ . . . You observe, notate, write the journal, and review the text with me . . . Politically, this journal is as important in Rome as a military victory in Gaul.\"\n\n\" _Patrone_ ,\" I stammered, \"non _existimo me dignum_ . . . I don't think I'm up to\u2014\"\n\nCaesar held up his hand to stop me. \"You were tutored by Gabinius' greekling . . . the same as his own children . . . That's good enough for me . . . Which reminds me . . . I will dispatch a personal message to the consul about . . . about your issue with his family . . . I will let him know that you are part of my personal staff . . . _et sub patrocinio meo_ . . . That should put an end to any more _incidents_ like the one in Aquileia.\"\n\nThat was perfectly clear. Caesar's offer was protection for writing his journal. \" _Ut vis tu, Patrone_ ,\" I responded.\n\n\"Good lad!\" Caesar said, actually tussling my hair. \"Get with Valgus . . . Tell him I want you riding like a trooper by the end of the week . . . I don't want to lose my _ad manum_ on the end of some Gallic lance!\"\n\n# VIII.\n\n# _De Calamitate Prima_\n\n# THE FIRST DEBACLE\n\n_Quo proelio sublati Helvetii quod quingentis equitibus tantam multitudinem equitum propulerant_.\n\n\"When the Helvetians push back a great number of our cavalry, with only five hundred of their own, they are encouraged by their success.\"\n\n(from Gaius Marius Insubrecus' notebook of Caesar's journal)\n\nHe badly misjudged the response of the Aedui and Sequani to our call for cavalry. We thought we could raise a few hundred. By the sixth hour of the next day, some two thousand had gathered near our camps.\n\nAt Caesar's bidding, I questioned the assembled Gallic riders. Some said they came to defend their homeland; some, to loot the Helvetii; some were simply following their chiefs; some were out for the adventure. When pressed by Caesar for some common reason for their enthusiasm, all I could say was that there had been years of peace in the lands of the Aedui and Sequani. It was now the beginning of the fighting season, and the young warriors were spoiling for a fight, any fight. In short, they were bored.\n\nEarlier, during the second hour, our legionary cavalry screen had reported that the Helvetii were on the move into the highlands west of the Arar. Caesar was content with allowing some distance to grow between his army and them; he still wasn't sure what size of a force he was dealing with.\n\nWhile Crassus was being briefed by Caesar on his new responsibilities as _legatus equitium_ , chief of cavalry, Labienus struggled to organize the Gauls into _turmae_ and to integrate Roman leadership over them. The Gauls, especially the Sequani, wanted revenge for the burning, pillaging, and slaughter the Helvetii and their German allies had visited on their people. They could hardly be restrained from immediately attacking the enemy. As time passed, more Gallic bands slipped off to the west to pursue the Helvetii independently. By the seventh hour, the rest of our Gallic cavalry initiated a general, headlong pursuit\u2014as if the Helvetii were defeated and fleeing. What Roman leadership Labienus had managed to integrate into this mass of horsemen were more dragged along than leading the way.\n\nI again found myself riding with Athauhnu and the Sequani. He was commanding an _ala_ of about twenty men under Madog, who led a hundred riders. Agrippa was the _angusticlavus_ assigned to advise him. We had another trooper, a Padus-Valley Gaul from the Twelfth Legion called Flavus, \"Whitey,\" because his hair was as blond as a Kraut's eyebrows. The rest of the unit was somewhat divided into three _alae_ , but except for family and clan groups who tended to stick together, the organization was quite fluid. And, they were all fired up to get at the Helvetii.\n\n\"I no can to hold back,\" Madog was complaining to Agrippa. \"Young men . . . very eager of going . . . want revenge . . . We lose maybe twenty already . . . They just go . . . We go too.\"\n\n\"Madog,\" Agrippa was cautioning him, \"we don't know how many Helvetii are out there or what their tactical deployments are . . . We could be riding into a massacre.\"\n\n\"Bah . . . Helvetii girls,\" Madog dismissed Agrippa's advice. \"We kill all.\"\n\nMadog shouted to get his men's attention. When he had it, he waved his _spatha_ over his head and whipped the Sequani into a blood frenzy. Then, he screamed, \"Follow me!\" in Gallic and led them galloping out toward the hills.\n\nWe three Romans just sat there in the dust of the Gauls' sudden departure. Agrippa looked over to me and said, \"Did you catch what he said? What's his plan?\"\n\n\"Plan?\" I shrugged. \"His simply told them to follow him and they will kill all the Helvetii they can find.\"\n\nAgrippa stared at me for a long heartbeat, then shrugged. \"We better catch up to them,\" he said. Then, he turned his horse and rode toward the hills, following the dusty trail of our Sequani.\n\nFlavus and I rode after Agrippa. Catching up to the Sequani wouldn't be easy. Although their horses were smaller than ours, they had good stamina, especially in the hilly country of their homeland. Also, the Sequani rode lighter than we did. Most did not wear armor. Of those that did, many wore hardened leather as _loricae_ , not the heavier chainmail armor and helmets that we were wearing. Many of the Sequani riders were armed with nothing more than small hunting spears. Only the richer Sequani had steel swords or even shields.\n\nI was carrying two swords: my legionary _gladius_ strapped on my right hip and a long _spatha_ tied down on the left front of my saddle. I had my _pugio_ on my left hip. Although I was carrying a small cavalry shield, a _parma_ , strapped behind my left shoulder, I had decided not to carry the light cavalry stabbing spear that Valgus called a \"Greek lance,\" the _dory_.\n\nI was still not comfortable riding into possible combat against experienced riders. In the little time we had had, Valgus tried to teach me critical combat riding skills, mostly controlling my mount with my knees and legs so I could use my hands to wield my weapons: the shield in my left hand and the _spatha_ in my right. Army mounts are trained for leg control, and Macro had shown me some military riding techniques back home. But, I had no doubt that in the confusion and terror of actual mounted combat, my riding skills would be far from adequate.\n\nDuring my drills the night before, Valgus had told me a story about a _tiro_ cavalryman, who lost control of his mount and was carried into the enemy formation. \"A one-man charge!\" Valgus chuckled. \"Didn't work out well for the poor son of a bitch!\"\n\nI didn't want to be that guy, but I wasn't sure I could prevent it.\n\nThe other problem was using weapons while mounted. As an infantryman, I was taught to leverage the power of my attack from the balls of my feet. This was the essential technique of the power behind the basic infantry attack with shield and sword, the _percussus_. But, a rider \"floats\" in the saddle; his feet are literally dangling at the sides of his mount. Not only could I get no leverage to power a sword blow, but if I overreached, I'd lose my seat and find myself on the ground.\n\nAgain, I didn't want to be that guy.\n\nMadog's _turmae_ weren't difficult to follow, but they were difficult to overtake. We pursued them west across the narrow river valley and up into the highlands. Several times as we were riding, I was aware that we were just three Romans riding alone through hostile territory. If the Helvetii discovered us before we overtook the Sequani, it would not go well for us.\n\nAt about the eighth hour, we were some nine thousand _passus_ out from the legionary camps. We were riding south up a small river valley with a wooded ridgeline to our west. As the sun shone through the trees at the top of the ridge, I noticed the silhouettes of riders.\n\nI called ahead to Agrippa, \"Tribune! We are not alone. Look to your right!\"\n\nAgrippa quickly spotted the riders. \"Who are they, _Decurio?\"_ he asked.\n\nIt took me a few heartbeats to realize he was talking to me. I wasn't used to my new rank yet.\n\n_\"No'scio, Tribune_!\" I answered. \"I'll challenge them. Be ready to ride like the Furies if they're hostile!\"\n\nI rode over to the edge of the woods, which only served to make the men on the ridgeline less visible. Realizing there was no help for it, I yelled a challenge at them in Gah'el: _\"Ar uh bruhnu! A uhduhch uhn gyfaillo i Rhufeinig_?\"\n\nAfter a few nervous heartbeats, I heard Athauhnu's voice from the top of the ridge in answer, \"Little Roman! What kept you? Come up and join the fun!\"\n\nI shouted over to Agrippa and Flavus, \"It's Madog's _turma_! They want us to come up!\"\n\nWe found a track up the ridge and were soon with the Sequani. When Madog saw us, he pointed to another broad valley to the west under our ridgeline. \"Good fighting,\" he said in his broken Latin. \"Sending many Helvetii to Land of Youth.\"\n\nBelow us was a swirling brawl of native horsemen\u2014hundreds of them. I could not separate Helvetii and Kraut from Aedui and Sequani. Men were hacking at each other from the backs of horses. On the ground, there were individual duals, small groups attacking other small groups, and all were wrapped in choking gray-brown dust. Periodically, I could recognize a Roman by his armor, but it was obvious that we were exerting no control over our allies or the battle.\n\n\"Good fighting!\" Madog repeated. \"Horses rest . . . Then, we go!\"\n\nThat delay may have saved us.\n\nFlavus suddenly pointed across the valley. \"Tribune! The woodline!\"\n\nI peered in the direction that Flavus had indicated. The far woodline was in shadow because of the declining sun, but soon I was able to detect some movement in the gloom.\n\nI began to ask Madog who it was, but I was interrupted by a burst of cacophonous trumpeting from across the valley.\n\n\"Helvetii come!\" Madog exclaimed.\n\nImmediately, from across the valley, Helvetian infantry, hundreds of them, mostly spearmen, charged into the cavalry melee.\n\nSuddenly, Agrippa yelled, _\"Vi'te!_ Look there!\"\n\nAnother large force of enemy infantry had worked its way undetected along the east side of the valley and was now rushing to block any escape route for our Gallic allies trapped in the valley below.\n\nThen, another series of trumpet calls sounded; these were somewhat different from the first. A body of the Gallic cavalry disengaged itself from the battle and fled headlong down the valley to escape the onrushing Helvetian infantry.\n\n\"Aedui pigs!\" Madog yelled at them. \"They run from good fight like children!\"\n\nAgrippa reacted. \"Madog! Follow me! We must open the road for our men!\"\n\nAgrippa moved down the ridge without waiting for Madog to respond. Flavus and I followed behind. We picked out a trail which led us down through the woods to the valley floor. I was relieved when the Sequani followed behind us.\n\nI could see the battle below as we descended. The Helvetian spearmen were decimating our cavalry. I saw more than one Roman go down as the Helvetii stabbed up at them from the ground with their long spears. The Romans were wearing chainmail _loricae_ , very valuable booty for the Gauls. I knew that those injured and dying were the newly minted _decuriones_ from the Eleventh and Twelfth Legions. Once they were unhorsed and on the ground, follow-on Helvetii infantry surrounded them hacking and stabbing with whatever weapons they had brought to the fight: some swords; many knives; a few clubs; even hoes, billhooks, and scythes\u2014anything that could kill.\n\nPresently we reached the valley floor. The second mass of Helvetii had not seen us. They were loosely strung across the valley exit, expecting little opposition except for the few horsemen who might have escaped the main battle.\n\nAgrippa rode out into the valley floor from the tree line, then yelled back, \"Insubrecus! On my right! Flavus, my left!\"\n\nWe rode out to comply. At that point, the Helvetii down the valley noticed us. I saw a few of them pointing and gesturing toward us.\n\n\"Madog!\" Agrippa ordered. \"Your _ala_ is with me. The other two split, one with Insubrecus, the other with Flavus!\"\n\nI heard Madog relay the instructions in Gallic, and the riders gathered behind us.\n\nAgrippa, \"Form wedge!\"\n\nMadog repeated the order, and the Gauls formed behind us as best they could. I suddenly realized that I was the point man in the right-flank wedge, the first man in.\n\nAgrippa yelled, \"Right and left flanks, follow ten _passus_ behind my center . . . at the WALK . . . FORWARD!\"\n\nOur _turmae_ began to move toward the Helvetian blocking force. I could see them in the distance, less than three hundred _passus_ away. They were beginning to coalesce into a line facing us.\n\nAgrippa, _\"Cornucen_ . . . SOUND ATTENTION!\"\n\nThere was some confusion as Madog relayed the order. Finally, a Sequani bugler sounded a series of cacophonous notes to get the attention of our allies engaged across the valley.\n\nAgrippa, \"At the TROT . . . FORWARD!\"\n\nWe picked up the pace of our advance toward the enemy. They now stood shoulder to shoulder, facing us. Their officers and chiefs were adjusting their line, shouting encouragement.\n\nAgrippa, _\"Cornucen_ . . . SOUND, WITHDRAW!\"\n\nThat was the signal for our men across the valley to disengage from the enemy and follow us out of the valley.\n\nAgrippa, \"At the CANTER . . . FORWARD!\"\n\nAt that, I could feel my mount's excitement grow. She seemed to be straining to get at the enemy. I had my shield off my shoulder and drew my _spatha_ from its sheath. I was guiding my mount as best I could, using only my legs and knees.\n\nAgrippa raised his own sword and screamed, \" _TURMA_ . . . CHARGE!\"\n\nThe horses stretched forward into a dead run toward the enemy line. Over the pounding of the hooves, I heard the war cries of the Sequani.\n\nI heard myself screaming in Latin, \" _Fortuna_! _Bona Fortuna m'ames_! Goddess of Good Fortune! Favor me!\"\n\nLooking forward, I could see a solid, dark line of enemy infantry. As we closed, I could distinctly see faces, equipment, and spear points leveled directly at us. Suddenly, I remembered Valgus saying that Roman cavalry is not meant to engage infantry. We pursue; we scout; we screen. But we cannot stand up to infantry. Across the rapidly shrinking space, I spotted one Helvetian. He was looking directly at me. His spear was leveled at _me_. He intended to kill _me_!\n\nAbruptly, out of nowhere, there was movement in the Helvetian line. A man dropped his spear and fled to the rear, then another, then more. My would-be killer looked to his right and saw his mates breaking and beginning to flee. He looked back at me. There was doubt in his eyes, then fear. Suddenly, he dropped his spear. He broke to his left. He was trying to get past our flank.\n\nWhen I hit the Helvetian line, it was no more. We thundered past it. We hacked down the Helvetii spearmen fleeing to the rear, trying to outpace our mounts. Some fell to the ground, hoping to avoid our swords. Others turned at the last moment in a futile attempt at resistance.\n\nWe killed them.\n\nAbout a hundred paces past the Helvetian line, we were out of the valley and in a bowl-like area where three valleys seemed to converge. Agrippa halted our advance and turned us around, facing the line of our own charge. About a hundred paces behind us, we could see what was left of our cavalry, riding to follow us out of the trap.\n\nAgrippa yelled, \"Spread out! Let them pass through us!\"\n\nMadog repeated the order in Gallic, and the Sequani did their best to comply. Their effort was adequate. Our escaping comrades managed to pass through our lines with little confusion. They did not halt to assist us.\n\nWhen they had cleared us, Agrippa yelled, \"Prepare to receive the enemy!\"\n\nAgrippa rode along our front with Madog in his wake, tightening our line, adjusting our positions, encouraging the men. In the distance, I could see a force of enemy cavalry about twice our size coming forward rapidly. My mount was still struggling to regain her wind.\n\nAgrippa commanded, \"If they attack, we move forward into them . . . We cannot allow them to hit us at a standstill . . . We cannot give them momentum . . . initiative.\"\n\nMadog struggled to relay Agrippa's orders. I had no idea how he was coping with Latin words like \"momentum\" and \"initiative.\"\n\nIn the distance, the enemy force was coalescing into individual riders. I was trying to detect their speed. I imagined that they would want to hit us at the gallop, but they seemed content to trot toward us.\n\nAthauhnu appeared suddenly at my side. \"Enjoy the ride, Little Roman!\" he chuckled. \"Soon the gods will give us more Helvetii dogs to kill. I'm happy the People of the Dark Moon did not remain with us. We will not have to share the glory with those pigs.\"\n\nAs I watched the enemy mass approaching, I was not at all sure that I appreciated Athauhnu's humor.\n\nAgrippa and Madog assumed positions in the center of our line. The enemy continued to approach at a trot. They were less than two hundred _passus_ from us. Agrippa knew he had to maintain enough distance to get our horses to a run before we made contact. He had just raised his sword to start us forward when the enemy halted.\n\nFor many heartbeats, we just sat there, looking at each other across a flat, grassy field. Then, one of the Helvetii riders came forward a few paces. He was wearing a high, plumed helmet and a chainmail _lorica_ ; he held up a large, battered, red shield. He raised a long Gallic _spatha_ over his head. He was yelling something across at us. I could only pick up a few words: \"dogs of the Romans . . . many heads taken . . . drinking mead out of your skulls!\"\n\nWhen he was done with his tirade, the Helvetii behind him raised a racket, screaming and hitting their shields with their swords and lances.\n\nThey seemed to be working themselves up to attack. At my side, Athauhnu said nothing. It seemed that his odd sense of whimsy had escaped even him.\n\nAgrippa was strangely paralyzed by the outburst. He just sat there on his horse. In my mind, I both urged him to order the advance before it was too late and prayed to _Fortuna_ that he would not.\n\nThen, the Helvetian chief made an unmistakable, insulting hand gesture in our direction and spit on the ground. He turned his horse and rode back into his own troop. The entire Helvetian horde seemed to collapse backward, following their chief away from us. Soon, we were staring at the backs of a withdrawing enemy.\n\nI could see Agrippa's shoulders sag with relief. Unless he were foolish enough to pursue, the fighting would be over for the day. I suspected Madog wanted to continue, but Agrippa reached over to Madog's mount and steadied both man and horse. We were finished for that day.\n\nFinished, except for having to explain this debacle to Caesar.\n\nWe discovered the legionary _castra_ less than five thousand _passus_ from the site of the battle. Caesar had moved most of the army forward to shadow the Helvetii. Agrippa settled the Sequani in a protected position between the camps. Then, we Romans and Madog went in search of Caesar's _praetorium_. We found it again in the _castrum_ of the Tenth Legion. When we approached the _praetorium_ tent, we spotted Labienus directing some soldiers.\n\n\"Agrippa, what in the name of Hades happened out there?\" he demanded as soon as he saw us. \"The Gauls are all in an uproar about some ambush . . . a massacre . . . They're saying the Helvetii are coming, and they're all running off into the hills!\"\n\nWe dismounted and approached Labienus. Agrippa asked, \"Do you want me to give my report to you or to the _imperator, Legate_?\"\n\nLabienus thought about it for a moment, then said, \"Let's go in and brief the boss. Crassus is already in there with him. How bad is it, Agrippa?\"\n\nAgrippa shrugged, \"Not good . . . Could have been a lot worse . . . but not good.\"\n\nAgain, Labienus stared at him briefly, then gestured to the tent entrance saying, \"Let's go see Caesar. Insubrecus! Come with us!\"\n\nCaesar was studying his maps. Crassus was with him, looking like he had just walked in from inspection parade. Clearly, the cavalry commander did not participate in his own unit's battle.\n\nWhen Caesar heard us enter, he asked Labienus, \"Titus, how confident are you that the six remaining cohorts of the Twelfth can hold the bridgehead against the enemy?\"\n\nLabienus shrugged, \"Six cohorts of trained Roman soldiers fighting from well-prepared, defensive positions on good terrain should be able to hold back a sea of barbarians, _Imperator_! Agrippa has returned. He has a report about the cavalry battle.\"\n\n_\"Bene_ ,\" Caesar responded, walking away from the map. \" _Nuntia_ , _Tribune_! Report!\"\n\nAgrippa, his helmet gripped firmly under his left arm, assumed a stiffer position of attention. _\"Imperator_ , I commanded three _alae_ of native cavalry . . . Sequani. . . . We encountered an enemy force of both cavalry and infantry, approximately\u2014\"\n\n\"Infantry?\" Caesar interrupted. \"There was infantry? How many? How equipped?\"\n\nAgrippa answered, \"Approximately a cohort . . . maybe as many as eight centuries . . . lightly armored . . . principally with spears . . . some farm implements . . . a few swords.\"\n\nCaesar nodded, \"This is the first I've heard of infantry . . . About six hundred, you say?\"\n\n_\"Nuntio recte, Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa answered.\n\nCaesar seemed to mull this over. Then, he said, \" _Bene_ . . . Please, continue your report.\"\n\nAgrippa continued, \"We encountered a force of infantry and perhaps ten _alae_ of cavalry approximately six thousand _passus_ to the west . . . When we arrived at the eighth hour, the enemy cavalry was engaging our cavalry\u2014\"\n\n\"Why did you not immediately attack the enemy, Tribune?\" Crassus interrupted. This was more of a challenge than a question.\n\nAgrippa turned his head to face Crassus. \"Legate, initially we were not in position to attack, and our horses were still winded from our advance\u2014\"\n\nCaesar interrupted him, \"We can get to that later, Crassus. Agrippa, continue your report!\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" Agrippa responded, again facing Caesar. \"At a given signal, the enemy infantry attacked our cavalry in two wings from concealment. One wing attacked our men directly; the other tried to seal off their escape\u2014\"\n\n\"Do you think this was a planned attack, Agrippa?\" Caesar asked.\n\nAgrippa hesitated. Caesar was asking him to commit himself on a military matter, use his tactical judgment, in front of his commander.\n\nFinally, Agrippa stated, \" _Existimo esse rectum, Imperator!_ I believe that's the case! There was a prearranged signal given to initiate the infantry attack. I believe the Helvetii deliberately ambushed our cavalry and attempted to annihilate them.\"\n\n\"Bah!\" Crassus exclaimed. \"Those barbarians are not that sophisticated\u2014\"\n\n\"That's probably what Longinus believed right up until the time one of those unsophisticated barbarians was sawing off his head!\" Caesar silenced him. \"I want to hear the tribune's report, Crassus . . . After all . . . he was there!\"\n\nCrassus blanched at Caesar's swipe, then remained silent.\n\nAgrippa continued, \"My three _alae_ attacked the enemy blocking force, allowing the survivors of our cavalry force to escape the trap. I estimate three or four _turmae_ of friendlies escaped from the valley. The enemy chose not to continue the engagement and withdrew north, up the valley. We then returned here to report.\"\n\nThere was silence as Caesar digested what he was just told. Suddenly, Madog whispered, \"Tell the Caisar that coward Aedui run away from fight.\"\n\n\"Who's this?\" Caesar asked, seeming to notice Madog for the first time.\n\nAgrippa responded, \" _Imperator_ , this is Madog mab Guuhn, leader of the Sequani cavalry, _equitatis Sequanianis dux.\"_\n\n_\"Salve, Dux,\"_ Caesar nodded toward Madog. Then, he turned back to Agrippa. \"What is this about the Aedui running from the battle?\"\n\n\" _Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa reported, \"when the Helvetii sprung their ambush, about three _alae_ of Aeduan cavalry withdrew from the battle before the enemy could block their escape.\"\n\nCaesar was just about to respond when Madog interrupted again, \"No, Agrippa . . . that not Aedui horseman . . . that . . .\" Madog's Latin began to fail him, \"important man soldier . . . protect.\"\n\nCaesar looked intently at Madog, then at Agrippa. Finally, he noticed me. \"Insubrecus, can you tell me what this . . . this Madapguinus fellow is trying to say?\"\n\nI asked Madog in Gah'el, \"Who were those horsemen, Lord?\"\n\nMadog responded, \"They were _fintai_ , the personal bodyguard of Deluuhnu mab Clethguuhno. I recognized their standards. He is the _dunorix_ of the People of the Dark Moon, the commander of the king's stronghold, Bibracte. He is also the brother of the king, Duuhruhda mab Clethguuhno!\"\n\nI translated this for Caesar. He shrugged and said, \"Then, we are fortunate that this . . . this _dunorix_ person escaped. If he had been killed, it would have been a disaster for us and for the Aedui.\"\n\nMadog picked up enough of what Caesar said to explain further. \"The Caisar does not understand! The _fintai_ of the _dunorix_ would have led the horsemen of the People of the Dark Moon into that valley. Perhaps, Deluuhnu himself commanded them! They would never leave the place of battle while their people were in peril. It would be unthinkable! Shameful! They led their own people into that ambush and left them to be slaughtered!\"\n\nAgain I translated, and again Caesar seemed inclined to dismiss the warning. \"Just bad luck . . . It happens.\"\n\nAgain, Madog, \"Surprised and ambushed by the Helvetii in their own lands? Impossible! They had to know! They led them into it.\"\n\nAfter I translated that, Caesar challenged _\"Qua causa?\"_\n\nMadog shrugged, \"The _dunorix_ is married to a Helvetian woman, the daughter of the former _orgorix_ , the war chief of that tribe, the one who planned this invasion. Through his mother's people, he has formed marriage bonds with all the major clans of the Helvetii. With others, he has exchanged silver and hostages. He plots not only the destruction of the Caisar's army, but the destruction of his own people. He is not satisfied with being a mere _dunorix_ of a single tribe; he plots to be the _dumnorix_ of the Gah'el!\"\n\nIt took me a few heartbeats to sort that out. Madog had constructed a clever pun: _dunorix_ , the \"fortress-king\" of the Aedui, and the _dumnorix_ , the \"universe-king\" of the Gauls. I translated all this for Caesar, translating _dumnorix_ as _rex Gallorum_ , king of the Gauls.\n\nCaesar was now interested in what Madog was saying. \"Ask him if the king of the Aedui, Diviciacus, knows of this,\" Caesar demanded.\n\nMadog understood Caesar's question. He shrugged, \"Diviciacus . . . Duuhruhda mab Clethguuhno . . . How could he not know what is happening in his own house?\"\n\nWhen Caesar heard this answer, he nodded. \"Insubrecus, tell this Madicus . . . uh . . . tell the _Dux_ he has done a great service to the Roman people . . . Tell him we are grateful . . . I will direct my _quaester_ to issue his _turma_ rations . . . equipment . . . whatever they need if he will continue to serve the _populi Romani_.\"\n\nWhen I translated this for Madog, his eyes widened. A single, worn-out chainmail _lorica_ was enough to assure the loyalty of one of his riders for a lifetime\u2014a well-forged sword, two lifetimes. Caesar had just bought the loyalty of Madog and his troop for as long as he needed them.\n\nMadog bowed. _\"Me' Caesar . . . gratias ti'ago . . . maximas gratias . . . Tu' vir sum, ego!\"_\n\nMadog departed. He was going to cash in on Caesar's promise before the general could change his mind.\n\nCaesar seemed a bit amused. \"It's just a few battered _loricae_ and a few rusty swords! Are you Gauls always this enthusiastically grateful?\"\n\nI decided to ignore Caesar's \"you Gauls\" characterization and explained, \" _Imperator_ , iron armor and weapons are valuable to these people. By putting them in Madog's hands, he can ensure the loyalty of his soldiers for the rest of their lives. You just made him one of the most powerful _orgorixa_ , war chiefs, among his people. Even his own king must now give him respect. In fact, you are now his _orgorix_ . . . his war chief. He will never cease being Sequani, but now he is, as he said, _vir tuus, miles Caesari_ . . . your man, a soldier of Caesar.\"\n\nCaesar stared at me briefly, then said, _\"Simil'est clientela?_ Like clientage?\"\n\n_\"Recte, Imperator_ ,\" I affirmed, \"but to the death . . . He is honor-bound to you.\"\n\n\"An important lesson, Insubrecus,\" Caesar responded, nodding. \"What do you think of all this, Labienus?\"\n\nLabienus shrugged, \"I don't know where to start. It seems we cannot trust the Aedui. What concerns me is that we are about to enter their territory and will be dependent on them to supply the army with food and fodder.\"\n\nCaesar seemed to become impatient, \"Yes . . . yes . . . Agrippa . . . what happened today? From your point of view . . . what went wrong?\"\n\nAgrippa stiffened a bit. He was a mere _angusticlavus_ and on the spot again before the _imperator_ , his chief of staff, and his own legate, Crassus.\n\nHe tried to cage his response, \" _Imperator_ . . . uh . . . there were many . . . uh . . . variables . . . things no one could foresee.\"\n\nCaesar had no patience for this evasiveness. \"Come now, Agrippa . . . You're a Roman soldier . . . an officer . . . We're all comrades here . . . Nothing matters except this army and the interests of the Roman people . . . You were out there on the ground . . . If you were me, what would you have done differently?\"\n\nAgrippa nodded, \" _Imperator_ , it was a matter of command and control. Once the Gallic cavalry rode off, they did what they wanted to do. None of us could control them. There were too many of them, too few of us, and too little time to integrate leadership among them.\"\n\n\"So, you're saying this was _my_ fault?\" Crassus accused.\n\n\"No! No, Legate!\" Agrippa attempted. \"No one could have\u2014\"\n\nCaesar interrupted, \"Please . . . gentlemen . . . if it were anyone's _fault_ , it would be mine. I am the commander of this army. I cast my _pilum_ before I had a mark. No . . . if anyone is to blame for this . . . this . . . _calamitas_ . . . this debacle . . . it's me. Thank you for your _libertas_ , Agrippa, your candor. It's a Roman virtue, and I appreciate it. Now, gentlemen . . . please, leave me . . . except for you, Labienus. I need some time to think.\"\n\nAs we left Caesar's _praetorium_ , Crassus intercepted us. \"Tribune!\" he summoned Agrippa.\n\n_\"Adsum ti', Legate_ ,\" Agrippa responded, coming to attention.\n\n\"Tribune!\" Crassus started. \"You will never . . . I repeat . . . never speak out of line in or out of my presence again! You will report to me and only to me! If the _imperator_ needs to hear anything you have to say, he will hear it from me. Do you understand me clearly, Tribune?\"\n\n_\"Perspicue, Legate_!\" Agrippa almost shouted.\n\n_\"Miss'est, Tribune_!\" Crassus dismissed him. Then, he noticed me.\n\n\" _Tu_ ,\" he started. \" _Tu! Si tu non deliciae Caesari Galliculae_ . . . You . . . you . . . if you weren't Caesar's little Gallic bitch, I'd have your guts for boot straps! I can't stop you from telling the _imperator_ anything you want, but as long as you're assigned to my command, you stay away from me. I don't want to see you, hear you, or be reminded that you as much as exist. Do you understand me, boy?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Legate_!\" I shouted.\n\n\"You'd better! If I have any more trouble with you, _boy_ , even Caesar won't be able to save your sorry ass!\"\n\nWith that parting shot, Crassus stomped out of the _praetorium_.\n\nI waited a moment before following him out. I was halfway through a string of expletives, \" _verpa_ . . . _mentula_ . . . _fututor canibus_. . .\" when I noticed Agrippa standing outside the tent. I immediately stiffened to attention.\n\n\"Tribune!\" I stammered. \"I didn't see . . . I mean . . . I\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it, _Decurio_ ,\" Agrippa said, putting his hand on my shoulder. \"We've had one hell of a day. I'm parched. Would you happen to know where we could find a nice jug of wine, or maybe some _posca? Coleonibus Martis_! I'd even settle for some of that horse piss the Gauls call cooru.\"\n\n# IX.\n\n# _Lente Festinamus_\n\n# WE HURRY SLOWLY\n\n_Caesar suos a proelio continebat ac satis habebat in praesentia hostem rapinis pabulationibus populationibusque prohibere_.\n\n\"Caesar held his troops back from battle. For the time being, he considered it adequate to prevent the enemy from looting, foraging, and plundering.\"\n\n(from Gaius Marius Insubrecus' notebook of Caesar's journal)\n\nHe pursued the Helvetii for the next ten days.\n\n_Pursuit_ is perhaps too aggressive a word to describe what was happening. After the debacle with our cavalry, and the continuing uncertainty of the enemy's strength, Caesar refused to allow any of his units to become engaged with the Helvetii.\n\nOur cavalry tried to maintain contact with the enemy. On its face, this mission was not much of a challenge. We were following a massive horde, tens of thousands of men, women, and children. They were dragging everything they possessed along with them, with some of it on their backs, some strapped to beasts of burden, and the rest piled into slow-moving wagons. We could follow them from their trail: a path of crushed grass, burned huts, dead livestock, and uprooted foliage almost a thousand _passus_ wide.\n\nAlso, our infantry, which could easily march twenty thousand _passus_ a day without breaking much of a sweat, was barely moving ten. By the standards of the Roman army, the pace was leisurely. By the seventh day of our \"advance,\" the Twelfth Legion had caught up with us, having tucked the Tigurini back in along the Rhenus and having pulled down the bridges over the Arar. Caesar could now deploy all five of his legions against the enemy.\n\nAt the same time, the enemy was becoming quite aggressive. Not a day passed without an attack on one or more of our cavalry patrols. From a tactical point of view, this made perfect sense. Tacticians called it \"preventing reconnaissance.\" The enemy cavalry was screening the main body from our reconnaissance patrols.\n\nAthauhnu, by then all decked out in his Roman chainmail _lorica_ and shining brass cavalry helmet, told me that the Helvetii were too thoughtless and rash to execute an actual strategy. Most of the attacks on our cavalry were carried out by minor Helvetian war chiefs seeking heads, horses, and booty. Unfortunately, as it would prove, many of our senior officers believed this theory, too.\n\nHowever, these incessant spoiling attacks by the Helvetii were taking a toll on our Gallic allies. There was no booty to be had and much danger to be anticipated. Unlike the Roman army deserters, who would sneak away alone or in pairs in the dead of night, the Gauls just left. Entire _turmae_ rode away to return to their homes. When I asked Madog about it, he just shrugged. If there was no glory to be had, no riches to seize, why remain? By the tenth day, I doubted we could field five _turmae_ of native cavalry against the Helvetii.\n\nThe most pressing problems, though, were the men's rations and the fodder for the horses. The legions had gone through the ten-day marching rations that they had been carrying, but no resupply had arrived from our allies, the Aedui, whose territory we were marching across. Caesar had managed to bring up one supply column from Lugdunum back at the confluence of the Rhodanus and the Arar. But, we had advanced almost one hundred thousand _passus_ away from that supply depot. Although the legions had cleared a passable road along our route of march, Labienus was still doubtful as he calculated the amount of time the _impedimenta_ took to make the trip and its carrying capacity. The inescapable conclusion was that we could not adequately supply the army along that route. Unless the Aedui made good on their promises to supply the army, the men would have to be placed on reduced rations\u2014sooner rather than later.\n\nCaesar was resisting the recommendation to reduce his men's rations. He knew that Roman soldiers would tolerate many hardships on campaign\u2014their officers' arrogance, harsh discipline, even at times tactical incompetence\u2014but they would not tolerate logistical bungling for long.\n\nNever botch the men's rations!\n\nOn the afternoon of the eleventh day, after returning to the legionary _castra_ from patrol, I was summoned to Caesar's _praetorium_. I was still riding with Agrippa and Madog's Sequani. Agrippa was proving to be a good officer and a good companion. During one of our rides, he shared with me his desire to pursue a career in the army, not politics down in Rome. He was concerned about being subordinate to Crassus and his arrogance. But, avoiding Crassus while on active field duty didn't prove much of a challenge. The man didn't seem interested in doing anything that might tarnish his armor. Agrippa was also aware of my relationship with Caesar, but he never brought it up in any of our conversations.\n\nOne afternoon, Agrippa shared with me that he had a little brother named Marcus back home in Asisium. Their father had died when both boys were young, and Agrippa had to assume the role of _pater familias_ for his brother, younger sister, Vipsania, and their mother. Marcus was only fourteen, five years younger than Agrippa. Marcus idealized his older brother and wanted to follow him into the army when he was of age.\n\nWith a start, I realized that, as we were riding with Madog's Sequani through the lands of the Aedui, thousands of _passus_ north of the Rhodanus in _Gallia Comata_ , trying to avoid being ambushed by enemy war bands and trying to make contact with a large and menacing enemy force, I would be turning seventeen on my next birthday.\n\nI reported to Caesar's _praetorium_ as ordered. When I arrived, Labienus and Caesar were conferring in front of the operations map. Caesar was asking, \"What if we attempted to shorten our supply lines by moving the supply depot down the Rhodanus to a position directly south of our location? Surely, we could float our supplies and equipment down the river on barges. That would also shorten the route from our port in Massalia.\"\n\n\"That would shorten our supply lines,\" Labienus agreed. \"And, if the Helvetii continue to march west, we may eventually have to do just that. But, that will not solve our immediate problem of feeding the men and the livestock. Also, we'd have to reconnoiter and establish supply routes south to the river. That would strip away part of our infantry force, while at the same time we are facing a numerically superior enemy. No! The only solution is to draw supply from the Aedui\u2014either with their help, as they promised, or despite them.\"\n\nCaesar seemed to ruminate over what he had been told, finally asking, \"What are your recommendations, Titus?\"\n\n\"I see only two options, Caesar,\" Labienus answered. \"One, we send out foraging parties and take what we need from the surrounding settlements. Granted, we could pay for what we take, but we need food and fodder immediately. Second, you summon Diviciacus and demand he make good on his promises. Threaten to take hostages if need be, but you've got to put his _colei_ in the vice and get him moving!\"\n\nCaesar thought about that for a few heartbeats. \"What if we strip our ranks for _venatores_ and send them out to bring back game?\"\n\nLabienus shrugged, _\"Venatores_ would be useful to augment our rations with meat, but I doubt that they can supply the entire army with food. Besides, even if most of the hunters manage to avoid being picked off by enemy cavalry, how much game do you think they'll find within ten thousand _passus_ of our army after the Helvetii have gone through and stripped everything? And, hunting does nothing to alleviate our fodder shortages.\"\n\nIt was then that Caesar noticed me. \"Ah! Insubrecus! You ride with Agrippa's Sequani. How are the Gauls feeding their horses?\"\n\nI shrugged, \"They let them graze when they're in a secure location and far enough off the line of march so that there's foraging available. Sometimes, they just go into an Aedui village and demand food and fodder for keeping the Helvetians moving away. The farmers aren't altogether pleased with it, but with Helvetii and German raiding parties in the area, they recognize the necessity of keeping the Sequani on their side.\"\n\nCaesar thought about this briefly. Then said, \" _Bene_! There's our answer, Labienus. We'll put Diviciacus' balls in a vice, like you say. Summon him to me here. Meanwhile, we'll send out a limited number of foraging details to the nearby villages . . . detail the Eleventh and Twelfth. There are plenty of Gallic speakers among the soldiers in those legions. Remind the Gauls in the villages that it's the Roman army that's keeping the Helvetii and Germans at bay, and the Roman army needs to eat. We will pay for what we take. Detail a member of the _quaester's_ staff to accompany each detail. He'll designate what's useful to the army . . . Have him draw funds from the treasury for payment . . . standard rates for anything taken. Take care to leave the Gauls enough to survive until the next harvest. Rome is their friend, not their oppressor. Put a junior tribune, an _angusticlavus_ , in charge of each detail, with a _centuria_ of _muli_ from the legions. We must use moderation in this. The men will only take action to defend themselves or the supplies. I want no incidents with the friendlies. We are swimming in a sea of Gauls, so stirring up a storm is not in our interest. In fact, I will personally brief all the _angusticlavi_ and centurions before they go out. The message to Diviciacus should be clear: fulfill his promises to supply the army, or we'll take what we need.\"\n\nThis was a classic Caesarian performance: take in information, process it quietly and quickly, and then deliver an explosion of decisions and instructions.\n\nWhile Caesar spoke, Labienus was muttering, _\"Bene_ . . . _bene_ ,\" while furiously taking notes on a _tabula_.\n\nFinally, Caesar asked, _\"Habesne quaestiones ullae, Labiene_? Any questions?\"\n\n\" _N'abeo_ ,\" Labienus muttered, still writing.\n\n\"What do you think, Insubrecus?\" Caesar asked me. \"How will the Gauls react?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"Difficult to say, _Patrone_. Armed Roman soldiers are entirely different from Gallic cavalry to these people, but payment will help. The _quaester_ will need to pay the village headman, not the individual farmers. Also, it may be good to barter a bit. The Gauls consider that more . . . uh . . . gracious . . . more civil than just forcing a fixed price.\"\n\n\"Good point,\" Caesar agreed. \"Did you get that, Titus?\"\n\n\"Barter a bit . . . more civil,\" Labienus muttered not looking up from his _tabula_. Finally, he stopped writing.\n\n\"Titus,\" Caesar began, \"thank you! Go arrange the foraging details with the _quaester_ and the _primi pili_ of the Eleventh and Twelfth. Detail the tribunes yourself. That lad, Caecina\u2014the one who commanded the _vexillatio_ , the detail that escorted the Tigurini back to the Rhenus\u2014he'd be a good choice for this. But only our 'brighter lamps,' eh? Initially ten teams: five north and west, five south and west. Stay clear of the enemy. Also, find Agrippa and that Madocus _Dux_ who commands the Sequani cavalry and have them report to me. I want them to shadow the foraging details going north.\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" Labienus said.\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Caesar acknowledged. \"Insubrecus! You stay! I need to talk to you about something.\"\n\nLabienus and his _tabula_ left the _praetorium_ on his mission, and Caesar gestured me over to his field desk. He gestured to a chair, _\"Sedeas, Insubrece_!\"\n\nCaesar picked up a couple of the _tabulae_ stacked on his desk. \"I've reviewed the work you've done on my journals, and I'm pleased . . . quite pleased. I've made a few minor changes.\"\n\nHe handed me the stack. I opened the first and recognized the opening lines of the first entry, _\"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres_.\" Then, I noticed where Caesar had inserted a correction. Caesar wrote, _\"nostra_ , in our language, they are called Gauls.\"\n\n\" _Patrone_ ,\" I said, \"we call ourselves _Gah'ela_ , which is close to the Latin word used in the text, 'Galli,' so there's really no need\u2014\"\n\n\"I understand that,\" Caesar interrupted. \"But, this book is not meant for language scholars and geographers. It's meant for the _plebes_ in the forum. The word _Galli_ represents the things of Roman nightmares: giant, bloodthirsty, invincible savages from the dark forests of the frozen lands to the north . . . and these are _our_ victories . . . _nostra_. Subtle, I agree, but sometimes _suggesting_ is more powerful than _stating_.\"\n\nI nodded my agreement. Caesar went on, \"But, that's not the reason I asked you to stay. I received a response from Consul Gabinius, about . . . about our little problem.\"\n\nWith that, Caesar had my complete attention. I replaced the _tabulae_ on his desk.\n\n\"I'm actually quite surprised at how quickly the consul responded,\" Caesar continued. \"Almost as surprised as I was by the response. In short, Gabinius denies all knowledge of any attempt on your life.\"\n\n\" _Patrone_! _Sed igitur quis_?\" I began.\n\nCaesar held up his hand to silence my protest. \"I believe the consul. He has no reason to lie and every reason to tell the truth in this matter. Since I made it clear to him that this was a matter of _patrocinium_ , and therefore a matter of the _dignitas_ of my family, he could very well have brought up the _dignitas_ of his family. You did put a shameful mark on his son's face with that _pugio_ of yours, and the consul could have horse-traded for some political advantage. But, he didn't. He simply said he and his son were not involved in this thing.\"\n\n\"I was only defending myself, _Patrone_ \u2014\" I protested.\n\nAgain, Caesar stopped me, \"I know that, Gai. I believe Gabinius understands that, too. But, I also believe this line of inquiry is a dead end.\"\n\nAs I was mulling that over, Caesar said, \"There is one more thing.\"\n\n\"What is that, _Patrone_?\" I responded.\n\n\"The consul has asked me to take on his son as a _tribunus militium_ ,\" Caesar stated. \"It seems that his posting to Greece . . . well . . . that fell through. Gabinius had to make some deals and pull in some markers to get elected, and that soured his son's posting to Greece. It seems that Gabinius and the proconsul to Greece are no longer in the same political camp. But, Gabinius is an associate of Pompey, and I need Pompey's good will in supporting my interests in Rome. So, I really have no choice but to\u2014\"\n\n_\"Sed, Patrone_!\" I burst out.\n\nCaesar again raised his hand to silence me, \"Gai! I have little real choice in this! It's politics! Besides, there's an old Roman saying, _'Vincinia amici teneantur hostes magis_. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.' I'll find something to keep young Gabinius busy in the supply depot. He can keep Pulcher and the pack mules company. Or, I need someone to command the military port in Massalia. You'll never see him, and he'll be firmly under my thumb. His father and I both understand _patrocinium_ and _dignitas_. There will be no problems having him with the army . . . none . . . I will not allow it.\"\n\nIt made sense, but I was not totally convinced.\n\nCaesar changed the subject. \"I've been giving some thought to what you told me about the possibility of Roman interference with the Helvetii.\"\n\n_\"Audio, Patrone_ ,\" was all I could muster. My mind was still trying to sort out the Gabinius news.\n\n\"Ambitious Romans have been known to provoke barbarians on the borders of the _imperium_ for the sake of military adventures,\" Caesar explained. \"According to your sources, while Piso and Messalla were consuls, Orgetorix took Roman silver from a senatorial in order to provoke the Helvetii to abandon their homeland. Messalla is not a soldier, and Piso expected to be given the Syria province, not Gaul. Rome's golden boy, Pompey, celebrated his triumph for defeating Mithridates that year. Even he is not so ambitious that he would provoke a war in Gaul so soon after returning from Asia. That leaves Crassus. He certainly had enough gold to buy a mere Helvetian chief, and he was still smarting after Pompey stole his glory in the slave wars. The Senate only awarded him an _Ovatio_ for defeating the slaves, not the Triumph he desired. He had the opportunity and the motive, I think. Defeating the tribe that played a leading role in the destruction of Longinus' army would have assured him a Triumph. All he had to do was convince the Helvetii to invade our _provincia_ and then convince the Senate to give him the command. He had more than enough gold to accomplish both.\"\n\nI just nodded. All this was a bit beyond me, but I did recognize the name Crassus. The dressing down that Crassus Iunior had given me over the recent cavalry debacle was still fresh in my mind.\n\n\"That still begs the question why Romans would be still involved with the Gauls, now the Aedui, it seems,\" Caesar continued. \"Crassus' attention has turned east toward Parthia, so who is trying to buy betrayal from the Aedui, I wonder?\"\n\nI correctly understood this as a rhetorical question and kept silent.\n\n\"There are two distinct possibilities,\" Caesar continued. \"Pompey could be trying to engineer my defeat simply to take me down a few notches. He's protective of his reputation as Rome's premiere soldier, and he's not the type of man who shares his glory with anyone . . . But, no . . . he's now my son-in-law . . . married to my Iulia.\"\n\nI realized Caesar was talking simply to hear himself out, so I remained silent.\n\n\"Then there are the _Optimates_ in the Senate, the last, sorry vestiges of Sulla's excesses. They would do anything to bring me down. Cicero and Cato are too traditional to engineer the defeat of a Roman army in the field. Lucullus is filthy rich from the booty he brought home from Asia. He could buy half of Gaul, and he's still smarting from being relieved from his command so that Pompey could finish off Mithridates and celebrate a Triumph. But, he's an old man now. He seems content with his building projects and his fishponds. Bibulus has never forgiven me for upstaging him during our consulship. He tried to block my appointment as proconsul to Gaul. Pompey even thinks Bibulus is trying to assassinate him, but I doubt he's capable of a complex plot. He can hardly plan his day competently. Then there's Brutus. He's young, but not without ambition. And, Pompey killed his father. But, no . . . that can't be . . . He's Servillia's son . . . That would be close to patri\u2014\"\n\nCaesar suddenly interrupted his own monologue. He seemed to come out of his musings and return to his _praetorium_ in the hills of _Gallia comata_. He again noticed me sitting in front of his desk.\n\n\"This issue bears watching, Gai,\" he said. \"I think our friend, the one whose men ran from the cavalry battle, what did you call him? The _dumus rex_?\"\n\n\"Deluuhnu mab Clethguuhno,\" I offered. \"The _dunorix_ of the Aedui, the king's brother.\"\n\n\"That's the one!\" Caesar agreed. \"He bears watching. He may be the key to this.\" Then, Caesar seemed to have an idea. \"And, he may be just what I need to put pressure on his brother.\"\n\nAt that point, Caesar's _scriba_ stuck his head into the _cubiculum_ , \" _Imperator!_ The tribune, Agrippa, and his Gaul are here as ordered.\"\n\n_\"Bene,\"_ Caesar responded. \"Send them in!\"\n\nI rose as Agrippa marched into the room in full kit, helmet tucked under his left arm. He assumed a stiff position of attention and reported to Caesar, \" _Imperator, Lucius Vipsanius Agrippa, Tribunus Militium, defert ut imperatus!_ \"\n\nI noticed that Madog hung back, watching the Roman show.\n\n\" _Laxa, Tribune_ ,\" Caesar responded. \"Sit down here. Madocus _Dux_! Please . . . sit! I wish to talk to you about a mission. Please sit, all of you.\"\n\nWe sat, and Caesar called out to his clerk, _\"Scriba_! A jug of _posca_ . . . and four cups!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_ ,\" responded a bodiless voice from beyond the tent flap.\n\nI wondered briefly how Caesar managed to have a supply of _posca_ while many of the legionary _muli_ were considering boiling their boot straps for soup.\n\nAs we all settled in front of Caesar, he began, \"While we're waiting for the _posca_ , tell me how things are going out there.\"\n\nAlways an awkward question to answer in front of the commander, especially considering how prickly the absent legate, Crassus, was of his \"prerogative.\"\n\nAgrippa, as the senior officer on our side of the desk, waded in. \" _Imperator_ , the main body of the enemy continues to move slowly west, as you know. We notice that their depredations have lessened considerably since they left the lands of the Sequani.\"\n\nMadog audibly grunted when Agrippa stated this.\n\n\"We believe that it is due to the pressure our army is putting on them . . . We are still experiencing aggressive counter reconnaissance, mostly from their cavalry . . . But small infantry units, usually no more than a _centuria_ in size, have, at times, attempted to engage us. According to your orders, we have avoided contact whenever possible\u2014\"\n\nCaesar interrupted Agrippa's report, \"Bene . . . What about you, Madocus? What are you seeing out there?\"\n\nMadog shrugged, \"Agrippa, to be truthful . . . very dangerous . . . Helvetii and German everyplace . . . want fight.\"\n\n\"Bene,\" Caesar agreed. \"But, I heard you react when Agrippa said that enemy damage has lessened since the enemy entered Aedui territory. Why do you think that is?\"\n\nMadog shrugged again, \"Aedui buy them, I think . . . Give Helvetii silver . . . No burn, no steal . . . Give Helvetii food . . . maybe you food . . . Kill Sequani . . . No kill Aedui.\"\n\nCaesar's clerk entered the _cubiculum_ with a pitcher of _posca_ and cups. As he set them down on the desk, Caesar asked, \"Were you sure to test the _posca_ , Ebrius? Is it up to your standard?\"\n\n\"I assure you it is, _Imperator_ ,\" the clerk responded without batting an eye. \"And, I guarantee it's not poisoned.\"\n\n\"Glad you're looking out for me,\" Caesar responded. I assumed this was a well-rehearsed routine between them. \"You may go. We'll pour ourselves.\"\n\nAs the clerk, Ebrius, left, Caesar asked, \"Will you do the honors, Insubrecus?\"\n\nAs I poured, Caesar began his briefing. \"Tomorrow, I'm sending out ten foraging details . . . wagons and a century of _muli_ from the Eleventh and Twelfth Legions. There'll be an _angusticlavus_ in command and a centurion with the infantry. I'm sending one detail straight north. They'll be the most exposed team . . . close to the enemy . . . hilly country . . . perfect for ambushes. I want you to screen them to the west and make sure they have a clear route out and back . . . Pretty standard cavalry mission. They'll pull out at first light tomorrow when the signal for ending the fourth watch sounds.\"\n\nWhen Caesar finished, we all took the opportunity to sip the _posca_. Ebrius was right. The _posca_ was prime. It hardly burned the back of my throat at all as it went down; it had a nice aftertaste of honey and herbs.\n\nCaesar continued, \"One of my goals is to test the attitudes of the Aedui toward us and to find out why they haven't come through with the supplies they promised us. If there is any evidence of a conspiracy between the Aedui and the Helvetii, that's where you come in, Insubrecus. I want you to be my fly on the wall. Pick up any intelligence you can from the villagers.\"\n\n_\"A'mperi'tu', Imperator_!\" I acknowledged, putting my cup down on the desk.\n\n\"I have summoned Diviciacus, the king of the Aedui,\" Caesar continued. \"I expect him no later than tomorrow afternoon, but I plan to let him cool his heels, at least until the day after. I need to be briefed by you on what you find out in the field _before_ I face him. In fact, your information will go a long way in my planning a strategy for dealing with the Aedui. So, I expect to see all three of you in my _praetorium_ tomorrow\u2014no later than the first night watch.\"\n\nBoth Agrippa and I muttered _\"A'mperi'tu'!\"_ Madog just nodded.\n\nCaesar took a long draught from his cup. He was enough of a trooper that the _posca_ didn't seem to affect him at all. But, then again, if anything affected Caesar, he gave little indication of it.\n\nHe continued, \"By the time you get back in, I expect the _castra_ to have moved about ten thousand _passus_ west of this location. But, your best bet is to return to this location and follow our trail out. If for any reason the army doesn't relocate tomorrow and you go directly to where you expect us to be, you'll run right into the Helvetii.\"\n\nWe had already figured that one out, but we all nodded as if Caesar had given us sage advice.\n\n\" _Quaestiones ullae?\"_ Caesar asked. \"Any questions?\"\n\n_\"N'abeo, Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa and I answered. Madog just shrugged and grunted.\n\n_\"Bene,\"_ Caesar said. _\"Miss'est_ . . . Get some sleep! You have an early start in the morning. Insubrecus . . . stay behind, please!\"\n\nI rose as Agrippa and Madog left. As soon as they were gone, Caesar said, \"Gai, I'm posting some dispatches, instructions to one of my _comites_ , my deputy down in Aquileia. The courier departs tomorrow at first light. I understand that you come from a small farm just outside Mediolanum. Perhaps you'd like to write a short note to your parents? Let them know you're safe . . . what you're doing. I know military service can be worrisome, especially for mothers. What's her name? Valeria, is it not? My clerk can fit you up with some papyrus and a pen. Place your message in the dispatch bag, and I'll see that it's delivered. Your parents will be proud of your promotion. I'll give instructions for the courier to wait for a response.\"\n\n\" _Multas gratias, Patrone_!\" I stammered.\n\nI was staggered, not only by Caesar's kindness, but also by the fact he actually knew where my home was, and he knew my mother's name. Later, many who claimed to know Caesar well, certainly better than I did, claimed this was all part of an act, an elaborate ruse to instill loyalty and devotion in those around him. I never learned the truth of it. Caesar was certainly a consummate actor, always on stage, but he was also a man, a human being. And, a kindness imitated is still a kindness done.\n\nOn my way out of the _praetorium_ , I did scribble out a quick note to my parents, mostly to mama. After all these years, I don't remember what I wrote. Probably some bromides about being well, about the weather being warm and dry, about having plenty to eat, about being in no danger\u2014the sort of stuff a young soldier thinks his mother should hear, the sort of stuff I wrote to her until the day arrived when writing home didn't make sense to me anymore.\n\nMama has long since gone to the Land of Shadows. A hundred Orpheuses with a hundred lyres cannot bring her back. What I wouldn't give to be able to write one more message to her and have the courier wait for her response. I'm sure I'd take the opportunity more seriously than I did that evening in Caesar's _praetorium_.\n\nBefore dawn the next morning, I joined Agrippa and the Sequani cavalry. The foraging parties were assembling in a secure, open area between the legionary _castra_. In the dark, the assembly was a confused mass of dark, moving shapes, alive with the creaking of wagons, clanking and scraping of armor and weapons, jangling of harnesses, whickering, snorting and stomping of horses anxious to be on their way, complaints and curses in Latin and Gallic, and the smell of the ever-patient mules.\n\nWe sorted things out and found the foraging party we were supposed to screen. It was commanded by the _angusticlavus_ , Caecina, who had commanded the _vexillatio_ , the detail escorting the surviving Tigurini back to the Rhenus. He was again paired with Sanga, the centurion from the Twelfth Legion. I stood back as Agrippa sorted things out with them.\n\nI found Athauhnu's _turmae_ and was surprised when he greeted me in Latin, _\"Salve, Decurio!_ \"\n\n\"Finally assuming some civilized manners, Chief?\" I responded in Gah'el.\n\n\"Latinly, _Decurio_ \" he responded again in broken Latin. \"Madocus _Dux_ to say we Roman soldier . . . to take Roman gift . . . sword . . . silver . . . now to speak Roman word.\"\n\n\" _Bene!_ \" I encouraged him. I had gotten used to Madog's fractured Latin, even Spina's Aventine-Hill gutter patter. Figuring out what Athauhnu was trying to say shouldn't prove too much a challenge. \"I'll call you Adonus _Decurio_ from now on when we speak Latin.\"\n\n\"Adonus,\" Athauhnu tried his new Roman name. \"Is _bene_ . . . Adonus _Decurio_!\"\n\nI heard Agrippa call for us, and we found him at the northern edge of the assembly. The eastern sky was beginning to turn dark purple. We needed to get this show on the road if we were going to cross the departure line according to Caesar's wishes.\n\nWhen we found Agrippa, Caecina was standing with him; Sanga was hovering behind him, the silhouette of his helmet's transverse crest identifying him as a centurion.\n\n\"The tribune and I have worked out a plan,\" Agrippa began nodding toward Caecina. \"Madog, we need to split up your cavalry . . . Insubrecus _Decurio_ , you will accompany Att Owen's _ala_.\"\n\n\"Adonus _Decurio, Tribune_ ,\" Athauhnu corrected him.\n\nAgrippa hesitated for a heartbeat, not sure what had just happened. I was about to say something when he shrugged and continued, \"The _ala_ of Adonus _Decurio_. Our target is the small _vicus_ we scouted the day before yesterday, the one with the large, round building or barn in the center and the perimeter fence built from brambles. Your mission is to scout the route directly to the village for Caecina's foraging party. But, do not enter the village. When you reach it, move around it, preferably to the west if the terrain and the situation permit. Seal its flank and rear . . . No one in, no one out. I don't want them hiding the cattle and trying to carry off the grain . . . _Compre'enditis_ _vos_?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Tribune_!\" I answered. I wasn't sure how much of this the newly minted Adonus _Decurio_ was getting.\n\n\"You are to avoid contact with the enemy,\" Agrippa continued. \"If you detect the enemy, fix their position and move south back to Caecina's force. We'll let the _muli_ , the legionary grunts, sweep away the trash.\"\n\nI heard Sanga guffaw and slap the hilt of his _gladius_ when Agrippa said this. Agrippa continued, \"I will be with Madocus _Dux_ and the two remaining _alae_. We will be paralleling the ridgelines to the west of the route of march to seal it off from enemy reconnaissance or raids. Standard visual and aural signals remain in effect. _Quaestiones_?\"\n\n_\"N'abeo, Tribune_ ,\" I responded.\n\nAthauhnu said nothing. I was positive that the Latin terms \"paralleling,\" \"reconnaissance,\" and \"standard visual and aural signals\" were well beyond his Latin. I could hash it out with him in the saddle.\n\n\"I assume the same order of march on the return,\" Agrippa finished. \"But, we'll talk again when we're on the objective. Insubrecus _Decurio_ . . . are you and . . . and . . . Adonus _Decurio_ ready to move out?\"\n\n_\"Parati, Tribune_!\" I answered.\n\n\"Bene!\" Agrippa said. \"Stay in contact with the foraging party all the way to the objective. You lead out. I'll follow and peel off to the west before we enter the hill country to the north. Caecina, as we discussed, lead out your foraging party about a quarter of the hour after we depart, about when the eastern sky starts to go from red to orange. That should put us a few hundred _passus_ in front of you.\"\n\n_\"Constat, Agrippa_!\" Caecina said.\n\n\"Let's mount up, Insubrecus!\" Agrippa concluded. \"May _Domina Fortuna_ favor us this day!\"\n\nIn the darkness, I heard mutterings, _\"Domina Bona_ . . . _Fortuna . . . Dea Bona_.\" I found myself patting my _lorica_ where my medallion hung.\n\nInitially, we made good time, despite the darkness. I was again riding the black mare with the white snip, on which Valgus, my _decurio_ in Caesar's praetorian detail, had trained me. Valgus believed that man and horse were a team; they trained together, and they fought together. Like _gemini_ , they had to trust each other completely. I felt I was getting to that point with my horse, Clamriu. I could feel her moods, sense her enthusiasms, her fatigues, and her fears as we rode. She responded easily to the reins or to my knee and leg directions.\n\nValgus didn't believe in Roman soldiers giving their mounts names; he considered it _alienus Romanitati, barbare_ , as he put it. But, all the great heroes of Gran'pa's sagas rode noble steeds with their own identities. So, I named my mare Clamriu after one of Arth Mawr's mounts. Even then I knew it was a childish affectation, but one I still wished to embrace.\n\nWe reached the hills, and Agrippa's detail moved off to the west. We had to go more slowly now. Not only because of the darkness, but also because this was terrain that favored close ambush. Athauhnu sent _exploratores_ , a two-man point detail, out about twenty paces ahead of the main body. It was still too dark to make flankers practical, so we were vulnerable as we made our way slowly over the narrow trail. Before the encroaching hills had obscured the eastern sky, I noticed that the horizon was revealing itself in a golden glow. Caecina and his foraging party should be well on their way from the assembly area.\n\n\"Adonus _Decurio,\"_ I called to get Athauhnu's attention.\n\n_\"Quid volare_ tu?\" he responded in Latin. \"What to fly you?\"\n\nI realized quickly that he meant to ask what I wanted. I switched to Gah'el. \"I think we should leave two riders at the trail head to make sure the foraging party doesn't miss it.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" he responded. \"Damn Romans could get lost between a tent and a latrine.\"\n\nI didn't think to remind _'_ Adonus _Decurio'_ whose side he was on at the moment. The fact that he had stopped referring to me as \"Little Roman\" and seemed to except me from the innate disorientation of all Romans marked a major advance in our relationship.\n\nAs soon as there was adequate light, Athauhnu posted two riders out on each side of our column as flank security. Where the terrain was open and flat, they ranged out almost fifty _passus_ from our line of march; when the terrain closed in, they virtually rejoined our column.\n\nOur \"command group\" consisted of Athauhnu, me, a trumpeter with a hunting horn hanging strapped across his chest and chinking against his chainmail lorica as he rode, and a _vexillarius_ , carrying a bright red pennant attached to a long spear. We rode at the head of the column, about twenty passus behind our two-man point element. Occasionally, when the terrain flattened and the trail ran straight, we caught sight of the two riders. The rest of our _ala_ , twelve troopers, rode in a staggered formation along the trail. To our rear, two riders kept contact with Caecina and the wagons.\n\nWe were an _ala_ of twenty-four riders, small by Roman standards, but considering the Gauls' peculiar sense of _officium et fidelitas_ , quite adequate.\n\nAgain, by the standards of the Roman army, we appeared to be a motley collection of troopers, a band of Gallic brigands. We sported an assortment of bronze and steel helmets: some conical, some round, some with cheek guards, some without. About half the men wore chainmail; a few wore leather; and several had nothing more than padded jackets. Most of the men wore Gallic long swords; the rest had short Roman _gladii_.\n\nI noticed a couple of our troopers were carrying _iacula_ , light javelins, in long quivers behind their saddles. To me, such weapons didn't seem to serve any purpose; they seemed too light to be of any use in combat against armor. I asked Athauhnu about it.\n\n\"Ah,\" Athauhnu answered, \"we call that _uh gae_. It's a weapon given to my people by the god, Lugus, when we departed from the Land in the Skies.\"\n\nI recognized the word. In Gran'pa's stories, the ancient heroes had magical weapons called _gaea_ that dripped gore, glowed with anger in combat, and once thrown, always tasted enemy blood. I had never actually seen one before. I was expecting a substantial weapon, something worthy of Homer's epic\u2014a long, heavy ash shaft thrusting a long, black, razor-sharp, steel blade. These javelins that the Sequani troopers were carrying seemed insubstantial, flimsy.\n\nAthauhnu noticed my skepticism. \"Lend me your shield, Arth Bek,\" he requested, holding out his hand.\n\n\"What?\" I questioned.\n\n\"Your shield,\" Athauhnu insisted, \"let me have it.\"\n\nI shimmied out of my shield, which was hung across my back, and handed it over.\n\n\"Emlun! To me!\" he called out to one of his troopers.\n\nA rider from the middle of our column came forward. He looked to be a boy of about my age, maybe a bit younger. He had a round, bronze helmet bouncing on top of his head, and he wore a padded jacket. His _spatha_ , hanging across his chest by a leather baldric, looked to be at least two sizes too big for him.\n\n\"Yes, Athauhnu . . . uh . . . Chief,\" he said to Athauhnu.\n\n\"Emlun,\" Athauhnu instructed, \"take this Roman shield up the trail about a hundred _passus_ and hang it facing us on a tree right next to the trail.\"\n\nThe one called Emlun stared at Athauhnu for a couple of heartbeats, not sure what was going on. Then, he shrugged, took my shield, and rode ahead down the trail.\n\nAthauhnu watched him go. \"My cousin,\" he explained, \"my mother's sister's son . . . a good lad . . . Needs some seasoning.\"\n\nWe watched Emlun pound down the trail, finally stopping to hang my shield on a tree. Even from that distance, I could see the red boar of the Tenth Legion painted around its center. Emlun waved to us when the shield was secure.\n\nAthauhnu waved his cousin back to the column. As Emlun was cantering back, Athauhnu called out again, \"Guithiru! To me!\"\n\nThis time, one of the veteran troopers rode up to Athauhnu. He was arrayed in Roman chainmail, the cheek-pieces of his bronze _galea_ helmet secured tightly under his chin.\n\n\"Yes, Chief!\" he saluted.\n\nAthauhnu pointed down the trail to my shield. \"The boar . . . kill it!\"\n\nGuithiru grinned, \"Where do you want me to hit it?\"\n\nAthauhnu shrugged, \"You kill a boar by spearing its heart!\"\n\nGuithiru nodded. He reached behind his saddle and extracted one of his _gaea_ from a quiver. He waited a few heartbeats for Emlun to clear the trail and rejoin the command group. Then, he shouted and kicked his heels back into his horse's flank. His gray, dappled stallion exploded down the trail, gaining speed as he approached his target. I watched as Guithiru rose up off the saddle with his knees locked into his horse's flank. This was a signal for the stallion to increase his speed. Guithiru's hand and arm holding the _gae_ came up, then thrust forward in a blur. Even from a hundred _passus_ away, I could hear the sharp thwack as the javelin punched into its target. Guithiru pulled his stallion up some thirty _passus_ beyond my now transfixed shield. He waved back toward Athauhnu.\n\n\"Let's go see if Guithiru killed his boar,\" Athauhnu invited.\n\nWe cantered down the trail. As we approached the tree, I could see that Guithiru had indeed \"killed the boar.\" His _gae_ had pierced the image of the red Tenth Legion boar just behind its front legs, right where the animal's heart would have been. The javelin had punched completely through my shield and had pinned it fast to the tree.\n\n\"That is how deadly a _gae_ is in the hands of a warrior!\" Athauhnu remarked.\n\nGuithiru rode up to inspect his handy work. \"Perhaps we should just leave it there like that as a warning to our enemies,\" Guithiru suggested.\n\nAthauhnu shrugged, \"The Romans would force our _decurio_ to buy a new one.\"\n\nGuithiru laughed at the folly of Roman quartermasters and dismounted. After a few twists and pulls, he managed to extract his javelin from the tree, but he had to cut it out of my shield with his _pugio_. He handed the round _parma_ back up to me. There was a small, jagged hole in its middle, straight through the heart of the red boar.\n\n\"Hold it away from your body if we get into a fight, _Decurio_ ,\" Guithiru suggested. \"Maybe your chainmail will be enough to stop the point.\" Then, with a laugh, he resumed his position back with the column.\n\nI inspected the ruin of my shield. I had been considering trading it for an oblong, Gallic cavalry shield. It would be a bit heavier than my _parma_ , but it would give better protection for the upper legs and head. This little demonstration convinced me.\n\nAbout an hour later, crossing our trail, we discovered fresh tracks left by an unknown force. Since there was no reason for friendlies to be in the area, we had to assume they were hostiles.\n\nWe were crossing a small valley split by a stream running toward the southeast. We could easily see our two scouts on the other side of the stream, some fifteen hundred _passus_ ahead of the column. They had stopped, and one of the scouts seemed to be examining something on the ground while the other remained mounted and alert. Suddenly, the mounted scout whistled to get our attention and beckoned us forward.\n\nAthauhnu acknowledged the summons. He whistled to get the attention of our flankers, who were operating some thousand _passus_ up and down the valley on either side of the trail. He signaled them to halt; then he indicated that they should be vigilant to their front.\n\nThen, he called for Guithiru.\n\n\"What do you wish, Chief?\" the warrior asked when he joined the command group.\n\n\"Our scouts have found something,\" Athauhnu explained. \"We're going forward. Keep the men here until we get back. Keep them alert.\"\n\n\" _Uhr wuhf ifitho, a pen_ ,\" Guithiru acknowledged. \"Yes, Chief!\"\n\nAthauhnu and I rode forward to meet the scouts. As we approached them, the mounted scout, a rider named Alaw, greeted us: \"We found a trail . . . riders moving up the valley.\"\n\nWe dismounted and walked over to the scout, who was examining the ground.\n\n\"What is it, Rhodri?\" Athauhnu demanded.\n\nThe one called Rhodri rose, \"About twenty riders . . . moving northwest . . . not in a great hurry . . . Horses are shod . . . heavy burdens . . . Armored men, I think.\"\n\n\"How long ago?\" Athauhnu asked.\n\nRhodri shrugged, \"Not long . . . dawn . . . a little earlier. I'll follow the trail through the grass. Maybe I can find some fresh droppings.\"\n\n\"No need,\" Athauhnu said. \"Shod horses and armored riders, you said?\"\n\nRhodri nodded.\n\n\"Not Helvetii,\" Athauhnu said to me. \"Not all their horses are shod, and most of their cavalry aren't equipped with heavy armor like the Romans.\"\n\n\"Not Helvetii?\" I questioned. \"Then who?\"\n\nAthauhnu shrugged, \"Maybe People of the Dark-Moon . . . a group of Aedui . . . This is their territory. If it were a rich noble's _fintai_ he would equip his bodyguard with armor and equipment.\"\n\n\"There's no Roman cavalry operating up here,\" I affirmed. \"We'll assume they're hostile, Helvetii or not.\"\n\nAthauhnu nodded.\n\n\"What's off in that direction?\" I asked Athauhnu, gesturing to the northwest where the riders had gone.\n\nAthauhnu shrugged. \"I don't know. There seems to be a ridgeline leading off to the north. Bibracte, the Dark-Moon king's fortress is to the northwest . . . I don't know . . . Our objective is directly north from here . . . maybe another seven or eight thousand _passus.\"_\n\nI looked up to the northwest where the valley twisted into a heavily wooded ridgeline. \"We're probably under observation out here in the open,\" I said to no one in particular.\n\n\" _Uhr wuhf uhn cuhtino_ ,\" Athauhnu answered. \"I agree. We should push on to the village.\"\n\n\"We should,\" I agreed. \"But, I need to send a rider back to the Roman column with a message.\"\n\nAthauhnu nodded; he whistled to get Guithiru's attention. \"Send my cousin up to me!\" he called.\n\nSoon Emlun galloped up to our position. \"The _decurio_ has a job for you,\" Athauhnu informed him.\n\n\"What is it, _Decurio_?\" Emlun asked.\n\n\"I want you to ride back to the Romans with a message,\" I began. \"Report to the tribune, Caecina. He's the officer wearing plate armor with a red plume in his helmet. Tell him we believe there is enemy cavalry operating in the area . . . a group of twenty to thirty, heavily armed, positioned on the high ground to the northwest. Repeat that for me.\"\n\nEmlun did. I continued, \"Approach the Roman column carefully. They'll probably have a _contubernium_ , eight infantry . . . to their front, walking point. Most of them can't tell the difference between you and a _Helvetius_ . . . and they don't much care. They'll unload a few _pila_ at you, then issue a challenge.\"\n\nEmlun laughed. \"If I can't get close to Romans without being seen, I should just go back to my father's farm and help the plant the summer crops.\"\n\n\"Be that as it may,\" I cautioned, \"just be careful! Some of those troops speak _Gah'el_ , so you'll be understood. Now, repeat the message again for me.\"\n\nEmlun did, and I sent him galloping down the trail toward the Roman foraging party.\n\nWe saw no sign of any threat for the next hour. Emlun rejoined our column to say that Caecina had acknowledged my message. We were climbing the last ridgeline before reaching our objective. I estimated the Aeduan _vicus_ to be no more than a few hundred _passus_ distant.\n\nSuddenly, Rhodri appeared at the top of the ridge ahead of us and whistled sharply. Then, he pointed to the northwest. There, in a small clearing at the top of a hill, where our ridgeline twisted up into the highlands, were four riders.\n\nAthauhnu and I cantered to the top of the ridge to get a better look. The riders remained stationary. They were obviously observing us and felt no need to remain hidden.\n\n\"Who are they?\" Athauhnu demanded of Rhodri when we reached the top.\n\n\" _Ni Rhufeinig_ \" Rhodri shrugged. \"Not Romans . . . Well-armed . . . Dark-Moon warriors, I think . . . king's men . . . _fintai_.\"\n\nI looked toward the group. They were carrying no standards or pennants, but the sun glinted off their armor. \"They seem interested in us,\" I said to no one in particular.\n\n\"Indeed, they do!\" Athauhnu agreed. \"And that village we're trying to reach.\"\n\n_\"Edruhch, a pen_!\" Rhodri said suddenly, pointing east into our line of march. \"Look, Chief!\"\n\nWhen I looked, I could see a smudge of grayish-black smoke staining the sky about where the village should be.\n\n\"That can't be good,\" I muttered. Then, I whistled back to our main column. \"Send up Emlun!\"\n\nAthauhnu's cousin soon joined us. \"I have another message for the Romans,\" I told him.\n\nEmlun acknowledged me, and I began my report, \"Tell Caecina that we have made visual contact with an unidentified force of cavalry approximately one thousand passus to the northwest on the high ground . . . four riders, well-armed and armored. Also, there is evidence of hostile activity at our objective. Repeat that back to me.\"\n\nHe did, so I continued, \"Take an escort with you . . . another warrior for security. Be careful! We're under enemy observation. Don't get ambushed!\"\n\nEmlun nodded vigorously. \"I'll take Idwal with me, if you approve, Chief,\" he said. He was excited to be in contact with the enemy.\n\nAthauhnu grunted in the affirmative.\n\n\"Repeat the message again!\" I ordered.\n\nEmlun did. _\"Redi guhvluh!_ \" I told him. \"Ride quickly, but keep your eyes open!\"\n\nEmlun flashed me a wide grin. Then, he was off down the hill.\n\n\"He still thinks this is a game,\" Athauhnu commented.\n\nThis time I grunted in the affirmative. Emlun and I were of an age, but somehow I had changed.\n\n\"Rhodri!\" I called to get the scout's attention. \"You and Alaw get as close to that village as you can without being detected. Then, get back to us. I want to know what we're riding into.\"\n\nRhodri quickly glanced over to Athauhnu, who nodded. Then, he rode off toward the _vicus_.\n\nAthauhnu whistled down the hill and gestured the column to join us.\n\n\"I didn't mean to 'ride your horse,'\" I told him, \"with Emlun and Rhodri, I mean.\"\n\nAthauhnu just shrugged, \"You're a warrior . . . _uhn pen_ . . . a chief . . . You're doing your job. You must be able to act without the approval of others. You must be willing to take responsibility for what happens. Emlun's a good choice. He rides light, and if we get into a mess down the trail, he's better out of it. And Rhodri knows his job. If the _poblo r'avon_ or any of their _cuun almaeneg_ , German dogs, are waiting for us down the road, he'll see them before they see him.\"\n\n_\"Poblo r'avon_?\" I questioned. \" _Gentes fluminis_ . . . River People?\"\n\n\"That's what we call the Helvetii,\" Athauhnu said. _\"Poblo r'avon_. When this is over, I'll be glad to drown every last one of them in that bloody river of theirs, the Rhenus.\"\n\nWe rode forward down the ridge, toward the Aeduan village. The smudge of dark smoke in the sky became increasingly larger as we approached. We had covered about two-thirds of the distance when Alaw met us on the trail.\n\n\"Report!\" I snapped, not waiting for Athauhnu.\n\n\"We rode to a spot overlooking the village,\" Alaw said. \"The smoke is from the large round house in the center. It's been burned . . . yesterday . . . no earlier . . . still smoldering. No sign of any enemy activity in the village. Can't tell what's going on in the hills to the north, but it seems quiet up there too.\"\n\n\"Where's Rhodri?\" I asked.\n\n\"He's watching the village from concealment,\" Alaw answered. \"If anything happens, he'll get back to us before we ride into it.\"\n\n\"What do you think?\" I asked Athauhnu.\n\nHe was about to respond, when Emlun rode up to us from the column.\n\n\"Did you report to Caecina?\" I asked him.\n\n\"I did!\" Emlun said. \"The Roman chief says we continue with the mission unless prevented.\"\n\nI looked up toward the northwest. Our watchers had disappeared. I wondered if Agrippa and the rest of Madog's riders had spooked them\u2014or maybe they were up to something else.\n\nAthauhnu brought me back from my musings. \"Arth Bek! I want to see that village with my own eyes before our band arrives. We should ride forward with Alaw.\"\n\nI nodded to Athauhnu, then said to Emlun, \" _Diolkh_! Thanks! Rejoin the column! Send Guithiru up to us!\"\n\nAgain, Emlun flashed his boyish smile and turned back toward the column. I heard his whistle and his calling out to Guithiru. So much for operational security! Now every Helvetian and Kraut within two hundred _passus_ knew we were there.\n\n\"I suppose you've noticed that our friends on the hill have left us,\" I said to Athauhnu.\n\nHe nodded and said, \"A while back.\"\n\nGuithiru approached us.\n\n\"The _decurio_ and I are going forward to scout the village,\" Athauhnu told him. \"When we send back to you, I want you to bring the rest of the band up to us.\"\n\n\" _Uhr wuhf ifitho, a pen_ ,\" Guithiru acknowledged. \"Yes, Chief!\"\n\n\"Take us in, Alaw!\" Athauhnu said.\n\nAlaw nodded and turned his horse back up the trail.\n\nWe followed Alaw at a slow trot for about five hundred _passus_ down the winding trail. The forest closed in on both sides. When we came to some rising ground, Alaw pulled up. He looked around for a few heartbeats and seemed to see what he was looking for.\n\n\"We dismount here,\" he told us, hopping down from his horse. \"Rhodri's just ahead.\"\n\nWe pulled our mounts off the trail, and I saw Rhodri's bay. We dropped our reins. The horses were trained to war. They would not move. Alaw led us up the hill, along an almost invisible path. We were just about to the top when Rhodri's voice challenged us.\n\n\"Rhodri,\" Alaw answered, \"I have the chief with me.\"\n\nRhodri suddenly appeared out of the brush. \"Come! Look!\" he said and gestured us forward.\n\nRhodri led us to his well-concealed observation point. \"Helmets,\" he hissed at us.\n\nWe removed our helmets so they would not betray our presence by reflecting sunlight. Then, we looked down into a small valley. In the middle, along a running stream, was the village. In its center stood a blackened, smoldering ruin of what had once been a large round-house\u2014a chief's hall or a storage barn. There were other, smaller round-houses and huts in the complex, but they seemed untouched. The cluster of huts was surrounded by a barrier of brush and bracken. I could see the outline of what had once been a defense ditch around the entire settlement; it had eroded into a grassy indentation by seasons of wind and rain. Beyond that, the village fields and grazing lands stretched to the edges of the forest.\n\n\"I've seen no movement down there,\" Rhodri hissed at us. \"No signs of life . . . no cattle or fowl . . . not even dogs . . . nothing.\"\n\n\"If they were massacred, there'd be bodies,\" Athauhnu mused. \"We'd see those . . . and the dogs. They never get all the dogs. They'd be back to feed on . . . feed on the leavings.\"\n\n\"Any activity to the north?\" I asked Rhodri.\n\nHe shrugged. \"Too many trees. Anything could hide in that forest. The birds show no alarm. This time of day, they like to stay close to the nest.\"\n\n\"Our orders are to bypass the village and screen it,\" I said to Athauhnu. \"Do you see any reason why we shouldn't continue?\"\n\nAthauhnu was silent. He was scanning the treetops to the north. Suddenly, he grabbed Rhodri's arm and pointed to the northwest, \"Look, there!\"\n\nI looked in the direction that Athauhnu was pointing, but saw nothing.\n\n\"Something's disturbed them,\" Rhodri agreed with Athauhnu.\n\n\"What do you see?\" I asked.\n\n\"A flock of birds rose from the trees there,\" Athauhnu pointed out over the village. \"It's too far for an ambush on the village. Could be nothing. But, that is where we should look.\"\n\nI nodded, then said, \"Alaw! Ride back to the troop and have Guithiru bring the men forward!\"\n\nWithout a word, Alaw moved back to where we left the horses.\n\nAthauhnu was talking, \"I think we should bypass the village to the west and work around it. It's the long way round, but it will position us uphill from whatever's spooking those birds.\"\n\n\" _Uhr wuhf uhn cuhtuno_!\" I nodded. \"Agreed!\"\n\nGuithiru soon brought the rest of the men up. I left two troopers behind\u2014 Emlun and his friend, Idwal\u2014to lead Caecina and the foraging detail into the village. The rest of us worked our way around the village to the west.\n\nIt was not cavalry country. We had to dismount and lead our horses up along narrow paths through the woods and brush. As we moved through the forest, the horses snorted; they were reluctant to move forward; their eyes darted about, examining the forest around them. Athauhnu said that horses had an innate fear of the forest. Somehow, they knew wolves hunted among the trees in packs. And, big cats, rarely seen but deadly killers, lurked in the shadows. On open ground, wolves were no match for horses. But here among the trees, the wolves were the masters.\n\nWe were making so much of a racket, trying to work our way around the village, I doubted any self-respecting wolf would be caught within a thousand _passus_ of us. As far as cats big enough to take down a horse, I didn't want to think about that.\n\nHorses weren't the only creatures made nervous by these dark, northern forests.\n\nWe finally reached a position we believed to be directly above where we suspected human activity. The village was invisible, down the sloping ground to our southwest. We had cleared most of the perimeter around the village, so I was confident that Caecina and the foraging detail weren't marching into a trap. But, we had to ensure there was no enemy threat to our front. I sent Alaw and Rhodri ahead on foot to scout the area.\n\nAlaw soon returned. \"There's a clearing about fifty _passus_ down the hill. We can see people\u2014\"\n\n\"People?\" I interrupted. \"Enemy soldiers?\"\n\n\"No,\" Alaw said. \"Mostly women and children . . . some old men . . . The missing villagers, I think.\"\n\n\"No sign of weapons . . . armor?\" I pressed.\n\nAlaw shrugged, \"They have planting tools.\"\n\n\"I think we should move forward,\" I said to Athauhnu. \"But, we need to be careful. These woods could hide an army. They may be using the women and children to bait us.\"\n\nAthauhnu nodded, and we moved forward.\n\nAlaw guided us to the edge of the clearing where Rhodri was waiting. I was just about to begin to deploy the _ala_ to sweep into the clearing when we heard a voice from down below.\n\n\"Are you oafs going to snap every shaggin' branch and crack every shaggin' twig you can find in those damned woods before you show yourselves? I could smell you and your shaggin' horses a thousand _passus_ away. Show yourselves, and get your arses out here!\"\n\nI stood up and exposed myself. Luckily, I wasn't greeted with an arrow in the chest. I saw a large man standing in the clearing below me. He sported bushy, gray Celtic mustachios that reached down to his chin\u2014rather a cascade of descending chins\u2014and he was wearing an old-fashioned domed helmet that floated on an aureole of bushy gray hair. His leather _lorica_ struggled to contain his belly. There was, however, nothing comic about the sword he was holding, a long, Gallic _spatha_ , whose recently honed edges caught the sunlight; it glowed like _Durn Gwin_ White-Hilt, the lightning sword Lugus.\n\n\"So, who the hell are you?\" he challenged me in Gah'el.\n\nI puffed out my chest and tried to channel all my Roman _dignitas_ , answering, \"I am Gaius Marius Insubrecus, _decurio_ of the praetorian cavalry of Caesar, _imperator_ \u2014\"\n\n\"You look like a shaggin' Roman, alright,\" he interrupted. \"But, those wankers standing next to you are no more Roman than my hairy bottom! By their colors, they look like _Soucanai_ to me! What the hell is a Roman puppy and a gang of _Soucanai_ sheep-shaggers doing on my lands?\"\n\n\"Are you chief here?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Chief? I'm the king around here . . . twice over, you Roman pup!\" he spat back. \"I am Cuhnetha mab Cluhweluhno, _buch'rix_ of these lands and _pobl'rix_ of the _Wuhr Tuurch_!\"\n\nI understood the words 'cattle king' and 'clan king.' _Buch'rix_ meant that Cuhnetha was the leader of this settlement, which was prosperous enough to have at least a modest herd of cattle. I wasn't at all sure about the meaning of the _pobl'rix_ of the _Wuhr Tuurch_ , the clan king of the Descendants of the Boar.\n\n\"Who are the _Wuhr Tuurch?\"_ I asked him.\n\nCuhnetha looked at me as if I were something nasty that just dropped from a tree into his path. \"Tuurch Mawr was the first king of the Aineduai, the Dark-Moon People\u2014Aedui to you Romans. He led the people down from the Land in the Skies into these valleys in the time before time. He defeated the _Pobl oh Danu_ , the People of the Dark God, and took these lands for the Aineduai. He rode as a chief at the right shoulder of Arth Mawr when the Gah'el rubbed the noses of _uh Chellinai_ , the Greeks, and you Romans as well, in dog shit. Now, he feasts with the gods in the Land of Youth! Enough of your questions, Pup! What are Romans and these _Soucanai_ dog-turds doing in my lands?\"\n\nAthauhnu answered, \"After we _Soucanai_ have destroyed the River People and the _Almaenwuhra_ that you Aiduai run from, even in your own lands, and the Romans go back to their grape farms, we are going to make dogs of your women and shit on the heads of your sons, oh _pobl'rix_ of cows and sheep!\"\n\n\"Our women alone are enough to drive you sheep-shaggers back into your shit-ridden swamps!\" Cuhnetha laughed. \"What are you called?\"\n\n\"Athauhnu mab Hergest,\" he answered. \"Pen _cefhul_ of Madog mab Guuhn, _pobl'rix_ of the _Wuhn_ clan of the _Soucanai_ and _Dux_ of the Roman Caesar.\"\n\n\"I should have guessed that a _Soucanai_ king would attach himself to a Roman's arse, oh Horse Chief of Madog!\" Cuhnetha shot back. \"But, unless we're going to fight, the law of our ancestors demands I offer you hospitality, and all this talking has given me a terrible thirst. So, come down out of those woods and join me!\"\n\nCuhnetha pulled off his helmet and walked away back into the clearing. \"Rhonwen!\" he shouted. \"Some _bragawt!_ The good stuff! _Medd coch_ . . . the red mead! We have guests!\"\n\nI looked over at Athauhnu. Despite all the insults hurled back and forth, he was laughing. When he saw me looking, he gestured toward the clearing.\n\n\"Come, Arth Bek!\" he invited. \"The King of Blowhards has offered us hospitality and is now honor bound for our safety. And he's right! Insulting him has given me a terrible thirst and a few cups of his _bragawt_ sounds like just the thing to slake it!\"\n\nWe followed Cuhnetha down into the clearing. For the Gah'el, hospitality is sacred. The host is responsible to the king for the comfort and safety of his guests. If a guest should die, through no fault of the host or his people, the host would have to pay his head price to the king. If a guest were killed or murdered through no fault of the host, three times the head price. Should the host himself harm a guest in any way, the host's rank and honors would be stripped and he would be exiled.\n\nNear the center of the clearing, Cuhnetha had a pavilion set up, a lean-to of leather sheets, not unlike those of a legionary tent. There were some rickety-looking wooden stools. Cuhnetha gestured for us to sit.\n\n\"The women will take your horses,\" he told us as he struggled out of his _lorica_. \"They'll also serve your men. Your nags look as relieved as you do to get out of those woods. We don't have much . . . some _bragawt_ , cheese, and yesterday's bread.\"\n\nAthauhnu got the men situated and came back to the pavilion, where a tall, lissome red-haired girl of no more than seventeen winters was pouring a reddish-orange liquid into clay cups.\n\n\"We call this _medd coch,\"_ Cuhnetha said, grabbing one of the cups. \"Our bees produce the richest honey in all the lands of the Aineduai. Drink!\" Cuhnetha took a long, noisy draught from his cup.\n\nWe drank. I was cautious, and that proved a good thing. Cuhnetha's _medd coch_ didn't have quite the bite of the _dur_ my father distilled out behind our storage sheds, where Mama wouldn't see, but it was hard to taste the difference. The fumes rose up into my head, making my eyes water, and the liquid burned like fire going down my throat.\n\n_\"Dur uh buhwuhd,\"_ Cuhnetha said as if he were reading my mind. \"The water of life. _\"_ He smacked his lips and held up his now empty cup to the red-haired girl.\n\nThe red-haired girl was obviously accustomed to Cuhnetha's act. She filled his cup, placed the pitcher on the ground next to his stool, and walked out of the lean-to.\n\nCuhnetha caught me watching her as she walked away.\n\n_\"Fuh nith,\"_ he said. \"My sister's daughter! _\"_ That was Gah'el guest-talk for, \"Don't think about it; she's family. _\"_\n\n\"So, _\"_ Cuhnetha started after another long pull from his cup, \"you never explained what a Roman and a band of Soucanai pig-thieves are doing in my woods.\"\n\n\"Your king promised us food if we fought the Helv . . . I mean . . . the River People for him, _\"_ I said. \"We've come to collect.\"\n\nCuhnetha laughed at that. \"Well, you've come a day too late, Little Roman! All the food's gone!\"\n\n\"Gone?\" I said. \"You mean the raiders took it all?\"\n\n\"Raiders?\" Cuhnetha snorted. \"There were no raiders here . . . You and your Soucanai friends excepted, of course.\"\n\n\"No, raiders?\" I questioned. \"Then who burned your barn?\"\n\n\"Barn?\" Cuhnetha shot back. \"That was no bloody barn! That was my hall! And, it was the men of that gob-shite of a _dunorix_ who burned it. They took the food!\"\n\n\"The _dunorix_? _\"_ I stammered. \"The commander of the king's fortress? Deluuhnu mab Clethguuhno? The king's brother? Your own people burned your bar\u2014I mean, your hall?\"\n\n\"Right and wrong, Little Roman, _\"_ Cuhnetha shot back, taking another long drink. \"The _fintai_ of the _dunorix_ set the blaze alright! But, Deluuhnu mab Clethguuhno is not 'my own people'! He's the snot-nosed, treacherous, piece of shit of his usurping, twice-bastard father, Clethguuhno mab Grefhuhtha. May he rot in the latrines of Annuhfn while worthy men piss on his head for all eternity!\"\n\nWhile Cuhnetha was refilling his cup, I asked, \"'Usurping, twice-bastard'? Are you saying he's not of the royal clan? Who is the legitimate king of the Aiduai, then?\"\n\n\"I am!\" Cuhnetha almost shouted. \"I am the _pobl'rix_ of _Wuhr Tuurch!_ The high kingship of the Aiduai has always been founded in the _Wuhr Tuurch!_ Since we descended from the Lands in the Sky, the descendants of _Tuurch_ have always ruled the tribe! That was until Clethguuhno poisoned my grandfather. My da was only a boy, then, not yet of the age. Clethguuhno convinced the Council of the Three Generations that the gods had killed my grandfather\u2014not the concoction of Greek weeds he put in his beer. And, with hordes of _Almaenwuhrai_ rampaging through our lands, the Aineduai needed a strong man . . . a warrior . . . ruling the tribe. My grandfather's death was a sign that Clethguuhno should rule. Then, when the Germans left us to go south and kill Romans, Clethguuhno's breeding bitch gave him two strong sons . . . heirs. He convinced the Council to recognize his oldest, Duuhruhda, as his heir.\"\n\nRanting was thirsty work. Cuhnetha held up the now-empty pitcher and bellowed to Rhonwen for more. From somewhere out among the milling Aineduai and our Soucanai troopers in the clearing, I heard a woman's voice yell back, \"Wait your turn, old man!\"\n\n\"No respect, I get!\" Cuhnetha complained. \"From my own blood!\" Then, he looked at me, \"Don't ever marry a red-haired woman, boy! She'll be the death of you!\"\n\nI didn't take his advice, and after thirty-some years, I'm still alive\u2014bruised somewhat, but still alive.\n\n\"So, now the _Wuhr Blath_ rule the tribe,\" he started.\n\n\"The Wolf People?\" I questioned.\n\n\"That's Duuhruhda's clan,\" Cunetha said, while glaring out into the clearing as if that would bring Rhonwen faster. \"The shaggin' descendants of the shaggin' wolf. It was they who came here yesterday with their carts, demanding all our stored food. It's for the king's _dun_ , Bibracte, they said. I asked them how we were going to eat until the crops were in. Eat your seeds, they laughed. They're already in the ground, I said. They just laughed. Then, they burned my hall. It was a message from their bloody _dunorix_ , that gob-shite brother of that gob-shite usurper . . . Deluuhnu mab Clethguuhno.\"\n\nRhonwen finally arrived with a fresh pitcher of the _bragawt_.\n\n\"It's about time!\" Cuhnetha grumbled. \"A man could die of thirst waitin' on the likes of you, girl!\"\n\n\"Shut ya gob, old man!\" she shot back. \"And just be thankful I pay ya any mind!\"\n\nAs she turned to leave, Rhonwen gave me a smile and a wink. I felt both in my heart.\n\n\"Where is your _fintai, pobl'rix_?\" I heard Athauhnu ask as he leaned forward for Cuhnetha to fill his cup. \"Why did your warriors allow this?\"\n\nCuhnetha snorted, \"My son led our sixteen warriors and five boys to Bibracte weeks ago, when that usurping, pretending king\u2014may he wipe backsides in Annuhfn for all the ages\u2014summoned them. Now they're all cowering behind those nice, thick walls up on top of those high hills, while the River People and Krauts do whatever they want to the rest of us. When those worthless followers of the _dunorix_ set the fire, my people fled to the woods. When it's safe, I have to bring them back . . . start rebuilding . . . decide how I'm going to feed them until the harvest. A king's responsibility is to his people . . . to the land! When the land burns, the king burns. That's how we did it in the old days . . . Kill the king; choose another!\"\n\nCuhnetha drained his cup to that sentiment.\n\nRemembering Caecina and his foraging detail, I stood. Athauhnu did also.\n\n_\"Diolch i chi am eich cletuhgaruuch, A Argluuhth_ ,\" I pronounced the ritual of thanks.\n\n_\"Riduhch chi bab amser uhn cael eu croesauu uhn fi, A Argluuhth_ ,\" Cuhnetha rose unsteadily and completed the ritual. \"You are always welcome at my hearth, Lord . . . at least, as soon as I rebuild the shaggin' thing,\" he added.\n\n# X.\n\n# Scaena Caesaris\n\n## CAESAR'S DRAMA\n\n_Diviciacus multis cum lacrimis Caesarem complexus obsecrare coepit ne quid gravius in fratrem statueret quod si quid ei a Caesare gravius accidisset cum ipse eum locum amicitiae apud eum teneret neminem existimaturum non sua voluntate factum qua ex re futurum uti totius Galliae animi a se averterentur haec cum pluribus verbis flens a Caesare peteret_.\n\n\"In tears Diviciacus embraced Caesar and began to implore him not to condemn his brother further. If Dumnorix were severely dealt with by Caesar, no one would believe that it had been done without Diviciacus'concurrence since Caesar held him in such regard. All Gaul would turn its favor away from him if such a thing were to happen. Weeping profusely, Diviciacus begged these things of Caesar.\"\n\n(from Gaius Marius Insubrecus' notebook of Caesar's journal)\n\nHe found Caesar and the army by the eleventh hour. They had moved less than ten thousand _passus_ to the west, still following the lumbering mass of the Helvetii.\n\nCaecina was not a happy man. His wagons were empty; he felt that he had failed in his mission. When Athauhnu and I descended to the village from Cuhnetha's encampment, Agrippa and the other two _alae_ of Madog's Sequani cavalry had already returned from their screening mission in the west. Caecina's foraging detail had also arrived from the south; his wagons were assembled in the center of the village, while Sanga's infantry had secured the perimeter.\n\nObviously, there was no food, and no Aedui, to be found.\n\nI briefed the tribunes and Sanga on what Athauhnu and I had found and on what Cuhnetha had told us.\n\nCaecina wasn't satisfied, \"I suggest we send Sanga and his _centuria_ back up the hill and squeeze that cow king's balls. He must have some grain hidden away! And what about cattle? Did you see any sign of livestock?\"\n\nAgrippa shook his head. \"Even if we do, I don't imagine we'll get enough food to make a difference. The Aedui have had more than enough time to hide any remaining supplies not stolen by their own people. I'm more concerned with what this _dunorix_ bastard's up to. It seems as if he's stripping the countryside to starve us, when he's supposed to be gathering food to feed us.\"\n\n\"Caesar will not be pleased if we return with empty wagons,\" Caecina insisted.\n\n\"You can't squeeze wine out of raisins,\" Agrippa countered. \"We will at least be able to offer Caesar information that he may find useful. If the Aedui, or some faction within the royal household, are plotting against us, Caesar will need to be informed. I recommend that we rest the men and animals until the eighth hour. Then, we return to the army.\"\n\nThe men were sullen on the way back. Not only did they think that their mission had failed, but they were also not looking forward to the expected food shortages and reduced rations.\n\nWhen we reached the legionary camps, we discovered that we were not the only foraging party to return empty-handed. All the foragers who had marched north and northeast found empty barns. The ones coming in from the south and southeast had had better luck because the Helvetii and our army had screened these settlements from being stripped by their own people in Bibracte.\n\nWe again found Caesar's _praetorium_ in the camp of the Tenth Legion. Labienus was outside the tent with his _tabulae_ , taking reports from the returning foraging parties and instructing them how to distribute their takings.\n\nWhen he saw us, he said, \"Agrippa . . . Caecina . . . you marched due north . . . Let me guess . . . Our Aeduan allies beat you to the food.\"\n\n\" _Recte, Legate_ ,\" Agrippa responded. \"We came back empty.\"\n\nLabienus grunted and scratched something into his _tabula_. Then, he seemed to notice me, \"Ah . . . Insubrecus . . . Caesar wants you. He needs you to make sense out of those daily journals he's collecting. The rest of you are dismissed. You did a good job today . . . Not your fault it didn't work as planned . . . not your fault at all.\"\n\nI asked Athauhnu if he would have someone look after Clamriu, my horse. He nodded. \"I'll have Emlun look after her for you. He'll bring her back to Valgus after she's groomed and had a chance to cool down.\"\n\nWhen I entered Caesar's _cubiculum_ , I saw the _imperator_ standing over by his operation maps in a heated discussion with four officers. They wore chainmail _loricae_ and had their swords hanging on the left\u2014centurions. Each wore a broad, red sash, designating their status as _primi pili_ , the _de facto_ commanders of Caesar's four veteran legions\u2014despite any _legatus_ Caesar might assign to tag along.\n\nCaesar was stripped down to his _subarmalis_ jacket; his plate armor _lorica_ and helmet were tossed in a corner. His hair was plastered down on the top of his head by the weight of his helmet and the sweat of the day.\n\nWhen Caesar spotted me, he called over, \" _Bene_ , Insubrecus . . . the _tabulae_ are there by my field desk. I'll be finished here soon.\"\n\nI did my best not to eavesdrop on Caesar's conversation: rations needed to be distributed to the men soon; break off contact with the enemy; march south into the _provincia;_ resupply from Massalia\u2014or attack now and finish the enemy.\n\nThen, I heard Caesar say, \" _Satis! Me Taedet!_ I command here! I will decide what this army will do!\"\n\nI couldn't help but look over. The four centurions stood stiffly, braced at attention before their commander.\n\nCaesar recovered his composure. His jaw relaxed, and the Caesarian mask was back in place. \"Excuse me . . . gentlemen . . . It's been a long, frustrating few days. I will consider everything you've said. I know you are motivated only by what's good for the Roman people and for this army. Please . . . leave me now . . . I have much to consider.\"\n\nThe centurions' positions of attention seemed to loosen around the shoulders, just slightly; their chins seemed a bit less braced. They muttered, \" _A'mperi'tu_ ',\" and they began moving away from their commander.\n\nOne of them noticed me. It was Malleus, \"The Hammer,\" _primus pilus_ of the Tenth Legion. He came over to where I was sitting. Since Caesar was the ranking officer in the tent, I did not rise, but I sat up stiffly.\n\n\"Insubrecus,\" Malleus said, noticing my decurion sash, \"or, should I say, Insubrecus _Decurio_. Moving ahead in the world, I see. Congratulations on your promotion! If your career continues at this pace, I'll be working for you by the end of this campaign.\"\n\nI knew Malleus was pulling my leg, but I wasn't quite sure of his point. I decided to play it safe. \" _Gratias ti', Centurio_!\"\n\nMalleus nodded in reply. \"Your old centurion, Strabo, is back on his feet and still with the Tenth Cohort. I may be moving him up to the _acies secunda_ soon. You should pay a visit. I'm sure he'd be glad to see you.\"\n\n\" _Gratias ti', Centurio,\" I repeated_.\n\nMalleus nodded again. He had a slight smirk on his face. \"Don't let too much of that _tabula_ wax rub off on you . . . It's not good for soldiering. I may want to get you back in the Tenth to do some real soldier's work.\"\n\nWith that, Malleus left the tent.\n\nAfter a short while, Caesar wandered over from the maps. \"Another day . . . another ten thousand _passus_ . . . day after day. I don't know how exciting you can make that sound in your report, Insubrecus.\"\n\nCaesar seemed to be prattling a bit. With him, that meant he was talking about one thing while his mind was processing something else. \"When senior centurions think they must give advice to their commander, things are not good.\n\nThe men must be getting restless . . . worried about their rations . . . tired of avoiding an enemy they think they can beat . . . Ten thousand _passus_ a day and then build another marching camp. That doesn't tire them out enough. They have too much extra energy to stew and fuss . . . too much time to be anxious about getting this thing over with . . . Uneasy about rumors . . . running out of food . . . wondering what the purple-striped chump in the command tent is doing . . . No good for discipline.\"\n\nSuddenly, he came out of his ruminations. \" _Scriba!_ \" he yelled.\n\n\" _Imperator!_ \" answered the voice of his clerk from the outer _cubiculum_ of the tent.\n\n\"Get me Labienus!\" Caesar ordered. \" _Stat_ '!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu_ '!\" the voice responded.\n\n\"Insubrecus,\" he said to me, \"hand me those reports . . . No . . . not those . . . Today's . . . the dailies . . . yes.\"\n\nI handed Caesar a stack of tabulae. He had just started trying to examine them when Labienus entered.\n\n\"Ah! _Bene!_ Labienus,\" Caesar started. \"What's our battle-line strength? How many infantry can we deploy against the enemy?\"\n\n\"Just legionaries?\" Labienus responded without missing a beat.\n\n\"Yes . . . yes,\" Caesar said, still trying to balance the tabulae in his arms while looking through them.\n\nLabienus reached over and plucked one of the tabulae from Caesar. He opened it and began to read, \"Seventh Legion . . . they had a strength of 4,327 . . . seven on leave . . . twenty-seven detached for detail . . . forty-two on sick call.\"\n\n\"Just bottom-line it for me, Labienus!\" Caesar interrupted.\n\n\"Yes . . . yes,\" Labienus muttered, reviewing the daily strength report. \"The four veteran legions, the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth, 15,552 effectives, give or take a dozen or so. The new legions, Eleventh and Twelfth, 8,736. If we put everyone in the battle line, 24,288.\"\n\n\"24,288,\" Caesar repeated. \"What are our intelligence estimates of enemy strength?\"\n\nLabienus placed the current _tabula_ on the desk and reached over and removed another _tabula_ from Caesar's tenuous grasp. \"Bottom-line it again?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes . . . yes,\" Caesar said.\n\nLabienus began to examine the new tabula. \"This isn't an exact science,\" he muttered as he read. \"Since we separated the Tigurini from the other clans, forty, maybe fifty thousand maximum. Of those, no more than fifteen thousand fully equipped warriors. The rest are just tribal musters. That includes both cavalry and infantry. We can't get a good fix on the Germans. We think no more than ten thousand total, maybe three thousand warriors. So, we're facing less than twenty thousand warriors of battle-line strength; the rest would be just dirt farmers and swine herders with pitchforks and scythes.\"\n\n\"If we engaged them tomorrow, could we beat them?\" Caesar asked.\n\nLabienus shrugged, \"Almost twenty-five thousand trained Roman infantry . . . eighteen thousand barbarian warriors supported by a herd of sword-fodder . . . We pick the ground . . . Can't see why not . . . Yes . . . we could win that fight.\"\n\n\"How many days on full rations do we have?\" Caesar shot.\n\nAgain, Labienus took one of his _tabulae_. \"We haven't fully tallied what the foraging parties brought in, but . . . three days, full rations . . . maybe, stretch it to four. That's a conservative estimate. Three days, I'd say.\"\n\n\"We could reach the Rhonus from here in one long day,\" Caesar said. \"About thirty thousand _passus_ . . . one and a half days at a regular march . . . another day to gather supplies from the _provincia_. So, we have to decide now. We break off the pursuit and march to the Rhonus, or we go right at the Helvetii and resupply ourselves with their food, or we go hungry waiting for these Gallic _verpae_ in Bibracte to deliver on their promises.\"\n\n\" _Patrone_ ,\" I interrupted.\n\n\" _Quid dicere vis tu, Insubrece?_ \" Caesar said.\n\n\"Bibracte, _Imperator_ ,\" I answered. \"There's plenty of food in Bibracte. The Aedui have been stockpiling it there, and it's no more than twenty thousand _passus_ north of here . . . one day's march.\"\n\n\"That is consistent with what many of our foraging parties have reported, Caesar,\" Labienus confirmed. \"The Aedui seem to be stripping their own villages of food and livestock and bringing it into their fortress at Bibracte.\"\n\n\"Why would they do that?\" Caesar asked.\n\nLabienus shrugged, \"Feed the garrison . . . deny it to the Helvetii\u2014\"\n\n\"Or, deny it to us,\" I interrupted.\n\nCaesar stared at me for a few heartbeats. Just when I was convinced that he was going to reprimand me for interrupting a senior officer, he asked, \"So, you're suggesting we could march on Bibracte and resupply there?\"\n\nLabienus made a noise and Caesar asked, \"What is it, Titus?\"\n\n\"That may be our most dangerous option, Caesar,\" he said.\n\n\"Cur?\" Caesar demanded, \"Why?\"\n\n\"That would put the army between the Helvetii and the Aedui, with no clear line of withdrawal to the Rhonus,\" Labienus stated. \"We'd have over eighteen thousand barbarians on our asses. Only the gods know how many Aedui would be to our front, and we'd have a fortified position to crack\u2014with our siege equipment back on the Arar. I'm not sure that's the battle we want.\"\n\nA light seemed to go on in Caesar's mind. \"A trap . . . the food is the bait . . . Roman silver encouraging the Helvetii and interfering with my alliance with the Aedui . . . That seems to be a stretch, Labienus, but I see your point.\"\n\n\" _Patrone_ ,\" I said, \"there is another thing.\"\n\nWhen I had Caesar's attention, I explained what I had learned from Cuhnetha about the dynastic issues among the Aeduan clans.\n\nAfter listening, Caesar rubbed his hands together. \"This is getting as intricate as the plot of a Greek play. The _dunorix's_ men burning out a rival's village . . . rumors of Roman silver and purple-stripers riding with the enemy . . . a poisoned king . . . our allies withholding supplies . . . and a horde of barbarians seemingly beckoning us farther on to our destruction. A Greek melodrama, Labienus. All we need is a pirate king and a kidnapped virgin. The Aeduan king . . . he is to be here tomorrow . . . correct?\"\n\n\" _Recte, Imperator_ ,\" Labienus nodded.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Caesar continued. \"Summon my senior officers . . . all my _legati_ . . . the _centuriones primi pili_ of the legions . . . the senior military tribunes, _the laticlavi_ , too. I'll conduct a council of war to discuss our situation . . . Do we provoke a battle with the Helvetii . . . break off pursuit and withdraw to the _provincia_ . . . or turn north against Bibracte?\"\n\nThe next day, during the third hour, Caesar was in his _praetorium_ , waiting for the arrival of the Aeduan king, Duuhruhda mab Clethguuhno. Our _exploratores_ had reported the Helvetii on the move, but the legions remained in camp. What Duuhruhda had to say was critical to Caesar's next move.\n\nThe council of war the night before had been stormy.\n\nTo a man, the senior centurions wanted to close with the Helvetii and destroy them. They claimed this was the only option the men would accept. Withdrawing to the _provincia_ was a retreat, a shameful defeat of a Roman army by a crowd of _pilosi_ \u2014shaggy barbarians in plaid breeches. Caesar would be shamed in the army and in Rome. Enough of the talk. Enough of the delay! Catch up to them . . . Kill them . . . Eat their food . . . Take their gold . . . Take their women . . . Have done with it!\n\nThe legates were a bit more circumspect. After all, they were civilians, not soldiers, and politicians at that. They were along on this campaign to enhance their public careers in Rome, not to decorate some barbarian's hut with their bloody heads. Certainly, a great victory would go a long way to their winning the next lap of their political careers, the race along the _cursus honorum_. Some of them had their eyes on a consul's chair in the foreseeable future. A retreat back to the _provincia_ was not especially helpful to them, but their political careers could survive that. They could blame the defeat on Caesar. But, the bloody defeat of a Roman army would be the end of their political lives\u2014 maybe quite literally.\n\nThe broad-stripe tribunes, the _laticlavi_ , didn't say much. They were of the senatorial class, but many were extra sons who didn't have much of a political or financial future in Rome. Their home was in the army, unless they were lucky enough to have an older brother die prematurely and were summoned home to take his place. Some were actually committed to a military career. So, they did not want to cross the _primi pili_ for military reasons and did not want to oppose the _legati_ for fear of losing possible political favors in the future.\n\nThe upshot of it was that, if the Helvetii offered the opportunity of a battle on favorable ground in the next two days, the army would attack. Caesar had sent out his _exploratores_ at first light with orders to locate a possible battlefield.\n\nIf, however, the opportunity did not arise to attack the Helvetii, the army would return to the _Rhonus_ and resupply from the _provincia_. They would bridge the river and establish their _castra_ on the north bank, so technically they weren't retreating back into the _provincia_. There, they would watch and wait. When the enemy settled down, they would renew the offensive.\n\nThe option of turning north against Bibracte was rejected as too risky. None of the officers wanted to be trapped against a fortified enemy position, low on rations, with the Helvetii across their line of withdrawal.\n\nThe wild card in this game was Duuhruhda.\n\nCaesar planned to confront the Aeduan king aggressively concerning his promise to supply the Roman army. If the king could be forced to make good on his promises, the crisis was over. The Roman army could continue pursuing its current strategy of attrition against the Helvetii. Caesar believed the key to the king was his brother, the _dunorix_ , and his family's tenuous claim to the throne.\n\nCaesar wasn't quite sure how he would use that as leverage.\n\nLabienus entered Caesar's _cubiculum_. He was formally attired as a senior Roman officer. He wore a highly polished, muscled, bronze _lorica_ with a Medusa image engraved high on his chest. He had a bronze _galea_ helmet sporting a brightred, horsehair crest and highly polished cheek pieces fastened tightly under his chin. Hanging from a polished leather _balteus_ on his left side, he carried a _gladius_ in a leather scabbard wrapped in gold wire. His legate's red sash was tied about his waist.\n\n\"Caesar, the scouts report that the Aedui are approaching,\" he said.\n\n\"How far out are they, Labienus?\" Caesar asked.\n\nLabienus shrugged, \"By now, less than five hundred _passus_.\"\n\n\"Has the escort detail arrived at the _Porta Praetoria?_ \" Caesar enquired.\n\n\" _A'venere_ ,\" Labienus answered. \"Yes! Five _contubernia_ from a first-line cohort . . . Third _Centuria_ of the Second Cohort, I believe . . . Under arms with shields and spears . . . Under the command of their centurion . . . a . . . uh . . . Mettius . . . uh\u2014\"\n\n\"Mettius Atius Lupinus,\" Caesar filled in. \"He's a Roman . . . from the _subura_ , I believe. His father's a _fullo_ , a fuller. Because of that, some of the boys call him _Lotium_ . . . Piss. But, only behind his back\u2014unless they want the _medicus_ trying to put their jaws back together.\"\n\n\"Uh . . . yes,\" Labienus agreed, \"that's him . . . Mettius Atius Lupinus. He'll bring the king and his brother here to you. Also, he'll allow no more than ten members of the king's . . . uh . . . What do you Gauls call _praetoriani_ , Insubrecus?\"\n\n\" _Fintai, Legate_ ,\" I answered.\n\n\"Yes . . . _fintai_ . . . ten members of the king's bodyguard detail with their swords and daggers only.\"\n\n\" _Euge_ ,\" Caesar agreed. \"The bodyguards remain outside with the legionary detail. You and Lupinus escort the king and his brother in here to me. Is Valgus standing by with my _praetoriani?_ \"\n\n\" _A'sunt_ ,\" Labienus affirmed. \"They're in my cubicle. The Gauls will not see them when they enter.\"\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Caesar nodded. \"Insubrecus, you remain here as my _ad manum_. Take notes of our conversation. But, if the king should suddenly develop problems understanding my Latin, you interpret for me. Let's get this _spectaculum_ started!\" Caesar rubbed his hands together.\n\nLabienus left Caesar's cubicle. Very little time passed before I heard footsteps and voices approaching the entrance. Caesar was sitting in his chair of state, the _sella curulis_ of a Roman magistrate possessing the _imperium_ of the Senate and the people. Caesar sat straight as a spear on the backless chair, which he had positioned to face the entrance of his _cubiculum_. His red _sagum_ was draped over the chair. Around his head, he had affixed his _corona civica_ , a golden chaplet of oak leaves woven to form a crown. I noticed how well the gilded oak leaves covered his thinning hair and receding hair line. His highly polished bronze _lorica_ reflected the lights of the many lamps he had burning around his _cubiculum_. But, from my perspective, the brightest light in the room seemed to shine coldly from Caesar's pale blue eyes.\n\nDuuhruhda mab Clethguuhno, King of the Aedui, was first to enter, followed closely by his brother, the tribal _dunorix_ , Deluuhnu. Both men seemed a bit disoriented, uncomfortable at being in the middle of a legionary camp surrounded by thousands of Roman soldiers and uneasy at having to leave their bodyguards outside Caesar's tent.\n\nI could tell by the way the men were equipped\u2014their finest armor and weapons, the bright colors of their cloaks and _bracae_ , their golden torques and armbands\u2014that they had intended to overawe their Roman ally. I was sure that they had ridden into the camp on the two largest stallions from their herds, but the horses were now out of sight, impotently munching grass somewhere outside our camp.\n\nThe Aedui stood before Caesar, Deluuhnu a pace behind his brother. Labienus and the centurion, Lupinus, slipped in behind them and stationed themselves between the Gauls and the exit, as Caesar had instructed.\n\nCaesar did not rise. He said, \" _Salve, Diviciace, Rex!_ And greetings Prince Dumnorix, brother to the king!\"\n\nI winced a bit at Caesar's butchering of Gallic names and titles, but clearly this was not the time to launch into a pronunciation lesson.\n\nCaesar continued, \"I have summoned you here to demand that you explain why my army has not been resupplied as you promised. I thought I'd give you the courtesy of explaining your failure before I turn away from my pursuit of those I thought were our common enemies and march on your _oppidum_ , Bibracte, and take what has been promised me!\"\n\nDuuhruhda now clearly understood why he and his brother were standing alone in front of Caesar, surrounded by Caesar's army. Unless they could give a satisfactory answer, they were not leaving this place.\n\n\"Caesar\u2014\" Duuhruhda began.\n\n\"It is customary to address a Roman magistrate by his office, _King!_ \" Caesar interrupted. \"In my case, you will address me as _imperator_.\"\n\n\"Caesar . . . I mean . . . _Imperator_ ,\" Duuhruhda started, \"this is not Italy! We have long winters and cool springs. The crops have not ripened\u2014\"\n\n\" _Me tadet specium_ ,\" Caesar interrupted. \"If I wanted a lesson in agriculture, I would have read Cato. My troops need to be fed!\"\n\n\" _Imperator_ ,\" this time Deluuhnu, the king's brother, spoke, \"my men are collecting what food is left among our people after a hard winter. These things take time\u2014\"\n\n\"Insubrece!\" Caesar interrupted him, calling my name, \"Insubrecus! That report!\" He held his hand out to me.\n\nI had no idea what Caesar was talking about! I took a step toward him to ask discretely what he meant. But, as soon as I was within arm's reach, he snatched the _tabula_ in which I was scratching my notes.\n\n\"My sources tell me,\" Caesar pretended to read, \"that there are powerful men among the Aedui who are preventing the villages from gathering the grain. If the Romans defeat the Helvetii, they say, Rome will subjugate the Aedui and all the rest of Gaul. These men claim that if the Aedui cannot rule Gaul, it is better to be ruled by Helvetii than by Romans. My sources tell me these same men are betraying my plans and the movements of my army to the Helvetii. They plot the defeat of my army by starvation or by battle. And, the ringleader of this cabal of treasonous filth is . . .\" Caesar looked up from the _tabula_ directly into the eyes of the king, \"Dumnorix, your brother!\" Caesar slammed the _tabula_ shut.\n\nDuuhruhda recoiled as if struck. Deluuhnu's face went ghostly pale. His right hand seemed to inch closer to the hilt of his sword. Then, he remembered where he was, and the two Roman officers standing directly behind him. His hand relaxed and fell back to his side.\n\n\"What have you to say to this . . . King?\" Caesar spit out the last word into Duuhruhda's face.\n\nI almost felt sorry for the man. He was trapped in the middle of a Roman legionary camp and entangled in a drama of Caesarian cunning. It was a magnificent piece of stagecraft. He didn't have a chance.\n\n_\"Imperator_ ,\" the king stammered.\n\n\"I am not finished reading my charges against your brother,\" Caesar announced, as if he were a _praetor_ trying a criminal case in front of the forum mob. He reopened his all-knowing _tabula_.\n\n\" _Item_ ,\" Caesar began, \"Dumnorix is the tribal _exactor_ , the tax collector, and as such, _he_ is responsible for the collection of the foodstuffs that were to be distributed to my army. And, this collection effort, by your own admission, has failed! I blame this failure on Dumnorix and his desire to weaken my army.\"\n\nCaesar paused. I was glad that neither Gaul realized that no _tabula_ could possibly contain so much information.\n\nCaesar again looked down at the _tabula_ and seemed to place his finger on another non-existing charge. \" _Item_ , Dumnorix is married to a woman of the Helvetii. Because of these marriage bonds, he favors the Helvetii and desires their victory over Rome and even over his own tribe!\"\n\nCaesar again paused for effect, then continued, \" _Item_ , Dumnorix has created strong political ties with the ruling classes of other Gallic tribes through the marriages of his mother's sisters and other close female relations. He does this in order to establish himself as the ruler of the Aedui, the Helvetii, and eventually all Gaul, once my army has been destroyed. He has gone so far as to exchange hostages with the Helvetii to assure mutual cooperation in this plot against me!\"\n\nCaesar was not done with this crucial scene. \" _Item_ , Dumnorix engineered the defeat of a Roman cavalry force by luring it into an ambush and then ensuring its defeat by withdrawing his personal cavalry forces once the engagement began. This treachery led to the deaths of a score of Roman citizens.\"\n\nCaesar again closed the _tabula_ and fixed the king and his brother in the cold, blue steel of his glare. \"The final offence alone justifies a summary judgment and his immediate crucifixion!\"\n\nCaesar looked up toward Labienus. \"Labienus! Has the king's escort been neutralized?\"\n\n\" _Gestum, Imperator!_ \" Labienus snapped.\n\n\" _Bene!_ \" Caesar answered. \"Summon my _praetoriani!_ \"\n\nLabienus called for Valgus, and immediately he and ten members of Caesar's praetorian cavalry entered the room in full rig.\n\n\"Seize that man!\" Caesar ordered, indicating Deluuhnu. The praetorians had the king's brother in their grasp before either Gaul could react. Valgus pulled Deluuhnu's hands roughly behind his back and began to bind them while one of his troopers removed the _dunorix's_ weapons.\n\n\"This is an outrage, Roman!\" the king shouted, forgetting Caesar's demanded protocol. \"We came here in good faith! You are responsible for our safety! My people will not stand for this . . . They will rise against you . . . They will join with the Helvetii.\"\n\n\"And, who will lead this insurrection, _King?_ \" Caesar asked in a low voice.\n\n\"I shall!\" Duuhruhda shot back. \"I, as their king.\"\n\n\"Which brings me to the next item of business,\" Caesar told him. \"Insubrecus, hand me that communique from Rome . . . the one that arrived by consular courier last night.\" Caesar gestured toward his field desk, on which lay a number of _tabulae_ and pieces of papyrus.\n\nI had no idea what Caesar was talking about. No special courier had arrived last night. Then, I remembered that I was playing a part in Caesar's drama. The _tabulae_ and _papyri_ were just props. I pretended to search through the papers and finally selected one that was covered with Labienus' scribbles.\n\n\"Here it is, _Imperator!_ \" I announced, handing it to Caesar.\n\nCaesar took the piece of papyrus and pretended to review it. \"This is an urgent message from my colleague in Rome, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, who serves the Senate and the Roman people with Marcus Licinius Crassus and me, as a _triumvir_. You've heard of Pompeius, have you not, Dumnorix?\"\n\nThe king's brother blanched as if having his arms tied behind him and being in the grasp of two of Caesar's _praetoriani_ was suddenly the least of his worries.\n\nCaesar continued, \"Pompeius writes . . . oh . . . but before we get to that, did you know, Diviciacus, that Pompeius is also my son-in-law . . . married to my daughter, Iulia? I hope he will give me a grandchild soon. We Romans take our familial obligations very seriously.\"\n\nCaesar let that snippet sink in, then continued. \"Pompeius has complained to me, both as his father-in-law and as a Roman magistrate, to look into an injustice done to one of his clients . . . a member of your tribe, a king . . . by the name of . . . Cuneda . . . Did I pronounce that correctly, Insubrecus?\"\n\nI leaned in over Caesar's papyrus and pretended to read, \"That's Cuhnetha, _Imperator_ , Cuhnetha mab Cluhweluhno.\"\n\nDuuhruhda's face went white when he heard that name.\n\n\"Yes,\" Caesar affirmed, \"Cuhnetha . . . It seems that Pompeius wants me to look into his client's complaint . . . nasty business, too . . . He claims that your father murdered his grandfather and stole the throne from him . . . Claims that he's the rightful king of the Aedui.\"\n\n\"Pompeius would never have written such a letter,\" Deluuhnu suddenly contradicted. His speech was cut short as Valgus smashed him across the face.\n\n\"Gag the prisoner,\" Caesar ordered. Valgus forced a piece of cloth into Deluuhnu's mouth while one of his troopers bound it fast with his _sudarium_.\n\n\"What would a condemned, treasonous, sack-of-shit barbarian know about what Pompeius Magnus would or would not have written to a Roman proconsul?\" Caesar charged.\n\nCaesar looked over to where I was standing, and I swear he winked at me.\n\nCaesar then noticed that Deluuhnu was bleeding from his nostrils. \"Make sure he doesn't suffocate, Valgus!\" he ordered. \"I don't want him to cheat the cross!\"\n\nCaesar turned back to the king. \"My colleague and son-in-law, Pompeius, has asked me to look into his client's complaint that he is the rightful king of the Aedui. And, _you_ . . . you are standing here in front of me, after failing to provide me with the food that you promised me, the food I need to feed my troops . . . after harboring and abetting a traitorous plot against the Roman people by your own brother . . . and after threatening to lead the Aedui in revolt against me . . . Insubrecus!\"\n\n\" _Ti' a'sum, Imperator_!\" I snapped.\n\n\"Cuhnetha mab . . . uh . . . whatever that name was . . . Didn't I recently see that name in a report?\" Caesar asked. \"I seem to recall that one of our foraging parties reported that his village was burned . . . his crops stolen . . . his livestock run off?\"\n\nThat was a bit of an embellishment, but it was theater after all. I responded, \"Yes, General, and the man claimed it was done by Aedui, the _fintai_ of the _dunorix_ , the king's brother, Deluuhnu.\" I was getting into my part.\n\nCaesar turned to the king. \"You see, Diviciacus. I have already begun my investigation for my colleague and son-in-law . . . Perhaps I should dig into this matter more deeply while you remain here as . . . as my guest. That way you can witness your brother's execution.\"\n\nThe king had stood motionless before Caesar. Then suddenly, he fell to his knees, placing both his hands, empty and upright, on Caesar's knees. This was the Gah'el ritual of submission.\n\nIn tears, the king of the Aedui begged, \"I implore you, _Imperator!_ Spare my brother! No one is more ashamed of his actions than I am! But, he has great influence with the Aedui and over the neighboring tribes. He has even tried to use his influence to undermine me, his own brother! But, he _is_ my brother.\n\nWhen I look at him, I see my father's eyes staring back at me. And, he is still a youth. When we were young and full of our own importance, deceived by a belief in our own immortality, who among us has not done what we should not have done, tried what we should not have tried? If you move against Deluuhnu, no one in the tribe will believe I was not complicit; no one will believe that I did not betray my own brother, and among my people that is an unforgivable crime. The very gods would turn against me! To remain loyal to a fratricide would surely invite the wrath of the gods.\"\n\nCaesar, like most Romans, did not know how to react to this sudden outpouring of Gallic grief and emotion. He glanced at me over the king's bowed head.\n\nSomehow, I sensed that this was Caesar's endgame. He had Duuhruhda exactly where he wanted him. Discretely, I gestured to Caesar to place his hands in those the king was holding open on his knees, thus showing that he accepted Duuhruhda's submission.\n\nCaesar nodded at me and did so, saying, \"I accept your reasoning, King, and I accept your submission to the Roman nation. Rise! I release you to return to your _oppidum_ at Bibracte, and I command you to collect the promised rations needed by my army and deliver them to our _castra_ by this time tomorrow.\"\n\nDuuhruhda rose, but kept his head bowed. \"I thank you for your clemency, _Imperator_ , and will do what you command. My brother\u2014\"\n\n\"Dumnorix will remain here with me . . . as my _guest_ ,\" Caesar stated. \"I will stay his execution as long as _you_ remain a faithful and dependable ally. You may tell your people that he remains here at my side as a trusted advisor. When we have defeated the Helvetii and the threat to your lands and mine is removed, I will decide what is to be done with him. But, for now, he is safe.\"\n\n\" _Multissimas gratias, Imperator_ ,\" Duuhruhda mumbled. \"Do I have your leave to depart?\"\n\n\" _Abeas, Rex!_ \" Caesar stated.\n\nDuuhruhda wasted no time in escaping from Caesar's presence. Labienus and Lupinus followed him out. Caesar abruptly realized that the battered, bound, and gagged Deluuhnu was still standing before him in the grasp of his _praetoriani_.\n\nNo play can end until all the actors have made their exits and all the props are removed from the stage. And, Deluuhnu was a prop in Caesar's play. Surrounded by thousands of Aedui, on whose cooperation Caesar depended, he had had no real intention of executing the man. He was merely leverage over his brother, the king.\n\n\"Take him away!\" Caesar ordered almost absently. \"And, keep a close eye on him. He's valuable to me!\"\n\nValgus nodded and gestured the prisoner and the _praetoriani_ out of the tent.\n\nNow that the play was over, Caesar seemed to droop a bit in his curial seat. \" _Scriba_!\" he yelled.\n\n\"Ti' _a'sum, Imperator_!\" the voice from the other room responded.\n\n\" _Vinum_ ,\" Caesar ordered, \"a large pitcher . . . and four cups!\" Then, before the clerk could ask, he added, \" _Merum!_ No water!\"\n\n\"Nicely played, Insubrecus,\" Caesar said softly, \"nicely played, indeed. I'll make a Roman politician out of you yet.\"\n\nI took my bow just as Labienus returned to the cubicle.\n\n\"The king's gone,\" Labienus reported. \"He took off out of here so fast, you'd think his horse's tail was on fire. Lupinus is marching his detail back to their tents.\"\n\nBefore Caesar could respond, his clerk entered with the wine. Caesar asked him, \"Is the wine up to your standards, Ebrius?\"\n\n_\"Certissime, Imperator_ \" the clerk answered. \"You know I wouldn't let any of the cheap stuff get by me.\"\n\nEbrius placed the pitcher and the cups on the field desk, then left.\n\n\"Would you pour, Insubrecus?\" Caesar requested.\n\nAs I was pouring the wine, Caesar asked, \"What did you think of the performance, Labienus?\"\n\nLabienus took a cup of wine from me, and answered, \"I'm wondering if we didn't do that pompous king a favor by keeping Dumnorix here?\"\n\n\"Quo _modo?_ \" Caesar asked.\n\n\"If Dumnorix is causing his brother problems with the Aedui,\" Labienus explained, \"we just removed the _podex_ for him.\"\n\nCaesar grunted, took a sip of his wine, and then said, \"Did you see the way Dumnorix reacted when he heard Pompeius' name? He damn near admitted that he's working as his agent.\"\n\nLabienus shrugged, \"That's possible, Caesar. He certainly didn't believe that Pompeius would support the claims of uh . . . what's that other Gaul's name again, Insubrecus?\"\n\n\"Cuhnetha, Legate,\" I offered.\n\n\"Quite,\" Labienus agreed. \"Cuhnetha . . . Dumnorix certainly didn't believe that Pompeius supported Cuhnetha's claim to the throne. But, concluding from that that Pompeius is actively colluding with our enemies is a bit of a stretch.\"\n\n\"Pompeius interfering with the Gauls would explain many of the rumors of purple-stripers and Roman silver,\" Caesar mused. \"My daughter has written me from Rome saying that Pompeius is keeping strange company these days . . . dinner parties with Cicero and Bibulus . . . inviting Milo to his home for hushed conversations over jugs of wine. He even took a meeting with Cato. How he despises the man!\" Caesar grimaced over some memory filtering through his head.\n\nHe continued, \"I imagine he'd claim he was just greasing up the _Optimates_ . . . looking out for our mutual interests in the Senate. But, we are in too precarious a situation up here to take any chances. It's far better to confirm than to trust.\"\n\nAll at once, Caesar was back in the room, focused. \"Labienus, I want you to do a bit of research. I want a list of any officer in the army who has any possible connection with Pompeius . . . anything . . . family . . . clientage . . . recommendations . . . prior service . . . anything!\"\n\nLabienus asked, \"How far down do you want me to dig?\"\n\n\"Right down to the bottom!\" Caesar snapped. \"Even if the man is serving as an _optio_ in a third line cohort, I want to know.\"\n\n\"Caesar, our veteran legions are originally from Spain! They served under Pompeius there!\" Labienus protested.\n\n\"True,\" Caesar agreed. \"But, I doubt Pompeius was cultivating the _muli_ back then, except to keep them fed, paid, and busy. Concentrate on the older, more senior officers, anyone who was a junior centurion when Pompeius was in command . . . especially anyone he promoted.\"\n\n\"Do you doubt the loyalty of our senior centurions?\" Labienus asked. \"You're talking about _primi pili_ , even the _praefectus castrorum_!\"\n\n\"Doubt?\" Caesar puzzled. \"No . . . I don't _doubt_ them . . . I just want to be _sure_ of them . . . _absolutely_ sure.\"\n\nLabienus was just about to say something when Caesar's clerk, Ebrius, entered the cubicle. \"Forgive the interruption, _Imperator_ ,\" he announced. \"But, I have an officer outside who claims to have urgent information for you.\"\n\n\"An officer?\" Caesar questioned. \"Who?\"\n\nAn _angusticlavus_ , a narrow-striper, one of the _exploratores_ you dispatched this morning\u2014\" Ebrius began to explain.\n\n\"One of the scouts!\" Caesar exclaimed. Ebrius now had Caesar's undivided attention. \"Send him right in, Ebrius! I want to hear what the man has to report!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator!_ \" the clerk obeyed and left the tent.\n\nA few heartbeats later, Agrippa entered Caesar's _cubiculum_ followed by Madog. Caesar greeted them eagerly, \"Agrippa! Madocus _Dux! Beneventi!_ Please! Help yourselves to some wine!\"\n\nBoth men poured some wine into cups. Agrippa drank deeply. Madog sniffed his. He saw his companion drinking, so he did likewise. He grimaced a bit. The Sequani chief had yet to develop a taste for the grape.\n\nCaesar waited while Agrippa drank, then asked, \"What do you have to tell me, Tribune?\"\n\n\" _Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa began, \"we have found your battlefield. You can trap the Helvetii!\"\n\nAgrippa now had Caesar's full attention, \" _Mi' dicas_ , Agrippa!\"\n\n\"They hardly moved today, _Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa continued. \"They seem to be consolidating some of their stragglers and letting their livestock rest and feed. They're spread out in a valley no more than ten thousand passus west of here with high ground on three sides. They've made no move to secure that high ground or to screen its approaches with their cavalry. We were able to move in above their encampments without being detected.\"\n\nMadog was nodding along with Agrippa's briefing. His wine cup was almost empty. \"True . . . true,\" Madog agreed, \"very stupid Helvetii . . . fear nothing.\"\n\n\"Less than ten thousand _passus_ , you say?\" Caesar was nodding. \"Little security . . . _bene_ . . . _bene_ . . . What's the slope of the hills? Can our infantry negotiate it?\"\n\n\"There's high ground on their flank,\" Agrippa continued. \"A hillock, really. It's flat on top and could easily accommodate two legions arrayed in the _acies triplex_. The slope down to the valley floor is open and not too steep.\"\n\n\"Wait a moment, Agrippa!\" Caesar said. Then, he called out, \" _Scriba!_ Ebrius! To me! Quickly!\"\n\nCaesar's military clerk appeared, \" _Ti' a'sum, Imperator!_ \"\n\nCaesar ordered. \" _Celeriter!_ Quickly! I need a sand table . . . a terrain model. Can you round something up for me?\"\n\nEbrius shrugged, \" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator!_ \"\n\nCaesar also realized that he had removed the campaign maps from his headquarters in preparation for his confrontation with the Aedui. \"And, have a couple of your assistants set my maps back up!\" he instructed. \" _Age, Miles!_ \"\n\nCaesar had the bit between his teeth, so Ebrius shot out of the tent like a _ballista_ bolt.\n\nCaesar looked about the room, then ordered me, \"Insubrecus! My desk . . . bring me a piece of that papyrus . . . There should be some charcoal over there, too . . . Bring me a piece!\"\n\nI ran over to the field desk to collect the items. Madog was observing all of the Roman turmoil while he poured himself another cup of Caesar's wine. His Gallic distaste of the insipid Roman grape-mash was clearly becoming a thing of the past. There was some hope that _Romanitas_ could be brought to _Gallia comata!_\n\nI brought Caesar the papyrus and charcoal. He handed it to Agrippa, ordering, \"Sketch the terrain so I can see it, Agrippa . . . Less than ten thousand passus, you say?\"\n\n\"No more, _Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa nodded as he drew. \"They hardly moved at all . . . just sitting there.\"\n\nMadog leaned in, almost as interested in what Agrippa was doing as he was in the wine.\n\nWhile Agrippa drew his map and briefed Caesar, Ebrius returned to the tent with two legionary _muli_ carrying their _dolabrae_ , entrenching tools. \"Right here!\" He pointed to a spot on the ground in front of where a couple of his assistants had begun to set up the campaign maps. \"About ten _pedes_ by ten _pedes_ square . . . through all the grass, right down to the dirt . . . Make it smooth, and be sure you take all the spoil out of here with you . . . Use your helmets if you can't find buckets.\"\n\nThe grunts started whacking at the turf. Caesar looked over to where they were working, and said, \"Scrape it clean for me, boys! Ebrius'll give you some _posca_ to replace all the sweat!\"\n\n\"Smooth as a baby's bottom, _capu_ ',\" one of them grunted between swings with the entrenching tool.\n\nWhile they worked, a couple more _muli_ came through carrying some cut logs. Ebrius directed them to stack their load at the back of the tent.\n\nAs they were leaving, I heard Ebrius tell them, \"Grab up the buckets outside the tent and take 'em down to the water point . . . Fill 'em with sand from the stream bank . . . the dry stuff . . . and bring it back here . . . on the double . . . _il' capu_ ' is in a hurry!\"\n\nCaesar, Labienus, and Agrippa were bent over Agrippa's map. Madog hovered behind the group with his half-emptied cup of wine.\n\nCaesar was questioning Agrippa closely concerning the details: \"Is there a stream between those two ridges? How steep is that slope? You're sure they haven't ringed their wagons? Show me again where you saw the horses grazing.\"\n\nThe two legionaries in the back had finished their digging. One was carrying the spoil out in a bucket, while the other began to fit the logs around the cleared space.\n\nI heard Caesar say, \"What do you think, Labienus?\"\n\n\"I think we got them where we want them,\" Labienus affirmed. \"We couldn't ask for a better set up than this.\"\n\n\" _A'sentior_ ,\" Caesar nodded. \"I agree. But, I have to see the terrain myself. Agrippa! You and Madocus _Dux_ will lead me out there.\"\n\n\"Shall I alert Valgus?\" Labienus asked.\n\n\"My praetorian detail? No! Too many Romans,\" Caesar stated. \"Too much activity . . . I don't want to tip my hand to the enemy. I'll go alone with Agrippa . . . and you too, Insubrecus! You're with me.\"\n\nWe rode to where Agrippa had located the Helvetii. As per Caesar's instructions, our Sequani cavalry took us in from the north. Caesar was anxious to see whether there was a negotiable avenue of approach for his infantry around the enemy's flank. He had left his red general's cloak behind and wore the ruddybrown _sagum_ of a _mulus_. He strapped his helmet to his saddle in order to prevent it from being recognized as Roman and to avoid the possibility of any reflection of the afternoon sun, which might alert the enemy of our presence.\n\nWe got ourselves into position in a little over an hour. We left our mounts in a stand of woods, guarded by one of the cavalry troopers. Athauhnu's _ala_ was deployed to our rear as a screen to ensure that an enemy patrol didn't surprise us from that direction.\n\nDuring the ride, Athauhnu practiced his latest attempts to learn Latin on me. Phrases like \"trees to be green being good\" and \"horse to be running prompt when field to be flat\" were still ringing in my ears as I crept forward behind Caesar, Agrippa, and Madog to get a glimpse of the enemy. The cavalrymen of Madog's remaining _ala_ were fanned out around us as we advanced toward the lip of a flat hilltop.\n\nAs we neared the edge, I could hear the hum of activity from the valley below. We advanced on our hands and knees. To this day, when I see one of Caesar's heroic statues standing magnificently on a gilded marble plinth in one of his temples, I grin as I remember him that day, his thinning hair plastered flat to the top of his head, a streak of mud running down his cheek, and his breath labored as we crawled through the long grass to get a look at the Helvetii.\n\nAnd what a sight we saw!\n\nThe entire valley below us was teeming with people, animals, tents, wagons, campfires, and equipment, all seeming to swirl about in smoke, noise, and colors. There must have been tens of thousands of them down there: men, women, and children\u2014all seemingly without a care and behaving as if they were on some spring holiday. There was no sign of any military preparedness, no fortifications, no sentries, and no formations of armed men. Women went about their chores, many with babies on their hips; children chased each other about in mindless patterns; and the men seemed content to laze about around the fires and the tents.\n\nCaesar had his hand-drawn map out and was making corrections and notations with a piece of charcoal. \"If I had two legions up here now, I could finish this thing by sundown,\" I heard him whisper to Agrippa.\n\n\"You see where the valley narrows a bit to the east?\" he continued. \"That's where we want their main body to assemble. We want all their attention focused right there. Then, we sweep down on their flank and rear from this hill.\"\n\nWe remained in place for about half an hour before Caesar indicated he had seen enough. We withdrew from the hill and returned to the legionary _castra_.\n\nAs soon as we got back, Caesar immediately set his plans in motion. He directed Labienus to summon his senior officers to a war council at the tenth hour, all his legates, the broad-stripers, and the _primus pilus_ of each legion.\n\nWhile Labienus was about that, Caesar studied his maps and supervised Ebrius and his assistants in building in the sand table an accurate terrain model of what we had just observed. Caesar then had Ebrius' clerks cut and paint a number of wooden blocks to represent military formations: red for Roman, with numerals indicating legion designation; black for the Helvetii, each representing five thousand warriors. Caesar arranged and rearranged the blocks on his sand table as he hypothesized various scenarios. When Labienus had finished arranging the war council, he joined Caesar at his sand table, and they discussed the various options.\n\nThe council of war that assembled later that day in Caesar's _praetorium_ was very different from the previous meeting.\n\nCaesar began by announcing to his officers, \"Gentlemen, we have located the main body of the enemy in a valley approximately ten thousand _passus_ west of our location. It is my intention that this army will advance on the enemy, attack at dawn tomorrow, and destroy the Helvetii.\"\n\nWith Caesar's pronouncement, I looked up from the _tabula_ in which I was scribbling notes. There was absolute silence among the assembled officers, but I could see the knuckles of the senior centurions whiten as their grasp tightened around the hilts of their swords. After a few heartbeats, they began to nod in agreement. Caesar's legates and the broad-stripe tribunes remained perfectly still.\n\nCaesar, standing over his terrain model using a _sudis_ as a pointer, continued, \"We are located approximately here. The enemy is spread out for about two thousand _passus_ in this valley, here. They do not seem to be aware of, nor do they seem to care, about our proximity to them. They have made absolutely no defensive preparations.\"\n\nWhen Caesar said this, I noticed that two or three of the senior centurions shook their heads and smirked. No Roman army would permit itself to be caught out in the open in enemy territory.\n\nCaesar continued, \"It is my intention to attack using the basic hammer and anvil tactic. Labienus will command the 'hammer,' a task force of two legions, the Seventh and Eighth. I will command the 'anvil,' four legions, the veteran Ninth and Tenth and the two new legions, the Eleventh and Twelfth . . . Yes, Malleus?\"\n\n\" _Imperator_ , what are your estimates of enemy strength in the valley?\" the _primus pilus_ of the Tenth Legion asked.\n\nCaesar smiled slightly and nodded. He knew where Malleus was going. He answered, \"Our intelligence indicates that the Helvetii and their allies can field between twenty-five and thirty thousand trained warriors . . . probably twice that number in tribal levies. My observation of the enemy position this afternoon supports those estimates. Are you worried that there aren't enough of them out there for each of your Tenth Legion boys to get at least ten each?\"\n\nMalleus grinned broadly as he said, \"No, _Imperator_ . . . my boys'll earn their ten copper _asses_ a day . . . That's a penny for each of those shaggy _comati_ they stick. My concern is that we seem to be dividing our forces in the face of a numerically superior enemy. It seems to me that's the way Caepio and Maximus screwed up against the Cimbri back in the day . . . No offense, _Imperator_.\"\n\nCaesar leaned forward on the _sudis_. \"And none taken, Malleus. As a senior centurion, your job is to keep the purple-striped nobs Rome keeps sending up here from totally screwing the pooch. Caepio and Maximius put a river between their two armies and did not exercise unified command. In fact, those two political _stulti_ did everything they could to work against each other, and many good Roman soldiers died as a result of their arrogance and ambition. I have no intention of allowing that to happen to this army. The two wings of our army will always be under my command and will not become so separated that they cannot support each other should the enemy decide to attack. In fact, luring the Helvetii into attacking one of the columns is my plan. Allow me to continue.\"\n\nMalleus nodded his credence to Caesar's explanation. Caesar continued, \"Labienus' division will depart from this location at the beginning of the third watch. He will march along this northern route and get behind the enemy's left flank by occupying this hill, here. Their primary goal is to reach this hilltop, which is their assault position, undetected. They will remain there in a concealed position until our main force has engaged the enemy's front, here.\"\n\nThere were no questions, so Caesar continued, \"I will lead the main body along this route, entering the enemy-occupied valley just before dawn at this point. We will advance toward the enemy and deploy across this narrow ground here . . . three legions forward in the _acies triplex_ . . . the Tenth on the right flank, the Ninth in the center, and the Eleventh on the left. The Twelfth will serve as my reserve, deploying in a line of cohorts across the rear of the forward three legions. The objective of my division is to get the Helvetii to attack our line. The optimum point of contact is here, along this line, where our flanks will be secured by high ground. When the enemy has committed itself to that attack, Labienus' division will advance from its concealed assault position and attack the enemy's rear. These _hursiti_ , hairbags, do not have the discipline to sustain a two-front battle. They'll crumble when Labienus attacks. Then we finish it. Questions, gentlemen?\"\n\nThere was silence for a few heartbeats while the officers absorbed what Caesar had told them. Then Spurius Hosidius Quiricus, the _primus pilus_ of the Ninth Legion, known around the camps as _Quercus_ , the \"Oak,\" spoke up: \" _Imperator_ , I see you have one of the new legions, the Eleventh, on the battle line. Are you sure they're up to it? No offense, Iudeaus!\"\n\nQuercus was apologizing to Marcus Sestius, the _primus pilus_ of the Eleventh. Sestius was an old hand who had served with Pompeius in the east and was wounded in a skirmish in eastern Syria. A Greek hoplite had tried to drive his spear into Sestius' left thigh but missed his aim slightly. Ever since then, the boys referred to the centurion as Iudaeus after one of the eastern tribes which practiced some bizarre ritual on the penises of the males of their tribe. Iudeaus didn't seem to care about the nickname and always asserted that, despite the wound, the _mulieres castrorum_ never complained.\n\n\"None taken, Quercus,\" Iudaeus answered. \"My boys're up to it.\"\n\nAs Quercus nodded, Caesar said, \"I expect the Helvetii to send in their tribal levies first to soften us up for the warriors. I expect that they'll falter after our first volleys with the _pila_. Before their chiefs can rally them, Labienus should be down on them. Then, the _acies prima_ can move forward into the valley and clean them out.\"\n\nThe officers nodded. As Caesar said, it was a classic tactic: hammer and anvil.\n\nCaesar continued, \"That's where you and your cavalry come in, Crassus!\" With his _sudis_ , Caesar pointed to a round, red block on the left flank of the legionary line. \"I'm concentrating the legionary cavalry on the left flank. That way they won't get tangled up with Labienus' boys, who will be in front of our right flank. The cavalry will advance apace with the infantry front line\u2014until I give the signal from my position on the right flank. At that signal, you will attack down the valley. Stampede them, Crassus . . . Kill as many as you can . . . Panic them! The limit of your advance is here where this small stream crosses the valley, or when I signal the recall. I want you to position yourself in front of the main body of the cavalry, Crassus. Right up with the forward edge of the infantry line. If you spot an opportunity, an opening, you go! Even if I haven't signaled the advance, you go! Can you do that for me?\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Imperator_ ,\" Crassus responded. I smiled to myself as I noted down his response. Looked like that pretty boy was finally going to get some mud on his boots.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Caesar acknowledged. \"I'm deploying the auxiliary cavalry on our flanks for security.\" He pointed to another round, red block positioned to the north, saying, \"Madocus _Dux_ , I want your boys on the northern flank, watching the approaches from Bibracte. I want no surprises from our _socii_ , the Aedui, during this operation.\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Caesar_!\" I heard Madog's voice among the crowd of Romans.\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Caesar said. \"Assignments for the legates . . . Labienus, you're with the Seventh . . . Cotta, you go in with the Eighth in Labienus' division . . . The rest will march with me . . . Pedius, the Ninth . . . Rufus, the Eleventh . . . Vatinius, the Twelfth . . . Crassus, you have the cavalry. I'm with the Tenth. The boys'll march light . . . basic combat load . . . one day's rations and water. We won't be pulling down our marching camps here when we pull out. Each legion will detach its tenth cohort to secure their _castrum_ and their baggage. Pulcher, you'll be in charge of the _castra_. If you're attacked by an overwhelming force, you can consolidate the cohorts in one of the camps until we can relieve you. But, you are to hold this position . . . _Compre'endis?_ \"\n\nCaesar was ensuring that the army had somewhere to retreat to in the event that the beehive he was about to kick over proved more dangerous and powerful than he had estimated, especially now that he could no longer rely on the good will of the Aedui.\n\n_\" Compre'endo, Imperator!_ \" I heard Pulcher's voice sound. Pulcher had been on his best behavior since Caesar had relegated him to the ash and trash detail.\n\n\" _Bene_ , gentlemen!\" Caesar concluded. \"Labienus' division pulls out at the beginning of the third watch. My division, an hour after that. Remember, Asellio writes, _'Audaces amat Fortuna!_ Fortune favors the bold!' Let's finish this thing! Return to your commands! _Miss'est!\"_\n\nI am glad that at that point in my career, I hadn't yet read the _Rerum Gestarum Libri_ of Sempronius Asellio, the histories of the Third Punic War, because then I would have known that he also wrote, \"No military plan survives the first step of its implementation.\"\n\nAfter the officers had left, I waited while Caesar gave some directions to Labienus. \"Titus, it's absolutely imperative that you get your legions in position without being detected by the Helvetii. Also, do not reveal yourself to them or commit yourself to the attack until you're absolutely sure that my division is in position. We should be visible from your position, and you'll hear my attack signals. Your two veteran legions, even on high ground, may not be enough to withstand a determined attack by that horde. Despite what I told Malleus, if the enemy gets between me and you, I'm not sure I can get to you, and we want no repeat of the Cimbri disaster. If you're detected by the enemy during your approach to the assault position, break off and return here. Warn me by cavalry couriers, and I'll withdraw my division. But again, you're to initiate no attack unless I'm in position. Wait until you see their backs; then you go in.\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Caesar,\" Labienus responded_.\n\n\"Good man!\" Caesar responded, clapping Labienus on the shoulder. \"Get your boys ready, and I'll see you before you pull out.\"\n\nLabienus walked away, and I offered Caesar the _tabula_ with the meeting notes for his review. \"I don't need to see that, Insubrecus,\" he said. \"Just give it to Ebrius for the file.\"\n\nThen, after a moment, he said, \"I'm sending you up north with Agrippa and the Sequani. Sorry. You're going to miss the big show, but whatever the Aedui are up to is critical to me. I'm as interested in who enters Bibracte as I am in who departs . . . Those _cunni_ are up to something, and I'm convinced now that someone down in Rome is pulling their strings. Agrippa knows to keep a low profile up there, but if you can grab hold of someone who can help me understand what in the name of Nemesis is going on . . . I don't care if it's a Roman, an Aeduus, a Helvetius, or a blue-painted Briton . . . Grab him up, and bring him to me in a condition in which he can still talk.\"\n\n# XI.\n\n# Calamitas Itera\n\n## ANOTHER DISASTER\n\n_Multo denique die per exploratores Caesar cognovit et montem a suis teneri et Helvetios castra movisse et Considium timore perterritum quod non vidisset pro viso sibi renuntiavisse_.\n\n\"Finally, after most of the day had passed, Caesar discovered from his scouts that the mountain was occupied by his forces and that the Helvetians had moved their camps. Caesar now understood that Considius had lost his nerve, and what he had reported to Caesar as having been personally seen by him, he had not actually seen.\"\n\n(from Gaius Marius Insubrecus' notebook of Caesar's journal)\n\nAt the time, I was not sure whether I was disappointed or relieved\u2014 disappointed about missing what Caesar called \"the big show,\" or relieved knowing that I wouldn't be trapped in a narrow valley upto my ass in frenzied hairbags screaming for my blood. By the end of the second watch that night, while the Roman camps were in a maelstrom of movement and noise, I was mounted and moving north with Agrippa and the Sequani cavalry. We encountered no enemy counter-reconnaissance patrols. It was as if the Helvetii just didn't care that a Roman army was less than ten thousand _passus_ away from their main camps.\n\nWe rode hard and arrived at a wooded ridgeline overlooking a broad valley by dawn. From there we could see the dark, hulking mass that was the _dun_ , the royal fortress-city of the Aedui, Bibracte.\n\nThe _oppidum_ sat on a double hill, a higher summit to the east with a lower summit to the west and north. It was surrounded by two walls. The lower, which seemed to surround the entire bottom of both hills, was almost fifteen _pedes_ in height and built of stone reinforced with logs. The second, which stretched higher along the slope around the double peaks of the hill, had a sturdy, log fronting. I assumed the logs held a thick core of soil and spoil, like the walls of a permanent legionary camp. From where we stood, we could see a road leading from the south and west, entering the fortress through a large, well-guarded, and fortified gate.\n\n\"That not main gate,\" Madog was telling Agrippa. \"That on the north side of _oppidum_. But, if Aedui talk to Helvetii, that road runners to use.\"\n\n\" _Bene_ ,\" Agrippa agreed. \"Let's put an _ala_ across that road. I expect that when Caesar attacks, the Helvetii will send a courier up to inform Diviciacus. If that happens, we'll let the courier pass. If a response is sent, that's the one we'll intercept. But, we'll want the courier alive.\"\n\n\"Maybe response from Aedui is attack Romans,\" Madog cautioned.\n\n\"Then, we don't need the messenger,\" Agrippa said. \"We ride south and warn Caesar.\"\n\nAgrippa noticed me looking away to the south. \"You see something, _Decurio?\"_ he asked.\n\n\" _Aliquid non cerno, Tribune_ ,\" I answered. \"No, sir. I was just wondering why we can hear nothing from the south.\"\n\nAgrippa shrugged, \"The army's in a valley over twenty thousand _passus_ away. We may not hear the battle here. So, let's stay focused on our own mission.\"\n\nI nodded. Still it seemed strange to me that two huge armies were locked in a decisive struggle a few thousand _passus_ to the south, yet here, there was no indication of it.\n\nMadog was talking, \"Other gate for north road; we need watch.\"\n\nAgrippa grunted his assent. \"Where is it?\" he asked Madog.\n\n\"To north,\" Madog answered, pointing, \"other side hill that direction.\"\n\nAgrippa nodded. \"That's your job, Insubrecus. You and Athauhnu work your way around there without being seen. Get a good, concealed observation position. Same deal. You see any known enemy couriers, snatch them up on their way out, though I doubt you'll see any Helvetii north of here. And, if the Aedui move south, they'll probably come this way. Greek or Roman merchants, you see any of them, stop and question them. Hold them until you withdraw. I want you back here by the sixth hour. By that time the battle in the south should be decided. I'll stay in this area. Madog, will you take the south road?\"\n\nJust before Athauhnu and I pulled out, Agrippa said to me, \"Take a good look at the defenses, Insubrecus . . . any weaknesses you can see . . . places where the walls need repair . . . gaps . . . low spots. Pay special attention to water breaks, sewers, or streams. I have a feeling we're going to be back here in a couple of days and the boss is going to want to take this place apart.\"\n\nIt took Athauhnu and me the better part of an hour to work our way around to the north. We passed a few farmsteads, to which we gave a wide berth. We had a nervous few moments when a farmer's dog took a noisy and somewhat passionate interest in our presence. But, for the most part, the land around Bibracte was quiet and sparsely inhabited.\n\nBy the second hour, we were on well-wooded, high ground from where we could see a road winding down from the north and another coming in from the northwest. They met at a large gate piercing the lower wall of Bibracte. It was as Madog said. This gate was larger, more formidable than the one in the south. Dressed in the red-plaid tartans of the Aeduan royal house, a detachment of about ten Aedui warriors were guarding the double portal and collecting tolls from those wanting entry and duties from those leaving. We guessed there were more troops concealed in the gatehouse.\n\nWe split the _ala_ into three sections: one kept watch on the roads and gate; another provided security around our position; the third slept. Athauhnu volunteered to take the first command shift and let me take a nap after having ridden most of the night. I found myself a warm, shady spot on top of some springy pine needles just over the reverse slope. I kept my _lorica_ secured, but loosened by boots. I rolled my _sagum_ into a pillow and lay back. I felt like I had no more than closed my eyes when I felt someone shaking my shoulder. It was Athauhnu's nephew, Emlun.\n\n\"Come with me!\" he whispered. \"Athauhnu . . . I mean, the chief, wants you to see something.\"\n\nI rubbed my eyes open, then tightened my boots. With my _sagum_ rolled up and under my arm, I followed Emlun over the crest of the low ridge to where Athauhnu was crouched behind some trees. When he saw us approaching, he signaled us into a crouch. When we reached his position, he pointed down toward the north road.\n\nThere, I could see a group of riders, ten warriors by their armor and weapons. They were followed by an entourage of servants and baggage. This was obviously not a war band. The leader was arrayed to impress: a tall, conical helmet; gold arm bands; a polished, chainmail _lorica;_ a rich cloak swept back to reveal a long, Gallic _spatha_ in a rich gold-wrapped leather scabbard. I caught a glint of gold around his neck, the golden torc of a noble.\n\n\"They are not River People, not Helvetii,\" Athauhnu was saying. \"I do not recognize their tartan.\"\n\nAthauhnu gestured one of his warriors over to him. It was the scout, Rhodri. \"Do you recognize the colors?\" Athauhnu asked him.\n\nI focused on the colors that the riders were wearing. Their _bracae_ and cloaks were in a blue and white plaid that I had never seen before. A _signifer_ riding immediately behind the noble was displaying a banner of long blue and white strips, which stretched back and flapped in the light breezes.\n\nRhodri nodded, \"Blue and white . . . they are Barisai from the north. I went on a cattle raid into their lands two . . . three winters ago . . . Nasty place . . . too cold . . . Cattle are thin. They built their _dun_ on an island in the middle of a river . . . Nasty place . . . Floods every spring. Nothing worth taking in their lands . . . not worth the horse fodder to raid them.\"\n\nAthauhnu nodded and whispered to me, \"You Romans call them Parisi.\"\n\n\"Parisi,\" I repeated. I had heard the name, but knew nothing about them. \"What are they doing down here?\" I asked.\n\nAthauhnu just shrugged. \"By his gold, he's one of their chiefs . . . a noble. It must have something to do with the king, with Duuhruhda.\"\n\nAs we watched, one of the noble's _fintai_ handed him something. He held it up to examine it. It was a white wand, the sign of a diplomatic mission. He had come to negotiate with the king.\n\nAs the Parisi rode to the north gate, the noble raised the white wand so the guard detail could see it. I saw the officer of the guard point in a direction and bow. The rest of the guard detail stepped aside and let the Parisi enter Bibracte.\n\nI didn't know what all this meant, but I was sure Caesar would be interested. By that time, I was wide awake, so I let Athauhnu get some sleep. I rotated our security detail and checked the horses. Everything was in order. I checked the position of the sun. It was still well before _meridies_. I settled down to watch the roads.\n\nI spent my time examining the fortifications. Back then, I had no experience or training in evaluating the strength of fortress walls. Since then, I have studied the treatises of Aeneas Tacticus and participated in a number of sieges, from both sides of the defensive walls. Back then, I had only been in the army long enough to note that there was no defensive ditch protecting the walls of Bibracte. Otherwise, the walls looked strong for the most part and in good repair. I noticed that the walls dipped down into a small valley between the north gate and the double-peaked hill in the south. From the look of the terrain within the double walls, there seemed to be a stream that flowed down from between the hill tops and must have come through both walls where they crossed that small valley.\n\nBy the shortened shadows, it was about the fifth hour when I noticed movement on the north road. I hissed over to the trooper closest to me, Alaw, to go get Athauhnu. By the time Athauhnu joined me, the shapes of the riders on the road were resolving themselves. It was another group of warriors.\n\nWhen I pointed them out to Athauhnu, I heard him hiss the word, \"Belgai!\"\n\nThese warriors were not as well arrayed as the Parisi. Their clothes were dark colored, varying shades of black, brown, and gray. Most of their armor was hardened, boiled leather; their faces were bearded; great gouts of hair escaped from underneath their helmets. Their horses, though, were magnificent, black and dark gray, larger even than the horses that the Roman army preferred, which came from Spain and the east, the land of the _Arabiani_. The mounts of the _Belgae_ pranced and snorted as they moved down the road, as if constantly challenging the control of their riders.\n\nTheir weapons were equally impressive. Each warrior carried a long lance with a flattened iron head, almost two _pedes_ long and a _palmus_ broad in the center, pointed and sharpened on each edge. This was a formable weapon, capable of stabbing and slashing. Each wore a long _spatha_ , hung from a dark leather baldric and secured at the hip by a wide leather belt. Their shields were round with a dark iron boss; each displayed the totem of a red wolf's head.\n\nThese were the _Belgae_ , a nightmarish race of fierce savages clinging to the frozen edges of the known world on the shores of _Oceanus_. Even the _Germani_ from beyond the _Rhenus_ feared these people, and now they were here, among the Aedui, less than twenty thousand _passus_ from our army.\n\n\"What are the _Belgai_ doing in Gaul?\" I heard myself say in Gah'el.\n\n\"They're not all _Belgai_ ,\" I heard Athauhnu say as he pointed down toward the head of their column.\n\nI looked where Athauhnu had indicated and noticed a rider who had been partially obscured by the Belgic leader. He was a smaller man, bareheaded and clean shaven. His hair was cut short, like a Roman. I noticed that under his reddish-brown military cloak, he wore a short sword on his right hip, a Roman infantry _gladius_.\n\n\"A Roman?\" I questioned.\n\n\"A _Rhufeinig_!\" Athauhnu agreed.\n\nI watched as the party approached the gate. Since _Belgae_ do not observe Gallic protocols, they carried no wand of negotiation. But, they were obviously expected. The Aeduan guard detail passed them through into the dun.\n\nI heard Athauhnu snort.\n\n\"What's so funny?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Belgai and Barisai despise each other,\" he answered. \"A blood feud since the Belgai came across the Rhenus and pushed the Barisai off their lands. I would love to be a bird in the rafters of Duuhruhda's hall when those two meet.\"\n\n\"Enemies become friends only when they have a common enemy,\" I quoted.\n\nAthauhnu grunted his agreement.\n\nIt was close to the seventh hour, almost time to pack it up and head south, when another party arrived, this time down the road from the northwest. Alaw, who had been posted up that road as a scout, alerted us.\n\n\"A _Pen_ ,\" he reported to Athauhnu. \"Chief! A merchant and his party are approaching the city.\"\n\n\"How many?\" Athauhnu asked.\n\nAlaw shrugged and calculated, \"The merchant . . . his woman . . . two bodyguards . . . a slave . . . four pack mules.\"\n\n\"How far out?\" Athauhnu asked again.\n\nAgain, Alaw shrugged, \"Maybe five hundred _passus_. He's in no hurry.\"\n\n\"Let's intercept!\" I suggested.\n\nAthauhnu grunted his agreement, then hissed, \"Guithiru! Mount five!\"\n\nThen, he turned to Alaw, \"Is Rhodri keeping an eye on him?\"\n\n\"'Tis, Chief!\" Alaw nodded.\n\nWe walked our horses down off the reverse slope of the ridge and hit the road out of sight of the city gate. There we mounted and followed Alaw to the northwest. We spotted the merchant's party less than four hundred _passus_ up the road. He halted when he saw us. His two guards attempted to look as menacing as they could in the face of nine well-armed riders.\n\nWe halted about ten _passus_ away. Almost immediately, Rhodri joined us from behind the merchant's party, and now they faced ten. I held up an empty right hand to show him I was not holding a weapon and asked in Latin, \"Are you bound for the fortress of the Aedui?\"\n\nThe man hesitated for a few heartbeats, then answered in a halting Latin, \" _Romani_ vos?\"\n\nI answered, \"We are from Caesar's army. Are you not a Roman?\"\n\n\" _Non Romanus. Graecus_ ,\" he answered.\n\n\"N\u03b1 \u03bc\u03b9\u03bb\u03bf\u03cd\u03bd \u03c4\u03b7\u03bd \u03b5\u03bb\u03bb\u03b7\u03bd\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae \u03b3\u03bb\u03ce\u03c3\u03c3\u03b1,\" I said. \"I can speak Greek.\"\n\nThe man stared again, then smiled, \"Like a Roman schoolboy trying to recite Homer for his tutor,\" he said in Gah'el.\n\n\"Then Gah'el it is,\" I agreed. \"Where are you bound?\"\n\n\"This is the road to Bibracte, is it not?\" he shrugged.\n\n\"'Tis,\" I agreed. \"Where are you coming from?\"\n\nThe man shrugged, \"I am coming down from the lands of the Senones, but I have been as far north as the Ocean, among the Veneti.\"\n\nI could tell Athauhnu and the men were uneasy about being out in the open while we talked, so I said, \"We would like to hear your tales of the Senones and the Veneti. Perhaps we can talk out of the sun, over in those trees.\"\n\nNow it was the merchant's turn to be nervous about being waylaid by a band of brigands pretending to be Roman soldiers\u2014or about being waylaid by actual Roman cavalry who might be looking to augment their wages. So I spoke again, \"I am Gaius Marius Insubrecus, _decurio_ in Gaius Iulius Caesar's _praetoria_. And, this is Athauhnu mab Hergest, _pencefhul_ of the Soucanai, in the service of Caesar and the Roman people.\"\n\nThe man's eyes widened a bit at that. \"Romans this far north and Soucanai this far west! These are indeed interesting times.\" Then, he looked up at the sun. \"You are correct, young man, this sun is hot. A short rest under the shade of some trees would be welcomed.\"\n\nWe moved over to a grove of trees to the north of the road. Alaw and Rhodri moved farther north to screen the road. Athauhnu dispatched Guithiru and two men to the south. The rest of our troop spread out, securing the area.\n\nAs we dismounted, the merchant announced, \"I am called _Gennadios Haw Emporos_ , Gennadios the Trader. The woman is called Evra. She claims to be from an island beyond Britannia, where the dead live. Years ago, when she was a girl, she was taken in a raid by the Veneti. Now she's my woman.\"\n\n\"Not _that_ long ago, Merchant!\" she spat.\n\nAthauhnu's eyes widened at that. \"A woman from the island of the dead! Then, that place exists!\"\n\nGennadios shrugged, \"She claims she never saw the dead feasting in golden halls. According to her, it's a place of pigs, cattle, and salmon the size of _tiuunai_ , tunnyfish, in the rivers. No! No walking dead. Just drunks, pigs, and fat farmers. Eh, _Meli Mou?_ \"\n\nThe woman gave a dismissive grunt as she adjusted the pack straps on one of the mules.\n\n\"Ah! Where are my manners?\" Gennadios said. \"Wine! Evra! The skin of retsina! Three cups!\"\n\nThen he turned to us, \"I doubt you've ever tried retsina. We use pine resin to preserve the wine. It travels well!\"\n\nGennadios' woman from the Isle of the Dead handed us cups, then poured the wine. It was golden yellow as it flowed from the wine skin. I could smell the pine resin. When all the cups were poured, we acknowledged our host and drank. I was surprised. It was light, delicious.\n\nGennadios smacked his lips, then said, \"I had heard that Caesar had moved north of the Rhonus, but I hadn't expected to see his men this side of Bibracte.\"\n\n\"Really?\" I said. \"Where did you hear that news of Caesar?\"\n\n\"From the Roman delegation to the Senones\u2014\" he began.\n\n\"Romans! Among the Senones! Who\u2014\" I began.\n\nGennadios held up his hand. \"Yes! A Roman delegation arrived in the Senones' _dun_ , Agedincum . . . When was it? About two . . . three weeks ago. They had a broad-striper leading them . . . a noble or a senator . . . A real nob, he was. The rest looked military . . . Bodyguards, I would think, led by a narrow-striper. They had an audience with the _uucharix_ , the tribal king, Caswalu, but they spent most of their time with his _dunorix_ , Dramaelo. No love lost between those two, I can tell you. Dramaelo is older, but Caswalu seems to have favor with you Romans.\"\n\n\"Do you know what these Romans wanted?\" I interrupted.\n\n\"Wanted? Oh, yes . . . They told the king that Caesar did not have the Roman Senate's authorization to cross the Rhonus . . . that the Aedui were still friends of the Roman state.\"\n\n\"They specifically mentioned the Aedui?\" I interrupted again.\n\n\"They didn't have to,\" Gennadios tutted. \"They had an escort of Aedui riders from the _fintai_ of the Aeduan _dunorix_.\"\n\n\"Deluuhnu?\" I asked.\n\n\"The same,\" Gennadios confirmed. \"Why are you surprised? Didn't you know that Dramaelo is married to Deluuhnu's sister?\"\n\n\"His sister?\" I said.\n\n\"Oh, yes!\" Gennadios continued. \"In fact, many of Dramaelo's troops are Aedui. Makes his king right nervous.\"\n\n\"Did the Romans encourage the Senones to attack Caesar's army?\" I asked.\n\n\"Attack them?\" Gennadios answered. \"No . . . not in so many words. But, the impression they gave was, if the Senones joined with the Aedui in defending Aedui territory against Caesar's unauthorized incursion, the Senate would understand.\"\n\nEvra, who was sitting with the two bodyguards over by the mules, called over to Gennadios, \" _Labhair t\u00fa i bhfad r\u00f3, fear d'aois. Roinnt l\u00e1 beidh go bhfaigheann mharaigh t\u00fa_.\"\n\nI didn't understand what she said, but some words sounded familiar, almost recognizable.\n\nGennadios chuckled. \"She's telling me to keep my mouth shut,\" he told us. \"The women of the Gaelige . . . that's what they call themselves on the Isle of the Dead . . . Gaelige . . . sometimes the people of Eriu . . . that's their goddess of love . . . Aphrodite. You'd never know it from Evra. Their women are like the women of the Gah'el, but ten times worse. They just do what they want . . . say what they want. When I get back to Massalia, I'd keep Evra locked up, but she wouldn't stand for it. She'd tear my place apart, and me along with it.\" He chuckled again.\n\n\"Gaelige,\" I said absently. \"Almost sounds like Gah'el . . . but back to the Romans.\"\n\n\"Yes, the Romans,\" Gennadios said, filling his cup and offering more wine to Athauhnu and me, which we gratefully accepted. \"Quite generous they were too, especially to the _dunorix_. All nice, new silver, too.\"\n\nGennadios reached into his _marsupium_. He pulled out a silver coin and handed it to me. It was unworn and shiny, a newly minted _quadriga_ , a _denarius_ coin. I flipped it over and saw the image of one of this year's consuls, my erstwhile patron, Aulus Gabinius.\n\nGennadios was talking, \"It worked out well for me. Usually there's not much hard currency among the tribes. I sometimes have to resort to bartering . . . swatches of eastern cloth and pottery for chickens . . . that sort of thing . . . Useless when I get home. A man needs silver to live in Massalia.\"\n\nI handed the coin back. \"You didn't happen to hear the name of the purplestriper did you?\" I asked.\n\n\"Hear it!\" Gennadios exclaimed. \"I did better than that! I sold a skin of wine to his tribune. The man had a ghastly scar across his face . . . still red and puckered in places . . . Said he got it in a skirmish with the Belgae last season. I hadn't heard anything about Romans fighting the Belgae. He told me the man's name was something like Pompius . . . That's it . . . Gaius or Gnaeus Pompius. When Simathemeni . . . that's my name for the scarred Roman . . . \"Scar Face\" . . . when this Simathemeni got a bit drunk, he referred to his companion as Minus. That means 'The Lesser,' doesn't it? I never understood you Romans' sense of humor.\"\n\nI certainly thought I recognized the name. Pompius or Pompeius. That was the name of Caesar's colleague, one of the _triumviri_. But Pompeius Minus? Pompeius was called Magnus, \"The Great.\" Was he one of Pompeius' freedmen? No, a freedman wouldn't dare wear a broad, purple stripe, regardless of who his _patronus_ was. Did Pompeius Magnus have a son? If so, wouldn't he be called Pompeius Iunior\u2014or was \"Scarface\" making a sarcastic joke, like Gennadios thought?\n\nBefore I could ask, Guithiru came into the grove. He addressed Athauhnu, \"Chief! A messenger came up from the Roman tribune. We're to withdraw and meet him south of Bibracte.\"\n\nI sensed something important was up. Was it the battle in the south? Had Caesar been defeated? Were we cut off?\n\nI stood up. \"We thank you for your hospitality, Gennadios. We must depart.\"\n\nI thought to tell him not to inform the Aedui of our presence, but telling a merchant not to share gossip and information made as much sense as asking a stream not to flow.\n\nI reached into my _marsupium_ and found a small, silver _mercurius_ and handed it over to the merchant. \"For the wine and the conversation, _phile mou_ ,\" I told him.\n\nGennadios made the coin disappear into his own purse. \" _Vobiscum fortuna sit, mi amice!_ \" he said in Latin.\n\n\" _Et tecum_ ,\" I responded, unconsciously rubbing my _lorica_ where my medallion rested.\n\nI looked over to where Evra was sitting. The woman from the Isle of the Dead was glaring at me with the soulless, black eyes of Hecate.\n\nUnconsciously, I made the _cornucellus_ , the little horn, with the fingers of my right hand to ward off the evil eye.\n\nWe rejoined Agrippa, Madog, and the rest of the Sequani troopers at the rendezvous point south of Bibracte. Agrippa told me briefly that a full _ala_ of the _dunorix's fintai_ , almost forty riders, had sallied out of the south gate a little less than an hour earlier. At first, Agrippa feared that his troop had been detected and the Aedui were going to attack him. But, the Aedui rushed past his position without as much as a wink. They pounded down the road to the south, toward where our army was engaged with the Helvetii. Agrippa sent five _exploratores_ to follow the Aedui while he waited for my _ala_ to return from north of Bibracte.\n\n\"Any word of the battle?\" I asked him.\n\nHe shrugged, \" _Nil!_ Not even a sound!\"\n\nWe rode south in the tracks of the Aedui. We had gone about ten thousand passus when we found our scouts. They were in a narrow wooded cut between two low hills. Two had been killed by arrows; two more had been brought down with stabbing wounds to the abdomen, typical of a close ambush by infantry; one scout was missing. Their horses were gone. All the bodies had been stripped of their armor and weapons.\n\nA trooper from our point element was examining the ground around the bodies.\n\n\"What happened here?\" Madog demanded.\n\nThe trooper shrugged. \"Men on foot . . . maybe fifteen . . . twenty at the most . . . They hid in the brush along the trail . . . went off in that direction . . . leading riderless horses.\"\n\nI translated for Agrippa.\n\n\"Where is Ailwuhnu?\" Madog asked after the missing man.\n\nAgain the trooper shrugged. \"He's not here. Maybe they took him?\"\n\nOur other point man came back down the trail. \"They had horses just over the rise,\" he reported. \"They retreated south toward the Helvetii.\"\n\n\"The Aedui we're tracking?\" Madog demanded.\n\n\"No,\" the trooper said. \"The horses rode light. The Aedui had steel armor. These men did not.\"\n\nMadog was just about to respond when there was a commotion to our rear. One of our men was leading a horse carrying a wounded man. It was our missing _explorator_. He was doubled forward in his saddle. There was blood down his saddle and his right leg.\n\nMadog recognized the man, \"Ailwuhnu! What happened here?\"\n\nThe man gathered his strength to face his chief. \"Ambush, Lord,\" he gasped. \"They came at us . . . up out of the brush.\" His companion steadied him in the saddle.\n\n\"The Aedui?\" Madog began.\n\n\"No!\" the man gasped. \" _Almaenwuhra!_ Germans!\"\n\nI translated that for Agrippa. \"There are Krauts with the Helvetii?\" he said to no one in particular. \"What are they doing up here?\"\n\nThe Sequani were helping Ailwuhnu down from his horse. I was no _medicus_ , but the man had a deep stab wound in his lower right abdomen. His chances were not good. And, he could suffer for days.\n\n\"Bring up the _medduhg_!\" Madog called down the line of riders. Then, he turned to Agrippa and said in Latin, \"We have _medicus_ for horse. He do what he can.\"\n\nWhile the Sequani were trying to make Ailwuhnu comfortable, Agrippa said, \"We need to get back to the army; Krauts this far north is not a good sign.\"\n\n\"I am same,\" Madog nodded. \"I leave companions here. Take care of thing. Then we go.\"\n\nMadog dismounted and walked over to where the _medduhg_ was treating the wounded trooper. I saw Madog take the hand of the wounded man as they spoke. Then, they embraced briefly. Madog touched the man's cheek as a father saying farewell to his child, then he remounted.\n\nA rider came up beside me. It was Athauhnu.\n\n\"Ailwuhnu is Madog's sister's son,\" he said. \"This is not a good thing.\"\n\n\"What will they do?\" I asked.\n\nAthauhnu shrugged, \"What they can. If he cannot travel, the _medduhg_ will give him drugs to make him comfortable before the _cuhthraulai_ , the daemons, possess his gut. Then he'll help him to _tir ieuenctid_.\"\n\n\"The Land of Youth,\" I echoed remembering Gran'pa's tales. \"You mean the _medduhg_ will . . . he'll kill him?\"\n\nAthauhnu nodded. \" _Ie!_ It is . . . _un drugaretha_ . . . a mercy. There is no honor for a warrior to die drenched in his own piss and shit after hours of agony. The _medduhg_ will send him to the feasting hall of heroes. It is an honorable death.\"\n\nAthauhnu left me to follow his _ala_ down the trail. I looked back to where the _medicus_ was attending to Ailwuhnu. He was propped up against a tree. His eyes were closed; his face was pasty white, almost greenish, covered with sweat. He would be feasting with the heroes before the sun was down. For the first time in my career as a soldier, a thought formed clearly in my mind: _fortunae deae gratias ago_. I thanked the goddess Fortuna that it was not me. I turned my horse and followed Athauhnu.\n\nSince we did not know the outcome of the battle, Agrippa led us to where the camps had been when we departed that morning. They were still there, but the legionaries, who had been left behind, were dismantling them. Agrippa found the legate, Pulcher, and asked him for news of the battle.\n\n\"Battle!\" Pulcher snorted. \"There was no battle. Our _imperator_ allowed the barbarians to escape right out from under his ample snout. Those hairy Gauls are still laughing themselves sick over the incompetence of\u2014\" Then, Pulcher thought about what he was about to say and continued, \"There was no battle. The army's in camp ten thousand _passus_ to the west. You'll find Caesar there.\"\n\nAgrippa was about to walk away, when Pulcher spoke again, \"When you see the _imperator_ , tell him I have obeyed his order and released the Aeduan prisoner, Dumnorix!\"\n\nWe found Caesar's _castra_ along a ridgeline south of where the battle with the Helvetii was to have taken place. As we entered the camp of the Tenth Legion, we could sense the sullenness and resentment of the soldiers. Through no fault of their own, the enemy had escaped. So, the halfhearted pursuit of an enemy they believed they could have defeated would continue. And still, no new rations had been issued. The men had long ago exhausted their supplies of fresh meat and wheat; even their marching rations of jerky and _buccellatum_ were gone. Even worse, the _posca_ , their beloved sour wine, was a memory. To fill their stomachs, they could look forward to nothing but barley and water, usually a punishment ration, while their enemy ate well and had been allowed to walk out of their trap, with nothing but contempt for them. They blamed their officers; they blamed Caesar.\n\nWe found Caesar's _praetorium_ in the center of the camp. As we dismounted, we saw Ebrius, his clerk, standing outside the tent.\n\n\"You might want to think twice about going in there,\" he warned us. \"The boss is not having a good day.\"\n\nAgrippa ignored the _scriba_ and entered. Madog and I followed. Even in the outer _cubiculum_ , we could hear Caesar's voice, \"I don't care what his excuse is . . . whether he lost his nerve . . . whether he's blind . . . or whether he's just bloody incompetent. He's relieved of his command! He's not fit to serve in this army! I want him out of camp before the sun sets!\"\n\nWe slipped into Caesar's office. Labienus seemed to be in the line of fire of Caesar's tirade. He was still dressed in his battle armor, his helmet locked under his left arm.\n\nCaesar looked over and saw us. \"Agrippa,\" he said, \"I suppose you have more good news for me?\"\n\nBefore Agrippa could answer, Ebrius entered the tent.\n\n\"Pardon my interruption, _Imperator_ ,\" he apologized, \"but the senior centurions are outside as you ord . . . er . . . requested.\"\n\nCaesar nodded. \"You are dismissed, Labienus, but don't go far. Agrippa! I need some time with my officers in private; then we'll talk.\"\n\nWhen we got outside, Agrippa turned to Labienus, \"What in the name of _Dis_ happened, sir? Why are we still here? What happened to the enemy?\"\n\nLabienus held up his hand to silence Agrippa. I could see the fatigue and frustration in his eyes.\n\n\"It was a good plan, and it should have worked,\" Labienus began. \"But, it turned into a complete cluster. I got my two legions into position above the enemy a good hour before dawn. The Helvetii had no idea we were up there. They must have detected Caesar approaching just after dawn because we could see the camp begin to stir. A battle line was forming down toward our left front, just like Caesar planned. The warriors were forming up the musters and pushing them forward. The enemy had their backs to us . . . no idea we were there. Then, it all just came apart. The Helvetii began to melt away from the intended battle position and began to move to the west as if there was no threat approaching. They must have detected our presence up on the hill because a group of them began pointing up toward our position. Luckily, there wasn't enough discipline down there to organize an attack, or we could have been _immerda_. A bunch of the Helvetii dropped their _bracae_ and showed us their backsides before they walked away . . . really pissed my boys off. They wanted to run down there and stick their _pila_ through the Helvetians' _bracae_... I had all I could do to keep them together.\"\n\n\"But what happened?\" Agrippa persisted.\n\n\"I'm getting to that,\" Labienus continued. \"I sent riders to find Caesar. He was digging in here, wondering what the hell had become of me. It seems that when he was coming up the road toward the Helvetii, he had sent some _exploratores_ forward to make contact with my division . . . an _ala_ of Roman cavalry under an _angusticlavus_ named Considius. He couldn't have chosen a worse officer for that assignment. Considius has been with the army since the time Marius was fighting Sulla. The man is as blind as Homer . . . can't see past his own nose, and all of his cronies have been covering for him. He reported to Caesar that my hill was occupied by the enemy and my division was nowhere to be found. So Caesar halted the advance and veered off to the south to find some high ground in case the Helvetii attacked him. By midday, I was sitting on my hill, watching the dust of the enemy escaping to the west, and Caesar was on his hill, wondering where I was . . . all because of a blind scout. A blind scout! It would be damned funny if I had any sense of humor left.\"\n\nAbout that time, the six _primi pili_ of the legions left Caesar's tent. I had seen men look grimmer, but that was at a funeral. Ebrius beckoned us into Caesar's office. \"The _imperator_ will see you now,\" he intoned.\n\nCaesar was sitting in a slouch beside his field desk, legs extended in front of him. He was staring intently at the ground. \"My senior centurions tell me that after today's _calamitas_ , they cannot guarantee the loyalty of my troops,\" he said as we entered. \"What good news do you boys have for me?\"\n\nAgrippa reported what we had seen and heard around Bibracte. Caesar said nothing. He just rubbed his forehead and shook his head.\n\nWhen Agrippa reported the ambush by Germans and the death of Madog's nephew, Caesar said, \"Germans . . . that's all I need . . . Germans this far west of the Rhenus. My condolences to you and your family, Madocus _Dux_. Your nephew died in the service of Rome. His name will be remembered.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Caesar,\" Madog responded. \"He died like a warrior . . . a good death.\" Madog's voice sounded hollow, exhausted.\n\n\"Parisi and Belgae delegations in Bibracte . . . A Roman riding with a Belgae war band . . . Renegade Aedui horsemen somewhere in my rear . . . A Roman senatorial telling the Senones that if they attack us, Rome will not take offense. Do I have it all, Agrippa?\" Caesar asked.\n\nAgrippa nodded, but then said, \"One more thing, _Imperator_! Pulcher reports that he has released Dumnorix, according to your order.\"\n\nWhen Agrippa said this, Caesar's head jerked up. He stared at Agrippa for a few heartbeats, then said in a low voice, \" _Quid dicebas tu?\"_\n\n\" _Imperator_ ,\" Agrippa responded, \"Legate Pulcher reports that he released the Aeduan, Dumnorix.\"\n\n\"He did what?\" Caesar shouted jumping to his feet. \" _Iste stulte_ . . . that . . . that _verpa_! He did what?\"\n\n\"Released Dumnorix . . . the Aeduan,\" Agrippa stammered.\n\n\" _Cacat_!\" Caesar shouted, his fist slamming down on the desk. \"Labienus! Send a detachment of my _praetoriani_ back to those camps . . . bring that _podex_ , Pulcher, here . . . to me! Stat'! _Iste fellator_. .. That _half-wit_ better have a good explanation, or I'll crucify him!\"\n\nSuddenly, Caesar's eyes became unfocused. He stumbled, barely able to steady himself on the field desk. Labienus rushed forward and took his arm. Without taking his eyes off Caesar, he said, \"Insubrecus . . . quickly . . . find Spina, the _medicus_ . . . Bring him here! Agrippa! Madocus! Wait outside!\"\n\nI flew out of the tent, past a startled Ebrius. I ran over to the medical tent, less than thirty _passus_ away. \"Spina! Spina, _Medice!_ \" I shouted.\n\nI heard his thick, Aventine accent from one of the rear compartments, \"Who's dat? Whadda you want? I'm ovah hee'ah!\"\n\n\"Medice!\" I shouted. \"I'm here to bring you to\u2014\" Then, I stopped myself. Yelling out that the commander of the army was near collapse was not conducive to morale, especially after a day like this.\n\nSpina came out of the back. \"You callin' for me, or what?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, _Medice_ ,\" I said, lowering my voice, \"please accompany me to the _praetorium . . . stat_ '.\"\n\n\"The _praetorium?_ \" Spina started. Then, he whispered to me, \"Is da boss havin' one of his spells?\"\n\nI nodded at him. He nodded and then went back into the tent where jars of herbs and drugs were stored. He packed something into a _loculus_ and said, \"Okay, let's get adda hee'ah!\"\n\nAs we walked back to the _praetorium_ , he recognized me, \"You're dat _tiro_ I patched up a while back, ain't cha? Duh one who got stabbed by duh slave who wasn't a slave, right?\"\n\n\" _Recte_ ,\" I confirmed.\n\n\"How's dee ahm?\" he asked.\n\nIt took me a heartbeat to realize he was asking me how my arm was. \"Good as new,\" I told him.\n\n\" _Bene!_ \" he said. \"Looks like yaw getting up in duh world. A _decurio_ in less than a year . . . a praetorian to boot! Dat's impressive!\"\n\nBy that time we were at the _praetorium_ , Spina was immediately passed straight through to Caesar's _cubiculum_. I saw Agrippa and Madog still standing outside.\n\n\"What's this all about?\" I asked.\n\nAgrippa just shrugged, but he looked worried.\n\nMadog said in his broken Latin, \"Sometimes gods enter in man's anger\u2014\" Then, he stopped. Either his Latin or his knowledge had failed him.\n\nAfter a bit, Spina came back out. \"Youse can go back in now. He wants to tawk to yas. Not too long. He needs to sleep.\" Then, he walked back toward the medical station, whistling some tuneless sounds.\n\nWe reentered Caesar's _cubiculum_. He was sitting at his desk, drinking something that smelled of wine, vinegar, and something else\u2014something sweet and cloying. He seemed relaxed, his eyes lidded and heavy. Labienus was standing next to him.\n\nCaesar looked up at me and asked, \"Insubrecus, are you familiar with the story of the Gordian's Knot?\"\n\nI remember the Stick telling us the tale during a class on Greek culture. I recited, \"When Gordias became the king of Phrygia, his son, Midas, dedicated a chariot to Zeus and tied its shaft with an intricate knot of cornel bark. He declared whoever could undo the knot was the rightful king of Phrygia. Later, Alexander arrived in Phrygia, when it was a province of Persia. When challenged to prove himself worthy of the throne by undoing the knot, Alexander sliced it in half with his sword. That night, there was a violent thunderstorm. Alexander took this as a sign that Zeus was pleased and would grant Alexander many victories.\"\n\nCaesar nodded. \"Not lyrical, but accurate, Insubrecus. All these stories and reports of Romans, Belgae, Krauts, and whatnot have become a knot I do not have time to unravel, so I'm just going to slice it open!\" Caesar announced. \"Tomorrow at dawn, this army marches on the Aeduan capital... we march on Bibracte!\"\n\n# XII.\n\n# _Bibracte_\n\n# BIBRACTE\n\n_Et quod a Bibracte, oppido Haeduorum longe maximo et copiosissimo, non_ _amplius milibus passuum XVIII aberat, rei frumentariae prospiciendum_ _existimavit; itaque iter ab Helvetiis avertit ac Bibracte ire contendit_.\n\n\"The town of Bibracte, by far the largest and most prosperous settlement of the Aedui, was not more than eighteen miles away. Since Caesar estimated that the town would provide him a supply of grain, on the next day, he diverted his route of march away from the Helvetians and toward Bibracte.\"\n\n(from Gaius Marius Insubrecus' notebook of Caesar's journal)\n\nDuring the fourth watch, Caesar assembled his six legions in the dark valley north of the camps. I was again assigned to Agrippa and Madog's Sequani cavalry. Our mission was to screen Caesar's advance to the east. Once we came abreast of Bibracte, we were to swing around it to the east and seal its northern approaches. Caesar hoped he could trap any Gallic deputations still in the _oppidum_ and any Romans accompanying them. My mission was to ensure that any prisoners we took were delivered to Caesar's interrogators in a condition to talk.\n\nAs we rode through the darkness, my head was fuzzy from lack of sleep and a bit too much of Caesar's _posca_ the night before. I don't know what strange and exotic herbs Spina had dosed Caesar with, but it put the _imperator_ into one of his rare loquacious moods. He kept Labienus and me up well into the second watch, talking about his vision for Rome and his frustrations with the antiquated, doddering machinery of the _res publica_.\n\n\"These old fools in the Senate just don't understand Rome's position through the extension of our _imperium_ ,\" he was saying. \"They think they're still ruling a city and the farmlands around it. Marius . . . even Sulla . . . taught them the foolishness of that. One strong man with the support of the army can set their whole house of straw ablaze.\"\n\n\"But, Caesar,\" Labienus protested, \"these institutions . . . our laws . . . the Twelve Tables . . . prevent too much power from falling into the hands of a single man. Our ancestors understood this from the tyranny of the kings. The _mos_ _maiorum_ , the tradition of our ancestors, is sacred.\"\n\nCaesar retorted, \"The _mos maiorum_ didn't stop Sulla from killing hundreds of his enemies for their estates, did it? He just ignored it, and the Senate quaked in their red boots while he did it. Why? He had an army to back him up, an army loyal to Sulla's purse, not to the Senate.\"\n\n\"We have restored the _res publica_ since Sulla\u2014\"\n\n\"Bah!\" Caesar snorted. \"The sacred _mos maiorum_! When _fides_ and _pietas_ encounter silver and greed, they melt away! And there is the heart of it! Rome is not ruled by _virtus_ ; it's ruled by _avaritas_ . . . and Rome's greed seems to have developed an infinite desire for plunder. So she extends the _imperium_ , grasping more and more. We do not rule our provinces; we rape them! We say we send out proconsuls and propraetors to protect the interests of the _res publica_ . . . to bring _Romanitas_ to the barbarians . . . But what do they really do? They enrich themselves and their masters in the Senate! The only difference between a Roman army and a pack of brigands is size and discipline. If you encounter either, they'll strip you bare and leave you bleeding!\"\n\nI continued to wonder what Spina had put in Caesar's drink.\n\n\"Look at Insubrecus, here!\" Caesar went on. \" _He_ represents the future of Rome! He's one generation out of a round hut; his grandfather wore trousers just like the Helvetii we're chasing across _terrae comatorum_ , the lands of the hairbags. But, he is the future of Rome\u2014not those over-educated, inbred senatorials down in Rome who think they have the right to rule the world because some boot-licking, scroll-sniffing charlatan told them they're descended from Romulus! Bah!\"\n\nLabienus was sweating freely by this time. He was devoted to the legendary Rome of Mucius Scaevola, Scipio Africanus, and Cato the Elder. Or, at least he was devoted to the legends of these heroes from the dim chronicles of our history.\n\n\"When I return to Rome from this command,\" Caesar continued, \"I plan to introduce legislation to offer the franchise to _Gallia Cisalpina_ and all of _Italia_ \u2014\"\n\n\"Certainly, that will not pass the Senate!\" Labienus protested.\n\n\"Politics, my dear Labienus! Politics!\" Caesar snorted. \"As long as I, and my tame, plebian tribunes, support land reforms for Pompeius and oppose debt reduction for Crassus, it will pass. Believe me! Those doddering old fools in the Senate love their luxuries and fear the gangs of Clodius and Milo more than they cherish their _mos maiorum_. And that's only the beginning!\"\n\nCaesar went on like that well into the night, until the wine and drugs finally took hold of him. As we were sitting in that tent that summer night about twenty thousand _passus_ south of Bibracte, we had no idea how Nona was spinning out the threads of our destinies: the death of Caesar's daughter, Iulia, and his split with Pompeius; the death of Crassus in the land of the Parthians; Labienus' death while fighting against Caesar in the civil wars; Caesar's own death at the hands of those to whom he had granted his _clementia_. No! As we sat and drank _posca_ that night in _Gallia_ , all of that lay well in the future __.\n\nCaesar's plans for Rome and the fumes of the _posca_ I had drunk the night before were fogging my head as we pounded north into the darkness on our way to Bibracte.\n\nBefore I returned to my quarters the night before, Labienus had confided in me that Pulcher did, in fact, possess a written directive apparently issued by Caesar's headquarters, ordering the immediate release of the Aeduan prince, Dumnorix. Pulcher claimed that the directive had been delivered to him by an _angusticlavus_ , a narrow-striper whom he did not recognize.\n\nRegardless, Pulcher was finished in the army.\n\nLabienus advised him to pack his kit and be on the road to Massalia before Caesar remembered his threat to crucify him. Not that even a proconsul with full _imperium_ could, or would, execute a citizen, a patrician, and a senatorial, like a slave, but why test the theory? Labienus told Pulcher to be on a ship to Ostia before Caesar had a chance to try to make good on his threat.\n\nThe issue that really worried Labienus was that there were obviously Roman officers serving within the army who were actively engaged in undermining Caesar and his efforts to bring the Helvetii to heel.\n\nBy dawn the Sequani cavalry _turma_ was positioned across the only major avenue of approach from the east that could cut across Caesar's line of advance. It was more of a pathway than a road that travelers had created following a tributary river up from the Rhonus Valley.\n\nAgrippa and Madog had advanced as a recon in force some two to three thousand _passus_ down the narrow, wooded valley. Athauhnu and I were positioned where the road from the east broke out of a valley and joined the road from the south we had taken from Caesar's camps. From there, both roads ran toward the west, up into a broader valley, which we expected our army to cross on its way to Bibracte. We weren't expecting any problems. We assumed the main body of the enemy was well to the west.\n\nAs usual, Alaw and Rhodri were deployed a few hundred _passus_ down the road to the east. Guithiru was deployed with five of our troopers to screen our rear. The morning sun was beginning to warm me and diffuse the fumes in my head. Athauhnu seemed quite amused by my damaged condition.\n\n\"I have known men who had to drink for courage before battle,\" he joked, \"but you're the first one I've ever known who gets drunk the night before so he's hungover _for_ the battle!\"\n\n\"Not today,\" I dismissed him. \"I'm in no condition.\"\n\nAthauhnu reached into his _marsupium_ and handed me what looked like a dried out twig. \"Here! Chew on this. It will clear your head,\" he offered.\n\nI took the stick and examined it.\n\n\"Go ahead, Arth Bek!\" Athauhnu encouraged. \"I wouldn't poison you.\"\n\nI chewed a bit on the twig. It did seem to help a little.\n\n\"Madog is concerned about the Caisar,\" I heard Athauhnu say.\n\n\"Concerned about the Caisar?\" I questioned. \"In what way?\"\n\nAthauhnu shrugged. \"Madog says that last night, Caesar had a . . . a spell . . . and when he recovered, he decided to go to Bibracte.\"\n\n\"Caesar knows what he's doing,\" I defended my _patronus_.\n\nAgain, Athauhnu shrugged. \"At times the gods send madness to cause a man to destroy himself. We march north, with the Helvetii behind us and the Aedui in front of us. If things go badly, we Soucanai will go east back into our own lands. You should come with us, Arth Bek. The Aedui will show no mercy to defeated Romans.\"\n\nI had no idea how to respond to that. In the case of a defeat, escaping to the east made sense. But, that would mean abandoning Caesar and the Roman army, to which the _sacramentum_ bound me until dismissal or death.\n\nBefore I could formulate a response, two riders came pounding up the trail from the east. It was Alaw and a trooper that had gone forward with Madog. They pulled up in front of Athauhnu. \" _A Pen! Uh doucliau geluhnai_!\" Alaw reported. \"Chief! The enemy's coming!\"\n\n\" _Uh geluhnai_?\" Athauhnu questioned. \"The enemy? The River People . . . the Helvetii?\"\n\n\" _Na, Pen_!\" the man responded. \" _Almaenwuhra_! Germans!\"\n\n\"How many?\" Athauhnu asked the man.\n\nThe messenger shrugged. \"The valley is narrow . . . the road twisted . . . They advance without fear. Madog believes there are many.\"\n\n\"Cavalry?\" Athauhnu pressed the man.\n\n\"We have seen only mounted men,\" the man confirmed.\n\nAthauhnu nodded and walked over to his horse. He took a hunting horn that had been attached to his saddle and blew some discordant notes to assemble his _ala_.\n\nThen, he surveyed our position. \"See that rise there?\" he asked the messenger, pointing to where the ground rose to meet the road from the south. \"Tell Madog I will assemble my troop there.\"\n\nThe Alaw nodded, and he and his companion turned back down the road. He passed Rhodri riding in, in response to Athauhnu's summons. Soon, Guithiru and his detail returned.\n\nAthauhnu mounted and quickly briefed his men: \"The enemy approaches from the east. Germans! We do not know how many. Madog is withdrawing to our position. We will move west up the valley. We will stay above the Germans, between them and the Romans. When they reach this point, they will have to deploy . . . spread out. Then we will see how many we're dealing with.\"\n\n\" _A Pen_ , the sun will be in our eyes!\" Guithiru observed.\n\n\"It can't be helped,\" Athauhnu stated. \"We will keep the higher ground.\n\nThey are mounted! If there are too many to fight, we will escape to the west, toward the Romans.\"\n\nGuithiru grunted.\n\nWe withdrew to the top of the rise and deployed, in line, facing the opening of the road below. There we waited. To our rear, the valley rose gently toward the north and west. Whoever these Germans were, they were heading right into the flank of the advancing Roman army.\n\nWe seemed to wait for an eternity before we spotted movement on the road below. I could sense our troopers tense as the first riders became visible below us. They were ours! Athauhnu signaled to them with his hands. They quickly joined us, assembling in line on our left flank. Their leader approached Athauhnu. He was a veteran warrior called Ci, the \"Hound.\"\n\n\" _A Pen_!\" he reported to Athauhnu, \"the Germans advance . . . Madog has engaged but withdraws before them.\"\n\nAthauhnu grunted and nodded. Ci rejoined his troop.\n\nAgain, we waited. At least the flies that started buzzing around in my stomach made me forget about the pain in my head. Suddenly, I realized that I had thoroughly chewed the twig Athauhnu had given me earlier. I spit it out.\n\nAthauhnu kept his eyes on the opening of the road below us, but said to me out of the side of his mouth, \"This is the worst time . . . just before the enemy comes. Once they are here, we won't have time to be afraid.\"\n\nI nodded, grateful for Athauhnu's use of the word \"we.\"\n\nSoon, Madog's men came up the road. Again, Athauhnu waved and pointed to our right flank. Madog and Agrippa were the last riders to emerge. Madog had a man behind him on his horse. I heard Athauhnu mutter, \"Two missing.\"\n\nAthauhnu waved again. Agrippa and Madog joined us in the center of the Sequani line. The man riding behind Madog dropped off the horse. Then, I saw that he had the stub of an arrow protruding from his thigh.\n\nMadog caught me looking at the man. \"German horsemen do not carry bows,\" he said in Gah'el. \"There are warriors on foot down there.\"\n\n\" _Pedes_?\" I responded in Latin. \"Infantry?\"\n\nAgrippa heard me. \" _Pedes, Insubrece_! I don't think this is a raiding party coming in from the east. I need to get an idea how many Krauts are coming up that road, then warn Caesar.\"\n\nAlaw pointed toward the road below us. \" _Pen! Maint uhn dod_! Chief! They're here!\"\n\nGerman riders were emerging from the valley and filling the field below us. They saw us but didn't seem at all concerned. There didn't seem to be any organization. They milled around in the field below us, some pointing toward us, with others just roaming about.\n\nTheir equipment wasn't impressive. Some had bronze helmets, others leather, some none at all. I could see no chainmail, but I did see some leather _loricae_. Most of them carried either lances or stabbing spears.\n\nI heard Madog spit, \"Farmers on horses!\"\n\nThen, another group of warriors emerged from the narrow valley. These men were well-equipped, with steel helmets, chainmail, and large, round shields with the image of what looked like a red oxen with long horns painted over the boss. Each had a red, horsehair topknot trailing from his helmet. One rider, a giant with a red beard, emerged from the trail. Directly behind him rode a mounted warrior carrying a totem on a spear shaft, with long, black oxen horns and a skirt of a black pelt below it.\n\n\"That one must be their _eorle_ ,\" I heard Athauhnu use an unfamiliar term.\n\n\"What's an _eorle_?\" I asked out of the side of my mouth, afraid to take my eyes off the giant below us.\n\n\"That's what the Germans call their _penai_ , their chiefs,\" Athauhnu answered. \"The riders with him are his _gedricht_ , his _fintai_. He equips them, feeds them, and they are sworn to protect him in battle or die with him. The Germans believe that any member of the _gedricht_ who survives a battle in which their chief dies is cursed to wander the middle lands alone, an outcast.\"\n\nMadog interrupted us, pointing down at the Kraut standard. \"That is the totem of the Aurochs. They are Germans . . . the People of the Aurochs . . . You Romans call them _Boii_ . . . the 'cow people.' And that is no _eorle_! That is their _ciuning_ . . . their tribal king . . . look. There are at least fifty riders in his _fintai_. No _eorle_ could support so many. That is the tribal muster coming up the trail . . . Thousands would be my guess.\"\n\nAs he spoke, well-armed warriors on foot emerged from the valley. They didn't march in step or in any recognizable formation as did the legions. They just poured out onto the open area below us. The men wore bronze or steel helmets, many with cheek guards and some with bands of metal extending down over their noses. Some carried spears; some war axes. Each wore a long sword on his left side and a shorter sword on his right. Every one of them carried an oversized, round shield. They poured out of the valley in the hundreds.\n\n\"Those are _cnihtas_ , the professional warriors of the tribe,\" Madog said. \"They are _dugath_ , _veterani_ , blooded warriors. They form the _scilde wealle_ , the shield wall, in the center of the battle line. Behind them march the _iougath_ , the young warriors, boys who have yet to be blooded. They stand behind the shield wall. And, behind them, the _fiurd_ , the tribal muster. They form the flanks of the battle line in the defense. When the Germans attack, they're the shock troops. They disrupt the enemy's line so the _dugath_ can get in among them and do the real killing. That's a tribal assembly down there. The Boii are going to war against the Caisar.\"\n\nIt was just then that we heard a trumpet call in the distance behind us.\n\n\"Caesar?\" I asked.\n\n\"It must be,\" Agrippa answered, \"but, if the army's on the march, why would it be sounding trumpet signals?\"\n\nDown below we could see the Boii king haranguing his cavalry and pointing up the slopes toward us.\n\n\"I think that big Kraut down there with the red beard wants us out of here,\" Agrippa observed.\n\nI translated for Madog, but he had understood most of it. \"Tribune right. Time go away for us,\" he announced in Latin.\n\nMadog made sure that the wounded man had been mounted behind another warrior. He was about to signal his riders to withdraw to the west when Agrippa said, \"We can't leave yet.\"\n\nMadog froze. Then, he said in Latin, \"Stay here, madness! Why no go?\"\n\n\"Where are the Tulingi?\" Agrippa asked. \"The Tulingi were marching with the Boii. Where are they?\"\n\nBefore Madog could answer, we could see the German riders begin to move toward us. There was no order to their advance, just knots of three to six riders beginning to move up the slope toward us. They didn't seem to be in any hurry to attack uphill into what appeared to be a disciplined and well-equipped Roman cavalry detachment.\n\nMadog quickly snapped out some orders. Athauhnu and Ci were quickly to withdraw five hundred _passus_ to the west. Madog's _ala_ would screen the withdrawal from the German cavalry. I translated for Agrippa, who nodded and said, \"You stay with Athauhnu. I'm with Madocus!\"\n\nBefore I turned my horse, I looked down the hill. The German _dugath_ was still emerging from the valley. They were milling about down there, waiting for their horsemen to clear us off the ridge. There had to be almost two cohorts of them below us.\n\nAthauhnu gave Ci the order to withdraw. We cantered our horses back to our new position. There was no point in winding them; we didn't know what was in store for us. We followed the valley floor as it gently rose toward the northwest. When we arrived at our new position, I could clearly hear Roman signal trumpets away to the west. I remembered some of the signals from my training. I thought I heard \"assemble.\" And, the only reason I could think of to sound that command while on the march was contact with the enemy. But, which enemy: Helvetii, Aedui, or both?\n\nTo our east, Agrippa and Madog withdrew slowly toward our position. The German cavalry followed cautiously, without any semblance of purpose or organization. They maintained a healthy distance from the Sequani riders. Finally, Agrippa and Madog joined us. The Germans continued to maintain a safe distance. They halted in small groups of seven to ten riders about a hundred _passus_ to our front. There were no more than fifty of them below us. There was no sign of the German infantry cresting the ridge to the east.\n\nI reported to Agrippa: \"I can hear our army. They seem to be no more than three to five thousand _passus_ up the valley. I think they're engaging the enemy.\"\n\n\"Is the enemy between us and the legions?\" Agrippa asked.\n\nI hadn't thought of that. \"I . . . I don't know, Tribune. There is no sign of enemy troops to our rear . . . just the sound of Roman trumpets.\"\n\nAgrippa stared up the valley for a few heartbeats, then shrugged, \"Can't worry about that now. We're not finished here yet . . . Madocus _Dux_!\"\n\nMadog sidled up next to Agrippa, \" _Quid vis tu, Tribune_?\" he asked. \"What do you want, Tribune?\"\n\n\"We're going to teach those arrogant _verpae_ a lesson. We attack!\" Agrippa said, pointing toward the motley assemblage of German riders.\n\nMadog nodded and called for Ci. Athauhnu was mounted beside me.\n\n\"Three wedges,\" Agrippa instructed. \"Madocus' _ala_ center, Adonus left, and Caius right. I'm with Madocus. Insubrecus with Adonus. We advance no farther than our last position on the ridge.\"\n\nI translated for Athauhnu and Ci. Athauhnu spoke up, \"They are too close. We will not be able to get the horses to the gallop before we're among them.\"\n\nI translated that for Agrippa. He nodded and said, \"You are correct, Adonus _Decurio_ , but I do not believe that will make much of a difference with that rabble. They'll run as soon as they see us advance. I want one last look at the Kraut infantry. I want to see if we can locate the Tulingi down there with the Boii. And last, I want the German cavalry terrified that their infantry will have to advance blind, with no cavalry screen. That should slow them down some.\"\n\nI translated. Both Athauhnu and Ci grunted and eagerly nodded in agreement. There was a blood debt. The Germans had raided their lands, burned their homes, and raped their women. Now they must pay.\n\nAgrippa wasted no time. He and Madog trotted back to their band of riders and almost immediately moved forward toward the Germans. Athauhnu and I moved our men to Agrippa's left; Ci moved to the right. The cavalry wedges formed naturally as we advanced. But, I heard Agrippa give the command, \" _Alae . . . ad . . . cuneum_! Troops . . . form . . . wedge!\" I shrugged my shield off my shoulder. Strapping it to my left arm, I fell in behind Athauhnu on his left.\n\nI heard Agrippa's voice again, \" _Alae . . . equiis . . . citatis_! Troops . . . to the canter!\"\n\nMadoc signaled the Sequani by pumping his right fist twice, and the horses broke into a canter.\n\nAhead of us, I could see the Germans take notice and stiffen, but they seemed frozen in place. They didn't know what to do.\n\nAgain, Agrippa, \" _Alae . . . spathas . . . stringite_! Troops . . . draw . . . sabers!\"\n\nFinally, in ones and twos, the Germans began to turn their horses away from us. They began to retreat back toward their army. Some remained in place, frozen.\n\nAgrippa, \" _Alae . . . equiis . . . currentibus_! Troops . . . to the gallop!\"\n\nWe were just beginning to pick up some speed when we ran into those few Germans too foolish to run. One appeared directly in front of me. His eyes seemed to be the size of _denarius_ coins. He dropped his spear and raised his arms up, as if to protect himself. I saw Athauhnu's sword slice into his face just above his mouth. His body tumbled to my left. I felt a brushing impact with his horse. Then, I was past him. Nothing but empty fields and fleeing German horsemen were to my front.\n\nWe were about a hundred _passus_ away from our objective when Nemesis struck.\n\nThe mounted _gedricht_ of the German _ciuning_ began to crest the slope in front of us\u2014whether alerted by their own fleeing cavalry or following the king who wanted to see the terrain in front of him, I could not tell. The _ciuning_ was riding in the center of his troop.\n\nMadog ran directly at the German king. Athauhnu changed the direction of our gallop so we would crash into the Germans' right flank.\n\nI heard the crash as Madog's troop collided with the Krauts. I had no time to look. We hit the German flank immediately after. My horse, Clamriu, crashed into a German's mount. I saw her bite down into the other horse's neck. The rider was thrown off away from us. He never rose. His horse collapsed and rolled where the rider fell. I saw a face in front of me, bearded. I stabbed at it and felt an impact up through my sword arm. I glimpsed a tightly packed group of Germans protecting a wounded man, leading him down the slope away from the battle. It was their king.\n\nThen Clamriu reared back. I almost tumbled over her rump. She was kicking and biting at another horse. The Kraut rider was trying to get control. A Sequani reached over and plunged his sabre into the man's arm pit. He went down into the scrum. The German riders seemed to be melting away back down the hill. Somewhere to my right, I could hear a Gallic hunting horn. Our troops were pulling back toward it. The tangle of men and horses was unraveling. I stole a look down the ridge. The ground was covered with German infantry. A chief on a horse was trying to rally them up the ridge toward our position. I could sense some movement in our direction. Again I heard the Gallic signal to assemble. I moved back to where our troop was gathering.\n\nAgrippa was still in the saddle. He had a slicing wound across the ridge of his nose and his left cheekbone. Madog and Athauhnu seemed winded, but unbloodied. Ci was not there. Then, I saw him sorting out our troops as they rode back from the point of contact.\n\nAgrippa grabbed my arm. I realized I hadn't sheathed my _spatha_. I raised it and realized the point was bloodied. I wondered how I could clean it off before returning it to the sheath. I heard Agrippa's voice in the distance. \"Are you listening, _Decurio_?\"\n\n\"Uh . . . _audio? Te audio, Tribune_!\" I heard myself say.\n\n\"You are to ride back to the army!\" Agrippa was saying. \"Find Caesar . . . Tell him there's an entire Kraut army on his flank . . . at least ten thousand . . . probably more . . . Boii and Tulingi . . . They're marching west . . . _Compre'hendis tu_?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Tribune_!\" I said snapping out of it.\n\nI still didn't know what to do with my bloodied _spatha_.\n\nAthauhnu handed me a bloody rag. \"Use this,\" he told me. \"The German who wore it doesn't need it anymore!\"\n\nI cleaned off my _spatha_ and returned it to the sheath on my saddle.\n\n\"Emlun and Rhodri will ride with you,\" I heard Athauhnu say.\n\n\"Rhodri without Alaw?\" I questioned.\n\nAthauhnu shot me a dark look. \"Alaw feasts with the heroes in the Land of Youth,\" he said.\n\nThe three of us ran west as fast as our tired mounts could take us. Most of the way, we didn't dare to go faster than a canter. Ahead, I could hear the Roman trumpets clearly. The last signal I heard was a general call for close ranks. That could only mean the enemy was advancing on the legionary line.\n\nAhead, there was a wooded ridgeline that advanced across the valley from the south. Beyond it, I could hear a noise, a noise like powerful waters running and the murmur of thousands of voices.\n\nRhodri suggested we climb the ridge and not go around it to the north. I agreed. That decision probably saved our lives.\n\nWhen we crested the ridge below us, we saw the enemy, the Helvetii, tens of thousands of them, moving north across the open valley. We were _behind_ the enemy horde!\n\nTo my right, on a gently rising slope along the north wall of the valley, was Caesar's army. Four legions in _acies triplex_ , the triple line, were facing the Helvetii. Above them, I could see the remaining two legions in _acies duplex_ , two battle lines with open ranks, matching the flanks of the forward legions.\n\nThe Helvetii were rushing straight toward Caesar like a wall of water when a damn breaks. I wondered briefly if our army could withstand such a massive flow of warriors.\n\nI did feel a momentary surge of relief, realizing that the Germans would arrive on the battlefield in front of our troops. Then, Rhodri grabbed my arm and pointed to a long slope about five hundred _passus_ to our left.\n\n\"The Helvetii are forming a shield wall there!\" he said.\n\nI peered in the direction Rhodri indicated and could easily make out enemy troops forming ragged battle lines on the forward slope.\n\n\"Look there!\" Rhodri said again. \"The king has set himself near the hilltop!\"\n\nAgain, I could see a cluster of heavily armed, mounted warriors where Rhodri indicated. There was a cluster of enemy standards among the riders.\n\n\"This is not right, Arth Bek,\" Rhodri started.\n\n\"Not right? What do you mean?\" I asked.\n\n\"Their _brenna aw frouuhdrau_ , their war chief, is holding his best troops back from the attack,\" Rhodri explained, pointing toward the enemy standards. \"Only the tribal musters advance. The warriors led by their war chief should be advancing behind them under the tribal standards. When the musters open the Roman lines, the warriors must be in position to attack through the gaps. Something is wrong!\"\n\nJust then, the Romans began their attack.\n\nThe forward edge of the enemy advance had begun to climb up toward the Roman front line. When it was about thirty _passus_ away, I heard the Roman trumpet signal _pila ponite_ , \"present spears!\" There wasn't much movement along the Roman line; most of the _muli_ in the front line had already assumed the position by the time the enemy reached the bottom of their hill.\n\nThen, as the enemy closed to twenty passus, _pila parate_ was sounded, \"ready spears.\" Even at this distance, I could see movement and reflections of light as the _muli_ , almost in a single motion, brought their throwing spears to the ready position.\n\nThen, the trumpets sounded _pila iacite_ , \"open fire.\" This was followed by three blasts of the horn, three rounds. The soaring spears looked like a fastmoving, black cloud rushing from the Roman lines into the front edge of the enemy, some fifteen _passus_ away. Before the first volley struck, a second was in the air, then, a third.\n\nThe effect of the spear volleys was devastating.\n\nThe natural reaction to a volley of spears is to raise shields for protection. But, the Roman _pila_ are weighted, designed to punch through a shield with enough force to penetrate even the thickest protective padding, even hardened leather.\n\nMost of the Helvetii muster-men wore nothing; in fact, many had attacked bare-chested to show their contempt for the enemy. They were mowed down like wheat under a scythe.\n\nEven if a warrior were lucky enough to have chainmail to blunt the point of the _pilum_ , the impact of the blow would be enough to knock him down, and the spear would have rendered his shield useless. The Roman _pilum_ is designed so it cannot be extracted from a shield, leaving a man naked before the short, Roman stabbing sword, the _gladius_.\n\nNo sooner had the third volley of _pila_ risen into the air than the Roman trumpets signaled _acies prima_ , \"Front line!\" Then, _gladios stringite_ , \"Draw swords!\" Across the valley, all along the Roman front line, light flashed as thousands of short swords were drawn from their scabbards.\n\nBehind me, I heard Emlun calling my name. I didn't want to take my eyes off the drama unfolding in front of me.\n\nThe Roman trumpets called _impetum facite_ , \"Attack!\"\n\nThe entire Roman front line descended on the muddle that was once the front edge of the Helvetian attack. It was no contest. The Romans slaughtered any of the Helvetii foolish enough to try to stand their ground.\n\nThen, from the hill to our left, the Helvetian trumpets blasted out a cacophonous strain. Immediately, the thousands of Helvetii in the field below us turned and ran from the Roman advance. At that time, I was too inexperienced to realize that the maneuver I was seeing was impossible for a barbarian army, unless it had been planned.\n\nAgain, Emlun called to me.\n\n\"What is it?\" I called back.\n\n\" _Madog un dod_!\" he answered. \"Madog comes!\"\n\n\"Signal him up here to us!\" I instructed.\n\nAs the Helvetii fled south, the Roman trumpets blasted \"general call.\" Then, _signa proferte_ , \"advance the standards.\" Immediately, the second and third lines followed the first down the ridge and began crossing the valley in pursuit of what Caesar believed was a defeated and fleeing enemy. I noticed that the two legions near the top of the ridge held their position.\n\nAgrippa was suddenly at my side. He was speechless for a few heartbeats as the panorama of the battle unfolded below him.\n\nOff to the north, I saw the Roman cavalry advance across the enemy's left flank, led by an officer mounted on a white horse and a bright red _sagum_ trailing behind him.\n\n\" _Venatum Caesar ducit ipse, Tribune!_ \" I said to Agrippa. \"Caesar leads the pursuit himself, Tribune!\"\n\nWe watched as Caesar and most of our cavalry disappeared behind the edge of a distant hill heading toward the enemy's rear.\n\nSuddenly, Agrippa exclaimed, \" _Verpa Martis! Quae calamitas_! This is a disaster!\"\n\n\" _Pro qua dicis tu_?\" I sputtered, forgetting all military protocol.\n\nAgrippa turned and grabbed me by my shoulder armor. I thought he was going to deliver _castigatio_ for being insubordinate.\n\nBut instead, he said, \"Don't you see it, Insubrecus? That Kraut horde is less than an hour behind us. They will arrive _here_ , right where we're standing. By that time, they will be on the flank and rear of our army and in position to attack. And, our _imperator_ is on the wrong side of the battlefield, out of position, chasing after easy kills and plunder! Over ten thousand Germans will be pouring down this hill right onto the back of our army! It will be the massacre of Arausio all over again!\"\n\nAgrippa noticed the two legions still positioned on the ridgeline to the north. \"Those must be the Eleventh and Twelfth,\" he concluded. \"Caesar must be holding them back so the army will have a position to retreat to. There must be a senior officer up there with them. I hope he has a set of _coleones_! We have to turn the army around!\"\n\n\"Madocus _Dux_!\" Agrippa called.\n\nMadog approached our position. He too was initially stunned by what he saw below us. He too immediately understood the German threat.\n\n\" _Immerda sumus_!\" he said, for once getting the Latin idiom right.\n\nAgrippa instructed him, \"Madocus, your mission is to track the Germans and screen our army. I believe this will be their final coordination line for an attack on the Roman rear. When they reach this point, withdraw down into the valley below. Stay between the Krauts and our army! Do not become decisively engaged with them! You must maintain your freedom to maneuver. I will go below and try to organize a defense. I will look for you on the field of battle. But, if this thing goes wrong, I release you from your _sacramentum_. Do what you can for the survivors, but get your people back to your own lands as best you can. The Aedui will be looking to settle some old debts once we Romans are gone.\"\n\nTo ensure Madog understood, I translated while Agrippa spoke. A few _pedes_ away, I saw Athauhnu listening. He looked grim.\n\nAgrippa turned to me. \"You're with me, Insubrecus _Decurio_. Let's see if we can pull Caesar's balls out of the vice he's placed them in.\"\n\nAs I retrieved Clamriu from Emlun's care, I felt a hand grasp my shoulder. It was Athauhnu. He looked at me gravely, then nodded his head. \"You dress and talk like a Roman,\" he announced, \"but you are still Gah'el. When this is over we will feast together, either in the hall of my father in the lands of the Soucanai or in the Hall of Heroes in the Land of Youth.\"\n\n\"Save me a place on the mead-bench!\" I said. \"We'll fight over the hero's portion.\"\n\nWe placed our hands on each other's shoulders in the fashion of the Gah'el. I mounted Clamriu and followed Agrippa onto the battleground below.\n\nWe rode hard across the battlefield, behind the Roman third line, to the right flank of the army, the commander's position. Agrippa was hoping that Caesar had left someone there with enough _auctoritas_ to take command of the army in his absence. We were disappointed.\n\nWhen we arrived, we found no senior officers. Malleus, the \"Hammer,\" the _primus pilus_ of the Tenth Legion, was advancing on foot along with his legion on the right flank of the entire Roman army.\n\nAgrippa pulled up next to Malleus. \"Are you in command here, _Centurio_?\" he asked.\n\nMalleus shrugged, \"I must be, Tribune . . . I'm the senior officer present!\"\n\n\"Where is the _imperator?_ \" Agrippa asked.\n\n\"Forward with the cavalry,\" Malleus indicated the fleeing enemy's open flank.\n\n\"What orders did Caesar leave you?\" Agrippa demanded.\n\nAgain, Malleus shrugged, \"He said to continue to advance . . . Keep up the pressure . . . Don't let them rally against us . . . The normal shit, Tribune. What's the problem?\"\n\n\"The Boii and Tulingi are coming in on our left flank, _Centurio_ . . . You're walking into an ambush!\" Agrippa declared.\n\nMalleus' face blanched. \"There's nothing I can do. I have my orders. My authority only extends over the Tenth.\"\n\nAgrippa nodded. \"I will find someone who has the authority. Listen for the signals!\"\n\nWith that, Agrippa turned his horse, and we galloped toward the two legions still stationed on the hill to the north. As we rode, I wondered who Caesar had put in command on the hill. Unless he were willing to take a risk and use some initiative, we were _perfututi_ , absolutely screwed.\n\nWe immediately spotted a command standard on the right flank of the Eleventh Legion. It was Labienus. There was hope!\n\nLabienus came forward when he saw us riding up. He knew we were screening the army's flank and sensed our urgency. Agrippa wasted no time in briefing him. Labienus immediately understood the gravity of the situation.\n\n\"And Caesar cannot be reached?\" he demanded of Agrippa again.\n\n\"No, Legate! The _imperator_ has gone forward with the cavalry,\" Agrippa confirmed.\n\n\" _Cacat_!\" Labienus exploded. \"Shit! How soon will the Krauts arrive?\"\n\nTogether, we all looked across the battlefield to where we had left the Sequani cavalry screen. They had not withdrawn from the hill. The Germans were not yet in position. \"My guess, we have less than an hour,\" Agrippa answered.\n\nI watched as Labienus examined the disposition of forces on the battlefield. Then, he examined the ridge from which we expected the Germans to descend on us. He seemed to make a decision.\n\n\" _Fabi! Ad me_!\" he called over to his command group.\n\nA broad-striper rode forward. \" _Ti' adsum, Legate_!\" he reported.\n\n\"Fabius, have both legions entrench!\" he instructed. \"Two camps with enough room to protect the baggage train. Do it now!\"\n\n\"Sir,\" Fabius responded, \"there's no water on this hill . . . Perhaps I should find a better position?\"\n\n\"No time, Fabius!\" Labienus shook his head. \"Have the men fill their water bottles . . . There should be some water carts within the supply train . . . Fill them . . . Fill anything that will contain water . . . but get those camps built! We may not have much time!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Legate_!\" Fabius responded.\n\nFabius turned his horse back toward the standing legions and started to snap out orders to the senior centurions.\n\nLabienus called out again, \"Iudaeus!\"\n\nThe _primus pilus_ of the Eleventh stepped forward. \" _Ti' adsum, Legate_!\" he reported.\n\n\"Put one of your flute girls on a horse and send him to me!\" Labienus ordered. \"I need to borrow him for a while!\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Legate_!\"\n\nAgrippa spoke suddenly and pointed across the battlefield. \" _Legate, ecce_! Sir, look!\"\n\nAlong the edge of the woods on the ridgeline, where we had left Madog, there was movement.\n\n\"We're running out of time,\" Labienus muttered.\n\nA legionary _cornucen_ rode up to our group with his _cornu_ draped around his body.\n\n\" _Ti' adsum, Legate_!\" he said, almost falling off the horse with the effort.\n\nLabienus pointed to the left flank of our advancing army, the point closest to where the Germans would soon appear. \" _Illuc_! There! We ride there! _Celerrime_! We haven't much time! Follow me!\"\n\nLabienus galloped down the hill, Agrippa immediately behind him.\n\nI looked over to the trumpeter. \"You going to make it?\" I asked.\n\nThe man was holding his reins with one hand, a saddle horn with the other, all the while trying to keep his _cornu_ from slipping down off his shoulder.\n\n\"I'll make it, _Decurio_ ,\" he said, with no sense of certainty.\n\nWe galloped across the battlefield. As we rode, I saw the Sequani cavalry break from cover and ride down the slope. They didn't seem to be  fleeing, but withdrew in good order. They rode about fifty _passus_ from the bottom of the slope and spread out in a screening line between the ridge and the left flank of our army. There was still no movement on the hill above them.\n\nI finally caught up to Agrippa and Labienus. \"This will be our right flank, here!\" Labienus was saying.\n\n_Right flank of what?_ I wondered.\n\n\"I will be positioned here with the _cornucen_. Where is that man?\"\n\nWe looked back from where we rode. The trumpeter was still barely on his horse, about seventy _passus_ from our position.\n\n\" _Festina! Festina, miles_!\" Labienus shouted. \"Hurry!\"\n\nLabienus continued, \"Agrippa! You will position yourself on the left flank. Don't let them turn you. Bend back in a prevent formation if they overlap us.\"\n\nThere was movement now in the trees on the ridge above us. The Germans had arrived.\n\nThe trumpeter finally arrived. Immediately, Labienus ordered, \"Signal . . . third rank . . . attention!\"\n\nThe man tried, but nothing meaningful came out of his _cornu_. It made a sound like a duck farting in a swamp. He gave up on the horse and slid down from the saddle. Finally, planting his feet back on firm ground, he took three deep breaths. When he took his fourth, he raised the trumpet to his lips and blew, \"Third rank . . . attention!\" I could see the transverse crests of the centurions marching in the third rank of the closest legion turn. I imagined I could hear them echoing the order to their _muli_ : \"Attention!\"\n\n\"Order, ' _Consistite_!'\" Labienus instructed. \"Halt!\"\n\nThe _cornucen_ looked at Labienus and stammered, \" _Consistite, Legate_?\"\n\n\"Do it!\" Labienus ordered.\n\nThe trumpeter blew the signal. The entire third line of the Roman advance, twelve cohorts, came to a halt in two steps.\n\nIn front of us we could see the German _fiurd_ , the muster-men, pouring out of the woodline.\n\n\"Don't let them go right into the attack!\" Labienus hissed through his teeth. \"Mass them there . . . Give me the time I need.\"\n\nThen, Labienus ordered, \" _Cornucen_! Order . . . third rank . . . _signa_ _conversate_ . . . turnabout!\"\n\nThe trumpeter did as ordered. Across the field behind us, our little army of twelve Roman cohorts turned as a single man. I saw the standards and officers run to reverse their positions: centurions front and right; _optiones_ rear and center.\n\nThe Krauts seemed to be cooperating with Labienus. The musters were milling about on the ridgeline. The sight of an entire Roman army maneuvering across a battlefield as if on parade will make even experienced soldiers pause.\n\nI heard Labienus mutter again, \"Here's where it gets complicated!\" Then, \" _Cornucen_ . . . signal . . . third rank . . . _ad dextram_ . . . _aciem_ . . . _formate_!\"\n\nLabienus gave the order for the entire third rank to wheel right and form their battle line facing the Germans. The trumpeter blew the signal, and twelve cohorts began to wheel into position.\n\nLabienus snapped a command to Agrippa: \"Ride across their front! Get on their left flank! Guide them to a line on my position facing the enemy. Move, Tribune!\"\n\nOver his shoulder, as he galloped across the advancing Roman front, Agrippa yelled, \" _A'mperi'tu'!_ \"\n\nThen, Labienus was talking to me, \"Insubrecus! Ride forward to Madocus _Dux_. He is to withdraw as the Krauts advance. Have the Sequani take a position behind our battle line here. We will only be eight men deep at the most. If any of the Krauts break through, the Sequani are to stop them . . . mop them up. Is that clear?\"\n\n\" _A'mperi'tu', Legate_!\" I confirmed and rode forward, looking for Madog.\n\nAs I rode off, I heard Labienus order the trumpeter: \"Signal . . . third line . . . _gradus bis_ . . . double-time.\"\n\nI found Madog in the center of the screening line. He seemed bent slightly forward in his saddle. Then, I noticed blood flowing down his right leg.\n\n\"Madog, _Pobl'rix_!\" I said in Gah'el. \"You are hurt!\"\n\n\"I can still ride, Arth Bek!\" he responded somewhat breathlessly.\n\nI related Labienus' commands. Madog nodded. He blew his hunting horn, then led the way to our new position.\n\nBefore I followed, I looked up at the Krauts. Well-equipped members of the _dugath_ were aligning the ranks of the muster-men. The attack was imminent. I turned my horse to follow the Sequani. I could see the Roman cohorts double-timing up to the battle line. I remembered these drills from my training. The men on the left flank who had the farthest to run would be heaving by the time they got into position.\n\nWe rode across the front of the Roman advance and around its left flank. Madog ordered his men into three loose wedges behind the Roman line: Athauhnu on the left, Ci on the right, and himself in the center. As the senior Roman officer, I assumed a position with Madog.\n\nOn the ridge, the _dugath_ was finalizing the disposition of the _fiurd_. From the looks of it, they wouldn't overlap our flanks. A rider emerged from the woodline, trailed by a _gedricht_ , a royal bodyguard.\n\n\"Their _ciuning_?\" I asked Madog.\n\n\"No,\" Madog gasped. \"I've done for that bastard. That's one of his _thegns_ . . . his companions . . . what you Romans call _comites_. I left that German _ciuning_ with his guts hanging out over his belt.\"\n\nMadog could hardly catch his breath. He was holding onto his saddle horns to steady himself.\n\n\"Do you want me to call for the _medduhg_ , the medic, _Madog Pobl'rix_?\" I asked him.\n\n\"No,\" he panted, \"no . . . my men must stay strong . . . Can't see their king fall out of the saddle . . . not now.\"\n\nOur cohorts had finally come on line facing the Germans. From my position near the center of the line, I could see some of the _muli_ on the left flank doubled over with the exertion of double-timing in full combat kit. The _centuriones_ and their _optiones_ were trying to straighten the lines and get the men ready for the German assault, but even they were affected by the run they had just made.\n\nThe Krauts on the hill made no move to take advantage. From the distance, I could hear chanting, some weird and disturbing sound from the German line: \"Wo . . . wo . . . wo.\"\n\n\"What is that?\" I muttered out loud.\n\n\"They're praying to Woden,\" Madog responded.\n\n\"What's Woden?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Not what . . . who,\" Madog began to say. Then, a fit of painful coughing racked him. When he steadied himself, he spit out whatever was in his throat. It was a bog of bloody phlegm.\n\n\"They are . . . they are calling on their god, Woden, to send the _Wal Ciurige_ . . . the gatherers of the dead . . . to take them to the _Wal Halle_ . . . the feasting hall of the dead . . . if they are killed in battle.\"\n\nMadog started coughing again.\n\n\"They will feast there,\" he continued, \"with the heroes of their people . . . until Woden calls them forth . . . for the _rako werdum_ . . . the great war . . . at the end of times.\"\n\n\"That sounds like our Land of Youth,\" I observed.\n\n\"Bah!\" Madog tried to start, but again a fit of coughing hit him. There was a small trickle of blood running from the side of his mouth.\n\nHe finally caught his breath to speak, \"They believe that everything . . . everything will be destroyed . . . at the _rako werdum_ . . . the end of times . . . Men . . . the gods . . . and the earth will be burned away. _Wal Ciurige_ . . . they're only the crows. They strip the flesh off the battle dead . . . nothing more . . . Woden is a god of carrion.\"\n\nMadog's description of the crows reminded me of a tale Gran'pa had told me of a dark phantom, a goddess, the _Mawr Riganu_ , the great queen, who appears on the battlefield in the semblance of a great crow to feast on the blood of the slain. I shuddered. I reached up and rubbed my _lorica_ where my _Bona_ _Fortuna_ hung.\n\nAthauhnu was right when he said the waiting is the worst.\n\nThe straw-headed bastards on the hill were working themselves into a frenzy: \"Wo . . . wo . . . wo.\"\n\n\"It won't be long now,\" Madog gasped.\n\nI could see that our battle line had stabilized, but the main Roman attack force, the first and second battle lines, were still advancing toward the Helvetii. A gap was opening between their left rear rank and our right flank.\n\nI called over to Ci and pointed to the gap opening on our right flank. He nodded and moved his _ala_ into it.\n\nThe movement of the Gallic horsemen must have caught the attention of the _primus pilus_ commanding the legion advancing against the Helvetii on the end of the Roman battle line. I could see from its standards, it was the Seventh Legion. Suddenly, their _acies secunda_ , three cohorts, halted, turned about, and aligned themselves in a prevent formation, a line diagonal to their route of march, to protect their left flank against the German threat. Then, the two left-most cohorts of the _acies prima_ executed a smart, three-quarter turn to the right and tucked themselves to the rear of the advancing First and Second Cohorts to reinforce them. All this was accomplished as if they were on parade and not unexpectedly moving into a battle position.\n\nThen, I heard a shout to my front. I looked. The German _fiurd_ was charging down the ridgeline at us.\n\n\" _Maent uhn dod_!\" was all Madog could manage. \"They come!\"\n\nSuddenly, the entire ridgeline to the north, where Caesar thought the alreadydefeated Helvetii were cowering, exploded in a cacophony of Gallic trumpets and movement. The Helvetii warriors threw themselves down the ridgeline into our advancing legions.\n\nThe ambush was triggered, and we were standing right in its kill zone!\n\nLooking back toward the Krauts, I immediately saw that they had miscalculated. First, our lines were too far back from their ridge for their momentum to take them into us. They would have to run across at least seventy _passus_ of flat ground before making contact. That should wind them and slow their attack. Second, the Krauts were headed straight for us and not for the gap opening on our right. Killing Romans seemed more important than winning the battle.\n\nThen, I noticed that the Germans had left about a hundred men deployed across their ridgeline. Archers!\n\nLabienus saw them too. Before the Krauts could launch their arrows, his trumpeter sounded, \" _Notate_! _Ad testudinem_!\", \"Form the turtle!\"\n\nImmediately, the Roman _muli_ in front of me closed ranks and lifted and locked their shields over their heads. They were protected from the German arrows, but large gaps opened in the battle line.\n\nI felt a hand grab my forearm. It was Madog.\n\n\"We move back . . . out of range,\" he gasped. I didn't know what was holding him up in the saddle. His face was pasty, almost greenish. There was a patina of sweat across his face.\n\nAs we moved back, the German muster-men cleared the hill slope and screened our line from their archers. The archers ceased fire. The _dugath_ , the professional warriors, organized themselves into five groups, each about the size of a Roman century. They moved down the slope, spreading themselves out across the battle line. They followed behind the German _fiurd_.\n\n\"They follow,\" Madog panted, indicating the _dugath_. \"Wherever the _fiurd_ opens the battle line . . . they attack.\"\n\nLabienus realized that the arrow fire had ceased. He and the _cornucen_ emerged from the turtle. Neither of their horses had been hit. The legate remounted so he could see the battlefield, but the trumpeter chose to stay on his feet. At Labienus' command, he again signaled, \" _Notate_! _Aciem formate_!\"\n\nImmediately, the turtles collapsed and the _muli_ reformed their line. The forward edge of the German _fiurd_ was less than thirty passus from our lines.\n\nThe trumpet called, \" _Pila ponite_! _Pila parate_!\" I saw the arms and javelins of the entire Roman battle line come up.\n\nLabienus waited.\n\nThe Krauts closed to within twenty passus, then fifteen, then ten. \" _Iacite_ . . . _iacite_ ,\" I heard myself mutter. \"Throw . . . throw.\" Then, finally, the trumpet sounded: \" _Pila iacite_! Open fire!\"\n\nThe Roman spears went forward into the German attack. It staggered as men crumbled. Others tripped over the bodies of the dead and wounded. Some stopped running to avoid the growing pile up. Others stopped to try freeing their shields of the Roman spears. The rear ranks piled up on the stalling and staggering front ranks.\n\nThere was no second volley!\n\nThen, I remembered that these were _miles aciei tertiae_ , third-rank men. They were only carrying one _pilum_ each.\n\nQuickly Labienus ordered _gladii stringite_ : \"Draw swords!\"\n\nThen, immediately _impetum facite_ : \"Attack!\"\n\nLabienus was _attacking_ a superior force!\n\nInitially, it worked. The Roman _muli_ quickly covered the ten _passus_ between themselves and the struggling pile of men that had been the forward edge of the German attack. These they quickly cut through. Then, they came into contact with the rest of the horde of Kraut muster-men who had lost all forward momentum. Our advance slowed, but we were still moving forward.\n\nAs we moved forward, though, the gap on our right widened.\n\nI heard a cacophonous trumpet call from the German ridgeline. The Kraut _thegn_ had stationed himself there so he could see his battlefield. He indicated the gap on our right with his sword. Immediately, one of the formations of the _dugath_ turned and moved toward it. As they moved forward, they formed a wedge, like a Roman _cuneus_ , a \"bore's snout.\"\n\nI yelled over to Ci, commanding our cavalry on the right, and indicated the threat. He raised his hand to acknowledge. I saw the two cohorts from the Seventh Legion adjust their position in the face of the new threat. But, they stayed well back. Their mission was to protect the rear of their own legion, not pull our balls out of the vice.\n\nI turned to Madog to recommend we reinforce Ci's _ala_. He was off his horse, on the ground, not moving.\n\n\" _Medduhg_! _Medduhg_!\" I yelled.\n\nThe Sequani horse doctor was immediately off his horse, attending to the king.\n\n\"Athauhnu! To me!\" I called to our troop on the left.\n\nAthauhnu rode over.\n\n\"Madog's down,\" I told him. \"The troop is yours! We must reinforce Ci! The Germans are attacking the gap!\"\n\nAthauhnu nodded. He called over to his men, \"Guithiru! You are in command! Move center!\"\n\nWe rode over to the right and joined Ci.\n\nThe Kraut wedge was moving toward us, now no more than fifty _passus_ from the gap, over sixty warriors, at least, with shields up. They formed a solid, German _scilde wealle_ of linden wood, leather, and iron and were determined to crash through us.\n\nOur horses would not attack a shield wall, and there were less than forty of us. I could see the red-horned aurochs totems painted on the round shields as they bore down on us.\n\nThen, I remembered Athauhnu's lesson with the _gaea_ , the light hunting spear that had pierced my cavalry shield as if it were _vellum_.\n\n\"Athauhnu!\" I snapped. \"A _gaea_ attack!\"\n\n\" _Gaea_ will not penetrate that!\" Athauhnu objected.\n\n\"They don't have to!\" I said. \"We just need to weigh down their shields. We have to fight them on foot. Our horses won't stand up to that!\"\n\nAthauhnu understood immediately. He gave instructions to Ci, then yelled, \"Follow me!\"\n\nMy Sequani horsemen attacked the German wedge in a file. Each rider approached at an acute angle, turned in front of the wedge, and delivered a single blow with a _gae_.\n\nThe _dugath_ halted when they became aware of the Gah'el attack. We took advantage of their indecision. The Sequani turned and attacked a second time. The Krauts quickly realized that horsemen couldn't seriously damage them, so they resumed their advance. I could already see many of their shields were held lower, weighed down by our spears.\n\nIt wasn't much, but it was all we had.\n\nI dismounted and ran into the middle of the gap. \"Form shield wall on me!\" I shouted.\n\nLabienus finally noticed the activity on his flank and quickly realized the threat. He bent back his First Cohort to protect his right flank. His only reasonable hope was to safeguard his own formation, which was already heavily engaged with the German _fiurd_. He could do nothing to help us.\n\nThe Sequani began to form around me. I had my Roman short sword out. Most of the Gah'el had only the _spatha_ , the cavalry long sword\u2014not the best weapon for this type of close-in fighting. We were all carrying Gallic cavalry shields, light and oblong, giving little protection for the throat and legs of dismounted fighters. They also lacked the punching handle of the Roman infantry _scutum_ ; they were defensive weapons only. I did not have much confidence that they would stand up to the massive German round shields bearing down on us.\n\nThe Kraut wedge was less than ten _passus_ away. I could hear them chanting a cadence to time their attack. As they got closer, the pace of the cadence increased. They planned to bowl right through us.\n\nSuddenly, the right side of the German wedge collapsed.\n\nThe two Roman cohorts on our right from the Seventh Legion had delivered a volley of _pila_ in support of us. The Krauts never saw it coming. More than a score of them went down.\n\n\" _Illuc_!\" I screamed pointing to the hole in the wedge. \" _Impetum facite_! _Illuc_! There! Attack there!\"\n\nI suddenly realized I was screaming in Latin, but it made no difference. The Sequani leapt into the gap in the wedge, slashing and stabbing. The Kraut formation crumbled like a rotten wall. German warriors dropped their shields and spears. They began running to the rear. A few tried to hold their ground. They were quickly cut down.\n\nI was still standing exactly where I had originally positioned myself. I had won a fight without as much as striking a single blow, without even moving!\n\nAthauhnu was still standing next to me. \"Shaggin' Germans!\" he spat. \"Only brave when they think they're winning.\"\n\nI stepped forward and turned toward the Romans who had delivered the decisive blow. I raised my right fist in their direction, and yelled, \" _Io! Victoria_!\"\n\n\" _Io_! _Victoria_!\" they thundered back. The signifers moved their standards up and down in celebration. A centurion raised his fist and saluted me back.\n\nBut, the fight wasn't over yet. We were still engaged with the Boii _fiurd_ across our entire front. Off to my right, I could also see the dust of our desperate fight with the attacking Helvetii.\n\n\"Let's remount the troop!\" I said to Athauhnu.\n\nWe remounted the two _alae_. I posted Ci's men back in the gap to remind the Krauts that we were still there. Athauhnu and I rode back to the center of the battle line, displacing Guithiru's troop back to the left flank.\n\nOur line was no longer advancing against the Germans, but it seemed to be holding its own. Labienus had had to relieve his first rank and bring the second forward. We were only eight men deep, four pairs of _gemini_. The first line was recovering its strength and reorganizing itself for its expected redeployment. From the look of things, they had lost about a quarter of their strength, killed or wounded.\n\nThe legionary slaves, distinctive in their brown tunics and with their small handcarts, were hard at work carrying water to the men in the battle line. From the dead or badly wounded, they were also collecting the equipment, which they dragged back to a collection point located somewhere behind our lines.\n\nThe _capsarii_ , the legionary medical orderlies, were also up on the line, carrying their _capsae_ , boxes of bandages and medical equipment. They were bandaging and stitching up the slightly injured _muli_ so that they could stay in the fight.\n\nThe more seriously wounded were being triaged. Those who had a chance of surviving were taken directly back to the _medici_ , who had established a medical station about fifty _passus_ behind us. Some of the _capsarii_ were riding horses with a double saddle. The wounded man was lifted up on the saddle in front of the orderly, and they rode back to the aid station.\n\nThose who had little chance of survival waited. Sometimes, if the wound was hopeless and a man was in great pain, the _capsarius_ would help the soldier on his journey.\n\nOther slaves were loading the bodies of the dead onto their handcarts and taking them back so the _medici_ could confirm that they had indeed crossed the river.\n\nThe _capsarii_ wore black tunics. I imagined this was to hide some of the blood. As they worked, their hands, arms, and faces became covered with the blood of the dead, dying, and wounded. The _muli_ called them _cornices_ , crows. They referred to evacuation back to the medical station as _ad cornices ire_ , \"to go to the crows,\" or sometimes, _cornices pascere_ , \"to feed the crows.\"\n\nI shivered, thinking of these images: the _Mawr Riganu_ , the great crow, drinking the blood of the dead; the _Wal Ciurige_ , the black carrion goddesses of the Germans; the black-clad _capsarii_ , scurrying around the dead and dying on the battlefield.\n\nWhere was Madog?\n\n\" _Medduhg_ ,\" I called. \" _Medduhg_! To me!\"\n\nThe man rode over from Guithiru's troop. \"What is it, Arth Bek?\" he asked.\n\n\"The king!\" I demanded. \"Where is Madog?\"\n\nHe shrugged, \" _Uh brana dua . . ._ the black crows didn't want to take him, so I brought him back myself.\"\n\nI looked over to the Roman medical station. I had a bad feeling.\n\n\"Athauhnu!\" I said. \"I am checking on Madog. If anything happens, send a rider!\"\n\nI rode back to the medical station. The place smelled and sounded like an abattoir in the depths of Tartarus. It reeked with the stench of blood and freshcut meat. The wounded moaned, some screamed, many cried.\n\nClamriu reared back from the place. I have since learned that, in many ways, horses are smarter than men. I dismounted and approached on foot.\n\nTo my left, I saw the _medici_ working. A man was being held down on a bloodstained wooden table by two burly attendants. A doctor was cutting on the man's abdomen. The soldier screamed, arching his back. The _medicus_ jumped back, removing his hands and scalpel from the man's gut.\n\n\"Hold him still, damn you!\" he yelled at the attendants.\n\nIn front of me were three groupings of men. To the left, farthest from where the _medicus_ was working, were the dead. Their only companions were two slaves, who were busy chasing the carrion birds away from an inviting feast. I watched as a slave returned from the battle lines with his handcart and dumped three fresh bodies on the pile. _Cornices pascit_ , I thought. He is feeding the crows.\n\nNext were the badly wounded, men not expected to survive. A couple of black-clad attendants walked among them. Some seemed to be treating wounds; others were checking to see if a man had crossed over. I watched as an attendant called over one of the dead-pile slaves and indicated a body for removal.\n\nClosest to the surgery were the slightly wounded. Some were lying on the grass, others sitting up. Most of the attendants worked with this group, checking wounds, bandaging others, giving the men water. I saw a _medicus_ come over, wash his hands in a bucket, then indicate a wounded man to an attendant. The attendant stood the man up, walked him over to the open-air surgery, and sat him on a table for the doctor to treat.\n\nIt was then that I noticed a man lying by himself off to one side, seemingly belonging to no group. I walked over to him. It was Madog. His eyes were half open; his face was greenish-white; his chest was not moving.\n\nI looked to my left and saw a _capsarius_ walking among the badly wounded.\n\n\"You!\" I shouted at him.\n\nHe looked over at me with a trace of curiosity.\n\n\"Yes! You, soldier! Get over here! Now!\" I ordered.\n\nHe scrutinized me for a few heartbeats. From my sashes, he took in that I was a junior officer, a member of some nob's praetorian detail. He decided that he should at least placate me. He sauntered over. His hands and arms were covered with blood, ranging from bright, wet red to crusted black. There were even streaks of gore on his left cheek and forehead.\n\n\" _Qui' vis tu_?\" he asked with no great interest. \"Whadda you want?\"\n\nI was in no mood to be placated.\n\n\" _Quid vis tu, Decurio_!\" I insisted.\n\nHe shrugged. \" _Si ti' placet_ . . . if that's what makes you happy... What do you want, _sir_?\"\n\n\"Why is this man not being treated?\" I demanded.\n\nThe crow looked at me as if I had lost my mind. \"For one thing, he's a bloody wog!\"\n\n\"I know he's a wo . . . a Gah'el . . . He fights for Rome . . . He was wounded fighting for Rome. So why in the name of _Dis_ isn't he being treated?\" I raged at the man.\n\n\"Look around you . . . _sir_!\" the _capsarius_ came back at me. \"We have our hands full treating _Romans_. We don't have time for any of your bleedin' _wogs_ . . . Besides,\" he said, nudging Madog's unresponsive shoulder with the toe of his boot, \"somebody made this one a _good_ wog . . . He's already dead!\"\n\nThat's when I hit him.\n\nTo this day, I don't remember hitting him. One minute I was watching him kick my dead comrade; the next, he was sitting on the ground with blood pouring from the wreckage of his nose.\n\nHands immediately grabbed me from behind. The _capsarius_ ' buddies were trying to restrain me. A wounded officer waiting for treatment intervened.\n\n\"Break this shit up!\" he ordered. \"What are you doing, _stulti_ , you idiots? Don't we have enough hairbags and Krauts to fight? Do we have to fight each other?\"\n\nThe attendant I punched was getting off the ground with the help of one of his friends. \"This officer struck me!\" he sprayed through the blood from his ruined nose. \"I want to press charges!\"\n\n\"Shut your gob!\" the wounded officer retorted, grabbing my elbow. \"You deserved it . . . What I saw was an officer delivering a justified _castigatio_ to an insubordinate gob-shite of a crow!\"\n\nHe steered me away from the gathering flock of crows. \"What do you think you're doing, _Pagane_?\" he hissed at me.\n\nWhen he called me _Pagane_ , I finally recognized him. \"Bantus,\" I answered, \"are you hurt?\"\n\nBantus touched the bandages covering his neck and right shoulder. \"A Kraut arrow got through our turtle,\" he explained. \"The _capsarius_ up on the line couldn't remove the arrowhead, so he sent me back here to feed these crows.\"\n\n\"So, you were with us! You fought with Labienus?\"\n\n\"That who it is?\" Bantus asked. \"I was over on the left with the third-line cohorts from the Tenth.\"\n\n\"I'm with the Sequani cavalry,\" I told him. \"That was their _dux_ whom that _mentula_ kicked!\"\n\n\"The Sequani?\" Bantus nodded. \"You guys put up a hell of a fight in the gap. I saw it just before I went to the crows.\"\n\nI spotted a rider galloping toward us. It was Emlun.\n\n\"That's one of mine,\" I told Bantus. \"I have to get back.\"\n\nI quickly collected Clamriu.\n\nBantus went on, \"Most of your old mates are with the second line now. They're catching shit up on the hill with the rest of the Tenth Legion. They sent Minutus all the way up to the first line because of his size. Strabo's still with the tenth cohort, though. He was still on his feet when I was sent back\u2014\"\n\nEmlun rode up to us. \"Arth Bek!\" he called to me in Gah'el. \"Athauhnu says you must return!\"\n\n\"I'm coming!\" I responded, mounting Clamriu.\n\nThen, to Bantus, \" _Vale, contubernalis_! Be well, mate! I have to get back to the party!\"\n\n\" _Vale, Pagane_!\" Bantus responded. \"Try to stay off the pyre!\"\n\nEmlun and I rode quickly back to the battle line. Athauhnu met us about ten _passus_ behind our line.\n\n\"Madog's dead,\" I told him.\n\nAthauhnu didn't as much as blink at the news. \"I expected it,\" he said. \"No man could have lived long with such a wound. He feasts with the heroes, and we may soon join him. The Germans are massing the _dugath_ for an attack.\"\n\nI looked across the field. The German _thegn_ and his _gedricht_ had come down off the ridge. He was massing a division of the _dugath_ against our center. I tried to count, but it was impossible. The Germans kept no order, no formation. I estimated that the Krauts were massing over two cohorts\u2014about a thousand warriors about seventy _passus_ to our front. Fresh troops, well-armed. They should rip through our thin, exhausted cohorts like wolves through sheep.\n\nOn each of our flanks, the _thegn_ had also assembled about a cohort of the dugath, around five hundred warriors, to prevent us from shifting men to the center.\n\nAcross our entire line, our men were nearing exhaustion. They had been engaged with the German _fiurd_ , the muster-men, for over two hours. Each fighting pair of _muli_ , each _gemini_ , had been in the front rank at least twice. One in three were down, dead, or wounded. The rest were trying to martial their last vestiges of strength.\n\nThe German muster-men were not pressing hard. They were also exhausted, and they knew that the _dugath_ was about to take over the fight. They had done their job. Our ranks were exhausted and whittled to the bone. It was time for their warriors to finish the job\u2014not a time to get killed uselessly.\n\nSuddenly, Agrippa was at my side.\n\n\"Didn't you hear officers' call, _Decurio_?\" he announced. \"Labienus is summoning us.\"\n\nI rode off after Agrippa, with Athauhnu trailing behind. We met Labienus just behind our right flank cohort, a Seventh Legion unit. He had also assembled the senior centurions from each legionary group.\n\nLabienus wasted no time.\n\n\"I assume you men have seen the Krauts massing in our center,\" he began. \"They obviously plan to attack at that point. Our line is six men deep, at the most, and on its last legs. If we let them hit us, we're through.\"\n\nThere was no demurring from the officers. Even the centurions did not baulk. We were looking at a looming disaster.\n\n\"I plan to form maniples with the centuries of the Ninth and Eighth Legions at the expected point of enemy contact,\" Labienus announced.\n\nLabienus could have caused no more surprise with that statement than if he had announced the god Mars was on his way, with a troop of unicorns, to rescue us. No Roman legion formed maniples in combat; Marius had obsoleted the tactic over fifty years ago.\n\nA maniple was a formation of two massed centuries, closed ranks, one behind the other. It was a tactic used to achieve tactical mass back in the days when the phalanx was the state-of-the-art combat maneuver. Basically, two armies would run straight into each other and keep pushing and shoving in a scrum until one broke. But, the maniple formation was rigid; it had no flexibility. The enemy could run right around its flank, or if they had elephants, stomp it flat. The Roman army hadn't seriously employed massed maniples since they were massacred by Hannibal and the Carthaginians at Cannae.\n\nMarius had reorganized the Roman legion into ten cohorts of six separate centuries each. This was possible because all Roman legionaries were trained and equipped to the same standard. The three unequal divisions of legionary infantry\u2014 _triarii_ , heavy infantry; _principes_ , spearmen; and _hastati_ , light infantry\u2014 were a thing of the ancient past. Also, the cohort-based organization allowed a commander the flexibility to deploy his troops according to the terrain and the nature of the threat on the battlefield, a principle that Labienus himself had demonstrated when he peeled off twelve cohorts from the rear of four advancing legions to meet an enemy threat on their left flank.\n\nCuriously, vestiges of the old manipular system still existed in the training and traditions of the army. Within the cohorts, the first, second and third centuries were known as the _prior_ , or front-line centuries, based on what their positions would have been in the maniple. The remaining centuries\u2014the fourth, fifth, and sixth\u2014were called the _posterior_ centuries because in the maniple, they would have stood behind the forward centuries in the phalanx. What's more, the prestige of the centurions commanding any cohort is based on whether they are _prior_ or _posterior_ centurions.\n\nIn training and on parade, the command to form maniples was still given. But, this formation was used only to cross up _tirones_ during training drills or to put on a show for some visiting nob\u2014not while decisively engaged with an enemy force, as Labienus was about to attempt.\n\nTo make matters worse, the only viable way of forming maniples from _acies_ _formata_ , the linear battle line formation in which we were currently deployed, was by first forming the _quincunx_ , the \"five dots.\"\n\nAccording to legend, the great Scipio Africanus innovated this maneuver at the battle of Zama. When Hannibal sent his elephants in to destroy the Roman phalanxes, Scipio opened gaps in his front by having his centuries displace and shift behind one another, thus allowing the elephants to pass through the Roman lines.\n\nThe only time the _quincunx_ was employed in modern warfare was well before contact was made with the enemy, and it was only used in order to allow support troops and cavalry to pass easily through legionary lines. Once the enemy was proximate, the three \"posterior\" centuries of each cohort were moved forward on line, and the ranks were closed.\n\nNo one would conceive of forming the _quincunx_ while in contact. In our current deployment, since the posterior centuries were grouped together, this would open two ninety-foot gaps in the middle of our line!\n\n\"This will double our depth at the point of attack. I believe with a front sixty-men wide and sixteen deep, we can hold the Krauts main attack back,\" Labienus concluded. \"Any questions?\"\n\n\"Legate, what about our flanks?\" Agrippa asked.\n\n\"Good question, Agrippa!\" Labienus answered. \"The Krauts did us a favor there. In fact, they've done us two favors. The first is that they have exposed their plans. They see no point in stealth. They think they can just walk right over us. The second is to your point. Except for their earlier attempt on our right flank, they have not pressured our flanks at all. In fact, we now overlap _them_ on both flanks. You and I will continue to command the flanks. Our mission is to ensure that, when their spoiling attacks hit, they do not turn us. If they do, we're in danger of being enveloped. So we have to hold on the flank. Centurion?\"\n\nA centurion I didn't recognize from the Ninth Legion spoke. \"Legate, when we form the _quincunx_ , what's to keep those _verpae_ from charging into the gaps?\"\n\n\"Good question!\" Labienus nodded. \"Insubrecus _Decurio_ , that's where you and the Sequani come in. Split your command into two divisions. When the _quincunx_ opens, you deploy a division into each of the gaps. I don't think the Kraut muster-men have the heart to attack. But, if they try, you stop them. And, you need to protect the flanks of the exposed _prior_ centuries when the _posterior_ centuries pull back from the line. Just make sure you get your men back before the door closes . . . _Compre'endis tu_?\"\n\n\" _Compre'endo, Legate_!\" I affirmed.\n\n\" _Bene_!\" Labienus concluded. When we reestablish the line of battle, we will align on the Eighth Legion. That's all! Return to your commands! Listen for the signals!\"\n\nI translated what was being said to Athauhnu. I doubt he understood much about maniples and _quincunces_ ; there weren't even words in Gah'el to express such formations. But, he did understand that we were intentionally opening gaps in our lines to pull off some obscure Roman battlefield dance routine, and it didn't please him. What pleased him less was that we were expected to ride into the gaps and throw ourselves in front of German infantry.\n\nWe rode back to our position behind the Roman lines. Athauhnu assembled the Sequani riders and quickly briefed them on what to expect. He then separated them into two divisions: one under me and Guithiru, the other under Ci and himself. I noticed he didn't mention anything about Madog. Each of our divisions assumed a ready position, mine behind the Ninth Legion, Athauhnu behind the Eighth.\n\nTime was running out for us. A gap had formed between our front line and the German _fiurd_ ; they were starting to disengage. But, the Kraut _dugath_ , massing for the attack, were not moving. They were chanting their strange mantra to their god, Woden: \"Wo . . . wo . . . wo.\"\n\nThen, from our right, a Roman bugle sounded, \"Attention!\"\n\nThen, came a signal for the Eighth and Ninth Legions, quickly followed by, \"Q _uincuncem . . . formata_!\"\n\nImmediately, the posterior centuries of the two legions executed an about-face and began to march in quick time to the rear.\n\nAs they began to move off the line, I led my riders into the opening gap. Initially, the German muster-men proved Labienus right; they froze. Then, a few of the bolder ones made to follow the retreating centuries into the gap. We rode at them, and they quickly retreated. I was able to form two lines of cavalry across the gap. The _fiurd_ showed no desire to attack us.\n\nAcross the field, I noticed movement behind the massed German warriors. The _thegn_ realized something was up. Perhaps he feared his prey was retreating from him and he would not get the chance to kill many more Romans this afternoon. He rode in front of his center division, stabbing his sword in our direction. He harangued his elite troops to move forward, to take advantage of the widening gap in the Roman line. But, like all barbarian maneuvers, this one had a momentum all its own that no leadership could alter. The German _dugath_ remained still and continued its woeful chant; it would move when it was ready, not before.\n\nThe posterior centuries had reached their position in the _quincunx_. They halted and turned about, again facing front. No sooner did the motion of the maneuver cease than Labienus sounded the signal trumpets again: \"Eighth Legion! Ninth legion! _Manipulos formate_!\"\n\nImmediately, the rearmost Roman centuries executed a right-face and began to double-time behind the forward centuries.\n\nThe Germans did react to this maneuver.\n\nThe _thegn_ may not have totally understood what he was witnessing, but he now understood its purpose. We were reinforcing our lines to meet his attack on our center. Still, his _dugath_ would not move forward. He dispatched most ofhis _gedricht_ , his personal bodyguards, to attack the gaps in the Roman line. But, he miscalculated. His own _fiurd_ , still milling about on the battlefield, watching the Roman maneuver like a crowd in the arena watching a show, got in their way. His _gedricht_ were soon tangled among their own troops, and their attack never arrived.\n\nI looked over to where the German _thegn_ was raging at the _dugath_ to move, screaming for the _fiurd_ to get out of the way, and thundering at his _gedricht_ to attack the Roman gap. I saw he had less than a dozen men left to protect himself.\n\nNo sooner had that realization entered my mind, than Labienus signaled again, general call: \" _Aciem formata_! Form battle line!\"\n\nQuickly, I turned my troop, and we rode out of the gap as the Tenth Legion battle line closed with the Ninth. At the same time, the Ninth Legion maniples moved right to close on the Eighth, while the Seventh moved left.\n\nThe door had slammed shut! Labienus had pulled off the maneuver!\n\nThe Krauts were finally beginning to move. All three divisions of the _dugath_ were running forward to attack our lines. Behind them, the German _thegn_ and the twelve remaining members of his _gedricht_ stood alone in the field.\n\nI had an insane idea!\n\nMy military training and discipline told me to hold my position, to block and contain any penetration of our line. But, the Krauts had exposed themselves to a potentially fatal blow, which only I could deliver.\n\nWhat was it that Caesar had said the other day? _Audaces amat fortuna_!... Fortune loves the bold! Instinctively, I reached up and touched my _lorica_ where my _Bona Fortuna_ hung. It seemed strangely warm.\n\n\"Athauhnu!\" I yelled, turning Clamriu and riding toward our left flank. \" _Me_ _sequere!_ Follow me!\" I quickly realized that, in my excitement, I had spoken Latin, so as I rode past his position on the left, I repeated myself in Gah'el, \" _Diluhna fi_!\"\n\nI galloped the Sequani around our left flank. I remember catching a glimpse of Agrippa's shocked face as we thundered by. We rode out onto the field, past the right flank of one of the Kraut divisions. A couple of their warriors looked over toward us, but continued their run toward the Roman line. As soon as I cleared the rear of the German _dugath_ , I angled right to where I knew the _thegn_ was standing.\n\nHe was still there, alone except for the small remnant of his bodyguard troops.\n\nI halted opposite, about a hundred _passus_ distant. I turned Clamriu toward the Germans, extended my arms out parallel to the ground, and Ci's _ala_ , the seventeen men still in the saddle, assembled on both sides of me, facing the Krauts. Athauhnu lined his twenty-two riders up behind us. Then, he rode forward and took a position on my right.\n\nAcross the field, the remnant of _thegn's gedricht_ began, almost hesitantly, to position themselves between us and their leader, whom they were sworn to protect to the death.\n\nThe gods of the Gah'el were about to collect on that promise!\n\nBut first, I had one last die to cast.\n\nI rode out a few steps and turned to face the Sequani.\n\n\"Warriors of the Soucanai!\" I shouted. \"Madog, your king is dead!\"\n\nI heard a moan go up from the men.\n\nI raised my hands. They became silent.\n\n\"The man who killed your king . . . the dog who treacherously cut Madog down after he had slain the king of the Germans . . . and stabbed him from behind in his moment of triumph . . . stands there . . . before you!\"\n\nI pointed right at the German _thegn_ , who was sheltered behind the thin line of his _gedricht_.\n\nThe men were growling.\n\nI drew my _spatha_. \"A place on the mead-bench beside Madog in the Land of Youth, and the hero's portion served by the hands of Andraste, the goddess of victories, to the man who delivers the head of that German dog to the tomb of Madog!\" I shouted.\n\nI turned Clamriu and charged the Germans.\n\nMy Sequani thundered behind me, screaming for German blood.\n\nTo their credit, the _gedricht_ remained faithful. They died for their oath.\n\nAs I galloped toward the Germans, I shimmied my shield off my left shoulder and inserted my forearm through its bindings. I aimed for a gap in the center of the German line. When I hit it, I felt a glancing blow on my shield from the Kraut to my left. I didn't bother with the one on my right. I was through the line and bearing down on the German _thegn_.\n\nAs I reached him, I heard a crash behind me as the rest of the troop made contact with the Germans.\n\nThe _thegn_ pulled back hard on his reins. His horse reared up on his hind legs. Clamriu crashed into her opponent's chest. The German horse began to tumble backward. I felt a massive blow on my helmet, just above my eyes. I tumbled backward into blackness.\n\nWhen I awoke, Emlun was kneeling over me, and Rhodri was standing beside him. Emlun helped me sit up. That was a mistake. The world seemed to twinkle and spin in front of me. I felt like I would vomit.\n\nWhen my eyes focused again, Emlun held up my helmet. In the front, there was a dent the size of a small fist.\n\n\"Cheap Roman tin!\" Emlun shook his head. \"A German horse brought you down! You ought to get yourself a new helmet from a good Soucanai smith!\"\n\nClamriu was calmly cropping the grass a few feet away. Behind her, a couple of the Sequani were trying to subdue the _thegn's_ riderless horse. Just over to my right, I saw his body with two _gaea_ spears protruding from its chest. I puzzled for a moment why the body looked strange. Then I realized; it had no head.\n\nRhodri gestured toward the _thegn's_ horse. \"You brought him down, Arth Bek. By our custom, his horse and his armor belong to you!\"\n\n\"Athauhnu?\" I croaked.\n\nEmlun pointed across the field toward the Roman lines.\n\nAthauhnu was galloping across the face of the German horde spinning something over his head. It looked vaguely like a ball, a ball attached by a yellow rope. It was a head, the head of the German _thegn_!\n\nThe Germans were standing, watching. I realized that they had dropped their shields and weapons. The Roman _muli_ from our battle line were advancing among them, driving them down onto their knees, tying their hands behind their backs, collecting their weapons. Our fight was over.\n\nEmlun was talking: \"Athauhnu killed the German you passed. Guithiru and me followed you through their line. By the time we caught up with you, you were already down. So was the _thegn_. His horse rolled over him. He was probably dead already, but Guithiru put the first javelin into him. Then I stuck him. Athauhnu came and took his head for Madog. The honor was his as chief. We'll bury it with Madog. Lay it between his feet. That German dog will be his slave in the Land of Youth for eternity!\"\n\nThey stood me up. Another mistake. This time I did vomit. Strangely, I felt a bit better after that. Emlun steadied me.\n\nI saw a small group of Roman riders approaching. The leader wore a bright red _sagum_ and rode a white stallion.\n\nIt was Caesar.\n\nLabienus rode immediately to his left.\n\nI tried to assume some semblance of attention as the _imperator_ arrived. Again a mistake. Emlun's steadying grasp was the only thing that kept me from pitching forward into the grass.\n\n\"Well, this completes my collection of insubordinates!\" Caesar said dryly. \"First a senior legate, who won't stay where he's been assigned, but starts his own battle with the Germans, and now a _decurio_ , a very junior _decurio_ at that, who abandons his assigned post to lead a cavalry attack against a superior force of German infantry. What do you have to say for yourself, soldier?\"\n\n\" _Nil 'scusationis mi', Imperator_!\" I snapped out, as if a _tiro_ on punishment parade.\n\n\"You have that right!\" Caesar snorted. \"There's no excuse at all! It's a marvel Rome has survived this long with soldiers like you following her eagles.\"\n\nCaesar jerked the head of his horse around and rode toward the top of the ridge where his battle with the Helvetii still raged.\n\nLabienus hesitated. Then he said to Emlun in perfect Gah'el, \"Trooper! Get this Roman officer to a medic!\"\n\nBefore he turned to follow Caesar, he winked.\n\n## _Post Scriptum_\n\nAt Bibracte, I survived my first battle.\n\nOnly politicians, historians, and generals classify battles as victories or defeats.\n\nSoldiers recognize no victories. Even in the greatest national victories, comrades are lost, and the survivors suffer. They suffer from the wounds they receive; they suffer from what they witness; they suffer from the loss of dear friends. Win, lose, or draw, soldiers just thank _Domina Fortuna_ for sparing their lives and pray to her that this will be their last fight.\n\nAt the time, I expected that our war was over at least for that year. Having defeated the Helvetii, Caesar would withdraw the army south of the Rhodanus. We would spend the rest of the campaign season in the _provincia_ , licking our wounds, collecting rations, and getting ready for the winter.\n\n_Erratum_! I was wrong. Despite our battered condition after Bibracte, Caesar wasn't done.\n\nI hoped that Bibracte could be my only great battle. I would serve my remaining enlistment in relative peace and safety, and return home to Mediolanum. There, Macro and I would quickly become rich wine merchants, and perhaps then I would win back my beloved Gabi.\n\n_Denuo erratum_! Again I was wrong.\n\nThey say that the greatest gift the gods have given to men is they don't see their own future.\n\nI believe that.\n\nHad I known on that day that what lay before me was over twenty years of blood, betrayal, and loss; that after the Helvetian campaign would come years of brutal fighting in Gallia, Aquitania, Belgica, Germania, and that mysterious island across _Oceanus_ , Britannia; and then Caesar's wars in Italia, Hispania, Asia, Africa, and Aegyptus; then Octavius' wars against the _Liberatores_ , Sextus Pompeius, and finally Antonius; that after the battle at Bibracte would come Gergovia, Alesium, Dyrrhachium, Pharsalus, Zela, Alexandria, the Nile, Thapsus, and Munda with Caesar; then Forum Gallorum, Mutina, Philippi, Naulochus, and Actium for Octavius; along with hundreds of murderous encounters in places too insignificant to be remembered by a name, I believe seeing the course of my future would have driven me _demens_ , completely mad.\n\nBut the gods at least spared me that.\n\nAgrippa stayed with us in Mediolanum only a few days before returning to his refuge in Italia. He graciously invited us to visit his estates near Asisium. Then, he departed south, carrying with him my answer to Octavius' request.\n\nIt seems that our _princeps civitatis_ is continuing Caesar's vision of extending _Romanitas_ into the provinces. Octavius has appointed a number of provincial citizens, whom the Roman senatorials consider no better than _peregrini_ , foreigners, to military and civil positions traditionally reserved for Romans of the proper pedigree. He has even appointed provincials to the Roman Senate.\n\nOctavius also plans to extend Roman citizenship to the provinces by creating _municipia_ , cities with citizenship rights in the established provinces and in the major tribal centers of the newly acquired territories. Established cities in the \"civilized\" provinces, as he terms them, would be granted full Roman citizenship with the right to vote. Other cities and tribal centers would be granted a lesser degree of citizenship, which would grant their residents the protection of Roman magistrates, service in the legions, and of course, payment of taxes and financial levies to Rome.\n\nMediolanum is planned as one of Octavius' initial \"first-class\" _municipia_ in the strategically important _Gallia Cisalpina_ region. Since this is a plan with which the aristocratic elements in the Roman Senate are not pleased, the Augustus is determined that these first grants are successful. In order to do that, he is handpicking the city magistrates.\n\nOctavius has already commissioned the two _duumviri_ and the two _aediles_ who will administer affairs in Mediolanum. In fact, one of the _duumviri_ is my cousin, Lucius Helvetius Naso Quartus, who still runs my grandfather's empire of foundries, garum factories, and wine presses.\n\nOnce things have \"settled,\" these positions will become elected annually. But for now, Octavius is controlling and supervising the process personally\u2014which brings me to his request.\n\nFirst and foremost, I am to be Octavius' \"eyes and ears\" in Mediolanum. As one of his former officers, he knows that I will report to him what he needs to know\u2014not what I want him to know.\n\nSecond, I am to be commissioned as the _praefectus urbis_ of Mediolanum. As such, I will have command of all things \"military\" in the newly minted _municipium_ , meaning command of the urban militia cohort, which exists only to collect the tolls and taxes at the city gates. I am also to form a troop of _vigiles_ , after the model developed by Lucius' brother, Marcus Agrippa, in the city of Rome.\n\nThe primary duty of the _vigiles_ would be firefighting. However, they would also serve to maintain civil peace and safety by patrolling the city streets on the lookout for thieves, muggers, burglars, and runaway slaves.\n\nBefore Agrippa left, I discussed the offer with my wife, Rhonwen. She asked only two questions: would I get paid, and would the job get me out of the house? When I answered that I would receive a salary from the Augustus' privy purse, five times that of a _primus pilus_ in the legions, and would have to establish a _praetorium_ near the center of town, from which to run things, she told me I should do it.\n\nBesides, she said, she didn't think I should disappoint such a nice man as Lucius Vipsanius Agrippa after he had travelled so far just to ask me to do this.\n\nSo, I find myself about to start a new career, again in the service of the _gens Iulia_. I have decided that, despite my new responsibilities, I will continue to write my memoirs of Caesar's wars in Gaul. While I am waiting for the confirmation of my appointment as the _praefectus urbis_ of the new Roman _municipium_ of Mediolanum, I have begun to review my journals of Caesar's campaign against Ariovistus and the Suebi. I am dubbing this chapter of my journal, _De Re Suebiana_ , \"The Swabian Affair.\"\n\n## MILITARY LATIN\n\nDespite the many modern novels, whose setting places the reader among Roman soldiers, and popular movies about the Roman Empire, surprisingly little is known about the day-to-day operations of a Roman legion during the time of Caesar.\n\nCaesar's own works about his military operations in Gaul and the subsequent civil war is perhaps the best detailed surviving sources for that period. But, Caesar's goal was not to write a manual about Roman military operations; Caesar's goal was political self-promotion.\n\nA fifth-century work sometimes called _de re militari_ , \"Military Operations,\" attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, survives and presents a representation of the military operations at the height of Rome's power. Although Vegetius claims to have based his treatise on descriptions of Roman armies of the mid to late Republican period from Cato the Elder, Cornelius Celsus, Frontinus, and Paternus, and on Roman military operations during the principate and early empire from the imperial constitutions of Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian, little of Vegetius' sources survive, and his writings are separated from his primary sources by centuries. Additionally, Vegetius was not a historian or a soldier, and his purpose seems to be more a nostalgic recalling of the glory days of Roman military power than a reporting of what actually happened. So, _de re militari_ resembles a somewhat clumsy compilation of materials from various sources rather than a military field manual reflecting the actual standards and practices of the Roman legions.\n\nIn order to create a realistic setting for this novel, the author has based the \"big picture\" on the first half of the first book of Caesar's _de bello Gallico_ where he reports his campaign against the Helvetians.\n\nHowever, in order to create the microcosm of the Roman soldier in training and in the field, the author has channeled his five years of studying Latin and Roman history with his twenty-five years serving in the infantry and rangers. The scenes of Gaius Marius Insubrecus' basic training with the Tenth Legion outside the Roman city of Aquileia are based on the author's own infantry training in Ft. Jackson, South Carolina and his airborne and ranger training in Ft. Benning, Georgia. In the novel, Caesar's Gallic cavalry _alae_ conduct road reconnaissance and screening missions based on the same principles of US light-infantry or armored cavalry scout platoons.\n\nRoman legionaries use a vocabulary that modern soldiers would appreciate. Where the author's comrades in Vietnam would describe a particularly unpleasant experience as \"being in the shit,\" Insubrecus' _contubernales_ refer to the same as _immerda_. The American soldier refers to a screwed up situation as FUBAR; the Roman soldiers in this book call it _perfututum_.\n\n### **Military Terminology**\n\nBesides the \"formal\" tactical terminology of the Roman army, little is known about how the soldiers actually spoke. They weren't the types to leave a written records of their conversations.\n\nAs was related in the first book of the Gaius Marius Chronicle, _The Gabinian Affair_ , the Roman legionary during the time of Caesar was more rustic than urban and more provincial than Roman. So, it is reasonable to believe that they incorporated words, grammatical constructions, and accents from their native languages into the Latin they used as the _lingua franca_ of the legions. The author is reminded of the \"Army English\" he had to learn as an infantry recruit; it sounded more Southern than Yankee and had its own jargon. To \"put the quietus\" on something was to stop it; the plural of the noun \"man\" was often \"mens\"; and combat was described as \"hitting the shit.\" So, it's reasonable to assume that the Roman _muli_ in Caesar's time had their own brand of spoken Latin, which would probably have made Cicero weep.\n\nAlso, the language used between soldiers tends to be direct, colorful, and, in a strange sense, intimate. That was the character of US Army \"rhetoric.\" Drill sergeants often referred to their charges as \"maggots\"; so Roman training officers may have called their _tirones_ , _blattae_ , \"cockroaches.\" Lazy or incompetent soldiers were referred to as \"snuffies\"; so the author invented the Latin term _funguli_ for legionaries known to cut too many corners in the performance of their duties.\n\nOther than that, the following list of Roman military jargon is perhaps just another example of a traditional, classical education gone dreadfully wrong!\n\nAcies (pl. acies) \u2013 edge, battle line\n\nAcies triplex \u2013 the triple line, standard battle formation of the Roman legion\n\nAcies prima \u2013 The vanguard of the legion on the march or the front line of the\n\nlegion deployed for battle in the _acies triplex_ ; the First, Second, Third, and Fourth cohorts of the legion\n\nAcies secunda \u2013 the middle line, the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh cohorts of the legion\n\nAcies tertia \u2013 the rear line, the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth cohorts\n\nAgmen (pl. agmines) \u2013 a marching column\n\nNovissimum Agmen \u2013 the rearguard of the marching column; the rea, the caboose\n\nPrimum Agmen \u2013 the vanguard of the marching column, the \"bleeding edge.\"\n\nAla (pl. alae) \u2013 literally, a bird's wing; an element of Roman cavalry roughly equivalent in numbers to forty to sixty troopers\n\nA'mperi'tu' \u2013 military jargon coined by the author, short for _Ad imperatum tuum_ \u2014\"At your command\"; this was one of the acceptable responses from a subordinate to a superior's command.\n\nAquila (pl. aquilae) \u2013 literally, an eagle, a bird sacred to Iove; figuratively, the standard of a legion and its _animus_ , its \"life force, spirit, soul\"; the worst disgrace that could befall a legion was to lose its _aquila_ to an enemy.\n\nSub aquilis \u2013 literally, \"under the eagles\"; figuratively, \"in the army.\"\n\nAquilifer \u2013 an officer bearing the eagle standard of a Roman legion; also the \"treasurer\" of the legion handling payroll and burial club transactions.\n\nBallista (pl. ballistae) \u2013 a piece of Roman artillery that launched a large, arrowlike bolt over great distances\n\nBalteus \u2013 a leather baldric used to suspend a sword. It was worn over the shoulder, passing down to the side where the sword was suspended. Enlisted men wore their swords on the right side; centurions and senior officers on the left.\n\nBestiola (pl. bestiolae) \u2013 literally, any small animal; in the jargon of the Roman army, it's a derogatory term used to address trainees, equivalalent to \"maggot\" in English. (author)\n\nBlatta (pl. blattae . . . there's never only one of these things) \u2013 literally, a cockroach; figuratively, a legionary trainee.\n\nBuccellatum \u2013 hardtack; part of a _mulus_ ' marching rations.\n\nCaliga (pl. caligae) \u2013 Roman, hobnailed military boots.\n\nCapsarius \u2013 army slang for a field medic, one who carries a _capsa_ , a box or satchel, which carried medical supplies\n\nCapu' \u2013 boss, chief, from Latin _caput_ , \"head\"; modern Italian, _capo_. Military jargon coined by the author.\n\nCarinus \u2013 ruddy brown; in this story, the standard color of an enlisted man's _sagum_\n\nCastigatio (pl. castigationes) \u2013 a minor military punishment; often a beating with a centurion's _vitis_ , his vine cudgel.\n\nCastro' \u2013 an \"army brat;\" _mus castrorum_ , a \"camp rat\"; this is a soldier who was the offspring of a legionary and one of the _mulieres castrorum_ , camp followers, and brought up in a legion's _vicus_ ; these soldiers felt that they were _familia legionis_ , members of the legion's family, therefore superior to first-time enlistees; sometimes adopted as the soldier's cognomen, e.g., Lucius Furius Castro or Lucus Fulius De Castris (author).\n\nCastrum (pl. castra) \u2013 a legionary marching camp; these were constructed at the end of each daily march.\n\nCedo alteram, centurio! \u2013 \"Hit me again, sir!\" The expected response of a soldier undergoing _castigatio_.\n\nCenturia (pl. centuriae) \u2013 a sub-unit of a Roman legion consisting of ten _contubernia_ , eighty legionaries, commanded by a _centurio_\n\nCenturio (pl. centuriones) \u2013 a centurion, a Roman officer who commands a _centuria_ of eighty men\n\nCenturio prior pilus \u2013 a senior centurion; a centurion of the first rank; in this novel, designates a centurion who commands a cohort and so would stand in the front rank of the cohort in the battle line.\n\nCenturio primi ordinis \u2013 in this novel, designates a centurion of the first rank; a centurion who commands a century in any of the first four cohorts, which constitute the first rank of the legion in the _acies triplex_ , the \"triple battle line,\" a battle formation favored by Caesar\n\nCenturio primus pilus \u2013 \"The First Spear\"; senior centurion of a legion; commands the First Centuria of the First Cohors and also commands the First Cohors; in the absence of both the _legatus legionis_ , the legionary commander, and the _tribunus laticlavus_ , the \"Broad-Stripe\" tribune, commands the legion.\n\nCenturio secundi ordinis \u2013 in this novel, designates a centurion of the second rank; commands a century in Cohorts Five, Six, or Seven, the second rank in the line of battle\n\nCenturio tertii ordinis \u2013 in this novel, designates a centurion of the third rank; commands a century in Cohorts, Eight, Nine, or Ten, the third rank in line of battle; the reserve or \"Forlorn Hope\" of a legion\n\nChlamys (pl. chlamydes) \u2013 chainmail shoulder pads that fit over the _lorica hamate_ , a legionary's chainmail armor\n\nCingulum (pl. cingula) \u2013 a Roman military belt; this was one of the indicators of a soldier; it was decorated with an ornate buckle and highly polished metal bits; this and a razor-sharp pugio gave a mulus a bit of swagger when he went into town for wine and entertainment.\n\nCochleare (pl. cochleara) \u2013 a mess spoon; part of a legionary's mess kit\n\nCohors (pl. cohortes) \u2013 an element of a Roman legion commanded by a senior centurion, consisting of six centuries, 480 legionaries\n\nComes (pl. comites) \u2013 a companion; an intimate; used to describe a general's personal staff and \/ or members of his personal guard.\n\nContubernium (pl. contubernia) \u2013 a squad, a grouping of eight legionaries who share a tent in the field or a squad room in a permanent camp\n\nContubernales \u2013 members of a common _contubernium_ , \"mates,\" \"squaddies\"\n\nCornex (pl. cornices) \u2013 literally, a crow; in military jargon, a field medic (author), a _capsarius_ , who wore a black tunic in combat to hide the blood and gore on his uniform.\n\nCornices pascere \u2013 literally, to feed the crows; figuratively, to be evacuated to the aid\n\nstation.\n\nCornu (pl. cornua) \u2013 a Roman \"brass\" instrument about ten feet long in the shape of a musical G-clef; used to relay orders on the battlefield\n\nCornucen (pl. cornucines) \u2013 the horn-blower, a minor officer who carried a _cornu_ to signal orders over the field during battles.\n\nCorona civica \u2013 Civic Crown, the second highest Roman military decoration, after the \"grass crown\"; reserved for a Roman citizen who saved the lives of fellow citizens by killing an enemy on a spot not again held by the enemy that same day; the citizens saved must bear witness to the act\u2014no one else could be the verifying witness; any recipient of the Civic Crown was entitled membership in the Roman Senate.\n\nCuneus \u2013 the \"boar's snout\"; a Roman infantry and cavalry offensive military formation, the wedge\n\nDecanus \u2013 a junior legionary officer; commander of a _contubernium_ ; a squad leader\n\nDecurio (pl. decuriones) \u2013 a junior cavalry officer commanding a _turma_ , about thirty-five troopers.\n\nDicto pareo \u2013 literally, \"to what is spoken I comply\"; \"Yes, sir!\" Another acceptable response from a subordinate when given a command (author).\n\nDolabra (pl. dolabrae) \u2013 an entrenching tool; a versatile axe, pickaxe and mattock; no _mulus_ would be caught without his or his centurion would have his guts for shoelaces.\n\nDux (pl. duces) \u2013 this was not a formal military title in the time of Caesar. Literally, the word denotes a leader. In this book, it means \"chief\" and refers to anyone in a leadership position who is viewed favorably by the troops (author). Also, it's an honorary title given to native leaders of allied bands and auxiliary units.\n\nExpeditus (pl. expediti) \u2013 unburdened, lightly armed, ready for combat\n\nExplorator (pl. exploratores) \u2013 a scout, spy\n\nFabricator (pl. fabricatores) \u2013 an engineer, construction troop\n\nFossa \u2013 a ditch; part of the standard fortifications of a castrum\n\nFungulus (pl. funguli) \u2013 literally, a little mushroom, a fungus; figuratively, military slang for an incompetent soldier, a \"snuffy\" (author).\n\nFurca (pl. furcae) \u2013 a pole on which a soldier carried his personal equipment on the march\n\nFustuarium \u2013 a severe military punishment; being beaten to death with clubs by the members of one's _contubernium_ ; this is one of the few punishments inflicted in the Roman army where the victim is not expected to say, \"Hit me again, sir!\"\n\nGalea (pl. galeae) \u2013 the standard Roman military helmet\n\nGeminus (pl. gemini) \u2013 literally, a twin; figuratively, military fighting partners (author)\n\nGladius (pl. gladii) \u2013 the _gladius hispaniensis_ , \"Spanish short sword,\" the basic Roman infantry short, stabbing sword\n\nHastae purae \u2013 a minor military decoration\n\nHastile \u2013 a wooden staff carried by an _optio_ ; in battle, the _optio_ 's position was at the rear of the century; it is thought that the _hastile_ was used to keep the battle line straight, discourage flight, and to beat legionaries back into line should they get some other idea\n\nImmerda \u2013 from _in merda_ , literally \"in the shit\": figuratively, a Roman legionary's characterization of a bad situation. _Immerda sumus_! We're in the shit! (author)\n\nImmunis (pl. immunes) \u2013 a military status in which a soldier was excused from fatigue details and got extra pay for doing some specialized job, like clerk, blacksmith, forager, etc.\n\nImpedimentum (pl. impedimenta) \u2013 equipment, baggage, military kit\n\nImpeditus (pl. impediti) \u2013 marching under a full field load or _mulare_ , \"to mule it\".(author)\n\nImperator \u2013 a Roman title given to a victorious commander by acclamation of the troops; a general\n\nImperium \u2013 basically, \"power\"; it is the power of the Roman state over individuals which in Caesar's time was delegated by the Senate to a magistrate; also refers to the area where Roman law ran and where a Roman magistrate could wield the power of the state, _imperium Romanum_ , \"The Roman Empire.\"\n\nInterrogatio \u2013 interrogation, inquisition, a grilling; if a slave or non-citizen were undergoing an _interrogatio_ , torture would typically be used; legions had _immunis_ soldiers, _carnifices_ , who were specialists in getting the answers a general wanted from prisoners.\n\nIntervallum \u2013 an open area between the ramparts and tents in a _castrum_\n\nLagoena (pl. lagoenae) \u2013 water bottle, a canteen; part of a legionary's field kit\n\nLatrina \u2013 privy, water closet; the engineers were careful to place these downstream of the water and bathing point\n\nLatus apertum \u2013 the right side; the \"open side\"; the side of an individual soldier or an entire military formation not protected by shields\n\nLatus opertum \u2013 the left side; the side of an individual soldier or an entire military formation protected by shields\n\nLegatus \u2013 a legate; a senior Roman officer appointed to assist a Roman magistrate in some manner; usually of the Senatorial order, an equestrian plebeian, or patrician; a political appointee, a client of the magistrate, a political favor, a nephew or an in-law, or someone the magistrate didn't want to leave back in Rome, where he couldn't keep an eye on him. Legatus Equitium \u2013 cavalry commander; an ad hoc assignment.Legatus legionis \u2013 a legate appointed as the army commander's\n\nrepresentative in a legion; in Caesar's time these appointments were not permament assignments but ad hoc based on the situation; tactical control of the legion in combat was usually left to the legion's senior centurion, the _primus pilus_.\n\nLoculus \u2013 a military satchel; part of a soldier's marching pack\n\nLorica (pl. loricae) \u2013upper-body armor of a Roman legionary; during the period of the story, it was the _lorica hamata_ , made of iron chainmail for the enlisted men and plate armor for senior officers; men serving in the auxiliary units might wear leather _loricae_.\n\nMedicus (pl. medici) \u2013 doctor; army medic\n\nMercurius (pl. mercurii) \u2013 Mercury, a Roman god; military slang invented by the author for a sestertius coin\n\nMiles (pl. milites) \u2013 the basic word for a soldier; in this story, it's what _tirones_ , trainees, strive to become, _milites Romani_.\n\nMinerva \u2013 Minerva, a Roman goddess; soldiers' slang for a bronze triens coin (author)\n\nMulieres castrorum \u2013 women of the camps; camp followers\n\nMulare \u2013 \"to mule it\"; the Roman equivalent to the US Infantry expression \"humping\"; marching under a full load. (author)\n\nMulio (pl. muliones) \u2013 teamster, mule driver\n\nMulus (pl. muli) \u2013 literally, a mule; figuratively, army slang for an infantryman, a grunt (author); from the expression _muli_ Marii, \"Marius' mules,\" describing legionaries marching _impedimenti_ , \"loaded down\" with their personal equipment, after the Roman general, Gaius Marius, unloaded the mules in the baggage train and loaded the gear onto the backs of the legionaries to improve the mobility of the legions\n\nMurus (pl. muri) \u2013 a wall; in the military jargon of the author it describes a close-order defensive formation, a _murus scutorum_ , a shield-wall\n\nNil 'scusationis mi' \u2013 \"I have no excuse!\" One of the five responses authorized for a Roman legionary _tiro_ , along with \"Yes, Sir!\", \"No, Sir!\", \"Sir, I do not know!\" and \"Hit me again, Sir!\" (author).\n\nObsequar ti' \u2013 \"I obey you!\" Again, another acceptable reponse to a military order (author)\n\nOptio (pl. optiones) \u2013 \"chosen\" one; a junior army officer; second in command of a _centuria_ under the centurion\n\nOrdo (pl. ordines) \u2013 rank in battle or a social class\n\nPalus (pl. pali) \u2013 pole used to practice sword drill\n\nParatus \u2013 \"Ready!\" The only acceptable response when an officer asks _Parat' tu?_ \u2014\"Are you ready?\"\n\nParma (pl. parmae) \u2013 cavalry shield\n\nPassus (pl. passus) \u2013 a complete stride from when the right foot goes down until it comes down again; about five and a half feet on flat ground; the standard legionary daily march was twenty thousand passus\n\nPatera (pl. paterae) \u2013 mess tin\n\nPercussus \u2013 literally, a blow, strike, punch; in the book it's used to describe a soldier's use of dagger, sword, and offensive shield techniques; also, it means, \"hit man,\" someone who \"punches\" his victim with a dagger.\n\nPerfututum \u2013 FUBAR, totally screwed up! Much worse than _immerda_! (author)\n\nPes (pl. pedes) \u2013 a foot; army slang invented by the author for an infantryman, equivalent to the American military expression for an infantryman, a \"leg.\"\n\nPhalera (pl. phalerae) \u2013 a military decoration\n\nPilleum (pl. pillea) \u2013 a cap worn by freed slaves; in the army, a cap worn under the _galea_ for stability, fit and cushioning\n\nPilum (pl. pila) \u2013 Roman military javelin; really one of the legions' secret weapons. It was essentially an antipersonnel device, but it was also used to render opponent's shields unusable so the _muli_ could close in for their sword work; the shaft bent on contact so the _pilum_ could not be extracted from a shield or thrown back at the Roman line; a nasty piece of business.\n\nPorta (pl. portae) \u2013 a gate, portal; a Roman marching camp, _castrum_ , had four standard _portae_\n\n  1. Porta Decumana \u2013 the \"Gate of the Tenth Cohort,\" the back gate\n  2. Porta Praetoria \u2013 the main gate\n  3. Porta Principalis Dextra \u2013 right side gate\n  4. Porta Principalis Sinistra \u2013 left side gate\n\nPosca \u2013 a drink made from vinegar and herbs; mother's milk of a Roman soldier\n\nPraefectus \u2013 commander; a Roman officer, often of the centurion or tribune status, in command of a legionary _vexilliatio_ or an auxiliary unit\n\nPraefectus castrorum \u2013 commander of the camps; senior centurion of the army\n\nPraetorium \u2013 a headquarters\n\nPreatoriani \u2013 headquarters security troops\n\nPrimus \u2013 literally, first; military jargon coined by the author for \"Top Soldier,\" Number One; reserved for senior centurions; in direct address, \" _Prime!_ \" (pronounced PREEM-eh!)\n\nPteruges \u2013 the skirt of leather or fabric strips worn around the waists of Roman soldiers. They were often decorated with metal studs or embossed images.\n\nPugio (pl. Pugiones) \u2013 a knife used by Roman soldiers as a sidearm; along with the military belt, the _pugio_ was one of the indicators of a soldiers status; it was considered a \"noble\" and \"Roman\" weapon, unlike the _sica_ which was used by villains, thieves, scoundrels, backstabbers, throat-cutters, and barbarians from the east.\n\nQuadriga (pl. quadrigae) \u2013 literally, a four-horse rig in a chariot race; street talk coined by the author for a _denarius_ , a roman coin.\n\nQuaestor (pl. Quaestores) \u2013 in Caesar's time, _quaestores_ were officials who supervised the treasury and financial affairs of the state; as a proconsul, Ceasar would have had a _quaestor_ , or _quaestores_ , to help him cook the books in the provinces assigned to him; in this story, the _quaestor exercitus_ , is the army quartermaster.\n\nQuincunx (pl. quincunces) \u2013 literally, the pattern of five dots on a dice cube; figuratively, a disposition of soldiers or centuries in a military formation\n\nRudis (pl. rudes) \u2013 literally, a stick; a wooden practice sword or knife, weighted heavier than the real thing to build up muscle\n\nSaccus (pl. sacci) \u2013 a bag for carrying equipment, food, and loot; part of a soldier's marching pack\n\nSacramentum \u2013 the military oath taken by soldiers\n\nSagum (pl. saga) \u2013 a military cloak, woolen and treated to be waterproof\n\nSarcina (pl. sarcinae) \u2013 military marching pack\n\nScutum (pl. scuta) \u2013 Roman infantry shield\n\nSenior \u2013 literally, older; figuratively, \"Sir!\" (author)\n\nSica (pl. sicae) \u2013 a small, easily-concealable knife with either a straight or curved blade; believed to be of eastern origin, therefore not considered by Romans as a \"noble\" weapon; favored weapon of the _sicarius_ (pl. _sicarii_ ), the \"knife man\" or \"hitter.\"\n\nSignificatio (pl. significationes) \u2013 an indication of approval; in the novel, it is the ceremony in which _tirones_ are accepted as soldiers by their legion\n\nSignum (pl. signa) \u2013 the standard of a military unit\n\nSignifer \u2013 a soldier who carried a unit's _signum_\n\nSitula (pl. situlae) \u2013 a bucket; in the legions, _situlae_ , \"buckets,\" was a drill requiring trainees to carry full buckets over long distance to build upper-body strength (author)\n\nSocius (pl. Scocii) \u2013 an ally\n\nSpatha (pl. spathae) \u2013 a long sword, used mostly in the cavalry because a _gladius_ doesn't reach well when one is sitting on a horse\n\nSubarmalis (pl. subarmales) \u2013 padded jackets worn under a _lorica_ by Roman soldiers\n\nSudarium \u2013 a soldier's scarf; a \"sweat-rag\"; served many purposes for a _mulus_ . . . it kept his _lorica_ from chafing his neck on the march; it cushioned his shoulder from his _furca_ when marching _impeditus_ ; it wiped the sweat off his face; it was a handy field dressing.\n\nSudis (pl. sudes) \u2013 stakes used as part of army fortifications; antipersonnel devices\n\nTegimen (pl. tegimenta) \u2013 a covering; a leather carrying case for the _scutum_ , the legionary shield\n\nTesserarius (pl. tesserarii) \u2013 a Roman officer, usually third in rank in a _centuria_ ; named after a _tesserae_ , a clay token on which was written the daily password\n\nTi' adsum \u2013 \"At your service!\" Literally, _tibi adsum_ \u2014\"I'm here for you!\"\n\nTiro (pl. tirones) \u2013 the lowest thing on earth, a recruit, a rookie in the Roman army, a trainee\n\nTribunus (pl. tribuni) \u2013 a tribune, a military and civil officer\n\nTribunus plebis \u2013 tribune of the people\n\nTribunus militum \u2013 tribune of the soldiers, a military tribune\n\nTribunus angusticlavus \u2013 a military tribune from the _ordo equester_ , the knightly class; a junior tribune; a \"narrow-striper\"\n\nTribunus laticlavus \u2013 a military tribune from the Senatorial or Patrician class; a senior tribune; a \"broad-striper\"\n\nTurma (pl. turmae) \u2013 cavalry squadron; a cavalry unit of two or more _alae_\n\nUmbo \u2013 the boss of a shield\n\nVagina \u2013 a scabbard for a sword.\n\nVenator (pl. Venatores) \u2013 a hunter; an _immunis_ detail in the legion, a soldier who hunts game for rations\n\nVenatus \u2013 literally, the hunt; figuratively, a cavalry advance against a fleeing enemy\n\nVermiculus (pl. vermiculi) \u2013 literally, a maggot; figuratively, a training officer's pet name for a trainee.\n\nVeteranus (pl. veterani) \u2013 veteran, an experienced soldier, an \"old man\"\n\nVexilium (pl. vexilia) \u2013 a banner, flag\n\nVexilium rubrum \u2013 the red flag; symbol of a legion\n\nVexillarius \u2013 a guidearm; one who carries the unit pennant\n\nVexillatio (pl. vexillationes) \u2013 an independent detachment of legionaries commanded by a centurion or tribune; this was considered an \"independent command,\" so it was a desired assignment for any amibitious junior officer\n\nVia Praetoria \u2013 one of the standard \"streets\" of a _castrum_ running from Porta Praetoria, the main gate, to the Porta Decumana, the rear gate\n\nVia Principalis \u2013 one of the standard \"streets\" of a _castrum_ running from the Porta Principalis Dextra and the Porta Principalis Sinistra\n\nVicus \u2013 village; a settlement of camp followers outside a legionary _castrum_\n\nVimen (pl. vimenes) \u2013 the \"basket\"; a weighted, wicker practice shield used in training\n\nVirgo (pl. virgines) \u2013 literally, a virgin, a maiden; figuratively, a soldier who has not experienced combat, a \"cherry\" (author)\n\nVitis (pl. vites) \u2013 club, cudgel, swagger stick made from a grape vine; one of insignias of rank of a centurion used to direct military drill and to administer physical punishment.\n\n### **Roman Military Commands**\n\nAgain, little is known about Roman unit drill and combat commands. In order to bring the reader into the Roman battle line, the author used his own experience as a combat infantry commander and a liberal use of the commands developed by Roman military reenactors.\n\nIn the Gaius Marius novels, the Roman army uses a \"shorthand\" version of Latin for efficiency. So, in order to command a unit to turn to the right, the normal Latin expression, _ad dextram_ , meaning, \"toward the right hand,\" becomes _a' dex'_ , and the Latin command to turn, _versate_ , becomes _versat'_... \" _A' Dex... Versat_!\"\n\nSome drill commands, like \"Stat'!\"\u2014\"Stand up\" or \"Attention!\"\u2014were \"signal commands.\" When delivering these commands, an officer first names the unit for whom the command is intended, then delivers the command for execution by the troops. So, if a _decanus_ , a Roman squad leader, wants to bring his _contubernium_ of eight legionaries to the position of attention, he says, \" _Contubernium . . . Stat'_!\"\n\nMost Roman military commands are divided into two elements\u2014the prepatory command and the command of execution. The prepatory command is given to warn and prepare troops to execute a specific movement. The actual movement is executed on the command of execution.\n\nSo, if a Roman officer wants his detail to turn right, he first calls them to the position of attention by issuing the command, \" _Stat'_!\" He then issues a prepatory command, \" _A' Dex'_ ,\" meaning \"to the right,\" then the command of execution, \" _Versat'_!\" When the soldiers hear the command of execution, they turn to the right.\n\nThe Roman drill and combat commands used in the novels are:\n\nAciem . . . Format'! \u2013 \"Form battle line!\"\n\nAd Cuneum! \u2013 \"Form the wedge!\" A Roman attack formation\n\nA' Dex' Aciem . . . Format' \u2013 \"Form battle line to the right!\"\n\nA' Dex' . . . Versat'! \u2013 \"Right, Face!\"\n\nA' Pedes! \u2013 \"On Your feet!\"\n\nAd Signa! \u2013 \"Fall In!\"\n\nAd Sin' Aciem... Format' \u2013 \"Form battle line to the left!\"\n\nAd Sin' . . . Versat'! \u2013 \"Left, Face!\"\n\nA' Testudinem! \u2013 \"Form the turtle!\" A Roman defensive formation\n\nA Signis! \u2013 \"Fall out!\"\n\n(Unit) . . . Consistit'! \u2013 \"Halt!\"\n\nContra . . . Versat'! \u2013 \"About, Face!\"\n\nDex' . . . Dex' . . . Dex', Sin', Dex' \u2013 counting marching cadence, \"Right . . . right . . . right, left, right.\"\n\nEquiis . . . citatis! \u2013 \"Horses canter!\" (cavalry command)\n\nEquiis . . . currentibus! \u2013 \"Horses gallop!\" (cavalry command)\n\nGladios . . . stringit'! \u2013 \"Draw swords!\"\n\nGradus Bis . . . Movet'! \u2013 \"Double-time march!\" Increase marching pace to 120 passus per minute.\n\n(Unit) . . . Laxat'! \u2013 \"Stand at ease!\"\n\nImpetum . . . agit'! \u2013 \"Attack!\"\n\nManipulos . . . format'! \u2013 \"Form maniples!\"\n\n(Unit) . . . Miss'est! \u2013 \"Dismissed!\"\n\nOrdines . . . Densat'! \u2013 \"Close Ranks!\" Close the interval between each man to an arm's length.\n\nOrdines . . . Extendit'! \u2013 \"Open Ranks!\" Extend the interval between each man to two arm's lengths.\n\nOrdines . . . Revert! \u2013 \"Normal Interval\" This command is only given to recover from open to closed ranks; recover the normal interval between each man to one arm-length.\n\nPila . . . iacit'! \u2013 \"Cast spears!\"\n\nPila . . . parat'! \u2013 \"Prepare spears for casting!\" At this command, the legionaries place their feet shoulder distance apart, right foot back, shields held slightly up toward the enemy; right arm and hand holding the _pilum_ cocked to the rear, the point slightly elevated.\n\nPila . . . ponit'! \u2013 \"Present or pick up spears!\" At this command, the legionaries place their feet shoulder distance apart, right toe to left heel; shields remain level and to the front in a good defensive position. The right hand holding the _pilum_ is held at the level of the right ear, the _pilum_ parallel to the ground.\n\nPromov . . . ete! \u2013 \"Forward March!\" Step off on the right foot and march the standard Roman marching pace of sixty full passus per minute.\n\nQuincuncem . . . format'! \u2013 \"Form quincunx!\" Form the \"five dots\"\u2014a formation used to allow a passage of lines.\n\nScuta . . . erigit'! \u2013 \"Shields up!\"\n\nSigna . . . Conversat'! \u2013 Reverse the access of advance, a 180 degree turn; \"Turn about!\"\n\nSigna . . . Profert! \u2013 \"Advance!\"\n\nSpathas . . . Stringit'! \u2013 \"Draw sabers!\" (cavalry command)\n\n(Unit) . . . Stat'! \u2013 \"Attention!\"\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n**_Salman Rushdie_**\n\nSalman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels, four works of nonfiction, and a book of stories. He is coeditor of _Mirrorwork_ , an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and of the 2008 _Best American Short Stories_ anthology. His novel _Midnight Children_ was adjudged the \"Booker of the Bookers\" in 1993.\nBOOKS BY SALMAN RUSHDIE\n\nFICTION\n\n_Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights_\n\n_Luka and the Fire of Life_\n\n_The Enchantress of Florence_\n\n_Shalimar the Clown_\n\n_Fury_\n\n_The Ground Beneath Her Feet_\n\n_The Moor's Last Sigh_\n\n_East, West_\n\n_Haroun and the Sea of Stories_\n\n_The Satanic Verses_\n\n_Shame_\n\n_Midnight's Children_\n\n_Grimus_\n\nNONFICTION\n\n_The Step Across This Line_\n\n_The Jaguar Smile_\n\n_Imaginary Homelands_\n\n_Joseph Anton: A Memoir_\n\n# **The Prophet's Hair**\n\n# from _East, West_\n\nSalman Rushdie\n\nA Vintage Short\n\nVintage Books\n\nA Division of Penguin Random House LLC\n\nNew York\n_Copyright \u00a9 1994 by Salman Rushdie_\n\nAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover as part of _East, West_ in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1994, and subsequently published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1995.\n\nVintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nThe Cataloging-in-Publication Data for _East, West_ is available from the Library of Congress.\n\nVintage eShort ISBN 9781101973691\n\nSeries cover design by Joan Wong\n\nwww.\u200bvintagebooks.\u200bcom\n\nv4.1\n\na\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_About the Author_\n\n_Books by Salman Rushdie_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\nThe Prophet's Hair\nEarly in the year 19\u2014, when Srinagar was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men's bones as if they were glass, a young man upon whose cold-pinked skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth was to be seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the services of a dependably professional burglar. The young man's name was Atta, and the rogues in that part of town directed him gleefully into ever darker and less public alleys, until in a yard wet with the blood of a slaughtered chicken he was set upon by two men whose faces he never saw, robbed of the substantial bank-roll which he had insanely brought on his solitary excursion, and beaten within an inch of his life.\n\n\u2014\n\nNight fell. His body was carried by anonymous hands to the edge of the lake, whence it was transported by shikara across the water and deposited, torn and bleeding, on the deserted embankment of the canal which led to the gardens of Shalimar. At dawn the next morning a flower-vendor was rowing his boat through water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey when he saw the prone form of young Atta, who was just beginning to stir and moan, and on whose now deathly pale skin the sheen of wealth could still be made out dimly beneath an actual layer of frost.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe flower-vendor moored his craft and by stooping over the mouth of the injured man was able to learn the poor fellow's address, which was mumbled through lips that could scarcely move; whereupon, hoping for a large tip, the hawker rowed Atta home to a large house on the shores of the lake, where a beautiful but inexplicably bruised young woman and her distraught, but equally handsome mother, neither of whom, it was clear from their eyes, had slept a wink from worrying, screamed at the sight of their Atta \u2013 who was the elder brother of the beautiful young woman \u2013 lying motionless amidst the funereally stunted winter blooms of the hopeful florist.\n\nThe flower-vendor was indeed paid off handsomely, not least to ensure his silence, and plays no further part in our story. Atta himself, suffering terribly from exposure as well as a broken skull, entered a coma which caused the city's finest doctors to shrug helplessly. It was therefore all the more remarkable that on the very next evening the most wretched and disreputable part of the city received a second unexpected visitor. This was Huma, the sister of the unfortunate young man, and her question was the same as her brother's, and asked in the same low, grave tones:\n\n'Where may I hire a thief?'\n\n\u2014\n\nThe story of the rich idiot who had come looking for a burglar was already common knowledge in those insalubrious gullies, but this time the young woman added: 'I should say that I am carrying no money, nor am I wearing any jewellery items. My father has disowned me and will pay no ransom if I am kidnapped; and a letter has been lodged with the Deputy Commissioner of Police, my uncle, to be opened in the event of my not being safe at home by morning. In that letter he will find full details of my journey here, and he will move Heaven and Earth to punish my assailants.'\n\n\u2014\n\nHer exceptional beauty, which was visible even through the enormous welts and bruises disfiguring her arms and forehead, coupled with the oddity of her inquiries, had attracted a sizable group of curious onlookers, and because her little speech seemed to them to cover just about everything, no one attempted to injure her in any way, although there were some raucous comments to the effect that it was pretty peculiar for someone who was trying to hire a crook to invoke the protection of a high-up policeman uncle.\n\nShe was directed into ever darker and less public alleys until finally in a gully as dark as ink an old woman with eyes which stared so piercingly that Huma instantly understood she was blind motioned her through a doorway from which darkness seemed to be pouring like smoke. Clenching her fists, angrily ordering her heart to behave normally, Huma followed the old woman into the gloom-wrapped house.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe faintest conceivable rivulet of candlelight trickled through the darkness; following this unreliable yellow thread (because she could no longer see the old lady), Huma received a sudden sharp blow to the shins and cried out involuntarily, after which she at once bit her lip, angry at having revealed her mounting terror to whoever or whatever waited before her, shrouded in blackness.\n\nShe had, in fact, collided with a low table on which a single candle burned and beyond which a mountainous figure could be made out, sitting cross-legged on the floor. 'Sit, sit,' said a man's calm, deep voice, and her legs, needing no more flowery invitation, buckled beneath her at the terse command. Clutching her left hand in her right, she forced her voice to respond evenly:\n\n'And you, sir, will be the thief I have been requesting?'\n\n\u2014\n\nShifting its weight very slightly, the shadow-mountain informed Huma that all criminal activity originating in this zone was well organised and also centrally controlled, so that all requests for what might be termed freelance work had to be channelled through this room.\n\nHe demanded comprehensive details of the crime to be committed, including a precise inventory of items to be acquired, also a clear statement of all financial inducements being offered with no gratuities excluded, plus, for filing purposes only, a summary of the motives for the application.\n\nAt this, Huma, as though remembering something, stiffened both in body and resolve and replied loudly that her motives were entirely a matter for herself; that she would discuss details with no one but the thief himself; but that the rewards she proposed could only be described as 'lavish'.\n\n'All I am willing to disclose to you, sir, since it appears that I am on the premises of some sort of employment agency, is that in return for such lavish rewards I must have the most desperate criminal at your disposal, a man for whom life holds no terrors, not even the fear of God.\n\n'The worst of fellows, I tell you \u2013 nothing less will do!'\n\n\u2014\n\nAt this a paraffin storm-lantern was lighted, and Huma saw facing her a grey-haired giant down whose left cheek ran the most sinister of scars, a cicatrice in the shape of the letter _s\u00edn_ in the Nastaliq script. She was gripped by the insupportably nostalgic notion that the bogeyman of her childhood nursery had risen up to confront her, because her ayah had always forestalled any incipient acts of disobedience by threatening Huma and Atta: 'You don't watch out and I'll send that one to steal you away \u2013 that Sheikh S\u00edn, the Thief of Thieves!'\n\nHere, grey-haired but unquestionably scarred, was the notorious criminal himself \u2013 and was she out of her mind, were her ears playing tricks, or had he truly just announced that, given the stated circumstances, he himself was the only man for the job?\n\n\u2014\n\nStruggling hard against the newborn goblins of nostalgia, Huma warned the fearsome volunteer that only a matter of extreme urgency and peril would have brought her unescorted into these ferocious streets.\n\n'Because we can afford no last-minute backings-out,' she continued, 'I am determined to tell you everything, keeping back no secrets whatsoever. If, after hearing me out, you are still prepared to proceed, then we shall do everything in our power to assist you, and to make you rich.'\n\nThe old thief shrugged, nodded, spat. Huma began her story.\n\n\u2014\n\nSix days ago, everything in the household of her father, the wealthy moneylender Hashim, had been as it always was. At breakfast her mother had spooned khichri lovingly on to the moneylender's plate; the conversation had been filled with those expressions of courtesy and solicitude on which the family prided itself.\n\nHashim was fond of pointing out that while he was not a godly man he set great store by 'living honourably in the world'. In that spacious lakeside residence, all outsiders were greeted with the same formality and respect, even those unfortunates who came to negotiate for small fragments of Hashim's large fortune, and of whom he naturally asked an interest rate of over seventy per cent, partly, as he told his khichri-spooning wife, 'to teach these people the value of money; let them only learn that, and they will be cured of this fever of borrowing borrowing all the time \u2013 so you see that if my plans succeed, I shall put myself out of business!'\n\nIn their children, Atta and Huma, the moneylender and his wife had successfully sought to inculcate the virtues of thrift, plain dealing and a healthy independence of spirit. On this, too, Hashim was fond of congratulating himself.\n\n\u2014\n\nBreakfast ended; the family members wished one another a fulfilling day. Within a few hours, however, the glassy contentment of that household, of that life of porcelain delicacy and alabaster sensibilities, was to be shattered beyond all hope of repair.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe moneylender summoned his personal shikara and was on the point of stepping into it when, attracted by a glint of silver, he noticed a small vial floating between the boat and his private quay. On an impulse, he scooped it out of the glutinous water.\n\nIt was a cylinder of tinted glass cased in exquisitely wrought silver, and Hashim saw within its walls a silver pendant bearing a single strand of human hair.\n\nClosing his fist around this unique discovery, he muttered to the boatman that he'd changed his plans, and hurried to his sanctum, where, behind closed doors, he feasted his eyes on his find.\n\n\u2014\n\nThere can be no doubt that Hashim the moneylender knew from the first that he was in possession of the famous relic of the Prophet Muhammad, that revered hair whose theft from its shrine at Hazratbal mosque the previous morning had created an unprecedented hue and cry in the valley.\n\nThe thieves \u2013 no doubt alarmed by the pandemonium, by the procession through the streets of endless ululating crocodiles of lamentation, by the riots, the political ramifications and by the massive police search which was commanded and carried out by men whose entire careers now hung upon the finding of this lost hair \u2013 had evidently panicked and hurled the vial into the gelatine bosom of the lake.\n\nHaving found it by a stroke of great good fortune, Hashim's duty as a citizen was clear: the hair must be restored to its shrine, and the state to equanimity and peace.\n\n\u2014\n\nBut the moneylender had a different notion.\n\nAll around him in his study was the evidence of his collector's mania. There were enormous glass cases full of impaled butterflies from Gulmarg, three dozen scale models in various metals of the legendary cannon Zamzama, innumerable swords, a Naga spear, ninety-four terracotta camels of the sort sold on railway station platforms, many samovars, and a whole zoology of tiny sandalwood animals, which had originally been carved to serve as children's bathtime toys.\n\n'And after all,' Hashim told himself, 'the Prophet would have disapproved mightily of this relic-worship. He abhorred the idea of being deified! So, by keeping this hair from its distracted devotees, I perform \u2013 do I not? \u2013 a finer service than I would by returning it! Naturally, I don't want it for its religious value...I'm a man of the world, of this world. I see it purely as a secular object of great rarity and blinding beauty. In short, it's the silver vial I desire, more than the hair.\n\n'They say there are American millionaires who purchase stolen art masterpieces and hide them away \u2013 they would know how I feel. I must, must have it!'\n\n\u2014\n\nEvery collector must share his treasures with one other human being, and Hashim summoned \u2013 and told \u2013 his only son Atta, who was deeply perturbed but, having been sworn to secrecy, only spilled the beans when the troubles became too terrible to bear.\n\nThe youth excused himself and left his father alone in the crowded solitude of his collections. Hashim was sitting erect in a hard, straight-backed chair, gazing intently at the beautiful vial.\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was well known that the moneylender never ate lunch, so it was not until evening that a servant entered the sanctum to summon his master to the dining-table. He found Hashim as Atta had left him. The same, and not the same \u2013 for now the moneylender looked swollen, distended. His eyes bulged even more than they always had, they were red-rimmed, and his knuckles were white.\n\nHe seemed to be on the point of bursting! As though, under the influence of the misappropriated relic, he had filled up with some spectral fluid which might at any moment ooze uncontrollably from his every bodily opening.\n\nHe had to be helped to the table, and then the explosion did indeed take place.\n\n\u2014\n\nSeemingly careless of the effect of his words on the carefully constructed and fragile constitution of the family's life, Hashim began to gush, to spume long streams of awful truths. In horrified silence, his children heard their father turn upon his wife, and reveal to her that for many years their marriage had been the worst of his afflictions. 'An end to politeness!' he thundered. 'An end to hypocrisy!'\n\nNext, and in the same spirit, he revealed to his family the existence of a mistress; he informed them also of his regular visits to paid women. He told his wife that, far from being the principal beneficiary of his will, she would receive no more than the eighth portion which was her due under Islamic law. Then he turned upon his children, screaming at Atta for his lack of academic ability \u2013 'A dope! I have been cursed with a dope!' \u2013 and accusing his daughter of lasciviousness, because she went around the city barefaced, which was unseemly for any good Muslim girl to do. She should, he commanded, enter purdah forthwith.\n\nHashim left the table without having eaten and fell into the deep sleep of a man who has got many things off his chest, leaving his children stunned, in tears, and the dinner going cold on the sideboard under the gaze of an anticipatory bearer.\n\n\u2014\n\nAt five o'clock the next morning the moneylender forced his family to rise, wash and say their prayers. From then on, he began to pray five times daily for the first time in his life, and his wife and children were obliged to do likewise.\n\nBefore breakfast, Huma saw the servants, under her father's direction, constructing a great heap of books in the garden and setting fire to it. The only volume left untouched was the Qur'an, which Hashim wrapped in a silken cloth and placed on a table in the hall. He ordered each member of his family to read passages from this book for at least two hours per day. Visits to the cinema were forbidden. And if Atta invited male friends to the house, Huma was to retire to her room.\n\n\u2014\n\nBy now, the family had entered a state of shock and dismay; but there was worse to come.\n\nThat afternoon, a trembling debtor arrived at the house to confess his inability to pay the latest instalment of interest owed, and made the mistake of reminding Hashim, in somewhat blustering fashion, of the Qur'an's strictures against usury. The moneylender flew into a rage and attacked the fellow with one of his large collection of bullwhips.\n\nBy mischance, later the same day a second defaulter came to plead for time, and was seen fleeing Hashim's study with a great gash in his arm, because Huma's father had called him a thief of other men's money and had tried to cut off the wretch's right hand with one of the thirty-eight kukri knives hanging on the study walls.\n\n\u2014\n\nThese breaches of the family's unwritten laws of decorum alarmed Atta and Huma, and when, that evening, their mother attempted to calm Hashim down, he struck her on the face with an open hand. Atta leapt to his mother's defence and he, too, was sent flying.\n\n'From now on,' Hashim bellowed, 'there's going to be some discipline around here!'\n\n\u2014\n\nThe moneylender's wife began a fit of hysterics which continued throughout that night and the following day, and which so provoked her husband that he threatened her with divorce, at which she fled to her room, locked the door and subsided into a raga of sniffling. Huma now lost her composure, challenged her father openly, and announced (with that same independence of spirit which he had encouraged in her) that she would wear no cloth over her face; apart from anything else, it was bad for the eyes.\n\nOn hearing this, her father disowned her on the spot and gave her one week in which to pack her bags and go.\n\n\u2014\n\nBy the fourth day, the fear in the air of the house had become so thick that it was difficult to walk around. Atta told his shock-numbed sister: 'We are descending to gutter-level \u2013 but I know what must be done.'\n\nThat afternoon, Hashim left home accompanied by two hired thugs to extract the unpaid dues from his two insolvent clients. Atta went immediately to his father's study. Being the son and heir, he possessed his own key to the moneylender's safe. This he now used, and removing the little vial from its hiding-place, he slipped it into his trouser pocket and re-locked the safe door.\n\nNow he told Huma the secret of what his father had fished out of Lake Dal, and exclaimed: 'Maybe I'm crazy \u2013 maybe the awful things that are happening have made me cracked \u2013 but I am convinced there will be no peace in our house until this hair is out of it.'\n\nHis sister at once agreed that the hair must be returned, and Atta set off in a hired shikara to Hazratbal mosque. Only when the boat had delivered him into the throng of the distraught faithful which was swirling around the desecrated shrine did Atta discover that the relic was no longer in his pocket. There was only a hole, which his mother, usually so attentive to household matters, must have overlooked under the stress of recent events.\n\nAtta's initial surge of chagrin was quickly replaced by a feeling of profound relief.\n\n'Suppose', he imagined, 'that I had already announced to the mullahs that the hair was on my person! They would never have believed me now \u2013 and this mob would have lynched me! At any rate, it has gone, and that's a load off my mind.' Feeling more contented than he had for days, the young man returned home.\n\n\u2014\n\nHere he found his sister bruised and weeping in the hall; upstairs, in her bedroom, his mother wailed like a brand-new widow. He begged Huma to tell him what had happened, and when she replied that their father, returning from his brutal business trip, had once again noticed a glint of silver between boat and quay, had once again scooped up the errant relic, and was consequently in a rage to end all rages, having beaten the truth out of her \u2013 then Atta buried his face in his hands and sobbed out his opinion, which was that the hair was persecuting them, and had come back to finish the job.\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was Huma's turn to think of a way out of their troubles.\n\nWhile her arms turned black and blue and great stains spread across her forehead, she hugged her brother and whispered to him that she was determined to get rid of the hair _at all costs_ \u2013 she repeated this last phrase several times.\n\n'The hair', she then declared, 'was stolen from the mosque; so it can be stolen from this house. But it must be a genuine robbery, carried out by a bona-fide thief, not by one of us who are under the hair's thrall \u2013 by a thief so desperate that he fears neither capture nor curses.'\n\nUnfortunately, she added, the theft would be ten times harder to pull off now that their father, knowing that there had already been one attempt on the relic, was certainly on his guard.\n\n\u2014\n\n'Can you do it?'\n\nHuma, in a room lit by candle and storm-lantern, ended her account with one further question: 'What assurances can you give that the job holds no terrors for you still?'\n\nThe criminal, spitting, stated that he was not in the habit of providing references, as a cook might, or a gardener, but he was not alarmed so easily, certainly not by any children's djinni of a curse. Huma had to be content with this boast, and proceeded to describe the details of the proposed burglary.\n\n'Since my brother's failure to return the hair to the mosque, my father has taken to sleeping with his precious treasure under his pillow. However, he sleeps alone, and very energetically; only enter his room without waking him, and he will certainly have tossed and turned quite enough to make the theft a simple matter. When you have the vial, come to my room,' and here she handed Sheikh S\u00edn a plan of her home, 'and I will hand over all the jewellery owned by my mother and myself. You will find...it is worth...that is, you will be able to get a fortune for it...'\n\nIt was evident that her self-control was weakening and that she was on the point of physical collapse.\n\n'Tonight,' she burst out finally. 'You must come tonight!'\n\n\u2014\n\nNo sooner had she left the room than the old criminal's body was convulsed by a fit of coughing: he spat blood into an old vanaspati can. The great Sheikh, the 'Thief of Thieves', had become a sick man, and every day the time drew nearer when some young pretender to his power would stick a dagger in his stomach. A lifelong addiction to gambling had left him almost as poor as he had been when, decades ago, he had started out in this line of work as a mere pickpocket's apprentice; so in the extraordinary commission he had accepted from the moneylender's daughter he saw his opportunity of amassing enough wealth at a stroke to leave the valley for ever, and acquire the luxury of a respectable death which would leave his stomach intact.\n\n\u2014\n\nAs for the Prophet's hair, well, neither he nor his blind wife had ever had much to say for prophets \u2013 that was one thing they had in common with the moneylender's thunderstruck clan.\n\nIt would not do, however, to reveal the nature of this, his last crime, to his four sons. To his consternation, they had all grown up to be hopelessly devout men, who even spoke of making the pilgrimage to Mecca some day. 'Absurd!' their father would laugh at them. 'Just tell me how you will go?' For, with a parent's absolutist love, he had made sure they were all provided with a lifelong source of high income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business.\n\nThe children, then, could look after themselves.\n\nHe and his wife would be off soon with the jewel-boxes of the moneylender's women. It was a timely chance indeed that had brought the beautiful bruised girl into his corner of the town.\n\n\u2014\n\nThat night, the large house on the shore of the lake lay blindly waiting, with silence lapping at its walls. A burglar's night: clouds in the sky and mists on the winter water. Hashim the moneylender was asleep, the only member of his family to whom sleep had come that night. In another room, his son Atta lay deep in the coils of his coma with a blood-clot forming on his brain, watched over by a mother who had let down her long greying hair to show her grief, a mother who placed warm compresses on his head with gestures redolent of impotence. In a third bedroom Huma waited, fully dressed, amidst the jewel-heavy caskets of her desperation.\n\nAt last a bulbul sang softly from the garden below her window and, creeping downstairs, she opened a door to the bird, on whose face there was a scar in the shape of the Nastaliq letter _s\u00edn_.\n\n\u2014\n\nNoiselessly, the bird flew up the stairs behind her. At the head of the staircase they parted, moving in opposite directions along the corridor of their conspiracy without a glance at one another.\n\nEntering the moneylender's room with professional ease, the burglar, S\u00edn, discovered that Huma's predictions had been wholly accurate. Hashim lay sprawled diagonally across his bed, the pillow untenanted by his head, the prize easily accessible. Step by padded step, S\u00edn moved towards the goal.\n\nIt was at this point that, in the bedroom next door, young Atta sat bolt upright in his bed, giving his mother a great fright, and without any warning \u2013 prompted by goodness knows what pressure of the blood-clot upon his brain \u2013 began screaming at the top of his voice:\n\n_'Thief! Thief! Thief!'_\n\n\u2014\n\nIt seems probable that his poor mind had been dwelling, in these last moments, upon his own father; but it is impossible to be certain, because having uttered these three emphatic words the young man fell back upon his pillow and died.\n\nAt once his mother set up a screeching and a wailing and a keening and a howling so earsplittingly intense that they completed the work which Atta's cry had begun \u2013 that is, her laments penetrated the walls of her husband's bedroom and brought Hashim wide awake.\n\n\u2014\n\nSheikh S\u00edn was just deciding whether to dive beneath the bed or brain the moneylender good and proper when Hashim grabbed the tiger-striped swordstick which always stood propped up in a corner beside his bed, and rushed from the room without so much as noticing the burglar who stood on the opposite side of the bed in the darkness. S\u00edn stooped quickly and removed the vial containing the Prophet's hair from its hiding-place.\n\nMeanwhile Hashim had erupted into the corridor, having unsheathed the sword inside his cane. In his right hand he held the weapon and was waving it about dementedly. His left hand was shaking the stick. A shadow came rushing towards him through the midnight darkness of the passageway and, in his somnolent anger, the moneylender thrust his sword fatally through its heart. Turning up the light, he found that he had murdered his daughter, and under the dire influence of this accident he was so overwhelmed by remorse that he turned the sword upon himself, fell upon it and so extinguished his life. His wife, the sole surviving member of the family, was driven mad by the general carnage and had to be committed to an asylum for the insane by her brother, the city's Deputy Commissioner of Police.\n\n\u2014\n\nSheikh S\u00edn had quickly understood that the plan had gone awry.\n\nAbandoning the dream of the jewel-boxes when he was but a few yards from its fulfilment, he climbed out of Hashim's window and made his escape during the appalling events described above. Reaching home before dawn, he woke his wife and confessed his failure. It would be necessary, he whispered, for him to vanish for a while. Her blind eyes never opened until he had gone.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe noise in the Hashim household had roused their servants and even managed to awaken the night-watchman, who had been fast asleep as usual on his charpoy by the street-gate. They alerted the police, and the Deputy Commissioner himself was informed. When he heard of Huma's death, the mournful officer opened and read the sealed letter which his niece had given him, and instantly led a large detachment of armed men into the light-repellent gullies of the most wretched and disreputable part of the city.\n\nThe tongue of a malicious cat-burglar named Huma's fellow-conspirator; the finger of an ambitious bank-robber pointed at the house in which he lay concealed; and although S\u00edn managed to crawl through a hatch in the attic and attempt a roof-top escape, a bullet from the Deputy Commissioner's own rifle penetrated his stomach and brought him crashing messily to the ground at the feet of Huma's enraged uncle.\n\nFrom the dead thief's pocket rolled a vial of tinted glass, cased in filigree silver.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe recovery of the Prophet's hair was announced at once on All-India Radio. One month later, the valley's holiest men assembled at the Hazratbal mosque and formally authenticated the relic. It sits to this day in a closely guarded vault by the shores of the loveliest of lakes in the heart of the valley which was once closer than any other place on earth to Paradise.\n\n\u2014\n\nBut before our story can properly be concluded, it is necessary to record that when the four sons of the dead Sheikh awoke on the morning of his death, having unwittingly spent a few minutes under the same roof as the famous hair, they found that a miracle had occurred, that they were all sound of limb and strong of wind, as whole as they might have been if their father had not thought to smash their legs in the first hours of their lives. They were, all four of them, very properly furious, because the miracle had reduced their earning powers by 75 per cent, at the most conservative estimate; so they were ruined men.\n\nOnly the Sheikh's widow had some reason for feeling grateful, because although her husband was dead she had regained her sight, so that it was possible for her to spend her last days gazing once more upon the beauties of the valley of Kashmir.\nBOOKS BY\n\nSALMAN RUSHDIE\n\nEAST, WEST\n\nFrom the author of _The Satanic Verses_ comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical and humane, this book renews Rushdie's stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence.\n\nShort Stories\n\nTHE MOOR'S LAST SIGH\n\nBooker Prize\u2013winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes \"Moor\" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.\n\nFiction\n\nVINTAGE INTERNATIONAL\n\nAvailable wherever books are sold.\n\nwww.\u200bvintagebooks.\u200bcom\n\n# **HIGHLIGHTS FROM VINTAGE SHORTS**\n\n\u2666 **We Should All Be Feminists** by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie\n\n\u2666 **Moral Disorder: A Story** by Margaret Atwood\n\n\u2666 **The Outing** by James Baldwin\n\n\u2666 **Dallas: November 22, 1963** by Robert A. Caro\n\n\u2666 **Where Climate is Heading** by Climate Central\n\n\u2666 **Fifteen Poems** by Leonard Cohen\n\n\u2666 **Progress** by Katharine Graham\n\n\u2666 **How War Begins** by John Keegan\n\n\u2666 **The Vision** by Jonathan Lethem\n\n\u2666 **Provence in Ten Easy Lessons** by Peter Mayle\n\n\u2666 **Vissi d'Arte** by Lorrie Moore\n\n\u2666 **American Hunger** by Eli Saslow\n\n\u2666 **Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party** by Alexander McCall Smith\n\n\u2666 **A Market Tale** by Martin Walker\n\n**Find out more on the Vintage ShortsFacebook page**\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9781101973691\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. About the Author\n  3. Other Titles\n  4. Title Page\n  5. Copyright\n  6. Contents\n  7. The Prophet's Hair\n\n  1. \n  2. \n  3. \n  4. \n  5. \n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58.\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Cover\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Table of Contents\n  5. Start\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nMicrosoft\u00ae SQL Server\u00ae 2012\n\nMASTER DATA SERVICES\n\nSecond Edition\n\nAbout the Author\n\n**Tyler Graham** is Director of Industry Solutions for the Profisee Group. He moved to Profisee after completing the latest release of Master Data Services as a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft. He has spent over ten years in the data management space and is a frequent speaker at conferences. When he is not working on learning new industry, he is skiing, swimming, or hiking with his family.\n\nAbout the Technical Editor\n\n**Lynn Gasch** has worked in software development and testing for more than ten years. After completing degrees in computer science and mathematics at Virginia Tech, she hired on at a small Seattle office focused on artificial intelligence research, and tackled projects in diverse areas such as computer-based education, network monitoring and security, data mining, and information retrieval. She joined Microsoft four years ago and is currently a member of the SQL Server Master Data Services test team. When not working, Lynn and her family enjoy the recreational opportunities of the Pacific Northwest, and she will endeavor to stay off crutches next ski season. Lynn's review of this book was based on her own personal opinions, and not in her capacity as a Microsoft employee.\nMicrosoft\u00ae SQL Server\u00ae 2012\n\nMASTER DATA SERVICES\n\nSecond Edition\n\n**Tyler Graham**\n\nNew York Chicago San Francisco Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City Milan New Delhi San Juan Seoul Singapore Sydney Toronto\n\n|    \n---|---\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.\n\nISBN: 978-0-07-179786-3\n\nMHID: 0-07-179786-6\n\nThe material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: ISBN: 978-0-07-179785-6,\n\nMHID: 0-07-179785-8.\n\nMcGraw-Hill eBooks are available at special quantity discounts to use as premiums and sales promotions, or for use in corporate training programs. To contact a representative please e-mail us at bulksales@mcgraw-hill.com.\n\nAll trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Where such designations appear in this book, they have been printed with initial caps.\n\nInformation has been obtained by McGraw-Hill from sources believed to be reliable. However, because of the possibility of human or mechanical error by our sources, McGraw-Hill, or others, McGraw-Hill does not guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, or completeness of any information and is not responsible for any errors or omissions or the results obtained from the use of such information.\n\nTERMS OF USE\n\nThis is a copyrighted work and The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (\"McGrawHill\") and its licensors reserve all rights in and to the work. Use of this work is subject to these terms. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976 and the right to store and retrieve one copy of the work, you may not decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, reproduce, modify, create derivative works based upon, transmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, publish or sublicense the work or any part of it without McGraw-Hill's prior consent. You may use the work for your own noncommercial and personal use; any other use of the work is strictly prohibited. Your right to use the work may be terminated if you fail to comply with these terms.\n\nTHE WORK IS PROVIDED \"AS IS.\" McGRAW-HILL AND ITS LICENSORS MAKE NO GUARANTEES OR WARRANTIES AS TO THE ACCURACY, ADEQUACY OR COMPLETENESS OF OR RESULTS TO BE OBTAINED FROM USING THE WORK, INCLUDING ANY INFORMATION THAT CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH THE WORK VIA HYPERLINK OR OTHERWISE, AND EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. McGraw-Hill and its licensors do not warrant or guarantee that the functions contained in the work will meet your requirements or that its operation will be uninterrupted or error free. Neither McGraw-Hill nor its licensors shall be liable to you or anyone else for any inaccuracy, error or omission, regardless of cause, in the work or for any damages resulting therefrom. McGraw-Hill has no responsibility for the content of any information accessed through the work. Under no circumstances shall McGraw-Hill and\/or its licensors be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, consequential or similar damages that result from the use of or inability to use the work, even if any of them has been advised of the possibility of such damages. This limitation of liability shall apply to any claim or cause whatsoever whether such claim or cause arises in contract, tort or otherwise.\nDedicated to Tera, who made all of this possible.\nContents at a Glance\n\n Chapter 1 **Introduction to Master Data Services**\n\n Chapter 2 **Installation and Configuration**\n\n Chapter 3 **Starting an MDS Project**\n\n Chapter 4 **Creating Your Model**\n\n Chapter 5 **Integrating Master Data Services with Other Systems**\n\n Chapter 6 **Working with Hierarchies and Collections**\n\n Chapter 7 **Working with Master Data**\n\n Chapter 8 **Using Business Rules**\n\n Chapter 9 **Creating Versions of Data**\n\nChapter 10 **SQL Server 2012 MDS Add-in for Excel**\n\nChapter 11 **Implementing Security**\n\nChapter 12 **Publishing Data to External Systems**\n\nChapter 13 **Extending MDS with Web Services**\n\nChapter 14 **Advanced Modeling**\n\n**Index**\nContents\n\nForeword\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nIntroduction\n\nChapter 1 **Introduction to Master Data Services**\n\nWhat Is Master Data Management?\n\nHistory of Master Data Management\n\nOverview of Other Master Data Management Solutions\n\nERP Systems as MDM Solutions\n\nSpecialized Master Data Management Solutions\n\nCatering to the Titans\n\nMicrosoft's Solution to Master Data Management\n\nNew Features of MDS in SQL Server 2012\n\nWhat Master Data Services Still Delivers\n\nThe Value Proposition\n\nAbout the Sample Company\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 2 **Installation and Configuration**\n\nDetermining the Initial Scope of Your Project\n\nAbout the Main Street Clothing Company Implementation.\n\nPreparing the Web Server\n\nWindows 7 Web Application Requirements\n\nWindows Server 2008 R2 Web Application Requirements\n\nInstalling Master Data Services\n\nAbout MDS Configuration Manager\n\nProcedure: How to Install Master Data Services\n\nCreating an MDS Database\n\nProcedure: How to Create an MDS Database\n\nAbout System Settings\n\nCreating the Master Data Manager Web Application\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Master Data Manager Website (Optional)\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Master Data Manager Web Application\n\nProcedure: How to Associate the MDS Database with the Web Application\n\nSecuring Your Web Application\n\nGetting the Latest Version of MDS\n\nUpgrading 2008 R2 MDS\n\nRepairing the MDS Database\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 3 **Starting an MDS Project**\n\nHow Do I Know Master Data When I See It?\n\nBusiness Process Models\n\nSystem Roles\n\nSystem of Entry\n\nSystem of Record\n\nSubscribing System\n\nMapping the Data\n\nDetermining What to Do with Duplicate Records\n\nDetermining Which Attributes to Manage\n\nThe Main Street Clothing Company Example\n\nFinding a Data Steward\n\nLeveraging the Business Process Models\n\nFilling in the Gaps\n\nDetermining System Types\n\nCleansing Data for Initial Import into MDS\n\nLeveraging the MDS Excel Add-In to Manage Your Project\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 4 **Creating Your Model**\n\nMDS Modeling Concepts\n\nBuilding a Model\n\nDeploying a Model\n\nProcedure: How to Deploy a Model Using ModelDeploy.exe\n\nAbout Models\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Models\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Model\n\nAbout Entities\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Entities\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Entity\n\nAbout Members\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Members\n\nProcedure: How to Add a Member\n\nAbout Attributes\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Attributes\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Attribute\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Domain-Based Attribute\n\nAbout Attribute Groups\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Attribute Groups\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Attribute Group\n\nProcedure: How to Reorder Attribute Groups\n\nUsing Web Services\n\nCreating a Model\n\nCreating an Entity\n\nCreating an Attribute\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 5 **Integrating Master Data Services with Other Systems**\n\nStaging Architecture\n\nBenefits of Entity-Based Staging\n\nBatch Tags\n\nSecurity in Staging\n\nSystem Settings\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Staging Process\n\nStandard Leaf and Parent Staging Fields\n\nStaging Import Types\n\nMember Staging Examples\n\nUsing Staging to Deactivate Members\n\nLoading Relationships\n\nRelationship Table Fields\n\nRelationship Staging Examples\n\nImporting Data into the Staging Tables\n\nProcedure: How to Import Data into SQL Server by Using SSIS\n\nInitiating the Staging Process\n\nProcedure: How to Use Master Data Manager to Initiate the Staging Process\n\nProcedure: How to Use Stored Procedures to Initiate the Staging Process\n\nThe End of Staging Sweep\n\nUsing Web Services to Stage Data\n\nErrors That Occur During Staging\n\nProcedure: How to View Staging Errors in Management Studio\n\nStaging Errors View\n\nViewing the Staging Batch Table\n\nProcedure: How to Clear the Staging Queue\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 6 **Working with Hierarchies and Collections**\n\nRagged vs Level-Based Hierarchies\n\nDerived Hierarchies\n\nExplicit Hierarchies\n\nDerived vs Explicit: Which Hierarchy Is Best?\n\nCreating Derived Hierarchies\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Derived Hierarchy\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Three-Level Derived Hierarchy\n\nHiding Levels\n\nSystem Settings for Hierarchies\n\nCreating Explicit Hierarchies\n\nNon-mandatory Explicit Hierarchies\n\nMandatory Explicit Hierarchies\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Explicit Hierarchy\n\nRecursive Hierarchies\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Recursive Hierarchy\n\nDerived Hierarchies with Explicit Caps\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Derived Hierarchy with Explicit Cap\n\nCollections\n\nWeighting of Collection Members\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Collection\n\nCreating Hierarchies by Using Web Services\n\nCreating a Derived Hierarchy with \u00bathe MetadataCreate Operation\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 7 **Working with Master Data**\n\nChanges in SQL Server 2012\n\nViewing the Base Entity\n\nFinding Data by Filtering\n\nOperators\n\nUsing Matching\n\nSorting and Pagination\n\nSorting\n\nPagination and Other Settings\n\nNew Explorer Format\n\nEdit One Attribute for One Member\n\nEdit One Attribute for Multiple Members\n\nExporting Members\n\nWorking with Data in Hierarchies\n\nMoving Members by Dragging and Dropping\n\nMoving Members by Using the Clipboard\n\nMoving Members in a Derived Hierarchy by Updating Attribute Values\n\nTransactions\n\nReviewing Transactions\n\nReversing Transactions\n\nAnnotations\n\nAnnotating Transactions on Update\n\nNavigating Related Entities\n\nNavigating Attributes\n\nNavigating Many-to-Many Relationships\n\nMetadata\n\nUsing Web Services to Work with Members\n\nRetrieving Members\n\nCreating and Updating Members\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 8 **Using Business Rules**\n\nBusiness Rules Overview\n\nBusiness Rule Structure\n\nBusiness Rule Workflow\n\nCreating a Business Rule\n\nEditing a Business Rule and Configuring a Rule's Expression\n\nProcedure: How to Require Attribute Values\n\nDeleting a Condition or Action\n\nMore Expression Examples\n\nCreating Your Own Expressions\n\nPublishing Business Rules\n\nProcedure: How to Publish a Business Rule\n\nBusiness Rule Statuses\n\nApplying Business Rules\n\nProcedure: How to Apply Business Rules in Explorer\n\nResolving Validation Issues in Explorer\n\nProcedure: How to Validate a Version\n\nOther Business Rule Tasks\n\nProcedure: How to Change the Rule Name and Description\n\nProcedure: How to Set the Rule's Priority Order\n\nProcedure: How to Exclude Business Rules\n\nConfiguring E-Mail Notifications\n\nProcedure: How to Configure E-Mail Notifications\n\nProcedure: How to Configure a Business Rule to Send E-Mail\n\nCreating and Triggering Workflows\n\nCreating a Workflow in MDS\n\nViewing Change Tracking Group Reports\n\nTriggering an External Workflow\n\nUsing Web Services to Manage Business Rules\n\nGetting a List of Rules\n\nCreating a Business Rule using Web Services\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 9 **Creating Versions of Data**\n\nVersions Overview\n\nChanging the Structure of Your Model\n\nCommitting Versions\n\nVersioning for Main Street Clothing Company\n\nUpdating Your Version Name and Description\n\nProcedure: How to Change the Version Name and Description\n\nVersion Statuses\n\nProcedure: How to Lock a Version\n\nValidating a Version\n\nProcedure: How to Validate a Version\n\nProcedure: How to Resolve Validation Issues\n\nReviewing and Reversing Transactions\n\nCommitting and Copying a Version\n\nProcedure: How to Commit a Version\n\nProcedure: How to Reopen a Committed Version\n\nProcedure: How to Copy a Version\n\nVersion Flags\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Version Flag and Assign It to a Version\n\nViewing a Version's Ancestry\n\nProcedure: How to Delete a Version\n\nUsing Web Services to Work with Versions\n\nReturning a List of Versions\n\nChanging the Version Status\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 10 **SQL Server 2012 MDS Add-in for Excel**\n\nInstalling the Add-in\n\nProcedure: How to Install the Add-in for Excel\n\nWorking with MDS Data in Excel\n\nProcedure: How to Connect to the MDS Server and Load an Entity\n\nPublishing Changes\n\nRefreshing Data from the Server\n\nReviewing Transactions\n\nMaking Deletions in Managed Sheets\n\nCombining Data\n\nApplying Rules\n\nFiltering Entity Results Members\n\nProcedure: How to Load a Filtered Entity\n\nSaving and Sharing Queries\n\nProcedure: How to Save a Filter Query and Share It Through Outlook\n\nCreating and Modifying Entities Rapidly\n\nUsing the Excel Add-In at the Main Street Clothing Company\n\nProcedure: How to Create an MDS Entity from Excel Data\n\nMaking Changes to an Existing Entity\n\nProcedure: How to Modify an Existing Entity's Structure\n\nConfiguring Add-in for Excel Settings\n\nConfiguring Data Settings\n\nConfiguring Behavior Settings\n\nLeveraging Data Quality Matching in Excel\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 11 **Implementing Security**\n\nSecurity Overview\n\nSecurity Changes in SQL Server 2012\n\nUsers and Groups\n\nProcedure: How to Add a Group\n\nAdministrators\n\nProcedure: How to Change the Administrator Account\n\nTesting Permissions\n\nFunctional Area Permissions\n\nProcedure: How to Assign Functional Area Permissions\n\nModel Object Permissions\n\nQuick Facts About Model Object Permissions\n\nBest Practice for Model Object Permissions\n\nProcedure: How to Assign Model Object Permissions\n\nProcedure: How to Delete Model Object Permissions\n\nAccess to Entities\n\nAccess to Leaf Member Attributes\n\nAccess to Individual Attributes\n\nAccess to an Explicit Hierarchy\n\nAccess to Collections\n\nAccess to Other Model Objects\n\nDeny Permissions\n\nNavigational Access\n\nDeleting Permissions\n\nHierarchy Member Permissions\n\nQuick Facts About Hierarchy Member Permissions\n\nProcedure: How to Assign Hierarchy Member Permissions\n\nDetermining Which Permissions Apply\n\nCombining Permissions\n\nCombining Users and Groups\n\nSetting Security by Using Web Services\n\nRetrieving Users and Groups\n\nRetrieving User or Group Permissions\n\nAdding Users and Groups\n\nAssigning Permissions\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 12 **Publishing Data to External Systems**\n\nExporting Data to Subscribing Systems\n\nSubscription View Formats\n\nCommon View Architecture\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Subscription View8\n\nViewing a Subscription View in SQL Server\n\nSubscription Views and Model Deployment\n\nCreating a Subscription View with Web Services\n\nCreating Entity Views\n\nCreating Derived Hierarchy Views\n\nDeleting Views\n\nHow Main Street Clothing Company Uses Subscription Views\n\nProcedure: How to Export Subscription View Data\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 13 **Extending MDS with Web Services**\n\nExposing the Web Service\n\nExposing the WSDL\n\nProcedure: How to Enable the WSDL\n\nCreating an MDS Project in Visual Studio\n\nProcedure: How to Create an MDS Web Service Application\n\nCreating an Abstraction Layer\n\nMDS Web Service Operations\n\nMembers\n\nBulk Operations\n\nValidation\n\nTransactions\n\nAnnotations\n\nSubscription Views\n\nMetadata Structures\n\nSecurity\n\nBusiness Rules\n\nSystem Settings\n\nUser Preferences\n\nMiscellaneous Operations\n\nEntity-Based Staging Operations\n\nData Quality Operations\n\nThe Most Frequently Used Operations\n\nSearching for Members\n\nUnderstanding the EntityMembers Object\n\nSummarizing Member Data\n\nWorking with Metadata\n\nValidating Records in MD\n\nManaging Transactions\n\nHandling Errors in the Web Service\n\nSummary\n\nChapter 14 **Advanced Modeling**\n\nCommon Modeling Mistakes\n\nBuilding Outside Limitations into MDS\n\nTrouble Identifying Common Attributes\n\nEngineering Dead Scenarios\n\nRapid Model Development\n\nManaging Slowly Changing Dimensions\n\nOverwriting Rows (Type 1)\n\nAdding Rows (Type 2)\n\nAdding Columns (Type 3)\n\nUsing the Power of MDS to Simplify the Problem\n\nManaging Dimension for Main Street Clothing Company\n\nLimiting Unneeded Complexity\n\nDesigning for Exceptions\n\nDesigning for _N_\n\nSummary\n\n**Index**\nForeword\n\nIn the last few weeks I have received duplicate mailings from my bank. My doctor confused my records with another patient, also \"D. Farmer.\" A carrier delivered a ceiling fan, ordered online, with a remote control that does not match it; and the next day delivered a pair of shoes of the right brand, the right color, the right size, but the wrong model.\n\nI doubt that I am especially unlucky: we have all had similar experiences. The retailers, manufacturers, and service providers on the other side of these mishaps all have something in common\u2014problems with _master data_.\n\nThat these problems are so familiar is a sign that they are pervasive. And over the years we, in the world of data management, have tried to solve them in many ways. We created reference data sets, but often ended up with multiple reference sets covering the same field confusingly. We built data warehouses to drive reporting and analytics, and thought to use them as our \"single version of the truth.\" However, the data warehouse was populated and maintained on a different cycle, and for different purposes, than our line-of-business applications, and the data was not a suitable source for operational use.\n\nIn recent years, however, a body of practice has emerged that is aptly named \"master data management,\" or MDM. Practitioners don't stop at just compiling a reference data set, but implement architectures, data-driven processes, practices, and policies that oversee the entire lifecycle of data.\n\nTyler Graham has been at the forefront of this new practice. Tyler has seen the start of the master data management movement as a consultant solving complex issues for enterprise customers. He has also worked on software solutions, with the vendor Stratature, building an agile and effective MDM solution. More recently, Tyler has been at Microsoft building their Master Data Services platform, which brings master data capabilities to every user of the SQL Server database.\n\nSo, I don't think you could find a more able author to introduce you to Microsoft SQL Server's Master Data Services. This book covers everything you need to know: identifying systems that source or require master data; handling the data itself; establishing roles and practices for the \"data stewards\" and others who manage the processes; and naturally there is a wealth of practical advice on the Master Data Services platform itself.\n\nYou'll find this book to be an invaluable guide to a challenging subject area, and a fascinating technology.\n\n_\u2013Donald Farmer_\n\nProduct Advocate for QlikView, QlikTech\nAcknowledgments\n\nI would like to thank the entire MDS team for a great second release. Let me give a shout out to Val Lovicz, who provided great feedback on Chapter 14. I would like to thank my wife and kids for their patience while I was writing this, as many commitments suffered accordingly.\n\n_\u2014Tyler Graham_\nIntroduction\n\nThe release of SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services was the beginning of a new, more accessible era for master data management (MDM); SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services is this vision realized. Because of price and complexity, most solutions on the market today are geared toward large corporations and require dedicated consulting teams to implement. MDS, a feature of SQL Server Enterprise Edition, was built to democratize this process, providing MDM capabilities to a larger audience for a fraction of the price. MDS is meant to be rapidly deployed to any size organization and can solve a variety of master data challenges. The MDS Add-in for Microsoft Excel provides a paradigm shift in master data management by bringing it to the Information Worker (IW) tool of choice.\n\nThis book is intended for anyone interested in the features of MDS. It is meant to be used as an introduction, a learning tool, a training guide, and a reference manual. Even if you have no experience with MDS, each chapter builds on the previous chapter, so by the end of the book, you should be able to complete a majority of the tasks needed for a working MDS implementation. If you are a consultant with prior experience in the MDM market, you should find value in the product overview and web service examples, which allow you to adapt your existing MDM practice to support MDS.\n\nMaster Data Services is composed of some simple-to-understand components that can be used in a variety of ways. In order to provide the clearest understanding for new users, most of the book shows examples of standard, straightforward implementations. Complex examples and edge cases have been omitted from the book to avoid confusing the message. These complex topics are addressed in various resources you can find on the Internet, including the MDS team blog, www.mdsmodeler.com, and www.mdsuser.com.\n\nWhat You'll Learn in this Book\n\nThe intent of this book is to get you up and running with MDS. By reading it, you should become familiar with MDS-specific terminology (models, entities, attributes) and learn how to use MDS to solve your business problems. Each chapter introduces you to basic concepts, shows you how to use the Master Data Manager web application to perform related tasks, and gives you examples to complete the related tasks programmatically by using the web service.\n\nWhile the book provides advice on how to create a solution specific to your organization, implementing any MDM solution requires buy-in from many people across the organization. Doing the work to create models that will work for you and getting agreement that the MDS system is truly the system of record is more than half the battle. The book hopes to give you the confidence to approach your organization's MDM issues with a solid knowledge of how to implement and manage an MDM solution by using SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services.\n\nChapter 1: Introduction to Master Data Services\n\nThis chapter introduces the field of master data management and discusses its history. It explores the variety of popular MDM solutions and compares them to the Microsoft Master Data Services solution.\n\nChapter 2: Installation and Configuration\n\nThis chapter helps you consider the scope of your MDS implementation, and then gives you the steps to install and configure MDS. This chapter has a list of the Windows features and roles you must install before you can configure the Master Data Manager web application. This chapter also provides information about updating a prior instance of Master Data Services.\n\nChapter 3: Starting an MDS Project\n\nThis chapter gives you more in-depth ideas about how MDS will fit into your organization. Before you begin working with the product, it is important to spend quality time determining your organization's master data management needs. This chapter also includes information about how to deal with duplicate records and data cleansing.\n\nChapter 4: Creating Your Model\n\nIn this chapter, you start building a model. This chapter explains how to deploy the sample models that are included when you install MDS. This chapter also provides a start-to-finish walkthrough for creating the primary model objects. At the end of this chapter, you will have created a complete product model and should be able to understand the relationships between the MDS model objects.\n\nChapter 5: Integrating Master Data Services with Other Systems\n\nThis chapter explains how to load master data into MDS so that users can begin to manage it. This chapter introduces the database staging tables and the format required for importing data into the tables. It presents sample data, as well as procedures for loading the data and initiating the staging process, which imports the data into the correct tables in the MDS database.\n\nChapter 6: Working with Hierarchies and Collections\n\nThis chapter introduces the different types of MDS hierarchies: explicit and derived. After a brief introduction, you are led through the creation of some sample hierarchies. This chapter also shows variations on these hierarchies, which address specific business cases. This chapter also introduces the concept of collections and shows you how to create one. Finally, code samples show you how to use the web service to work with hierarchies.\n\nChapter 7: Working with Master Data\n\nThis chapter is intended for users who need to work with master data on a daily basis. It details the new Explorer UI in SQL Server 2012 and new features for data exploration and update. This chapter shows you how to filter data to find what you need, how to edit your data, and how to work with data in hierarchies. In addition, you learn how to review and reverse the transactions that are recorded whenever a user changes data. You also learn how to annotate transactions and data, which can be useful for change tracking. Finally, this chapter includes samples for using the web service to retrieve and update data.\n\nChapter 8: Using Business Rules\n\nThis chapter shows you how to create and configure business rules, and then how to publish them and apply them to data. You are shown how to configure e-mail notifications, how to use business rules to create internal workflows, and how to use business rules to trigger external workflows. Finally, code samples show how to use web services to interact with business rules.\n\nChapter 9: Creating Versions of Data\n\nIn this chapter, you learn how to change a version name and description. You learn about saving versions of your data (rather than your model structure), and about what it means to lock and commit a version. This chapter explains how to validate a version against business rules, how to flag a version of your data for subscribing systems or users, and how to determine where a version of data came from. And like all chapters, web service examples are provided.\n\nChapter 10: SQL Server 2012 MDS Add-in for Excel\n\nThis chapter introduces the new SQL Server 2012 \"killer app\" for Master Data Services, the MDS Add-in for Microsoft Excel. This utility will change the way companies approach master data. This chapter explains how to leverage Excel to make batch updates to existing MDS data and how to create new entities from data stored in regular Excel spreadsheets.\n\nChapter 11: Implementing Security\n\nThis chapter covers how to configure the granular level of security provided by MDS. There have been a number of simplifications made to the MDS security model in the latest release. This chapter explains how to add users and groups, how to configure administrators to have more permissions than the average user, and how to test permissions to ensure you've configured them correctly. This chapter explains the difference between functional area permissions, model object permissions, and hierarchy member permissions. It also explains which permissions apply when overlapping assignments are made. Finally, web service examples show how to set security.\n\nChapter 12: Publishing Data to External Systems\n\nThis chapter explains the concept of subscription views, which are standard SQL views that you create from within MDS. This chapter shows how to use these SQL views to export data to systems outside of MDS.\n\nChapter 13: Extending MDS with Web Services\n\nThis chapter shows you how to enable the web service. It includes a summary of all operations and gives you a basic idea of the use of each. It also includes additional code samples that weren't provided in other chapters, including how to search for members, return member counts, validate data, get and reverse transactions, and handle errors.\n\nChapter 14: Advanced Modeling\n\nThis chapter discusses some advanced modeling techniques to help users get more out of their Master Data Services application. Working with the field, I have seen a number of common errors occur when people build their MDS models. This chapter is labeled advanced to indicate not all users may be able to fully utilize the information in this chapter.\n\nAbout the Sample Company\n\nThroughout this book we use a fictional company called \"Main Street Clothing Company.\" We envision this company to be a small clothing retailer, just large enough to have a corporate office and manage its own IT. We thought that using one single continuous example would be the most successful way to demonstrate MDS concepts to the uninitiated. MDS was built and priced to provide a solution that can truly solve MDM issues for companies of all sizes, and we wanted to provide a complete example for this new emerging market. No matter the size of your business, many if not all of the concepts explained using Main Street Clothing Company should be applicable to your situation.\n\nAbout the Sample Data\n\nIn many chapters of the book, we mention www.mdsuser.com. We created this site to give you sample data to use as you go through the chapters in the book. Our intention was to give you two common models\u2014Product and Finance\u2014that you could experiment with while reading the book, and then modify in any way you want. These models are not meant to be taken too seriously\u2014they are samples that we put together with the hope that it is easier to learn something when you can see a real-world example. MDS can be used for any domain you care to manage; it's not restricted to lists of customers or products, but these domains provide you with a frame of reference.\n\nYou should always feel free to deploy these models, update them to your heart's content, and then delete them and start over. In the writing of this book, we've created and deleted our model dozens of times, and the only recourse is that we lost track of what we were doing from time to time. Until you've seriously solidified your MDS solution, you should feel free to push MDS to its limits and seek help when you're stuck. There is a community of committed users on the MDS forums on MSDN; the forums are often a good place to start when you're troubleshooting.\n\nIn this book we also provide code samples that illustrate the more common procedures described in each chapter. Chapter 13 is devoted completely to how to programmatically interact with MDS. All of the code samples in the book are available electronically at www.MHProfessional.com\/computingdownload and at www.mdsmodeler.com. These samples are free and are meant to be used in support of the book. We truly hope you find the samples and this book useful and that you achieve success with your MDM implementation.\nChapter 1\n\nIntroduction to Master Data Services\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  What Is Master Data Management?\n\n  History of Master Data Management\n\n  Overview of Other Master Data Management Solutions\n\n  Microsoft's Solution to Master Data Management\n\n  About the Sample Company\n\nMaster Data Services (MDS) is Microsoft's solution for managing master data. In the past, master data management (MDM) has been a highly problematic area for database administrators. To help you understand better how MDS addresses the inherent challenges of MDM, this chapter begins by explaining what MDM encompasses and how it has been handled historically. It then introduces you to MDM solutions other than MDS and explains their shortcomings so that you can fully appreciate the features and functionality of MDS, which is introduced in the latter half of the chapter. The chapter wraps up by introducing you to the sample company we'll be using throughout the rest of the book and describing some of its business problems that a master data management solution is meant to solve.\n\nWhat Is Master Data Management?\n\nMaster data management (MDM) is the management of the nontransactional data within an organization. Throughout the book we will use the terms organization, business, and company interchangeably. The definition of \"master\" data varies by organization, but can be loosely defined as the nouns that describe all business processes. These nouns might be organization-specific data, like your organization's list of products or list of employees. Or the nouns might be common reference data provided by an external service provider or government agency, like address information or a Dunn & Bradstreet (D-U-N-S\u00ae) number. Although customer and product are the two most commonly managed domains, many businesses find value in managing additional domains, such as wells and fields at big oil companies and recipes at food manufacturers.\n\nNOTE\n\n_When we discuss MDM, we often use the word_ domain. _We use this overloaded word to mean a group of related business data that is an area of focus for an MDM solution\u2014for example, accounts or customers._\n\nIn most businesses, customers buy products or services. Because customer relationships are essential, each time a customer buys a product or service, the transaction is recorded. After the transaction is recorded and coded properly, the details of the transaction will never change. MDM is about managing the relationships between these static transactions, rather than the transactions themselves. For example, for a retail chain, each store has a certain group of products in its inventory and a database of registered customers. The list of products available to sell and the list of customer addresses are master data. That Sally bought four shirts on Friday is a transaction.\n\nThe more often this data is required for a transaction, the greater its importance to your organization. Central management of this data helps identify data discrepancies between multiple transactional systems and helps your organization run more efficiently.\n\nMaster data management is composed of the following:\n\n  The business policies (who owns the data, where the data lives, and so forth)\n\n  The processes (how the data is updated)\n\n  The technological tools that facilitate these processes\n\nBy definition, all companies must utilize some form of MDM, although the term generally refers to the implementation of formalized processes and specifically designed tools.\n\nHistory of Master Data Management\n\nWhen companies began using computer applications to manage information, in order to perform tasks and generate results, all pertinent data had to be loaded into each application directly. Over time, companies adopted more applications and had to enter the same dataset into each of them. As a response to this, developers began to employ the technique of creating master files that stored key, reusable data for use within each application. These initial master files were the first MDM systems.\n\nOnce the master data was loaded into each application, new records would be added in the application or to the master list, the result of which was that the two sets of data were no longer in sync. Early data reconciliation efforts were time consuming and costly. Very few tools existed that could identify differences and manage duplicate records.\n\nEnterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were then created to help combine the data in these systems and to solve the constant need for integration between systems. ERP systems were meant to be single software suites that managed standard business processes within an organization. Each module in an ERP system could leverage the common master data tables required for the associated business process. Many organizations today consider the master data tables within their ERP systems to be the \"master\" data within their organization.\n\nAs more and more organizations adopted ERP systems, they realized that using these single systems in isolation was an unrealistic solution. They then adopted multiple ERP systems, and their master data problems re-emerged. Specialized systems designed to manage the most problematic domains became major implementations in larger organizations. Now there is a push in the industry to provide solutions that can solve MDM issues across a wide variety of domains.\n\nOverview of Other Master Data Management Solutions\n\nAll organizations must deal with their MDM issues. Whether managing domains in Excel spreadsheets or managing them with a specialized solution, a key role of the IT department in any size organization today is to provide processes for managing master data and integrating it across all systems. Various solutions other than MDS are available, but each has weaknesses that are addressed by MDS.\n\nAs explained in the following sections, ERP solutions have several drawbacks as MDM solutions; other specialized solutions can prove to be too specialized; and MDM solutions typically cater to only the biggest organizations. As you will read later in the chapter, in MDS, Microsoft hopes to provide an adaptable solution that can cater to organizations of all sizes.\n\nERP Systems as MDM Solutions\n\nWhile ERP systems are a significant consumer of master data, using these systems by themselves to manage master data has major drawbacks. Also, the initial vision that a single ERP system would handle all of the computing needs of an organization was shortsighted.\n\nERP Systems Are Not Specialized or Innovative\n\nWhile many ERP systems contain modules for most common business processes, a specific industry need or the need for more innovative software leads businesses to implement additional systems. Integration of these new systems with current IT infrastructure and business processes becomes a major implementation cost of any new system.\n\nERP Systems Do Not Play Well with Others\n\nWhen a company merges with or acquires another company, it inherits additional ERP systems. Since these systems are highly customized and not initially designed for easy integration, additional processes must be created to ensure that these systems are synchronized across the organization. The complexities of these software systems and the underlying data models make successful integration, or even effective synchronization, extremely difficult for large organizations. When Tyler moved across the country for work, it was impossible for his electronic bank accounts at a nationwide bank to move with him because each of the bank's regions was on its own system. Imagine, it was easier to move the contents of a house 3000 miles than to move a set of data and transactions that would fit on a thumb drive.\n\nERP Systems Do Not Manage Analytical Dimensions Effectively\n\nThe need for complex modeling and analysis of transactional data to determine statistics and trends has led companies to create advanced online analytical processing (OLAP) systems and associated data warehouses to go along with them. These systems have added new, complex data modeling needs that simply are not supported in legacy applications. Hierarchies and other consolidations are not natively managed by ERP systems.\n\nERP Systems Are Not Designed to Manage Attributes\n\nMany ERP system vendors realize that users will want to store additional attributes in their master tables. To accommodate this, they provide a few custom fields for customers to use as they see fit. These custom fields get overloaded with information without providing any validation of appropriate use.\n\nSpecialized Master Data Management Solutions\n\nAs you would suspect, the most common domains for management are those domains most troublesome to large organizations. Specialized systems have been created to manage these domains, with many features designed directly for them. These systems are designed to manage a single domain and don't translate well to other master data problems. The two most common types of specialized solutions for managing master data are customer data integration and product information management.\n\nCustomer Data Integration\n\nCustomer data integration (CDI) solutions are designed to provide a standard view of customers across an organization. Some CDI solutions accomplish this as a single system that centralizes customer data across an enterprise. Other solutions manage the integration of multiple ERP systems and additional systems through a registry approach. These solutions manage customer IDs from multiple systems to ensure synchronization and to provide a consistent view of each customer.\n\nA central feature of CDI solutions is the ability to identify and manage duplicate customer records. Other common features include address correction and standardization and the ability to integrate with service organizations to further enrich business-specific customer knowledge. CDI implementations tend to incorporate most systems within an enterprise and focus on a relatively small subset of attributes.\n\nCompanies with customer management problems will certainly benefit from a CDI implementation. Unfortunately, these features do not translate well to managing other domains across the enterprise such as organization or product.\n\nProduct Information Management\n\nProduct information management (PIM) solutions are designed for the product domain. There are fewer PIM solutions than CDI solutions, and PIM solutions tend to focus on specific industries. Most PIM solutions centralize product data management and provide integration to many distribution systems. These solutions tend to be implemented in large retailers and wholesalers that need to manage multiple sales channels for large product catalogs. Management of online catalogs and integration with standardized product channels are some specialized features of PIM solutions.\n\nAgain, these systems are highly effective to solve a narrow band of problems. These systems do not translate well to additional domains. Very few providers have solutions in both the CDI and PIM spaces.\n\nCatering to the Titans\n\nHistorically, vendors of MDM solutions have catered to the needs of Fortune 500 companies. Until recently, the MDM market was dominated by complex and expensive applications that generate large amounts of consulting dollars to trained implementers. These companies generally have the means and the budget to pay for the consulting time and tools that comprise an MDM solution. These solutions are tied to either a specific domain or a feature set that supports one domain better than others. These solutions are expensive and are built to solve a unique set of issues in large organizations. The size and complexity of these engagements has led many of these projects to end in failure.\n\nThe MDM market's focus on Fortune 500 companies doesn't mean that small and midsize companies don't face similar issues with managing their data. Any organization that's attempting to store critical data in multiple systems or spreadsheets and having trouble determining a true version of its master data is in need of an MDM solution.\n\nThe costs associated with MDM solutions and the high risk of failure in self-deploying such solutions leave a large portion of the small and midsize business market underserved. Out of necessity, many of these businesses are using Excel spreadsheets or internally designed systems to manage master data. These systems typically neglect the need for security, central management, and versioning.\n\nMicrosoft's Solution to Master Data Management\n\nMicrosoft first shipped Master Data Services with SQL Server 2008 R2. That release was largely about Microsoft entering the MDM market and beginning to shape the discussion around MDM. It also provided an opportunity for Microsoft to begin building channels for partners that both implement the solution and create additional applications on top of MDS. In effect, the first release was about getting into the game. The second release is about changing the rules. In SQL Server 2012, MDS looks to redefine the MDM market, expanding the types of data stored and easing the barriers to managing that data. This section provides a quick overview of the new MDS features in SQL Server 2012 as well as the features carried forward from SQL Server 2008 R2.\n\nNew Features of MDS in SQL Server 2012\n\nMicrosoft has added a number of new features to increase the usability and applicability of MDS.\n\nMDS Add-In for Microsoft Excel\n\nWell before the original version of MDS shipped with SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft had the most widely used MDM tool in the market: Excel. More master data is stored within Excel worksheets than any other tool on the market. The new SQL Server Master Data Services Add-in for Microsoft Excel will enable owners of this data to continue to leverage all of the features of Excel that they know and love as they move their data from the desktop to the server. Chapter 10 provides a tutorial on the new Add-in for Excel.\n\nEntity-Based Staging\n\nWhile the original MDS staging process is available in this release, a new staging schema will contain a new staging table for each created entity. These tables provide a far more intuitive process for loading bulk data into MDS. This new process will be described in Chapter 5.\n\nWhat Master Data Services Still Delivers\n\nMDS provides a number of features that facilitate central management of master data while providing greater access to the editors and consumers of this information.\n\nDomain Agnostic\n\nMDS is not designed for a specific domain. Any data type and virtually any data schema can be supported by the MDS system. Chapter 3 discusses how to map your organization's systems and determine how MDS might best suit your needs. Chapter 4 shows you how to create your models, entities, and attributes, which are the core MDS objects.\n\nHierarchy Management\n\nExcel- and IT-developed applications are notoriously bad at representing hierarchical data. Specialized controls and multiple hierarchy types in MDS provide effective and flexible management of business hierarchies. Chapter 6 shows you how to create hierarchies and collections.\n\nWeb-Based UI\n\nA web-based user interface (UI) provides access to a large user base without the need for installing software on numerous machines. As intranet access becomes more portable, mobile device access can be integrated into the MDM story. Chapter 7 provides instructions for business users to help them work with data in the Master Data Manager web application, which is the primary place where business users will interact with the data.\n\nTransaction Logging\n\nEven with a robust security model, it is essential to provide an audit trail of changes. MDS provides a filterable transaction log to ensure a manageable history of changes. Chapter 7 explains how to view and reverse transactions. It also explains how to annotate transactions so users can explain why they made changes to the master data.\n\nData Validation\n\nMany master data lists require additional validation to ensure certain fields are populated in specific cases. Business Rules can provide users with a proactive monitoring process to ensure data validity before these lists are used in process systems. Chapter 8 shows you how to create business rules and set up notifications to users of Master Data Services.\n\nVersioning\n\nMany domains require snapshots of different points in time to be maintained. With MDS, each model can be versioned, which allows users to tag specific versions for subscribing systems. Chapter 9 shows you how to create versions of a model and how to flag versions for subscribing systems.\n\nSecurity\n\nThe ability to control access at the entity, attribute, and record levels allows IT to empower business stewards to update data in a single centralized tool without risking unauthorized changes. Chapter 11 shows you how to implement security.\n\nThe Value Proposition\n\nThe MDS system is built to be rapidly deployed for any domain within an organization. Once deployed, all models support additional customization without complex coding or reconfiguration. The intent is to make MDM software more accessible to small and midsize businesses, and to aid departments of large companies in creating solutions for themselves. While MDS provides a rich web services platform for system integration, enabling you to use web services to create your own custom user interface, you do not need to use web services to take advantage of what MDS has to offer. An MDS implementation can be completed successfully by business users with no programming knowledge.\n\nAbout the Sample Company\n\nIn an effort to provide context to the features of MDS, all of our examples are based on a fictitious children's clothing company called Main Street Clothing Company. This company is a regional retailer with stores in three states.\n\nFor the past ten years the company has been in an expansion phase; it has a novel store layout and, with the bankruptcy of a competitor, it has grown to 13 locations. As the economic environment has cooled, the company is looking to manage costs and understand its business better.\n\nAn IT study early in the year determined that a new ERP implementation would be cost prohibitive and that the company would be best served by committing to its current IT infrastructure for a minimum of five years. Figure 1-1 shows the overall IT infrastructure.\n\n**Figure 1-1** _System architecture for Main Street Clothing Company_\n\nIn the ERP study, a number of inefficiencies and poor business processes were identified:\n\n  While the purchasing department was able to track merchandise purchases through purchase orders added to the financial system, contacts and specifics were being managed in a number of Excel spreadsheets. When the purchasing manager was in the hospital unexpectedly for two weeks, the employees who filled in didn't understand much of the process.\n\n  The addition of a new website sales channel in 2007 led to a rapid expansion in both product and customer lists that were not managed well. Customer information was inconsistent and difficult to manage. Many products online were drop shipped, leading to some confusion with the current warehouse process because logistics personnel could not readily identify these items and thus spent time looking for the items or attempting to request additional inventory from the purchasing department.\n\n  Management has been complaining about the speed at which reports have been provided at month end. Complexity of the organization and the constant changes to its hierarchies has led to almost a week of cleanup and reconciliation effort with each month's end.\n\nBy implementing Master Data Services in Main Street Clothing Company, we hope to provide continuity to the procedures and give context to the business problems and processes being solved in our implementation.\n\nSummary\n\nMaster data management issues are pervasive within organizations and have existed since the beginning of the electronic age. Solutions have evolved over time to address these issues, and Master Data Services is another phase of that evolution. Traditionally, MDM solutions have tended to cater to larger corporations that can afford customized solutions for specific domains. MDS provides an accessible and affordable solution for organizations of all sizes. Throughout this book, we will incorporate samples designed for a small company that is tackling common MDM challenges.\nChapter 2\n\nInstallation and Configuration\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Determining the Initial Scope of Your Project\n\n  Preparing the Web Server\n\n  Installing Master Data Services\n\n  Creating an MDS Database\n\n  Creating the Master Data Manager Web Application\n\n  Securing Your Web Application\n\n  Getting the Latest Version of MDS\n\n  Upgrading 2008 R2 MDS\n\n  Repairing the MDS Database\n\nThe first step in any software application is to deploy the software, and Master Data Services is no exception. In this chapter, we begin with a quick discussion of project size and scope. This should help you determine your needs, including whether you need any external assistance. We then discuss installing the application to a server. As MDS is a web-based application, the deployment and configuration can be extensive. Many users may be upgrading MDS from 2008 R2, we will discuss this process as well as the new repair feature. At the end of the chapter, we discuss options to ecure your data and some steps to extend the application.\n\nDetermining the Initial Scope of Your Project\n\nBefore installing Master Data Services, it is important to determine your short- and medium-term goals for the application. MDS was designed as a web application to provide a simple deployment model for a wide range of organizations. This is also a good time to make sure you have the necessary information to deploy and configure the application successfully, and to determine whether your project requires external expertise. There are a number of questions to consider before installing MDS:\n\n  _Which domains will I manage in MDS?_ While this book addresses how to organize this data in later chapters, it is important to take an initial assessment of what data must be stored to create a functional MDS solution.\n\n  _How many attributes will I need to manage?_ For each domain that will be managed in MDS, it is valuable to understand the number of attributes that are relevant to the organization. A central benefit of MDS is the ability to modify your model at any time, so a complete list is not essential. A rough estimate of the number of attributes provides one of the best metrics of the scope of the management problem and can provide insight into the owners, editors, and consumers of the records to be managed.\n\n  _How many employees will edit the data?_ To provide an effective long-term solution and to see the largest return on investment (ROI) for any master data management solution, it is imperative to empower the owners of the data to make changes directly within the system. Whether this is accomplished directly in the Master Data Manager web application or in some external entry system that is integrated with MDS, empowering the business owners reduces IT effort and eliminates the communication breakdowns that occur when routing data changes through IT.\n\n  _How many employees will consume the data?_ Ideally, completed implementations should give everyone with a business need in the organization the access to the cleanest and most accurate data at all times. In most MDM projects, reaching this ideal state is a work in progress and data consumers should be prioritized based on business need and the costs associated with providing access.\n\n  _How many systems do I need to integrate?_ Depending on the size of the organization, identifying all systems that rely on a specific domain may not be feasible this early in a project. Most small and medium-sized businesses should identify all systems that consume the domain to be mastered and determine the primary owner of each system.\n\nBased on the preliminary data that you discover from answering the preceding questions, you can determine the relative complexity of your MDM project. The table shown in Figure 2-1 should help you to enumerate the complexity of your project.\n\n**Figure 2-1** _Project scope_\n\nThe complexity of your project should affect both the scope of the implementation and the amount of ongoing effort required to maintain the MDS project. Small projects should be manageable by novice individuals with sufficient business knowledge and the aid of this book. These projects should be functional and productive within a week's worth of effort.\n\nMany small projects revolve around finding a home for \"homeless\" data within the organization. This data is critical to regular business processes, but not important enough to be managed in any standard process system. Much of this homeless data tends to live in unmanaged Excel spreadsheets. The transition of this homeless data into MDS can provide structure and control over it. If IT personnel were previously responsible for managing changes provided by business users, they can now provide users with access to the appropriate data directly. No formal roles or duties need to be created.\n\nA wide range of projects fall into the intermediate range. These projects can be handled internally, but require resources to be fully committed to the implementation effort. Most small and medium-sized business implementations will be intermediate-sized projects. As these projects become more complex, bringing in outside expertise for the implementation should be considered seriously. Making the decision to do so does not diminish the need for internal knowledge and education; although these consultants will aid in the implementation of the solution initially, internal staff will be needed to maintain the MDM system and processes going forward. Most of these projects can be managed in a single phase, requiring approximately 30 to 200 hours to be successfully implemented. Identification of at least one data steward within the organization is essential to long-term success.\n\nData steward is a common role found in MDM projects. These individuals tend to be technically savvy while still understanding the nuances of the business domains. A data steward must be a champion of data governance and must help create sustainable data maintenance processes within the organization. Many times, data stewards find themselves acting as referees in how data is maintained, caught between competing business processes and applications. Systems may maintain different rules regarding the quality and timeliness of data that must be managed by the data steward. The ability to find efficient compromises will determine how effective a data steward is for an organization.\n\nOnce projects reach a certain level of complexity, they become too large to manage in a single phase. The cost and complexity of these large projects requires engaging external expertise that can provide the guidance and resources necessary to implement enterprise-wide MDM solutions. These large projects may span multiple years and locations, and breaking these projects into multiple milestones and ROI checkpoints is advisable. If these projects can be broken down into more manageable intermediate projects, lessons learned from preceding projects can be applied to later implementations.\n\nAbout the Main Street Clothing Company Implementation\n\nMain Street Clothing Company will be managing two models within MDS, Finance and Product. Within these models, the company plans to maintain fewer than ten entities. Initially, the number of systems to integrate will be limited to three process systems. Based on this information, IT feels comfortable providing a single internal resource to build and deploy MDS. Billy Jean, an IT-savvy assistant to the controller, has been identified to manage the Finance model. The Product model will be managed by a designee of the VP of Purchasing. This person has not yet been identified.\n\nPreparing the Web Server\n\nMaster Data Services requires a 64-bit machine and runs only on the following operating systems:\n\n  Windows Server 2008\n\n  Windows Server 2008 R2\n\n  Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate\n\n  Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate\n\nWhile MDS needs to create (or attach) a backend database to either a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance or a SQL Server 2012 instance, this instance does not need to be located on the same machine. MDS does not support SQL Server Standard or Express editions for the database backend.\n\nIn preparation for installing the MDS application, you must enable a number of Windows features to support the web-based UI.\n\nWindows 7 Web Application Requirements\n\nFigure 2-2 identifies the minimum Windows features that must be enabled for MDS to function properly in Windows 7. To turn on these features, open Control Panel, click Programs, click \"Turn Windows features on or off,\" select the check box for each of the features highlighted in Figure 2-2, and then click OK.\n\n**Figure 2-2** _Windows features (highlighted) required in Windows 7 for MDS_\n\nWindows Server 2008 R2 Web Application Requirements\n\nIn Windows Server 2008 R2, use Server Manager to configure the following role services and features.\n\nFirst, install the Application Server role services by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open Server Manager.\n\n**2.** In the left pane, expand Roles.\n\n**3.** Click Application Server.\n\n**4.** In the Summary section, Role Services subsection, click Add Role Services on the right.\n\n**5.** Select the following role services:\n\n  NET Framework 3.5.1\n\n  Web Server (IIS) Support\n\n  HTTP Activation (under Windows Process Activation Service Support)\n\n**6.** Click Install.\n\nNow, install the Web Server role services by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open Server Manager.\n\n**2.** In the left pane, expand Roles.\n\n**3.** Click Web Server (IIS).\n\n**4.** In the Summary section, Role Services subsection, click Add Role Services on the right. Select the following role services:\n\nNow install the following features by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open Server Manager.\n\n**2.** In the left pane, click Features.\n\n**3.** In the right pane, click Add Features. Select the following features:\n\nInstalling Master Data Services\n\nInstalling MDS is a relatively simple process and is only responsible for dropping the bits onto the machine. Any machine that will implement the Master Data Manager web application or the web services needs to run the installation package. In SQL Server 2012, the MDS feature is now a shared feature of the standard SQL Server setup.\n\nProcedure: How to Install Master Data Services\n\nTo install Master Data Services, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Run the BI or Enterprise Edition SQL Server Install, as MDS is now a part of the main install process as a shared feature.\n\n**2.** On the Installation Type page, shown here, select a 2012 server instance or install a new instance. Since MDS is a shared feature, this will have no effect on the installation.\n\n**3.** Click Next.\n\n**4.** On the Feature Selection page, select the Master Data Services check box at the bottom of the Features list.\n\n**5.** Click Next.\n\n**6.** Depending on the other features you have selected, additional setup pages may appear. No settings chosen on these pages affect your Master Data Services implementation.\n\n**7.** The last setup screen shows a summary of your installation selections.\n\n**8.** When the installation completes, click Finish.\n\nAfter successful installation, you must open Master Data Services Configuration Manager. You can now use it to create your database and website and to enable web services.\n\nAbout MDS Configuration Manager\n\nOnce the bits are installed, MDS Configuration Manager will assist you in the process of configuring MDS for first use. MDS Configuration Manager, shown in Figure 2-3, is divided into two sections: Database Configuration and Web Configuration. The initial screen indicates whether or not the prerequisites, valid versions of Windows PowerShell and Internet Information Services, can be found. If not, you will need to resolve these issues before continuing with configuration of MDS.\n\n**Figure 2-3** _Master Data Services Configuration Manager_\n\nCreating an MDS Database\n\nThe initial step in configuring Master Data Services is to create a new MDS database. You can create the database on either a SQL Server 2008 R2 database server or a SQL Server 2012 database server. Whether this is a local instance or an instance that exists on another database server, MDS Configuration Manager will perform a check to ensure that the database server is Enterprise, Developer, or DataCenter. In SQL Server 2012, the BI edition is also supported. Once this check is successful, an \"empty\" MDS database will be created on the database server. This empty database will contain all of the tables, views, and stored procedures that make up the architecture of MDS.\n\nYou must first determine whether to install the MDS database locally or on another machine. There are two major factors that should influence this decision:\n\n  _Do you already have access to a database farm or server running SQL Server 2008 R2 or 2012?_ Although not always available, this would provide the most economical way to split the two roles of MDS onto separate machines. Please be aware that MDS licensing requires that all machines that have any component of MDS installed must be licensed for the SQL Server 2012 BI edition or higher. The only exception to this is a database server supporting SQL Server 2008 R2.\n\n  _Does your organization have any restrictions about having the database server and web server roles on the same machine?_ Although this is an antiquated philosophy born in older, less secure versions of both products, some companies still insist that the database server and web server not be on the same box.\n\nA lesser concern for most companies should be the application's performance. Although it is true that MDS will use processor capacity for both stored procedures on the database server and handling requests on the web server, in most implementations these burdens should be handled by standard hardware that is available on the market today. Microsoft does not provide minimum hardware requirements for MDS, but due to the cost of the license, we suggest a minimum of 8GB of RAM on a quad-core machine. With this configuration, an implementation that must support 20 concurrent users would be fine.\n\nProcedure: How to Create an MDS Database\n\nThe Master Data Services database is where your master data will be stored. To create an MDS database, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** If Master Data Services Configuration Manager is not open, launch it from Programs | Microsoft SQL Server 2012 | Master Data Services | Configuration Manager.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Master Data Services 2012 can be installed concurrently with MDS 2008 R2, so be careful that you open the correct Configuration Manager._\n\n**2.** In the left pane, click Database Configuration.\n\n**3.** In the right pane, click the Create Database button.\n\nThe Create Database Wizard is launched.\n\n**4.** Click Next.\n\n**5.** On the Database Server page, leave the defaults unless you want to connect to a remote instance of SQL Server or use a different type of authentication. If you choose Integrated Security, you must use the credentials of the logged-in user.\n\nNOTE\n\n_In this example we specify a local account, but you can use a domain account instead._\n\n**6.** Click Test Connection to ensure you can connect successfully.\n\n**7.** Click OK to close the dialog box.\n\n**8.** Click Next.\n\n**9.** On the Database page, enter a name for your database. Depending on the collation and regional settings for your database, searches you do in the Master Data Manager web application may or may not be case sensitive. I would not change default collations without a good reason within your organization.\n\n**10.** Click Next.\n\n**11.** On the Service Account page, type the name of the account that the websites use to connect to the database. Later, you will designate the same account if you create an associated website.\n\n**12.** Click Next.\n\n**13.** On the Administrator Account page, type the name of a user who you want to have the ability to edit all data and to view and update all models. This user is more likely to be a business owner than to be an IT person.\n\n**14.** Click Next.\n\n**15.** On the Summary page, click Next.\n\n**16.** A progress message is displayed while the database is created. When it's done, you should see a success message.\n\n**17.** Click Finish to close the wizard.\n\nMDS Configuration Manager opens and displays the default settings.\n\nAbout System Settings\n\nSystem settings displayed on the Database Configuration page of MDS Configuration Manager are stored in your MDS database in the tblSystemSetting table. These settings apply to the database, the website, and web services. Many of the system settings are self-explanatory, but we will discuss them in the chapters that explain the features they apply to. For now, you can leave the default values.\n\nCreating the Master Data Manager Web Application\n\nThroughout much of this book, we will talk about Master Data Services as a platform. MDM applications need the capability to integrate with all of the systems and business processes within an organization. Unlike other platforms that Microsoft creates, MDS comes with a complete user-facing, web-based UI. Configuring this web application on a web server will allow any user to access MDS through their browser.\n\nNOTE\n\n_MDS officially supports Internet Explorer 7 and 8. While users can access the site using other browsers, those other browsers may display screens incorrectly, with menus that behave poorly or not at all. Unless you are extremely adventurous and vehemently opposed to IE, always access MDS with IE 7, 8, or 9._\n\nWhen creating the Master Data Manager web application, there are two possible workflows: either you select the default website and create the web application, or you create a new website and the web application is automatically created. Later in this chapter, we discuss how to secure your website. If you plan to secure MDS to require Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections, it is advisable to create a new site now.\n\nChanges to any of this web configuration information at any time will not affect the underlying MDS implementation. All MDS implementation-specific data is stored in the database. This allows you to back up and restore MDS on any number of servers or configurations without any potential for loss of data. The same database could potentially be used by multiple websites or servers configured instead of the same database server. If your server is part of a server farm where the default site has been removed or you cannot use it, you can create a site now. Otherwise, you can skip this procedure, select the default website, and go straight to creating your application.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Master Data Manager Website (Optional)\n\nTo create a Master Data Manager website, complete the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_If you create a new site, the web application is automatically created. You can skip the procedure for creating a web application and continue with associating the site to the database._\n\n1 Open Master Data Services Configuration Manager.\n\n**2.** In the left pane, click Web Configuration.\n\n**3.** In the right pane, select \"Create new website\" from the Website drop-down menu.\n\n**4.** In the Create Website dialog box, enter a name for your website.\n\n**5.** The Protocol setting is now locked down for HTTP. If you need to use HTTPS, you will have to use IIS to configure the site after it is installed.\n\n**6.** In the IP address and Port fields, leave the default values or enter new values. A default installation in Windows 7 already uses port 80, so you must select a different port, like 8080, or you will get an error.\n\n**7.** For the Host header field, if your site is going to be on an intranet, leave it blank. If your site will be available on the Internet or you want to create multiple host names for your site, enter the host name.\n\n**8.** In the Application Pool section, leave the name of the site or enter your own. An application pool with this name will be created in IIS.\n\n**9.** In the User name field, enter the same username you used as the service account when you created the database.\n\n**10.** In the Password and Confirm password fields, enter the user account password.\n\n**11.** Click OK.\n\n**12.** A note about HTTPS is displayed. Click OK.\n\nFor more information about securing your website, see the \"Securing Your Web Application\" section later in this chapter.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Master Data Manager Web Application\n\nIf you chose to use the default website, you can create the Master Data Manager web application by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** In the Website drop-down list, select Default Web Site and then click the Create Application button.\n\n**2.** In the Create Web Application dialog box, you can change the default alias or application pool names or leave them alone. The alias determines your URL. In this example, the URL will be http:\/\/MDSServer\/MDS.\n\n**3.** In the User name field, type the name of the user you used for the service account when creating the MDS database. This user is the application pool identity in IIS.\n\n**4.** Click OK to save.\n\nProcedure: How to Associate the MDS Database with the Web Application\n\nYou must now associate a database with the web application you just created.\n\n**1.** On the Web Configuration screen, in the Associate Application with Database section, click the Select button.\n\n**2.** In the Connect to a Master Data Services Database dialog box, click Connect.\n\n**3.** In the Master Data Services Database list, your database is automatically selected. Click OK to close the window. You can now view the association between your website and its database.\n\n**4.** Click Apply to save your changes.\n\nAfter you associate your web application with your MDS database, you are prompted to launch the web application. If you can successfully open the Master Data Manager home page from the local machine and from other machines on the intranet, your installation has been successful.\n\nIf Internet Explorer prompts you for your username and password, enter the credentials you used for the Administrator Account when creating the database. Other users do not have permission to access the Master Data Manager web application until the administrator gives them permission.\n\nSecuring Your Web Application\n\nMDS Configuration Manager will create an unsecured website only. This means that data traveling over the wire (between the web server and the client's browser) is unencrypted and readable by anyone. Since this site will not be publicly available and the master data stored is not highly sensitive, these settings should be fine for most organizations. If you are concerned about the security of your master data or if sensitive internal information is stored in MDS, you can require SSL for your website.\n\nThis requires completing three steps: create or download a certificate, apply the certificate to the default website, and require SSL.\n\nFirst, you must download a certificate for your website. To do so, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open Internet Information Services (IIS). You can locate it by clicking Start, right-clicking Computer, and choosing Manage. IIS is listed under Services and Applications.\n\n**2.** In the Connections pane, click the server name.\n\n**3.** In the center pane, double-click Server Certificates.\n\n**4.** In the Actions pane, click the action preferred by your organization. Since every company has a different policy for getting and managing certificates, we will leave the acquisition of your certificate up to you.\n\nAfter you have a valid certificate, you must apply the certificate to the website. To do so, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** In IIS, click Default Web Site (or other site you created).\n\n**2.** In the Actions pane, click Bindings.\n\n**3.** Click the Add button.\n\n**4.** From the Type list, select https.\n\n**5.** Select the SSL certificate you created.\n\n**6.** Click OK.\n\n**7.** Click Close.\n\nNow require SSL by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** In the Connections pane, click the website.\n\n**2.** In the center pane, double-click SSL Settings.\n\n**3.** Select the Require SSL check box and indicate whether you want to ignore, accept, or require client certificates.\n\n**4.** In the Actions pane, click Apply.\n\nGetting the Latest Version of MDS\n\nMicrosoft issues hotfixes in response to customer requests. These hotfixes are periodically compiled into cumulative updates. And eventually, these cumulative updates are released as service packs, roughly a year after the initial release.\n\nIn the case of the latest release of Master Data Services, the initial version release is a far more stable product and you can expect fewer updates to be required with this SQL Server 2012 release.\n\nUpgrading 2008 R2 MDS\n\nAll of the moving parts within the SQL Server box can make upgrading from 2008 R2 MDS difficult to understand. Before we discuss upgrade, make sure that you understand the components that make up your 2008 R2 implementation:\n\n  **Database Engine** This is the Microsoft service that shipped with 2008 R2 that mounts and controls SQL Server database files. MDS does not require you to upgrade the Database Engine, as MDS 2012 is compatible with both 2008 R2 and 2012 engines.\n\n  **MDS database** This is the database that you created earlier in the chapter. All information stored in your Master Data Services implementation resides in this database. This database has two versions that you need to concern yourself with. The _database version_ is the version of the engine that the database is compatible with. You cannot restore database backups from a previous version of SQL Server (2008 R2, for instance) to a new version (2012). To upgrade the database version, you must upgrade the database instance and all the attached databases. The _schema version_ is MDS specific. Just as you were required to update the schema version with some cumulative updates that you installed in the prior release, MDS 2012 requires you to upgrade the schema version, as shown next. The Upgrade Database button is available in MDS Configuration Manager after you select a database. This button is only active if the schema version is not compatible with the current installed version of MDS 2012.\n\nYou may need to upgrade your MDS 2008 R2 instance to Service Pack 1 in order to upgrade the schema. Before you upgrade the MDS database schema to 2012, ensure you have made a backup of the database. If you want to keep your 2008 R2 and 2012 implementations running side by side, you will need to back up and restore the database as a different name. Once you upgrade the database schema to 2012, the 2008 R2 web components will no longer work with that database.\n\nRepairing the MDS Database\n\nWhen you restore an MDS database file to a new database server or a new filename, it may become necessary to \"repair\" the database. In the past, the required running a number of server changes from script. MDS Configuration Manager now has a Repair Database button that you can click to have these tasks performed automatically. Select the MDS database in question, and if a repair is required, a message will display and the Repair Database button will be enabled.\n\nSummary\n\nIn this chapter, we have successfully installed and configured Master Data Services. After determining the scope of our application, we were able to determine the best architecture for our system. We explored the configuration options available in MDS and deployed the web application. The end of the chapter discussed upgrade processes and described the boundaries of the MDS system.\nChapter 3\n\nStarting an MDS Project\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  How Do I Know Master Data When I See It?\n\n  Business Process Models\n\n  System Roles\n\n  Mapping the Data\n\n  The Main Street Clothing Company Example\n\n  Determining System Types\n\n  Cleansing Data for Initial Import into MDS\n\n  Leveraging the MDS Excel Add-In to Manage Your Project\n\nBefore you build a model in MDS or any other master data management (MDM) system, it is essential to have a basic understanding of your data and current processes. In this chapter, we provide deeper insight into what is and what is not master data, and we provide some simple labels for your current business systems. Toward the end of the chapter, we discuss some tips and tricks for modeling your data, with the goal of helping you to free your enterprise from many of the data restrictions that have plagued it for so long. We then apply these lessons to the Main Street Clothing Company example. In this chapter we will discuss system types and data cleansing processes. With the release of the Excel Add-In, implementing an MDS system has become significantly easier.\n\nHow Do I Know Master Data When I See It?\n\nOver the past year, one of the questions most commonly asked by customers has been, \"Is there a definitive line between master data and other important data in my company?\" The truth is, there isn't one and there shouldn't be. In most companies, master data management is used only for business-critical domains like product or customer because the implementation of MDM solutions throughout these organizations would be prohibitively expensive. If an accessible solution with a rapid time to value were available, other important domains could benefit from MDM tools as well.\n\nWe've already talked about a couple of the key differentiators between master data and transactional data within an enterprise, but they are worth repeating: Data that you wish to store in MDS should not relate to a single event in time because that is transactional data. In MDS, you should store information that has a state or continues to have a state for some specific period of time. This information is master data.\n\nBusiness Process Models\n\nBefore you build your model in MDS or any other MDM system, it is imperative to understand the flow of data through your enterprise. Where do new accounts, customers, or products originate? What is the process that turns a concept into a product? What is the process to onboard a new customer? How does the data flow from inception to all systems across the organization?\n\nBusiness process modeling can provide decision makers with the information that they need to prioritize and plan the creation of their MDS implementation. Modeling relevant processes related to the creation and maintenance of domains you are interested in managing is the most logical place to start. Although you could employ skilled business process managers to interview employees and provide detailed designs of their findings, most projects can get by with a do-it-yourself approach.\n\nYour first step should be a quick inventory of any existing documentation of current processes, like the example shown in Figure 3-1. Much of what you require might already exist. Be sure to review any existing documents with current employees in the modeled roles. It is astounding how quickly reality can diverge from the documentation given a little bit of time. The more manual the processes, the more easily these processes can change or be abandoned.\n\n**Figure 3-1** _Diagram of sample business process model_\n\nWhen you conduct the interviews required to create a business process model yourself, you should complete the following two steps in sequence. Each step provides insight into the investigated domain. Make sure to record the actors, activity, and length of time required for each business process.\n\n**1.** Determine how new data members are created in the organization. Make sure to investigate any alternative methods that may lead to the creation of a new member. Lead the interview with questions like \"How does this system interact with other systems?\" or \"Are there any emergency processes?\" These can lead to important discoveries. As you begin to integrate systems across organizations, it may be pertinent to ask about any automated systems that may generate new members.\n\n**2.** For each of the methods discovered in the previous step, drill into any workflow or process to enrich the data member before you consider it complete and ready for use in any systems within the scope of the project. Each system that depends on this information may have different requirements, so it is best to address each system's needs. This step is also the best time to identify the primary owner for each business process or system. Primary owners have a vested interest in their processes and will require assurances that most if not all of their current domain needs will be addressed in any business refactoring.\n\nAll of the information you collect will result in a diagram or set of diagrams similar to Figure 3-1. These diagrams will help you to determine the most palatable flow of master data through the organization. You will need to review each system within the scope of the project to decide what type of role it will play for data of each domain type. Determining the role played by each system is the next step in determining how MDS fits into your organization.\n\nSystem Roles\n\nSystems can be categorized into three different roles. As different domains have significantly different origination points, it is common for the same system to perform separate roles for different domains within a company.\n\nSystem of Entry\n\nA system of entry (SOE) is a system where data is first entered in a business. These systems typically include all of the users who are able to create new data. Generally, these are the systems that are used daily by the owners of the type of data being investigated. Many systems of entry require that rules be enforced before data can fully be entered. Oftentimes these rules force much of the accumulated information about the member record to be managed outside of the system.\n\nThink of a new product being created. Often, the inception of a new product is scribbled on a napkin or sketched on a whiteboard. Many of the details of the product will be discussed and decided via e-mail format. It is important to capture and manage this process, because creating a workflow and roles around product creation can provide many benefits, like online collaboration and a tracked history of the creative process. The lack of resources to manage this process often impedes the implementation of a new product.\n\nSystem of Record\n\nA system of record (SOR) is any system within the organization that is considered the source for other systems. Typically, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is the system of record within an organization, but oftentimes many other systems can be considered sources for downstream systems. Many data inconsistencies are created on multiple SORs within an organization. While MDS strives to be an adequate SOE for organizations, it is imperative that many if not all of the SORs are moved onto the MDS platform. This is where much of the value of master data management is derived.\n\nSubscribing System\n\nAs your MDS implementation matures, the most common type of system should be a subscribing system. Subscribing systems are those systems that consume data from another system with no direct user changes to the managed domain. Some larger companies use an intermediate store to pass data to multiple systems. As long as direct changes are not made in any of these systems, all these systems can be considered downstream subscribing systems.\n\nMapping the Data\n\nThe next phase in the project plan is to determine data sizes and types within the Master Data Services system. Analysis of all source systems' main tables and their columns to determine the best data type for storing that data can provide an initial roadmap for MDS. There are two main questions that must be asked during this phase: What kinds of internal constraints are placed on this column? Are there any downstream constraints in the organization that require further data cleansing to be performed?\n\nYou should start the mapping process by identifying those columns within the source system that you will manage in MDS. For each of these columns, determine a rudimentary data type. In Chapter 4, we discuss the different data types available in MDS, but for now just identify data as date, number, or string.\n\nIf you identify a date field, be very careful that this field provides information across multiple systems and is a state of the mapped domain. Oftentimes, date fields are red flags that you have mistaken a system-specific field such as \"entry date\" for a more important field like \"start date\" or \"discontinued date.\" You should be extra wary of any column that requires the storage of a specific date or time. These fields generally signal that the information stored is most likely transactional in nature.\n\nColumns that you identify as numeric should be reviewed as well. Is this column storing a valid state on a record? We have seen many projects in which the designers have been tempted to map in fields such as account balances or sales figures. These numbers are subject to daily change and are best handled as part of a business intelligence (BI) solution. Master Data Services does not support simple math functions or consolidations, in an effort to dissuade users from storing inappropriate data. This does not mean all numbers should not be stored. MSRP, safety stock levels, standard terms, and credit limits are all valid information for MDS. When identifying numeric columns, you should log the precision, or number of decimal places, each column will require. While many systems may not limit this on the backend, the actual required precision should be easy to determine for the primary system owner.\n\nWhen mapping a source system to MDS, it may be advisable to create additional tables to store choices for certain fields. Some of these relationships are easy to see. If there is a foreign key relationship within the source system that displays options for one field to another, you should continue to preserve this relationship. For instance, if a customer has a relationship to an address table that stores addresses available to the customer, this relationship can be modeled in MDS.\n\nSome relationships are not quite as evident, though. For instance, a source system may only store specific attributes as text fields, yet valid values for those text fields may be constrained by the business process. If those values are better managed in a separate table, and a foreign key relationship between those tables would be advisable, you want to highlight those relationships now. Determine if any of these relationships may be reused. For instance, within many data sources, there will be a number of fields that map to a choice of either Yes or No. In these cases, you may want to create a single entity to store those valid choices.\n\nDetermining What to Do with Duplicate Records\n\nData quality is a major concern for corporations, and the identification and management of duplicate records is a central task in the effort to ensure data quality. Duplicate records exist within organizations for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest reasons employees duplicate records is that they are unaware that records already exist in a separate system, because the systems are not integrated effectively. These records should be merged wherever possible.\n\nSome companies intentionally duplicate records within systems for a specific purpose, typically to work around limitations within current applications to support necessary business processes. In most cases, these duplicates must remain within the business application to continue to provide the workaround they were designed for. Systems that required duplicate member records should never be considered for Systems of Record. When connecting these subscribing systems to the MDS repository, master data attributes should be updated in all downstream attributes.\n\nDetermining Which Attributes to Manage\n\nTo determine whether an attribute should be managed in MDS, data stewards must decide on the nature of the attribute. Is this a state of the domain? Is this information useful for multiple systems? All numeric and date fields should be evaluated closely. Tracking information should not be managed if it is specific to an application in the organization. Calculated values or balances should not be managed in an MDS system because these values will change over time. Make sure that attributes that store a product's age are not managed as such but that you manage the product's date of creation instead.\n\nThe Main Street Clothing Company Example\n\nBefore the Main Street Clothing Company attempts to build anything in Master Data Services, it is critical that it examine its current processes. All of the following chapters of this book will leverage information collected in the following pages. Although building an MDM solution can be an iterative process, early understanding of the problem space and employees' roles in the process can lead to rapid satisfaction and effective adoption of the new system. An early successful implementation can lead to additional requests for new domains.\n\nFinding a Data Steward\n\nOnce Main Street Clothing Company had determined that an MDS implementation would be beneficial to its organization, it needed to find a project manager. Since there were a number of important sets of data to manage and some amount of ongoing responsibility would be required post-implementation, Anthony Green was identified as the best candidate for the position. Anthony has been with Main Street Clothing Company for a number of years in a business analyst role. He has some limited database experience and was involved in a number of prior system implementations. Main Street plans to have Anthony remain as the owner of the MDS server and serve as the _de facto_ data steward for the organization.\n\nLeveraging the Business Process Models\n\nDuring the implementation of SAP, the implementation team created detailed maps of the business process for creating new products and accounts. Anthony can use these maps to determine the best way to integrate MDS into the current process. One of these maps is shown in Figure 3-2.\n\n**Figure 3-2** _Product business process map_\n\nAnthony is able to leverage this information to investigate how much time is required to create a new account, and he finds very little inefficiency in this process. The major issue with accounts is the difficulty the accounting department has when managing multiple consolidations for the chart of accounts. This issue tends to be related to legal and taxation requirements. Figure 3-3 shows Main Street Clothing Company's process for processing accounts.\n\n**Figure 3-3** _Account business process map_\n\nDespite his best efforts, Anthony was unable to find any process maps that detailed the location data for the company. Although it has been over a year since Main Street Clothing Company has opened a new store location, everyone agrees that the workflow for opening a new store is disorganized and reactive.\n\nFilling in the Gaps\n\nIn reviewing the existing business process models, Anthony determined that the system of entry for products in his company was first created in a custom Access database run by the product acquisition team. This team consists of a manager and two buyers who work with a number of manufacturers and suppliers.\n\nThe product acquisition team enters the products that they wish to purchase into their homegrown system. They also use this system to keep track of notes such as expected demand and types of offers they are considering. After the manager has agreed with their findings, the buyers e-mail a spreadsheet of new product purchases to the accounts team.\n\nThe accounts team then manually codes new products into the system and ties them to a supplier code. When an invoice arrives from the supplier, new product inventory is added into the ERP system for those products. Any products that are absent on the initial entry must be entered at this time. An attempt will be made to contact the appropriate buyer to determine whether the new product is accurate, but if the buyer is unavailable, much of the product information will be left blank for later input. Many of these inconsistencies are not found until month-end reports are run and data is blank. Sometimes, additional merchandise is accepted and placed in the store even though it was not intended to be purchased by the buyer. In these cases, the product acquisition team must scramble to determine if this is a fortuitous mistake or if they need to pull the inventory from the shelves. The product acquisition team estimates that this happens two to three times each year.\n\nAnthony then reviews the business process models for location. He determines that much of the information in the SAP system is in one large entry as the location is conceived. Because the creation of a new store is a long process with many people involved, there is no standard process for collecting all the required information, such as square footage, lease type, and other information that is negotiated or decided upon. Anthony determines a larger problem for location is that the parties responsible for managing renewal of leases or other location management do not have access to the system where this data is stored. They are managing this information in files and folders and have very few electronic warnings before these things require attention. This creates the unwelcome situation where lease negotiations or other decisions are triggered by third parties who call headquarters.\n\nInvestigation of the employee process shows Anthony that, in many cases, starting dates and ending dates are incorrect in the source system because the accounts team has been incorrectly coding the hire date as the start date for the last six months. One store manager was aware of the issue but had been unable to get the accounting department to fix the problem. The accounts team, which was in the middle of month- and year-end close, felt this problem could wait to be resolved and just forgot to return to the problem once those times of high stress had concluded. Anthony would like to address these inconsistencies as part of the MDS implementation.\n\nDetermining System Types\n\nNow that Anthony has reviewed the current processes, he needs to determine the role each system will play when MDS is added into the process. As each business process treats systems differently, he recognizes that he should look at the matrix of each system for each domain within the organization.\n\nOnce MDS is implemented in the organization, many of the systems will perform a different role within the organization. The following table shows the revised system model.\n\nFor each domain to be managed in MDS, Anthony builds a new business process model to show what the proposed process will look like once his implementation is complete. He will use these diagrams to socialize the new process and ensure that all participants feel their interests will be met. It is important that all stakeholders feel that the implementation team is aware of their specific needs and that the new process will not be an obstacle to their daily jobs.\n\nIn the model shown in Figure 3-4, Anthony proposes that the product management database be replaced with a model that includes MDS. All of the functionality that was supported in this system can be replicated within MDS.\n\n**Figure 3-4** _New product management process with MDS_\n\nAnthony suspects that the distributed nature of locations management makes MDS a natural place to manage this domain. In the model shown in Figure 3-5, Anthony shows the location management process where MDS will now be used to manage the location workflow process.\n\n**Figure 3-5** _New location process where MDS manages location creation process_\n\nCleansing Data for Initial Import into MDS\n\nNow that Anthony has socialized the proposed process for managing products in MDS, he must create a clean list of products to initially load into MDS. In many organizations, producing a clean list of products can be a large project; due to the size of Main Street Clothing Company, Anthony will take an export from the product management database as a starting point. He will enhance this export by adding any products that exist in the ERP system. These additional products may have been added if they were part of an invoice received from a supplier.\n\nVery little de-duplication will be required for managing any domains at Main Street Clothing Company. One of the benefits of implementing an MDM solution while a company is small is that you can get a handle on your data before the complexity and size of the processes and data make cleansing a major project for the organization. For each domain, Anthony will create an Excel spreadsheet listing all of the records and their managed attributes.\n\nLeveraging the MDS Excel Add-In to Manage Your Project\n\nWith the addition of the Add-in for Excel in SQL Server 2012, Master Data Services is providing a potential game-changing tool when it comes to MDM project management. Excel provides the perfect interface to rapidly build and then hone your model with the end-user base. While none of the preceding steps are removed, the ability to grab data out of any tool using Excel and create an entity within minutes will give modelers the ability to quickly iterate over and refine their models. This approach will be discussed further in Chapter 10.\n\nSummary\n\nIt is important to understand the flow of data within an organization before implementing an MDM system. Any MDM system that does not match the natural flow of data through an organization is doomed to fail, as busy users work in the easiest, most natural manner. Analysis of business processes can provide insight into the flow of related data through the enterprise. All systems within an organization can be classified as either systems of entry, systems of record, or subscribing systems.\n\nMany systems within the organization will have data-cleansing needs. It is important to determine what remediation will be acceptable if duplicate records are found. If history must be maintained for duplicate members, a mapping between the MDS source and the system should be maintained. In the next chapter, we discuss how to create our models in MDS.\nChapter 4\n\nCreating Your Model\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  MDS Modeling Concepts\n\n  Building a Model\n\n  Deploying a Model\n\n  About Models\n\n  About Entities\n\n  About Members\n\n  About Attributes\n\n  About Attribute Groups\n\n  Using Web Services\n\nIn this chapter, we discuss the creation and customization of MDS models. In MDS, models are the central work surface that will be exposed to the master data editors and consumers once your project goes live. The success of your project will depend mainly on how well you design your model.\n\nWe begin with a discussion of modeling concepts. Then we examine how to deploy prebuilt models. We load the sample company's Finance model and then spend the remainder of the chapter creating a Product model from scratch. Finally, we look at examples of how to use web services to perform some of the procedures we've already performed in the web UI. (From now on, \"Master Data Manager web application\" and \"web UI\" are used synonymously.)\n\nMDS Modeling Concepts\n\nMaster Data Services is made up of a relatively simple group of concepts. These concepts are encapsulated as data containers and services exposed in MDS. While these concepts are simple to understand by themselves, it is the varied and complex data schemas that these concepts support that provide both the power and complexity of MDS. Before we delve into the implementation of the model objects, let's review general definitions of these MDS concepts. Each of these concepts is described in more detail later in the chapter.\n\n  **Models** Models are the highest level of organization within MDS. Models are nothing but containers of related entities. Only entities within the same model can be related within MDS. Models are the first concept discussed in this chapter.\n\n  **Entities** Entities are the base containers for data in MDS. In their simplest form, entities can be thought of as tables in a database. Users control the attributes (columns) that are managed for each entity. If explicit hierarchies are enabled for an entity, the entity becomes far more complex, managing parent members and their consolidations as well as collections, their attributes, and the members associated with those collections. Most of this chapter is devoted to discussing how to create the structures of entities.\n\n  **Members** Members are the records that populate all the entities created in MDS. Members can be either leaf or consolidated. Leaf members are the primary members of an entity. If an entity is enabled for explicit hierarchies and collections, then consolidated members can be created, and can have their own attributes. Members will be discussed in this chapter as well as in Chapter 7.\n\n  **Attributes** Attributes describe members. Attributes can be loosely thought of as columns in a table. Entities contain members and their attribute values. Attributes can be free-form or domain-based.\n\n  **Domain-based attributes** Domain-based attributes are attributes in which the available values are restricted to the members stored in a related entity. This is similar to selecting from a predefined list, but in MDS all lists are entities themselves.\n\n  **Hierarchies** Hierarchies are consolidations or groupings of members that aid in reporting and analysis. There are two management types for hierarchies in MDS: explicit and derived. Hierarchies enforce rules for member inclusion to ensure consolidations do not lose or double count values in connected applications. Hierarchies will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6.\n\n  **Collections** Collections provide member grouping flexibility that is not supported in hierarchies. Collections will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6.\n\nBuilding a Model\n\nMaster Data Services begins as a blank canvas, allowing you to create your data models within the product in any way you choose. The model structure is created in the System Administration functional area of the Master Data Manager web application, or by using the web services. As you create the structure, you can open the Explorer functional area of the web UI to see the results of your work. The Explorer functional area is where users will go day to day to manage their master data.\n\nOpening the System Administration area of the Master Data Manager web UI for the first time can be a daunting experience. In the latest release, System Administration defaults to the model creation screen if you have not loaded any models. When you first create an MDS database, only the Metadata model is created. Figure 4-1 shows this first model open in the Model View screen. This is the only system model within MDS and has been marked for deprecation in a future release. While this model can still be accessed from System Administration or Explorer as its own model, all access to the Metadata features from your own models has been eliminated through the web UI. Access to these features will need to be completed through the web services for Metadata.\n\n**Figure 4-1** _The default Metadata model that is created during installation_\n\nIf you are a new user of MDS, you have two avenues for creating your first useful model within the product. You can load a sample model deployment package into your database and modify the model from there, or you can build your model from scratch.\n\nStarting with a predefined model can be the easiest way to get started with SQL Server MDS. Over the course of this book, we are going to work with Finance and Product models for our fictional company, Main Street Clothing Company. In this chapter, we are going to deploy the Finance model and create the Product model from scratch. You can find the complete packages of our models, both with and without sample data, at our web site: www.mdsuser.com.\n\nMDS also includes three sample models in the installation. These samples are very basic Customer, Product, and Account models, located in Program Files\\Microsoft SQL Server\\110\\Master Data Services\\Samples\\Packages. You can take a look at them to get a better idea of some of the more common features of the application.\n\nWhile these model deployment packages provide some data and attributes and support the documentation provided in Microsoft Books Online for SQL Server 2012, they are relatively limited in their functionality and do not provide adequate coverage for the exercises listed in this book. However, these models include sample data, hierarchies, business rules, and versioning, so you can see what the end result of all your upcoming work might look like.\n\nIn the next exercise, we will walk through how to deploy our sample Finance model.\n\nDeploying a Model\n\nA model deployment package is an XML file saved with a .pkg extension. It includes the model structure, the business rules (Chapter 8), and version flags (Chapter 9) and subscription views (Chapter 12). It does not include file attributes (Chapter 4) or user and group permissions (Chapter 11). Model packages can contain the data from a version of the model when created from the ModelDeploy.exe command-line executable. Only the model structure can be created or deployed from the web UI in the SQL Server 2012 version of Master Data Services. The new utility and the limitations on data in the web UI were added in response to the inability to support all model sizes through the web services.\n\nModel deployment in MDS was designed to provide organizations with two very important capabilities related to managing data models in MDS. The first is the capability to develop, test, and deploy a model within three separate implementations of MDS, while limiting the number of objects that need to be re-created in each environment. This enables IT management to roll out changes en masse and to ensure that the production environment remains operational throughout the process.\n\nThe second capability enables organizations to share their model schemas with others. There are a number of efforts across a host of industries to standardize object models. Previously, most organizations would develop data models in a vacuum, creating schemas that solved their current problem most efficiently. They integrated only those applications owned by the organization and central to the solution. IT departments at all of their competitors were doing the same. This led to a wide variety of data models among competitors in the same industry. Some organizations built data models that were flexible, stable, and scalable, but many did not. When consolidation within an industry occurred, acquiring companies discovered similar business processes were hard to integrate due to the vastly different data models that had been developed in isolation.\n\nFollowing are a couple of advantages to employing common data models within an industry:\n\n  **Benefit of experience** Civilization wouldn't get very far if each new generation needed to reinvent the wheel. By leveraging a common data model developed by industry experts, companies are able to avoid issues that they might otherwise experience personally.\n\n  **Standardization** Standards help companies and software providers by limiting the amount of variation that must be managed. Standards allow companies to better manage acquisitions and new integration projects. Software can focus on enhancing business value as opposed to compatibility.\n\nMDS supports these efforts in two ways. By not enforcing its own model, MDS ensures there is one less data model to be managed. Model deployment empowers industry leaders to quickly build master data\u2013centric versions of these industry models, providing efficient deployment across their industry. Any customization that needs to be made to these standardized models is still supported in MDS.\n\nProcedure: How to Deploy a Model Using ModelDeploy.exe\n\nTo deploy a sample model using ModelDeploy.exe, complete the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_If you want to deploy the sample Finance model we refer to in this book, get it fromwww.mdsuser.com before you start this procedure._\n\n**1.** Copy the Finance package file to the Program Files\\Microsoft SQL Server\\110\\Master Data Services\\Configuration directory.\n\n**2.** Open a command prompt from the Start menu. It is advisable to run the command prompt as administrator to ensure access to the file location.\n\n**3.** Using the cd command, change the directory to Program Files\\Microsoft SQL Server\\110\\Master Data Services\\Configuration.\n\n**4.** Run mdsmodeldeploy.exe deploynew -model Finance -package finance.pkg.\n\n**5.** If successful, you should see the message \"MDSModelDeploy operation completed successfully\" and the elapsed time for the call displayed.\n\nYou can confirm that the model was deployed successfully by going to the home page and looking in the drop-down list of available models, as shown next. If you were already viewing the web UI, you may need to click the \"Refresh cached information\" link on the MDS home page.\n\nTo view the Finance model in more detail, select VERSION_1 from the Version list and then click Explorer. Your business users will manage master data in the Explorer functional area. When you configure security, you will be able to give users access to specific data within the Explorer functional area.\n\nAll other functional areas of the web UI are intended for administrators. Let's take a moment to discuss the other four functional areas.\n\n  **Version Management** Use this area to validate full versions of your model against business rules. You can also create versions of your models and their data, and assign version flags, which indicate to subscribing systems which version of a model to use. More details about versioning can be found in Chapter 9.\n\n  **Integration Management** Use this area to import data into the proper MDS database tables. You can also use this area to create subscription views, which are SQL views used by subscribing systems to retrieve data from MDS. More information about staging data can be found in Chapter 5. See Chapter 12 for information on exporting data by using subscription views.\n\n  **System Administration** Use this area to build your models, entities, attributes, attribute groups, and derived hierarchies. You also use this area to manage business rules and create and deploy models. You will use System Administration extensively in this chapter and in Chapter 8 when we discuss business rules.\n\n  **User and Group Permissions** Use this area to give users access to specific functional areas and to specific data within those areas. More information about security is provided in Chapter 11.\n\nAbout Models\n\nAs discussed previously, models are the highest level of organization within Master Data Services. Models are nothing but containers of related entities. Only entities within the same model can be related within MDS. This supports a simplified versioning model where all entities within a model are versioned simultaneously. Although many models revolve around a single domain such as customer or product, this is not a requirement. You can combine major entities into a single model if this makes business sense.\n\nWhen determining whether or not to include an entity in a model, there are a number of factors to consider:\n\n  Do the entities in the model have a relationship to one another?\n\n  If so, is this relationship master data? Many entities have relationships that are transactional in nature. Only those relationships that are states that change over time and are not discreet instances should be managed in the MDS system.\n\n  Do the entities change on similar schedules? If two entities have a natural affinity to be versioned at separate times, you may need to manage them in separate models.\n\n  Does an entity relate only to a subset of another entity? If only a subset of the members participate in the relationship between the two entities, ensuring accurate selection may be compromised. Business rules can be used to ensure only the valid members are selected; business rules will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8.\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Models\n\nAfter performing all of the analysis discussed in Chapter 3, Anthony Green has determined that he needs to create two models in the organization's Master Data Services instance. The Product model will revolve around a central Product entity. This entity will not require an explicit hierarchy, so Anthony will create only product leaf members to begin. Due to the interconnected nature of all other managed entities, Anthony will create an additional model called Finance. Since there is no finance entity or entities to add, he will create the model only.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Model\n\nTo create a model, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Models.\n\n**3.** On the Model Maintenance page, click the Add model button (the green plus sign).\n\n**4.** On the Add Model page, in the Model name field, type a name for your model. For this example, we'll call the model **Product**.\n\nThe three check boxes on this page can be confusing if you've never done this before:\n\n  **Create entity with same name as model** Leave this box selected. This check box does just what it says\u2014it creates an entity called Product. This option is here because, in many cases, a model revolves around a central entity.\n\n  **Create explicit hierarchy with same name as model** Briefly, an explicit hierarchy is a free-form hierarchy in which you can specify any number of levels, with a leaf member being allowed at any level and consolidated members being used for grouping. If you think you might want a hierarchy like this, you can select this check box. Because we don't discuss explicit hierarchies until Chapter 6, clear this check box for now. You can always enable this later.\n\n  **Include all leaf members in mandatory hierarchy** When you clear the preceding \"Create explicit hierarchy\" check box, this option is disabled.\n\n**5.** Click Save.\n\nThe Product model is now displayed in a tree view in System Administration, as shown in Figure 4-2. If it's not displayed already, click Model View on the menu bar in System Administration to view it.\n\n**Figure 4-2** _Models in the System Administration functional area_\n\nThe hierarchical structure that is displayed here is meant to give you a quick look at the models you have permission to view and to the entities in each. This structure is not meant to represent levels of importance the way a typical hierarchy would. As you learn more about entities and attributes, we will provide more details about this structure.\n\nViewing the Results in Explorer\n\nNow let's look at the model in the Explorer functional area. Go back to the Master Data Manager home page by clicking the logo.\n\nTIP\n\n_If you are running Internet Explorer 8, you should choose Compatibility Mode before viewing data in the Explorer functional area of Master Data Manager. From the IE Tools menu, choose Compatibility Mode._\n\nSelect the Product model from the list. Select the version, which was automatically created as VERSION_1. Now click Explorer.\n\nThe first base entity Silverlight Explorer grid will be displayed when you open the Explorer functional area. In the latest release, the old Explorer screen is no longer the initial screen loaded for users. This screen is still available from the menu at the top of the screen.\n\nThe top _base entity_ is the entity that is displayed by default when you open the Explorer functional area of the web UI. After you create more entities, you will be able to drag-and-drop items in the hierarchy to move a different entity into the \"base\" position. More than one entity can be listed as a base entity within a model. If multiple entities are listed as base entities, the first base entity will display when Explorer opens. The Explorer screen will still show all base entities for the model. You do not need to have a base entity in your model, though. If you don't, when Explorer opens, the first entity listed alphabetically will be displayed; all entities are available from the menu bar.\n\nNow you're ready to learn more about entities and practice creating a few.\n\nAbout Entities\n\nIn MDS, all data that is managed by the system is stored in entities. Entities can be loosely thought of as tables in SQL. The data within entities are called members.\n\nMDS's entities can also support explicit hierarchies. Once explicit hierarchies have been enabled for an entity, an entity becomes far more than a single table. The entity can then support parent and collection members, as well as hierarchy and collection relationships. Hierarchies and collections are discussed in detail in Chapter 6.\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Entities\n\nWithin the Product model, the Product entity has already been created. We now need to create all of the supporting entities that will be used as options for attributes of members in the Product entity. While most of these entities will be used to populate a single domain-based attribute only, some entities can be used to populate multiple entities within the model. Entities such as Neck Style, Color, and Size can only be used for a single purpose, but multiple entities can use attributes with constraints such as \"Yes\" and \"No.\"\n\nFirst we will create the Yes No Picklist entity; then we will create all other entities needed in the Product model.\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Entity\n\nTo create the Yes No Picklist entity, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities.\n\n**3.** On the Entity Maintenance page, click Add entity.\n\n**4.** On the Add Entity page, in the Entity name box, type **Yes No Picklist**.\n\n**5.** In the \"Name for Staging tables (optional)\" box, you can type a unique name for the staging table created specifically for this entity. The entity name will be used if no value is provided. This value cannot be changed in the web UI once the entity is saved. See Chapter 5 for more information on staging.\n\n**6.** You can check the \"Create Code values automatically\" check box to automatically assign a new integer value to newly created members. See Chapter 8 for more details on this process.\n\n**7.** In the \"Enable explicit hierarchies and collections\" drop-down list, select No. Again, you can enable this later if you need to.\n\n**8.** Click Save.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Sometimes when you save an entity, you have to wait a long time for the page to refresh. You know the entity has been created when the Add Entity page closes and you're returned to the Entity Maintenance page._\n\nThe Yes No Picklist entity is now displayed on the Entity Maintenance page.\n\nTo continue following along with the examples in this chapter, create the following entities: Type, Fabric, Neck Style, Gender, Color, and Size. These entities will contain lists of values that will be used to describe products, as you will soon learn. When you are done, your Entity Maintenance page should look like Figure 4-3. Your entities are automatically alphabetized here.\n\n**Figure 4-3** _Completed Entity Maintenance page_\n\nViewing the Results in Explorer\n\nNow let's look at the entities in Explorer. Go back to the home page by clicking the logo in the top left or by clicking the Home link.\n\n**1.** Select the Product model, VERSION1, and click Explorer.\n\n**2.** Choose Entities on the menu bar, and you see a list of available entities.\n\nIf you select an entity to view it in more detail, you can see that there is no master data in the entity yet. If there were, a grid would be displayed.\n\nLet's stop creating the model for a moment and talk about the members that will populate the grid.\n\nAbout Members\n\nMembers are the individual records stored in Master Data Services. Members are uniquely identified by the required Code attribute. There are two types of members in MDS: leaf members and consolidated members.\n\nLeaf members are the most granular level of records in an entity and usually represent physical objects within your business. For example, in a Product entity, a leaf member might be Men's Shirt #602. A leaf member in an Employee entity might be John Smith. A leaf member in a Warehouse entity might be Warehouse-98101.\n\nOne notable exception to this rule of thumb applies to any entities managed within the Finance domain. When managing entities associated with Finance, leaf members typically represent those low-level identifiers that transactions can be coded to. If transactions are coded with a store, account, employee, and product, you can be assured that the available values for each of these attributes should be stored as leaf member records in the associated entities.\n\nConsolidated members are used only in explicit hierarchies, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Members\n\nWhen implementing MDS, most entities will need to be populated from an initial data source. In Chapter 3 we retrieved and cleansed an extract file of the current products. In Chapter 5 we will discuss how to use staging tables to populate all of the current members into the proper entities. Before this staging can be completed, Main Street Clothing Company must ensure that all of the entity containers have been properly configured to accept the staged data.\n\nSome entities that are used as domain-based attributes have so many members that loading them through staging at the same time as the product members makes the most sense. In the case of simple entities with very few members, however, the effort to stage the members would exceed the effort needed to create them through the web UI. These members need to be created before we attempt to stage any product data.\n\nProcedure: How to Add a Member\n\nTo add a leaf member, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, select the Product model and VERSION_1 from the drop-down lists.\n\n**2.** Click Explorer.\n\n**3.** On the menu bar, choose Entities | Product.\n\n**4.** Under Product Entity, click Add Member.\n\n**5.** In this release, all new members are created on the same screen. A new member can be added in the right pane. In this pane, enter a name and code for your product. When we use the staging process to import the majority of our products, the name will be a concatenation of many fields. If you want to continue using our example, complete the fields as follows:\n\nNow add a few members to the Yes No Picklist entity:\n\n**1.** On the menu bar, choose Entities | Yes No Picklist.\n\n**2.** Above the grid, click Add Member.\n\n**3.** In the right pane, populate the Name and Code fields, entering **Yes** for the name and **Y** for the code.\n\n**4.** Click the OK button at the bottom of the pane.\n\n**5.** Click Add Member again.\n\n**6.** In the right pane, enter **No** for the name and **N** for the code.\n\n**7.** Click the OK button at the bottom of the pane. The members are now displayed in the grid.\n\nAfter you learn more about attributes, you will create a domain-based attribute that will use the Yes No Picklist values as the source.\n\nAbout Attributes\n\nAll entities within Master Data Services can be enriched by the creation of additional attributes. MDS supports a subset of the attributes supported in SQL Server. MDS supports four specific types of free-form attributes for leaf and consolidated entity members: text, datetime, number, and link. Text and link are essentially string fields, with link providing one-click support for hypertext links. Number supports as many as seven decimals, and datetime allows you to specify the mask for how the data will be input.\n\nIn order to relate two entities and ensure that values are constrained to specific values, MDS gives users the ability to create domain-based attributes. These attributes limit available values to the list of active members within the related entity.\n\nThe last type of attribute available to entities is the file attribute. Within a master data entity, it may be advisable to manage some files associated with each member. For instance, there may be instruction documents, specifications, blueprints, or photos that need to be associated with a Product entity within an organization. However, the file attribute has a number of limitations that make it less attractive to use for file management than SharePoint. First, to limit database sizes of MDS, file attributes will not be versioned. Only the last loaded file will be available within the MDS system. The transaction log will display information related to new files that have been loaded, but these will not be reversible.\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Attributes\n\nIn order for Anthony to successfully load all of the current products into Master Data Services, he must complete the creation of a Product entity. This includes creation of all free-form attributes to the proper specifications identified in Chapter 3. All product attributes that have currently been identified need to be created in MDS.\n\nIt is quite possible that during the attribute creation process or subsequent data loads, new information will be uncovered that changes the shape or type of attribute in MDS. Creating models in MDS should be an organic process. As new column needs are discovered at Main Street Clothing Company, Anthony will determine the best process for integrating these columns into Main Street's daily processes, ensuring that no process requirements are overlooked.\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Attribute\n\nLet's start by creating a free-form attribute. To create a free-form attribute, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities.\n\n**3.** On the Entity Maintenance page, select Product from the list of entities.\n\n**4.** On the toolbar that is displayed, click the \"Edit selected entity\" button.\n\nNOTE\n\n_The button does not appear until after you click the entity in the list._\n\nOn the Edit Entity page, you can see that two attributes are listed: Name and Code. When you create an entity, these attributes are automatically created. You cannot delete them.\n\n**5.** Click the \"Add leaf attribute\" button.\n\n**6.** On the Add Attribute page, select the Free-form option and complete the fields as shown here:\n\n  The value of the \"Display pixel width\" field determines how wide the column will be when it's displayed in the Explorer area of the web UI.\n\n  The \"Input mask\" field lets you decide whether to show negative numbers in parentheses or show a minus sign instead.\n\n  For now, don't enable change tracking. You will use this later, along with business rules, to notify someone when an attribute value changes.\n\n**7.** Click Save.\n\nOn the Edit Entity page, the new attribute is displayed.\n\nYou can click either Save or Cancel to leave this page. Either way, your attribute is saved.\n\nNOTE\n\n_To continue following along with the examples in this chapter, create the following free-form attributes: Retail Price (number with two decimal places), Safety Stock Level (number with no decimal places), Reorder Point (number, also with no decimal places), and Design (text)._\n\nIf you make a mistake, you can delete the attribute and create a new one, or you can edit the attribute and change the editable fields. At this point you might also want to edit the Name and Code attributes to set the \"Display pixel width\" field to a smaller number.\n\nTIP\n\n_If you want to hide an attribute without using security, set the \"Display pixel width\" field to 0._\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Domain-Based Attribute\n\nEach domain-based attribute has two parts:\n\n  The entity that contains the members that will be used as a picklist\n\n  The attribute that refers to the entity\n\nYou have already created an entity called Yes No Picklist and populated it with two members. Now you need to create a domain-based attribute that uses the members from the entity as attribute values.\n\nTo create a domain-based attribute, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities.\n\n**3.** On the Entity Maintenance page, select Product from the list of entities.\n\n**4.** On the toolbar that is displayed, click the \"Edit selected entity\" button.\n\n**5.** On the Edit Entity page, in the Leaf attributes section, click the \"Add leaf attribute\" button.\n\n**6.** On the Add Attribute page, select the Domain-based option and complete the fields as shown here:\n\nThe attribute is going to be called \"Discontinued.\" For each product, we want to know whether or not it has been discontinued. So type **Discontinued** as the attribute name and select Yes No Picklist as the entity that provides the members to use as attribute values.\n\n**7.** Click Save.\n\nViewing the Results in Explorer\n\nNow let's go back to Explorer and look at the Discontinued attribute:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, select Product and VERSION_1 from the lists and then click Explorer.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Entities | Product.\n\n**3.** Select the first member in the grid.\n\n**4.** Scroll to the bottom of the right pane. You can now select a value from the Discontinued drop-down list.\n\n**5.** Select N {No} for the attribute value.\n\n**6.** Click the OK button at the bottom of the pane to save the new values.\n\nTIP\n\n_You can select the Setting button above the grid to show the name and code of each attribute value, or to show the code only._\n\nNow create other domain-based attributes:\n\n**1.** Based on the entity Yes No Picklist, create a domain-based attribute named **Available to Outlet**.\n\n**2.** Based on the entity named Type, create a domain-based attribute named **Type**.\n\nYou can use the same name for the domain-based attribute that you already used for the entity.\n\n**3.** Do the same for the Fabric, Neck Style, Gender, Size, and Color entities, using the same name for the domain-based attribute.\n\nViewing the Results in System Administration\n\nIf you go back into the System Administration functional area (or if you are in System Administration already and on the menu bar you click Model View), you can view your model structure in a hierarchical format, as shown in Figure 4-4.\n\n**Figure 4-4** _The Product model structure_\n\nThe domain-based attributes can be expanded to show that they are entities with their own Name and Code attributes. The free-form attributes do not have attributes; they are just attributes of the Product model.\n\nAbout Attribute Groups\n\nMaster Data Services can contain every attribute associated with an entity in a business. Because of this, some entities can become unwieldy when viewed as a single table in the web UI. In a large organization, it is not uncommon for a major entity to contain over 400 attributes. Very few, if any, system users are interested in viewing all attributes simultaneously. Most users are interested in viewing only specific, related attributes at any one time. MDS provides the ability to group attributes into multiple tabs in the Master Data Manager web application. MDS calls these groupings _attribute groups_. Any attribute can be added to any attribute group.\n\nTypically attribute groups are created for each role consuming data within an entity. Different functional areas of the organization will be concerned with different groups of attributes for each entity stored in the application. Access to attribute groups can be managed by applying security for different users or groups at the attribute group level. This will be covered in more detail in Chapter 11.\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Attribute Groups\n\nMain Street Clothing Company has determined that the best approach to grouping attributes in Master Data Services is to group attributes by role. Because multiple roles are interested in the same attribute values, some attributes will appear in multiple attribute groups. In many cases, the same individuals perform the duties of multiple roles. Managers of these groups saw value in splitting these roles early in the design phase in an effort to prepare for future employee growth. Anthony reviewed all proposed consumers of MDS and determined the following roles:\n\n  **Logistics** In the past year, the company has leased warehouse space in two central locations to manage back inventory and take advantage of bulk discounts. To manage these warehouses, information related to reordering stock and product status is provided in a single group.\n\n  **Marketing** The Marketing role includes the VP of marketing and the individual store managers. All of these individuals need access to information about the variety of products and their costs in order to make informed decisions about incentives and discounts.\n\n  **Pricing** Within the company, multiple groups are interested in pricing. To aid in the management of these attributes, a separate attribute group was created to display only the cost and suggested retail price of each product.\n\nIn this chapter, we have shown you a very manual way to create entities, the goal being to explain all of the components of MDS entity creation. In SQL Server 2012, we encourage you to check out the entity creation functionality available in the MDS Add-In for Excel. This functionality quickly creates new entities in MDS with very minimal input from the user required. More information on this process can be found in Chapter 10.\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Attribute Group\n\nCAUTION\n\n_In SQL Server 2012, the system-created All Attributes attribute group is always available for users. Attribute groups are no longer a method to hide or secure attributes from users._\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Attribute Groups.\n\n**3.** Select a model and entity from the lists and click Leaf Groups.\n\n**4.** Click the \"Add attribute group\" button that is now displayed.\n\n**5.** In the \"Leaf group name\" box, type **Logistics**. This will be the first tab displayed in Explorer on the grid that displays members in the Product entity.\n\n**6.** Click Save. The group is displayed as a folder on the Attribute Group Maintenance page.\n\n**7.** Expand the Logistics folder by clicking the plus sign to the left of it.\n\n**8.** Click the Attributes label. The \"Edit selected item\" button is displayed.\n\n**9.** Click the \"Edit selected item\" button.\n\n**10.** A list of available attributes is displayed. Assign attributes to the group by selecting them and then clicking the right-pointing arrow. In this example, we're going to add Safety Stock Level, Reorder Point, Discontinued, and Available to Outlet.\n\nTIP\n\n_You can use ctrl-click to select multiple attributes and then add them all at the same time by clicking the arrow. The double arrows will add or remove all attributes to the group._\n\n**11.** Click Save. The attributes are now displayed beneath the Logistics group.\n\nBefore looking at the results in Explorer, create a few more groups:\n\nYou can include attributes in multiple groups, or in none. Name and Code are automatically included in all groups.\n\nNOTE\n\n_To rename a group, click the name of the group and then click the \"Edit selected item\" button._\n\nViewing the Results in Explorer\n\nLet's take a few minutes to view the attribute groups in Explorer.\n\nOn the Master Data Manager home page, ensure that the Product model and VERSION_1 are selected. Click Explorer. Then, on the menu bar, choose Entities | Product. The tabs are displayed, and each tab has the columns you selected, in addition to the Name and Code columns.\n\nIf you decide you want to change the order of your tabs, complete the next procedure.\n\nProcedure: How to Reorder Attribute Groups\n\nYou can change the order of your tabs by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Attribute Groups.\n\n**3.** Click the Leaf Groups label.\n\n**4.** Click the \"Edit selected item\" button.\n\nThe list of attributes in the group is displayed.\n\n**5.** Click the attribute group you want to move and use the arrows to move it up or down. The topmost group will be the leftmost tab in Explorer.\n\n**6.** When you're done, click Save.\n\nUsing Web Services\n\nCreating and retrieving any of the Master Data Services objects explored in this chapter are completed using the same MDS web service operations, MetadataCreate and MetadataGet, respectively. While these two calls can be extremely powerful, they require users to create an array of different objects to successfully create and get data from the web service. In the examples in this section, the encapsulation allows developers using these calls to ignore internal IDs and work with only common object names when coding against the MDS web service. Throughout the rest of the book, we will provide examples of calls to encapsulate common coding scenarios.\n\nCreating a Model\n\nThe first object that must be created in the Master Data Services system is a model. We can create a new model with a minimum of information from the user.\n\nCreating an Entity\n\nIn this example, we encapsulate the call to create a new entity for a given model. This example only creates an entity that is not hierarchy enabled. The web service requires us to create the model objects to hold the new entity object. More complex examples can be found in Chapter 13.\n\nCreating an Attribute\n\nAttributes can be created on a variety of object types in MDS. Attributes can be created on leaf and consolidated entities, as well as collections. The following example creates a new attribute of a specified type on the entity and model that has been passed in. Similar to the entity creation example, this procedure builds on the creation of an entity object and adds the attribute.\n\nSummary\n\nIn this chapter we created the initial structure of our Master Data Services solution. We created models, entities, and attributes. Attribute groups provide the ability to display attributes for each role or process that consumes the data stored. Unlike the example in this book, implementing a model in MDS at your company can and should be an iterative process. The customizability and speed of structural changes in this application allows organizations to quickly react to changing business processes or discovered inefficiencies. Often, changes to the data model are identified as we load data into the model, which will be the focus of the next chapter.\nChapter 5\n\nIntegrating Master Data Services with Other Systems\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Staging Architecture\n\n  Loading Relationships\n\n  Importing Data into the Staging Tables\n\n  Initiating the Staging Process\n\n  Using Web Services to Stage Data\n\n  Errors That Occur During Staging\n\n  Viewing the Staging Batch Table\n\nWhile master data management requires extensive integration with other systems within your enterprise, Master Data Services does not provide any features to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL). MDS is designed to leverage SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), but it also works well with other ETL solutions such as Informatica, InfoSphere DataStage, or any other product in this space.\n\nTo get data into and out of the system and communicate with other applications, Master Data Services uses staging tables for the incoming data flow and uses subscription views for the outgoing data flow. In SQL Server 2012, Microsoft has completely re-architected the staging process in MDS, creating new tables for each entity created in the system. In this chapter, we describe these staging areas of the application and discuss common methods to integrate systems with MDS. We also discuss some tips and tricks for integrating using SSIS and T-SQL jobs. This chapter is not meant to be a substitute for other SSIS books that may be available; for more complex operations, such as complex data flows and manipulations, you should consult _Hands-On Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services, Second Edition_ by Ashwani Nanda for assistance.\n\nStaging Architecture\n\nThe new staging architecture of Master Data Services creates a separate staging table for each entity created in the system. These tables are dynamic, adding or deleting columns as new attributes are managed in the entity. As attributes can differ between leaf members and consolidated members, two additional tables are created if the entity supports explicit hierarchies. The _Consolidated table supports loading consolidated members for any explicit hierarchy created for the entity, and the _Relationship table loads the structure of the hierarchy. Hierarchies are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6.\n\nAll of these tables are located in the new staging (stg) schema. This new schema is provided to better delineate between system objects that should be avoided and the tables and stored procedures users are encouraged to work with directly.\n\nBenefits of Entity-Based Staging\n\nThis new staging model has the following significant benefits over the three-common-table structure of the previous MDS release:\n\n  **Strongly typed columns** Now that each attribute in the entity has a corresponding column in the table, these staging columns can match the type and length of the defined attribute. This can provide rapid feedback about any truncation or data type issues when loading the staging table.\n\n  **Increased performance** Using common tables meant that all SQL statements in the underlying code needed to be dynamic. This limited SQL Server's innate ability to create query plans, extremely limiting performance.\n\n  **Securable tables** Using common tables to load data into MDS meant that security was an all-or-none alternative. Users who had the right to load members into one entity or attribute could also load new entity members or update information in entities they had restricted access to. Unique tables for each entity allow database administrators to leverage SQL Server security to lock down access on a per-entity and per-type basis.\n\n  **Better integration** By modeling the MDS entity table structure in the staging tables, integrators are able to better leverage SSIS and other ETL solutions to load data into MDS without significant data manipulation.\n\nBatch Tags\n\nIn the previous release of MDS, users were required to navigate a combination of user columns and sweeping procedures in order to manage batches within the system. Many people modified the tblStgBatch table directly in order to control batch IDs effectively. SQL Server 2012 introduces a new batch tag concept to manage data loads. Batch tags add the ability to uniquely tag their data with any character combination up to 50 characters. This tag can then be passed in the load process. For instance, if there is a nightly load of SAP data into MDS, each ETL process could tag the loaded data with a SAP < _Load Date_ > batch tag combination, as shown next. This tag would be stored along with the system-assigned batch ID to provide direct history of what data was loaded into each entity each night.\n\nSecurity in Staging\n\nWhile MDS is a feature of SQL Server, MDS does not rely on the SQL Server security model to secure data within the system. In Chapter 11 we will go into the details of the MDS security model, but in this chapter it is important to be aware that giving access to SQL objects within the MDS database must be handled with care. In SQL Server 2012, securable objects have been broken out into the stg schema. You can secure each of these objects for users who will use staging.\n\nStaging and subscription views are separate from the web-based security model that is enforced in the web UI. Subscription views are SQL views used by subscribing systems to get data from MDS. These views are described in detail in Chapter 12.\n\nThe use of the staging tables and the consumption of subscription views are intended for advanced system batch integration. To ensure that these processes can be completed as quickly as possible, database objects lie outside of the security model and rely on database administrators to restrict access using SQL Server security roles to limit access to any sensitive information stored in MDS. We will discuss the securing of these database objects in Chapter 11.\n\nSystem Settings\n\nBefore you load data into the staging tables, confirm the following staging system settings that are set in Master Data Services Configuration Manager, which you launch from Programs | Microsoft SQL Server 2012 | Master Data Services | Configuration Manager.\n\n  **Log all staging transactions** Set this to On to have transactions logged when the staged records are loaded into the appropriate Master Data Services database tables.\n\n  **Staging batch interval** When you set the staging process to start, this setting determines the number of seconds afterward that your batch is processed. The default setting is 60 seconds (1 minute).\n\nAbout Main Street Clothing Company's Staging Process\n\nMain Street Clothing Company has created what it believes to be a basic, functional model structure. Now Anthony Green needs to ensure that all the requisite information is loaded, to ensure that all products can be staged into the system.\n\nAnthony determines that the best method for addressing new attribute values will be a manual process managed by the Product Procurement team. This process will be managed through the use of business rules, as discussed in Chapter 8.\n\nAnthony compiles a summary of the attribute values that need to be loaded before the company's current product list can be loaded. He reviews each attribute to determine if there is any additional data associated with these values that should be managed as well. For each attribute, he will need to create or load several members to be used as domain-based attribute values.\n\nSince none of these attribute values requires advanced management nor has over 15 values, Anthony determines that loading these records manually is the most efficient method. A few of the more technical manufacturers have discussed system integrations to provide electronic access to new product lines. As these systems become available, Anthony will review the necessary ETL processes to automatically load new products and their requisite domain-based values.\n\nIf Anthony had decided to use the staging process, he could have created a spreadsheet similar to those available at www.mdsuser.com.\n\nStandard Leaf and Parent Staging Fields\n\nA staging table will be added to the stg schema in the MDS database for each entity that is created. This initial table will be named using the Name for Staging Tables input provided when you create the entity. This name cannot be changed using the UI once you have created the entity.\n\nThe following table describes the common columns in each leaf and parent staging table.\n\nStaging Import Types\n\nBecause entity-based staging loads all attributes for a given entity's members simultaneously, a number of import options had to be created. These options load the data provided into MDS based on the import type provided for each member record. Since different import types can be loaded simultaneously and the results of each type can affect data drastically, it is imperative to ensure the correct import type is passed with each member record.\n\nMember Staging Examples\n\nYou can populate the tblStgMember table by using T-SQL statements or by using SQL Server Integration Services. In our SSIS examples, we'll import a CSV file, but there are a variety of options available, including SQL Server, Access, Excel, and others.\n\nThe examples in this section are meant to illustrate the staging process, but they do not necessarily build on the Product model that we've laid out so far. You can visit www.mdsuser.com to download the CSV files you need to stage in all of the members, attributes, and collections for the Product and Finance models. You can get those files now and compare them to the examples, or try creating your own sample products.\n\nUse the following examples to create a new leaf member, update a leaf member, delete a leaf member, purge a leaf member, create a consolidated member (needed only for explicit hierarchies), and create a collection (a different type of grouping that your organization may or may not use). When using a CSV file to stage members, the first row in the file should contain the column names. Collection member management will use the prior version staging tables to add or update collection members into the system through staging.\n\nCreate a Leaf Member\n\nIn this example, we are going to specify the member code required to create a leaf member. We are not going to specify the member name, because the name is not required. In Chapter 8, we'll show you how to use business rules to create a concatenated member name. Since the new staging table schema can load attributes with the members, all attributes could have been added to this example. To ensure readability and brevity, only a few attributes have been added to the following examples unless otherwise specified.\n\nAlso in these examples, we no longer need to provide a username with each member record, as was required in the prior MDS release. This process has been replaced with the batch tag. Batch tags can be used to separate loads of data into the system, and SQL Server security can be used to control access to each staging table, stored procedure, and error view.\n\nUpdate a Leaf Member\n\nFollowing are two import examples that show you how to update a leaf member with the name _ and the code 1001. In the first example, we only want to update certain attributes and do not need to update any attributes to NULL. In the second example, we want the member record to exactly match the values we are loading. Be very careful when loading data using this method, as any new attributes will be erased from the system. (They will default to NULL in the staging table and load as NULL into MDS.)\n\nThis import example shows the partial attribute update:\n\nThis example shows the exact member update:\n\nDelete a Member\n\nThere are two options to soft delete members from MDS using staging. An import type of 3 soft deletes a member from the system only if the member is not referenced by any other entity that has a relationship to the member. An import type of 5 removes these references, setting these related members' attribute values to NULL. All soft delete actions from staging only require the ImportType, ImportStatus_ID, BatchTag, and Code columns to have values. All other data provided in the row will be ignored.\n\nThis example shows how to soft delete data with no references:\n\nPurge a Member\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, you can now purge members from the system. While soft delete retains the member history and does not allow the code to be reused within the entity for the current version, purge completely removes the member and all history for the current version. There are two options to purge members from MDS using staging. An import type of 4 purges a member from the system only if the member is not referenced by any other entity that has a relationship to the member. An import type of 6 removes these references, setting these related members' attribute values to NULL. All purge actions from staging only require the ImportType, ImportStatus_ID, BatchTag, and Code columns to have values. All other data provided in the row will be ignored.\n\nThis example purges data with no references:\n\nThis example purges data and removes references:\n\nCreate a Consolidated Member\n\nThis example shows you how to create a consolidated member with the name Short Term Assets and the code STA for the Account entity.\n\nCreate a Collection\n\nThis example shows you how to create a collection with the name Boys Winter Set and the code BWS. Unfortunately, collections are not handled with the new entity-based staging. To manage collections using staging in SQL Server 2012, you need to use the old, deprecated tables from the prior release. This collection won't have any members in it. It is simply creating a collection with this name and code. To add members to collections, you can use the TblStgRelationship staging table.\n\nCollections have a MemberType_ID of 3 to distinguish them from leaf members (1) and consolidated members (2).\n\nUpdate a Collection's Attribute\n\nThis example updates the Description attribute of the Boys Winter Set (BWS) collection to read \"Boys 2011 Winter Set.\" If you have not defined additional attributes for your collections, the only attributes you can update are Owner_ID, Description, Name, and Code.\n\nAdd One Collection to Another\n\nThis example adds the Boys Winter Set (BWS) collection to the Fall and Winter Sets (FWS) collection.\n\nAdd a Leaf Member to a Collection\n\nThis example adds leaf member 1052 to the Boys Winter Set (BWS) collection.\n\nAdd a Consolidated Member to a Collection\n\nThis example adds the Boys (B) consolidated member to the Fall and Winter Sets (FWS) collection. The TargetType_ID of 5 tells the system that you are setting a collection member.\n\nUsing Staging to Deactivate Members\n\nThe soft delete process in the leaf and consolidated entity-based staging has replaced the deactivation process of the prior release of MDS. Unfortunately, there is no way to reactivate a member through the new staging process. When you deactivate a member, the member code no longer changes to a 32-character GUID, making that code unavailable for use. The purge import type will solve this issue. Entity-based staging does not support reactivating the member. This can be useful if you want to restore a member's attributes and its membership in hierarchies and collections. If you want to reactivate a member, you need to leverage the deprecated tblMemberAttribute table.\n\nThis procedure no longer requires that you look in database tables for information, as the code is not updated to a GUID. In Chapter 7 we will show you how to delete and reactivate members in the Master Data Manager web application. Using the web UI is simpler than using staging and leaves less room for error. The new purge functionality is only available in staging, and it should be noted that purging the member will cause you to lose attribute assignments and hierarchy relationships as well as any history stored within the selected purge version.\n\nExample: Reactivate a Member\n\nThis example shows how to reactivate a member that was deactivated. Note that the member code is now the code and has not changed to a 32-character GUID.\n\nLoading Relationships\n\nThe last staging table type within MDS entity-based staging is the relationship table. This table will be created only if the entity is hierarchy enabled. You use the stg.< _Staging Name_ >_Relationship table to load explicit hierarchy relationships. Explicit hierarchy relationships can still be entered in two ways. You can load data as a parent relationship, or you can load data as sibling relationships.\n\nIn most cases, the easiest way to load data into MDS is to load it in parent-child format. Many systems care not about the order of members within the hierarchy but rather about the consolidations themselves; in these cases, parent-child format is the easiest way to load records through staging. When parent-child records are loaded through staging in this manner, the sort order is triggered in a standard way. Any new children of a consolidated member in the system are placed as the last siblings in the tree, similar to how birth order works in a family tree for humans.\n\nIf sort order matters and you cannot control the order of data within your staging load, you can load records into MDS using the sibling type. Using 2 as the relationship type, new relationships are created at the same level of the hierarchy as the next sibling to the target code specified. This allows you to directly set the order of records in an explicit hierarchy without reloading the entire hierarchy.\n\nCreating a new record as the first sibling of any parent requires a two-step process. The first step is to load the new relationship as a sibling to the first child of the target parent. The second step is to set the first child as a sibling to the just loaded member. This reverses the order of these two child members.\n\nRelationship Table Fields\n\nUse stg.< _Staging Name_ >_Relationship to move members in explicit hierarchies. You cannot use this table for updating derived hierarchies or for adding or removing members to or from collections. To update derived hierarchies, you must update the attribute values that determine the hierarchy. For more information about hierarchies and collections, refer to Chapter 6.\n\nThe following table describes the fields in tblStgRelationship.\n\nRelationship Staging Examples\n\nThe following examples show how to populate the Account Relationship staging table by using T-SQL statements or by using SSIS to import a CSV file. Again, many of the members referred to in these examples do not exist yet in the samples we've provided, and you will get errors if you try to update a member that doesn't exist. Use these examples to get ideas for how to stage your own data, or use the staging spreadsheets we've provided at www.mdsuser.com.\n\nSet a Parent-Child Relationship in an Explicit Hierarchy\n\nThis example sets the Short Term Assets (STA) consolidated member as the parent of the Cash member in the Chart of Accounts explicit hierarchy.\n\nTIP\n\n_If you want to specify the Unused node of an explicit hierarchy as the parent, use MDMUNUSED for the TargetCode. If you want to assign a hierarchy member to the root, use ROOT._\n\nSet a Sibling Relationship in an Explicit Hierarchy\n\nThis example sets Long Term Assets at the same level as Short Term Assets in the Chart of Accounts explicit hierarchy.\n\nAdd One Collection to Another\n\nThis example adds the Boys Winter Set (BWS) collection to the Fall and Winter Sets (FWS) collection. This is a deprecated table, but it is the only way to use staging to update a collection member in SQL Server 2012.\n\nAdd a Leaf Member to a Collection\n\nThis example adds leaf member 1052 to the Boys Winter Set (BWS) collection.\n\nAdd a Consolidated Member to a Collection\n\nThis example adds the Boys (B) consolidated member to the Fall and Winter Sets (FWS) collection.\n\nImporting Data into the Staging Tables\n\nYou may already have decided how to get your data into the MDS database's staging tables. If you haven't, we'll show you how to do it by using SQL Server Integration Services. After you import your data into the tables, you can proceed with running the import, which puts the data from the staging tables into the appropriate MDS database tables. You can load files that are provided for later chapters by using the following process.\n\nProcedure: How to Import Data into SQL Server by Using SSIS\n\nIn this procedure, we are going to use a flat CSV file with a header row that includes column names. To import a CSV file into the SQL Server MDS database staging tables by using SSIS, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open SQL Server Management Studio.\n\n**2.** Right-click the MDS database.\n\n**3.** On the submenu, select Tasks | Import Data.\n\n**4.** On the Welcome page, click Next.\n\n**5.** On the Choose a Data Source page, select Flat File Source as your data source.\n\n**6.** Click the Browse button to browse to the file. (You must select CSV as the file type to view your files. TXT is selected by default.)\n\n**7.** Select the \"Column names in the first data row\" check box.\n\n**8.** Click Next.\n\n**9.** On the next Choose a Data Source page, confirm that the preview of your data looks accurate and click Next.\n\n**10.** On the Choose a Destination page, confirm that your MDS database is selected and click Next.\n\n**11.** On the Select Source Tables and Views page, ensure that you select the appropriate staging table. You should load data only into tables in the stg schema. If you are not sure which table to load into, you can check in the Manage Entities screen in System Administration functional area. You can also click the Preview button at the bottom of this screen to preview your data.\n\nCAUTION\n\n_The correct table is not selected by default. Be careful not to click Next without changing the destination table._\n\n**12.** Click Next.\n\n**13.** On the Review Data Type Mapping page, click Next.\n\n**14.** On the Save and Run Package page, click Next.\n\n**15.** On the Complete the Wizard page, click Finish.\n\nWhen the process is complete, a message is displayed, stating that the execution was successful.\n\nInitiating the Staging Process\n\nAfter you have populated the staging tables with your data, you must run the batch process that loads the data from the staging tables into the MDS-specific tables. In SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services, Microsoft has created a specific staging stored procedure for each entity-based staging table.\n\nTo initiate the staging process, you can use\n\n  The Master Data Manager web application\n\n  A stored procedure in the MDS database\n\nIn an effort to align with other SQL Server features and to provide to users an efficient method to load data into MDS, the new web services for entity-based staging are not supported for customer use. Data stewards should plan to move all of their MDS staging processes to leverage the appropriate stored procedures.\n\nProcedure: How to Use Master Data Manager to Initiate the Staging Process\n\nTo use the Master Data Manager web application to initiate the staging process after you've loaded data into the MDS staging tables, complete the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_In the latest release of MDS, staging batches are now processed by entity, and processing begins at an interval determined by a setting in Master Data Services Configuration Manager. As a data steward, you are responsible for initiating the processing of each table individually, so you should import only the records you intend to load in the proper order (for example, import colors before importing products set to that color)._\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Integration Management. On the initial Import Data page, all batch tag grouped records that have not been cleared are displayed for the selected model. Even with identical batch tags, entity and type will be broken out in the table.\n\n**2.** Select the model and then select a batch tag from the table to load into the system. The total number of records to be imported should be displayed in the Records column.\n\n**3.** Above the batch list, click the Start Batches button.\n\n**4.** In the Run Selected Batches dialog box, shown next, select the version to load selected batches into.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Committed versions are available in the list even though you will not be able to load members into those versions. If the number of records to be imported does not seem correct or the batch tag is missing, ensure that your batch tag was properly entered, that the Batch_ID field for each record in the table is NULL, and that the ImportStatus_ID field for each record is 0._\n\nClick OK. The batch is assigned an ID, and the Status column is updated to QueuedToRun.\n\nTIP\n\n_On the menu bar, click Import Data to refresh the page until the Status column is updated._\n\nWhen the batch has finished processing, the Status column is updated to Not Running and errors are listed in the Errors column.\n\nYou can go to Explorer functional area to view your staged members, or open the Staging Batch Errors view to view the details of your errors.\n\nProcedure: How to Use Stored Procedures to Initiate the Staging Process\n\nAfter you have loaded data into the staging tables by using either T-SQL or SSIS, using the web UI or web services to trigger a staging load process can be inconvenient. While we do not recommend coding against stored procedures as a general rule, the benefits outweigh the risks in this case.\n\nYou can trigger logging of transactions or validation by using staging stored procedures. The stored procedures, described in the following section, provide access to additional functionality that is not exposed in the UI. These stored procedures are also more accessible when loading data through SSIS.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Microsoft does not guarantee that these interfaces will remain constant, nor does Microsoft provide any backward compatibility at the stored procedure level._\n\nThe End of Staging Sweep\n\nThe new batch tag approach has replaced the staging sweep process used in the prior release of MDS. While the deprecated three-table approach still requires staging sweep use, all new staging tables automatically receive a batch ID upon triggering the load process.\n\nUsing Web Services to Stage Data\n\nThere are a number of calls within the web service that leverage the staging tables and processes to load data into Master Data Services. Some of these calls provide support for bulk loading of data. These calls manage the entire process of populating the staging tables and triggering the staging process. The structure of these calls will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 13.\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, all of the new staging calls have been tagged for \"Internal Use Only.\" These calls were not created or tested for external consumption. The new staging tables provide a much more compelling integration with SSIS using the new stored procedures to trigger staging loads, and staging batches can be created when loading the staging tables.\n\nErrors That Occur During Staging\n\nSometimes errors occur during the staging process. As each row in a staging table is processed, the Status_ID column is updated with a 1 if staging succeeded and a 2 if it failed. If staging failed, the ErrorCode column is updated with a new (to SQL Server 2012) complex error code that can help you troubleshoot the issue. This number is useful to humans only through the new staging error view created for each entity.\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, all errors are now determined for a record in the batch that is processed. In the new staging error view created for each entity, these errors are expanded into a new row for each error that is found on the record.\n\nYou can no longer see a translation of these error messages in the Master Data Manager web application; however, you can save a SQL script to the Clipboard to review in SQL Server Management Studio.\n\nProcedure: How to View Staging Errors in Management Studio\n\nTo view details of your staging errors in SQL Server Management Studio, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the initial import data screen, click the row for the batch with errors you want to explore.\n\n**2.** Click the Copy Query button to load the SQL query onto the Clipboard. If this is your first time using this feature, Silverlight may ask permission to write to the Clipboard. If so, click Yes to continue.\n\n**3.** Open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the database server running the MDS database.\n\n**4.** Open a new query window and press ctrl-v.\n\n**5.** Click the Execute button at the top of the screen. You will notice that many more errors than original member records can be present, as a row in the view has been created for each error found by the staging process.\n\nStaging Errors View\n\nTo help you better manage errors in your staging batches, Microsoft includes in the latest release of MDS the errors view table, the columns for which are listed and described in the following table. A single view shows errors for all staging table types for an entity. Filtering this view by the appropriate batch ID is the best way to see your issues effectively. (This is what copy query provides.)\n\nViewing the Staging Batch Table\n\nThe last table specifically related to staging is the batch table, mdm.tblStgBatch. This table stores information related to each load of data imported into the MDS system. Summary information related to the success and failure of each record is stored in the batch table indefinitely. As this table is not part of the stg schema, users should not modify this table directly.\n\n*The Service Broker queue is used only as an asynchronous timer. Generic staging messages are placed on the queue and staging batches are triggered by the Queued to Run status only.\n\nProcedure: How to Clear the Staging Queue\n\nTo clear a batch from the staging queue, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Integration Management.\n\n**2.** In the pane, click the row for the batch you want to clear.\n\n**3.** Click the Clear Batches button.\n\nThe value in the Status column changes to Queued to Clear. When it's done processing, the Status column changes to Not Running. This can be considered completed for any batch that is displayed.\n\nSummary\n\nIn this chapter, we discussed techniques for using staging tables to load data into Master Data Services efficiently and effectively. We discussed the changes to the staging process in SQL Server 2012 and the benefits of entity based staging. We reviewed examples of using SQL Server Integration Services or standard SQL calls to populate records into the new staging tables. Within the discussion of staging tables, we also discussed types of errors that can occur during the data loading process from the staging into MDS and how to use the new error views provided in this release. We provided likely solutions to these errors. In the next chapter, we will discuss hierarchy types in greater detail.\nChapter 6\n\nWorking with Hierarchies and Collections\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Ragged vs. Level-Based Hierarchies\n\n  Creating Derived Hierarchies\n\n  System Settings for Hierarchies\n\n  Creating Explicit Hierarchies\n\n  Recursive Hierarchies\n\n  Derived Hierarchies with Explicit Caps\n\n  Collections\n\n  Creating Hierarchies by Using Web Services\n\nBusinesses are not built only on lists; they require more complex structures for data. Dollars, units, and hours must all be calculated to produce consolidated views of a business. For many years, companies have been using business intelligence (BI) applications to better understand their businesses and discover opportunities for both cost savings and revenue growth. At the heart of these applications are the hierarchies that make consolidations possible.\n\nWhen managing consolidations within a business, it is imperative that all values are accounted for once and only once. To ensure this, hierarchies in Master Data Services enforce that all leaf members have one and only one parent. This limits your ability to manage many-to-many relationships within MDS and display these relationships hierarchically.\n\nIn this chapter, we review the two primary types of hierarchies supported in MDS. We then create these derived and explicit hierarchies within our models. Finally, we create a number of special hierarchies and discuss the various uses for these special hierarchies.\n\nBefore you start this chapter, go to www.mdsuser.com and download the ZIP file for Chapter 6, called chapter6.zip. This ZIP file contains the following files that you will use in this chapter:\n\nThe Product model represents everything you created in Chapter 4, but it includes several hundred product members with their attributes already populated. This gives you a fair amount of data to work with and will help the samples in this chapter make more sense. The Finance model is similar insofar as it is fully populated with data and contains the structure you'll need to work with the hierarchies we create in this chapter.\n\nRagged vs. Level-Based Hierarchies\n\nWhen you're working with hierarchies, it is important to understand some common terms used across applications. Any hierarchy can be either ragged or level based. _Ragged_ describes hierarchies that support leaf members at multiple levels. A hierarchy is _level based_ if leaf members always exist at the same level, regardless of the number of levels within the hierarchy.\n\nSome business applications do not support ragged hierarchies, so it is important to know the limitations of downstream systems before you create hierarchies in MDS.\n\nDerived Hierarchies\n\nIn MDS, derived hierarchies provide the ability to highlight preexisting data relationships within entities and display them hierarchically. Derived hierarchies are based on the preexisting data relationships within MDS. In SQL Server 2012, derived hierarchies have been expanded to allow more complex relationships to be managed effectively. It is clear that as the MDS product advances, derived hierarchies will continue to evolve to handle all data relationships, and explicit hierarchies will lose importance. Derived Hierarchies will continue to be expanded past the definition that every level within the hierarchy corresponds to a specific domain-based attribute within the entity\u2013attribute chain (see Figure 6-1).\n\n**Figure 6-1** _A derived hierarchy, created by using a domain-based attribute_\n\nExplicit Hierarchies\n\nExplicit hierarchies are multilevel hierarchies with very few restrictions. Explicit hierarchies are managed as name\u2013value pairs, with consolidated members containing other consolidated or leaf members. Explicit hierarchies are created for one entity at a time. Derived hierarchies, in contrast, require multiple entities.\n\nConsolidated members are almost always theoretical items, whereas leaf members represent physical items. Like leaf members, consolidated members can have attributes assigned to them. In the MDS database, a separate table exists to manage consolidated members and their associated attributes. Consolidated members are available only if an entity is enabled for explicit hierarchies. Each consolidated member can be associated with only a single hierarchy no matter how many explicit hierarchies have been created for the entity.\n\nDerived vs. Explicit: Which Hierarchy Is Best?\n\nDerived hierarchies are determined by the structure of the model, and changes to the structure are rare. To illustrate the value of this rigor, consider the following scenario that organizations commonly encounter.\n\nOur fictional company devises a regional hierarchy to manage sales. As with most of these hierarchies, this hierarchy begins as a level-based hierarchy, with each level within the hierarchy corresponding to a distinct type of attribute. To store the hierarchy, IT uses the parent-child format from its analysis system.\n\nOver time, this hierarchy is modified by midlevel managers to help them manage their divisions better. Changes are not centrally managed, and new levels are added monthly. John is the manager of the Western region of the company. John has two managers who split duties managing the Southwest division for him: Bill and Margaret. Since Bill and Margaret are splitting the Southwest, John needs to split divisional data in the company's reports to measure this divisional structure. To do this, he creates two additional nodes within the hierarchy for the Southwest division, SWB (Southwest Bill) and SWM (Southwest Margaret).\n\nOver time, Bill and Margaret move on to other jobs, either moving up in the company or on to other opportunities. Yet the Southwest division continues to be split into SWM and SWB. This is not an isolated occurrence, as many managers make isolated changes to the hierarchy structure. Some of these changes may not be warranted, and others may have a short shelf life. Soon the initial hierarchy is unrecognizable and difficult to manage. The ability to provide managers with rigid derived hierarchies, malleable explicit hierarchies, and focused collections allows BI professionals to provide the perfect tool for each scenario.\n\nCreating Derived Hierarchies\n\nDerived hierarchies require that you have one or more entities, each of which has a domain-based attribute that you want to group members by. In MDS, you cannot group members by more than one domain-based attribute at a time. This doesn't mean that your derived hierarchy can't have multiple levels, just that each level must be based on a domain-based attribute relationship.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Derived Hierarchy\n\nIn this example, you'll create a derived hierarchy that has two levels. You will roll up products by gender. Product will be at the lowest level in the hierarchy, and Gender will be one level higher.\n\nTo create a two-level derived hierarchy, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Derived Hierarchies.\n\n**3.** From the Model list, select the model if it isn't selected already. In this case, select Product.\n\n**4.** Click the \"Add derived hierarchy\" button.\n\n**5.** In the \"Derived hierarchy name\" field, type a descriptive name for your hierarchy. In this case, we're going to name the hierarchy **Product by Gender**.\n\n**6.** Click the \"Save derived hierarchy\" button. The page that is displayed has three panes.\n\nOn the left are the entities that can be added to the current level in the hierarchy. In the center are all the entities in the derived hierarchy; right now there are none because you haven't added any yet. Each time you drag an entity from the left pane to the center pane, the left pane refreshes with the list of entities that remain available to add.\n\nYou should always drag the lowest-level entity first. In this case, we want a hierarchy with products at the lowest level.\n\n**7.** In the left pane, click and drag Product to the \"Current levels\" label in the middle pane. Release the mouse button and the screen refreshes, with Product displayed in the Current Levels pane.\n\nThe Preview pane refreshes to show a list of products.\n\n**8.** Now you can drag the entity you want to group by. In this case it's Gender, so click Gender in the left pane and drag it to the Current Levels pane.\n\nThe page refreshes and the Preview pane shows all products grouped by gender.\n\nNOTE\n\n_The hierarchy is saved as you build it. No Save button is available on this page._\n\nIf you decide you do not want to group by gender, click Gender in the Current Levels pane and then click the Delete button that's displayed at the bottom of the pane. If you decide you want to rename your hierarchy, click the \"Edit selected item\" button on the top left of this page.\n\nThe real value of a derived hierarchy occurs when new products are created. You can configure a business rule so that each time a new product is added, if the Gender attribute is not populated, an e-mail notifies all interested parties. Business rules will be covered in more detail in Chapter 8.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Three-Level Derived Hierarchy\n\nNow you are going to create a derived hierarchy with three levels. After completing this procedure, you should be able to build your own multilevel hierarchies.\n\nIn the Product model you have built so far, you don't have the ability to create a three-level derived hierarchy. This is because the Product entity is the only entity that has domain-based attributes. To create a hierarchy with multiple levels, each entity in the hierarchy must be used as a domain-based attribute of another entity.\n\nFor example, right now you can roll up products by Gender, Size, Type\u2014any of Product's domain-based attributes. But you can't roll up products by size and _then_ by gender. You have to choose one or the other.\n\nIn this example, you will create a derived hierarchy that rolls up products first by product line, then by manufacturer. This will require two relationships:\n\n  The Product entity must have a Line domain-based attribute.\n\n  The Line entity must have a Manufacturer domain-based attribute.\n\nWhen you're done creating the structure, you will be able to roll up Product by Line by Manufacturer. The Product model doesn't have this structure right now, so let's create it.\n\nCreate a Manufacturer Entity\n\nCreate an entity called Manufacturer and populate it with six members. (Note: It does not need to have explicit hierarchies enabled.) You can get these members from chapter6.zip on www.mdsuser.com. Import 1Manufacturer.csv into stg.Manufacturer_Leaf and use Integration Management to start the staging process. Or, create these members manually in Explorer.\n\nFor the Product Entity, Create a Line Domain-Based Attribute\n\nNow, for the Product entity, you're going to create a domain-based attribute that's based on the Line entity:\n\n**1.** In Master Data Manager, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities.\n\n**3.** From the Model list, select Product.\n\n**4.** Click the Product entity and then the \"Edit selected entity\" button.\n\n**5.** In the Leaf attributes section, click the \"Add leaf attribute\" button.\n\n**6.** Choose Domain-based, type **Line** for the name, and select Line for the source entity.\n\n**7.** Click the Save attribute button.\n\nFor the Line Entity, Create a Manufacturer Domain-Based Attribute\n\nNow in System Administration, perform the same steps as you just did, but edit the Line entity instead. Add a leaf attribute, domain based, called **Manufacturer** , based on the Manufacturer entity.\n\nCreate a Line Entity and Assign Manufacturer to Each Line\n\nCreate an entity called **Line** and populate it with 14 members. (Note: It does not need to have explicit hierarchies enabled.) You can get these members and their associated Manufacturer from chapter6.zip on www.mdsuser.com. Import 2Line.csv into stg.Line_Leaf and use the Integration Management functional area to start the staging process. Alternatively, create the members manually by referring to the following table. Remember, you create the entity in System Administration and add members in Explorer.\n\nAssign a Line to Each Product, and a Manufacturer to Each Line\n\nYou can use 3Product.csv from www.mdsuser.com to assign a Line attribute to each product. Remember that attributes are now imported with the members in the stg.Product_Leaf staging table and you use Integration Management to start the staging import process. Or, you can assign attributes manually in Explorer.\n\nIf you decide to do this manually, here are a few things to consider:\n\n  The Line attribute is not part of an attribute group yet, so it will not be displayed in Explorer. Add it to the Marketing attribute group if you want to edit it.\n\n  You can edit members individually in the UI or use the MDS Add-in for Excel to perform bulk edits.\n\nYou are now ready to create your three-level derived hierarchy.\n\nCreate the Derived Hierarchy\n\nCreating the hierarchy should be the easiest part of the process:\n\n**1.** In System Administration, on the menu bar, choose Manage | Derived Hierarchies.\n\n**2.** Ensure Product is selected in the Model list and click the \"Add derived hierarchy\" button.\n\n**3.** For the name, type **Product by Line by Manufacturer**.\n\n**4.** Click and drag Product to the Current Levels pane. A list of products is displayed in the Preview pane.\n\n**5.** Click and drag Line to the Current Levels pane and drop it on Product.\n\n**6.** Manufacturer is the only entity available to add to the hierarchy. Click and drag it to Line in the Current Levels pane. When you release the mouse button, the full hierarchy is displayed in the Preview pane.\n\nYou can now expand and collapse nodes in the hierarchy to get an idea of the structure.\n\nHiding Levels\n\nIf you click any of the levels in the Current Levels pane, you can hide the level from users by selecting No from the Visible list. This can be useful when you have a multilevel hierarchy structure and users don't need to see many of the middle-tier levels when working with the hierarchy.\n\nYou can also change the name of a hierarchy level by updating the value in the Column name field.\n\nSystem Settings for Hierarchies\n\nThere are two settings in Master Data Services Configuration Manager that apply to hierarchies and collections. Now that you know more about what hierarchies look like, you might want to change these.\n\n  **Number of members in the hierarchy by default** This setting determines how many members are displayed in a hierarchy node before a label named...more... is displayed. The default setting is to show 50 members.\n\n  **Show names in hierarchy by default** This setting determines whether the name and code of each member are displayed or only the code is displayed. The default setting is to show both name and code.\n\nCreating Explicit Hierarchies\n\nThere are two types of explicit hierarchies in MDS: mandatory and non-mandatory. Before you create an explicit hierarchy, you should determine which type you'll need.\n\nNon-mandatory Explicit Hierarchies\n\nWhen you create a non-mandatory explicit hierarchy, all children are located in a node named Unused, as shown in Figure 6-2. Leaf members in the Unused node do not show up in subscription views based on the explicit hierarchy. This means that when you use subscription views as source data for subscribing systems, all the members in the Unused node are excluded. For more information on subscription views, see Chapter 12.\n\n**Figure 6-2** _A non-mandatory explicit hierarchy, where all leaf members start in the Unused node_\n\nNon-mandatory explicit hierarchies are easier to work with when you have large numbers of leaf members. To build an explicit hierarchy, you must create consolidated members, which are displayed at the root by default. You can then move leaf members from the Unused node to the consolidated members that live at the root.\n\nMandatory Explicit Hierarchies\n\nWhen you create a mandatory explicit hierarchy, all leaf members are initially located at the root of the hierarchy. As you create consolidated members, they are also added to the root, but they are displayed at the end of the list. To find them, you must search or scroll to the end of the hierarchy. Figure 6-3 shows a mandatory explicit hierarchy where consolidated members exist but are not displayed because they follow hundreds of leaf members.\n\n**Figure 6-3** _A mandatory explicit hierarchy, where all leaf members start at the root_\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Explicit Hierarchy\n\nTo create an explicit hierarchy, you are going to use the Finance model, which, if you deployed it from the web site, includes a full list of sample accounts. To create an explicit hierarchy, you complete the following tasks:\n\n**1.** Enable the Account entity for hierarchies and collections.\n\n**2.** Populate the consolidated members for the Account entity.\n\n**3.** Create the explicit hierarchy.\n\nEnable the Entity for Hierarchies and Collections\n\nBefore you can create explicit hierarchies, you must always enable the entity for explicit hierarchies by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** In Master Data Manager, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities to open the Entity Maintenance page.\n\n**3.** From the Model list, select Finance.\n\n**4.** Click Account and then click the \"Edit selected entity\" button.\n\n**5.** From the \"Enable explicit hierarchies and collections\" list, select Yes.\n\n**6.** In the \"Explicit hierarchy name\" field, type **Chart of Accounts**.\n\n**7.** You are going to create a non-mandatory explicit hierarchy where all leaf members start in an Unused node, so clear the \"Mandatory hierarchy (all leaf members are included)\" check box.\n\n**8.** Click the Save entity button.\n\nIf you decide in the future that you want additional explicit hierarchies, edit the Account entity. You can now add explicit hierarchies, attributes for consolidated members, and attributes for collections from this page.\n\nPopulate the Consolidated Members for the Account Entity\n\nYou can use 4account.csv from www.mdsuser.com to populate the consolidated members (by using stg.Account_Consolidated), or you can complete the following steps in the Master Data Manager web UI:\n\n**1.** On the MDS home page, select Finance and VERSION_1 from the Model and Version lists, respectively, and click Explorer.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Hierarchies | Explicit: Chart of Accounts\n\n**3.** Above the grid, select the Consolidated members option from the drop-down list, which is new in SQL Server 2012 MDS.\n\n**4.** The drop-down list is blank. Click the Add button above the grid and add the following consolidated members (or create your own):\n\nCreate the Explicit Hierarchy\n\nThe hierarchy structure was created when you enabled explicit hierarchies for the Account entity. Open Explorer to view it in more detail.\n\n**1.** On the home page, select Finance and VERSION_1 from the lists and click Explorer.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Hierarchies | Explicit:Chart of Accounts.\n\nWhen you first open the hierarchy, only Root and Unused are displayed. If you expand Unused, all of the Account leaf members are displayed. If you click Unused, the grid on the right refreshes to display all of the Account leaf members.\n\nYou can now use 5account_relationship.csv with stg.Account_Relationship to move members in the hierarchy, or use the procedures in Chapter 7 that explain how to move hierarchy members. Figure 6-4 shows part of the hierarchy that will be created if you use the spreadsheet from www.mdsuser.com.\n\n**Figure 6-4** _An explicit hierarchy that shows a chart of accounts_\n\nRecursive Hierarchies\n\nA recursive hierarchy is a special type of derived hierarchy. In a typical derived hierarchy, the members in an entity are grouped by a domain-based attribute. In a recursive hierarchy, the members are still grouped by a domain-based attribute, but this domain-based attribute is based on the entity itself. For example, each employee in an organization has a manager. And the manager can be any one of the employees. The following procedures show how to use this employee-manager relationship to create a recursive hierarchy that shows Main Street Clothing Company's organizational structure.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Recursive Hierarchy\n\nTo create a recursive hierarchy, you are going to use the Finance model, which, if you deployed it from the web site, includes a full list of sample employees. To create a recursive hierarchy, you are going to complete the following tasks:\n\n**1.** Create a domain-based attribute for the Employee entity. This attribute will be named Manager and will be based on the Employee entity.\n\n**2.** Assign a manager for each employee or load a list of Manager attributes.\n\n**3.** Create the recursive hierarchy.\n\nFor the Employee Entity, Create a Manager Domain-Based Attribute\n\nThe Finance model has an entity called Employee. You need to create a domain-based attribute named Manager for the Employee entity:\n\n**1.** In Master Data Manager, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities.\n\n**3.** From the Model list, select Finance.\n\n**4.** Click the Employee entity and then the \"Edit selected entity\" button.\n\n**5.** In the Leaf attributes section, click the \"Add leaf attribute\" button.\n\n**6.** Choose Domain-based, type **Manager** for the name, and select Employee for the source entity.\n\n**7.** Click the Save attribute button.\n\nPopulate the Manager Attribute for Each Employee\n\nYou can use 6Employee.csv (from www.mdsuser.com) and stg.Employee_Leaf to populate each employee's Manager attribute. If you choose not to use the staging process, you can populate each employee's Manager attribute value manually by entering it in Explorer. Keep in mind that you should not populate a manager for the CEO. As long as you have one employee without a manager, you will have someone at the top of your organizational structure. If you used the Finance model provided, each employee's title is already populated in Explorer.\n\nCreate the Recursive Hierarchy\n\nAfter every employee but the CEO has a manager (or even just a few employees have one, if you want to quickly see how this works), you can create the recursive hierarchy by completing the following steps:\n\n**1.** In Master Data Manager, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Derived Hierarchies.\n\n**3.** From the Model list, select Finance.\n\n**4.** Click the \"Add derived hierarchy\" button.\n\n**5.** In the \"Derived hierarchy name\" field, type **Org Structure**.\n\n**6.** Click the \"Save derived hierarchy\" button.\n\n**7.** In the leftmost pane, click Employee and drag it to the Current Levels pane. When you release the mouse button, the Preview pane shows a list of employees.\n\n**8.** In the leftmost pane, click Manager and drag it to the Employee label in the Current Levels pane. When you release the mouse button, in the Preview pane, the CEO (or other employees without a manager assigned) is displayed at the highest level of the hierarchy, and the system recognizes that this hierarchy is recursive.\n\nAs you expand and collapse the hierarchy, you can see that each employee is listed only once. If you were to clear the \"Anchor null relationship\" check box, each employee would be listed individually, with any of his or her direct reports listed underneath. Anchor null relationship means that Carlos Garcia, who has a NULL value for his Manager attribute value, is considered the \"anchor\" for all other relationships. If there were multiple null relationships, these would all be displayed at the top of the hierarchy.\n\nDerived Hierarchies with Explicit Caps\n\nThe last type of derived hierarchy within MDS is the derived hierarchy with explicit cap. This is a standard derived hierarchy that has an explicit hierarchy on top. The topmost entity of the derived hierarchy must be the bottom level of the explicit hierarchy.\n\nExplicit cap hierarchies allow you to provide the best of both worlds. At the lower levels are derived levels that correspond to specific entities. At the top levels, you have the freedom to adapt the complex ragged structures allowed by explicit hierarchies. Explicit cap hierarchies allow you to define many lower bases to the same explicit hierarchy. These hierarchies are primarily used in finance domains such as Chart of Accounts and Organization Structure.\n\nA global chart of accounts allows you to map disparate financial systems into your standard chart of accounts. This mapping allows corporate employees at large organizations to have common nomenclature when discussing financials with divisions across the globe. When working within multinational corporations, the complexities of accounting are further complicated by regional accounting laws that must be enforced. Corporate controllers cannot be expected to understand the intricacies of all these accounting practices worldwide, yet they must be able to hold individual business units accountable for their financial budgets and numbers. By creating a global chart of accounts and having each individual business unit map their country's unique chart of accounts into the global master account structure, individual countries can manage finances according to their regional requirements and corporate managers can still discuss their financials in a common manner.\n\nAs you can see in Figure 6-5, a company can use an explicit hierarchy for its global chart of accounts. This allows a ragged structure that's flexible and easy to update.\n\n**Figure 6-5** _An explicit hierarchy showing a multinational corporation's chart of accounts_\n\nEach business unit can have its own standard chart of accounts that it maintains in a level-based derived hierarchy, as shown in Figure 6-6.\n\n**Figure 6-6** _A derived hierarchy for one division of the multinational corporation_\n\nWhen you combine the derived hierarchy with the explicit hierarchy, the top levels are dictated by the explicit hierarchy and the bottom levels are populated by the derived hierarchy, as shown in Figure 6-7.\n\n**Figure 6-7** _A derived hierarchy with explicit cap_\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Derived Hierarchy with Explicit Cap\n\nTo create a derived hierarchy with explicit cap, you must have your explicit hierarchy already created. You should also have an entity with domain-based attributes that you plan to use to create the derived hierarchy.\n\nThen follow the directions for creating a derived hierarchy (in System Administration, choose Manage | Derived Hierarchies). Drag the entities for the derived hierarchy over to the Current Levels pane. When your derived hierarchy is complete and the top level of the hierarchy is the bottom level of the explicit hierarchy, drag the explicit hierarchy to the Current Levels pane and drop it above the other levels.\n\nThe structure of the hierarchy looks similar to that of a derived hierarchy; the results, however, are ragged at the top and level-based at the bottom.\n\nNOTE\n\n_You can use the same explicit hierarchy as a cap for multiple derived hierarchies._\n\nCollections\n\nWhile hierarchies provide structures to manage consolidations of entire entities, you or your users might need to group a small number of members for your personal use. Master Data Services provides the ability to manage these personal consolidations through collections. Collections are containers for members from a single entity. Collections can hold leaf members, consolidated members, or other collections within them. Collections do not follow the same rules as hierarchies. Collections can contain a member twice, as long as that member is contained in separate objects within the collection.\n\nThere are many different scenarios where collections can be a valuable tool. Collections can be used to manage personal charts of account consolidations or employee shifts. The Main Street Clothing Company uses collections a few times each year to manage sets of clothing (for example, a seasonal shirt, pants, belt, and hat). Collections allow Main Street to group members without using a hierarchy where all members need to be accounted for. It is simply a combination of random members that Main Street uses for analysis.\n\nWeighting of Collection Members\n\nIn the SQL Server 2012 version of MDS, weighting has been surfaced to the UI. Weighting on collections enables users to apportion values across all members in a collection. This process can be invaluable in managing partnerships or managing sets where multiple quantity of the same member exists, such as a six-pack or a case. The default weighting for each member is 1.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Once members are added to the collection, you can set the weight for each member in the collection. Make sure you save the weight for a member before setting the next weight. Every time you save a weight for a member, all other unsaved weight changes will be lost._\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Collection\n\nIn this example, you'll create a collection that represents a set of clothes for boys. Main Street Clothing Company sells two sets every season: one set for boys and one set for girls.\n\nBefore you can create a collection, you must enable the entity to have collections. Some organizations never use collections, but Main Street uses a few. To create a collection, you complete the following tasks:\n\n**1.** Enable the Product entity for hierarchies and collections.\n\n**2.** Create a collection.\n\n**3.** Add members to the collection.\n\nEnable the Entity for Hierarchies and Collections\n\nAs with explicit hierarchies, you cannot create a collection for an entity until you enable the entity for hierarchies. To do so, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities.\n\n**3.** Select the Product model.\n\n**4.** In the list, click Product and then the \"Edit selected entity\" button.\n\n**5.** From the \"Enable explicit hierarchies and collections\" list, select Yes.\n\n**6.** You are prompted to enter a name for an explicit hierarchy. Even though you don't need an explicit hierarchy, you must create one. Type **Product** for the name and leave the \"Mandatory hierarchy (all leaf members are included)\" check box selected.\n\n**7.** Click the Save entity button.\n\nCreate a Collection\n\nTo create a collection, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Go back to the Master Data Manager home page by clicking the SQL Server image in the top left.\n\n**2.** Ensure the Product model and VERSION_1 are selected and click Explorer.\n\n**3.** If you point to Hierarchies on the menu bar, you can see that a hierarchy is now displayed. This is the one you just created. Again, you don't need this hierarchy, but it is required to create collections.\n\nTo create your collection, on the menu bar, choose Collections | Product. The Collections item on the menu bar shows the name of all entities that are enabled for explicit hierarchies and collections. None of the other entities in the model has enough members to merit collections, though, and right now you've enabled collections for Product only.\n\n**4.** To create a collection, click the Add Collection button above the grid.\n\n**5.** In the Details pane on the right side of the screen, enter the name and code, just as you would when you create a member. Enter **Boys Winter Set** for the name and **BWS** for the code.\n\n**6.** If you want to type a brief description for your collection, you can select the Description field in the Details pane and type a description. Click the OK button.\n\n**7.** The collection is displayed in the grid. Every collection has a Name, Code, Description, and Owner attribute. By default, the user who created the collection is listed as the owner.\n\n**8.** To save the changes to the collection, click the OK button at the bottom of the Details pane.\n\nAdd Members to the Collection\n\nNow that the collection exists, you can add members to it:\n\n**1.** In the list of collections, select the collection to modify, and in the right pane, click the Collection Members tab.\n\n**2.** Click the Edit Members button.\n\nThe page that is displayed has two panes. In the left pane are the leaf members for the product entity. You can select to view other collections or any product hierarchy from the drop-down list at the top of this pane.\n\n**3.** From the left pane, click the members you want to add and click the add button between the two panes. These represent a boy's shirt, pants, belt, and hat, which are sold together as a set.\n\nIf you have trouble finding any of these members, Microsoft has added full filter functionality to the collection member editor.\n\nMembers are added to the collection based on the structure of where they come from. If you add consolidated members from an explicit hierarchy, and that hierarchy already has a ragged structure, when you bring the members to the collection, that ragged structure is maintained. Any members in the collection can be reordered or removed using the buttons on the right side of the screen.\n\nCreating Hierarchies by Using Web Services\n\nWhile there are two types of hierarchies discussed within this chapter, we have only provided a derived hierarchy example here. Explicit hierarchies can be created as part of the MetadataCreate operation.\n\nCreating a Derived Hierarchy with the MetadataCreate Operation\n\nDerived hierarchies are created as a series of connected attribute levels. Each of these levels must be related properly within the system or the hierarchy will not be created. While creating derived hierarchies within the UI will limit the entities or hierarchies available at the current level, creating derived relationships within the web service does not provide this information until the error response is returned.\n\nThe following operation creates a three-level derived hierarchy that groups Product by Line by Manufacturer:\n\nSummary\n\nIn this chapter we discussed a number of methods for managing relationships in Master Data Services. We showed derived hierarchies, which enforce a level-based structure based on domain-based attribute relationships. We showed explicit hierarchies, which allow ragged structures but still prevent duplicates or loss of data. We talked about the system settings that affect hierarchies and showed real-world examples meant to help you build your own hierarchies. Finally, we showed collections and special hierarchies that can be used to manage more complex relationships within MDS.\nChapter 7\n\nWorking with Master Data\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Changes in SQL Server 2012\n\n  Viewing the Base Entity\n\n  Finding Data by Filtering\n\n  Sorting and Pagination\n\n  New Explorer Format\n\n  Exporting Members\n\n  Working with Data in Hierarchies\n\n  Transactions\n\n  Annotations\n\n  Navigating Related Entities\n\n  Metadata\n\n  Using Web Services to Work with Members\n\nIn previous chapters we focused on creating the environment and architecture for managing master data in your organization. In this chapter, we begin to talk about how to work with your master data on a daily basis. We discuss the grid and filter that allow you to work with data within your master data entities.\n\nThe majority of MDS users will be entering the system to update data. Data stewardship activities in the Master Data Manager web application are managed within the Explorer functional area. A vast majority of users will only have access to the Explorer functional area. In this functional area, there are two major areas where users will work with data:\n\n  In the Explorer grid, where they can update consolidated or leaf members within a grid control.\n\n  On the hierarchy page, where they can navigate through a hierarchy to manage data changes in an integrated grid control.\n\nChanges in SQL Server 2012\n\nIn the initial release of MDS, there were significant bugs that impaired users' ability to use MDS to manage their data. In SQL Server 2012, the MDS team addressed these issues by adding the SQL Server Master Data Services Add-in for Microsoft Excel (which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 10) and completely re-architecting the Explorer functional area. The new Explorer area streamlines the data editing process. All updates to an entity can be made on a single screen.\n\nViewing the Base Entity\n\nThe entity that is set as the first \"base\" entity you have security access to is displayed when you first open Explorer. Users will immediately be able to review and update data in the Explorer grid. MDS no longer shows the Explorer screen, which gave users an overview of all objects associated with the base entity, upon entering the Explorer functional area. For more information on base entities, see Chapter 4.\n\nIn this book, we show you how to take actions in Explorer by using the menu bar. The Explorer screen is still available from the menu bar if you want to use this screen to navigate the model's main entities.\n\nFinding Data by Filtering\n\nTo begin working with data, you open an entity and, if necessary, filter the list of members to show those that you want to work with. Although the base entity is initially displayed, you can open a different entity by pointing to Entities on the menu bar and selecting the entity you wish to edit from the drop down list. All of the selected entity's members are displayed in a paged grid. The number of default members returned is 50, but because this release of MDS offers increased performance, you can increase this number significantly.\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, the filter is not always displayed. To display the filter grid, click the Filter button above the grid, as shown next. This button acts as a toggle to hide and display filter options. You can select any of the attributes of the entity from the Attribute drop-down list. Selecting the attribute limits the Operator list to those attributes available for that attribute type. The Criteria field will be an input box or a drop-down list based on prior column selections.\n\nWhen you're ready to apply the filters to the members in the grid, click the Apply button.\n\nNOTE\n\n_You can filter by multiple attributes by clicking the Add Criteria button and adding multiple rows of criteria before applying._\n\nThe filters that are currently applied will always be shown directly above the grid.\n\nFiltering can either be accomplished through adding simple criteria where every record can be evaluated or through using matching algorithms. Standard filtering leverages a list of operators that encompass all of the available expressions that can be applied.\n\nOperators\n\nThe operator determines how you're going to filter the list.\n\nUsing Matching\n\nWhen you select the \"Matches\" or \"Does not match\" operator, a small icon for an extended drop down appears. This drop down lets you configure your matching parameters. The default values are Levenshtein for the algorithm and 0.30 for the minimum similarity, but you can change them by using the controls provided. The closer the number is to 1, the more specific the results. To return a wider variety of results, specify a number closer to 0 (for example, 0.20, 0.10, or 0).\n\nThe following table shows the four types of similarity matches you can do programmatically. In each of these cases, 1 indicates an exact match and 0 indicates no match.\n\nThe following example shows the Matches operator and the default matching settings.\n\nYou can see by looking at the number of records displayed in the lower right that 12 results were found.\n\nIf you change the Algorithm setting to Jaccard with the default settings, you retrieve only four results, as shown next. Further research may be necessary to determine what algorithm works best for your dataset.\n\nIn general, 0.30 to 0.70 is a reasonable range to retrieve a list of results based on your dataset. If you want the default to be something other than 0.30, you can change it in the Master Data Services database, in the tblSystemSetting table. GridFilterDefaultFuzzySimilarityLevel determines the default Similarity Level.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Some MDS system settings have not been exposed in Master Data Services Configuration Manager, and this is an example of one. All of the settings in Configuration Manager are in tblSystemSetting, and you can change the settings directly in the table or in Configuration Manager. Use care and ensure you're comfortable working in the database if you decide to make the change directly in the table._\n\nSorting and Pagination\n\nWhen working in the grid, it is useful to understand sorting, pagination, and some other related settings.\n\nSorting\n\nBy default, the members in the grid are sorted in the order they were loaded in the entity. In the prior version, records were returned sorted by code, but this was modified in the SQL Server 2012 release to ensure initial results are returned as quickly as possible. You can click any column heading to sort the members by that column. Click once to sort in ascending order, and again to sort in descending order. You can sort by the values in only one column at a time. Each time you leave the page and return to the grid, the default sort is displayed. Clicking on a column to change the sort will reload sorted data from the server instead of sorting the records already displayed in the grid.\n\nPagination and Other Settings\n\nIn this release of MDS, a new Settings button has been added above the grid. To modify settings for the Explorer grid, click the Settings button in the menu bar to open the Settings dialog box, which has the following settings:\n\n  **Records per page** You can change the number of records to be displayed per page. The new Silverlight grid can handle any number of records per page. The number of records is then displayed, followed by arrows that you use to page through the members.\n\n  **Display format** This setting controls how all domain-based attributes are displayed within the Explorer grid and Details pane. Members in the grid can be sorted based on the order of the name and code values are displayed, whichever column you choose to display first will be used to sort the potential attribute values.\n\n  **Freeze columns** In the first release of MDS, the Name and Code columns were always pinned to the left side of the Explorer grid. In SQL Server 2012, each user can control how many columns are pinned to the left of the grid. The default value is no columns frozen to the left.\n\n  **Show System Attributes** In SQL Server 2012, MDS can now expose a number of system attributes in read-only format. Both the created and last updated timestamp will be displayed in the grid for all attribute groups. These columns can be used to sort or filter records in the grid. Since these system attributes are read-only for all users, they do not appear in the Details pane.\n\nNew Explorer Format\n\nIn an effort to simplify the edit process of members in the web UI, users can now edit a selected member on a single screen. Any member selected automatically displays in the Details pane on the right side of the Explorer window.\n\nEdit One Attribute for One Member\n\nWhile you can no longer update values in the grid directly, any value for a member can be updated on the Explorer grid screen. Selecting any member in the grid displays that member in the new Details pane on the right side of the Explorer screen. Any value for the member can be updated in this pane. This Details pane displays all attributes available in the currently selected attribute group. To save your changes, click the OK button at the bottom of the pane. Edit controls are disabled for members or attributes a user does not have security permissions for. Security is discussed in more detail in Chapter 11.\n\nChange the Number of Domain-Based Attributes Displayed in List\n\nIn MDS Configuration Manager, you can change whether a list of attribute values or a new filterable dialog box is displayed when you click the edit icon of a domain-based attribute value. The setting is called \"Number of domain-based attributes in list,\" and you set the maximum number of members that will be displayed in the attribute selection drop downs. List maximums can be anything between 10 and 1000 members. Once the list exceeds this number a pencil will appear next to the attribute and a more complex selection dialog box is displayed instead of a list.\n\nEdit One Attribute for Multiple Members\n\nThe ability to select multiple members and change the values in the grid has been removed in this release of MDS. The product team felt that this functionality was better handled in the freely available Add-in for Excel. The web UI has been designed to navigate easily between members in related entities. Batch data changes should now be completed in the MDS Add-in for Excel, as explained in Chapter 10.\n\nExporting Members\n\nIf you have used a previous release of Master Data Services, you may have used the Export to Excel function to send data to an Excel worksheet. This functionality has been replaced with the Add-in for Excel. For more information on editing members in Excel, please see Chapter 10.\n\nWorking with Data in Hierarchies\n\nIn the Explorer functional area of the user interface, you can view, edit, and move members in a hierarchy. As with most of the screens in the Explorer UI, the hierarchy screen has been redesigned in the latest release of MDS. The new hierarchy screen has been designed to allow users to navigate and manage data in a single screen. This screen is very similar to the original Explorer grid but with an additional hierarchy pane added to the left side of the Explorer window. Consolidated members can be managed only from the hierarchy screen.\n\nHierarchy members can also be organized using the hierarchy Explorer screen. There are a few different methods for moving members; the one you choose will be based on how many members you want to move and the type of hierarchy you are working with. Moving members in a derived hierarchy is slightly different from moving members in an explicit hierarchy.\n\nMoving Members by Dragging and Dropping\n\nThis procedure is basically the same for both hierarchy types. The only difference is the location you can drop members to. If you are working in an explicit hierarchy, you can\n\n  Drop a leaf member beneath a consolidated member or at the root.\n\n  Drop a consolidated member beneath a consolidated member or at the root.\n\nIf you are working in a derived hierarchy, you can\n\n  Drop a leaf member anywhere beneath a domain-based attribute value that applies to the member. For example, you can drop products beneath colors, because Color is a domain-based attribute of Product.\n\nTo move a member in a hierarchy, click the label of the member you want to move. (The mouse pointer will become a pointer with a plus or not icon based on the suitability of the drop location.)\n\nHolding the mouse button down, drag the member to the new location and, when the pointer cursor becomes a plus sign (+), release the button.\n\nThe member is moved to the new location.\n\nMoving Members by Using the Clipboard\n\nThis procedure is also the same for both hierarchy types. To move members in any type of hierarchy by using the Clipboard, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** In the hierarchy tree, select the check box for each member you want to move (Stores 101 and 105 in this example).\n\n**2.** Click the Cut button at the top of the hierarchy.\n\n**3.** Click the label of the member you want to move the members to (Freestanding in this example).\n\n**4.** You can click the Paste dropdown button or select Paste from the drop-down selections to add Stores 101 and 105 as children of Freestanding.\n\nThe members are displayed in the location you specified.\n\nMoving Members in a Derived Hierarchy by Updating Attribute Values\n\nIn addition to using the Clipboard or dragging and dropping, you can move a member in a derived hierarchy by updating the member's attribute value that determines its location in the hierarchy.\n\nWhen you first open a derived hierarchy, the top levels are displayed in the hierarchy structure on the left.\n\nIn the grid in the middle, the top-level members are displayed. To display the members contained in any level, click a node in the hierarchy tree. The grid in the middle refreshes. For example, when you click Female in the hierarchy tree on the left, all of the female products are listed in the grid in the middle.\n\nIn the grid, find the attribute that determines where the member is displayed in the hierarchy. In this example, we'll click the Marketing tab and scroll to the right until the Gender column is visible. Find the member you want to move, select its row, and then, just as you would do to update any other attribute value, click the drop-down arrow in the Details pane, as shown next.\n\nNow change the value. When you click the OK button at the bottom of the Details pane, the grid and hierarchy are updated, and the member is moved to the node based on your selection. In this case, the product moved from the Female to the Male hierarchy node.\n\nSearching for Members in a Hierarchy\n\nYou can use the search field above the hierarchy to find members. Unfortunately, the search functionality has a number of limitations:\n\n  The text you enter must be an exact match of either the full name or the code. To search for partial matches, use the % wildcard.\n\n  The search does not find members in the Unused node of explicit hierarchies.\n\n  If you have so many members in your hierarchy that the...more... label is displayed, members that aren't displayed are still included in the search results.\n\nTo use the search field, type your search text and click the magnifying glass icon. Your search is applied and the hierarchy is updated. To remove the search, click Close Search button at the top of the hierarchy control.\n\nSetting the Number of Members That Are Displayed\n\nIn MDS Configuration Manager, you can change the number of members displayed in each hierarchy node before you have to click...more....\n\nThe setting is called \"Number of members in the hierarchy by default,\" and you set the maximum number of members that will be displayed. If you have more than that number, the...more... label is displayed.\n\nManaging Hierarchy Display Settings\n\nThe hierarchy grid uses the display format settings to control how members are displayed in the hierarchy. Members will be displayed either as Code, Code (Name), or Name (Code). You can change these settings using the settings button above the grid.\n\nTransactions\n\nEvery change made to data in Master Data Services is logged as a transaction. All transactions log the type, prior value, new value, the user who made the change, and the time the change was made. In the Explorer functional area, all users have access to their own transactions and can reverse any transaction they have access to. In the Version Management functional area, administrators can review and reverse transactions for all users.\n\nThe following types of transactions are logged and displayed in the Master Data Manager web application:\n\nNOTE\n\n_By default, transactions are not logged for data that's staged into the system. Transaction logging for staging can be turned on in the MDS Configuration Manager system settings._\n\nReviewing Transactions\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, transactions can be reviewed only in the Version Management functional area. On the menu bar, choose Transactions. Transactions are displayed in a grid. You can filter the grid by using the Filter Criteria section. In this release of MDS, the transaction manager has not been upgraded to Silverlight.\n\nReversing Transactions\n\nTo reverse a transaction, in the grid, click the row of the transaction you want to reverse, and then click the Revert Transaction button.\n\nIn the previous release of MDS, deactivated members were given a GUID identifier to allow those members' code to be reused. In this release, members that are deleted in the UI keep their code. This keeps the member's prior transactions tied to the member they were made on. If a member code that has been soft deleted in the system must be reinstated, you can reverse the transaction that shows the member changing from Active to De-Activated.\n\nIf you reverse this transaction, the member and its original code will be reactivated. The member will be part of all hierarchies and collections it was a member of before it was deleted; it will be as though the member was never deleted in the first place.\n\nAnnotations\n\nYou can annotate transactions to explain why you took an action. In the prior MDS release, these actions were hard to find after you entered them. In the current release, as you update individual member attributes in the Details pane, you can add an annotation to apply to the transaction. Transactions and their annotations for an individual member can be viewed in the same location.\n\nAnnotating Transactions on Update\n\nTo annotate updates to attributes, open Explorer to an entity. In the grid, select the member you want to update. Update the attributes you want to change. After you update the attributes, type the annotation in the Annotations box at the bottom of the Details pane.\n\nAfter you have typed the annotation, click OK.\n\nTo review the transactions from that member, click the View Annotations link below the Annotations box and you will see all transactions for the member. The transactions you just made will show the annotation as well as a time and date stamp. Additional annotations can be added to any transaction from this screen as well.\n\nNavigating Related Entities\n\nOne of the key value propositions of the MDS Explorer UI is the ability for users to navigate quickly through an entity and understand a total view of a member. In SQL Server 2012, a number of new features have been added to ensure that this full view can be easily navigated by data stewards.\n\nNavigating Attributes\n\nMany domain-based attribute values have their own information to provide to users. Consider the scenario of managing customers in MDS. One of the fields in the customer record is a domain-based attribute of ZIP code. This system uses a table for postal codes to store additional demographic information for each code. Within MDS, a data steward can drill down from a selected customer into the associated demographic information by clicking a single button in the Details pane.\n\nClicking this additional button attached to all domain-based attributes of a member opens a new tab in your browser with the new entity filtered by the selected value of the member you were reviewing.\n\nNavigating Many-to-Many Relationships\n\nWhile many relationships within a model follow the one-to-one pattern or the one-to-many pattern, some data may require the support of many members from one entity relating to many different members in another entity. This relationship is termed many-to-many.\n\nAs an example, suppose Main Street Clothing Company has decided to start doing its own manufacturing of some simpler items for its stores. To manage this data in MDS, Main Street had to create two additional entities. The Raw Materials entity stores all of the items that Main Street combines to create its finished goods (the items it will sell to customers). The Raw Material to Product entity maps these combinations. As previously discussed, each manufactured product is made of multiple raw materials, and a raw material is reused in many different products.\n\nThe bottom-right corner of the Explorer screen in MDS is the Related Entities section. If the current entity has any many-to-many relationships defined in the system, a link will be displayed.\n\nMetadata\n\nPrior users of MDS may notice that Metadata has been removed from the Explorer functional area. This feature has been marked for deprecation and can be accessed only from the metadata model or web services.\n\nUsing Web Services to Work with Members\n\nThe calls associated with getting and changing master data within Master Data Services are the most commonly used web service calls by organizations looking to customize their MDS implementation. These calls allow users to enter new member records, update existing member records, or bring back existing entity member record sets.\n\nRetrieving Members\n\nThe EntityMembersGet operation will retrieve member records from any entity that exists within MDS. This operation supports paging to allow users to show a subset of the entity within a customized UI. This operation also supports subselecting a set of attributes to be retrieved. If you are going to use the paging criteria to retrieve a subset of records, be sure to lock down the sort criteria before you page; otherwise, inconsistent records will be returned.\n\nThere are three types of member return options. An EntityMembersGet operation can return either data, counts, or both data and counts. Some systems may require the total number of records to be returned before they return any member detail, and the \"record counts only\" return option provides this functionality. For organizations interested in using the paging mechanism to return records, the \"data and counts\" return option can provide a preview of the number of records in the full entity record set.\n\nIn the following code sample, we provide an example that returns a standard EntityMembersGet request with a standard page size of 50 members. This request has no complex filter.\n\nWhen retrieving large amounts of data from the web service, it is quite likely that you will run into the following error:\n\nSystem.ServiceModel.CommunicationException was unhandled Message=The maximum message size quota for incoming messages (65536) has been exceeded. To increase the quota, use the MaxReceivedMessageSize property on the appropriate binding element.\n\nThis is to protect users from themselves. Each organization must determine how large the maximum message size can be, but this can be set in the client's app.config file by changing the following parameter:\n\nCreating and Updating Members\n\nMaster Data Services provides the following three operations for managing entity members within the system. They support three different types of data loads.\n\n  **EntityMembersCreate** Only new member records with unique codes can be created with this operation. If a member code already exists, an error will be thrown in the returned error collection and the member will not be created or updated.\n\n  **EntityMembersUpdate** Only existing members can be updated using this operation. If a member code or ID is provided that does not exist within the system, an error will be returned in the error collection passed in the operation result and the member will not be created.\n\n  **EntityMembersMerge** Many users have been confused by this operation and believe it has something to do with record survivorship or match merge functionality. This operation does nothing to look for possible matches or provide any survivorship functionality; it only allows users to create and update records simultaneously within MDS.\n\nThe following example shows only the EntityMembersMerge operation because this operation provides the most flexibility for users programming against MDS. For simplicity in programming and to show all of the capabilities of setting attributes, we have hard-coded some defaults from the Main Street Clothing Company product example. If you are using this call within your organization, you need to replace the defaults with attribute parameters that are passed into the operation.\n\nSummary\n\nIn this chapter we looked at how users will manage data within Master Data Services on a daily basis. We discussed using the new Explorer screen to update individual members. Every change made in MDS is logged as a separate transaction. All users can view all the transactions on a specific member. Transactions cannot be reversed in the explorer screen, this requires access to the Versioning functional area. Users can however provide additional annotations to any prior transaction on a member.\nChapter 8\n\nUsing Business Rules\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Business Rules Overview\n\n  Creating a Business Rule\n\n  Editing a Business Rule and Configuring a Rule's Expression\n\n  Publishing Business Rules\n\n  Applying Business Rules\n\n  Other Business Rule Tasks\n\n  Configuring E-Mail Notifications\n\n  Creating and Triggering Workflows\n\n  Using Web Services to Manage Business Rules\n\nManaging data is not just about storing the data in a customized entity; it is also about ensuring that the data is both accurate and complete. Master Data Services provides business rules to achieve this aim. In this chapter, we review business rules and discuss how to create both simple and complex rules. We discuss how to create simple workflows in MDS and how to integrate with external workflows such as those provided by SharePoint.\n\nBusiness Rules Overview\n\nIn many organizations, no matter what the size, the business owners responsible for managing the master data don't have the technical knowledge needed to implement the related processes. If the business owners don't know how to use SQL Server or how to code business rule engines, they can be left at the mercy of their IT departments. At the same time, because the IT department has the technical know-how, the burden often falls on them to learn business domains they don't necessarily need to know. MDS strives to simplify the creation of business rules to empower business users to manage their own data quality.\n\nIn MDS, business rules are declarative expressions that govern the conduct of business processes. These expressions are compiled into stored procedures that perform the task of validating the data. The area of the Master Data Manager web application used for business rules was created to empower business users to write relatively complex business rules without knowledge of Transact-SQL.\n\nBusiness Rule Structure\n\nBusiness rules are IF...THEN statements. IF certain conditions evaluate to true, THEN perform specific actions. Conditions can be combined using either AND or OR logical operators. These operators can be used to create extremely complex business rules. You can use as many as seven levels for complex conditioning.\n\nAlthough you have the ability to create complex rules, there are some real benefits in creating multiple, more granular rules. You should consider breaking any rule that uses the logical OR operator into multiple rules. This makes rules easier for other users to read and understand. Multiple rules also allow you to exclude specific rules and to provide more granular notifications. Rules built with the AND operator must be kept together to function as a unit.\n\nBusiness rules are always applied to attribute values. For example, if an attribute value is blank, you might want to send an e-mail to notify someone or set the value to Pending. Or you might want to update the value of one attribute based on the value of another attribute. Because business rules are applied to attribute values, you should determine which attributes you're going to work with before you start creating rules. Each time you create a rule, you must select the model, entity, and type of member that contains the attribute you're looking for.\n\nBusiness Rule Workflow\n\nBusiness rules must be created, configured, and published before you can validate data against them. The workflow includes the following steps:\n\n**1.** Create a business rule, which adds it to the list of available rules.\n\n**2.** Edit the rule and configure its expression.\n\n**3.** Publish the rule so it's active and can be used to validate data.\n\n**4.** Apply the rule to members.\n\nWhen you apply the rule to members, the attribute values for each member are validated and they either pass or fail validation. If they pass, no action is required. If they fail, you must update the attribute values and re-validate your data successfully against the rules. If you don't take action, your hierarchies may not be complete or your data might otherwise be invalid.\n\nCreating a Business Rule\n\nThe first step in the workflow is to create a business rule. Creating a rule means adding it to the list of existing rules. This procedure doesn't configure the rule to do anything, nor does it publish the rule. It's simply the first step necessary in using business rules to validate data.\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Business Rules.\n\n**3.** On the Business Rule Maintenance page, choose a model, entity, and member type to be validated. In this example, select Product, Product, and Leaf, respectively. For the attribute, leave it at the default, All. The Attribute list works as a filter for the list of business rules. In general, you should leave this as All to ensure that all rules are displayed.\n\n**4.** Click the \"Add business rule\" button.\n\nA new row with a light blue background is displayed in the table. The blue highlight indicates that the row is selected.\n\nYou are now ready to edit the business rule and configure its expression.\n\nEditing a Business Rule and Configuring a Rule's Expression\n\nA business rule frequently consists of a condition and an action. The condition is evaluated, and if it evaluates to true, one or more actions are initiated. If a rule contains no conditions, the rules engine will always initiate the actions.\n\nRules on the Edit Business Rule page are defined by using the following format:\n\nIF < _condition_ > THEN < _action_ >\n\nYou can configure business rules to evaluate a wide variety of expressions. In this chapter we will strive to show you some common business rules and give you the knowledge needed to create some of your own.\n\nProcedure: How to Require Attribute Values\n\nIn this first example, a business rule ensures that the Cost, Retail Price, and Gender attributes of all products are populated with values. The expression for this rule will be\n\nIF < _nothing, because it applies to all cases_ >\n\nTHEN require an attribute value for Cost, Retail Price, and Gender\n\nTo create the structure of a rule to perform this type of validation, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Follow the procedure to create a new business rule. In this example, on the Business Rule Maintenance page, select the Product model, Product entity, Leaf member type, and All attributes and click the \"Add business rule\" button.\n\n**2.** Click the row for the rule you want to edit and then click the \"Edit selected business rule\" button.\n\n**3.** The Edit Business Rule page is displayed. In the Components pane on the top left, expand the Actions node.\n\n**4.** Scroll down. Under the Validation node, click \"is required\" and drag it to the THEN pane in the middle right. Drop it on the Actions label.\n\n**5.** The Edit pane in the lower right becomes the Edit Action pane. In the Attributes pane on the lower left, click Cost and drag it to the Edit Action pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label.\n\n**6.** At the bottom of the Edit Action pane, click the Save item button. This saves the action you just added.\n\n**7.** Repeat steps 4, 5, and 6 for the Retail Price and Gender attributes. When you're done, you should have three actions displayed in the THEN pane.\n\n**8.** In the top-left corner, click the green arrow to return to the Business Rule Maintenance page. Because the rule was saved as you created it, there is no need to save again when you leave the page.\n\nNow that the rule exists, you must publish it if you want to apply it to your data. The procedure for publishing the rule is covered in \"Publishing Business Rules,\" later in the chapter. First, we'll look at more functionality on the Business Rule Edit screen.\n\nDeleting a Condition or Action\n\nWhile you're working on the Edit Business Rule page, you may realize you've selected the wrong action or condition. In either the IF pane or the THEN pane, you can right-click any condition or action and click Delete to remove it.\n\nMore Expression Examples\n\nNow we'll continue with other examples of business rules you might want to create. Later in this chapter, we'll explain how to validate your data against active business rules.\n\nProcedure: How to Populate One Value Based on Another Value\n\nYou can populate an attribute value based on other attribute values. This is probably the most common use for business rules.\n\nIn this example, we want to indicate that discontinued products that have fewer than 50 items in stock are now available to outlet stores. The expression will be\n\nIF Discontinued = Y AND Safety Stock Level < 50\n\nTHEN Available to Outlet = Y\n\nTo create this rule, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Follow the procedure to create a new business rule. In this example, on the Business Rule Maintenance page, select the Product model, Product entity, Leaf member type, and All attributes and click the \"Add business rule\" button.\n\n**2.** Click the row for the rule you want to edit and then click the \"Edit selected business rule\" button. The Edit Business Rule page is displayed.\n\n**3.** In the Components pane, expand the Conditions node.\n\n**4.** Under the Value comparison node, click \"is equal to\" and drag it to the IF pane on the top right. Drop it on the Conditions label.\n\n**5.** The Edit pane in the lower right becomes the Edit Condition pane. In the Attributes pane, click Discontinued and drag it to the Edit Condition pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label.\n\n**6.** The Attribute value radio button is selected. Next to it, select Y from the list. This selector will vary depending on the type of attribute you select. Numeric attributes will allow a number to be entered in a numeric control, and free-form text fields would provide a text box.\n\n**7.** At the bottom of the Edit Condition pane, click the Save item button. The IF pane is populated with the condition: Discontinued is equal to Y.\n\n**8.** In the Components pane, click \"is less than\" and drag it to the IF pane. Drop it on the And label.\n\n**9.** In the Attributes pane, click Safety Stock Level and drag it to the Edit Condition pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label.\n\n**10.** The Attribute value radio button is selected. Next to it, type **50**.\n\n**11.** At the bottom of the Edit Condition pane, click the Save item button. The IF pane is populated with the condition: Safety Stock Level is less than 50.\n\n**12.** In the Components pane, expand the Actions node.\n\n**13.** Scroll down. Under the Change value node, click \"equals\" and drag it to the THEN pane. Drop it on the Actions label.\n\n**14.** In the Attributes pane, click Available to Outlet and drag it to the Edit Action pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label.\n\n**15.** The Attribute value radio button is selected. Next to it, select Y from the list.\n\n**16.** At the bottom of the Edit Action pane, click the Save item button.\n\nThe business rule is complete.\n\nProcedure: How to Concatenate Values\n\nIn this example, a business rule creates a member name that is a concatenation of several attribute values. For example, one of our product names is\n\nM Red Shirt 3 V Neck\n\nThis is a concatenation of these attribute values:\n\nGender Code + Color Name + Type Name + Size Name + Neck Style Name\n\nBefore we imported our products, we did this concatenation in Excel. Now we want to do this concatenation in MDS for all products, new and existing. We've also decided to use the full Gender name (Male) as part of the product name, rather than just the code (M). To create this rule, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Follow the procedure to create a new business rule. In this example, on the Business Rule Maintenance page, select the Product model, Product entity, Leaf member type, and All attributes and click the \"Add business rule\" button.\n\n**2.** Click the row for the rule you want to edit and then click the \"Edit selected business rule\" button. The Edit Business Rule page is displayed.\n\n**3.** In the Components pane, expand the Actions node.\n\n**4.** Under the Change value node, click \"equals a concatenated value\" and drag it to the THEN pane. Drop it on the Actions label.\n\n**5.** In the Attributes pane, click Name and drag it to the Edit Action pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label. (You drag the attribute whose value you want to concatenate; in this case, you want to concatenate the Product's Name value.)\n\n**6.** Also in the Attributes pane, expand the Gender node and click Name. Drag it to the Edit Action pane and drop it on the Value label.\n\n**7.** Right-click DBA.Gender.Name and choose Add text.\n\n**8.** Double-click the label that instructs you to do so (shown next). A text box is displayed. Type a single space to indicate the space between values. Then click away from the field to make the text box back into a label.\n\n**9.** In the Attributes pane, expand the Color node and click Name. Drag it to the Edit Action pane and drop it on the Value label.\n\n**10.** Right-click DBA.Color.Name and choose Add text.\n\n**11.** Double-click the label that instructs you to do so. A text box is displayed. Type a single space to indicate the space between values.\n\n**12.** Repeat steps 9\u201311 for Type Name, Size Name, and Neck Style Name.\n\n**13.** At the bottom of the Edit Action pane, click the Save item button. The THEN pane is updated with all of the actions you specified.\n\nThe business rule is complete. Now, when you validate your data, all product names will be updated based on this rule.\n\nTIP\n\n_You can use concatenation to create link attributes, like those used for Bing maps (for example,<http:\/\/bing.com\/maps\/default.aspx?where1=15%20Cherry%20Street%20Springfield%20WA%2098000>). In this case, you would concatenate the Name attribute values for the Location entity's Street Address, City, State, and Zip Code attributes to create a link._\n\nProcedure: How to Populate an Attribute Value from a Different Entity\n\nIn Chapter 6, we created a three-level hierarchy:\n\nProduct > Line > Manufacturer\n\nIn this example, the Product entity had a Line attribute, and the Line entity had a Manufacturer attribute. But the Product entity did not have a Manufacturer attribute.\n\nThis structure is required in order to create the hierarchy. But you probably want to see the manufacturers at the same time as you look at the products; that is, you want the Product entity to have a Manufacturer attribute.\n\nYou can set up the structure required for the hierarchy but then use business rules to populate the Manufacturer value, in this case. The following procedure describes how to show the manufacturers along with the products without losing the hierarchy structure. This is going to require some work before we proceed to creating the business rule.\n\n**1.** For the Product entity, create a free-form attribute called **Manufacturer**. See Chapter 4 for information on how to create free-form attributes.\n\n**2.** For the Product entity, create an attribute group called **Product Line** and add the Manufacturer and Line attributes to it. You can also see Chapter 4 for how to create attribute groups.\n\n**3.** Create a business rule to populate products with the appropriate manufacturer. This means that the rule will populate the Product entity's Manufacturer attribute with the Line entity's Manufacturer attribute values.\n\na. Follow the procedure to create a new business rule. In this example, on the Business Rule Maintenance page, select the Product model, Product entity, Leaf member type, and All attributes and click the \"Add business rule\" button.\n\nb. Click the row for the rule you want to edit and then click the \"Edit selected business rule\" button. The Edit Business Rule page is displayed.\n\nc. In the Components pane, expand the Actions node.\n\nd. Under the Change value node, click \"equals\" and drag it to the THEN pane. Drop it on the Actions label.\n\ne. In the Attributes pane, click Manufacturer and drag it to the Edit Action pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label. (You drag the attribute whose value you want to populate; in this case, you want to populate the Manufacturer value.)\n\nf. In the Attributes pane, expand the Line node and click Manufacturer. Drag it to the Edit Action pane and drop it on the Select attribute label.\n\ng. At the bottom of the Edit Action pane, click the Save item button.\n\nThe business rule is complete.\n\nNOTE\n\n_InChapter 11, we will discuss how to set security assignments, but it is usually best practice to limit access to columns populated by business rules._\n\nProcedure: How to Use Incremental Values for Code Attribute in SQL Server 2012\n\nYou might want to populate an attribute value with an incremental number. For example, maybe you want each new product to have a unique number as its Code value and you want to increment each new product number by five. In the first release of MDS, you used business rules to do this. In SQL Server 2012, this special action of creating Code values was moved to the entity creation screen.\n\nIn the current Finance model, the Code attribute values for the Location entity start with 100 and additional Code values are incremented by one. As new locations are added, the Code value should be one number higher than the highest number that's already used. The following example shows how to set up the entity to do this incremental numbering. This can be turned on and off for an entity at any time.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Even though you're going to populate the Code attribute, you will notice in Explorer that the Code attribute is editable._\n\nTo update the entity to automated code creation, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** In this example, on the Entity Maintenance page, select the Finance model and the Location entity and click the \"Edit selected entity\" button.\n\n**2.** On the Edit Entity page, select the \"Create Code values automatically\" check box.\n\n**3.** Checking the box displays an integer input box labeled Start with. If you are not sure which number to start with, you can leave 1 for the Start with value. MDS will populate the Code value with the next possible value.\n\n**4.** At the top of the Edit Entity page, click the Save entity button.\n\nThe automation is complete.\n\nThis new code-generation process was implemented to provide speed and functionality outside of the business rule process. In SQL Server 2012, members created through staging and the web service can now generate Code values. In order to maintain performance on large entities, the last integer used is stored in the tblCodeGenInfo table of the MDS database. This will track the largest Code value for each entity. If a user inadvertently updates a code member to a large integer, you may need to fix the problem in this table directly.\n\nCreating Your Own Expressions\n\nThe following reference tables explain the possible conditions and actions you can use to create business rule expressions.\n\nConditions\n\nIf a condition evaluates to true, an action is taken. For example, if an attribute value is greater than another attribute value (the condition), then the attribute value is changed (the action).\n\nActions\n\nThere are four categories of actions you can take by using business rules.\n\nDefault Value Actions\n\nDefault value actions set a blank value to a value specified by the rule. If a value is already populated, default actions do not have an effect.\n\nChange Value Actions\n\nChange value actions update values to new values each time business rules are applied.\n\nValidation Actions\n\nValidation actions are used to send e-mail notifications when data fails business rule validation.\n\nExternal Actions\n\nExternal actions start applications outside of Master Data Services.\n\nPublishing Business Rules\n\nAfter you have created a business rule, you must publish it. Publishing a business rule means making it available to validate data against it. You can create as many rules as you want, but if you don't publish them, they aren't applied to your data when you start validation.\n\nAfter you publish a business rule, you can always exclude it if you decide you don't want to apply it to data. Any time you edit a rule, you must republish it or it won't be applied to data as part of the validation process.\n\nProcedure: How to Publish a Business Rule\n\nTo publish a business rule, click the \"Publish business rules\" button.\n\nFor all business rules that have expressions defined, the value in the Status column changes to Active. Data can now be validated against the rules. You can exclude rules you do not want to publish. For more information, see \"Procedure: How to Exclude Business Rules,\" later in this chapter.\n\nBusiness Rule Statuses\n\nThe following table describes all possible statuses for rules on the Business Rule Maintenance page.\n\nApplying Business Rules\n\nBusiness rules are not valuable until you validate data against them. Data can be validated against business rules in the following ways:\n\n  You can validate the members for a single entity at a time in the Explorer functional area of the Master Data Manager web application. Business users with Explorer permissions can do this.\n\n  You can validate the members for a single entity that you have loaded into an Excel worksheet using the Master Data Services Add-in for Excel. If the number of members loaded into the sheet exceeds the limit configured on the server, the whole entity will be validated asynchronously.\n\n  You can validate all entities in a model in the Version Management functional area of the Master Data Manager user interface.\n\n  You can use web services to validate all or some members as they are passed in.\n\n  You can run a stored procedure to validate at different model object levels. While using the stored procedures directly is not encouraged, you may find it necessary to implement the data management process for your organization.\n\n  Validations can be triggered through the staging stored procedures. For more information about this stored procedure, see Chapter 5.\n\nProcedure: How to Apply Business Rules in Explorer\n\nUsers with permission can apply business rules in Explorer. To do so, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, select the Product model and VERSION 1 from the drop-down lists.\n\n**2.** Click Explorer.\n\n**3.** On the menu bar, choose Entities | Product (or whichever entity you want to validate against business rules).\n\n**4.** Above the grid, click the Apply Rules button. In this release of MDS, the button can now be expanded to apply rules to the entire entity or to look at the current status of a validation request.\n\nA green check mark indicates success. A red exclamation point indicates failure.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Only the members on the current page in the grid are validated. So if you are showing 50 members, only those 50 members are validated against business rules._\n\nResolving Validation Issues in Explorer\n\nIn Explorer, you can no longer view validation issues in a list format. The newly streamlined Explorer UI and the new Add-in for Excel should replace the need for the My Validation Issues page. In the Explorer UI and the Add-in for Excel, you can now filter on validation status, allowing you to display all members that failed validation, as shown here:\n\nBy selecting a specific member, you can see all validation issues related to the member at the bottom of the Details pane to the right. This provides a single screen to correct validation issues that have been found.\n\nProcedure: How to Validate a Version\n\nIn the Version Management functional area of Master Data Manager, you can validate an entire model version at once. For more information and full instructions, see Chapter 9.\n\nOther Business Rule Tasks\n\nNow that you have created rules, you might want to update the name and description of each to ensure you can tell them apart. You can also change the order in which the rules run, or exclude rules from running.\n\nProcedure: How to Change the Rule Name and Description\n\nYou should give each business rule a name and description so you can keep track of what the rule is used for. To change the name or description of a business rule, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Business Rule Maintenance page, in the row for the rule you want to rename, double-click the Name column. The cell becomes editable.\n\n**2.** Type the text you want and press enter. The Status column changes to Changes pending.\n\n**3.** Click the \"Publish business rules\" button.\n\n**4.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK. The status changes to Active.\n\nThe text is updated. Follow this same procedure to update values in the Description column.\n\nNOTE\n\n_The name cannot be more than 50 characters and the description cannot be more than 255 characters._\n\nProcedure: How to Set the Rule's Priority Order\n\nBusiness rules execute based on the priority order provided in the Priority column. If you change the priority, you're changing the order in which the rules are applied to data. It is possible to have two rules with the same priority. In this case, MDS will determine the order for these two rules, usually the order of creation.\n\nTo change a business rule's priority, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Business Rule Maintenance page, in the row for the rule with the priority you want to change, double-click the Priority column. The cell becomes editable.\n\n**2.** Type the number you want and press enter. The status changes to Changes pending.\n\n**3.** Click the \"Publish business rules\" button.\n\n**4.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK. The status changes to Active.\n\nTIP\n\n_You can click the column heading to sort by the Priority column._\n\nIn Master Data Services Configuration Manager, you can change the number that the Priority column is increased by when you create a new rule. The default is 10 but you can change it by updating the \"Number to increment new business rules by\" setting.\n\nProcedure: How to Exclude Business Rules\n\nYou can exclude rules if you're not ready to publish or if you're troubleshooting. If you wish to save the business logic but temporarily exclude the rule from validation processes, you can check the Excluded check box and republish the rules.\n\nTo exclude a business rule, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Business Rule Maintenance page, in the row for the rule you want to exclude, select the Excluded check box. The status changes to Exclusion pending.\n\n**2.** Click the \"Publish business rules\" button.\n\n**3.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK. The status changes to Excluded.\n\nConfiguring E-Mail Notifications\n\nYou can configure MDS to send e-mail notifications when an attribute value fails validation against certain types of business rules. First, you must configure e-mail settings to ensure e-mail can successfully be sent. Then, you must edit the business rule to indicate who to send e-mail notification to if validation fails. If you don't need e-mail notifications, you can skip this section.\n\nA few notes before you get started:\n\n  If you trigger e-mails to a group, only the users who have accessed the Master Data Manager web application will receive the mails.\n\n  To confirm that the e-mail is sent to the user's correct address, on the Master Data Manager home page, click User and Group Permissions. To the left of the user, click the down arrow, then choose Edit | General. If the e-mail address listed is not correct, click the Edit button and update it.\n\nProcedure: How to Configure E-Mail Notifications\n\nBefore you can configure e-mail notifications, you must know the IP address of the SMTP server that will send the mail. You should also have an e-mail address and display name for the account that will send the mail.\n\nAfter you get this information, you can configure e-mail notifications by completing the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_This is a one-time process in Configuration Manager. If you need to update the Database Mail profile after you've set it up initially, you must do so in SQL Server Management Studio._\n\n**1.** Open Master Data Services Configuration Manager.\n\n**2.** In the left pane, click Database Configuration.\n\n**3.** In the right pane, click the Select Database button.\n\n**4.** In the Connect to Database dialog box, connect to a database and click OK. The System Settings section is populated with settings for the database.\n\n**5.** In the System Settings area, scroll down to the end of the list.\n\n**6.** Click the Create Profile button.\n\n**7.** Populate the Create Database Mail Profile and Account dialog box as follows:\n\n**8.** Click OK to save and close. The Database Configuration page is updated with the name of your Database Mail profile.\n\nOther E-Mail Settings in Configuration Manager\n\nThere are a few other settings you can use to customize e-mails for your implementation:\n\n  **Master Data Manager URL for notifications** The URL that's used in the link in the e-mail notification. You should enter the name of your web site so users who get the e-mail can go directly to the validation issue by clicking the link.\n\n  **Notification e-mail interval (in seconds)** How often e-mails are sent. The default is every two minutes.\n\n  **Number of notifications in a single e-mail** How many validation issues are included in a single e-mail.\n\n  **Default e-mail format** Format for e-mails.\n\n  **Regular expression for e-mail address** Used to validate e-mail addresses in the User and Group Permissions functional area of Master Data Manager. It determines the format that is allowed when entering e-mail addresses. Unless you have reason to change it, leave the default setting.\n\n  **Database Mail account** You cannot change this setting. It is intended to show you the name of the Database Mail account in SQL Server in case you need to update it.\n\nProcedure: How to Configure a Business Rule to Send E-Mail\n\nAfter you configure Database Mail in Configuration Manager, you must specify who will be notified when data fails validation against business rules.\n\nNOTE\n\n_To send e-mail notifications, the rule must have a validation action. (Validation actions are listed on the Edit Business Rule page, in the Components pane, under Actions | Validation.) Other types of actions do not send e-mail._\n\nTo configure a business rule to send e-mail, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Business Rules.\n\n**3.** On the Business Rule Maintenance page, choose a model, entity, and member type for your rule to apply to. In this example, select Product, Product, and Leaf. For the attribute, leave All.\n\n**4.** For the business rule for which you want to send e-mail, double-click the Notification column. Expand the Users node or Groups node to find the user or group you want to send mail to.\n\n**5.** Click the name of the user or group. The Notification column is updated with the value you selected. The Status column is updated to Changes pending.\n\n**6.** Click the \"Publish business rules\" button.\n\n**7.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK.\n\nCreating and Triggering Workflows\n\nBy using business rules and customizing your data model, you can create relatively simple workflows for managing the flow of data through Master Data Services. If you want to manage a one- or two-step approval process or notify users when more data is required, you can simply use the MDS interfaces provided to create these workflows.\n\nSome organizations will require more complex event processing. If your organization requires multitiered approvals or complex decision trees, then integration with a SharePoint workflow may better suit your needs. Integration with SharePoint workflow will require some coding expertise and basic understanding of Windows workflow foundation.\n\nCreating a Workflow in MDS\n\nA simple MDS workflow might include getting approval when an attribute changes. For example, if someone in Purchasing needs to change the cost of a product, the head of Purchasing might want to be notified so that he can approve or deny that change.\n\nYou can create workflows in MDS based on any condition, but we're going to show you an example where an attribute value changes. In this case, you don't know what the attribute has changed to; you just know that it has changed.\n\nTo address this scenario, MDS uses change tracking groups attached to attributes. Each entity within Master Data Services has up to 31 change tracking groups that can have any number of attributes allocated to them. An attribute can be managed by only one change tracking group at a time.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Change tracking is still not triggered through the staging process in the SQL Server 2012 release of MDS. If you require automatic updates to trigger change tracking, you must use the web service to update data._\n\nTo create a workflow within MDS, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Add attributes to a change tracking group (so you can be notified when their values change).\n\n**2.** Add a domain-based attribute named Approved and populate it with Yes, No, and Pending members.\n\n**3.** Create a business rule to send notification when the attribute values change.\n\nThese steps create a simple workflow. Any time the cost of a product changes, the Approved attribute changes to Pending and the purchasing manager is notified. It is the purchasing manager's job to open MDS, review the change, and approve or deny it.\n\nProcedure: How to Add an Attribute to a Change Tracking Group\n\nYou must add an attribute to a change tracking group before you can use rules to determine if the attribute value has changed. To add an attribute to a tracking group, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Entities.\n\n**3.** Select a model from the Model list. In this case, select Product.\n\n**4.** Click the row of the entity that contains the attribute and click the \"Edit selected entity\" button. In this example, edit Product.\n\n**5.** In the Leaf attributes section (or whichever section contains your attribute), click the attribute and click the \"Edit selected attribute\" button. In this example, edit Cost.\n\n**6.** At the bottom of the page, select the \"Enable change tracking\" check box.\n\n**7.** The \"Change tracking group\" field is displayed. You can set this number to any number you want. It is just used as a grouping for multiple attributes. If you want to include more than one attribute in this group, use the same group number for each attribute.\n\n**8.** Click the Save attribute button.\n\nNow if you want, you can edit other attributes and add them to the group with the same number. To do this, follow the same steps and make sure to use the same number for the group.\n\nViewing Change Tracking Group Reports\n\nIn the first release of Master Data Services, managing change tracking group attributes was a time-consuming task because there was no way of seeing all change tracking group associations in one place. While there is still no way in the UI to see a complete list of associations, two new views have been provided to give administrators insight into which attributes each change tracking group consists of and which business rule leverages that group:\n\n  **viw_SUBSCRIPTION_CTG_ATTRIBUTES** This view provides a list of all attributes associated with a change tracking group in any model in the database.\n\n  **viw_SUBSCRIPTION_CTG_BUSINESS_RULES** This view provides a list of all business rules that leverage a change tracking group as a condition. This view does not filter out rules that are excluded or not currently active.\n\nProcedure: How to Create an Approved Attribute\n\nNow you're going to create an attribute that will change whenever the Cost attribute changes. This attribute acts as a flag to make others aware that the cost has changed.\n\nBy now, you should be able to create an entity and attribute in System Administration and create members in Explorer. If you need a refresher, see the procedures in Chapter 4.\n\nTo continue with this example:\n\n**1.** In System Administration, for the Product model, create an entity named **Approved**. This entity does not need to be enabled for hierarchies.\n\n**2.** In System Administration, create a leaf-level domain-based attribute for the Product entity. This domain-based attribute should be based on the Approved entity and be named **Approved**.\n\n**3.** Add the Approved attribute to the Pricing attribute group so you can view the attribute in Explorer.\n\n**4.** In Explorer, open the Approved entity and create three members: **Yes** , **No** , and **Pending**. If you have created multiple versions of the Product model, make sure you do this in the latest version.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Business Rule That's Triggered by Change Tracking\n\nNow you're going to create the business rule to update the Approved attribute when the Cost attribute changes. You can create your own rules for any attributes that change by using similar steps.\n\n**1.** On the home page, click System Administration.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Manage | Business Rules.\n\n**3.** Select a model, entity, member type, and attribute. In this case, choose Product, Product, Leaf, and All.\n\n**4.** Click the \"Add business rule\" button.\n\n**5.** The row is highlighted. Select the \"Edit selected business rule\" button. The Edit Business Rule page is displayed.\n\n**6.** In the Components pane, expand the Conditions node.\n\n**7.** Under the Value comparison node, click \"has changed\" and drag it to the IF pane. Drop it on the Conditions label.\n\n**8.** In the Attributes pane, click Cost and drag it to the Edit Condition pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label. (Important: The attribute you drag here does not have any effect on MDS. It's required to create the rule, but the change tracking group and the attributes assigned to it, not the attribute, is what the rule is based on.)\n\n**9.** Click Save item.\n\n**10.** In the Components pane, expand the Actions node. In the Change value node, click \"equals\" and drag it to the THEN pane. Drop it on the Actions label.\n\n**11.** In the Attributes pane, click Approved and drag it to the Edit Action pane. Drop it on the Select attribute label.\n\n**12.** Select Pending from the list.\n\n**13.** Click Save item.\n\n**14.** Click the Back button in the top-left corner.\n\n**15.** Click the \"Publish business rules\" button.\n\nNow any time a cost changes and business rules are applied, the Approved column changes to Pending.\n\nTo have e-mail sent to the manager, create another business rule that sends e-mail when the Approved column is Pending. To do this, use the \"is equal to\" condition and the \"is not valid\" action.\n\nOn the Business Rule Maintenance page, in the Notification column, choose the user or group you want to notify. This user or group is responsible for changing the Approved attribute from Pending to Yes or No.\n\nNOTE\n\n_You might want to create an additional business rule that notifies a different user or group if the Approved attribute value changes to No._\n\nTriggering an External Workflow\n\nWorkflows external to MDS are triggered by using the external action business rule. When business rules are applied, all entity members that evaluate to true by the conditions provided are sent to the external action Service Broker queue.\n\nTo enable external actions, the workflow integration service must be installed separately. Otherwise, the data gathered by external action business rules just sits in the external action Service Broker queue without triggering any effect. Because this workflow listener pulls requests from a Service Broker queue, only a single workflow listener should be connected to an MDS database at a time and no other custom components should be pointed at the external action Service Broker queue.\n\nA diagram of the process is shown in Figure 8-1. The workflow integration service queries the database periodically, and if the external action business rule has put data in the Service Broker queue, the data is passed by the service to either a SharePoint workflow or some other, custom workflow.\n\n**Figure 8-1** _The workflow integration service interacting with workflows external to MDS_\n\nNOTE\n\n_If the SharePoint or other workflow is not configured properly, the service still clears the data from the queue and attempts to pass it to the workflow. At this point, even if you re-validate against business rules, the change tracking has already occurred and the data won't be re-added to the queue._\n\nThe following procedures should help you get started with installing the workflow integration service and configuring MDS to trigger external workflows. We've also written a white paper specific to triggering SharePoint workflows, which you can view here: <http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/ff459274(SQL.100).aspx>.\n\nInstalling the Workflow Integration Service\n\nThe first step in triggering an external workflow is to install the workflow integration service. It is called Microsoft.MasterDataServices.Workflow.exe and it can be found in Program Files\\Microsoft SQL Server\\110\\Master Data Services\\WebApplication\\bin. You can use InstallUtil.exe to install the service. When you are ready to begin pulling data from the Service Broker queue, you will start this service.\n\nAs administrator, open a command prompt and enter the following command:\n\nUpdating the Web Configuration File\n\nDepending on the type of external action you want to trigger, different settings must be made in the Workflow configuration file. This file is called Microsoft .MasterDataServices.Workflow.exe.config and can also be found in Program Files\\Microsoft SQL Server\\110\\Master Data Services\\WebApplication\\bin.\n\nIf the only external actions that will be triggered are SharePoint workflows, then only the link to the MDS database is necessary. An example of the database connection string needed for a SharePoint workflow is shown here:\n\nIn this example, MDSServer is the name of the server and MDS is the name of the database.\n\nFor each external DLL that you want to install into MDS, you must add a reference in the configuration file. Multiple external references must be added to the same XML node and separated by a semicolon. An example of two external actions is shown here:\n\nCreating a SharePoint Workflow in Visual Studio\n\nIf you decide you want to use SharePoint for your workflow, use these steps to get started designing a workflow in Visual Studio:\n\nNOTE\n\n_You must use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to create your SharePoint workflow._\n\n**1.** Open Visual Studio 2010.\n\n**2.** Using the SharePoint 2010 templates, create a Sequential workflow project.\n\n**3.** Drag the OnWorkflowActivated control from the toolbox to the designer area.\n\n**4.** Right-click the control and choose Generate Handlers.\n\nThe data passed from the business rule process into the Service Broker queue will be contained in the string MDSData = workflowProperties.InitiationData. You must now parse the MDS data string into separate data fields and use the MDS web service to interact with Master Data Services.\n\nCreating a Business Rule That Starts a Workflow\n\nTo trigger an external workflow from within MDS, you must create a business rule that starts the workflow. To do so, create a business rule as you normally would.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Workflow business rules should always contain a condition. Otherwise, the workflow would be continually triggered._\n\nThe action needed to start the workflow is the last item in the node of the Components pane. Under the External action node, click \"start workflow\" and drag it to the THEN pane and drop it on the Actions label.\n\nThen populate the Edit Action pane as follows:\n\nThen save the item and publish the business rule as you normally would. When the business rule is applied, it populates the queue. When you start the service, the queue is cleared and an attempt is made to pass the data to the workflow.\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, Master Data Services has broken out the SharePoint Workflow DLL. You can get this open source DLL in the MDS workflow sample at <http:\/\/sqlserversamples.codeplex.com>. Search for Master Data Services to find the samples page.\n\nUsing Web Services to Manage Business Rules\n\nBusiness rule management is the most complicated process exposed by the Master Data Services web service. Although we provide a couple of simple examples in this section, writing more complex business rules is significantly more intricate and would require a significant amount of this book to explain. Automation of MDS business rules should only be attempted by experienced developers working on a specific project that requires business rule automation.\n\nGetting a List of Rules\n\nThere may be instances where you want to programmatically consume Master Data Services' business rules in external systems. While we have seen significant interest in this, we believe the internal ruleset limits the capability for MDS to be used as a rule warehouse. Users interested in this type of solution should look at using standard MDS entities to store this data. For users interested in getting rules out of MDS, the following procedure shows a common request to get a list of business rules:\n\nCreating a Business Rule Using Web Services\n\nThe most complex operations in MDS are the creation and update of business rules in MDS. If you are interested in automating the business rule process, we suggest that you keep the processes simple, by not adding complex conditions or actions in the beginning. At the conclusion of this procedure, a new business rule will be created but will not be published. You will need to publish the rule in another operation or through the UI.\n\nSummary\n\nIn this chapter we discussed the ability to manage master data by using business rules. These business rules were created to allow business users to quickly and efficiently create logical constructs to manage the data within their entities. Business rules are entity and type centric. Using notifications and business rules, simple workflow processes can be managed using only Master Data Services functionality. If more complex workflows need to be managed, you can trigger SharePoint workflows using the external action business rule. The functionality of business rules did not significantly change in this latest release with the limited exception of new views for change tracking groups and a new process for auto-generating Code values. In the next chapter we will discuss using validation as part of a version management process.\nChapter 9\n\nCreating Versions of Data\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Versions Overview\n\n  Updating Your Version Name and Description\n\n  Version Statuses\n\n  Validating a Version\n\n  Reviewing and Reversing Transactions\n\n  Committing and Copying a Version\n\n  Version Flags\n\n  Viewing a Version's Ancestry\n\n  Using Web Services to Work with Versions\n\nAfter you understand the workflow for adding and modifying the data stored in MDS, you must learn how to manage that data over time. For each model within MDS, a historical record of the data can be stored. These data snapshots are called _versions_.\n\nEach time you create a version of a model, the data for all the entities within the individual model are versioned at the same time. Only the data is stored; any changes to the structure of the model affect all versions and can create unintended consequences.\n\n_Version flags_ are another important component of versioning in MDS. By assigning flags to versions, integration with other systems can be better managed.\n\nThere were no significant changes to versioning in the SQL Server 2012 release. Administrators should continue to use versions to manage snapshots of their models over time.\n\nVersions Overview\n\nIn order to manage data within your organization effectively, you may be required to create versions of the data stored within a model. In MDS, the data in all entities within each model is versioned simultaneously. A benefit of this design is that you can manage relationships between entities without worrying about time and version. A side effect of this design is that entities in different models cannot interact with one another.\n\nThere is often a natural cadence to many data domains. This cadence can help define which entities should be managed in the same model. For example, in many organizations, the accounting department manages structural changes on a monthly basis. As each month ends, everyone in the accounting department goes through standard routines to ensure that the month's books can be closed properly. Any entities related to this process\u2014accounts, divisions, departments, or other internal business entities that are central to this process\u2014should be managed together, versioned in concert with the month-end process.\n\nIn another example, an organization may release products on a quarterly basis. All entities central to the product development process would follow this quarterly versioning scheme. Other entities may not require a versioning scheme at all.\n\nVersions provide a number of benefits to the data management process:\n\n  **Complete model history for a specific point in time** MDS model versions can be committed to ensure that an exact record of a model's data can be stored for later review. These committed versions can provide a portion of the required audit trail for new, more rigorous compliance requirements.\n\n  **Limited access during sensitive processes** When performing certain processes, like validating the entire model or loading large numbers of records, it may be prudent to restrict access to the model by locking it.\n\n  **Additional version copies for analysis** Additional versions can be created outside of the standard cadence for a variety of purposes. These versions can be used to examine new hierarchy configurations or potential acquisitions without affecting the current regular processes.\n\nChanging the Structure of Your Model\n\nMDS does not version metadata changes. Any changes to the model structure affect all open and committed versions. If an attribute or entity is deleted, for example, all history for that attribute or entity is lost from all versions _forever_. When you need to maintain historic data, we suggest that you use security permissions to hide attributes or entities instead of deleting them. You can also hide attributes by setting the display width to zero or by not adding them to attribute groups.\n\nWhen you add an attribute or entity, the model structure is updated in all versions as well. You can add the corresponding data to any version of the model; if you add data to a later version, the structure exists in the earlier versions but the data does not.\n\nCommitting Versions\n\nSometimes users and downstream systems need to be certain that all data has been validated and reviewed. Because MDS allows incomplete members to be added to the system and encourages users to manage the data creation and correction workflow from within MDS entities, it may not be reliable for external production systems to use open or locked versions. Only committed versions ensure that all members in every entity within the model have passed all business rules successfully. Once a version is committed, no additional changes can be made to the data, and the status of the version cannot be changed.\n\nFigure 9-1 shows the most common version control workflow.\n\n**Figure 9-1** _Default version control workflow_\n\nA few notes about Figure 9-1:\n\n  Each time the status changes, if notifications are configured, an e-mail is sent to model administrators. For more information about notifications, see Chapter 8.\n\n  You can change a setting in MDS Configuration Manager so that you can copy versions with a status other than Committed, but Figure 9-1 shows the default behavior.\n\n  You can validate a version at any time. Locking the version ensures that users don't make changes after you've validated, but it's only necessary if you plan to commit the version or otherwise prevent users from making changes.\n\nVersioning for Main Street Clothing Company\n\nMain Street Clothing Company has separated its entities into two separate domains: Account and Product. A major reason for this split was the version cadence of each domain.\n\nAs a clothing company, Main Street finds that its product lines change significantly based on the season. This creates a natural cadence for managing major changes to its product list on a quarterly basis. The account model is managed on a monthly basis as part of the accounting team's regular month-end close process.\n\nUpdating Your Version Name and Description\n\nBefore you lock, validate, commit, or copy a version of your model, you might want to customize the version name and description. You can do this at any time. The new version name is displayed in many places in the Master Data Manager web UI, but you will probably notice it most on the home page, when you select the model name and version from the drop-down lists.\n\nProcedure: How to Change the Version Name and Description\n\nTo change the version name and description, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Version Management.\n\n**2.** From the Model list, select the model with the version name or description you want to change.\n\n**3.** Double-click the cell that contains the version name or description that you want to change. The cell becomes editable.\n\n**4.** Change the text.\n\n**5.** Press enter.\n\n**6.** Double-click the cell with the version description.\n\n**7.** Change the description to the text you want.\n\n**8.** Press enter.\n\nThe name and description are updated.\n\nNOTE\n\n_The date\/time shown in the Last Changed Date column is based on the last change to any of the version information on this page, including the status._\n\nVersion Statuses\n\nAs you work with versions of your model and its data, you change the status of the version and then make copies of it. The version status indicates whether or not the model structure and its data can be updated. The following table lists the possible statuses for a version.\n\nProcedure: How to Lock a Version\n\nWhen you're ready to save a version of the model, you first lock it. Then you can validate the model data and work on resolving issues that occur when data fails validation against business rules. To lock a version, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Version Management.\n\n**2.** From the Model list, select the model you want to lock.\n\n**3.** Select the row for the version you want to lock. The background is shaded when the row is selected.\n\n**4.** Click the Lock button.\n\n**5.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK.\n\nThe Status column changes to Locked.\n\nNow you can proceed with validating the version against business rules so that you can commit the version and create a copy of it.\n\nValidating a Version\n\nWhen you validate a version against business rules, all the members in the model are validated against business rules. You can validate subsets of members in the Explorer functional area, but you use the following procedure to validate all members at the same time.\n\nProcedure: How to Validate a Version\n\nTo validate the members from a version against business rules, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Version Management.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Validate Version.\n\n**3.** Select the model and the version you want to validate.\n\n**4.** Click the Validate button.\n\n**5.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK.\n\n(You may have to do steps 4 and 5 twice. You will know that the process is complete when the Commit button is enabled. Depending on the number of rules and members needing validation, this may take a long time to complete.)\n\nValidation Statuses\n\nThe statuses that are displayed on this page help you determine which members have passed business rule validation and which members have failed. The following table lists the possible validation statuses.\n\nProcedure: How to Resolve Validation Issues\n\nBefore you can commit the version, you must resolve all business rule validation issues by completing the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_In Explorer, users can no longer view their own individual business rule issues, if they are recipients of notifications that are sent when validation fails users will need to use the links in the e-mail they receive or use the Excel Add-in described inChapter 10. As an administrator, you can view all issues for all users by following this procedure._\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Version Management.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Validate Version.\n\n**3.** Select the model and the version.\n\nA list of all validation issues is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Unlike the old Explorer functional area, this page shows validation issues for all users.\n\n**4.** If you need to unlock the version at this point so that users can update data, return to the Manage Versions page, select the model, and click the Unlock button.\n\nNOTE\n\n_To fix the validation issues, you can now filter based on the validation status in Explorer as well as the new Add-in for Excel, which is discussed in more detail inChapter 10._\n\nReviewing and Reversing Transactions\n\nTo help resolve business rule validation issues, you can review transactions for all users in the Version Management functional area. To do so, choose Transactions. For the steps required to reverse a transaction or annotate it, see Chapter 7.\n\nCommitting and Copying a Version\n\nYou should not commit a version until you are sure it's complete and accurate. Once you commit a version, you cannot undo it without opening the database. You also have the ability to delete a version, but you must also go into the database to do so. In either case, you should only do these procedures if you're not concerned with compliance issues and if you're comfortable working in the database.\n\nIn general, you should commit the version and then copy it, giving users the ability to continue updating the data.\n\nProcedure: How to Commit a Version\n\nWhen all members pass validation against business rules and the version is locked, you can commit the version by completing the steps that follow.\n\nCAUTION\n\n_After you commit a version, you cannot reopen it from the UI. Before committing, you should be sure that you no longer want to modify the data._\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Version Management.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Validate Version.\n\nIf all rows in the table show 0 except the Validation succeeded row, then the version can successfully be committed. Click Commit.\n\n**3.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK.\n\nWhen the version is successfully committed, a success message is displayed. Back on the Manage Versions page, the Status column is updated to Committed.\n\nNow you can copy the version.\n\nProcedure: How to Reopen a Committed Version\n\nYou can change a committed version back to an open version by completing the steps that follow.\n\nCAUTION\n\n_This action should be performed by a DBA only in those rare situations in which the version was committed by mistake. If production systems have pulled this data and used the results for reporting that is subject to compliance, the more appropriate action is to copy the version and commit a new, revised version for compliance purposes._\n\n**1.** Open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the MDS database.\n\n**2.** In the table mdm.tblModel, in the ID column, note the ID of the model.\n\n**3.** In the table mdm.tblModelVersion, in the Model_ID column, find the ID from step 2.\n\n**4.** In the row for the version of the model you want to open, change the value in the Status column from 3 (Committed) to 1 (Open) or 2 (Locked).\n\nThe version is now displayed as open or locked in the web UI.\n\nProcedure: How to Copy a Version\n\nWhen you copy a version, a new version with the next version number is created. Newly created versions have the status of Open and are available for editing by users and administrators. To copy a version, complete the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_By default, you can copy Committed versions only._\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Version Management.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Versions.\n\n**3.** From the Model list, select a model.\n\n**4.** Click the row for the version you want to copy.\n\n**5.** Click the Copy button.\n\n**5.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK.\n\nA new row is displayed in the grid. You can update the name and description to indicate which version you want this to be.\n\nCopy Versions Other Than Committed\n\nIn MDS Configuration Manager, you can change whether you can copy models with any status or just those with a status of Committed. The setting is called \"Copy only committed versions\" and the default is Yes. Set it to No if you want to copy versions of any status.\n\nIf your organization acquires another organization, or you want to work with a hypothetical version of the data, it can be useful to copy other versions of the data. If you have more than one open version, however, remember that users can modify it. You can set security to prevent access, but it is not a straightforward process. See \"Hierarchy Member Permissions\" in Chapter 11 for more information.\n\nVersion Flags\n\nWhile versions can provide a myriad of benefits, managing the integration with other systems can be a nightmare as the current version changes over time. MDS addresses this issue with the implementation of version flags. Each version in MDS can be flagged with a custom flag specific to the selected model. These flags allow data stewards to tag a version as current, prior, draft, or some unique identifier for downstream systems. Each version can have only one version flag associated with it at a time.\n\nBecause downstream systems rely on the validity of data being presented in a version, MDS can require versions to be committed before the flag can be applied. For most production systems, it is important to ensure that committed versions require flags. This check will be the only way to ensure that a specific version has passed validation before being used by downstream systems.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Version Flag and Assign It to a Version\n\nTo create a version flag and assign it to a version of a model, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click Version Management.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Flags.\n\n**3.** From the Model list, select a model.\n\n**4.** Click the Add button.\n\n**5.** A grid is displayed. Type a name and description and select whether the flag is available to apply to Committed versions only (True) or to versions of any status (False).\n\n**6.** Click the Save button.\n\n**7.** On the menu bar, choose Manage | Versions.\n\n**8.** In the row of the version you want to assign the flag to, double-click the Flag column. A list is displayed.\n\n**9.** Select the flag from the list.\n\n**10.** Press tab or enter.\n\nThe Flag column is updated.\n\nNOTE\n\n_You can assign a flag to one version at a time only._\n\nViewing a Version's Ancestry\n\nYou can copy any previous versions to create new versions; for example, you can copy versions in this order:\n\n  Version 1 to Version 2\n\n  Version 2 to Version 3\n\n  Version 1 to Version 4\n\nIf you create several versions of a model and you are trying to determine where each version came from, you can view the Copied From column on the Manage Versions page.\n\nThis column shows only the most recent version in the version's history. You can view a more in-depth historical record by viewing the version ancestry. On the Manage Versions page, click the row you want to see a history for and click the View Ancestry button. In this example, we'll view Version 3, which was a copy of Version 2.\n\nThe Version Ancestry dialog box that is displayed shows the history. You read this dialog box from bottom to top; 0 is the first time the version was generated, 1 is the second time, 2 is the third, and so on. In this case, the first version of this model was Version 1, then it was copied to Version 2, and then to Version 3.\n\nProcedure: How to Delete a Version\n\nNormally, you should not need to delete a version of your model. This procedure is intended to help you with testing or if some circumstance forces you to take this action. Use with caution.\n\nCAUTION\n\n_If you delete the only version for the model, the model becomes unusable._\n\nTo delete a model version, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the MDS database.\n\n**2.** In the view mdm.viw_SYSTEM_SCHEMA_VERSION, determine which version of the model you want to delete, and copy the value in the ID field.\n\n**3.** Create a new query similar to the following:\n\nReplace _value from step 2_ with the ID from step 2.\n\nWhen you run the query, the version is deleted. The Master Data Manager web application reflects this change shortly after. To confirm the change, click the \"Refresh cached information\" link on the MDS home page. This link is located in the upper-right corner of the page.\n\nUsing Web Services to Work with Versions\n\nWeb services can be used to update information related to versions within a model. In this example, we use the MetadataUpdate method for the first time. Unlike the MetadataCreate operation, identifiers cannot be created using the Name field only to allow people to update the name.\n\nReturning a List of Versions\n\nWhen managing versions through the MDS web services, the GetVersion helper class will be very useful because version updates cannot be managed based on the name directly, as we have discussed. In this helper class, we will return the version based on the model and version name. Similar helper classes would be required to update any metadata objects.\n\nChanging the Version Status\n\nVersion information is updated using the MetadataUpdate operation. The following code leverages the helper class outlined in the prior section to retrieve the identifier for the version you want to update. In this code, we lock the version. A similar method could be used to commit the version, but committing a version requires that the version has been successfully validated first.\n\nSummary\n\nVersioning provides you with the flexibility to manage models over time. Versions can be in one of three states: open, locked, or committed. Committed versions can provide users and downstream systems with the assurance that all members have been validated and the committed version will not be changed in the future. Integration with downstream systems can be facilitated by using version flags. Version flags can be used on draft versions, or you can require that versions be committed before they can be flagged. In the next chapter, we will discuss the new Excel Add-in for MDS.\nChapter 10\n\nSQL Server 2012 MDS Add-in for Excel\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Installing the Add-in\n\n  Working with MDS Data in Excel\n\n  Creating and Modifying Entities Rapidly\n\n  Configuring Add-in for Excel Settings\n\n  Leveraging Data Quality Matching in Excel\n\nMore master data is stored in Excel than in any other application on the planet. Some smaller companies use this solution because it is cost effective and easy to use. Others use it to store their \"homeless\" data in worksheets because it is the tool they are most comfortable with. Even the largest organizations with the greatest, most well-designed MDM systems that money can buy struggle with propagation of master data in Excel.\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, the Master Data Services team has attempted to harness the power of Excel to give users all the security, audit, and management features of MDS in a package that information workers are most comfortable with. In this chapter we will explore the current features available in Excel and how you can leverage those features for all types of data management.\n\nUsing the combination of Excel and MDS as a data management tool can provide organizations with significant advantages. Excel is a natural platform for managing data from a variety of sources. Its built-in data functionality can be used to parse and cleanse data before loading the data into MDS. The developer interfaces, whether code, macros, or formulas, can provide additional custom automation in a rapid fashion, without voiding any support in the MDS solution.\n\nMany of Excel's limitations are also addressed by using it in conjunction with Master Data Services. Data sharing, security, and transaction logging have always posed problems that spreadsheet designers have struggled to solve. One of the biggest concerns with storing data in Excel is the lack of security and central management. Using the MDS Add-in for Excel can alleviate many of these concerns.\n\nInstalling the Add-in\n\nThe MDS Add-in for Excel is a separate, free installation available on the Microsoft website. The easiest way to download the latest edition of the Add-in is to use the link on the web UI's home navigation page. This link will be updated to the latest Excel Add-in download as new versions become available. It is important to understand that the Excel Add-in is not tied to the SQL Server update schedule. New versions of the Excel Add-in can and will include additional functionality that can be used with a SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services implementation.\n\nProcedure: How to Install the Add-in for Excel\n\nTo install the Master Data Services Add-in for Microsoft Excel, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Click the Install Master Data Services Add-in for Microsoft Excel link on the navigation page, shown next, and download the proper edition for your computer. The edition required is based on whether you have the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Microsoft Office installed on your computer.\n\n**2.** Run the setup until you see the following initial installation screen. Click Next.\n\n**3.** On the License Agreement page, you must accept the license agreement to enable the Next button and continue the installation. Once you accept the terms, click Next.\n\n**4.** Click Install to begin the installation.\n\nThe MDS Add-in for Excel installation may require Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime to be installed. This is available for free on MSDN.\n\n**5.** Once the installation has completed successfully, open Excel. If you already have Excel open, you will need to open a new instance for the Add-in to be available. A new Master Data ribbon should be available.\n\nWorking with MDS Data in Excel\n\nThe Master Data Service Add-in for Excel will allow you to load entity data into a worksheet as an Excel formatted table. An Excel table is really a perfect environment to review and manage reasonable amounts of data from Master Data Services. Filtering, sorting, and formula functions can be used to review the data in a friendly format without destroying the ability to write back to the server. Data can also be taken \"offline\" and modified without connectivity and then published back to MDS when connectivity has been restored.\n\nProcedure: How to Connect to the MDS Server and Load an Entity\n\nTo load an entity from Master Data Services into Excel, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Click the Master Data tab to display the Master Data ribbon.\n\n**2.** Click the Connect button to create a new connection. After you have set up the connection, clicking this button will connect automatically to the stored connection.\n\n**3.** The connection manager will display. In the possible event you are managing multiple Master Data Services implementations, you can manage them here. Click the New button at the bottom of the screen to add the connection to your server.\n\n**4.** In the Add New Connection dialog box, provide a description and server address for the connection. You can use any name that is identifiable for the connection. Don't worry about this now, as you can always change the name as new servers are added. The MDS server address is just the base URL that you use to connect to the MDS server. Ensure this address does not contain a page such as default.aspx at the end. Click OK when you are finished.\n\n**5.** Click the Connect button to connect to the server.\n\n**6.** After making a new connection, the Master Data Explorer task pane displays on the right side of the screen. Select the Product model from the Model drop-down list. The most recent open version (Version 4) will be selected by default, but you can change to any available version in the Version drop-down list.\n\n**7.** Double-click the Product entity from the list shown next. Data will immediately begin to load into the active sheet. If data already exists in the sheet, a warning message about data loss is displayed. If you select Yes, all data will be lost from the sheet. (Please be careful not to lose important data in this procedure.) Data on the MDS server is not affected.\n\nA new Excel table with all the Product entity attributes as columns is created on the active sheet and all members of the Product entity are added as rows in the worksheet.\n\nPublishing Changes\n\nUnlike the web UI, the Add-in for Excel does not update members as changes are made to each cell. Instead, every change to a cell is monitored and the cell is colored to denote an unpublished change. Cells can be changed by direct edit or by leveraging any of the more efficient methods of updating a range of cells, such as copy and paste or autofill.\n\nThis coloring feature has the unwanted effect of removing the ability to undo changes in Excel. While we think that the benefit of having colored cells is worth this loss of functionality, you can turn off this feature in the settings.\n\nInitially, when you click the Publish button, the following transaction annotation form appears. You can add a comment about the change to all changes or provide a comment for each change individually. If you want to suppress this form for future Publish actions, select the \"Do not show this dialog box again\" check box at the bottom of the form.\n\nPublishing changes will also trigger validation on those updated members. Any validation errors will be returned to the page, and two new columns will appear. You can toggle between showing and hiding these columns by clicking the Show Status button on the ribbon.\n\nRefreshing Data from the Server\n\nOnce you have created an MDS managed sheet, controls in the Master Data Explorer pane become disabled. You cannot change the entity managed by the sheet, but all filter functionality is still available. You can save the parent workbook for this sheet and open it at a later time. All of the functionality should still be loaded. Instead of creating a new worksheet, you have two options to refresh data. Based on your needs, you can either refresh the entire managed sheet or refresh a selected range of cells. If you are ready to publish a worksheet that depends on certain attribute values that may have changed on the server recently, refreshing a selected range allows you to reload those attribute values before you publish your worksheet. You can also leverage this feature as a pseudo-undo.\n\nWhile not recommended, a saved sheet can be sent to another MDS user. Sending data within an Excel workbook circumvents security on the server. We will discuss sharing this query with others later in this chapter.\n\nReviewing Transactions\n\nYou can review the transaction history of any member in a MDS managed sheet by using a new MDS menu item at the bottom of the Excel menu displayed when you right-click a row in a managed sheet. Annotations for any transaction will be displayed in the right-hand column, and you can add additional annotations at the bottom of the screen.\n\nMaking Deletions in Managed Sheets\n\nDeleting members in an MDS managed sheet can be confusing. If you delete members using standard methods such as the right-click menu option, the member is removed only from the worksheet. It changes nothing on the MDS server. If you want to remove one or more members from the MDS system, you must use the Delete button on the Master Data ribbon. This method soft deletes all selected rows from the system. There is currently no way to purge members using the Add-in for Excel.\n\nCombining Data\n\nYou can map data from a range into an MDS managed sheet by using the Combine Data button on the ribbon. This button is enabled only when the active sheet is an MDS managed sheet. You can select a range and then map to each of the attribute columns present in the managed sheet. It is not required to map all of the attributes to combine data.\n\nApplying Rules\n\nIf you want to trigger validation on members awaiting validation without changing any data, you can apply validation to the managed sheet with the Apply Rules button on the ribbon. Only those members not currently validated will be processed. Any errors will display on the sheet and the validation status column will be shown.\n\nFiltering Entity Results Members\n\nWhile all of the datasets in our modest examples are small, many organizations may have entities that contain thousands or millions of members. The Add-in for Excel has been designed to hold up to a million MDS member records in a single managed sheet. There may be some instances when analyzing or managing a large number of records is warranted based on a business need, but most people should use the filtering function to limit results. The filtering function in Excel can limit both the number of columns and the number of rows returned from the MDS server.\n\nProcedure: How to Load a Filtered Entity\n\nTo load an entity with filtered members and attributes, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open a blank worksheet or a new workbook.\n\n**2.** Click the Master Data tab to display the Master Data ribbon in Excel.\n\n**3.** Click the Show Explorer button to display the Master Data Explorer pane.\n\n**4.** Select the Product model from the Model drop-down list at the top of the Master Data Explorer pane.\n\n**5.** Select the Product entity in the list. Selecting an entity enables the Filter button in the Master Data ribbon, as shown here:\n\n**6.** Click the Filter button to display the Filter dialog box.\n\n**7.** You can filter rows returned to the Excel worksheet by adding filter criteria in the Rows section. Select Validation Status from the Attribute drop-down list. You can now filter member records based on attribute values or the record's current validation status in SQL Server 2012.\n\n**8.** Select the \"is equal to\" operator from the Operator drop-down list.\n\n**9.** Select Validation failed from the Criteria drop-down list. Updates to row filter criteria do not automatically update the summary in the lower-right pane. To update this summary, you can click the Update Summary button at any time.\n\n**10.** To limit the attributes returned, select Pricing from the Attribute groups drop-down list in the Columns section on the left. The Summary pane will immediately update to 5 rows and 5 columns returned.\n\n**11.** Click the Select All button beneath the Attribute list box.\n\n**12.** Uncheck the Design attribute in the Attribute list box. The summary will update to 8 columns returned.\n\n**13.** Click the Load Data button to load the data into the active worksheet.\n\nSaving and Sharing Queries\n\nNow that we have created a complex request to pull selected attributes and records from an entity, we need to save this request for later use. For years, MDS users have asked the Microsoft development team to provide a process to persist filter criteria for future use. The Add-in for Excel now provides this functionality while also allowing users to share those queries with other users through Outlook with the click of a button.\n\nProcedure: How to Save a Filter Query and Share It Through Outlook\n\nTo save a previously created filter as a query, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Activate the managed worksheet from the previous procedure.\n\n**2.** Click the Master Data tab to display the Master Data ribbon in Excel.\n\n**3.** Expand the Save Query button drop-down list and select Save as Query. This saves the filter setting for the active managed sheet as an XML query. This query is stored on your machine and can be reloaded into a new worksheet from the server at any time.\n\nYou can manage stored shortcut queries from the Manage Queries form, which you also access from the Save Query button drop-down list. Previously saved queries can be loaded, renamed, or deleted from this screen.\n\n**4.** Click the Send Query button on the ribbon to share this MDS query with others. The benefit of sending the query rather than the worksheet itself is that the security configuration will trim results for each individual user. Only the members and attributes that each person has rights to will be returned when the Excel query is initiated.\n\n**5.** An e-mail is generated with the query attached as an XML file with a new .mdsqx extension. This file opens automatically on any computer with the MDS Add-in for Excel installed on it.\n\n**6.** Each user sees this warning message the first time that a file is opened, asking if the server connection should be allowed. You can add this server to a list of trustworthy servers and never see this message again by selecting the \"Always allow connections to this address\" check box and clicking the Yes button.\n\nCreating and Modifying Entities Rapidly\n\nEarly in my career, after spending many days loading files into Excel and databases, I had grown tired of needing to solve all of my column choices before I could see the results. I didn't always know what I wanted. The wizards walked me through seemingly endless steps to determine an output that never matched all of my expectations, and once I clicked Finish, the process did not allow for revisions. If I wanted a different result, I had to start the wizard over again. When I was designing the wizard for Excel, the users I took into account first were the consultants and data stewards. They needed a tool that could be used to quickly model and load data into MDS, so that was the tool I hoped to design. My requirements were as follows:\n\n  **Almost no information to do something** While it is nice to write a book on Master Data Services, I don't want reading this book to be a necessity for every user to get started. Master Data Services supports only a small subset of data types, so the Add-in should support determining the correct data type for the column and successfully loading all members.\n\n  **Every action can be triggered automically** If I want to change a column to a domain-based attribute or change the decimal scale of a number attribute, I don't want to re-create the entire entity. I just want to replace the column in question. If I need to add a new column, I want to click on the column of unmanaged data and select the name of the attribute in MDS.\n\n  **An entity is created for my DBA attribute automatically** If I select a column and determine that current values are the only values that I require, I want the supporting entity to be created. This entity should be populated with all of the unique values within the selected column.\n\nThe end result of successfully incorporating the preceding requirements into the tool's design is a very powerful feature that allows data stewards and consultants alike to quickly build and modify entities. The Add-in for Excel not only encapsulates MDS features in the Excel interface, but extends them into a much more powerful tool. The following examples and procedures will show you how these features work.\n\nUsing the Excel Add-In at the Main Street Clothing Company\n\nAt Main Street Clothing Company, each individual store manages a list of clerks and their schedules in Excel spreadsheets on the manager's laptop. Unfortunately, these spreadsheets are not currently backed up, nor are they integrated with headquarters' systems in any way. Store managers are concerned that any changes to their current process would add to their responsibilities, create inefficiencies in the process, and mandate unnecessary reliance on central IT.\n\nIT proposes the creation of a new model for store managers. Within this model, all managers and the designees will be model administrators. IT will spend an afternoon with each manager to help them create a new entity for each store's clerks. The process is detailed in the following procedure, the worksheet for which you can download from www.mdsuser.com.\n\nProcedure: How to Create an MDS Entity from Excel Data\n\nTo create an MDS entity from Excel data, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Click the Master Data tab to display the Master Data ribbon.\n\n**2.** Select all of the data to populate the new entity. The data area needs to be contiguous to be loaded correctly. To quickly select a large, contiguous range, select the uppermost cell of the range, hold down ctrl-shift, press right arrow, and then press down arrow.\n\n**3.** Click the Create Entity button on the ribbon to open the Create Entity form.\n\n**4.** Note that the range for the Excel table appears in the Range field. If you had forgotten to select the range or if you wanted to change the range selected, you could click the range selection button to the right of the Range field and select the range.\n\nNOTE\n\n_While there is a \"My data has headers\" check box for loading an entity without headers, I strongly discourage you from selecting this check box. Each column will be named Column A, Column B, etc. This is unlikely to be helpful to anyone and will probably just lead to more work later on._\n\n**5.** Select the model in which to store the new entity. In Chapter 14 we will discuss some different options on modeling. For now, just store the new entity in the Finance model.\n\n**6.** Select the version for the initial entity data to be loaded into. The entity will exist in all versions of the model, but members will only exist in the selected version.\n\n**7.** Input the name for the new entity in the \"New entity name\" textbox. The name must be unique in the model for the operation to succeed.\n\n**8.** Select \"Generate code automatically\" in the Code drop-down list. This sets up the entity with an automated code generated for each member. We could have selected a unique column, such as SSN, but that could lead to problems later on. While filling this column with unique values is not required for the entity to be created, only unique members and the first of the duplicate members would be created.\n\n**9.** You can optionally select a name column for the entity. For this example, leave the Name drop-down list box blank.\n\n**10.** Click the OK button to create the new entity.\n\n**11.** A new sheet will be created similar to a loaded MDS managed entity. Any duplicate records will be colored to highlight them as errors.\n\nWhen an entity is created, each column's contents are analyzed and a corresponding attribute is created in MDS of the appropriate type, string, number, or date. Sizes and scale will be determined by the initial members being loaded. This might be valuable in creating a model, but the ability to quickly modify an attribute is the new feature that will completely change project schedules.\n\nMaking Changes to an Existing Entity\n\nNow that we have created a new entity, we want to modify this entity's attributes to take full advantage of MDS features and add value over Excel tables alone. In the initial version of MDS, there was no way to transform an attribute from one type to another while keeping the values stored in the column intact.\n\nProcedure: How to Modify an Existing Entity's Structure\n\nTo load and modify an existing entity from Master Data Services in Excel, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Click the Master Data tab to display the Master Data ribbon.\n\n**2.** Click Show Explorer to display the Master Data Explorer pane.\n\n**3.** Load the Clerks Loc 1 entity created in the previous procedure.\n\n**4.** Select the State column header in the entity. This enables the Attribute Properties button on the Master Data ribbon.\n\n**5.** Click the Attribute Properties button. This triggers the Attribute Properties form to display, as shown in the illustration. You can update the name or type of an attribute in MDS on this form.\n\n**6.** Select \"Constrained list (Domain-based)\" from the Attribute type drop-down list. Selecting this option alters the form to provide a new drop-down list that enables you to select where to populate the values of the attribute from.\n\n**7.** Initially this new drop-down list box is set to the selected column. This would create a new entity to store all unique values in this column. You will notice another input box, \"New entity name,\" that allows you to name this new list of states. Select the State entity from the drop-down list. Changing this selection hides the \"New entity name\" input box.\n\n**8.** Click the OK button.\n\nNOTE\n\n_The attribute update process does not actually update the column. Instead, it creates a new column and then loads the values from the prior column into the new column. As long as the transition is completed successfully, the old column (and all its transaction history) will be deleted. If any errors occur, the column will remain with an _old suffix appended to the original column._\n\nConfiguring Add-in for Excel Settings\n\nThere are a number of settings for the Add-in for Excel that enable users to customize their installation to some extent. Unlike server settings, these options are stored on the client machine and are not sourced from the server in any way. Data stewards and IT administrators are encouraged to create internal policies on changing the data settings and provide guidance to your end users.\n\nSettings provide value in two ways. One group of settings gives customers an opportunity to tweak data performance and usage from the MDS server. The other group of settings allows you to adjust how the Add-in works within Excel. These settings are not grouped together but rather span across both the Settings and Data tabs within the Settings dialog box.\n\nConfiguring Data Settings\n\nAs the value of MDS and the new Add-in for Excel are recognized across your organization, you may discover a significant number of Excel queries hitting the Master Data Services server. Depending on your hardware deployment and the size of your entities in MDS, it may become valuable to provide policies on data consumption through Excel. While you cannot stop authorized users from making large requests to the server, you can modify warnings and the size of batches retrieved.\n\n  **Filter Warnings** Unlike the web UI, which defaults to load only 50 members at a time, Excel users can potentially load up to 1 million members to their Excel worksheets for analysis. The most effective setting to combat large data requests initiates warnings to users before they retrieve large datasets. These warnings are initially set to trigger for datasets over 10,000 rows and 100 columns. You can modify these values or turn off filter warnings completely.\n\n  **Batches size (in thousands)** These two settings do not change the total amount of data retrieved, just the size of the data returned in each request. Obviously, smaller requests create more traffic to and from the server, but this can help on client computers with memory constraints. These options are initially set to 50,000 cells per batch. I would leave these settings alone unless you experience significant delays during loading or publishing.\n\nConfiguring Behavior Settings\n\nThese settings affect the behavior of the MDS selection and publish processes in Excel. These settings will allow users to customize their Master Data Services Excel experience.\n\n  **Publishing** When you initially publish changes, you can set whether or not a dialog box prompts you to provide transaction annotations to provide greater detail about the transaction. You can suppress or re-enable this dialog box, respectively, by clearing or selecting the \"Show Publish and Annotate dialog box when publishing\" check box.\n\n  **Versions** In the Master Data Explorer, selection of a model triggers a default version to be selected. The initial setting is for the newest version to be selected, but you can either suppress the default selection or choose to have the oldest version become the default by using the Version selection drop-down list box. In the initial release of the Add-in for Excel, the Oldest selection does not appear to select properly.\n\n  **Logging** Selecting the \"Turn on detailed logging\" check box will create a detailed log of web service calls and actions in the Add-in for Excel. This detailed log will be required by support staff to debug any issues with the MDS plug-in. These logs can get quite large, so clear this check box during normal operations.\n\n  **Servers Added to Safe List** In order to protect Excel users, the first time that you load a shortcut file sent through Excel, you will be asked if you trust the server. If you accidentally indicate that you trust a server, you can clear this list by clicking the Clear All button. Note that this will clear all servers, so you will need to reapprove all MDS server locations when the next file is opened.\n\nLeveraging Data Quality Matching in Excel\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, Microsoft shipped a new feature, Data Quality Services (DQS), that provides project-level cleansing and matching tools for loaded datasets. Very little integration exists between MDS and DQS in this initial release. We expect this to change in future releases, but within 2012, the only integration between the two features is the ability to leverage DQS matching policies through the Add-in for Excel. This allows users to determine potential duplicates before loading new record batches into MDS. For more information on setting up Data Quality Services and creating matching policies, go to www.mdsuser.com.\n\nSummary\n\nThe MDS Add-in for Excel really changes the game in master data management, providing a well-known and efficient interface for all members of the enterprise to load and manage their data. The intuitive interface can create new entities, thereby eliminating or reducing costly modeling phases of MDM projects. In Chapter 14, the new modeling process will be discussed in greater detail.\nChapter 11\n\nImplementing Security\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Security Overview\n\n  Security Changes in SQL Server 2012\n\n  Users and Groups\n\n  Administrators\n\n  Testing Permissions\n\n  Functional Area Permissions\n\n  Model Object Permissions\n\n  Deleting Permissions\n\n  Hierarchy Member Permissions\n\n  Determining Which Permissions Apply\n\n  Setting Security by Using Web Services\n\nBy the time you are ready to implement security, most of the functionality in MDS has been enabled. Models have been built and refined, rules have been written, and the application has been integrated into your organization.\n\nIn order to deploy MDS, everyone needs access to the application. While transaction management can provide some accountability, limiting access based on needs and roles ensures that users are unable to change data without authorization. Limiting the number of models and functions available to users can also help them focus more quickly on the data they need. The ability to provide specific data access within the MDS system is the single most important feature of the application. The focused security access provided by MDS empowers business users and frees the IT organization to manage the overall process, not maintain the individual data points.\n\nIn this chapter we provide an overview of the security framework in Master Data Services. We discuss the process of managing user and group permissions and explain the highly customized access that can be granted. The rest of the chapter drills into each level of security by showing how permissions can be applied to your data.\n\nSecurity Overview\n\nMDS security is broken into three distinct areas:\n\n  **Functional security** Corresponds to each of the five functional areas displayed on the home page of the Master Data Manager web application. Most users need access only to the Explorer functional area of the web UI. All other functional areas are available only to administrators. Users must have permissions to the Explorer functional area to use the MDS Add-in for Microsoft Excel.\n\n  **Model object security** Provides access control to attributes, based on the model objects within the MDS architecture. For example, you can set permissions on an entity, which determines permissions for all attributes for the entity. Or you can set permissions on a single attribute, which affects that attribute only. Model object security is required; without it, a user cannot perform any tasks in MDS.\n\n  **Hierarchy member security** Provides the most granular level of security, and is optional. It is used to grant access to specific members, based on their location in a hierarchy.\n\nModel object permissions (which apply to attributes) and hierarchy member permissions (which apply to members) are combined to determine the exact level of security for every attribute value. Figure 11-1 shows how attribute and member permissions intersect so that security can be determined for an individual attribute value.\n\n**Figure 11-1** _Model object and hierarchy member permissions are combined to determine permissions for every attribute value._\n\nSecurity Changes in SQL Server 2012\n\nSecurity in the prior release of MDS was a double-edged sword. The ability to set security on multiple hierarchies simultaneously provided significant flexibility and complexity, but with so many pieces working together, it was easy for administrators to lose sight of what the effective permissions were for each user. A key effort for the second release of Master Data Services was to simplify the security model. In SQL Server 2012, attribute groups are no longer securable; you must set attribute security explicitly on each attribute. Direct hierarchy security has been removed from the security model.\n\nUsers and Groups\n\nMDS relies on Active Directory for user and group authentication. While all security permissions are stored in the MDS database, no passwords or group memberships are managed in MDS.\n\nTo keep security as simple as possible, you should do the following:\n\n  Create either Active Directory or local groups and add either Active Directory or local users to those groups.\n\n  Assign security in MDS to these groups, rather than to individual users.\n\n  If you decide to assign security to a user, don't also assign security to groups that the user is a member of. While MDS has rules for determining which permissions take effect, security becomes more complicated when you do this.\n\nBefore you begin working with security, you should take some time to determine which groups your users might be part of, and which attributes or members those groups might need access to. The following list should give you a general idea of the groups that Main Street Clothing Company might use. Some of the examples in this chapter show how you would assign permissions like these.\n\n  **Product Administrators** This group will have permission to all functional areas and to take any action available for the Product model. This includes changing the model structure and modifying all members, among many other things.\n\n  **Finance Administrators** This group will have the same type of permission as the Product Administrators, but for the Finance model.\n\n  **Purchasing** This group will be able to update the Cost attribute for all products.\n\n  **Warehouse** This group will be able to update the attributes on the Logistics tab only.\n\n  **Logistics** This group will be able to update the Safety Stock Level, Reorder Point, and Discontinued attributes. All other attributes will be read-only.\n\nAll of these groups will be able to access MDS after being assigned functional area and model object permissions. Main Street might also assign hierarchy member permissions to a few select members of the Purchasing group. These users should be able to view products for only the manufacturers they are responsible for.\n\nEven though we recommend that you assign permissions to groups, for the rest of this chapter we'll refer to permissions that users receive, because at the end of the day, groups wouldn't mean anything if users weren't in them. Users are ultimately the ones who will access the data.\n\nProcedure: How to Add a Group\n\nAfter you've created your groups either locally or on the domain, you can add the group to the web UI by completing the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_Adding a group to the web UI does not give the users in the group permission to access models or data. It simply adds the group to a list, so that you can start to assign permissions._\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click User and Group Permissions. The administrator account you specified in Configuration Manager when you set up MDS is shown in the Users list; for more information about administrators, see the following section.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Manage Groups.\n\n**3.** Click the Add groups button.\n\n**4.** In the Groups field, type the name of the group in the format Domain\\GroupName or Computer\\GroupName.\n\n**5.** Click OK.\n\nNow that the group is displayed in the list, you can continue with assigning functional and model object permissions, which are described in upcoming sections. If you need to add a user instead of a group, click Manage Users on the menu bar and then click Add users.\n\nNOTE\n\n_When you use groups, the users in the group aren't displayed in the list of users until after they have logged in._\n\nAdministrators\n\nIn MDS there are two types of administrators:\n\n  The system administrator you specified in the Administrator Account field when creating the MDS database. This user has full control over all models and data. When new models are created, this user automatically has access. This user also has permission to access all functional areas of the web UI. To change this user, you must run a stored procedure in the database. See \"Procedure: How to Change the Administrator Account\" for more information.\n\n  A model administrator who is manually assigned Update permission to a model, and no other model object or hierarchy member permissions. This user has full control over the model he or she has Update permission to. Model administrators do not necessarily have permission to access all functional areas of the application. For example, a model administrator might be responsible for integration only. However, they can perform all tasks in whichever functional area they have permission to access.\n\nAll model administrators with access to the User and Group Permissions functional area can assign permissions for other users. Keep this in mind when you're assigning someone permission to update a model.\n\nIn the following sections we explain how to manually assign the permissions that turn any MDS user into an administrator.\n\nProcedure: How to Change the Administrator Account\n\nWhen you created your database, you specified an administrator account. This user has access to everything, including any sensitive data you may be storing. If you want to change this user, complete the following steps:\n\nCAUTION\n\n_This procedure deletes the former administrator's account from MDS._\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click User and Group Permissions.\n\n**2.** Add the new administrator to the list of users by clicking the Add user button.\n\n**3.** Open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to your MDS database.\n\n**4.** In the table mdm.tblUser, find the user you just added and copy the value listed in the SID column.\n\n**5.** Create the following query:\n\n**6.** Replace _MDS_database_ with the MDS database name, _DOMAIN\\user_ with the new administrator's username, and _SID_ with the value you copied.\n\n**7.** Run the query.\n\nThis user now has permission to take all actions on all models and members. The former administrator is deleted from the list of MDS users. Note that if the former administrator was a member of a group that has security permissions, the user retains the permissions assigned to the group. You must remove the administrator from the local or domain group to fully remove his or her privileges.\n\nTesting Permissions\n\nAs you begin assigning permissions to groups, you'll quickly realize that it would be great to log in as the user and confirm that they have the access you intended them to have. You can do this by creating a test user or group and assigning permissions to it. Then you can access the Master Data Manager web application by using the credentials of the test user and view the data that the user views.\n\nTo have Internet Explorer prompt you for credentials when you open an intranet site like Master Data Manager, you can change IE's security settings. Open IE and choose Tools | Internet options. On the Security tab, ensure that Local intranet is selected and click the Custom level button. Scroll to the bottom of the Security Settings dialog box, and in the User Authentication section, click the \"Prompt for user name and password\" option.\n\nNow when you open a new browser, you are prompted for credentials.\n\nAfter you enter the credentials of your test user, you can confirm that they have the access you expect them to have. Each time you make changes to the test user's security, you should close and reopen the browser to ensure you're viewing the latest changes.\n\nNOTE\n\n_You will learn later in this chapter that hierarchy member permissions are not applied immediately. Keep this in mind when testing security._\n\nIf you are using IE 8 or IE 9, another setting to change before you start working with permissions is Compatibility View, which you should turn off. To do so, click Tools | Compatibility View. This makes the User and Group Permissions functional area work better. However, when you open the browser by using the test user's credentials and want to view data in the Explorer functional area, you should turn Compatibility View back on.\n\nFunctional Area Permissions\n\nFunctional area security determines which of the five functional areas on the Master Data Manager home page a user or group can access. Security at this level is either permitted or denied. If permission to access a specific functional area is denied, the area is not displayed in the web UI and related web service operations are denied.\n\nThe Explorer functional area is where users manage data. When you assign access to Explorer, you must assign access to specific model objects, so the user gets access to a specific set of data. When you assign access to any of the other functional areas, the user must have access to the entire model (on the Models tab) in order to use those areas. Without this access, the user can open the functional areas, but no models are displayed. This is how MDS handles permission for administrators.\n\nProcedure: How to Assign Functional Area Permissions\n\nTo assign functional area permissions, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click User and Group Permissions.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Manage Groups.\n\n**3.** To the left of the group you want to edit, click the down arrow.\n\n**4.** On the submenu, click Edit | Functions.\n\n**5.** At the top of the page, click the Edit button.\n\n**6.** In the Available functions list, select the functional areas you want the user to have access to.\n\n**7.** Click the right-pointing arrows to add the functional areas to the Assigned functions list.\n\n**8.** Click the \"Save and continue\" button to go to the Models tab, where you will set model object permissions.\n\nAt this point, the users in the group cannot do anything in MDS. If they open the web UI, they will see the functional areas but will not see models displayed either on the home page or in any of the functional areas.\n\nModel Object Permissions\n\nModel object permissions, assigned on the Models tab, are required. Users cannot view any models or data if they do not have model object permissions.\n\nWhen you give users permission to model objects, you are giving them the ability to edit attributes for members, based on the object you select. For example, if you set Update permission on the Product entity, all attributes for all Product members (leaf and consolidated) can be updated. If you set Update on the Color attribute of the Product entity, only the Color attribute can be updated.\n\nIn addition to giving a user the ability to update attribute values, if you assign Update model object permissions to a model, entity, or to the word \"Leaf\" or \"Consolidated,\" the user can also create and delete members. If permissions are assigned at a lower level, the user cannot create and delete members.\n\nNOTE\n\n_Permissions automatically cascade to all child objects within the current model unless permissions are assigned at a lower level. You do not need to explicitly set permission on every object._\n\nIf you assign Update model object permissions to the model only, the user is an administrator, which means he or she can access the model in functional areas other than just Explorer if given access to that functional area.\n\nQuick Facts About Model Object Permissions\n\nThings to remember about model object permissions include the following:\n\n  They are required.\n\n  They determine which attributes a user can view or update (as opposed to which members).\n\n  They apply to all lower-level objects unless another permission is explicitly assigned.\n\n  Update permission to Leaf or Consolidated model objects and above gives users the ability to create and delete members.\n\n  Update permission at just the model level makes the user an administrator.\n\nBest Practice for Model Object Permissions\n\nThere are many different model objects you can assign permission to. Giving access to specific models, entities, or attributes should fulfill most of your security needs. In SQL Server 2012, most complicated security configurations have been simplified with the removal of attribute group and hierarchy object security.\n\nProcedure: How to Assign Model Object Permissions\n\nTo assign model object permissions, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click User and Group Permissions.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Manage Groups. In this example, we're going to update the Finance Administrators group.\n\n**3.** To the left of the group you want to edit, click the down arrow.\n\n**4.** On the submenu, click Edit | Models.\n\n**5.** At the top of the page, click the Edit button.\n\n**6.** If the correct model isn't visible, select the model you want to view from the Model drop-down list. In this case we'll select Finance.\n\n**7.** Expand and collapse nodes in the tree until you see the object you want to give permission to.\n\n**8.** Right-click the object you want to give permission to, and from the menu that's displayed, click Update, Read-only, or Deny. In this example, we're going to right-click the Finance model and choose Update.\n\n**9.** Click Save. If you intend to assign hierarchy member permissions, you can click the \"Save and continue\" button.\n\nThe Model Permission Summary grid is populated with the permissions you've assigned.\n\nNOTE\n\n_You do not have to explicitly deny access to model objects you don't want users to see. Permissions cascade, so the user is implicitly denied access to any object that doesn't inherit permissions._\n\nThis was the simplest example, where you assign Update to the model and no other permissions. In this case, all of the users in the group can access all Finance members, as well as access the Finance model in any functional areas they have permission to access.\n\nProcedure: How to Delete Model Object Permissions\n\nBefore you can test other permissions, you may want to delete those you already assigned. To do so, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Models tab, in the Model Permission Summary grid, click the down arrow for the row that shows permissions you want to delete.\n\n**2.** From the submenu that's displayed, click Delete.\n\n**3.** In the confirmation dialog box, click OK.\n\nThe page refreshes and the permissions are deleted.\n\nNow let's go through all of the possible model object permissions you can assign.\n\nAccess to Entities\n\nWhen you assign Update permission to an entity, the user can create and delete members as well as update all attributes for the entity (assuming no other permissions are assigned). When you assign Read permission, the user can view all attributes for the entity.\n\nHere is what Update permission to a single entity (in this case, the Line entity) looks like after you save:\n\nAnd the following illustration shows what Update access to the Line entity looks like in Explorer.\n\nAs you can see, the user can update all attributes for all members in the Line entity. The user can also create and delete members when you assign permissions at this level. If the Line entity had hierarchies or collections, they would also be editable. When you have permission to read or update an entity, you can read or update any explicit hierarchies and collections for the entity.\n\nIn an effort to simplify security in this release, MDS gives access to change domain-based attributes in entities you have access to, but you no longer have Read access to those entities in the Explorer functional area. If you wish to provide Read access to the Manufacturer entity, for example, you must provide this security assignment explicitly.\n\nAccess to Leaf Member Attributes\n\nIn the tree, you can assign permission to the word \"Leaf\" that's displayed beneath an entity. This is a shortcut for giving permission to all attributes for all leaf-level members. If you assign Update permission, the user can create and delete members, just as if you assigned permissions to the entity itself.\n\nNOTE\n\n_If an entity does not have explicit hierarchies enabled, there is no difference between assigning permission to an entity and assigning permission to Leaf._\n\nIf the entity is enabled for explicit hierarchies, use this permission level to give a user access to update attributes for all leaf members or for all consolidated members. Otherwise, this permission does not need to be used, because you can assign permission directly to the entity.\n\nAccess to Individual Attributes\n\nWhen you assign Update or Read permission to a specific attribute, the user can update or read that attribute. It doesn't matter if the attribute is domain-based; the user is able to update the attribute value for the entity that the attribute applies to only.\n\nIn this example, the user has Update permission to the Product entity's Cost attribute:\n\nWhen the user accesses the Product entity in Explorer, the Name and Code attributes are read-only but the Cost attribute can be updated. While this is no longer displayed in the grid, the Name and Code columns are disabled in the Details pane.\n\nNote that when you assign permission to an attribute, the user can't create or delete members. Also note that if the attribute is domain-based, the user can't make changes to the entity the attribute is based on. For example, if a user has permission to update the Color attribute for the Product entity, the user can change a product's color, but the user cannot open the Color entity itself and change the color name from Blue to Light Blue.\n\nIf you wanted the user to be able to do either of these things, you would choose these permissions:\n\nIn Explorer, you can view the results. The user can update the Color attribute for all products. In the latest release, the grid does not provide graphical security feedback, but the Edit button is enabled for changing the Color attribute. The input boxes for name and code are grayed out.\n\nThe user can also create, delete, and update members of the Color entity. Here is the other entity:\n\nAccess to an Explicit Hierarchy\n\nIn an effort to simplify security, you can no longer assign permissions to an explicit hierarchy. You can no longer separate the ability to move members in an explicit hierarchy but not create and delete members.\n\nIf you assign Update permission to the root entity, the user can move members in the hierarchy. If you assign Read-only permission, the user can view the hierarchy but not make any changes.\n\nIn this example, the user is assigned Update permission to the Account entity. This gives the user Update access to the Chart of Accounts explicit hierarchy; these permissions would be the same for any explicit hierarchies created on the Account entity.\n\nWhen you open Explorer to view the results of these permissions, you can open the hierarchy and move members in it. You can also view the members in the entity the hierarchy is for (in this case, the Account entity), and now you will be able to update attributes for these members as well as create new ones.\n\nIf the user has Update permission to an entity, the user can also view and update all explicit hierarchies for the entity. If the user has Read-only permissions to the entity, the user can only view all hierarchies within the system.\n\nAccess to Collections\n\nWhen you assign Update or Read permission to the Collection object, you are assigning access to all collections. You can't give permission to an individual collection\u2014it is an \"all or nothing\" scenario.\n\nIf a user has Update permission, he or she can create, delete, and update collections. In this example, the user has permission to update collections for the Product entity:\n\nIn Explorer, all collections for the Product entity are displayed, and the user can create and delete collections, as well as update collection attributes like Name, Code, Description, or Owner.\n\nAt this point, the user can delete members from the collection but can't add any members because the user doesn't have permission to other model objects. If the user had a minimum of Read-only permission to the Product entity, he or she could add members to the collection.\n\nIn User and Group Permissions, on the Models tab, you can give permission to attributes of collections, so you can lock down the description or names of all of your collections, for example. In SQL Server 2012, you can no longer set permissions on attribute groups, just as you cannot set them with attribute groups that apply to entities.\n\nAccess to Other Model Objects\n\nSetting security directly on a derived hierarchy was removed in this release of Master Data Services. Derived hierarchy security is now based on access to all of the corresponding components of the derived hierarchy.\n\nIn addition, attribute groups should no longer be viewed as a way to secure attributes. All users have access to an All Attributes tab.\n\nAccess to a Derived Hierarchy\n\nFor any derived hierarchies to appear, the user must have or inherit Read or Update permissions on the model. This will obviously give the user Read or Update access to all of the entities in the model. Derived hierarchy access is now controlled by access to each of the components that make up the hierarchy. Every derived hierarchy where the user has access to all entities that make up the levels of the derived hierarchy will be displayed in the drop-down list in the Explorer UI. If any object is denied, the hierarchy will not be available, but the user may be able to affect the hierarchy by changing attributes within other represented entities they have access to.\n\nIn this example, the user is assigned Read permission to the Product model. To give the user Update access to the Product by Gender hierarchy, the user has Update permissions to the Product and Gender entities. Conversely, because the user is denied access to the Line entity that groups products by Line and then groups lines by Manufacturer, this hierarchy does not display in the hierarchy menu dropdown at the top of the explorer screen.\n\nWhen you open Explorer with this user's credentials, you can see only the Product by Gender derived hierarchy. Due to the deny permissions on the Line entity, the only derived hierarchy that can be accessed is the Product by Gender hierarchy. Access to Product by Line by Manufacturer is not presented because the user does not have access to the Line entity.\n\nBy updating the value of the Gender attribute, you change the location of a member in the hierarchy. For example, if you change the Gender attribute value for member 1000 to Female, the member would be displayed under the new line in the hierarchy. You don't need to view the hierarchy to know that this change has taken place.\n\nHowever, assigning permissions to a derived hierarchy does allow the user to view the hierarchy structure and move members in the tree, rather than just update attribute values.\n\nAlthough you can assign permissions to individual attributes, the user cannot work with the hierarchy structure unless you give him or her permission to the entity, model, or derived hierarchy model object.\n\nAccess to an Attribute Group\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, attribute groups are no longer a part of the security model in MDS. All attribute-level security must be applied at the individual attribute level. Permissions on attribute groups will now be evaluated as Hide(Deny)\/Unhide(Update). The addition of the All Attributes tab has also rendered attribute group security obsolete.\n\n**Attribute Groups in System Administration** You may have noticed when you were creating attribute groups that users and groups were displayed on the Attribute Group Maintenance page. The Users and Groups nodes on this page are for viewing users and groups who have Update permission to the attribute group (users with Read-only permission are not displayed and no longer have meaning). This is the only way to manage which attribute groups are displayed for each user. _This is not for purposes of security!_\n\nCAUTION\n\n_Do not attempt to edit users and groups on this page._\n\nYou should _not_ use this page to try to administer security for attribute groups. This is for display management purposes only.\n\nDeny Permissions\n\nYou'll notice that when you right-click a model object, Deny is listed on the submenu. In most cases you won't need to explicitly deny access to an object. Permissions cascade so that all lower-level objects inherit the assigned permissions. Objects that are at the same level or higher, and that don't have permissions explicitly assigned, are inherently denied.\n\nFor example, if you set Update permissions on the Product model but not on the Finance model, the user is denied permission to access the Finance model. You don't have to explicitly deny access. Or, for example, if you set Update permissions on the Color entity but not on any other entities, permission to access all other entities is denied.\n\nThese same rules apply to hierarchies on the Hierarchy Members tab. Hierarchy nodes at the same level and higher are inherently denied as soon as any Read-only or Update permissions are set. All other permissions cascade down the hierarchy.\n\nDue to the changes in SQL Server 2012, giving permissions to derived hierarchies may lead to a number of entities requiring Deny access privileges. Once you have added Update or Read-only access to the model level, any entity you wish to restrict access to will require explicit Deny permissions to be set.\n\nNavigational Access\n\nEvery user needs a certain degree of access to the system in order to open the members and attributes he or she has permission to. For example, if a user has permission to access three specific attributes, but not the model itself, the user can still view the list of models in the drop-down list on the home page. Users also have to be able to see the Name and Code attributes for the members so that they know what they are updating. This bare minimum required access is sometimes referred to as _navigational access_. We're not going to delve into the specifics of each model object, but you should know that when you give permissions to a user, you are also giving the user the navigational access required to work with the data they need.\n\nDeleting Permissions\n\nEarlier in this chapter, we showed you how to delete model object permissions. The procedure is the same for hierarchy member permissions. In the grid, click the down arrow next to the row with permissions you want to delete, and click Delete.\n\nIf you want to remove a user so that he or she no longer has MDS access, you need to complete two procedures. First, confirm the user's group memberships. Then, remove the user from the list.\n\nTo confirm the user's group memberships, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Manage Users page, to the left of the user, click the down arrow.\n\n**2.** On the submenu, click Edit | Membership. Note any groups the user is a member of.\n\n**3.** If the user is a member of multiple groups, go to the local or Active Directory group and remove the user from the group.\n\nNow remove the user from the list:\n\n**1.** On the Manage Users page, click the row of the user you want to delete.\n\n**2.** Click the \"Delete selected user\" button.\n\nBoth of these procedures are required to keep your list of users accurate. Otherwise you might end up with users in the list who don't truly have access or retain access due to additional group permission.\n\nHierarchy Member Permissions\n\nIn an effort to provide the functional equivalent of row-level member security without providing all of the maintenance nightmares associated with it, MDS provides hierarchy member security. This type of security allows you to assign security to all the members in a node of a hierarchy. The same cascading feature that is found in model object security applies to hierarchy member security.\n\nWith MDS, you have the ability to set security on levels of either explicit or derived hierarchies. This powerful feature allows you to limit access to data within MDS on a number of axes simultaneously (one axis from model object permissions, and a second axis from hierarchy member permissions, as was shown in Figure 11-1 at the beginning of this chapter).\n\nBecause you may have thousands or millions of members, hierarchy member permissions are applied only periodically. In the MDS database, in tblSystemSetting, the SecurityMemberProcessInterval setting determines how often these permissions are applied. The default setting is 3600 seconds, or 60 minutes, but you can update this to be more frequent. Note that even if you set it to every 10 seconds, you must wait 60 minutes for the 10-second intervals to start. Be aware that 10 seconds may not be enough time to fully apply permissions to all of your members.\n\nHierarchy member permissions are based on a version of a model and are copied forward on subsequent models. So if you set permissions on a hierarchy in Version 3, those permissions don't exist in Version 2, but they will exist in copies of Version 3. Be sure to consider that your users might have unintended access to data in earlier versions of your model if you set hierarchy member permissions in later models.\n\nQuick Facts About Hierarchy Member Permissions\n\nThings to remember about hierarchy member permissions include the following:\n\n  They are optional.\n\n  They determine which members (as opposed to which attributes) a user can view or update.\n\n  They apply to all lower-level members unless another permission is explicitly assigned.\n\n  They are not applied immediately, unlike model object permissions. You must wait until a specific interval of time has passed. This interval is based on SecurityMemberProcessInterval in tblSystemSetting.\n\n  You can run a stored procedure to force them to be applied immediately.\n\n  They are version specific. You set them for a specific version and they apply to that version and all future copies of that version. (They do not apply to any previous versions.)\n\n  You should not set permissions on explicit cap or recursive hierarchies. Security for these hierarchies is not supported.\n\nProcedure: How to Assign Hierarchy Member Permissions\n\nTo assign hierarchy member permissions to a group, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Manager home page, click User and Group Permissions.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Manage Groups.\n\n**3.** To the left of the group you want to edit, click the down arrow.\n\n**4.** On the submenu, click Edit | Hierarchy Members.\n\n**5.** From the lists, choose the model, version, and hierarchy you need. Keep in mind that permissions will apply to the version you select and later copies of that version after the permissions are created.\n\n**6.** At the top of the page, click the Edit button.\n\n**7.** Expand and collapse nodes of the hierarchy as needed, or search for a specific node. Notice that individual members are not displayed. You are setting permissions for all members that are in one or more specific nodes.\n\n**8.** Right-click the hierarchy node you want to give permission to, and from the menu that's displayed, click Update, Read-only, or Deny.\n\n**9.** Click Save.\n\nBecause the Main Street Clothing Company's models are fairly limited, the following example may not necessarily have real-world use, but it should help you understand how these permissions work.\n\nIn this example, the user has Update permission to two attributes for the Product entity: Color and Design.\n\nOn the Hierarchy Members tab, the user is assigned Update permission to the Female node. Permission to access all other nodes at the same level or higher is implicitly denied.\n\nAfter the hierarchy member permissions interval has passed and permissions are applied, the user can update only the Color and Design attributes for the Female members. The Male members (those with Male as the Gender) are not displayed.\n\nIn this example, you can start to see the intersection of model object and hierarchy member permissions. (You can also think of this as the intersection of attribute and member permissions.) If you were to keep this hierarchy member security but, on the Models tab, give Update access to the Product entity, the user would be able to see these same 200 members in hierarchies and collections as well as the main grid. The other 200+ Male members would always remain hidden.\n\nBecause hierarchy member permissions must always be used with model object permissions, there are rules for how these permissions are combined. For more information, see \"Determining Which Permissions Apply.\"\n\nOverlapping Hierarchies\n\nIf you've assigned hierarchy member permissions to more than one hierarchy, there is a good chance that you've assigned overlapping permissions to some members. If you do assign permissions to multiple hierarchies and those hierarchies contain the same members, the following rules apply:\n\n  If one hierarchy node is assigned Update permission and another is assigned Read-only permission, then the members in the node are Read-only.\n\n  If one hierarchy node is assigned Update or Read-only permission and another node is assigned Deny permission, then the members in the node are not displayed.\n\nDetermining Which Permissions Apply\n\nPermissions are applied in the following order of operations:\n\n  **Permissions for each attribute are determined (model object permissions)** Permissions assigned on the Models tab cascade down the tree structure and are applied to all objects. In this way, permissions for every attribute in the model are determined.\n\n  **Permissions for each member are determined (hierarchy member permissions)** Permissions assigned on the Hierarchy Members tab also cascade down the tree. In this way, permissions for all members in the model are determined.\n\n  **Attribute and member permissions are combined** Permissions are combined and access to each individual attribute value is determined.\n\nThis workflow is shown in Figure 11-2.\n\n**Figure 11-2** _Permissions workflow, showing the combination of model object and hierarchy member permissions_\n\nCombining Permissions\n\nWhen attribute permissions (assigned on the Models tab) are combined with member permissions (assigned on the Hierarchy Members tab), the following rules are applied:\n\n  Read-only overrides Update.\n\n  Deny overrides all other permissions.\n\nThe following example shows how this works. First, on the Models tab, assign Update to the Product entity's Color attribute. This gives the user the ability to update the Color attribute for all members.\n\nThen, on the Hierarchy Members tab, open the Product by Gender hierarchy and assign Update to the Female node and Read-only to the Male node.\n\nIf you apply the rules, all attributes for all members in the Male node should be Read-only. Because Read-only overrides Update, the user cannot update the Color attribute for the Male members.\n\nCombining Users and Groups\n\nWe've mentioned many times that life gets confusing when you assign permissions both to a user and to the groups the user is a member of. But if you decide you really need to do this, the web UI helps you determine which permissions are applied.\n\nWhenever you open a user account, on both the Models and the Hierarchy Members tabs, you can select Effective from the Permissions list to refresh the web UI and display the results of any overlapping user and group permissions.\n\nThis same list is not available when you're viewing groups; it's available only when you're viewing users.\n\nIf you want to understand how the combination of user and group permissions works in more detail, read on and we will attempt to clarify it for you.\n\nThe rules that apply when combining user and group permissions are\n\n  Deny overrides all other permissions.\n\n  Update overrides Read-only.\n\nThis means that if the user is assigned Read-only permission but the group is assigned Update permission, the applied permission is Update. MDS makes the assumption that if there is an overlap, the least restrictive permission should win. For example, if Bob is covering for a coworker while that person is out, and you add Bob to the other group temporarily, Bob keeps his existing permissions but also gains those of his coworker.\n\nFigure 11-3 shows the additional complexity that occurs when you have overlapping users and groups as part of the security workflow.\n\n**Figure 11-3** _The addition of overlapping users and groups to the security workflow_\n\nA Matter of Distance\n\nUnfortunately, overlapping users and groups is slightly more complex than these simple rules and Figure 11-3 can show. The cascading inheritance in the tree also plays a part. If two or more objects have permissions assigned to them, the \"Update beats Read\" rule applies. However, if an object has a different permission assigned and it's closer than the permission from the other user or group, then the closer permission applies instead.\n\nFor example, if a user has Read and a group has Update to the same model object, then Update is applied. However, if a user is assigned Update to an entity and a group is assigned Read-only to an attribute (a lower level than entity), then Update applies for the entity but the attribute is Read-only.\n\nThese same rules apply to the Hierarchy Members tab.\n\nThankfully, the UI does this calculation for you. On both the Models and Hierarchy Members tabs, click Effective in the Permissions list to display a user's effective permissions.\n\nOverlapping Functional Areas\n\nUsers and groups can also have overlapping permissions to functional areas. Functional area permissions are additive: if a user has permission to Explorer and a group has permission to Version Management, then the user has permission for both areas.\n\nSetting Security by Using Web Services\n\nAll security in Master Data Services is managed using two web service objects:\n\n  **SecurityPrincipal** Security principals correspond to Active Directory users or groups. While users may be in a group that exists in MDS, users will be managed in MDS only after they have logged on to the system through the web UI or web service (or some custom component built on the web service). To explicitly set permission on a user who is a member of a group, you will need to add the user from Active Directory explicitly.\n\n  **SecurityPrivilege** All distinct permissions within MDS are stored and managed as privileges. In most cases, only explicitly set permissions will be returned from the web service.\n\nRetrieving Users and Groups\n\nThe GetSecurityPrincipals operation, shown next, returns all current users and groups that match the criteria passed into the request. Only users that have used MDS through either the web service or web UI will be returned, even if they are members of an Active Directory group with access to MDS.\n\nNOTE\n\n_You must be a model administrator to perform this operation._\n\nRetrieving User or Group Permissions\n\nThe GetSecurityPrivilege operation returns privileges matching the criteria provided. These privileges will be related to the user or group that the permission is provided to.\n\nAdding Users and Groups\n\nWhile the CreateSecurityPrincipals operation includes \"Create\" in its name, it is really used to load preexisting Active Directory users or groups into MDS. This operation will also be used to update some user-specific properties that are stored directly in MDS.\n\nAssigning Permissions\n\nAll types of security privileges for users and groups can be created simultaneously with the CreateSecurityPrivileges operation. Multiple users or groups can be secured within the same operation as well.\n\nSummary\n\nIn this chapter, we explained the details of configuring security in MDS. We showed the process for assigning model object and hierarchy member security, and how the combination of the two determines cell-level security. We discussed model administrators and how to create and update them. We gave best practices for assigning security and talked about what happens when users belong to groups and security is assigned to both. Finally, we showed how to use the web service to view and assign permissions.\nChapter 12\n\nPublishing Data to External Systems\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Exporting Data to Subscribing Systems\n\n  Subscription View Formats\n\n  Common View Architecture\n\n  Subscription Views and Model Deployment\n\n  Creating a Subscription View with Web Services\n\n  How Main Street Clothing Company Uses Subscription Views\n\nAlthough the ability to manage data is an important feature of Master Data Services, the ability to export data to other systems in the enterprise is equally if not more important. MDS has simplified the export process by providing subscription views that you can create on any entity or derived hierarchy object within the MDS system.\n\nIn this chapter, we describe the different types of the export views that can be created and the format of each of these views. We discuss some tips and tricks for creating a proper view depending on the type of downstream system that will consume the data in MDS. We also provide an example of loading a downstream system from an export view we create. While Master Data Services provides no direct extract, transform, and load (ETL) features of any kind, the Integration Management functional area of the Master Data Manager web application (or \"web UI\") can facilitate your integration processes by providing a wide variety of views to assist in the loading of downstream systems.\n\nExporting Data to Subscribing Systems\n\nMaster Data Services can provide value for a project that keeps the data locked in its entities by providing process around the data management; however, to meet the operational or analytical needs of a master data management project, organizations need to transport stored data downstream to subscribing systems. To insulate organizations from the complex object model necessary to manage performance and the customization necessary within MDS, the developers created a subscription view layer.\n\nYou can create subscription views within the Integration Management functional area of the web UI, or by using the web service. The web service refers to these views as export views, but we'll use \"subscription views\" and \"export views\" interchangeably.\n\nSubscription View Formats\n\nThe following table shows the available subscription view formats. When you create a subscription view, you have to choose which format you want to use. There are two major types of subscription views within MDS: attribute views and hierarchy views. Attribute views display the data stored for leaf, consolidated, or collection members in an easily consumable tabular view. Hierarchy views provide relationship data for all types of relationships in MDS, whether explicit or derived hierarchies or collection members. Collection member relationships can only be displayed in a parent-child format. An additional view is available for derived and explicit hierarchies. It contains a row for each member and the parentage all the way to the top consolidation in the hierarchy; this view is considered level-based.\n\nCommon View Architecture\n\nMany of the columns in Master Data Services' subscription views are identical across view types. The columns provide either context for the data displayed in the view or additional system information for the records contained in the view. Subscribing systems can use this information to update a subset of records based on validation status or last updated statistics.\n\nProcedure: How to Create a Subscription View\n\nTo create a subscription view in Master Data Manager, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** On the Master Data Management home page, click Integration Management.\n\n**2.** On the menu bar, click Create Views.\n\n**3.** On the Subscription Views page, click the \"Add subscription view\" button.\n\n**4.** In the Create Subscription View pane that is displayed at the bottom of the page, enter a name for the view and select a model from the Model list. In this example, select Product and call the view **ProductsForPOS**.\n\nThis UI can be a bit confusing. There are three columns here and the radio buttons apply to the two options shown in each column.\n\n**5.** In the first column of choices, select either Version or Version flag and then select from the corresponding list. As a best practice, you should create a subscription view based on a version flag. Then, as you create new versions, you can move the flag to the latest version and you don't have to update your subscription view. If you created a version flag in Chapter 9, you can select it here. Otherwise, select the version that contains the data you want to export.\n\n**6.** In the next column of choices, select either Entity or Derived hierarchy and then select from the corresponding list. Your subscription view can show the contents of an entity or the structure of a hierarchy. For this example, select Entity and choose the Product entity from this list.\n\n**7.** In the third column of choices, from the Format list, select Leaf attributes. This determines the format of your view. If you were creating a view of a hierarchy, you would be prompted to select a format for the view and to choose the number of levels you want to show.\n\n**8.** Click Save.\n\nThe subscription view is now displayed in the top pane of the Subscription Views page. If you decide you want to change it, click the row and then the Edit button. You can also delete it if it's no longer necessary.\n\nScroll to the far right to view the Changed column. This column is important to note. If objects in the model structure change, this column changes to True. At that point, you need to edit the subscription view and save it again (you don't need to make changes to it; just edit and then save). This ensures that the view will still return accurate results based on the latest changes to the model.\n\nViewing a Subscription View in SQL Server\n\nNow you can open SQL Server Management Studio and take a look at the view. As shown in Figure 12-1, all of the members and their attributes are shown in a format that is easy for subscribing systems to consume.\n\n**Figure 12-1** _Opening a subscription view in SQL Server Management Studio_\n\nFor each domain-based attribute that is displayed in a subscription view, three columns are displayed. The \"_Code\" and \"_Name\" columns display the name and code. The \"_ID\" column displays the system key for the member. This is an internal key and should not be used in subscribing systems.\n\nSubscription Views and Model Deployment\n\nIn the SQL Server 2008 R2 release of MDS, a shortcoming of model deployment was its lack of support for subscription views. If you create subscription views for an entity or derived hierarchy, these views will not be re-created when moving model deployment packages between development, test, and production servers. Subscription views are now supported in model deployment with SQL Server 2012.\n\nCreating a Subscription View with Web Services\n\nAll subscription views in MDS are created using the ExportViewCreate operation. Depending on the type of view being created and whether you create the view based on version or version flag, different parameters are required.\n\nCreating Entity Views\n\nThis operation creates an entity-centric subscription view for a specified model and entity. This operation can support explicit hierarchy leveling and either method of version management.\n\nCreating Derived Hierarchy Views\n\nThis operation encapsulates the creation of derived hierarchy subscription views. Because the level setting is only valid when the chosen format is \"derived levels,\" this parameter is ignored for other view types.\n\nDeleting Views\n\nThe following code deletes a subscription view from Master Data Services no matter what the format of the subscription view. No data within the entity related to the export view will be changed in any way by this process. This call returns an operation result that will contain any errors that occurred in the deletion process, although these will be rare in this simple process.\n\nHow Main Street Clothing Company Uses Subscription Views\n\nWith all of the processes around maintaining location, product, employee, and account data now in place, Anthony must build the integration plan for passing and synchronizing data from MDS into all downstream systems.\n\nThe first step in building this plan is to determine the accuracy and accountability required for each subscribing system. Some systems require data that has been validated and version information that has been rigorously tracked. Other systems need data that is more recent and may still contain minor errors. MDS can provide this data for either purpose based on the type of version that is consumed. Version flags, as discussed in Chapter 9, also support this important distinction.\n\nFor each downstream system, Anthony must decide what type of subscription view provides the best format for consumption. Does this system require consolidation information? Does this system need attributes related to consolidated members? Anthony determines the best subscription view for each downstream system. As you can see from the following table, systems vary widely on the quality level required.\n\nThe point of sale (POS) systems in each of the stores must be updated nightly with the latest product lists and prices. Anthony decides the best way to do this is to use the data presented in his subscription views to export the data he needs. He uses SQL Server Integration Services to create a package that runs on a nightly schedule. Each morning when the managers come to work, their POS systems are already updated with the latest product information.\n\nProcedure: How to Export Subscription View Data\n\nTo export data from a Master Data Services subscription view to another data source, complete the following steps:\n\nNOTE\n\n_This procedure is just one example of how to get data out of MDS and into a subscribing system. Your process may differ._\n\n**1.** Open SQL Server Management Studio.\n\n**2.** Right-click the MDS database.\n\n**3.** From the submenu, select Tasks | Export Data.\n\n**4.** On the Welcome page, click Next.\n\n**5.** On the Choose a Data Source page, leave the defaults (it should be pointing to your MDS database) and click Next.\n\n**6.** On the Choose a Destination page, in the Destination field, select Flat File Destination.\n\n**7.** Browse to a text file name, select the \"Column names in the first data row\" check box, and click Next.\n\n**8.** On the Specify Table Copy or Query page, select the \"Copy data from one or more tables or views\" radio button and click Next.\n\n**9.** On the Configure Flat File Destination page, in the \"Source table or view\" list, select the view. In our case, it's the view: [mdm].[ProductsForPOS].\n\n**10.** Click the Edit Mappings button. In the Column Mappings dialog box, ignore all of the Destination columns except: Name, Code, Retail Price, Discontinued_Code, Type_Code, Gender_Code, and Manufacturer.\n\n**11.** Click OK to close the dialog box. Then click Next.\n\n**12.** On the Save and Run Package page, leave the Run immediately check box selected and select the Save SSIS Package check box.\n\n**13.** Click Next.\n\n**14.** On the Save SSIS Package page, type a name and description for your package, leave all other defaults, and click Next.\n\n**15.** On the Complete the Wizard page, click Finish.\n\nThe SSIS package is saved and Main Street Clothing Company can schedule the package to run nightly. When the package runs, the contents of the view are saved as a flat file to a file share. A separate batch system transfers the file to each of the 14 stores. The POS systems retrieve the data from the file, and each morning when the stores open, the POS systems have the latest prices and information.\n\nSummary\n\nConsuming data from the Master Data Services system requires analysis of the subscribing system's needs. These needs should be evaluated against the supported export formats. Subscription views provide a number of columns that can help filter and manage ETL processes into subscribing systems at an individual record level. Model deployment does not deploy subscription views from packages. If an organization has a lot of subscription views, it can programmatically manage these views through the MDS web service.\nChapter 13\n\nExtending MDS with Web Services\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Exposing the Web Service\n\n  Exposing the WSDL\n\n  Creating an MDS Project in Visual Studio\n\n  Creating an Abstraction Layer\n\n  MDS Web Service Operations\n\n  The Most Frequently Used Operations\n\n  Handling Errors in the Web Service\n\nIn this chapter, we explore in more depth the web services layer provided by Master Data Services. Every operation in MDS is exposed within the web service. Despite the large number of operations, any developer can be productive working against the web service by focusing on a few high-value operations. These operations can be used to create a customized UI tailored to your solution or to integrate existing applications with MDS.\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, most of the changes are beneath the interfaces. A number of the processes in the web service have been deprecated, while most of the new calls have been marked as private, meaning Microsoft will not support external use of the call. In this chapter, we will give you an overview of the new calls and let you know which ones might be worth taking the support risk for.\n\nExposing the Web Service\n\nIn the 2008 R2 release, for security purposes, MDS did not publicly implement the web service when you first installed MDS. In SQL Server 2012, the web service is always exposed because Silverlight is used for the Explorer screen. If you are using MDS with prebuilt applications, then everything you need is already done. If you are going to build your own solutions or use the samples listed in this book, then you must also expose the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) in order to compile against the service interface.\n\nExposing the WSDL\n\nTo expose the WSDL, you must modify the web.config file directly. This file is in the WebApplication directory where MDS is installed. If you installed MDS in the default location, the full path is C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft SQL Server\\Master Data Services\\WebApplication\\web.config.\n\nProcedure: How to Enable the WSDL\n\nOpen the web.config file with either Notepad or Visual Studio 2010. Find the following section:\n\nChange the setting for httpGetEnabled and includeExceptionDetailInFaults to **true**. Then save the file. This enables the web service to expose the WSDL. If you have configured SSL, as described in Chapter 2, change httpsGetEnabled to **true**.\n\nIf you receive an \"Access is denied\" error when you save, check the security on the file. When you install MDS, permissions are set on this file so that only the users in the local Administrators group have full control.\n\nYou may also have User Account Control (UAC) running. You can disable UAC temporarily; unfortunately, you will have to restart your computer when you do this. To disable UAC, open Control Panel and click \"System and Security.\" Under Action Center, click \"Change User Account Control settings.\" In the User Account Control Settings dialog box, slide the bar to the bottom so that you are never notified. Click OK to save. In the confirmation dialog box, click Yes. Restart your computer, and you should be able to edit the web.config file.\n\nCreating an MDS Project in Visual Studio\n\nNow that the web service is exposed, you can create your first project in Visual Studio. All of the code examples in this book use Visual Studio 2010.\n\nProcedure: How to Create an MDS Web Service Application\n\nTo create an application that uses the MDS web service, you must first create a project and then add the web service as a reference in the project. Depending on your needs, you can create any type of application you choose. In this book, we've created wrapper classes that can be used in any type of application.\n\nCreate a Project\n\nTo create a project in Visual Studio, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** Open Microsoft Visual Studio.\n\n**2.** Click File | New | Project.\n\n**3.** In the New Project dialog box, in the Project types section, under Visual C#, click Windows.\n\n**4.** In the Templates section, choose the application type. In this example, we chose Class Library.\n\n**5.** In the Name box, type a name for your application.\n\n**6.** Click OK.\n\nAdd a Service Reference\n\nTo add a service reference to the project, complete the following steps:\n\n**1.** In Visual Studio, with your project open, click View | Solution Explorer.\n\n**2.** In the Solution Explorer pane, right-click References and click \"Add Service Reference.\"\n\n**3.** The Add Service Reference dialog box is displayed. In the Address box, type the URL for the MDS service. This is usually your URL followed by \"\/service\/service .svc.\" For example:\n\nhttp:\/\/mdsserver\/mds\/service\/service.svc\n\n**4.** Click Go. The service is displayed in the Services section.\n\n**5.** In the Namespace box, type a name for the service namespace. This can be anything you want.\n\n**6.** Click OK.\n\nCreating an Abstraction Layer\n\nThe MDS web service is built on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Many of the initial calls may seem daunting or overly complicated if you are a first-time user. The web service operations may seem complicated because they must be generic in order to port all the model types and data schemas created in disparate implementations. The operations have been built to support all possible configurations and uses of the application.\n\nMost people, however, are interested in only a small subset of configurations and a small subset of the application features exposed to the web service. As you are getting used to the MDS web service, there are a few tips and practices that can help you more quickly integrate your organization with MDS. One of these is to create an abstraction layer.\n\nAn abstraction layer can do a number of things:\n\n  Provide other developers with only those calls that you wish them to program against\n\n  Ensure that everyone uses a similar standard when writing code against the web service\n\n  Enable you to provide complex calls in a far more consumable fashion\n\nMDS Web Service Operations\n\nWhile more than 50 operations are supported by the MDS web service, most people need to focus on only a few of those operations to handle the majority of their routines. MDS operations can be grouped by the MDS objects they control. These groupings are listed in order of importance in the following sections.\n\nMembers\n\nRetrieving and updating master data is by far the most frequent procedure you will want to automate. Many of these calls were optimized in SQL Server 2012 to support the MDS Add-in for Microsoft Excel. The EntityMembersUpdate and EntityMembersMerge calls can now support large datasets. When using these calls, the MDS team found that breaking extremely large sets into sets of 50,000 attribute updates is most effective on average systems. All of the operations for working with members are listed in the following table. For examples of these operations, see Chapter 7 and Chapter 11.\n\nBulk Operations\n\nAlthough many of these operations are called ModelMembers, that is a misnomer. The major distinction for these operations is that they leverage staging to bulk load records into MDS. In SQL Server 2012 these operations have been marked for deprecation. When loading more than a few thousand values (members times attributes), you can now use the EntityMembersMerge and EntityMembersUpdate. For examples of staging operations, see Chapter 5.\n\nValidation\n\nIn this release of MDS, a large portion of the data quality proposition is working with validation results from business rules created in the application. While there are a number of operations necessary to create business rules, only two operations manage the results of these rules. Examples of these operations are provided in the section \"The Most Frequently Used Operations,\" later in this chapter.\n\nTransactions\n\nAll data changes made through the web service or the web application UI are saved in the transaction table. Since the Add-in for Excel is built on the MDS web service, these transactions will also show in the transaction table. These transactions can be retrieved or reversed by using the following operations. Examples of these operations are also provided in the section \"The Most Frequently Used Operations.\"\n\nAnnotations\n\nEither members or transactions on those members can be given further explanation through annotations. Annotations are useful in providing further detail in workflow processes.\n\nSubscription Views\n\nExternal access to MDS managed data is enabled through views that are based on versions and view type. The following export operations manage these views. For examples of some of these operations, see Chapter 12.\n\nMetadata Structures\n\nBecause MDS contains descriptive metadata, the naming convention for the following operations is confusing. These operations will create any of the model objects supported by MDS. For examples of some of these operations, see Chapter 4.\n\nSecurity\n\nWhile MDS security relies on Active Directory, MDS authorization requires that users be added as principals either by their username or an Active Directory group they are a member of. Users and groups must be assigned both functional and member privileges to have access to MDS. For examples of some of these operations, see Chapter 11.\n\nBusiness Rules\n\nThe management of business rules in MDS is best left to the Master Data Manager web UI. The following operations are complex in their object model and not well documented. For examples of some of these operations, see Chapter 8.\n\nSystem Settings\n\nThere are a number of system-wide settings that allow system administrators to customize their MDS implementation. These settings are stored in tblSystemSetting and managed in MDS Configuration Manager.\n\nUser Preferences\n\nThese user preference calls support the MDS web application and have limited value for external systems. Leveraging these calls in your own custom UI work is not suggested.\n\nMiscellaneous Operations\n\nThe remaining operations are not easily grouped into categories.\n\nEntity-Based Staging Operations\n\nThese operations were added in SQL Server 2012 to allow the MDS web UI to manage the new entity-based staging process. These operations are marked as internal only. Microsoft will not support custom code that calls these APIs. The thinking is that users will use the new SQL stored procedures and SSIS to move data into the tables. Please refer to Chapter 5 for more information on entity-based staging.\n\nData Quality Operations\n\nIn SQL Server 2012, Microsoft shipped Data Quality Services. While DQS ships with SSIS plug-ins, it does not have an exposed API. To integrate DQS into the MDS Add-in for Excel, the Master Data Services team created these API calls linked to the DQS server. All of these calls are marked as internal only, so Microsoft does not support any use of these APIs. They are included here for the adventurous...\n\nThe Most Frequently Used Operations\n\nThe examples in this section show you how to build an abstraction layer for the most frequently used operations that are needed to integrate with MDS. We highly recommend that when you build applications against MDS, you focus on the operations provided in this section.\n\nThe operations that we do not address tend to be more complex and less useful to everyday consumers. For instance, triggering validation programmatically may be very useful for end users. Business rules, on the other hand, are complex to build in a user interface and difficult to manipulate programmatically. Because of this, creating business rules outside of the MDS application holds less value. Security is another area where most of you will not need to build additional UIs. Ignoring these two areas can greatly reduce the time to implement a customized solution.\n\nSearching for Members\n\nTo return data from an MDS entity, you must provide a valid identifier for the model, version, and entity. To further limit and refine the results that are returned from an EntityMembersGet operation, you can provide search terms.\n\nAll filter types that are available in Explorer when you're viewing members in the Master Data Manager web UI are supported by the search term parameter in the EntityMembersGet operation. The following table lists all of the filter operators, the corresponding search term syntax, and an example of each. In the Search Term Syntax column of the following table:\n\n  A stands for attribute.\n\n  V stands for generic value.\n\n  S stands for similarity.\n\n  T stands for match type.\n\n  C stands for containment bias.\n\nMost of the examples in this table come from the Product entity in the Main Street Clothing Company example.\n\nGetting Members by Using the SearchTerm Property\n\nThe following code provides an EntityMembersGet example that uses the SearchTerm property. In subsequent examples, we show only the highlighted SearchTerm portion.\n\nCombining Multiple Search Terms\n\nMultiple search terms can be combined with the use of the AND operator between each search criteria term, as shown next. Like the UI, search terms in MDS do not support complex conditions like OR or grouping.\n\nUsing Matching in Search Terms\n\nIn the Explorer functional area of the Master Data Manager web UI, you can use the Similarity operator to find matches similar to your search terms. However, you can use the MDS web service to create a much more robust process.\n\nThe following table shows the four types of similarity matches you can do programmatically. In each of these cases, 1 indicates an exact match and 0 indicates no match.\n\n**Levenshtein Search Term Example** The Levenshtein distance is the default type of match and does not require any additional parameters. Only Minimum Similarity and Type are supported.\n\n**Jaccard Search Term Example** The Jaccard search supports an additional parameter of containment bias.\n\n**Jaro-Winkler Search Term Example** The Jaro-Winkler match results are the least restrictive with our sample data. This method returns more results than any other method. The Jaro-Winkler type does not support containment bias.\n\n**Longest Common Subsequence Search Term Example** Longest common subsequence does support an extra parameter of length threshold. This is provided in a decimal percentage between 0 and 1. The default is .62, and a lower threshold will increase the number of possible matches returned.\n\nUnderstanding the EntityMembers Object\n\nThe EntityMember class centers on a collection of members. If retrieving EntityMembers using the EntityMembersGet operation, a number of additional objects will be populated depending on the type of criteria supplied. This same EntityMembers class needs to be created and populated by the call when creating new members in MDS.\n\nFigure 13-1 shows the EntityMembers class object and all possible members. In these class diagrams, the type of relationship between classes is denoted by 0, 1, and *. If a 1 is stated, the object is required or always provided. 0 means the class is optional, and * means multiple items can be added to the class collection.\n\n**Figure 13-1** _EntityMembers class diagram_\n\nSummarizing Member Data\n\nWhen you use the web service to select data by using the EntityMembers object, you do not get summary data that is useful for pagination or for otherwise showing record counts. To get this type of information, you can use the EntityMemberInformation object. This object contains the following attributes:\n\n  **MemberCount** The member count of the records returned in the current request. This will be based on the paging information provided.\n\n  **PageNumber** The current page number returned in this request.\n\n  **TotalMemberCount** The total member count for the current request. The MembersGetCriteria must remain constant for this total member count to stay consistent.\n\n  **TotalPages** The total number of pages for the current request. The MembersGetCriteria must remain constant for this page count to stay consistent.\n\nWorking with Metadata\n\nAll of the objects within MDS are created using the same operation: MetadataCreate. This operation creates models, entities, attributes, attribute groups, collections, and hierarchies. Throughout the book, there are examples of how to create these metadata objects.\n\nAs discussed in earlier chapters, MetadataCreate and MetadataClone are overloaded operations that allow you to create models, entities, and attributes within the MDS system. To create or return these objects, you must navigate the Metadata class and its child classes. Figure 13-2 shows a map of the Metadata class.\n\n**Figure 13-2** _Metadata class diagram_\n\nValidating Records in MDS\n\nAs an organization begins to interact programmatically with MDS, it may become necessary to trigger validation on specific members or an entire entity. Once validation has completed, users may need to retrieve validation issues that have been discovered. We have not had a chance to discuss these web service operations earlier in the book, so we'll provide some examples here.\n\nValidationGet operations can be tricky because they seem to support a wide variety of parameters, but only a few combinations will return results. These combinations seem to align with the UI controls for validation issues. Four validation examples are explained next.\n\nValidationGetByVersion Example\n\nThis operation gets all validation issues for a model and version combination. This would be used as part of the commitment process for a version.\n\nValidationGetByUser Example\n\nThis operation returns the results that correspond to notifications that were sent to a user.\n\nYou have two good options to get a valid user_id. You can find your correct user_id from the securityprincipleget web service call. If the application does not care about the user initiating the action and you want to ensure you get the most access, code using user_id = 1.\n\nValidationGetByMember Example\n\nThis operation returns results related to a member or set of members. In this example we pass in a single member.\n\nValidationProcess Example\n\nValidationProcess validates a model and version combination or validates a set of members passed into the operation. You can use an EntityMembersGet operation to retrieve a set of members related to a group of search terms and then loop through those members. In this simple example, we validate only a single member and pass back all validation issues found.\n\nManaging Transactions\n\nTransactions can provide users and managers with a complete record of all changes that have been made in the system. Model administrators will be able to see all transactions made within a model, while each user will have access to their own changes. These transactions also support reversal.\n\nTransactionsGet Example\n\nTransactionsGet operations return a list of transactions that meet the provided search criteria. Transaction search criteria only support values that are equal, so these criteria are exposed as identifiers attached to the criteria.\n\nTransactionsReverse Example\n\nWhile there may be many programmatic uses for TransactionsGet, TransactionsReverse should be used with caution. TransactionsReverse does not actually reverse the transaction, but rather reverts the current value from MDS to the prior value stored in the transaction log. This procedure can be very valuable when you need to reverse a change after triggering an external action. Make sure that you reverse the most recent transaction.\n\nThe following procedure is a simple example of how to reverse a single transaction based on the ID of the transaction. This procedure will throw an error if an invalid transaction ID is provided. You could add a conditional statement around the TransactionsReversed return statement to handle this case.\n\nHandling Errors in the Web Service\n\nAll MDS web service calls return an OperationResult object within their response messages. This OperationResult object contains a Request_ID to manage long-running requests and any errors that occurred as a result of the request. These errors can provide immediate feedback to client-side developers who need to find problems with their requests. These errors can range from useful to baffling, and sometimes it will take some trial and error to determine what is wrong. Each error will populate a portion of the following properties:\n\n  **Code** Error number specific to the type of error encountered. A general classification for web service errors is provided in the following table.\n\n  **Description** Localized text describing the error.\n\n  **Context.FullyQualifiedName** The fully qualified name of the object involved in the error. Some names are only unique within their context. An entity would be qualified with a model name prefix such as _ModelName : EntityName_.\n\n  **Context.Type** The type of object related to the error.\n\n  **Context.Identifier** The identifier of the object involved in the error.\n\n  **Context.Identifier.Id** The unique GUID of the object, if specified or available.\n\n  **Context.Identifier.Name** The name of the object, if specified or available.\n\n  **Context.Identifier.InternalId** The internal key from the MDS system tables.\n\nSummary\n\nThe MDS web service provides complete access to all of the functions that are found in the product. While many of the operations are detailed in other chapters of this book, this chapter acts as a reference to help you find the operations you need, and provides more detailed examples. After reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the main groupings available so you can programmatically access all that MDS has to offer. You should also be familiar with the changes made to the MDS web service in SQL Server 2012.\nChapter 14\n\nAdvanced Modeling\n\nIn This Chapter\n\n  Common Modeling Mistakes\n\n  Rapid Model Development\n\n  Managing Slowly Changing Dimensions\n\n  Limiting Unneeded Complexity\n\nModeling is more art than science. You need to understand not only your datasets and how they interact, but also the related systems. You also need to understand people and their processes. In this chapter, we will attempt to tackle some common complex modeling issues found in MDS projects.\n\nMaster Data Services is not a data warehouse or a reporting tool. It is a data management tool. This is a difficult distinction for many to understand. Master Data Services should be used to manage and store lists for the business. Security can create boundaries for multiple users. Business rules notify users of issues with the data, while the web UI, Add-in for Excel, and Services API give the entire organization access to work on the same datasets. All of these features are designed around managing data changes.\n\nOnce data is being managed correctly in MDS, extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes can send this data into data marts and warehouses to provide the reports demanded by the business. These systems can focus on the reporting structures, disseminating the information without concern for the data editing and quality processes. In this chapter we will try to provide insight into some of the more common complex problems that we have seen.\n\nCommon Modeling Mistakes\n\nMDS is best built from the top down, not the bottom up. As discussed in Chapter 3, the first step in managing data is to determine the major entities that need to be managed. Unfortunately, many modelers then move directly to the downstream systems to build their models, deriving all columns from these preexisting systems. This section discusses some significant pitfalls with this approach that you should be aware of.\n\nBuilding Outside Limitations into MDS\n\nWhether a system is purchased or created, the data model of that system was developed through a series of compromises. If you were building a system to manage payroll, how many attributes would you add for each employee? Would you add information about certifications they hold? Each system is built to solve a business need. Some of these systems attempt to solve multiple needs or allow for minimal customization. If you focus on a single system, you run the risk of bringing these compromises into MDS.\n\nA couple of common compromises seen in the field are perpetuating overloaded fields into your MDM system and propagating system column names. Either of these issues can blunt the effectiveness of your MDS implementation, limiting usability for business users.\n\nManage Overloaded Fields\n\nMany systems have tables that need to have a single column to use as the primary key. To ensure this column is always unique, values in this column may be a combination of three or more distinct values that have been pasted together, typically as a fixed-length combination. Do not bring this as a single column into MDS. Allow users to manage these distinct values separately. If visibility of this value is required, use business rules to concatenate the obscure codes into this overloaded value for the external systems.\n\nProvide Easily Recognizable Names\n\nMost systems try to use standard naming conventions and technical shorthand to name tables and fields within the database. Ensure that you adapt these names to be easily readable by your end users. This might apply to allowable values within some fields as well. Create an entity and provide useful names to each of these unique values.\n\nTrouble Identifying Common Attributes\n\nEach system within your enterprise comes preconfigured with some built-in nomenclature and culture. If you look at these systems at the database level, where table and column names have been abbreviated, determining meaning and use can be difficult. This can lead to confusion about how different systems or departments manage similar attributes. While these architecture diagrams can help lead the conversation, working directly with the business users is the best way to ensure you accurately model your business.\n\nEngineering Dead Scenarios\n\nWhen we rely on the existing structures of systems within the organization, we may find ourselves modeling scenarios the business does not require. This can be due to changes in the business structure over time or an incomplete understanding of the problem when the system was implemented. It is important to take advantage of the current mindshare of the business users to build your MDS model as the business wants it.\n\nRapid Model Development\n\nWith the advent of the MDS Add-in for Excel, Master Data Services has revolutionized the modeling process. In the past, there was a gulf between modelers who read and create data models and the rest of the business. The best way to bridge this gulf is to design a model, review it with the users, receive feedback, and repeat the process. With competing products, this process usually takes weeks or months for each iteration, whereas with the Add-in for Excel, a team can create a fully populated model in a couple of days.\n\nExcel is a great intermediate location for data from any source. Many of the datasets currently managed in your organization already exist within Excel. For any data that does not exist in an Excel sheet, you can use the existing data features in Excel to load the data into a workbook. Once the data is loaded into Excel, you can create a new entity by using the Create Entity wizard.\n\nManaging Slowly Changing Dimensions\n\nOne of the most common concerns that we deal with when helping data stewards model data in MDS is how to handle history within the system. In most cases these concerns are not drawn from operational systems as these systems typically focus on the processing of the current state. Analytic systems such as data warehouses or data marts need to store or report information based on changes over time. Most modeling discussions quickly turn to managing these dimension changes in MDS. This is the wrong way to look at it. The role of MDS is to create the changes, not to store them for reporting purposes. We need to look at how to leverage the existing tools in MDS to send these changes to the reporting systems that require them.\n\nRalph Kimball has spent much of his lifetime documenting techniques for analytic systems. One of his most discussed concepts is the handling of slowly changing dimensions. Mr. Kimball identified three types of dimensions that we will discuss here.\n\nOverwriting Rows (Type 1)\n\nThe simplest form of storage is in those dimensions that are stateless. Without any need to understand any previous values, ETL processes can simply overwrite the dimension from the subscription view without any further analysis. In a majority of companies, this should be the predominant type of data transfer, especially for supporting entities in the data warehouse.\n\nAdding Rows (Type 2)\n\nThe most prevalent type of versioning data in data marts and warehouses stores a new row for each change in the member record. The prior member record is effectively closed using a new key. In order to determine that a change has occurred and a new record needs to be made in the warehouse, the ETL process can look at the last changed date to trigger a new record for the member to be created, each row with a new surrogate key. Natural key or MDS code columns can be used to ensure different record versions can be tracked. You do not need to store this history in MDS.\n\nUnfortunately, the MDS system, like most systems, logs the last changed date as the date and time the change was made. In some cases, the date needs to be explicitly captured separate from the log. If the date is extremely important to the process and is part of the master record itself, create a new field or fields in MDS to store these effective dates. We will discuss the best way to manage these type 2 scenarios later in the chapter.\n\nAdding Columns (Type 3)\n\nSome systems or dimensions use the concept of another column per attribute change. This can be as simple as a prior and a current column for a single attribute. If your warehouse already has a table designed in the standard type 3 fashion, you can continue to populate this model using MDS. Otherwise, type 3 scenarios are tailor-made for versioning, as most users want to run reports for different periods of time.\n\nTo support original type 3 table formats, you can source current attribute values from the current version subscription views while sourcing all prior columns from a different set of subscription views linked to the prior version. These subscription views should leverage version flags to ensure they can work across multiple periods of time.\n\nUsing the Power of MDS to Simplify the Problem\n\nWe can view the loading of history into downstream data marts and data warehouses as an ETL problem or we can attempt to leverage MDS to improve the system. The reason most data marts and data warehouses traditionally used type 1, 2, and 3 storage methods was that data was flowing from one static data model into the reporting system. Information architects were unable to change the original tables that were storing managers, products, or accounts in their initial systems, so they needed to build ETL processes that attempted to pull the history into the reporting database structures.\n\nUnfortunately, these structures all have their drawbacks in this scenario. Type 1 storage is the most efficient, eliminating all duplication from the system. Type 2 is the most robust and most costly, as each change creates another entire record. Type 3 suffers from significant column expansion and an ever-changing data model as different history is required.\n\nMDS can change this equation. When history is required for a downstream dimension, it is rarely needed for all attributes. In fact, when working with data marts, only a few specific attributes require history, and using the time at which the change was made is extremely inaccurate. It is the effective date that matters sometimes for each report. This is where the MDS architecture can be extremely useful. In a matter of minutes, a new entity can be created that stores the important historical relationship along with two effective date columns, Start and End. We can then use subscription views to send this data from MDS. While the original type 1 dimension in MDS is unaffected by the new requirement we can populate a new dimension table to support the time-sensitive reporting requirement. Let's use Main Street Clothing Company to illustrate this problem.\n\nManaging Dimension for Main Street Clothing Company\n\nFor the past year, Main Street Clothing Company has been paying its individual store managers a monthly bonus based on sales at that manager's store. A monthly report has been created to provide sales numbers per manager to determine these monthly bonuses. Recently a new mall being built has created an increased demand for experienced managers in the area, and manager turnover has been increasing within the area. The market has also dictated that managers' bonuses be guaranteed in their employment contracts.\n\nCorporate must now include effective dates in the manager report to ensure accurate accounting of the bonuses. Instead of making changes in the Employee entity, making this a type 2 dimension, IT has decided to create an additional entity called Store Manager Relationship. In this entity, secured users can modify the effective management dates of each manager for each store.\n\nLimiting Unneeded Complexity\n\nAnother common scenario that occurs in MDS modeling is over-engineering an entity. The two common scenarios I see are data stewards designing for exceptions and designing for _N_. In both of these cases, the computer scientist in us can override common sense, creating additional complexity without adding significant business value. In each of these cases, considering the design time of each scenario is not as important as considering the time needed for users to manage data.\n\nDesigning for Exceptions\n\nIn many cases, I need to manage a dataset that has a relatively stable change rate 90 percent of the time or more. At other times, this dataset or a portion of the dataset may require a significant change in granularity. The easiest maneuver would be to manage the full dataset at the finer granularity and just make the changes in this single data format. Yet MDS is not designed as an automated system; it encourages and fosters user involvement. The value of a little additional design and integration time can provide significant benefits in terms of user satisfaction and limiting mistakes once the system is live.\n\nLet's take the common example of store hours. Suppose that you work in the corporate IT department of a company that owns a national chain of restaurants. The management of each store in the company has the option of opening and closing at any time they choose. The management of each store is given some discretion in determining their hours of operation because eating habits vary in different parts of the country. The company wants you to design a model where every store is able to do its own cost\/benefit analysis of staff versus revenue to optimize its operation's profit.\n\nWhile every store can select a different hour (or half-hour) at which to open and close each day, you find that certain patterns emerge. None of the restaurants opens before 5 a.m. or closes after 10 p.m. Hours of operation are different on the weekends, while weekday hours generally remain the same throughout the week. The major exception for this dataset is holidays. Every few months, a holiday significantly impacts the number of hours the restaurant is open. For reporting purposes, it is important to know the daily hours of operation when analyzing variable costs and revenue. No matter what happens, your ETL processes are going to need to translate this store operation information into usable data for reporting, and the cost for creating these processes is nominal no matter how you store the hours.\n\nGetting the correct operating hours from each restaurant is the single most important criteria in this project. These hours will be displayed on the company's website, which drives business to the stores. All of your reports will base calculations on total open hours, to determine labor efficiency. If you can't get accurate hours of operation for all stores, nothing else matters. Let's consider three architectures you could implement to solve this problem.\n\nMany IT professionals will like the simplicity of the design shown in Figure 14-1. A single table can store any number of days with similar hours. Now let's think through the use case for the actual table users in MDS. To correctly enter data into this format, a restaurant manager will need to add data changes into MDS as a new row. Any changes to this schedule require users to search and update many different records. Want to change the opening time on Friday for the year? You better set aside next Saturday to do so!\n\n**Figure 14-1** _One size fits all_\n\nThe model shown in Figure 14-2 gives the most flexibility, allowing users to set regular opening and closing hours each day of the week, with a separate table to break out any exceptions such as holidays. Each restaurant manager should be able to manage their standard hours in a matter of minutes. Whenever exceptions occur, the manager can quickly add them to the table. With this model, the ETL is a little more complicated because the Hours dimension needs to be generated from a combination of two subscription views, but the ease of use for the end user should quickly outweigh this extra complication.\n\n**Figure 14-2** _Holiday exceptions only_\n\nThe final example, shown in Figure 14-3, has some positives and negatives over the second option. While the second option gives each restaurant the ultimate flexibility in managing their own hours of operation, for some, this could lead to additional problems, with too much flexibility. Does corporate want to provide acceptable patterns for hours of operation?\n\n**Figure 14-3** _Weekday and weekend patterns_\n\nThis example also limits the chances for mistakes. In the previous example, a manager could mistakenly indicate that the restaurant will be open at 3 a.m. for dinner. Picking from a set of options can also allow new managers to leverage the wisdom of prior locations, by picking an operational pattern already in use. As a negative, adding a new hours pattern can be a complicated process, and changing hours on a specific day could be complicated or misuse the exception table.\n\nDesigning for _N_\n\nOftentimes we find models that value flexibility over function. While there are many business cases that support flexibility, and others where it may be mandatory, often the business value is questionable at best, and the additional complexity can kill usability. There is no greater case for this than managing customer data. In today's world, any customer can have multiple addresses and multiple phone numbers. Model builders might be tempted to support a customer model that allows for multiple contacts. This could be a separate address or phone table with the customer as an attribute. While this is supported in MDS, this practice can lead to problems both in usability and data quality control.\n\nThink about the case of running a retail establishment. You would like to get more information about your customers. Does the contact card you hand them give blanks for every phone number they are associated with? How about each address? We have found a much more usable model contains a single Customer entity with separate attributes for each phone number by type. A primary address set of attributes is also advisable unless business necessitates a separate table.\n\nThe benefits of adding attributes to a single table are not confined only to the model's general usability. A single entity can more easily support business rules, as well as better integration with matching and data quality tools.\n\nSummary\n\nMaster Data Services is really your data model layered on the Microsoft proprietary model. To use MDS most efficiently, data stewards must embrace the system as a data management tool and not as a data warehouse. Your MDS system should not mirror every dimension table in your data mart or data warehouse any more than it mirrors list tables in your operational systems. Business needs for data management should drive the model in MDS and the ETL process to load downstream data marts.\nIndex\n\nA\n\nabstraction layer\n\naccess. _See also_ security\n\ncollections\n\nentities\n\nhierarchies\n\nindividual attributes\n\nleaf member attributes\n\nmodel objects\n\nmodel versions and\n\nnavigational\n\nactions\n\nbusiness rules\n\nchange value\n\ndefault value\n\ndeleting\n\nexternal\n\nvalidation\n\nActive Directory\n\nadministration\n\nadministrator accounts\n\nanchor null relationship\n\nAND operator\n\nannotations\n\nApplication Development service\n\napplications. _See_ web applications\n\nApproved attribute\n\nattribute groups\n\naccess to\n\ncreating\n\nMain Street Clothing Company\n\nnaming\/renaming\n\noverview\n\nreordering\n\nin system administration\n\nattribute values\n\nconcatenating\n\npopulating\n\npopulating with incremental numbers\n\nattribute views\n\nattributes\n\naccess to\n\nadding to change tracking groups\n\ncode\n\ncollections\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating\n\ncreating approved attributes\n\ncreating in web services\n\ndisplay format\n\ndomain-based. _See_ domain-based attributes\n\nediting\n\nERP systems and\n\nfiltering\n\nfree-form\n\nhiding\n\nleaf member\n\nMain Street Clothing Company\n\nmanaging\n\nname\n\nnature of\n\nnavigating\n\nnumber of\n\noverview\n\npermissions\n\nproblems identifying\n\nrequiring value attributes\n\nSQL Server\n\nauthentication\n\nB\n\nbase entity\n\nbatch tags\n\nbatches, staging. _See_ staging batches\n\nbatches size setting\n\nBI (business intelligence) applications\n\nBing maps\n\nbulk operations\n\nbusiness intelligence (BI) applications\n\nbusiness process maps\n\nbusiness process models. _See also_ Main Street Clothing Company\n\ninterviews\n\nleveraging\n\nlocation considerations\n\noverview\n\nuse of\n\nBusiness Rule Maintenance page\n\nbusiness rule operations\n\nbusiness rules\n\nactions\n\nadditional tasks\n\napplying\n\nautomating\n\nconditions\n\nconfiguring expressions\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating\n\ncreating expressions\n\ndescription\n\nediting\n\ne-mail notifications\n\nexamples\n\nexcluding\n\nmanaging with web services\n\nname\n\nobtaining list of rules\n\noverview\n\npopulating values\n\npriority order\n\npublishing\n\nrequiring value attributes\n\nresolving validation issues\n\nstatuses\n\nstructure\n\ntriggered by change tracking\n\nvalidating versions against\n\nvalidation\n\nworkflows. _See_ workflows\n\nworking with\n\nC\n\nCDI (customer data integration) solutions\n\ncell-level permissions\n\ncertificates, server\n\nchange tracking\n\nchange tracking groups\n\nchange value actions\n\nchart of accounts\n\nClipboard\n\nCode attribute values\n\nCode property\n\nCode value\n\ncollection members\n\ncollections\n\naccess to\n\nadding consolidated members to\n\nadding leaf members to\n\nadding members to\n\ncombining\n\ncreating\n\nenabling entities for\n\noverview\n\nupdating attributes\n\nweighting of\n\nCommon HTTP Features service\n\ncommon view architecture\n\ncompany, sample. _See_ Main Street Clothing Company\n\nCompatability View\n\nconcatenating values\n\nconditions\n\nbusiness rule workflows\n\nbusiness rules\n\ndeleting\n\nConfiguration Manager. _See_ MDS Configuration Manager\n\nconsolidated members\n\nadding to collections\n\nadding to entities\n\ncreating\n\ndescribed\n\nhierarchies and\n\n_Consolidated table\n\nContext.FullyQualifiedName property\n\nContext.Identifier property\n\nContext.Identifier.Id property\n\nContext.Identifier.InternalId property\n\nContext.Identifier.Name property\n\nContext.Type property\n\ncredentials, prompting for\n\nCSV files\n\ncustomer data integration (CDI) solutions\n\nD\n\ndata. _See also_ records\n\ncleansing\n\ncombining\n\nconsumers of\n\nexporting. _See_ exporting data\n\nexternal access to\n\nfiltering. _See_ filters\n\nin hierarchies. _See_ hierarchies\n\n\"homeless\"\n\nimporting. _See_ importing data\n\nmapping\n\nmaster. _See_ master data\n\nmetadata. _See_ metadata\n\nowners of\n\npagination\n\npreparing for import\n\npublishing. _See_ publishing data\n\nrefreshing\n\nsecurity of. _See_ security\n\nsorting\n\nstaging. _See_ staging process\n\nvalidating. _See_ validation\n\nversions. _See_ versions\n\ndata quality matching\n\ndata quality operations\n\nData Quality Services (DQS)\n\ndata stewards\n\ndata validation\n\nDatabase Engine\n\nDatabase Mail profile\n\ndatabase server role\n\ndatabases. _See_ MDS database\n\ndatasets\n\ndefault value actions\n\ndeny permissions\n\ndeploying models\n\nderived hierarchies\n\naccess to\n\ncreating\n\ncreating with MetadataCreate\n\ndescribed\n\nwith explicit caps\n\nhiding levels\n\nmoving members in\n\nthree-level\n\nviews\n\nvs. explicit hierarchies\n\nDescription property\n\ndirect hierarchy security\n\n\"Does not match\" operator\n\ndomain-based attributes\n\nchanging number of\n\ncreating\n\ndescribed\n\nrecursive hierarchies and\n\ndomains\n\nconsiderations\n\ndescribed\n\nroles\n\nspecialized systems\n\nversions\n\nDQS (Data Quality Services)\n\nE\n\nediting\n\nattributes\n\nbusiness rules\n\nentities\n\nsubscription views\n\ne-mail notifications\n\nbusiness rules\n\nqueries\n\nversion status changes\n\nEmployee entity\n\nenterprise resource planning (ERP)\n\nentities\n\naccess to\n\nadding members to\n\nbase\n\ncreating\n\ncreating from Excel data\n\ncreating in web services\n\ncreating line entity\n\nediting\n\nenabling for collections\n\nenabling for hierarchies\n\nfiltering results\n\nincluding models in\n\nloading\n\nMain Street Clothing Company\n\nmanufacturer\n\nnaming\n\nnavigating\n\noverview\n\npopulating consolidated members for\n\nproduct\n\nrelationships\n\nsubsets\n\nvalidating\n\nentity views\n\nentity-based staging\n\nEntityMembers class\n\nEntityMembers object\n\nEntityMembersCreate operation\n\nEntityMembersGet operation\n\nretrieving members\n\nsearching for members\n\nEntityMembersMerge operation\n\nEntityMembersUpdate operation\n\nERP (enterprise resource planning)\n\nerror numbers\n\nerrors\n\naccess denied\n\ninvalid transaction ID\n\nobjects\n\nretrieving data\n\nduring staging\n\nweb services\n\nerrors view table\n\nETL (extract, transform, and load)\n\nETL processes\n\nExcel\n\nExcel add-in\n\napplying rules\n\nbehavior settings\n\ncombining data\n\nconfiguring settings\n\nconnecting to MDS server\n\ncreating\/modifying entities\n\ndata quality matching\n\ndeletions in managed sheets\n\ninstalling\n\nloading entities\n\nlogging options\n\nmanaging project with\n\nMDS entities\n\noverview\n\npublishing changes\n\nrefreshing data from server\n\nreviewing transactions\n\nsaving\/sharing queries\n\nworking with MDS data\n\nExcel spreadsheets\n\nexplicit cap hierarchies\n\nexplicit hierarchies\n\naccess to\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating\n\ndescribed\n\nmandatory\n\nnaming\n\nnon-mandatory\n\nparent-child relationships\n\npermissions\n\nsibling relationships\n\nvs. derived hierarchies\n\nExplorer\n\napplying business rules in\n\nfunctional area\n\nmetadata and\n\nnew format\n\nresolving validation issues\n\nreviewing business rule issues\n\nExplorer grid\n\nexport views. _See_ subscription views\n\nexporting data\n\nto subscribing systems\n\nsubscription views\n\nexporting members\n\nExportViewCreate option\n\nexpressions, business rules\n\nconfiguring\n\ncreating\n\nexternal actions\n\nextract, transform, and load. _See_ ETL\n\nextract, transform, and load (ETL)\n\nF\n\nfiles\n\nassociated with members\n\nCSV\n\nmaster\n\nsample\n\nXML\n\nfilter operators\n\nfilter warnings\n\nfiltered lists\n\nfilters. _See also_ grids\n\napplying to members\n\nentity results\n\nfinding data via\n\noperators for\n\nfinance administrators\n\nFinance model\n\nFinance_data.pkg file\n\nfinding items\n\ndata via filtering\n\nmembers\n\nmembers in hierarchies\n\nSearchTerm property\n\nFortune 500 companies\n\nfree-form attributes\n\nfunctional area permissions\n\nfunctional security\n\nG\n\nGetSecurityPrincipals operation\n\nGetVersion helper class\n\nglobal chart of accounts\n\nGlobally Unique Identifier (GUID)\n\ngrids. _See also_ filters\n\ngroup memberships\n\ngroups. _See also_ users\n\nActive Directory\n\nadding\n\nadding to web UI\n\nassigning security to\n\nattribute. _See_ attribute groups\n\nchange tracking\n\ncombining users\/groups\n\nlocal\n\nlogistics\n\noverlapping permissions\n\npermissions. _See_ permissions\n\npurchasing\n\nretrieving\n\nsearch\n\nwarehouse\n\nGUID (Globally Unique Identifier)\n\nH\n\nHealth and Diagnostics service\n\nhelper class\n\nhierarchies\n\naccess to\n\ncreating with web services\n\nderived. _See_ derived hierarchies\n\ndirect hierarchy security\n\ndisplay settings\n\nenabling entities for\n\nentities\n\nexplicit. _See_ explicit hierarchies\n\nhiding levels\n\nleaf members\n\nmember permissions\n\nmember security\n\nmoving members in\n\nnumber of members in\n\noverlapping permissions\n\noverview\n\nragged vs. level-based\n\nrecursive\n\nsearching for members in\n\nshowing members names\n\nsystem settings\n\nworking with data in\n\nhierarchy management\n\nhierarchy views\n\nhistory\n\nmodels\n\nversions\n\n\"homeless\" data\n\nhotfixes\n\nhttpGetEnabled setting\n\nHTTPS\n\nI\n\nIF...THEN statements\n\nIIS (Internet Information Server)\n\nimporting data\n\npreparing for\n\ninto SQL Server\n\nstaging import types\n\ninto staging tables\n\nincludeExceptionDetailInFaults setting\n\nincremental numbers\n\ninstalling MDS\n\nintegration improvements\n\nIntegration Management area\n\nInternet Explorer\n\ncompatability mode\n\nprompting for credentials\n\nsupport for\n\nInternet Information Server (IIS)\n\nJ\n\nJaccard search term\n\nJaro-Winkler search term\n\nK\n\nKimball, Ralph\n\nL\n\nleaf members. _See also_ members\n\nadding to collections\n\nadding to entities\n\nattributes\n\ncreating\n\ndescribed\n\nhierarchies\n\nupdating\n\nupdating attributes\n\nleaf staging fields\n\nlevel-based hierarchies\n\nLevenshtein search term\n\nlicense agreement\n\nline attributes\n\nline entities\n\nloading\n\nentities\n\nrecords\n\nrelationships\n\nlocal groups\n\nlocation management\n\nlocation workflow process\n\nlocking versions\n\nlogging\n\nExcel add-in\n\nstaging transactions\n\ntransactions\n\nlogistics\n\nLogistics role\n\nlongest common sequence search term\n\nM\n\nMain Street Clothing Company\n\nattribute groups\n\nattributes\n\nbusiness process models\n\nconsiderations\n\ndata steward for\n\nentities\n\nfilling gaps in\n\ninefficient practices\n\nmanaging dimension for\n\nmembers\n\nmodels\n\noverview\n\nprocess maps\n\nstaging process\n\nsubscription views in\n\nsystem architecture\n\nusing Excel add-in\n\nversioning for\n\nmanaged sheets\n\nManagement Studio\n\nManagement Tools service\n\nmanager domain-based attributes\n\nmanufacturer domain-based attributes\n\nmanufacturer entities\n\nmapping data\n\nMarketing role\n\nmaster data. _See also_ data\n\nannotations\n\nbase entity\n\ndefinition of\n\nexporting members\n\nfiltering\n\nin hierarchies. _See_ hierarchies\n\nrelationships and\n\nretrieving\n\nsorting\n\nupdating\n\nvalidation\n\nvs. transactional data\n\nworking with members\n\nmaster data management. _See_ MDM\n\nMaster Data Services. _See_ MDS\n\nmaster files\n\nMatches operator\n\nMDM (master data management)\n\ncomponents\n\nconsiderations\n\nhistory of\n\ninitiating staging process\n\nMicrosoft's solution to\n\noverview\n\nweb applications. _See_ web applications\n\nweb site creation\n\nMDM projects\n\nMDM solutions\n\ncustomer data integration\n\nERP solutions as\n\nFortune 500 companies\n\nproduct information management\n\nspecialized\n\nmdm.tblStgBatch table\n\nmdm.tblStgRelationship table\n\nMDS (Master Data Services)\n\nbulding outside limitations into\n\nconfiguring\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating new MDS database\n\ncreating workflows in\n\ndesigning for exceptions\n\ndesigning for _N_\n\nextending with web services\n\ninstalling\n\nintegrating with other systems\n\nintroduction to\n\nlicense agreement\n\nmapping data\n\nnew features\n\nobtaining latest version\n\nperformance\n\npreparing data for importing\n\npreparing web server for\n\nproduct management processes\n\nrelationships\n\nsample company. _See_ Main Street Clothing Company\n\nsimplifying problems via\n\nstaging process. _See staging entries_\n\nstaging schema\n\nsystem requirements\n\nsystem types\n\nupdates to\n\nvalue proposition\n\nMDS Configuration Manager\n\nassociating database with web application\n\nconfiguring e-mail notifications\n\nconsiderations\n\ndatabase creation\n\nsystem settings\n\nweb application creation\n\nweb site creation\n\nMDS database\n\nassociating with web applications\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating\n\nnaming\n\nrepairing\n\nschema version\n\nsettings\n\ntesting connection\n\nupgrading\n\nversion\n\nwhere to install\n\nMDS entities\n\nMDS models\n\nMDS projects\n\ncomplexity of\n\ncreating in Visual Studio\n\ndetermining scope of\n\nmanaging with Excel add-in\n\nmilestones\n\nsize of\n\nstarting\n\ntemplates\n\nMDS solutions\n\nMDS web applications. _See_ web applications\n\nMDS web service operations\n\nmdsuser.com\n\n.mdxqx extension\n\nmember operations\n\nMemberCount attribute\n\nmembers\n\nadding to collections\n\nadding to entities\n\nannotating\n\napplying filters to\n\nconsolidated. _See_ consolidated members\n\ncreating\n\ndeactivating\n\ndeleting\n\nediting attributes for\n\nexporting\n\nfiles associated with\n\nfiltering entity results\n\nleaf. _See_ leaf members\n\nMain Street Clothing Company\n\nmoving in hierarchies\n\nmoving via Clipboard\n\nmoving via dragging\/dropping\n\nnumber of members displayed\n\noverview\n\npagination and\n\npermissions\n\npopulating\n\npurging\n\nreactivating\n\nretrieving\n\nreturning results related to\n\nsearching for\n\nshowing names of\n\nstaging examples\n\nsummary data\n\nupdating\n\nvalidating\n\nworking with\n\nworking with in web services\n\nMetaCreate operation\n\nmetadata. _See also_ data\n\nMetadata model\n\nmetadata objects\n\nmetadata structure operations\n\nMetadataClone operation\n\nMetadataCreate operation\n\nMetadataGet operation\n\nMetadataUpdate operation\n\nmodel administrators\n\nmodel deployment\n\nmodel deployment packages\n\nmodel object security\n\nmodel objects\n\naccess to\n\npermissions\n\nModelDeploy.exe file\n\nModelMembers operations\n\nmodels\/modeling\n\naccess to\n\nadding members to entities\n\nadvanced techniques\n\nbasic concepts\n\nbuilding\n\nchanging structure of\n\ncommon mistakes\n\ncomplexity and\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating entities for\n\ncreating from scratch\n\ncreating in web services\n\ndead scenarios and\n\ndeploying\n\ndesigning for exceptions\n\ndesigning for _N_\n\nFinance\n\nflexibility vs. function\n\nhistory\n\nlimiting complexity in\n\nMain Street Clothing Company\n\nmanaging changing dimensions\n\noverview\n\npackages of\n\npredefined\n\nproduct. _See_ Product model\n\nrapid deployment of\n\nrelationships\n\nsample\n\nstandardization\n\nvalidation\n\nversions. _See_ versions\n\non web sites\n\nN\n\nnavigational access\n\n.NET Framework 3.5.1 Features service\n\nnumbers\n\ndata mapping and\n\nincremental\n\nnegative\n\noperators for\n\nO\n\nobject models\n\nobjects. _See also specific objects_\n\nerrors\n\nmetadata\n\nmodel. _See_ model objects\n\nOLAP (online analytical processing) systems\n\nonline analytical processing (OLAP) systems\n\nOperationResult object\n\noperators\n\nOR operator\n\nOutlook\n\nP\n\nPageNumber attribute\n\npagination\n\nparent staging fields\n\nparent-child relationships\n\npasswords\n\nperformance\n\nPerformance service\n\npermissions. _See also_ User and Group Permissions\n\napplying\n\nassigning\n\nattributes\n\ncell-level\n\ncombining\n\ndeleting\n\ndenying\n\nfinance administrators\n\nfunctional area\n\ngroups\n\nhierarchy member\n\ninheriting\n\nmembers\n\nmodel objects\n\nobject models\n\norder of operations\n\noverlapping\n\nproduct administrators\n\ntesting\n\nusers\n\nPIM (product information management)\n\nPIM solutions\n\n.pkg extension\n\npoint of sale (POS) systems\n\nPOS (point of sale) systems\n\npreferences\n\nPricing role\n\nprivileges. _See also_ permissions\n\nprocess maps\n\nproduct administrators\n\nproduct entities\n\nproduct information management (PIM)\n\nproduct management processes\n\nProduct model. _See also_ models\/modeling\n\nadding members\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating\n\ncreating entities for\n\nhierarchical structure\n\nProduct_data.pkg file\n\nproducts, assigning line attributes to\n\nprojects. _See_ MDM projects; MDS projects\n\npublishing business rules\n\npublishing changes\n\npublishing data\n\npurchasing group\n\nQ\n\nqueries\n\nR\n\nragged hierarchies\n\nrecords. _See also_ data\n\nduplicate\n\nloading\n\nper page\n\nstaged\n\nvalidation\n\nrecursive hierarchies\n\nrelationship staging examples\n\n_Relationship table\n\nrelationship table fields\n\nrelationships\n\nconsiderations\n\nloading\n\nmany-to-many\n\nstaging examples\n\nstaging process\n\nRepair Database button\n\nRequest_ID\n\nreturn on investment (ROI)\n\nROI (return on investment)\n\nrole services\n\nroles\n\ndata stewards\n\nLogistics\n\nMarketing\n\nPricing\n\nroles, system\n\nrules. _See_ business rules\n\nS\n\nsample company. _See_ Main Street Clothing Company\n\nsample files\n\nsample models\n\nschema version\n\nsearches. _See_ finding items\n\nSearchTerm property\n\nSecure Sockets Layer. _See_ SSL\n\nsecurity. _See also_ access\n\nadministrators\n\nauthentication\n\nchanges in SQL Server 2012\n\nconsiderations\n\ndirect hierarchy\n\nfunctional area\n\ngroups\n\nhierarchy members\n\nmodel object\n\noverview\n\npasswords\n\npermissions. _See_ permissions\n\nprivileges\n\nSecure Sockets Layer. _See_ SSL\n\nstaging issues\n\ntables\n\nusers\n\nvia web services\n\nweb applications\n\nweb sites\n\nsecurity operations\n\nsecurity principals\n\nSecurity service\n\nSecurityPrincipal object\n\nSecurityPrivilege object\n\nserver certificates\n\nserver farms\n\nservers. _See also_ Windows Server 2008 R2\n\nadding to safe list\n\nconnecting to\n\nInternet Information Server\n\nrefreshing data from\n\nSMTP\n\nSQL Server. _See_ SQL Server\n\nweb\n\nservice account\n\nService Broker queue\n\nservice namespace\n\nService Packs\n\nservice references\n\nservices. _See_ web services\n\nSharePoint\n\nSharePoint workflows\n\nsibling relationships\n\nsimilarity matches\n\nSimilarity operator\n\nSMTP authentication\n\nSMTP servers\n\nSOE (system of entry)\n\nsolutions\n\nCDI\n\nERP\n\nMDM. _See_ MDM solutions\n\nMDS\n\nPIM\n\nSOR (system of record)\n\nsort order\n\nsorting data\n\nSQL Server\n\nattributes\n\nimporting data into\n\nviewing subscription views in\n\nSQL Server 2012\n\ndata changes in\n\nnew MDS features\n\nsecurity changes in\n\nSQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)\n\nSQL Server Management Studio\n\nviewing staging errors\n\nSSIS (SQL Server Integration Services)\n\nSSL (Secure Sockets Layer)\n\nSSL connections\n\nstaging batch interval\n\nstaging batch table\n\nstaging batches\n\nstaging errors view\n\nstaging examples\n\nattributes\n\nmembers\n\nrelationships\n\nstaging import types\n\nstaging process\n\nadvantages of\n\narchitecture\n\nbatch interval\n\nbulk operations\n\nclearing batches from queue\n\nclearing staging queue\n\ndeactivating members\n\nentity-based staging\n\nerrors during\n\ninitiating\n\nleaf\/parent staging fields\n\nloading relationships\n\nlogging transactions\n\nperformance\n\nreactivating members\n\nsecurity issues\n\nstaging import types\n\nsystem settings for\n\nvia Master Data Manager\n\nvia stored procedures\n\nvia web services\n\nstaging (stg) schema\n\nstaging sweep procedure\n\nstaging tables\n\nstaging views\n\nstg (staging) schema\n\nstored procedures\n\nsubscribing systems\n\nsubscription view formats\n\nsubscription view operations\n\nsubscription views\n\ncreating\n\ncreating with web services\n\ndeleting\n\nediting\n\nentity views\n\nexporting data\n\nin Main Street Clothing Company\n\nmodel deployment and\n\nstaging and\n\nviewing in SQL Server\n\nsubsequence\n\nsubsets\n\nSystem Administration area\n\nattribute groups in\n\nbuilding a model\n\ndescribed\n\nhierarchies\n\nviewing model structure in\n\nsystem administrators\n\nsystem of entry (SOE)\n\nsystem of record (SOR)\n\nsystem roles\n\noverview\n\nsubscribing systems\n\nsystem of entry\n\nsystem of record\n\nsystem settings\n\nsystem settings operations\n\nT\n\ntables\n\nadding columns\n\nadding rows\n\nnaming conventions\n\noverloaded fields\n\noverwriting rows\n\nsecurable\n\nsecurity\n\nstaging\n\ntblMemberAttribute table\n\ntblStgBatch table\n\ntblStgMember table\n\ntblStgRelationship table\n\ntemplates\n\nTotalMemberCount attribute\n\nTotalPages attribute\n\ntransaction ID\n\ntransaction logging\n\ntransaction operations\n\ntransactional data\n\ntransactions\n\nannotating\n\nconsiderations\n\ngetting\n\nlogging\n\nmanagement\n\noverview\n\nreversing\n\nreviewing\n\ntypes of\n\nTransactionsGet operations\n\nTransactionsReverse operations\n\nT-SQL jobs\n\nT-SQL statements\n\nU\n\nUAC (User Account Control)\n\nuniform resource locators (URLs)\n\nupdates\n\nmaster data\n\nMDS\n\nmembers\n\nmetadata\n\nupgrading database\n\nURLs (uniform resource locators)\n\nUser Account Control (UAC)\n\nUser and Group Permissions area\n\nconsiderations\n\ndescribed\n\ne-mail validation\n\nuser notifications\n\nuser preference operations\n\nusers\n\nActive Directory\n\nassigning security to\n\ncombining users\/groups\n\ngroups of. _See_ groups\n\nnumber of\n\npermissions. _See_ permissions\n\npreferences\n\nretrieving\n\nV\n\nvalidation\n\napplying rules\n\nbusiness rules\n\ne-mail notifications\n\nentities\n\nmanaging rule results\n\nmembers\n\nmodels\n\nrecords in MDS\n\nresolving issues\n\nstatuses\n\nstored procedures\n\nuser notifications\n\nvalidating model version\n\nversions\n\nweb services\n\nvalidation, data\n\nvalidation actions\n\nvalidation operations\n\nValidationGet operations\n\nValidationGetByMember operation\n\nValidationGetByUser operation\n\nValidationGetByVersion operation\n\nValidationProcess operation\n\nvalues. _See_ attribute values\n\nversion control workflows\n\nversion flags\n\nVersion Management area\n\nversions\n\nancestry\n\nassigning flags to\n\nchanging name\/description\n\nchanging status\n\ncommitting\n\nconsiderations\n\ncopying\n\ndeleting\n\ne-mail notification\n\nexamples of\n\nExcel add-in\n\nhistory\n\nlocking\n\nMain Street Clothing Company\n\nopen\n\noverview\n\nreopening committed version\n\nreturning list of\n\nstatuses\n\ntransactions. _See_ transactions\n\nuses for\n\nusing web services with\n\nvalidating\n\nviews\n\ncommon\n\nderived hierarchy\n\nentity\n\nVisual Studio\n\ncreating MDS projects in\n\ncreating SharePoint workflows\n\nW\n\nwarehouse group\n\nWCF (Windows Communication Foundation)\n\nweb applications\n\nassociating MDS database with\n\nautomatic creation of\n\ncreating\n\nnaming\n\nprebuilt\n\nsecuring\n\nservice references\n\nsettings\n\nsystem requirements\n\nweb browsers. _See also_ Internet Explorer\n\nweb configuration file\n\nweb servers\n\nweb service operations\n\nweb services\n\nabstraction layer\n\nconsiderations\n\ncreating attributes\n\ncreating entities\n\ncreating hierarchies with\n\ncreating models\n\ncreating subscription views with\n\nenabling\n\nerror handling in\n\nexposing\n\nmanaging business rules\n\nretrieving members\n\nsetting security with\n\nstaging data via\n\nusing\n\nusing with versions\n\nvalidation\n\nworking with members\n\nWSDL\n\nWeb Services Description Language (WSDL)\n\nweb sites\n\ncertificates\n\ncompanion to book\n\ncreating Master Data Manager site\n\nmdsuser.com\n\nmodel packages on\n\nnaming\n\npasswords\n\nsample files\n\nsecurity\n\nservice accounts\n\nsettings\n\nweb UI, adding groups to\n\nweb-based user interface (UI)\n\nWindows 7 systems\n\nWindows Communication Foundation (WCF)\n\nWindows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment service\n\nWindows Process Activation service\n\nWindows Server 2008\n\nWindows Server 2008 R2. _See also_ servers\n\npreparing for upgrade\n\nupgrading\n\nWindows Vista\n\nworkflow integration service\n\nworkflows\n\nbusiness rules\n\nconditions\n\ncreating in MDS\n\nexternal to MDS\n\nSharePoint\n\ntriggering from MDS\n\nversion control\n\nwrapper classes\n\nWSDL (Web Services Description Language)\n\nX\n\nXML files\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nA WORLD WITHOUT WHY\nA WORLD WITHOUT WHY\n\nRaymond Geuss\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by Princeton University Press\n\nPublished by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,\n\nPrinceton, New Jersey 08540\n\nIn the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,\n\n6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW\n\npress.princeton.edu\n\nAll Rights Reserved\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nGeuss, Raymond.\n\n[Essays. Selections.]\n\nA world without why \/ Raymond Geuss.\n\npages cm\n\nIncludes bibliographical references and index.\n\nISBN 978-0-691-15588-3 (hardcover)\n\n1. Philosophy\u2014History. 2. Philosophy, Modern\u201421st century.\n\n3. Optimism. 4. Ethics. I. Title.\n\nB1626.G481 2014\n\n190\u2014dc23\n\n2013043562\n\nBritish Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available\n\nThis book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro\n\nPrinted on acid-free paper. \u221e\n\nPrinted in the United States of America\n\n1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2\nSPIEGEL: Vor zwei Wochen, Herr Professor, schien die Welt noch in Ordnung....\n\nADORNO: Mir nicht.\nContents\n\nPREFACE ix\n\n1. Goals, Origins, Disciplines 1\n\n2. Vix intellegitur 22\n\n3. Marxism and the Ethos of the Twentieth Century 45\n\n4. Must Criticism Be Constructive? 68\n\n5. The Loss of Meaning on the Left 91\n\n6. Authority: Some Fables 112\n\n7. A Note on Lying 135\n\n8. Politics and Architecture 144\n\n9. The Future of Theological Ethics 163\n\n10. Did Williams Do Ethics? 175\n\n11. The Wisdom of Oedipus and the Idea of a Moral Cosmos 195\n\n12. Who Was the First Philosopher? 223\n\n13. A World without Why 231\n\nNOTES 237\n\nINDEX 257\nPreface\n\nIt is natural for us to think that humans as animals belong to a certain biological species and are, as such, subject to a number of natural necessities such as the vital need to maintain a certain minimal body temperature and to eat and drink if they are to survive. We are, however, not merely biological entities but also inherently social animals, and societies, too, will \"need\" to satisfy certain conditions if they are to survive. In societies that do survive there will be a variety of mechanisms for imposing \"necessities\" on individuals and smaller groups; often these mechanisms will function under the guise of simply transmitting or \"passing on\" natural necessities. Thus, I must eat if I am to survive, so we must all work cooperatively for several hours a days in the fields or rice paddies if we are to survive. This transmission, however, is never a mere process of neutral \"passing on\" necessity. Actual human \"needs\" of any kind are never presented to us, as it were, \"raw\" but always in one social configuration or other, so any discussion of basic biological needs is perforce a kind of retrospective abstraction, which might be warranted, but, if it is, is always warranted for some specific purpose. In fact, what is called \"transmission\" is always a process of the transformation or social constitution of needs. \"Transformation or constitution\" is not a mistaken or incautious formulation, as if I couldn't make up my mind whether there was something, some \"need,\" there to start with that was \"transformed\" into a slightly different need or whether \"needs\" did not \"really\" exist until social processed. Rather it is an expression of my view\u2014which, of course, could be incorrect but is not inconsidered\u2014that this alternative is not to be taken as an absolute but is context-dependent. \"We all need to work together cooperatively in order to survive\" is deeply ambiguous, and this ambiguity is a breeding ground for ideological distortion. It can mean:\n\na. \"if we don't all work together cooperatively, each of us will die very soon (because the small boat we're in is leaking badly)\"\n\nb. \"if we don't all work together cooperatively, not all of us will survive (although some may)\"\n\nc. \"if we don't all work together cooperatively, we won't survive as a recognizable group (although each individual may disperse and survive alone or as a member of a different group)\"\n\nIn addition to these strict \"needs,\" that is, conditions that must be fulfilled if survival is to be ensured, humans also have an individually and socially idiosyncratic set of desires, preferences, wishes, and aspirations. We all need to eat and drink, but I prefer tea to coffee, although many people have the reverse preference. I also recognise that there are, or at any rate have been, individuals and even whole societies, such as that of ancient Rome, in which neither tea nor coffee is drunk at all. We also all grow up and remain throughout our entire lives enmeshed in a thick web of what are now called \"normative\" demands that have their origin ultimately in institutions that claim \"authority\" over us. In many Western European societies fathers of families were for a long time construed as \"heads of the household\" and had significant real and moral powers over their wives, children, and servants; political authorities of various kinds demanded allegiance; churches (or The Church) claimed to preach the word of god and had institutions like courts to enforce their views; relations of economic dependence among the members of small groups gave the words of those in key positions special weight; local forms of social pressure (and of solidarity) could take sharply articulated forms. Finally, as social beings we humans are to some extent capable of perceiving and acquiring knowledge about the real world in which we live, and we have some extremely feeble, only intermittently effective, and highly variable ratiocinative capacities. Human life is to a large extent constituted by an attempt to reconcile \"needs,\" desires, and \"normative claims\" on an individual and social level in view of our best knowledge about our world.\n\nQuestions about how individuals and groups should behave can arise in any social form, but it can seem to us from the vantage point of the apparently infinite distance that separates twenty-first-century Europeans from \"traditional\" societies that in those societies individuals may be perplexed and different groups (and duties to different groups) may conflict, but the question of the general structure of an individual human life and of social life as a whole will not seem to be particularly problematic. Since, however, the sources of such normative claims will be diverse, it can easily happen that they seem to make different demands on agents even in traditional societies. Equally individuals' perceptions, beliefs, and preferences will be different.\n\nIt is natural for thinking people in the West to start by assuming that the world is (finally) \"in order\" and trying to formulate explicitly and then \"reconcile\" the various claims made by the different authorities: The Gospel accounts of Mark and John can be made to tally. The emperor, the pope, and the local lord \"really\" are demanding us to lead the same kind of life. St. Paul can be rendered consistent with Aristotle. In a world with relatively intact and generally recognised authorities, the question of discipline, both of how and to what extent one should or may coerce others, and of self-discipline seems in principle answerable: One disciplines people by training them, as much as possible, to want to do what they in any case \"must\" (of natural necessity) do and also what they should do. To what extent it will be possible to make people want to do what they must and should do will depend on a number of unpredictable factors, among them the nature of the demands society makes and the kind of forces of coercion, manipulation, and educations it has available to it.\n\nWhat happens, however, if the questions go beyond queries about reconciling occasional discrepancies between individual authoritative statements? What if the emperor is a sinner and schismatic? What if the pope is a heretic? What if the very idea of \"being a heretic\" comes to look archaic and irrelevant? What could proper discipline (including self-discipline) look like in a world like that?\n\nSo is the world, including our authorities, fundamentally in order, or is it not? What would we mean by either of these two statements? How could we argue for one or the other of them? What, if anything, would follow for our lives if one or the other of these statements were true and could be shown to be true? There seems little doubt but that traditionally philosophy was supposed to ask this question, and also little doubt that philosophers had a predilection to answer it affirmatively and to draw from their particular version of the affirmative answer very far-reaching consequences for how humans should act. Dewey, that is, was clearly right to think that traditional philosophy was inherently conservative, having as its goal the project of inventing arguments to support as much of the existing forms of social authority as possible. Aristophanes may or may not have got Socrates right in taking him to be a dangerous subversive, but Plato was certainly on Aristophanes' side in thinking that a happy ending was possible only in a polity from which \"sophists\" were excluded. The difference is that Plato added to Aristophanes' arsenal of satire, innuendo, drama, slapstick, and verbal pyrotechnics a highly developed variant of one of the sophists' own weapons, ratiocination.\n\nThe task of philosophy became significantly more difficult starting in the late eighteenth century when the whole concept of \"authority\" but especially that of \"moral authority\" became problematic. The reason for this is the modern hypertrophy of ethical thinking centred on the idea of \"autonomy.\" After all, \"freedom\" was not the philosophical obsession in the ancient and medieval worlds that it has become in the past 250 years. That is perhaps because earlier periods actually had visible classes of slaves and serfs, and the distinction of \"free\" men from them was not as theoretically problematic; freedom was primarily a political problem\u2014could someone torture you with impunity or not; did you have to pay a lord to get married and work without compensation in his fields for a few days a week or not?\u2014not a moral or philosophical one. To be sure, from Herodotus to Nero one finds pathetic appeals to the \"freedom of the Hellenes,\" and \"libertas\" plays an important role in Roman politics, but this originally meant absence of barbarian, especially Persian, military domination over the Greek city-states, then \"independence from foreign rule\" (more generally), and this had little to do with the internal constitution\u2014oligarchy, monarchy, despotism, democracy\u2014of any given city-state. Later \"freedom\" could be associated with reduction or absence of forms of taxation, and with certain limited powers of self-management within the omnipotent Roman imperium. Or \"freedom\" might come to be associated with \"civitas,\" the acquisition of Roman citizenship. None of these were concepts that seemed to pose any special philosophical difficulties, certainly not any of the kind that arise for post-Augustineans. To be sure, one philosophical school, the Stoics, had developed views of freedom, but apart from them \"eleutheria\" was not a key concept in older Greek philosophy.\n\nThe situation changes completely with the advent of the new conceptions of radical individual autonomy in the eighteenth century. With Kant we get a canonical distinction between the morally valuable \"autonomy\" of an individual subject and a reprehensible \"heteronomy\" established as fundamental for ethics. Fascination with this distinction, though, can have bad effects for the concept of \"authority\" because it can easily be thought to belong more naturally with \"heteronomy\" than with \"autonomy.\" After all, if the doctor is the authority I will often follow his (or her) directives, not because I know them to be good but because the doctor has recommended them. Since it is clearly nonsense to say that I am being morally deficient in following good advice, the Kantian has a prima facie problem here, which he (or she) might try to address by saying that although I may not \"autonomously\" have decided to do this rather than that, I can still count as having behaved responsibly if I have autonomously decided to trust the doctor. This, however, does not solve the difficulty but simply pushes it back a step. Am I in a position to know that passing this particular examination really gives the doctor knowledge? How do I know that in accepting the \"authority\" of the Medical Board and its examination procedure I am doing more than accepting the local prejudice of my time and society? After all, there were formal and highly technical theology examinations in the Middle Ages, but no one now thinks those who passed those exams could tell us anything that would deserve to be believed or acted on. At each point in the regress the same kind of difficulty re-arises. The Kantian, then, will probably resort to saying that at some point the regress must stop and I must be able, or must have been able, to evaluate the authority-claim at that step \"autonomously\" (and I either did do that, showing myself to be a morally worthy subject, or failed to do that, thereby leaving myself open to legitimate moral criticism). Again, the use of the philosophical \"must\" should arouse suspicion. Why \"must\" there be such a point? The reason is that otherwise the theory with its sharp dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy wouldn't be plausible. But perhaps the theory is not plausible. In the ancient world \"freedom\" was not construed as incompatible with the recognition of \"authority.\" Free men and free self-governing communities would obviously orient themselves on the model of famous men of the past and on the opinions and practice of wise contemporaries. Similarly they would recognise the importance of traditions, established practices, and \"unwritten laws\"; in Rome they would have special regard for the auctoritas of the Senate. Finally, if they had any sense, they would attempt to interpret and obey advice, commands, and warnings given by the gods through oracles or via other \"signs.\" We don't believe in divine signs\u2014am I sure that my disbelief is something I acquired completely \"autonomously\" and is not in any way a reflection of the tacit assumptions of my cultural context?\u2014but if modern conceptions of \"autonomy\" are incompatible with any other of these phenomena, then so much the worse for those conceptions. What sort of human life would it be which failed to assign an important place to respect for, and even a deference to, the judgement and exemplary practice of others? Reverence, respect, and trust are different from blind or coerced submission\u2014in fact real respect is arguably never \"blind,\" but that also does not mean it is always the result of the \"autonomous decision\" of an individual (in the Kantian sense). When Kant claims \"Selbst der Heilige des Evangelii mu\u00df zuvor mit unserem Ideal der sittlichen Vollkommenheit verglichen werden, ehe man ihn daf\u00fcr erkennt\" [\"Even the holy man of the Gospels must antecedently be compared with our ideal of moral perfection, before one recognises him <as such a holy man>\"], this is, as Hegel might have put it, one of those half truths which, if presented as the whole truth, is worse than a simple mistake. Of course, in some sense we have to be able to connect the life of a human being who is a candidate for being an ethical paradigm with our moral conceptions, but it does not follow either that we antecedently have absolutely fixed and determinate conceptions, as Kant seems to assume, or that we accept someone as exemplary only if that person corresponds in every respect to what preexisting conceptions we might have. Otherwise it would not be clear how moral development or change was possible, but refusal to learn or to be surprised is no sign of an especially strong or good character; it is more usually of some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and fear. The other \"half\" of \"the truth\" is: our \"ideal of ethical perfection\" is never simply our own, in the sense of being a completely autonomous creation from nothing, or in the sense that we have in every way adequately \"rationally assessed and tested\" every component of it. Not only have we in fact never done this, but this is not the description of a possible state of human affairs. Kant's claim about the \"holy man of the Gospels\" is for him the end of the discussion and the story. Seeing that claim in contraposition to its other half, however, should rather be seen as the beginning of serious discussion.\n\nThe \"Enlightenment\" ideal of an autonomous individual who restricts himself in his acting and judging strictly to that which he understands thoroughly, has rationally well-grounded views about, and has in his control does not describe a possible form of human life. The proper response to this is not simply to accept the station in life we have been assigned and the beliefs our local \"authorities\" deem to appropriate for us to hold. The thinkers of the Enlightenment may have connected the practice of \"criticism\" with a particular quasimetaphysics of \"freedom,\" but there is no particular reason for us to make this mistake. As Foucault once put it, we need to extract and retain \"the ethos of enlightenment\"\u2014reasoned investigation of claims\u2014from the \"dogma of Enlightenment.\"\n\nThe essays in this collection, all of which were written during the past five years, discuss a number of different issues that arise from this basic situation: What is \"authority\"? What is \"discipline\"? What is \"criticism\"? What is the relation of authority to the question of the \"meaning\" of human life?\n\nSome of the essays in this collection have appeared in print before: essays 1, 10, and 11 in Arion (fall 2009, spring 2012, and spring 2013, respectively); essay 2 in Cambridge Literary Review (issue 1\/2009); essay 13 in The Point (issue 2\/2010); essay 9 in Studies in Christian Ethics (25, no. 2 [2012]). Essay 6 I originally wrote in German, and a severely truncated version of that text appeared in Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Ideengeschichte (Heft IV\/4, winter 2010); this is a translation of a revised text based on that longer original.\n\nMy thanks for discussion of all the topics and essays in this volume to the members of the Philosophisches Forschungskolloquium and especially to Richard Raatzsch. Without the help of Hilary Gaskin I would not have been able to write any of these texts.\nA WORLD WITHOUT WHY\n1\n\nGoals, Origins, Disciplines\n\nIn 1894 Wilhelm Windelband, who was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stra\u00dfburg, gave the annual Rector's Address to the assembled members of the university. He took as his topic the structure and classification of the sciences. It is superficial, he claimed, to try to divide the sciences by reference to their subject matter into sciences of nature on the one hand and sciences of spirit (or culture) on the other. A physical object like Mont Blanc or a species of plant or animal can be the subject of aesthetic analysis and evaluation, but such analysis is not part of natural science. Similarly, any human artistic activity has a psychological and eventually a neurophysiological or biochemical basis, but this does not make a study of the brain activity of Michelangelo while he was painting part of \"the humanities\" (as we would call them). Neither is it the case that there is some specific method or set of characteristic methods used by the natural as opposed to the cultural sciences (or vice versa). Precise observation is equally important everywhere, and the basic forms of logical inference and evidentiary argumentation are similar in all scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, Windelband argued, there is an important distinction between the two basic kinds of \"science\"; it is merely that the distinction is not in terms of methods or subject matter but in terms of goals or aims. Sciences, after all, are systematic human constructs, and most organized human activity is guided by some goal or other. We categorize things in different ways depending on our different purposes. A practical field guide to identifying things that fly in the night sky in a certain region of the earth might appropriately include both owls and bats, although according to another classificatory system that is widely used in biology, owls and bats do not belong very closely together because the first are birds and the second mammals. The field guide is not wrong to include bats and owls (though it would be wrong if it asserted that bats belong to the biological order aves or owls to the order mammalia). Similarly, a survival manual might perfectly reasonably group together some kinds of mushrooms and insects in one chapter, \"Things humans can eat,\" and distinguish them from a group containing poisonous mushrooms and other \"Things humans cannot eat\" in another chapter, even though this division cuts across recognized biological categories.\n\nOne reasonable human goal is to learn to deal with the world by recognizing the recurrent regularities it exhibits. Sciences with this goal Windelband called \"nomothetic.\" All mushrooms that look like this are poisonous, and if you eat them you will become very ill indeed and perhaps die. On the other hand, as human beings we are interested not only in laws, regularities, and recurrent features of the world but also in certain striking singularities. So, for instance, we are interested not just in the ways Mrs Dalloway is one more novel exhibiting the features all other novels exhibit but also in what makes it different from other novels or even unique. An account aimed at exhibiting the singularity of an object or event was to be called \"idiographic.\"\n\nThe period of the Second German Empire (1871\u20131919) was a Golden Age for the discussion of classificatory problems. This is probably not unconnected with certain aggressive imperialist ambitions that were widely entertained by the political classes of the time, which in turn were mirrored in the dominance of neo-Kantianism. Kant was notoriously almost pathologically obsessed with intellectual (and moral) tidiness, with making sharp and clear distinctions that would allow one to divide the world up into easily cognizable objects and sectors. For the neo-Kantian the question of the autonomy, distinctiveness, and principles of division of different kinds of human activity was of the very greatest concern. Sometimes these were nothing but turf wars, but sometimes more substantive issues were in play. Thus the discussion of economics between the so-called Historical School and the followers and associates of Carl Menger had ostensibly to do with the role that institutions and history should play in the study of economics, but that disagreement clearly mirrored differences in the conception of the way economic development would, could, or should take place. Could the industrial structures of Manchester simply be replicated in Germany, or would economic development need to take a very different course given the differences in history and institutions between Germany and Britain?\n\nWindelband, of course, writing in late nineteenth-century Germany, did not have at his disposal the concept of \"the humanities\" but would have had to speak of the Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften. Actually his Rectoral Address is entitled \"Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,\" though at one point he also refers to les belles lettres. Even if one cannot take seriously Windelband's specific theory about the nomothetic and idiographic, his point that what is at issue are disciplines as human constructs, not simply unvarnished, contrasting blocks of material, is well taken. When we talk about the humanities we are talking about a set of disciplines, human constructs, and we can undertake the construction of these disciplines in a variety of different ways, as well as classify the kinds of constructs that result in a variety of different ways.\n\nWindelband's two basic questions, then, are what sorts of things do we as humans generally want to know about, and why? One way of trying to answer these questions is by observing that there is a strong human tendency to want to know about the origins of things, as if this allowed one a special access to understanding them. What is probably the oldest extant document of Western literature provides several instances of this tendency. In the Iliad (book 6, lines 119\u2013236) Homer describes an encounter on the field of battle between two warriors who do not know each other. Before they fight, one, the Greek Diomedes, son of Tydeus, asks the other, who turns out to be an ally of the Trojans named Glaukos, who he is (\u03c4\u03af\u03c2 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03c3\u03cd \u1f10\u03c3\u03c3\u03b9, \u03c6\u03ad\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03b5, \u03ba\u03b1\u03c4\u03b1\u03b8\u03bd\u03b7\u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u1f00\u03bd\u03b8\u03c1\u03ce\u03c0\u03c9\u03bd;). Glaukos replies by embarking on a genealogy reaching back five generations, which contains a series of elaborate narrative accounts of what his father and grandfather and some of his ancestors did at various points in their lives:\n\nHigh-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation [\u03c4\u03af\u03b7 \u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u1f74\u03bd \u1f10\u03c1\u03b5\u03b5\u03af\u03bd\u03b5\u03b9\u03c2;]?\n\nAs is the generation of leaves [\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03ae], so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation [\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03ae] of men will grow while another dies. Yet if you wish to learn all this and be certain of my genealogy:\n\n[\u1f44\u03c6\u03c1\u1fbf \u1f10\u1fe2 \u03b5\u1f30\u03b4\u1fc7\u03c2 \/ \u1f21\u03bc\u03b5\u03c4\u03ad\u03c1\u03b7\u03bd \u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03ae\u03bd: literally,  \n\"that you might know well our generation \/ race \/ lineage\"]  \nthere are plenty of men who know it.\n\nThere follow here about fifty lines describing the trials, vicissitudes, and heroic exploits of his various ancestors (Ailos > Sisyphos > Glaukos (I) > Bellerophontes > Hippolochos). Glaukos ends his genealogy by speaking of his father:\n\nBut Hippolochos begot me, and I claim that he is my father; he sent me to Troy, and urged upon me repeated injunctions, to be always among the bravest, and hold my head above others, not shaming the generation [\u03b3\u03ad\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2] of my fathers, who were the greatest men in Ephyre and again in wide Lykia.\n\nSuch is my generation and the blood I claim to be born from\n\n[\u03c4\u03b1\u03cd\u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u03c4\u03bf\u03b9 \u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u1fc6\u03c2 \u03c4\u03b5 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03b1\u1f35\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2 \u03b5\u1f54\u03c7\u03bf\u03bc\u03b1\u03b9 \u03b5\u1f36\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9].\n\nOne might think this is just an instance of puerile boasting, which of course it is, and we might therefore put it aside as irrelevant. In this context it is, however, perhaps not as off-topic as it might seem. This is a world in which a few highly individuated warriors stand out\u2014often literally, it seems, standing in front of a large, anonymous mass of fighters (the \u03bb\u03b1\u03bf\u03af). By reciting his pedigree in such detail, Glaukos is imparting important and relevant information about his back-ground and probable training, as well as giving a kind of performance. Perhaps he is trying to raise his own spirits and to intimidate his opponent, signalling that he has no intention of slinking away, but he is also in some sense actually changing the situation. Having the pedigree Glaukos has means in this context that one is likely to be a person of a certain sort, interested and skilled in warlike pursuits, and brought up to try, as Glaukos says, \"to be always among the bravest\"; announcing that pedigree in a situation of public confrontation means identifying oneself in a certain way and thereby making it impossible to withdraw anonymously, without loss of face, into the mass of \u03bb\u03b1\u03bf\u03af.\n\nWhen Diomedes hears Glaukos's stories about his ancestors, he realizes that his own grandfather and Glaukos's grandfather were hereditary \"guest-friends,\" and so the two warriors decide not to fight each other after all and instead exchange armour in token of the renewal of this hereditary relation of guest-friendship. Determining who they are via their respective genealogies has important normative consequences for how they think it appropriate to treat each other. The question of who one's opponent is seems in this world a perfectly natural one to ask, and it also seems natural to answer that question, even in the heat of battle, by giving a genealogy and a series of narratives. Who I am and what my essential properties are are thought to be connected with my origin, which is given by a genealogy. The genealogical narrative is assumed to disclose something important about my essential powers, obligations, and entitlements. What we would call \"natural\" and what we would call \"social\" properties are not distinctly separated. Is the question of \"origin\" really so natural as all that?\n\nAnother early and important example of the human concern with origins is Hesiod's great cosmological poem Theogonia, which explains who a large number of gods, goddesses, and so forth are by giving their genealogies. Giving the genealogy here is intended to be explanatory; to know who and what a given god is means to be able to locate him in the sequence of divine generations, and this also gives one at least some minimal ability to address him, to know what to expect of him and how to deal with him.\n\nOddly enough, this genealogical interest in origins does not seem to have developed in the ancient world into an intellectual, hegemonic, formal discipline. Genealogical inquiries do not seem to have been one of the major direct ancestors of anything we moderns would recognize as full-blown \"history\" (or, for that matter, what the Greeks called \"history,\" namely systematic empirical enquiry of any kind), and history itself seems never in the ancient world to have attained the exalted status it occupied in some parts of Europe in the modern period. Rather, at a relatively early age the genealogical impulse was crushed to death and pulverized between two huge millstones, which to some extent represented theoretical competitors to genealogy. These two competitors were rhetoric and philosophy.\n\nTo start with the first of these, rhetorical culture was focused on producing persuasion through the medium of correct, aesthetically attractive, and effective speaking. Rhetorical training, then, meant the study of language in all its aspects but also the inculcation of certain aesthetic, moral, and political values that were considered part of being a persuasive speaker. In discussing ancient rhetoric it is important not to lose sight of two important facts. First of all, rhetorical training was in the first instance eminently vocational and practical, not abstractly speculative or merely ornamental. The ancient Greeks sometimes distinguished three types of persons who went to the Olympic Games. First there were those who went to compete\u2014to run, jump, throw the javelin, race their chariots, or pummel one another into insensibility with their fists. Then there were those who went to sell things; in the era before corporate sponsorships they were the objects of an entirely appropriate, almost universal contempt. Finally there were those who went to watch. This third group, the spectators, were the archetypal \"theorists.\" Observing, especially observing a highly public competition, can easily come to be associated with commenting on the performance of individual competitors and then with a kind of rudimentary criticism. Ancient rhetoricians were either direct participants in the rough-and-tumble of ancient politics, speaking in public assemblies and trying to get the better of other speakers by defeating their proposals, or competitive performers, and so, in the terms of this comparison, they were more like Olympic athletes than like spectators. Rhetoric as a disciplined skill seems in fact originally to have had a close connection with proto-democratic politics, where such skills would for obvious reasons be particularly valued.\n\nAlthough the basic structure of the discipline of rhetoric and its teleological orientation were practical and political, this did not exclude the development of some kinds of theoretical analysis and relatively disinterested criticism as a subordinate part of rhetorical culture. Thus in several early Platonic dialogues, particularly the Protagoras, we see Plato making fun of teachers of rhetoric who give way to an obsession with correct linguistic usage, subtle semantic differences, and a kind of morally edifying but, Plato claims, fundamentally insubstantial and unsound literary criticism.\n\nThe second important fact is that this rhetorical training was not, contrary to the propaganda of Plato, originally just a technique for unscrupulously manipulating people. To put it in somewhat later terminology, the original project of rhetoric was to teach something both inherently valuable and instrumentally valuable. It was inherently valuable because it made those who learn and practice it good, beautiful, and self-confident (and these are values in themselves), and it was instrumentally valuable because it was useful in helping one get one's way politically. It was precisely this orientation towards human improvement, not just effective instrumental manipulation, that made some of the original forms of rhetorical training such an easy target for Plato's criticism. Plato was terrified by what he took to be the potentially subversive (\"democratic\") political possibilities of rhetoric: anyone who could pay the fees, regardless of their genealogy and family connections, could learn the art of speaking persuasively from professional teachers of rhetoric. Nevertheless, Plato couches his criticism in epistemological terms. If the study of rhetoric really makes people better, he argues, then surely its teachers must be able to explain what the human good is and how the study of rhetoric conduces to helping people attain it. This is part of Plato's general argument that you cannot be performing an activity well unless you can explain why you are doing every component part of it in the way you are, and you can't do that unless you have the correct general theory. Since rhetoricians were basically inculcating skills in practical public speaking, secondarily developing certain ways of interpreting literature, and had some theories about some things (such as the correct order of the parts of a speech) but no general theory of the human good, Plato's conclusion is that they did not really know what they were doing and hence could not be doing it well, except, as he condescendingly sometimes adds, by accident (\u03b8\u03b5\u03af\u1fb3 \u03bc\u03bf\u03af\u03c1\u1fb3, Ion 542a).\n\nSeen retrospectively from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, there seems nothing extravagant in the claims of professors of rhetoric that they were making those whom they taught \"better people\"; after all, they were making them more able to participate effectively in public debate and in the common political life of their respective cities, and that might perfectly well be considered a good. Isn't Plato's Protagoras in some sense right to say that a human capable of taking part in sociable common life is better-off than one condemned to a life of solitude, isolation, and silence? Similarly, there seems nothing outrageous in claiming that one is benefitting people (and their cities), even though one cannot specify by reference to a general theory in exactly what way that is occurring. Given our complete inability despite over two thousand years of effort to agree on a theory of \"the good\" that would have satisfied Plato, it seems highly rash to continue to claim that possession of such a theory is a precondition for any stable form of good practice.\n\nPlato's criticism does not seem to have had much immediate effect; rhetoric was simply too useful for that. What killed off old-style rhetoric was the gradual but cumulative marginalization in the Roman Empire of the political bodies in which free speech was permitted and could be politically effective: the popular assemblies and then the Roman Senate.\n\nIn the context of the study and practice of rhetoric, genealogy, historical enquiry, or the study of origins might have had at best a subordinate place. Individuals like Varro (and the Emperor Claudius) might have had idiosyncratic antiquarian interests, and history of a sort had some standing as a source of exempla for virtuous or vicious action, so what one gets is at best something like what one finds in the first few books of Livy, and, apart from whatever concerns one might have about the accuracy of the account, the heavy moralizing quickly gets rather cloying.\n\nThat brings me to the second of the two huge millstones that ground away at the interest in origins: philosophy. The standard doxographic account of the origin of philosophy, which goes back at the very least to book 1 of Aristotle's Metaphysics, runs as follows: First, there were myths and poetic cosmologies, structured as narratives or genealogies, like that of Hesiod; then, at some point Thales of Miletus initiated philosophy precisely by breaking with mythic and genealogical accounts and by claiming that there is a single \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae for everything in the world: what he calls \"water.\" \u1f08\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae comes from the verb \u1f04\u03c1\u03c7\u03c9, which means to make a beginning, initiate, take the lead, and then, by a natural association, control or rule. The dancer who makes the beginning in some sense sets the tempo and determines the nature of the dance. For Homer, he who \"made the beginning\" of Glaukos is first of all his father, then his paternal lineage; and that is what determines what and who this person is. But with Thales, \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae seems to begin to take on the meaning of determining (abstract) principle, while leaving behind the idea that there is an interesting historical sequence that can be traced back to some initiatory moment. I don't know exactly how Thales thought water constituted the nature of the world, and I think it likely that this is not merely a personal failing of mine. Rather, I think \"we\" don't know\u2014the available information is just not adequate\u2014and it is even conceivable that Thales himself did not know exactly how he meant various of his claims. In a sense, as Hegel recognized, the whole history of philosophy is nothing more than an attempt to clarify what kind of \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae there can be for the world and in what relation it can stand to the cosmos as a whole and to individual objects and events.\n\nThales stood at the very beginning of this long historical process of clarification and didn't perhaps have views articulated as highly as those of later philosophers. The pursuit of clarity is in general a good thing, but the indiscriminate pursuit of clarity is a vice and a serious obstacle to the proper understanding of large parts of human life. This is particularly the case when considering the philosophical past. So the obscurity of Thales's actual theory is not surprising and in fact not so important; whatever specific theory he had, if indeed he had any, did not recommend itself sufficiently to any of those of his successors whose work survives for them to transmit it to us. Nevertheless, later thinkers have found in him a kind of origin for philosophy. Hegel remarks that when Thales says \"All is water,\" he is neither specifying an origin the way Glaukos is nor making a statement with the same structure, import, or \"grammar\" as the statement \"All the fish in this barrel are cod\" when it is made by the holder of a market stall. Also, \"water\" in this statement does not refer to the colourless liquid one finds filling the Aegean Sea but to some kind of speculative principle that stands in an unspecified relation to the well-known fluid. \"All is water\" makes a totalizing claim, the claim that everything in the world can in some way be accounted for by reference to a single abstract principle. Simply having that thought, even if one was not able to elaborate it any further, was, Hegel claims, enough to initiate what we have come to know as philosophy.\n\nWe have encountered two different senses of \"origin.\" First, origin in the sense of historical origination, as in the case of Glaukos, and second, origin in the sense of some explanatory scheme or principle that provides a unitary abstract account or rationale, as in the case of Thales.\n\nIn principle one can investigate the \"origin\" of something in either or both of the two senses. At some point in prehistory humans put two pieces of wood or stone together in a particular configuration and used them to beat pieces of material into shape. As we would say, they \"invented\" the hammer. One can, however, tell two slightly different stories about this. First, one can tell the story of origins of the hammer, for instance by visiting the Mus\u00e9e de l'homme in Paris and looking closely at the exhibited artefacts. One could also\u2014and this would seem to be a second way of proceeding\u2014discuss the \"origin\" of the hammer by looking at continuing configurations of human desires, goals, needs, and the conditions under which they are or are not attainable or capable of being satisfied\u2014by looking at the problem to which the invention of the hammer was the solution. One might\u2014or might not\u2014think that this second story gives one a better understanding, and in the second account one might think that the specific history is not of great interest. Given the problem (and that means given the assumption that human desires and needs are more or less invariant and environmental conditions more or less uniform), with enough ingenuity someone was eventually going to hit on the solution that consisted in inventing something very much like the hammer. The two stories are, however, perfectly compatible. Once the hammer is there it can, of course, have other uses in addition to its original one. For instance, certain hammers might be so beautifully made that they become objects of aesthetic contemplation. This new function can in some cases survive atrophy of the original need. To be sure, it is not clear to what extent Glaukos would accept that one could equally well tell two distinct stories, parallel to those concerning the hammer, about him. An account of his origins, he would likely think, would have to deal with the specific details of his history. There might be something about being the descendant of those specific ancestors that makes him the object of the kind of individualizing interest that finds its appropriate expression in an \"idiographic\" narrative. He might think it makes a huge difference that his ancestor is Bellerophontes, not some other equally heroic figure, if only because Bellerophontes was the guest-friend of Diomedes' grandfather, and thus Glaukos and Diomedes should not fight each other. What Glaukos is seems to be comprehensible only relative to his particular history and that of his ancestors.\n\nI have also been discussing \"origins\" in the context of two different inquiries. First, I have been asking what in fact are the origins of certain human disciplines\u2014from what matrix of human purposes, social pressures, and contingent occurrences they arose; the motivation for asking this question is to get a better understanding of these disciplines. Second, I have been recounting certain traditional views held by the practitioners of one of these disciplines, \"philosophy,\" about what should count as having a satisfactory understanding of any important human phenomenon. The overwhelming traditional view among philosophers is that one only has an adequate understanding of a phenomenon if one has a general theory about or an abstract rationale for it. So if one wants to call a search for the best understanding of something an enquiry into its \"origin,\" the term \"origin\" has its second, not its first, sense\u2014that is, a good account gives a unitary principle, and certainly not anything that looks like a sequential narrative.\n\nKant, for me, has always summed up what is most wrongheaded and retrograde in modern philosophy. He follows the philosophical tradition in rejecting any positive role for history in philosophical reflection. Rather, he construes the task of giving an origin for philosophy as that of providing a unitary abstract rationale for it and tries to connect that with a set of universal and invariant human interests. These interests require that humans try to attain a unitary view of the world as a whole. Human agents, Kant thought, had to act in the world, and this required them to make a series of assumptions about how their world was constituted. Several nineteenth-century neo-Kantian philosophers developed lines of thought that Kant had marked out into a theory of what came to be called the \"metaphysical need,\" which was the need for a single universal scheme that would make all things make sense. This metaphysical need was generally construed by those who believed it existed as a demand rooted in continuing aspects of human nature for the kind of cognitive and normative orientation that could only be given by something like a religious or a systematic \"philosophical\" worldview.\n\nKant's most important successor, Hegel, represents a significant break by virtue of his attempt to think about philosophy in a more inherently historical way. In one of his early essays he says that \"the need for philosophy\" arises not ahistorically for all rational practical agents by virtue of a metaphysical need they have but under highly specific social circumstances, namely when \"life has lost its 'unity.' \" This raises the un-Kantian possibility that fascinated several later philosophers in the Hegelian tradition, among them Marx, namely the idea that in a satisfactory society, from which certain kinds of deep-seated conflicts were absent, philosophy (along with religion) would be superfluous and would disappear. Of course, even in such a basically harmonious society there might be a pale successor-discipline to the antique magnificence of \"philosophy,\" which might, for example, take the form of straightforward attempts to get an overview of the state of our knowledge or even suggestions for minor improvements in our social arrangements. One line of criticism of what are sometimes called \"positivist\" strands in twentieth-century philosophy consists in claiming that positivists propound methods of direct observation and theory construction that would in principle be cognitively perfectly appropriate in a fundamentally harmonious society; however, by advocating the exclusive use of such methods in repressive and conflict-ridden societies like ours, they tacitly contribute to diverting attention from fundamental social antagonisms.\n\nHowever, once a connection is established between certain forms of enquiry or intellectual disciplines, such as philosophy, with interests or needs, the door is open to further subversive thoughts. It might be the case that some particular conceptual or theoretical invention itself creates psychological needs which, once they are in existence, are difficult to get rid of. This is the model that Nietzsche uses for Christianity. It develops a complex set of practices and institutions that arise for perfectly understandable but utterly contingent and perhaps slightly disreputable reasons, such as human weakness and resentment of that weakness, but which, once they get themselves established, generate from within the new set of human needs of which Christianity is the fulfillment. The salvation that Christianity offers is, arguably, not for everyone but for those who need it. Since salvation means in the first instance salvation from sin, it would seem that the Christian kerugma\u2014the message that sins can be erased and salvation is at hand\u2014would have no purchase on those with no sense of sin. Missionaries have special difficulty with people lacking a sense of sin, so they may need to create one. This is completely different from the case of the hammer, in that even if the hammer eventually acquires new functions, such as serving as an object of aesthetic appreciation, the original problem, that of beating things into a more serviceable shape, can be said to have existed before the hammer was invented. On Nietzsche's reading this is not the case with Christianity. Christianity did not in the first instance cure the preexisting problem of sin but attempted to cure a completely different (and, Nietzsche thinks, virtually incurable) other condition, namely a historically specific, widespread form of human debility. Christianity, as he puts it, \"turned sick people into sinners.\" This means that Christian institutional life can not only inculcate a belief that one is a sinner but actually produce people whose somatic constitution is correctly described as \"sinful.\" The model here is addiction to drugs. Those who believe or feel themselves to be \"sinners\" think they need the consolation Christianity provides; those who really have been turned into sinners really do need that consolation, in the way the addict needs the drug. The only difference is that whereas we tend to assume drug addiction is \"in principle\" reversible (i.e., given sufficient willpower and a facilitating environment), Nietzsche seems to think that for most people the changes introduced by Christianity are effectively irreversible. Still, this is compatible with thinking they are radically contingent.\n\nUnfortunately, this whole Hegelian project of doing philosophy in a historically informed way has recently fallen out of fashion for reasons that are too complex and obscure to be presented uncontroversially in brief compass, but a significant part of the reason is likely to be the fear that if one embarks on this path, one will eventually be confronted with the unpalatable alternative of either accepting a highly baroque and counterintuitive metaphysic of the kind Hegel himself advocated or losing one's bearings in the face of the teeming variety of historical forms of thinking and acting. The second of these two fears is often expressed as anxiety in the face of the threat of \"relativism.\" Loss of the absolute moral certainties given by Christian or Kantian attitudes can clearly give rise to vertigo, but perhaps the appropriate reaction to that is to show that the purported threat of \"relativism\" is illusory and to treat the vertigo as mildly pathological.\n\nEarlier I told the usual story about the origin of philosophy. However, it is notable that Plato gives a different story about the origin of philosophy, which does not begin with Thales. (The first extant occurrence of the word \u03c6\u03b9\u03bb\u03bf\u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b1 is in Plato, and it is not out of the question that he in fact coined the term.) This story is repeated in a very prominent place by Cicero. Philosophy starts with Socrates, and it actually gets going\u2014has its real origin or \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae\u2014when he turns his back on speculation about the natural world and turns to ethics. In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates says that when he was young and immature he concerned himself with what the Greeks called \u03c6\u03c5\u03c3\u03b9\u03bf\u03bb\u03bf\u03b3\u03af\u03b1 (that is, speculation about nature), but now that he has become an adult he is no longer interested in the structure of the universe but in how things need to be to be \"for the best.\" As Cicero puts it, Socrates \"brings philosophy down to earth\" (from inspection of the skies to the \u1f00\u03b3\u03bf\u03c1\u03ac). For Plato, this seems to mark a kind of beginning; however, Plato did not follow Socrates in his turn away from cosmological speculation but developed a highly peculiar theory about the cosmological basis of values: his theory of \"forms\" or \"ideas.\" This notion of a conjunction between cosmology and ethics developed especially long legs when it was taken over and adapted by Christianity because Christians construed their god as both creator of the natural world and moral legislator. I simply note that it is highly peculiar that these two distinct things\u2014speculation on the nature of the universe on the one hand and moral and political philosophy on the other\u2014get put together as one subject (philosophy).\n\nOnce a unity like \"philosophy\" gets itself established, especially institutionally established, for instance in schools or universities, there is an almost irresistible tendency to find or create a single unitary genealogy for the enterprise, which means both a unitary history and a unitary, noncontextual goal. There is a compulsion to make up a single rationale and project it back onto people who are then retrospectively declared to be \"precursors.\"\n\nNietzsche has a notorious line in criticism of all forms of analysis by reference to purported unique \"origins.\" He is especially scathing about attribution of the origins of continuing institutions to individual heroic founders: philosophy founded by Thales or Socrates, Christianity founded by Jesus. There was never a single origin for anything with any continuing historical significance. What looks like a unique origin always disperses into a multiplicity. All persisting institutions and practices have unsurveyable multiple sequences of completely contingent ancestors, \"contingent\" meaning that there was no logical or rational necessity in their conjunction. One can in principle trace these ancestors back indeterminately into the past, and the farther back one goes the more such ancestors there will be. At some point one will not be able to go farther, but that is merely, as it were, an accidental limitation of our cognitive powers or the evidence that happens to be available.\n\nIn fact, then, the account of the \"origins\" of philosophy I have given is a gross oversimplification. The history of the \"origins\" of philosophy is not simply one in which two different kinds of inquiries (physics and ethics) come together. There is at least a third more or less independent element: a concern with forms of argumentation, logical thinking, and the validity of inference. Plato, in composing his dialogues, makes great play of this concern with correct inference, a part of his thought that does not seem influenced either by the earlier speculators about nature (such as Thales) or by Socrates' moralizing but derives from several more obscure sources, including the so-called Eleatic philosophers (Parmenides) and, to some extent, the sophists. The influence of this tradition on Socrates was profound. Plato, to be sure, is anxious to distance Socrates from the sophists as much as possible, so anything he took over from them has to be rather carefully hidden, or Plato has to explain at great length in what way the Socratic version of the concern for correct speaking is different from that of the sophists.\n\nIt would not be surprising if the discipline of \"philosophy\" depended for its continuing vitality on the tension between these different poles\u2014between interest in the structure of the natural world, interest in forms of argumentation, and interest in \"what would be for the best\"\u2014so that without this tension the practice as we know it could not continue to exist, but would break up into individual parts, each of which would go its own way as a distinct discipline.\n\nThere seems, in fact, no reason anymore why those concerned to understand the structure of the natural world should ex officio also have a nontrivial interest in which political institutions or which works of art are best or in formal structures of speech and argumentation. \"Philosophy\" could dissolve itself into physics for the study of nature; linguistics, rhetoric, and mathematics for the study of speech, argumentation, and formal systems; and politics, belles lettres, and social psychology for the study of \"what would be for the best.\" I strongly suspect that a radical dissociation of these interests has already occurred, although many people have not noticed it yet, and the discipline of philosophy in its present configuration is held together only by a combination of historical inertia and a sentimentalized attachment to a mostly illusory image of a glorious past. As a purported single subject, philosophy seems unlikely to last. If the various components really have as little to do with each other as they nowadays seem to, this may be no bad thing.\n\nThis story is a tempting development of Nietzschean themes about the artificiality of what has its origin in a series of contingent encounters of originally diverse and heterogeneous elements. One should not, of course, conclude from the fact that certain disciples have a contingent history relevant to understanding their present form that just any old available elements could randomly be put together as a \"discipline,\" or that all conjunctions are equally good. For example, the Roman writer on architecture Vitruvius, when discussing the kind of training a good architect needed to have, states that such a person had to be especially well trained in music. The reason for this was that an architect was expected also to be a military engineer, and a military engineer would be called on to build and activate catapults, and catapults would shoot straight and thus be effective only if the tension in the ropes providing their motive power were equal. Ropes, I suspect, were not industrially produced to a high level of uniformity in the ancient world, and so the only way to tell whether the tension in two improvised ropes was equal was to pluck them and see whether they sounded the same note. If they did, the tension was equal; otherwise not. So in an ideal Vitruvian university architectural training would include bridge-building, ballistics, and music as forming a \"natural\" unit. This unity was \"natural\" in that the conjunction gave prospective architects very good preparation for tasks with which they would be confronted. One could not, that is, equally well have taught them cooking, ballet, and viticulture. On the other hand, if most warfare in the Roman world had been naval, it might have seemed more obvious to group ballistics and music with navigation and astronomy, not with bridge-building. When gunpowder arrives, music becomes irrelevant and can be expected to drop out of the military curriculum. So there are things that \"go together\" better than other things, but it is not at all clear that the idea of \"going together\" makes sense independent of some at least minimal reference to historically specific human projects, valuations, and purposes.\n\nIn addition, it is still an open question whether a conjunction that has been given such a synthetic unity\u2014for whatever reasons and in whatever way\u2014can also just as easily split up into its component parts. One might be tempted to argue that since traditional philosophy arose as a purportedly unitary pursuit from a series of accidental conjunctions occurring over a period of two centuries or so (roughly from Thales to Plato), there is no reason why it cannot also come apart again. This cannot be the whole story because of considerations like those mentioned in discussing the hammer or Christianity\u2014if, like the hammer, philosophy acquired some further functions that could best be discharged by a unitary discipline, or if, like Christianity, it generated from itself needs that only it could satisfy. If there are such hidden, new essential functions, what are they?\n\nIf this is true about philosophy, it is true in spades for \"the humanities.\" This term, in the sense in which it is used today in English-speaking countries, seems not to go back much further than the middle of the nineteenth century, and to say anything substantial about why it came into use and why it seemed plausible to think it had a referent would require more interest in and knowledge of nineteenth-century Britain than I possess. It seems plausible to expect that at least one of the immediate pressures operating here resulted from the demands of education, especially higher education. What seems, however, also rather clear, even to an outsider, is that the idea that there was one discernible, collective thing, \"the humanities,\" a more or less unitary set of subjects or disciplines that belonged together, required a highly constructive act of conceptualization, putting together various existing, disparate things that had not antecedently been thought to have anything particular to do with each other. The resulting synthesis was composed of various rather debased bits of detritus from the ancient world, with a particularly high concentration of bits of the ancient rhetorical tradition put together with bits of history and philosophy and some parts of the nonverbal arts. Again, from the fact that it was constructed, it does not follow that it was random in the sense that any collection of preexisting skills, forms of knowledge, and practices could equally well have been put together; the historical account is in part directly to show that that is not the case.\n\nIn light of the above remarks, the relatively artificial nature of the conjunction called \"the humanities\" ought no longer to seem surprising. It is in any case no news that all human classificatory schemes are partly structured by wider forms of human valuation and human purposes. One might with good reason think that much of value\u2014many important kinds of knowledge\u2014can relatively easily survive large-scale shifts in our way of classifying and organizing disciplines. To recur to Windelband's terminology, we will retain our \"idiographic\" interest in the Peloponnesian War (and in Thucydides' account of it), and much\u2014though possibly not all\u2014of what we find of the greatest interest will continue to come to representation whether this conjunction of events, actions, and words is treated as part of Altertumswissenschaft, of \"classics,\" or of \"history.\"\n\nThe proliferation and dispersion of new subjects and disciplines, combined with changes in the way we live and in our attitudes and dominant concerns, can be expected to render implausible our accustomed way of organizing academic subjects. There is nothing historically unprecedented about this. Foucault closes his study of what he calls the human sciences, Les mots et les choses, by comparing their central organizing conception, \"man,\" with a face drawn in the sand that is about to be washed away by the incoming tide. The face may be gone, but provided the sand remains, we have no reason for more than transitory twinges of grief, and certainly no reason for deep melancholy.\n\nIn conclusion, I suggest that if the general perspective on our historical situation that I have tried to sketch here is correct\u2014if philosophy in fact is on the point of dissolving into a number of different constituents and has long since lost any organic or systematic connection as a discipline with the so-called humanities, and if a similar fragmentation of the humanities themselves is under way\u2014then the whole question of giving some general account of the role of philosophy in the humanities doesn't make sense. Neither of the two purported entities has the requisite stability to admit a useful investigation of this question. At the moment, the relation between what is called philosophy and what are called the humanities is a matter of idiosyncratic associations between certain individuals, which are so contingent they border on the whimsical\u2014the odd Professor of Ethics who also happens to have read Greats at Oxford rather than PPE, or the don who works professionally on some aspect of the philosophy of language but also happens to be devoted to the ballet. Whether or not this dissociation is a temporary phenomenon, and if it is not, what new structures will eventually emerge, are matters of speculation, but since such controlled speculation was once one of the things philosophers used to do, I would suggest that if there is no ecological or economic catastrophe\u2014or something comparable that radically overturns, or even puts an end to, our organized intellectual life\u2014dispersal of the kind I have described is likely to be a continuing feature of our landscape for the foreseeable future.\n2\n\nVix intellegitur\n\nThe title of this essay is taken, with appropriate grammatical modification, from a comment by Cicero on Thucydides that has always fascinated me. In one of his treatises on the art of rhetoric Cicero is discussing the proper style to be adopted by the public speaker, and he discourages the aspiring orator from imitating the speeches in Thucydides' history. Thucydides, he admits, is good at describing battles and grand public actions, but this narrative style is not directly transferable to political or forensic oratory, and as far as the elaborate speeches that Thucydides includes in his work are concerned: \"Ipsae illae contiones ita multas habent obscuras abditiasque sententias vix ut intellegantur; quod est in oratione civili vitium vel maximum.\" [\"Those speeches contain so many obscure and recondite formulations that they are scarcely to be understood, which in a political speech is about the worst defect there is.\"]\n\nWhat exactly does it mean\u2014if indeed it means one univocal thing at all\u2014to say that a speech or a text is unclear, scarcely to be understood or hard to comprehend, and what exactly is supposed to be wrong with obscurity? One might think that this is a rather foolish question because isn't it self-evident that lack of clarity is a defect? My ultimate aim in this chapter, however, is to question this assumption and consider whether there are contexts and occasions in which and on which obscurity is not a deficiency, even a deficiency that might be pardonable or unavoidable, but something with positive value.\n\nObviously when Cicero discusses Thucydides' speeches he does not mean that they are what we would call completely incomprehensible, as a text in Chinese or Hungarian would have been had it been presented to him. Cicero (106 BC\u201343 BC) was not a native speaker of Greek or a contemporary of Thucydides (c. 458 BC\u2013c. 400 BC), but he lived only a couple of hundred years later, had resided for a time in Athens, and was a fluent speaker of what was at the time still a living language. I take it also that when Cicero says that the speeches in Thucydides are obscure, he does not merely mean that they are obscure to a Roman audience of the first century BC, or even to a Greek-speaking Roman of the first century BC, but that these speeches, he supposes, would also have been obscure to a fifth-century BC Athenian audience. After all, Cicero's book is a practical guide to his Roman contemporaries interested in becoming skilled orators, so the most reasonable construal of his advice is: \"Don't be as difficult to comprehend by Latin-speakers in c. 50 BC as Thucydides would have been to speakers of Attic Greek in c. 400 BC.\"\n\nI may misconstrue or fail to understand fully (or at all) what is perfectly clearly expressed because of fatigue, poor concentration, weak hearing, preoccupation, or any one of a number of other causes. The cases in which we are interested here, however, are ones in which there is no special explanation that refers to some specific fact about one individual person (rather than some other) and makes it the case that that particular person finds it difficult to understand the speech or text in question. One way in which that could be the case would be if what you said to me was \"inherently\" misleading or obscure or hard to follow, that is, if anyone\u2014within limits perhaps, for instance, \"anyone who was not a mind-reader or who did not have some other special form of access to your intentions, your past history, your other beliefs, and so on\"\u2014would be likely either to be puzzled by or to misconstrue it.\n\nDoes the notion of \"inherent\" obscurity, or its correlative, \"inherent\" clarity, make sense? Of course, if it is no more than an empirical, sociological claim\u2014some things I find it hard to grasp; some things you find it hard to grasp; some thing we both, and most of the people in some imagined reference group, would find it hard to grasp\u2014it is unobjectionable, but it is then unclear what its significance is, or indeed whether it even had any deeper significance. In everyday interaction and language-use what counts as clear and what as obscure depends very much on a highly variable context. \"It's down past the Catholic church\" is perfectly clear if I am talking to a neighbour, who will know that although there are various Catholic churches in Cambridge the one habitually used as a common point of topological reference is the one with a large spire at the corner of Lensfield Road and Hills Road; it will be likely to be obscure to someone who does not live in Cambridge. It isn't that, as one says, \"examples of this kind can be multiplied ad libitum\" because that suggests that there are special \"examples\" and thus that there could also be non-examples. Rather, I think this context-dependency is a universal phenomenon, except in the very few areas of everyday life that have been invaded by formal or technical usages, such as discussions of the legal requirements for proper tenancy, inheritance or conveyancing, medical prescriptions, or the naming of the parts and modes of functioning of complex machines like computers. These are isolated islands that depend for the fixity and univocacy of their meanings on being embedded in larger social mechanisms for enforcing strict uniformity, and when the appropriate mechanisms break down or malfunction, as they regularly, and eventually always, do, the islands are submerged again in the sea of everyday speech. These exceptions are exceptions because we make them that way through highly artificial means, which, however, will work only in specific local contexts; they can therefore never even in principle be models for the whole of our language-use, our cognitive or practical relation to the world, or our interactions with each other. Cicero can be understood actually to be making this point about context-dependency in the passage above. What he says is if you are giving a speech to a political meeting (contio) then this kind of Thucydidean style is not appropriate. It doesn't follow from this\u2014although it might in fact be true\u2014that it would be \"obscure\" in other situations or circumstances, for instance, among the members of a small group of the literary and political elite who met to understand the causes and the course of the war between Athens and the Peloponnesian League, and who could have their slaves read the relevant passages back to them several times for discussion. In fact one of the ancient sources (Dionysius of Halicarnassos) gives as the reason for Thucydides' \"difficulty\" that his speeches had too many thoughts condensed into each phrase. How many is \"too many,\" however, obviously depends on whether one is a Cicero standing in the Forum in Rome, shouting at a changing audience of half-distracted members of the plebs, or a Cicero sitting in the comfort and quiet of a rural villa with his learned friend Atticus and his learned slave Tiro.\n\nNevertheless, although what Cicero says in this passage is that Thucydides' style is not appropriate for public political oratory, it might also in fact be the case, although that is not Cicero's main point here, that Thucydides' style is inappropriate because \"obscure\" in any context that might reasonably be assumed to exist for reading it. We might be tempted to say that it is an \"objectively\" obscure style, meaning that Thucydidean speeches are hard to follow even for people who were not distracted, preoccupied, and so forth, and who also knew a lot about the man and the topic. One might go on to think that if this style is really difficult to understand for anyone in any context, this shows that the whole reference to a \"context\" is not really relevant here or was trivial and unimportant. One might finally then try to turn this around and imagine that there could be a style that was \"objectively clear\" in that anyone who understood the language in question could immediately grasp what was being said in it, provided the speaker took a minimum amount of care. Or one could think that there could be not merely a style but a whole language that had this property of \"objective clarity.\" This notion that some forms of speech or writing could be \"objectively\" clear or \"objectively\" obscure in some absolute sense is a recurrent illusion from which philosophers have great difficulty freeing themselves. Thus the late Wittgenstein criticises Frege for holding that all proper concepts must be univocal, sharply defined, and absolutely clear. He imagines someone like Frege objecting, \"[I]st ein verschwommener Begriff \u00fcberhaupt ein Begriff?\" [\"Is a vague concept really a concept at all?\"] and responds to this with a crushing:\n\nIst eine unscharfe Photographie \u00fcberhaupt ein Bild eines Menschen? Ja, kann man ein unscharfes Bild immer mit Vorteil durch ein scharfes ersetzen? Ist das unscharfe nicht oft gerade das was wir brauchen? Frege vergleicht den Begriff mit einem Bezirk und sagt: einen unklar begrenzten Begriff k\u00f6nne man \u00fcberhaupt keinen Begriff nennen. Das hei\u00dft wohl, wir k\u00f6nnen mit ihm nichts anfangen.\n\n[Is an indistinct photograph really at all a picture of a human being? Can one, in fact, always with advantage replace an indistinct picture with a distinct one? Isn't the indistinct one often just the one we need? Frege compares a concept with a domain and says: one cannot call a concept which is not clearly limited a concept at all. I take it that that means, we can't do anything with it <unless it is clearly delimited>.]\n\nI take this to mean that what we call \"clarity\" with respect to concepts depends on what we wish to do with those concepts, that is, with the context of our projects, wishes, expectations, and goals, and these can change. What is true of (individual) concepts is also true of the statements in which such concepts occur. Just to repeat the basic point, then, such notions as \"clear,\" \"precise,\" and so forth are highly dependent on the context within which we are employing them, and one extremely important aspect of that context is the human purposes or uses to which we wish to put the concepts (or propositions) under discussion. \"Clear\/obscure\" is always relative so some such envisaged context. If Wittgenstein is right, the assumption that there is some kind of \"absolute\" or noncontextual clarity is an illusion, on a par with a belief in Father Christmas.\n\nOne immediate consequence of this line of thought is to devalue \"absolute clarity\" as a cognitive or aesthetic ideal, given that such absolute clarity not only is not attainable but is incoherent\u2014a misunderstanding of what \"clarity\/obscurity\" could possibly mean. Similarly if clarity\/obscurity is always a distinction one makes relative to a context, this would have a strong tendency to undermine any attempt always to see obscurity as a defect or a failure\u2014perhaps an excusable defect but a failure in some sense nevertheless\u2014because even to speak of \"obscurity\" is to appeal to some standard, which, even if it is the most appropriate one, is still only one standard among a number of different possible ones, each dependent on a set of human purposes and interests. Since there is no standard given by reality itself, it is always in principle possible that the judgement \"This text is obscure\" is an expression not of an inadequacy of the text but of a failure on the part of the person making the judgement to be sufficiently reflective about what the appropriate context is and how the assertion in question fits into that context.\n\nOne source of possible \"obscurity,\" then, is the general context-dependency of language and the lack of absolute precision and determinacy of concepts in all natural human languages. More specific forms of misunderstanding or puzzlement can also, however, arise from syntactical features of particular languages. Thus, to take a famous example known to every student of Latin, in his epic poem about early Roman history Ennius has the god Apollo give King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who consults him before attacking the Romans, the following oracle:\n\nAio te Aeacida Romanos vincere posse\n\nwhich, given the grammatical peculiarities of indirect discourse in Latin, means either:\n\nA I tell you, descendant of Aeacus, that you are able to conquer the Romans\n\nor\n\nB I tell you, descendant of Aeacus, that the Romans are able to conquer you\n\nKing Pyrrhus assumes it means (A) and proceeds to carry out his attack on the Romans, only then to discover that it actually meant (B). To say that it \"actually\" meant (B), rather than that (B) accidentally turned out to be correct, is to assume for the sake of discussion here that there is a god Apollo who does know the future and is trying to express it in some way, but we will continue to make that assumption for the sake of discussion in most of what follows. This oracular response is a classic case of a perfectly straightforward ambiguity that should be immediately visible to virtually anyone who knew Latin at all and considered the response dispassionately.\n\nTo be sure, exactly how cognitively and morally culpable Pyrrhus is in immediately assuming that the oracle favours him depends partly on an aspect of the total situation about which we are not sufficiently informed. We know the (purported) exact words Apollo used in the response, but we do not know what specific question Pyrrhus asked. Given the context-dependency of the distinction between obscurity\/clarity, one would like to know the question asked as exactly as possible. Was the original question: \"Should I treat with the Romans or attack them?\" \"Are the Romans at all a threat to my hegemony?\" or \"Who will be victorious in the coming war, me or the Romans?\" or \"Shall I defeat the Romans?\" Cicero comments on the proverbial obtuseness of the descendants of Aeacus, citing another passage by Ennius to that effect (\"bellipotentes sunt magis quam sapientipotentes,\" i.e., \"powerful in war rather than powerful in wisdom,\" or perhaps \"war-strong, brain-weak\"), but if Pyrrhus had actually posed the question in the third form cited above, it seems almost inconceivable that he could have overlooked the ambiguity of the response because the very form of the question explicitly evokes the possibility of a Roman victory. This, of course, is part of the point. Pyrrhus's own response to the oracle is significant and indicative of his character. He does not even wish really to envisage the possibility of a Roman victory, so he does not take this possibility with sufficient seriousness. Humans are invariably at least to some extent self-centred and are strongly inclined to wishful thinking. They hear what they wish to hear. They sometimes even ask the wrong questions and then compound that error by jumping to conclusions about what the answers to these questions mean. This is a particularly striking character trait of the excessively self-confident Pyrrhus, and one that is exposed very clearly by his reaction to the oracle; he is more subject to this general human weakness than most other human beings are.\n\nIf one considers the response dispassionately, one should see that there is a further ambiguity that emerges more clearly if one pronounces the phrase with emphasis on the final word \"posse.\" If the question really was \"Shall I overcome the Romans?\" then a response couched in terms of what \"could\" happen, or who \"would be or is able\" to do what, might seem simply to be changing the topic, or perhaps to be an instance of the god giving himself a get-out clause, because presumably what \"could\" happen is not always what actually does happen. If one takes to this line of thought, (A)\/(B) no longer obviously represents an exclusive dichotomy. To say that the Romans are able to overcome Pyrrhus might be compatible with the possibility that Pyrrhus is able to overcome the Romans. Whether or not this was the case would depend on the particular sense one gave to \"posse\" [\"to be able to\"]. The god then might well be saying that either out-come is conceivable and possible. So with the emphasis on \"posse\" the response could mean:\n\nC It is inherently indeterminate who will win, you or the Romans; each one could (under appropriate circumstances) defeat the other.\n\nInterpreted in this way the response seems useful\u2014telling Pyrrhus to be careful\u2014and unobjectionably commonsensical. The second of the above interpretations, (B), had not come to Pyrrhus's attention because of his impetuous self-centredness. Even ex ante almost any-one else should and would have been able to see the ambiguity in that divine response, and given the notorious ambiguity of oracles, which had already been extensively noted by the time of Pyrrhus, anyone ought to have and almost anyone else would have looked for possible ambiguity. The fact that Pyrrhus didn't meant that he was dim, excessively self-obsessed, or perhaps overly self-confident, or all three. To have any one of these properties was to occupy a very bad starting point for attacking the Romans in the third century BC, no matter what other military skills one might have. Interpretation (C), on the other hand, would not be likely to recommend itself immediately to anyone who consulted the oracle in the first place because it stood in conflict with one of the assumptions that made oracular practice sensible. If it is objectively indeterminate who will win, why bother to consult the oracle?\n\nTwo kinds of human weakness, then, have emerged in this brief discussion of responses to oracles. First, humans are self-centred, too focused on their own abilities and powers, as if they were of final importance in the universe. They try to see the world as much as possible through the lens of what they could (and perhaps should) do. In the case of Pyrrhus this is associated with a certain kind of egotism, a heroic desire to show himself to be the best and acknowledged as the best through self-confident use of his own powers to defeat all comers, including, in the case in point, the Romans, who happened to be the next on his list. It is not, however, merely his overbearing insistence on his own primacy that is the problem with Pyrrhus. One can find a morally less questionable form of the same human self-absorption in the case of Oedipus. He, too, thinks primarily in terms of himself and what he has to do. Oedipus wants to avoid what is announced by the oracle partly for his own sake\u2014he does not wish to be the man who killed his father and married his mother\u2014but his attitude, we can assume, is at least partly altruistic in that he also wished to spare his father and mother the fate in store for them. As in the case of Pyrrhus, the oracular answer fits into a world that is seen by Oedipus as essentially a potential field of his own action, in which things are in the final analysis \"up to him to do or not do.\" As Oedipus's end may be taken to show, his own voluntary or involuntary action in the world is in the final analysis not that important. To think it is, that he can change his fate, that the world is essentially a realm constituted by his action, is a kind of wishful thinking.\n\nThe second form of human weakness we encounter is in a way the mirror image of the first. Rather than trusting too much to their own powers as agents to shape a course of action that will satisfy them, humans can be excessively overcome by the recognition of their own impotence and consequently excessively dependent and demanding. They can expect the god to give them the assurance that comes from absolutely unequivocal predictions that cannot be misunderstood. They need the world not to be one in which it is antecedently indeterminate (even for the god) who will win the battle; they need desperately to believe that there is already a determinate answer to the question \"Who will win?\" This is another form of wishful thinking.\n\nIt is well-known that over the entrance to the building in which the oracle at Delphi was located there were two inscriptions:\n\n\u03b3\u03bd\u1ff6\u03b8\u03b9 \u03c3\u03b5\u03b1\u03c5\u03c4\u03cc\u03bd [\"know yourself\"]\n\nand\n\n\u03bc\u03b7\u03b4\u1f72\u03bd \u1f04\u03b3\u03b1\u03bd [\"don't overdo anything\" or \"don't do too much of anything\"]\n\nThese inscriptions have from early times drawn the attention of philosophers and came increasingly to be interpreted as general ethical injunctions. The first was often interpreted in a way that gave rise to a tradition of construing an intense and interiorised form of introspection as a central component of the good life. The second was read, as far back as Plato's Charmides (164\u201365), as recommending to humans that they cultivate the virtue of \u03c3\u03c9\u03c6\u03c1\u03bf\u03c3\u03cd\u03bd\u03b7 (temperance, moderation, self-control), and thus it was tacitly taken to stand at the beginning of a tradition of preaching an ethics of moderation (e.g., it is thus interpreted by Nietzsche). Philosophers have also often looked for some relation between the two injunctions, but they have not generally been attracted to one of the more obvious ways of doing this: Self-knowledge is good but only, like everything else, in moderation. The course of subsequent philosophy would have been different if Socrates had come to believe that this was what the god was trying to tell him. Perhaps, though, one should return to one of the slightly more mundane ways of reading the two injunctions: Know exactly you want to ask before you enter the temple and don't pester the oracle with too many questions. It is not necessarily just that the god would be irritated by the need to give repeated responses, but if you felt the need to ask too many questions you would have shown yourself to be in no fit state to receive any response at all. It would be a sign you were stupid, hadn't thought about what you really wanted, or had abandoned yourself to your human tendency to want too much predictable determinacy in the world and were trying to use the god as a crutch to impose or create the illusion of an order that did not exist. Why, after all, should the god suffer such fools gladly?\n\nTo return to Pyrrhus, if the above were not enough, one can also wonder about what exactly vincere means in the god's response. Does it mean \"drive the enemy from the field in a given single battle,\" defeat strategically in a lengthy war (debellare), or overcome and permanently subjugate (subiungere)? Pyrrhus himself was in principle perfectly capable of making that distinction on appropriate occasions. After all, he was famous for remarking: \"If we win one more battle against the Romans, we'll be completely done for\" when he \"won\" a battle by eventually driving some of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of Roman troops off the field in disordered flight, but at the cost of losing men whom he could not replace. Does \"win\" mean \"tactical victory\" or \"strategic victory\"? How \"strategic\" and permanent must it be to count as victory?\n\nTwo different kinds of obscurity seem to be in play here. First, are the words of the god to be read grammatically according to schema (A), (B), or (C)? Second, what exactly does vincere mean? In the first case there seems to be a definite series of different possibilities, each of which can be taken to be of more or less clear import, that is, clear enough \"in the context.\" In the second case, the question is the rather different one of what is to count as \"victory.\" \"Ambiguity\" seems an appropriate term to designate the first of these cases, but the second case does not seem to be one of \"ambiguity\" properly speaking but of a certain kind of simple indeterminacy in a relevant dimension.\n\nLet us take now another example, one of the oracles reported in Book III of Aeneid as having been given to the Trojans. In the particular case in question we have, in contrast to Ennius's report about Pyrrhus, both the questions posed and the response, or rather we have a somewhat unusual speech which is a combination of an entreaty and a series of questions, and then a response. The combination of entreaty and question almost makes it seem as if the Trojans thought the god needed orientation, needed them to set the context of what they want and think they require, in order to prompt an appropriately phrased response:\n\nda propriam, Thymbraee, domum; da moenia fessis\n\net genus et mansuram urbem; serva altera Troiae\n\nPergama, reliquias Danaum atque immitis Achilli.\n\nquem sequimur? quove ire jubes? ubi ponere sedes?\n\nda, pater, augurium, atque animis inlabere nostris. (III.85\u201389)\n\n[Give us our own home, Apollo. We're exhausted; give us walls and a continuing succession of progeny and an abiding city. Save us, a mere remnant left alive by the Greeks and pitiless Achilles, and let us be the city of Troy built up again. Whom should we follow? [Or: What place should be strive to reach?] Or where do you order us to go? Where should we establish ourselves? Give us, father, a sign and enter gently into our souls.]\n\nTo which the voice of the god replies:\n\nDardanidae duri, quae vos a stripe parentum\n\nprima tulit tellus, eadem vos ubere laeto\n\naccipiet reduces. antiquam exquirite matrem.\n\nhic domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris\n\net nati natorum et qui nascentur ab illis. (III.94\u201398)\n\n[You hard-done-by men of Troy, the earth that first brought you forth from the root of your parents, that earth will accept you back to her happy breast if you return. Seek out your ancient mother. Here the house of Aeneas and the sons of his sons, and those who will be born of them will rule the whole world.]\n\nThe first thing to note is that the unclarity here does not derive from and is not otherwise involved with any kind of obvious grammatical ambiguity. It is also not really like the indeterminacy that emerges when one tries to imagine just what would count as a \"victory\" (in one of the many appropriate senses). The obscurity here is like that one encounters in trying to solve a riddle, and the Trojans are duly puzzled.\n\nAeneas's father, Anchises, quick off the mark, immediately jumps in and gives an interpretation, namely that the oracle means \"go to Crete,\" citing the Cretan origin of one of his alleged maternal ancestors. This, however, is rather quickly shown to be a mistake because the Trojan settlement in Crete falls prey to a serious pestilence, and so the Trojans themselves are thrown back into a state of puzzlement about the meaning of the oracle and realise that it was not as clear as Anchises took it to be.\n\nThe situation here is of a very different kind from that of Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus acted as if he was confident of knowing how the oracle was to be read. It just turned out that (in retrospect) he had misunderstood it. Looking on at this from the outside we can see that there are at least two (or three) relatively (given the context) clear alternative readings, which Pyrrhus ought to have considered. In the case of the Trojans the response has a completely different kind of indeterminacy. \"Seek your aged mother\" does not in the same way carve out a relatively clear set of alternative possibilities, and it is not exactly \"vague\" and open to reinterpretation in the way in which \"victory\" is. What exactly could \"Seek your aged mother\" mean? Go to Crete and settle there? They try that and it doesn't work. Since, as Book I makes clear, Venus is supposed to be Aeneas's \"mother\" and Jupiter addresses her as the Lady of Cythera (Book I), are they then to make for Cythera, the small island off the coast of the Peloponnese? Venus is also identified with Aphrodite and Aphrodite's island is Cyprus, so is Cyprus the goal? Does the oracle mean to go back to the Troad? That, after all, is where they were all born. Or does it mean something altogether different? For instance, if the \"earth\" is the common ancient mother of all humanity, does \"seek your ancient mother\" mean give up living in cities and adopt a troglodytic form of life, living in the caves that mother earth provides? Or does it mean pursue mining and metallurgy as a mode of life, investigating and exploiting the underground resources of mother earth? Or is it ironic and intended to mean that the Trojans should study natural philosophy (i.e., seek to find what the nature of mother earth really is), that they will be preeminent in such study, and that only in such intellectual pursuits can anyone find a home? Or is it an expression of \"the wisdom of Silenus\": \"The best thing for you all to do is die as soon as possible and go back to your ancient mother, the earth; that is the only place where any human has an abiding city\"? Or a Roman version of this: \"Die with as many extravagant gestures of bravery as you can, then you will 'rule the world' with your posthumous glory\"? Or should the Trojans become professional experts in genealogy, helping everyone find out who their ancient mother (and then also, perhaps, father) really was? Or a tribe of pimps and prostitutes continually seeking out their ancient mother (Venus) in this form, or devotees of a cult of cosmological Venus (Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas\/alma Venus)?\n\nIf the last of these possibilities seem increasingly far-fetched, as indeed they are, one might recall that that is often a characteristic of the fulfillment of oracles, and in the Aeneid itself one can find equally recherch\u00e9 examples of the way oracles are claimed to have been fulfilled and thus what it is retrospectively claimed they \"really\" meant. Oracles are often worse in this respect\u2014more obscure\u2014than riddles in that good riddles should in principle be solvable by the person to whom they are propounded in the present circumstances in which that person happens to find himself, whatever they may be, but many oracles can only be interpreted ex eventu. Recall the prophecy by the Harpy Celaeno in Book III (247\u201357) that the Trojans won't find their city until their extreme hunger (dira fames) has them \"gnawing at their tables\" (ambesas... absumere mensas). This turns out, much later, to mean something like eating sandwiches at a picnic (VII.109ff.). Book III is a flashback in which Aeneas is telling Dido in North Africa about his previous wandering, but no one, either when Celaeno originally spoke the prophecy or even in North Africa when Aeneas was recalling it, could have been expected to understand what \"gnawing at the tables\" would eventually turn out to mean.\n\nOne might think that the above is all perfectly reasonable, but that it somehow misses the point because it puts together a very general philosophical point about the incoherence of some conception of purported absolute clarity with a very particular set of examples of oracular or literary obscurity, which is really of a rather different kind. Even if complete and absolute clarity, precision, and determinacy is a chimera, the oracles described in the literary passages discussed could easily have been relatively clearer in practical terms, clearer in contextually relevant ways, than they were. Even if it isn't absolutely clear what \"victory\" is, what constitutes an \"attack\" or for that matter who the Romans are (do they include the Italians or not?), Apollo could have told Pyrrhus in no uncertain terms not to attack the Romans\u2014\"noli aggredi Romanos\" would have done the trick, if the god really was speaking Latin\u2014and that would have been a more useful and relevant response to the question that was actually concerning Pyrrhus than the one he received. Similarly the voice in Delos could have said immediately: Try Italy. \"Try Italy\" is not absolutely precise\u2014the Peloponnese clearly does not count as Italy, and Sicily, at this point in time, does not either, but what about the Po Valley? Instead of Rome should Aeneas perhaps really have tried to found Milan, Verona, or Venice? Still this advice is better as a useful response to the question posed than \"seek your ancient mother.\"\n\nAfter all, Apollo does eventually cause a clearer answer to be given when he instructs the household gods (the \"Penates\") to appear to Aeneas in a dream and give him the correct interpretation, namely to go to Italy (III.147ff.). This is confirmed by Aeneas's father, Anchises, who conveniently remembers at this point that Cassandra had often made similar predictions about the final destination of the Trojans. So Virgil, who is terribly concerned to give a divine pedigree for the Roman Imperium as constituted under Augustus, engages in some literary attempts at squaring the circle. On the one hand, there is the divine pronouncement, but such pronouncements are known to be obscure, so he adds a second announcement to clarify the first and then a further confirmation in the form of Anchises' \"recollection.\" Then the final confirmation comes in Aeneas's descent into the Underworld in Book VI. The idea presumably is to get both divine origin for the advice to settle in Italy and as strong a confirmation of the specific interpretation as possible.\n\nSo why doesn't the god initially say what he means with sufficient clarity to be immediately understood? One possibility is simply to say that this question is based on a misconception. There are no gods, and what are called \"oracles\" are just inventions of the priests and priestesses who \"serve\" the oracle; except by accident, they have no more knowledge of anything than we do. Lack of clarity is their way of minimising the chance that they will be found out to be frauds and lose their livelihood. Although I am myself an atheist, I think this is far too quick a response, so I would like to bracket it and continue on the assumption that Apollo and the others did exist, and did in some sense \"give\" oracular responses A further possibility would be the Epicurean view that although gods probably did exist, they were completely unconcerned with humans and their trivial problems and thus had no real interest in giving useful responses. Perhaps oracular response was a game the gods played with each other, in which humans were mere tokens on a cosmological board. Perhaps the gods gave responses only on days on which they had partaken too deeply of ambrosia and so were themselves understandably muddled. Perhaps the ones who gave responses were always on the ambrosia. Or perhaps divine knowledge, or certain types of divine knowledge, divine intention, or divine instruction, could inherently not be expressed, or could not be expressed in any human language, other than obscurely. We know that some kinds of divine instruction clearly could have been expressed more clearly because the Penates do eventually tell the Trojans in perfectly clear Latin that \"seek your ancient mother\" means \"go to Italy,\" but it does not follow from this that everything the god knows, wants, and intends can appropriately be thus clearly and directly expressed in all contexts.\n\nThis line of thought, that there is perhaps something in the divine mentation that cannot be adequately or appropriately expressed through clear speech, gives one an indication of the direction in which one might seek a possible positive rationale for obscurity.\n\nOne traditional view is that the god could in one sense have been more explicit but that he knew that doing this would be self-defeating relative to some wider purpose he was pursuing. The god is, after all, not a calculating device for predicting the future, much as certain humans might wish to reduce him to this, but, if he is at all like one of the gods in Homer, he will have his own intentions, plans, and projects. Perhaps, as Plutarch puts it, \"He is no less a philosopher than a prophet\" and has imposed on himself a far-reaching peadagogical task of improving the moral state of humanity. One does not, however, necessarily improve people by telling them clearly, directly, and in a form they can easily and correctly assimilate what they (think they) want to know. Plato's Socrates suggests that the obscurity of oracular pronouncements results from the desire on the part of the god to motivate humans to reflect and search for the truth. When the god says that no man is wiser than Socrates, he does not mean that Socrates is positively wise but only that compared to the god, all human wisdom is equally insignificant. You won't, however, really take this point until and unless you have tried yourself to refute the god and failed. The god's statement is thus intended to motivate Socrates to improve himself (and indirectly his fellow humans) in two ways. He is to pursue the truth assiduously but also to try to prove the god wrong. By failing he will become clearer about the nature of his own ignorance. The resulting grasp of his own cognitive limitations while continuing uninterruptedly to pursue truth is the beginning of wisdom. The best way to acquire a motivation to pursue the truth is perhaps through generating a state of puzzlement, and the best\u2014or at any rate an especially good\u2014way of creating the right kind of productive puzzlement is by giving an obscure oracular response.\n\nThis strategy, if that is the strategy, does not, of course, work for Pyrrhus. His problem is in part that he is confronted with the Romans, who are militarily superior to him in available resources; they \"can defeat\" him in the long run by simply allowing him to wear him-self down with his repeated \"victories.\" An equally important part of his problem, however, is that he is not puzzled when he ought to be. This, as has been mentioned, is a result of the particular character traits that exhibit themselves in his response to the oracle. Any sensible speaker of Latin would have seen that the response is not clear. Pyrrhus, however, is impetuous and overly self-confident. Now, of course, the god could have said to him, \"You are self-centred, impetuous and overly self-confident,\" but saying that would not really have transmitted the message to him in an effective way because people do not in general learn from being told things, or, at any rate, they do not often learn how to change deeply entrenched forms of behaving simply by being given good general advice about them. Perhaps Plato's Socrates thought that merely discursive instruction of individuals could cause those individuals to change their way of life, but if he did\u2014even if his instruction was \"dialectical\"\u2014he was wrong. Aeschylus was closer to being correct when he spoke of \"learning through suffering\" (\u03c0\u03ac\u03b8\u03b5\u03b9 \u03bc\u03ac\u03b8\u03bf\u03c2). Perhaps giving the obscure answer will not help Pyrrhus any more, but that could be because he is beyond hope; some people are. Arguably Plato realised that Alkibiades, for all his gifts and despite his association with Socrates, was beyond help, and expressed this in his Symposium. Perhaps the god is trying to improve others who observe Pyrrhus's fate. The next-best thing to experiencing paedagogical suffering oneself is perhaps to observe it \"firsthand\" in the case of a highly visible, exemplary individual. So if the intention of the god is not merely to articulate the truth but to express it in a form in which it is most likely to be understood and acted on, then obscurity might be the best way to do that. Not, of course, an infallible way, because there will always be incorrigible people like Pyrrhus, but one that might in the long run have some effect on humanity as a whole, and the god, if anyone, can afford to play the long game.\n\nUp to now the discussion has been conducted under a slightly oversimplified assumption, namely that there were only two relevant agents involved in the consultation of an oracle\u2014the god and the person soliciting the oracle\u2014but in standard cases in the ancient world it would make more sense to distinguish three agents: the god, the person seeking an oracular response, and the human priest(ess) who, as intermediary, actually spoke the god's response. It is convenient to use the Latin word vates to refer to such an intermediary.\n\nOccasionally in the past people have construed the role of the poet as in some sense like that of the vates. Sometimes poets themselves, most notably perhaps H\u00f6lderlin and Rimbaud, have seen themselves in this way. Even in the best of circumstances, however, the poet does not know exactly what the god knows or at any rate does not know whatever is to be known in the way in which the god knows it. The vates does not, that is, in transmitting the god's message know any more than anyone else who hears the message. So the extent to which the vates can consciously and in detail enter into the potential paedagogic purposes of the god is likely to be limited. Despite this, it could still be the case that the god himself was pursuing a paedagogical project not just of instructing and improving some individual (Pyrrhus or Socrates) but of shifting people's attitudes and perhaps even their way of living as a whole through obscure speech, and it could also be true that the appropriate paedagogical effect would well be lost by clarity of expression.\n\nIf one assumes that our society, mode of life, forms of imagination, and language are interconnected, then restrictions or forms of distortion or repression in our form of life would be likely mirrored in limitations and distortions in our possible modes not merely of perceiving but also of imagining the world. This, in turn, would have its analogue in our everyday use of language. If there is no possibility of exiting once and for all from our contextually embedded natural languages into a pure ideal language of absolute clarity, because no such linguistic system can exist except as an inherently limited and isolated sector that remains parasitic on our everyday forms of interaction and communication, then what, if anything, can we do?\n\nOne response might be a kind of fuite en avant, an active embracing and celebration of ordinary language with all its blemishes and idiosyncrasies. However, rather than, as the late Wittgenstein and some of his followers thought, assuming that everyday life and language were in their own terms fundamentally in order\u2014or even, in a Romantic gesture, a source of health\u2014perhaps one ought to accept, but not be fully reconciled to, the fact that everyday life and the social structures embedded in it are a basic locus of repression. Prisons and police stations are not the only means of forcing people to act in certain ways. If one is interested not just in overt action but in forcing people to think, wish, and fantasise in a certain way, indirect forms of social pressure are usually much more effective than the chain and the knout. If \"clarity\" is indeed relative to socially enforced forms of speech, then, unless one makes the highly implausible assumption that our society and form of life are completely free and noncoercive, the demand for clarity can be seen as a requirement of conformity to structures of repression. Such conformity might not merely be seen as limiting and disfiguring our human individual and social capacities but also as \"evil\" (in one sense of that word). The call for \"clarity\" then can potentially mean pressure in the direction of conformism and hence complicity in evil.\n\nIf that is the case, then perhaps one should distinguish two distinct tasks that the god or his (or her) vates might undertake. One task would be to break down the familiar forms of everyday speech (and then perhaps in consequence certain routine patterns of action and interaction); the second would be to create positive new meanings, ways of speaking and acting, and eventually modes of living. The second of these might be thought to be in principle more important, but if the forms of speech and imagination are as dependent on the actual social structure as was assumed, there will be very strong limits to the extent to which it is possible even to envisage anything genuinely new, except perhaps in highly exceptional utopian moments, such as in 1871 in the Paris Commune. The first task then might be actually and practically more important, because at least in principle dischargeable. It might, of course, be psychologically possible for someone to engage in the first task only if he or she succumbed to the illusion of thinking they were engaged in the second, but that is a separate issue.\n\nIf everyday language was infected with conformism, repression, and distortion, how might one break out of it? We have seen a number of expedients tried: Heideggerian primitivism, the reduction of everyday language to purported etymological roots, and the reconfiguration of it from those roots; Brechtian Entfremdung, once described as the attempt to write High German as if it were a dialect; Karl Kraus's astringent and adamantine literalism; Adorno's precious, convoluted play with pronouns and self-referential constructions; or Paul Celan's hermeticism based on the use of unusual words no longer in use but preserved in weird entries in out-of-date dictionaries.\n\nIt is easy to be merely obscure\u2014any monkey with a keyboard can do that\u2014but difficult to be productively obscure, that is, to produce something that is not just like the Chinese text mentioned at the start of this chapter. A text completely written in Chinese does not \"break down familiar forms of <English> speech\" because it simply stands outside them. To break them down is not simply to replace them, Chinese platitudes for English, but to shift them and our attitudes towards them. It is, however, also not at all obvious that any given author is in the best position to assess whether the obscurity and irritation his or her own text generates is really an instance of a creative positive transformation or a creative negative disruption of our attitudes towards our language, our possibilities, and our world. There is an important distinction between what I can see from the outside, from the third-person perspective, where obscurity may have positive value, and what is visible from the first-person perspective from which perhaps I have no alternative but to seek to avoid what I take to be lack of clarity as much as possible. This would mean valuable obscurity would necessarily be a by-product, like \"happiness,\" not something one could with any hope of success intentionally strive for, but something that will result only from a process of aiming at something else. What could that \"something else\" be?\n\nThe vates will then be engaged in a strange and deeply anti-Platonic form of paedagogy because ex hypothesi he will not in any concrete detail know the end or goal, and will in one sense not know what he is doing. He will need to strive for what he took to be clarity while perhaps knowing that no such thing exists in any absolute terms and while also knowing that precisely the obscurity he could not eliminate, and perhaps did not even notice, might turn out to be his most valuable achievement.\n\nIf a poem can be fully understood, it has perhaps already lost some of its most important value. Paul Celan recognised this when he wrote in the preliminary drafts of his famous speech \"Der Meridian\": \"Weshalb uns die Gedichte fr\u00fcherer Epochen 'verst\u00e4ndlicher' vorkommen als die unserer Zeitgenossen? Vielleicht auch deshalb, weil sie sich als Gedichte, d.h. mitsamt ihrem Dunkel verfl\u00fcchtigt haben.\" [\"Why do the poems of earlier epochs seem to us 'more easily comprehensible' than those of our contemporaries? Perhaps part of the reason is that they have evaporated as poems, that is, together with their darkness.\"] For a poem to be a poem is for it to be obscure: not completely to fit in to our usual forms of speaking, acting, and reacting. Celan speaks of the \"congenital, constitutive darkness\" of the poem; to \"clarify\" this would be to destroy the poem. This is perhaps part of the reason why art at any rate in our modern world is always a necessary failure. As long as the work remains obscure, it has not yet acted effectively, but when, and if, it stops being obscure, it loses its most important purpose, its real point. Contrary to certain classicist assumptions, a poem is never \"perfect\" and is also never, as Thucydides puts it, a \"possession for eternity\" (\"\u03ba\u03c4\u1fc6\u03bc\u03b1 \u1f10\u03c2 \u03b1\u1f30\u03b5\u03af\" I.22). This is not a deficiency but part of what makes the poem what it is.\n\nIn the glory days of \"logical positivism,\" individual and social maturity was sometimes said to reside in being able and willing to \"face the facts,\" and these were assumed to be discovered by natural science. It was also asserted that there could be an absolutely clear, utterly unambiguous, and context-independent ideal language, the formalised \"language of science,\" which was adequate for expressing all the facts, and that meant everything there is to know. Apart from the facts and their associated modes of representation, there was nothing that was amenable to being discussed in any but a wholly random and arbitrary fashion. As the ideal vehicle for the expression of \"the facts,\" the ideal language of science had a kind of normative standing for mature humans. However, to be able to face the absence of determinate \"facts\" in a given domain is also a sign of a realistic attitude towards the world and is something to be aspired to; inability to tolerate vagueness, ambiguity, indeterminacy, the shifting, unbounded, amorphous nature and sheer randomness of much of human life and of human language is also a serious human weakness.\n\nThere are three thoughts here that are distinct but complementary. First of all, the world-language unit is not composed, at any rate not exclusively, of fixed and sharply defined facts that could be the objects of ideally pellucid expression. Much of it is indeterminate in a way that would not admit of absolute clarification. Second, much of our speech is in any case directed not at trying to reflect the natural world or reproduce the social world at all but at trying to change it or them. Third, much of what we take to be clear seems that way only because repressive social forces impose restrictive, determinate forms on our behaviour and on our modes of thinking and imagining. The best modern poetry is responsive to all three of these thoughts. That is one of the things that makes it so unsettling for many people but also one of the reasons we should cherish it, if we can.\n3\n\nMarxism and the Ethos of the Twentieth Century\n\nOne of the things I have always most admired about Alasdair MacIntyre's work is the particular kind of intellectual courage it exhibits. This virtue manifests itself in a number of ways, including a willingness to address large philosophical questions head-on and to give straightforward answers to them. This is a form of courage, rather than merely of some other more etiolated cognitive excellence, because giving relatively bald and unvarnished answers to big questions makes it difficult to avoid facing up to the implications of what one says for action, and the action involved might be of a kind that requires exhausting, deeply disruptive, and potentially radical changes in the way one lives. In the spirit of an attempt to emulate, at least to some extent, this one of MacIntyre's intellectual virtues, let me try to give a simple answer to the simple question. What happened in moral philosophy in the twentieth century, and what happened to moral philosophy in the twentieth century? My answer to this is that Nietzsche is what happened \"in\" moral philosophy, that is, the very idea of a \"universal\" moral philosophy having any kind of transsubjective authority came under attack. The notion of \"transsubjective authority\" is both unclear and problematic, but that does not mean that it is not attempting, even if not with complete success, to designate something important. It certainly does not mean what philosophers call \"validity,\" and in general it is not a mere epistemic notion. A practice (and its associated concepts and forms of thought) has what will be called \"transsubjective authority\" if it is capable of effectively structuring the basic functions of society around itself, endowing them with meaning, telling us how we should understand them, issuing commands, injunctions, and recommendations that \"stick\"\u2014that is, that are as a rule taken to have weight and standing\u2014and finally if it is able to give some reasonable account of itself and stand up to criticism. So Christianity is a clear historical example of a form of life and thought that had transsubjective authority for a long time in the West. Christianity adds to the mix the idea that its authority is \"universal.\" So the claim is that in the twentieth century Christianity in particular and the very traditional idea of a \"universalist\" form of ethical life and thought were replaced by a consumerist array of views that was a reflection of a life devoted to more or less unreflective consumption, structured only by aesthetic predilections and the usual sociological imperatives of novelty, snobbism, and so forth. What happened \"to\" moral philosophy is that Marxism, which to some extent came from outside the stuffy int\u00e9rieur of academic philosophy, presented the only genuine and potentially viable attempt at reconstituting some notion of objective moral authority, an authority that was to be based on attributing to production an absolute social and political priority. If this attempt had succeeded, it would have changed the world and with it our intellectual and moral universe, but it failed. It used to be said that Marxism was a pseudo-religion or a religion-substitute and this claim was presented as if it was in itself a criticism. As if Marxists had simply not fully grasped the implications of the death of God. My view is that the problem was not that this was Marxism's aspiration but that it failed to achieve its aspiration. Philosophically, then, the story of the twentieth century is the story of the failure of Marxism.\n\nThe main philosophical \"problem\" in the twentieth century, then, is the complex of anarchic beliefs and anomic modes of living for which the proper name \"Nietzsche\" stands as the designator. This phenomenon \"Nietzscheanism\" is not a mere historical aberration or an accidental philosopher's mistake. Rather it is in some sense a veridical reflection of our social reality, and thus Nietzsche can be seen as giving a correct diagnosis of a set of ills with deep roots in modern Western societies. One of the ways in which Nietzsche uses the term \"nihilism\" is to designate the contemporary situation of disorientation in which \"[all] the highest values lose their value\" and all forms of authority lose their hold over individuals. This disorientation is thought to be so intolerable that the most urgent task for contemporary philosophers is to try to help social actors replace practical and theoretical Nietzscheanism with something more salubrious. Philosophers should be looking for a stable way of living together that would be potentially universal, in some yet to be specified sense of \"universal.\" This common life would need to be one that would allow us to cultivate certain individual and collective goods, many of which are highly context specific and dependent on historically fragile construction. In addition, it would ideally be one that would tolerate and support, or even foster, a correct reflective conceptualisation of itself, and thus allow us to see it as having some kind of standing, validity, or authority.\n\nThis does not yet by itself imply that Marxism is the only viable attempt to provide a coherent moral philosophy that would respond adequately to Nietzsche's challenge, so that the story of the twentieth century can be told as essentially the story of the development and failure of Marxism. Surely, one might think, there must have been other possible contenders for solutions to the problem we were looking to solve? Why is the story not told as one of the failure of Christianity or liberalism? I wish to suggest that Christianity and liberalism did not, properly speaking, \"fail\" because they were never real contenders. The reason for this is that neither one is properly \"universalist.\" What \"universalist\" means is, of course, itself a matter of controversy.\n\nThis is in no way surprising. After all, it is an oft-noted property of the most interesting philosophical questions that they are reflexive. In asking \"What form of life, what worldview, what philosophy, what authority is universalist?\" one is at the same time asking \"What exactly is, or could be, meant by 'universalist'?\" In a preliminary way one can say that a \"universalist\" worldview would be one that was relevant to everyone\u2014it was not from the very start intended to be the worldview only of aristocrats, football enthusiasts, medical practitioners, and so forth\u2014and second it would have to be a worldview that gave people orientation towards all the important features of human life. This preliminary account is not false, but it shares the same indeterminacy mentioned at the start. We don't know what \"relevant\" means in the phrase \"relevant to everyone\" or what \"important\" means in the phrase \"all the important features of human life.\" Part of what we have to do is conduct a unitary enquiry of some kind within which we discover what is relevant and ought to be important to us, and what \"relevant\" and \"important\" should be taken properly to mean.\n\nDespite its original (Pauline) intentions to provide a mode of access to salvation to all irrespective of their ethnic affiliation, Christianity, like all the revealed monotheistic religions, is so mixed up with highly local forms of human customary imagination that it is unthinkable that it ever could become truly universal, in the sense of being shared by all humans, unless it were imposed by a form of sustained, unchallenged military, cultural, and economic power no Christian country had in the twentieth century and which, certainly, none seems now likely ever to acquire. This is, of course, a variant of a theme common in Hegel, who connects religion with the ability of the human spirit to produce specific images and concrete narratives, what he calls \"Mythen, Phantasievorstellungen und positive, eigentliche Geschichten\" (\"myths, phantasms, and contentful narratives that are in fact mere stories\"). There is, of course, a place, even an important place in human life, for historically specific forms of narrative that engage strong human emotions and for local forms of the imagination, but our image-making capacities seem to have a limited ability to give a kind of persuasive account of themselves and their products that would render them universally acceptable and binding. Unless the particular revelation at a specific time and place on which a given religion is founded can be detached from its context in local fact and fiction, it seems unlikely to be able to command the unrestricted assent that it would require to constitute a proper response to Nietzsche, by exerting a visible and palpable universal moral authority.\n\nUnder modern circumstances, then, religion is fated either to degenerate into folklore, a particular emotionally tinged set of provincial ways in which the genuinely universal pressures of global capitalism are inflected in particular localities, or to become an inherently sectarian matter, that is, something relating to the specific choice a small group makes and through which that group isolates itself. Recall the origin of the term \"heresy\" in the Greek word \u03b1\u1f31\u03c1\u03ad\u03c9 (\"to choose, or pick\"): the heretical sect is a group that by choice cuts itself off from a wider \"catholic\"\u2014that is, genuinely all-encompassing\u2014community, thus becoming a \"sect.\" Its members choose some doctrines and practices rather than others. Members of a \"catholic\" community do not choose their way of life but are born into it, or \"grow\" into it. If there is an intact \"catholic community\" in existence that would be one situation, but if there isn't, no amount of wishing or engineering will in itself bring it back into existence. If no truly \"catholic\" community exists, then every religious grouping, even those into which the members are \"born,\" must be seen as in a very important sense a \"sect.\" So one slightly paradoxical way of describing the contemporary world is as one in which there is no (proper, universal, \"catholic\") religion but only (various) sects. A sect may have some healthy, admirable, and morally positive features, but it is not a framework for the reliable exercise of potentially overarching moral authority for the modern world as a whole.\n\nThat no revealed religion can be the solution of the Nietzschean predicament, then, does not imply that \"clarified\" and intellectualised successors of Christianity, such as Marxism, might not aspire to being successful in this enterprise. MacIntyre himself occasionally emphasises that Marxism can be seen as being something like a Christian heresy, although a \"heresy\" that might, even if in some sense finally a failure, potentially have been more universal than the original religious matrix out of which it emerged. Still it would be a \"heresy,\" part of the essential point of which was that it had turned itself into a philosophy and a kind of political and social thought, and so deprived itself of precisely those attributes that made Christianity not a philosophy but a religion.\n\nOne might, of course, argue that \"liberalism\" is not a contender as a solution to the Nietzschean predicament because it is not really a full-scale philosophy at all. Rather it is one or the other of two things. Either it is an attitude that is inherently adverbial, so that to be a Liberal is to be \"liberal,\" that is, to do whatever one does in a certain way or spirit of open-handedness, flexibility, and toleration with a minimal use of force. That is, to put it in an exceedingly tendentious way, a Liberal is a person who accepts the first half of the slogan that is often associated with the Jesuits, \"suaviter in modo,\" but ignores or blanks out, and thus tacitly cancels, the second half, \"fortiter in re.\" Alternatively Liberalism is a highly specific political programme, such as the demand that constitutional government be introduced in a particular country (such as Spain in the early nineteenth century). A psychological disposition or attitude, however, is not by itself an ethics at all because it is too indeterminate, referring exclusively to how we ought to act rather than what we should do. It might be thought to have some limited ethical value in that it would exclude certain forms of individual or collective action, such as certain crude inquisitorial practices, but that in itself will not give anyone a very useful orientation in life or answer perfectly reasonable questions such as: What courses of action should I (or we) pursue in a free-spirited and open-handed way? Of which institutions should I approve? Why exactly is toleration of error an overwhelming human good? When is discussion or negotiation possible and fruitful and when is it useless or inappropriate? What alternatives do we have when discussion will not serve? Who counts as \"one of us\"? For which purposes and why? Similarly, a particular political programme like constitutionalism might be compatible with any number of very different worldviews.\n\nI don't doubt that \"Liberalism\" was used originally in this adverbial way and then later as the designation of a specific political programme, but I think it is equally clear that nowadays, in much academic and peri-academic discourse, it is presented as a kind of worldview or philosophical position. During the course of his long career MacIntyre has diagnosed four problems with liberalism considered as a full-scale political and moral doctrine.\n\nFirst, much mainstream Liberalism is characteristically and inherently duplicitous in a way that will eventually reveal itself, particularly when liberals are most in need of orientation and moral guidance, namely when they encounter intact and self-confident nonliberal societies. Doctrinal liberals generally pretend to be above the fray in substantive ideological and moral disagreements. They claim, that is, not to be advocating one particular substantively specified way of life over another, yet they clearly are. Thus the British state, accepting it for the moment as an institution that is committed to the lowest-common-denominator Liberalism, which unites the Conservative and the Labour parties, now enforces a ban on forced marriages and intervenes, coercively if necessary, to prevent female circumcision and other practices, even against groups who take these customs to be an integral part of their way of life. To turn one of Isaiah Berlin's central contentions back against liberalism itself, one might say that even forcing people to acquire the preconditions for acting in an individually autonomous way is forcing them to do something (and not something else, e.g., \"merely\" liberating them or rendering them \"more rational\").\n\nSecond, liberalism cannot easily be extracted from at least some kind of complicitous association with laissez-faire capitalism, and so it inherits whatever deficiencies might be associated with that specific form of economic organisation. I might also add that if one central strand of twentieth-century Marxism is correct, this association with laissez-faire capitalism is a further reason to think that liberalism cannot be an ethical system that lays claim to any real universality. One reason for this is that laissez-faire capitalism seems to require an excluded underclass that is exploited (whether that be an internal proletariat or one externalised in quasi-colonial arrangements) and to which various liberal claims about voluntary contracting, transfer of ownership of property, free choice of occupation, and so forth, are effectively irrelevant. Another reason is that a laissez-faire economy depends on the continued existence of a series of social domains and institutions like the family, the legal system, the education system, and the health system. These institutions must operate according to pre- or noncapitalist principles and cannot coherently be fully subjected to the imperatives of the \"free market\" (although they can be significantly distorted and damaged by attempts to do this).\n\nThird, the substantive moral conception to which liberalism as a philosophy is committed, despite the protestations of neutrality made by many of its most vocal proponents, is one based in a pernicious way on a conception of the isolated individual as the locus of an absolute moral autonomy. This represents a serious cognitive limitation, because on this basis no adequate understanding of human society is possible, nor does it permit even individual human agents who are engaged in any serious forms of social behaviour to attain any satisfactory form of self-understanding. It is in fact exceedingly difficult to see how liberalism's pet recommendation \"increase individual freedom\" can constitute a contribution to solving any of the world's major problems.\n\nAn ethic based on this kind of hyperindividualist moral autonomy is, however, not merely cognitively mistaken, but\u2014and this I take to be MacIntyre's fourth point\u2014any form of social action based on or guided by such a view will also be deeply and actively destructive, dissolving forms of collective life that have real value without replacing them with anything of equal value. For these reasons, then, liberalism is not the answer.\n\nInitially it might look as if Marxism was simply orthogonal to the whole universe of discussion marked out by Nietzsche, Christianity, and liberalism. It does not seem to be focused on providing views about the universal validity of moral principles, the salvation of the soul, or the proper role of flexibility and toleration in human life. What it promised was three things. The first was something very concrete: an end to the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalist growth, and a regime of full employment, economic stability, and full social welfare and security for all. This first promise had particular importance in circumstances in which it called attention to the comparison with capitalist economies that were subject to recurrent, severe crisis, such as those of the 1920s and 1930s, and it retains its importance to the extent to which capitalist societies, despite Gordon Brown's foolish boast, still are subject to boom-and-bust. This first promise was concrete and empirical in the sense that it came about as close as one ever gets in the social sciences to being something the fulfillment of which could be determined by something like empirical scientific means.\n\nSecond, Marxism was committed to the view that the appropriately structured abolition of the private ownership of means of production would do away with what were historically superseded social fetters on the development of human powers and unleash an unexpected and hitherto unprecedented increase in human productivity. This increase in human productivity would have as its natural effect an increase in material well-being, that is, in the level of satisfaction of human needs and in levels of human consumption. This second promise, too, was something that, with the usual caveats and qualifications, could be connected with at least some crude standards of empirical confirmation.\n\nThe third promise was altogether more problematic for historical and philosophical reasons. That is the promise to end alienation. It is historically problematic because it was most clearly formulated in unpublished writings by Marx that became widely available only after World War I and therefore did not directly influence the formulation in the late nineteenth century of the basic Marxist canon. It has been thought to be philosophically problematic because it seemed to depend on a series of Hegelian views that might be thought to be questionable for any number of reasons (not least because they might be thought to remain implicated in basically idealistic ways of thinking about the world, which was found to be objectionable). \"Alienation\" is best understood relative to a distinction between the (mere) exercise of human powers and the \"appropriation,\" or \"re-appropriation\" [\"Aneignung\" \/ \"Wiederaneignung\"], of these powers. The intuition behind this distinction is that an individual human agent (or a group of such agents) can be the real locus through which certain powers are applied to the physical world without it being the case that the human individual, or group, in question has \"made the (relevant) powers its own.\" Making certain powers \"our own\" in turn means acquiring full control over the conditions of further development and the application of those powers and being able to affirm ourselves in the exercise of those powers. \"Alienation\" refers to the state of affairs in which we have not appropriated some of our most basic human powers, especially those closely connected with material production and reproduction of our form of life. Apart from concerns about the possible idealist overtones of this concept, one might worry that I have given an account of it that is circular and empty, just replacing one undefined and obscure counter or token with another: Alienation is supposed to be the lack of appropriation of powers. That in turn is \"defined\" by reference to \"making the power one's own.\" \"Making a power my own,\" however, is said to have taken place when I can \"affirm myself\" in exercising it. However, is \"self-affirmation\" a well-understood concept? The reference to \"self-affirmation\" means at the very least that a significant interpretative activity is required to connect the conceptual structure described in any way with anything that empirical social science would recognise as part of itself, and this might be thought to be a further reason to be wary of \"alienation.\" I do not wish in any way to minimise these genuine difficulties, but I do not think they finally matter for the question at issue.\n\nThe self-proclaimed Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe were remarkably successful in making good on the first of these promises. To the very end their populations enjoyed full employment and what was by Western European standards a very ample schedule of other benefits that provided more or less complete economic security. Nevertheless they collapsed, not just economically but, as it were, also morally. They failed, that is, to find enough ideational and motivational support among their own populations to continue to reproduce themselves. The reason for this was not, I submit, because they were oppressive, and certainly not because they failed to be \"democratic\" in the sense in which this term is used in Western liberal societies. It is also hard to think that they collapsed merely because they failed to end \"alienation,\" although it is true that they did thus fail, or perhaps more exactly, as Sartre sometimes claimed, they did not so much fail to end capitalist alienation as replace it with a specific, slightly different kind of alienation. In one of his essays he cites a poster in a factory in Eastern Europe in which workers are enjoined to take care of their health in order not to damage national production. In cases like this one's own health itself (and hence presumably one's own biological possibility of self-activity) is seen merely as a means to a fully external end. Still, politics is usually about differential, not categorical, forms of judgement and action, that is, we characteristically choose X not \"for itself alone\" but X in preference to Y or Z. So the spectrum of envisaged realistic possibilities that is presupposed in political decision is usually an important variable. If the choice, then, is exclusively between Soviet forms of economic and political organisation and Western capitalist ones, the failure of Soviet-style societies to end alienation would not be a very strong differential argument in favour of capitalist regimes because the latter made no serious attempt at all to make labour (and life) unalienated and unalienating (whatever \"alienation\" might turn out to mean). Yet when offered the opportunity, in the last decade or so of the twentieth century, populations in Eastern Europe overwhelmingly chose to abandon the self-proclaimed Marxist form of economy and of society and look towards Western European models of modern capitalism.\n\nThe lethal failure of twentieth-century European Marxism was its inability to produce consumer goods at the level of quality and quantity that was attained by Western Europe. So a failure in the second of the three promises. Those of us who have always lived in prosperous societies and have been materially comfortable may well be tempted to be somewhat condescending about this: Is mere failure to provide a steadily increasing stream of luxury consumer goods really good grounds for rejecting a social order, provided ample means for minimally decent living are available? Is even lack of \"economic efficiency\" good grounds for criticism? I think this is a temptation to adopt a morally shameful attitude that we should staunchly resist.\n\nThe positive attraction of the West, then, was completely understandable. It was the attraction of greater productivity combined with a social and political framework that was perceived as permitting a greater distribution of consumer goods. The failure of the Soviet system consisted in the incapacity to provide their populations with capitalist levels of consumption and an inability to elaborate any plausible alternative evaluative standard relative to which life in Soviet-style societies could be seen as distinctively good.\n\nThe difficulty was that a central strand of Marxism shared with capitalist ideologies a tacit or explicit productivist ethos. In a kind of parody of a motif taken from the High Enlightenment, a more economically and industrially productive society was expected to be one that was \"more advanced\" in almost every way. Marx himself was well aware of this strand in his own thinking but did not think it in any way problematic: he expected socialist economies to out-produce capitalist ones and to be self-evidently more rewarding, satisfying, and choiceworthy to those who lived in them than capitalist societies were; he also expected these two things naturally and easily to go together. Perhaps the clearest expression of the productivist view occurs in the Grundrisse:\n\nWir finden bei den Alten nie eine Untersuchung, welche Form des Grundeigentums etc. die produktivste, den gr\u00f6\u00dften Reichtum schafft? Der Reichtum erscheint nicht als Zweck der Produktion, obgleich sehr wohl Cato untersuchen kann, welche Bestellung des Feldes die ertr\u00e4glichste, oder gar Brutus sein Geld zu den besten Zinsen ausborgen kann. Die Untersuchung ist immer, welche Weise des Eigentums die besten Staatsb\u00fcrger schafft. Als Selbstzweck erscheint der Reichtum nur bei den wenigen Handelsv\u00f6lkern\u2014Monopolisten des carrying trade\u2014, die in den Poren der alten Welt leben, wie die Juden in der mittelaltrigen Gesellschaft.... So scheint die alte Anschauung, wo der Mensch, in wlecher bornierten nationalen, religi\u00f6sen, politischen Bestimmung auch immer als Zweck der Produktion erscheint, sehr erhaben zu sein gegen die moderne Welt, wo die Produktion als Zweck des Menschen und der Reichtum als Zweck der Produktion erscheint. In fact, aber, wenn die bornierte b\u00fcrgerliche Form abgestreift wird, was ist der Reichtum anders als die im universellen Austausch erzeugte Universalit\u00e4t der Bed\u00fcrfnisse, F\u00e4higkeiten, Gen\u00fcsse, Produktivkr\u00e4fte etc. der Individuen? Die volle Entwicklung der menschlichen Herrschaft \u00fcber die Naturkr\u00e4fte, die der sogenannten Natur sowohl, wie seiner eigenen Natur? Das absolute Herausarbeiten seiner sch\u00f6pferischen Anlagen, ohne andre Voraussetzung als die vorhergegangene historische Entwicklung, die diese Totalit\u00e4t der Entwicklung, d.h. der Entwicklung aller menschlichen Kr\u00e4fte als solcher, nicht gemessen an einem vorgegebenen Ma\u00dfstab, zum Selbstzwecke macht?\n\n[Among the ancients we never find an investigation of which form of landownership is most productive, creates the most wealth? Wealth does not appear as the end of production, although Cato is quite capable of investigating which form of cultivation of the field has the highest yield, and even Brutus knows how to lend out his money at the best rate of interest. The investigation is always which form of property creates the best citizens. Wealth appears as an end-in-itself only among some few trading nations\u2014monopolists of the carrying trade\u2014who live in the pores of the ancient world, like the Jews in medieval society.... The ancient conception according to which man in whatever narrow national, religious, or political form appears as the end of production seems to be very sublime compared with the modern world, where production appears as the end of man and wealth the end of production. In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of the needs, abilities, forms of enjoyment, productive powers, etc., of the individuals generated in universal exchange? The full development of human domination over natural powers, both of so-called nature and of his own nature? The absolute elaboration of his creative capacities without any further presupposition that the previous historical development which makes this totality of development, that is the development of all human power as such, not measured by any pregiven yardstick, into an end-in-itself.]\n\nOn the positive side, this does seem to give one at least a possible kind of response to Nietzsche, that is, it can be seen as a description of a universal framework that could be construed as containing a potential kind of quasi-moral but nonsubjective authority, an authority derived from the requirements for maximally developing needs and human productive powers and capacities for their own sake. However, this response does require one to put a huge amount of weight on a particular anthropological conception that emphasises the mutual dependence of human powers and human needs, and the necessary and potentially mutually reinforcing relation between individual and collective development of powers. Nietzsche, of course, would have rejected this conjunction of individual and collective. This disagreement between Marx and Nietzsche about the interconnection of individual and social powers ought not, however, to obscure a further deep-seated similarity. Both Marx's productivism and Nietzschean conceptions of the exercise of the individual will-to-power contain a very strong substantive quasi-normative commitment to the development of power as an \"end-in-itself.\"\n\nIs the development of every human power and of every need really good, and, more than that, is it a kind of absolute good-in-itself, as Marx's construction seems to imply? Historians often point to Rousseau as systematically introducing the idea of a \"false need\" into Western social thought. In human society we all develop forms of dependency on the good opinion of others, which give rise to any number of cognitively delusory but motivationally deeply seated \"needs,\" which make no contribution to any real human good and which we would in principle be better off without. Notoriously Marx will have none of this line of thought. He has a theory of needs, but no analysis of what it could be for a need to be false. A \"rich\" person is a person \"rich in needs,\" and this is a thoroughly positive and laudatory description. He thought any attempt to introduce a distinction between true and false needs would represent a return to what he took to be Rousseau's proto-Romantic primitivism or to an inherently ascetic view of life that could be justified only by reference to discredited forms of religious belief.\n\nParallel to these difficulties about \"needs\" is a question about the idea of a \"(natural, human) power,\" the development of which is here described as an end-in-itself. In some of Marx's early works one finds a very broad construal of this term. So even \"forms of enjoyment\" that might play a role in my relation to objects in the world (as mentioned in the above quotation), such as the cultivation of the senses and the ability to appreciate the beauty of nature, are construed as \"natural human powers\" (actually as \"menschliche Wesenskr\u00e4fte\"). Arguably this would not give rise to some of the worst features of productivism, because saying that a \"form of enjoyment,\" or even a larger configuration in which a specific form of enjoyment is an essential constituent, is an \"end-in-itself\" does not seem to leave open certain classic forms of alienation. It really would seem strange to claim that I was being inappropriately forced to develop my own powers of enjoyment of some type of object, at any rate provided that the development of such powers was part of what Marx sometimes calls an \"all-sided\" exercise of human powers and capacities. Unfortunately, sometimes Marx seems to give \"human powers\" a significantly narrower reading than the one just canvassed, as if the phrase were equivalent not to \"all\" the human powers included in one way or another in the cycle of production and consumption (including those of aesthetic appreciation, enjoyment, and discrimination) but were restricted to the power to produce goods or material objects that can be used or consumed. \"Power\" means, or at any rate is strictly modelled on, industrial production: \"Die Geschichte der Industrie... ist das aufgeschlagene Buch der menschlichen Wesenskr\u00e4fte\"). A \"human power\" is then tacitly understood essentially as a kind of instrument that is deployed to bring physical things into existence or change their location or material properties.\n\nMacIntyre, in his essay on the Theses on Feuerbach, pointed to a \"road not taken\" by the early Marx that diverges from that trodden by later Marxists. In the \"Theses\" the early Marx does not construe production either in the narrower or in the wider of the two senses distinguished above as the end-in-itself of human life. Rather he appeals to a different kind of human action altogether that is not construed as in the first instance a form of relating to \"objects\" at all. This form of human action is apparently conceived as standing altogether outside the context of the instrumental transformation of nature in the production of goods or the cultivation of powers to appreciate those goods (and then also perhaps natural phenomena of all kinds, considered as potential \"objects\"). Marx calls this form of activity \"praxis.\" Whatever \"praxis\" is supposed to be, it is supposed to be a radically autotelic\u2014that is, it is to have its end-in-itself and not in some external product\u2014and noninstrumental form of activity. Marx, however, does not really give a sufficiently detailed account of \"praxis\" for us to get a firm grasp on the concept and discover to what extent it is or is not genuinely enlightening. Appeal to \"praxis\" is no more than a gesture at something not further analysed rather than a satisfactory explanation.\n\nOne can see the work of some of the members of the so-called Frankfurt School as developing lines of argument that are parallel to the ones just discussed. Most of the members of this school agree on two points. First, that Marx was either confusing or confused about the exact nature of human action. He tended to construe all human action on the model of instrumental action or under the aspect of its possible mean-ends rationality. He tended, that is, to identify \"praxis\" and \"production,\" and then to construe \"production\" in a narrow way as \"industrial production.\" This in effect meant both conceptually reducing noninstrumental forms of action (such as \"praxis,\" whatever that finally meant) to forms of production and subordinating all human life to the imperatives of increased instrumental control over the environment (and over ourselves). Seen from this perspective, Marx's use of the phrase \"Herrschaft \u00fcber die Naturkr\u00e4fte <unserer> eignen Natur\" (\"the domination [italics added] over the natural powers of our own nature\") in the passage from the Grundrisse cited above can be read in a chilling way, as potentially the extension of a paradigm of coercive manipulation from our relations to nature to our relations to other humans, and from our relations to other humans to our relations to ourselves.\n\nSecond, the members of the Frankfurt School thought it essential to rehabilitate the distinction between true and false needs by showing how one could speak of \"false needs\" without asceticism, without a return to an Aristotelian conception of a substantively fixed human nature that could be used as a criterion, and without commitment to a Romantic \"return to Nature\" view. This attempt was not very successful because it ended up either with the pessimistic aesthetic vision of Adorno, which had no obvious connection to any form of concrete politics, or with the debased liberalism of Habermas and his neo-Kantian ideal speech theory.\n\nUp to now I have not mentioned what I call in my title \"the ethos\" of the twentieth century. To speak of \"the\" ethos is slightly misleading because it suggests that there is a single unitary such ethos. In one sense this is right, in that there seems to be agreement on a cycle of need-production-consumption pursued for its own sake. On the other hand, though, there are two slightly different ways of accentuating the components in this cycle. Marx emphasises the priority of production and tries to find a way of seeing how that production can be a form of human freedom and self-activity. This view dominated Eastern Europe during much of the twentieth century. The various ideologies of the capitalist societies, on the other hand, focused on consumption. The first way of inflecting the need-production-consumption cycle, just to repeat, was, I have claimed, finally unable to maintain itself partly because it was unable to out-produce the group of countries that eventually became the European Union and perhaps because it could give no plausible answer to the question of why production for its own sake was an end-in-itself and had no genuinely alternative value-system, or mode of self-congratulation, to propose. The second, consumption-oriented variety of this same basic worldview and form of society, as MacIntyre has shown, is the natural matrix for the various varieties of emotivism, existentialism, and moral anarchism that are characteristic of the philosophy and the life of our societies. Mainstream Marxism, then, was an attempt to answer the questions of the twentieth century in a way that was in some sense still commensurate with an important part of its ethos.\n\nHow might one break out of the cycle of need-production-consumption? One way would certainly be to find a single overarching goal outside it, if any such goal existed. And so it is very tempting to follow Aristotle down the path that leads from this reflection to the views that he presents in his ethical and political writings. In a famous passage in the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes:\n\n\u0395\u1f30 \u03b4\u03ae \u03c4\u03b9 \u03c4\u03ad\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f10\u03c3\u03c4\u1f76 \u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u03c0\u03c1\u03b1\u03ba\u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u1f43 \u03b4\u03b9\u0309 \u03b1\u1f51\u03c4\u1f78 \u03b2\u03bf\u03c5\u03bb\u03cc\u03bc\u03b5\u03b8\u03b1. \u03c4\u1f06\u03bb\u03bb\u03b1 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03b4\u03b9\u1f70 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c4\u03bf, \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bc\u1f74 \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1 \u03b4\u03b9\u0309 \u1f15\u03c4\u03b5\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd \u03b1\u1f31\u03c1\u03bf\u03cd\u03bc\u03b5\u03b8\u03b1 (\u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03cc\u03b5\u03b9\u03c3\u03b9 \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u03bf\u1f55\u03c4\u03c9 \u03b3\u0309 \u03b5\u1f30\u03c2 \u1f04\u03c0\u03b5\u03b9\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd, \u1f65\u03c3\u03c4\u0309 \u03b5\u1f36\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9 \u03ba\u03b5\u03bd\u1f74\u03bd \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03b1\u03af\u03b1\u03bd \u03c4\u1f74\u03bd \u1f44\u03c1\u03b5\u03be\u03b9\u03bd) \u03b4\u1fc6\u03bb\u03bf\u03bd \u1f61\u03c2 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c4\u0309 \u1f04\u03bd \u03b5\u1f34\u03b7 \u03c4\u1f00\u03b3\u03b1\u03b8\u1f78\u03bd \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u1f78 \u1f04\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03bd.\n\n[If then there is some end of our practical undertakings which we wish for the sake of itself, whereas we wish for the other things <we wish for> for the sake of it, and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for if that is the case, the sequence will go on without limit, so that our desire was empty and vain) it is clear that this <end> will be the good, i.e., the best.]\n\nThis is my own pons asinorum, the bridge from ignorance into the Promised Land of Understanding that I have found myself always unable to cross. Why, I have always wondered, should my desire be considered \"empty and pointless,\" just because it is part of a sequence of further desires that goes off into infinity (i.e., that continues indefinitely, has no definite stopping point)? I am thirsty today and want to drink. I know that even if I do now drink, I will be thirsty again tomorrow or the next day. Does that mean that my desire to drink now is \"empty\"? Even if my action on a specific desire is (doomed necessarily to be) frustrated and \"pointless\" (\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03b1\u03af\u03b1), I do not see how that makes the desire or the course of action to which it gives rise empty. Such desires and such actions are an important, in fact constituent, part of human life. To take a slightly more weighty example, I may desire (both for its inherent properties and for the other good things it leads to) greater European integration, the prosecution of Tony Blair in The Hague as a war criminal, and a more rigorous standard in education without having any idea how these different goals might be related to each other. Even if I were to agree that I need some central structure of desire unified under a single overarching end to give my life meaning, I do not see how it follows from that that all my desires need to be seen in reference to that central core. I don't, of course, mean to assert that all human desire is undifferentially or equally good or valid, or that it might not be perverted, inopportune, or otherwise unwise to act on some desires in some circumstances, but has human desire no weight and dignity in itself at all, apart from its integration into a single overarching end? Isn't human life in fact like this: a series of desires that at some indeterminate point, we know not when, eventually peters out?\n\nOne of the reasons I have always felt great resistance to this Aristotelian line of thought is that it seems to me to add fuel to a view of human life that I find repellent. This is the view that life is either like a race or an \u1f04\u03b3\u03c9\u03bd with clear winners and losers. Or that it is the exercise of a craft with a determinate end, say like the production of shoes, so that univocal success or failure is always discernible. First of all, I have always thought there was much to be said not exactly in favour of failure tout court but in potential appreciation of some of the aspects of failure. One would think that this would be a line of thought that recommended itself with particular force to Christians who took seriously Paul's preaching of \"Christ crucified.\" Second, much of human life and some of the most interesting and important parts of it do not seem to me to lend themselves plausibly to analysis in terms of success or failure at all. Some aspects of life are not appropriately construed relative to the idea that life is a single continuous narrative about the desire for and pursuit of a single unified (conception of the) good. Furthermore, a human life \"as a whole\" does not seem to me at all like a single huge race or the deployment of a craft. It seems to me highly questionable whether my whole life admits of treatment as a single narrative in any interesting sense, but even if I were to grant that it is or could be such a narrative, the kind of narrative in question would have to be one that would be only contingently related to the \"story\" of a single \u1fbd\u03b1\u03b3\u03ce\u03bd, competition, or race. Narrative should be seen as a way of distancing ourselves from Aristotle, not of rehabilitating him. If we at any particular time give our desires some minimal order by reference to some conception of a single overarching good, we also know that those conceptions of a unitary good change during our lives. Any unity of desire is \"necessarily\" and unavoidably fleeting, transitory, fragile, and imposed on much more chaotic structures that are, however, not just nothing or \"empty.\"\n\nThus Aristotle's view has always seemed to me utterly implausible as a view about the nature of human desire and thus also of human life as a whole. Human desire has at least some validity in itself, a validity that is not derived merely from some external higher end to which it is devoted. The passage cited from Nicomachean Ethics has also always seemed to me to indicate that, regardless of the rather sophisticated discussion one can find in his work of forms of human action that are autotelic, Aristotle is still fixated on a relatively rigid division of actions into those performed \"for their own sake\" (as end-in-themselves) and those performed \"(merely) for the sake of something else.\" In fact if he were to be able to rid his thought of the centrality of this distinction and see it as of merely local or contextual relevance, the argument for the existence of a single overarching end, on which the rest of the work to some extent rests, would be seen to be implausible. Even interpretations of Aristotle that emphasise the extent to which the conception of \u03b5\u1f50\u03b4\u03b1\u03b9\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u03af\u03b1 (\"happiness\" or \"human flourishing\") will be affected by reflection on the real conditions of human life and real human desires seem to me to hold fast to the \"(mere) means\"\/\"end (in itself)\" distinction. It is one thing to say that in determining what the end-in-itself is, one must reflect even on the means that will be necessary for its attainment, and quite another to do away with the distinction between means adopted for the sake of something other than themselves and ends-in-themselves altogether.\n\nThere is, at any rate, a whole traditional sequence of philosophers who think of themselves as turning their backs resolutely on the strict Aristotelian distinction between means and ends, actions under the dominance of instrumental rationality and some form of autotelic human activity. I would include in this tradition Hegel, Marx (in some of his moods), Dewey, Trotsky (sometimes), and Adorno (but not Habermas). Obviously the members of this group differ in any number of significant ways, but what seems to me characteristic of all of them is their conviction that one must try to break out of the cycle of need-production-consumption and in particular get away from the idea that some component of that cycle is a kind of end-in-itself. Rather, however, than thinking that there is some other single good that is the one overarching human goal, as Aristotle claims, but that goal is not production, they hold that there is no pregiven over-arching single goal. Human life is a matter of biens \u00e0 construire rather than of a bien \u00e0 trouver. Furthermore, they connect this thought and see it as in some way inherently connected with the idea of overcoming the very distinction between means and ends or instrumental and substantive rationality, or at any rate demoting any such distinction to the status of a mere contextual convenience with no final significance. Thus Trotsky speaks of the \"dialectic of means and ends.\"\n\nDialectical materialism does not know dualism between means and end. The end flows naturally from the historical movement. Organically the means are subordinated to the end. The immediate end becomes the means for a further end.\n\nAppeal to such a dialectic, however, is one way to try to save the deepest intuition behind Marxism, which is that humanity should be capable of collectively self-organising activity, which instantiates appropriate self-control, self-direction, and even, when necessary, self-limitation, without needing to appeal to any external principle. The central idea that humanity is constituted by a self-activity in which the distinction between instrumental action and action performed for its own sake is not relevant is detachable from productivism. This specific conception of self-activity seems to me more perspicuously graspable in Hegelian than in Aristotelian categories. I am sorry to say that I believe that I disagree with MacIntyre on this.\n\nThat leaves the issue of Nietzsche. Simply deciding in discussion to abandon Aristotle's distinction between instrumental action and action performed for its own sake will not by itself suffice to do away with Nietzscheanism, unless such a decision was part of a successful project of action to transform society. Marx thought it in some sense pointless to \"refute\" religion because it arose from human needs that were not satisfied by a certain social formation and would only disappear when those needs were more directly and palpably satisfied. Similarly, Nietzscheanism will disappear only when it loses its plausibility as a mirror of and guide to and in our social life. That will happen only if our social life takes a different form. Nevertheless, the framework provided by some conception of collective self-activity gives us, it seems to me, the best chance we have of constructing a world in which Nietzsche would be an irrelevance. Even if such an institutionally embedded and socially realised framework effectively did exist, it would still be possible for individuals to make a decision to try to reject it, but this decision would have a completely different status from that which a \"lifestyle decision\" has now. It would be more like what Christians in the medieval period had in mind when they considered the possibility that the fool might say in his heart that there is no God. Taking seriously the attempt to abolish the distinction between instrumental and substantive reason, between actions performed merely for the sake of other things and actions performed for their own sake, and finally between means and ends, by transforming society in a way that would make these distinctions really marginal and subordinate would, I think, move one beyond the ethos of the twentieth century. Not, of course, that there is politically the slightest chance of this happening at present.\n4\n\nMust Criticism Be Constructive?\n\nThere is a widely held view\u2014at least in contemporary Anglo-American societies\u2014that \"merely negative\" criticism is somehow defective or inappropriate. It is part of the responsibility of a critic, it is assumed, not simply to denigrate some institution, social arrangement, or form of action but to do so while providing at least the suggestion of a \"preferable\" way of acting, or a \"better\" way of organising some sector of the society. Though this view is widely shared, it is perhaps not unimportant to recall that it is not universally held. One might think, for instance, of Bakunin, who notoriously claimed, \"Auch die Lust an der Zerst\u00f6rung ist eine schaffende Lust\" (\"The pleasure in destruction is itself a creative pleasure\"), or of Adorno, who insisted that, because of the almost limitless ability of modern societies to co-opt even severe kinds of criticism, philosophy must be a relentlessly negative form of dialectical activity. These examples illustrate perhaps the discomfort that the idea of nonconstructive criticism arouses. One might, of course, argue that the very idea of completely negative criticism, like its mirror image, absolutely well-founded knowledge, is conceptually incoherent, but the most usual source of unease is not so much that there is anything conceptually inappropriate with the idea of completely negative criticism, rather there is a fear that it is a concomitant of an anarchic abdication of responsibility on the part of the critic, so the suspicion is a moral rather than specifically epistemological or cognitive.\n\nSo I would like to discuss three interconnected questions:\n\n1. What is \"criticism\"?\n\n2. Is there a single unitary sense of \"criticism\" that can be found in the forms of \"criticism\" actually practised in different domains of human life (e.g., social criticism, aesthetic criticism, the moral criticism of individuals and their actions, cultural criticism)?\n\n3. Must criticism be constructive? What is supposed to be wrong with it, if it is not constructive?\n\nThe first of these questions raises all the old philosophical questions that have been discussed ad taedium (if not ad nauseam) for over two thousand years about what it is to give a proper account of a concept or practice. Should one\u2014can one?\u2014 give a strict definition (Plato), a genealogical account (Nietzsche), or some kind of looser specification of the \"grammar\" of the concept by locating it in the context of a linguistically structured \"form of life\" (as in the later Wittgenstein)? This first question is in fact distinct from the second. The first question is directed to the notion of \"criticism\" in general. Is there any coherent concept (in any area of human endeavour); if there is, is there one concept or many; how can it\u2014can they\u2014be specified? These are questions that one can perfectly reasonably ask, and answer, insofar as they can be answered at all, in the context of any single kind of human activity. You can ask this question perfectly reasonably even if the kind of \"criticism\" you have in mind is restricted to the evaluation of restaurants by the \"food critics\" whom certain newspapers now employ. The second question focuses on whether, in addition to, or independent of whatever general ambiguities there might be in the concept of \"criticism\" there is some disciplinarily specific difference between criticism as characteristically performed in the study of music, painting, or literature, and criticism as it is practised in science, ethics, or politics.\n\nAs far as these first two questions are concerned, I would like to take a non-Socratic approach. That is, I would like to suggest that there is no single invariable notion of \"criticism,\" which could be the object of strict formal definition, giving necessary and sufficient conditions, but this does not really matter because such formal definitions are not possible in most of the more important realms of human life, and neither human life itself nor philosophy is any the worse for this. There is no single concept of \"criticism,\" either in ethics, politics, or art, but what there are, are certain paradigmatic cases, and these represent a kind of ideally or fully developed \"criticism.\" Something can perfectly legitimately be called \"criticism\" that does not satisfy all of these conditions. I claim that we should think of \"criticism\" in its fullest possible form as comprised of four analytically (although not always really) distinct elements or nontemporal stages. Another way of thinking about this is to locate our usual usage of \"criticism\" at the point of intersection of four dimensions. I will call the first of these four the \"structural\" or \"analytic\" dimension, the second the \"evaluative\" dimension, the third the dimension of \"argumentative connectivity,\" and the fourth the \"performative\" dimension.\n\nThe first dimension is that in which \"criticism\" is related to \"analyse,\" \"trace,\" \"differentiate.\" \"Critique\" (and related terms) derive from the Greek word \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03c9 and originally meant simply \"analysis,\" that is, the process of taking a complex apart in thought and specifying its constituent parts or elements. It was then also used to refer to the results of that process. Such analysis will never be strictly value-free, but it will also not be the case that by virtue of engaging in \"criticism\" of this kind I am in any way presupposing or expressing a negative attitude or judgement towards the object of criticism. \"Critique\" in this sense is self-evidently an activity of virtually universal application in all fields of human endeavour (even if, for contingent reasons, the word \"critique\" is not used in some particular language for what is going on). So I can perfectly reasonably be said to be engaged in \"literary criticism,\" if I analyse the parts of a poem or, for instance, its metre, regardless of whatever particularly evaluative attitude I might have towards it. If the poem is in the Alkaic strophe, and I state that this is the case and helpfully write out the scansion, that is a rudimentary form of literary criticism whether I especially like poetry written in the Alkaic strophe in general or not, or am indifferent, and whether I like this particular use of the Alkaic strophe or not (or am indifferent). By analysing the poem in this way I may be helping readers (or listeners) pay attention to features of the work that they might otherwise overlook or fail to notice. This may allow readers (or listeners) to acquire an enhanced engagement with the poem, whether this means that as a result a given reader or listener comes to evaluate the poem more or less positively than before, or whether the evaluation remains unchanged. In addition, even if the analysis does not change my evaluation, it may help me understand why I like or dislike the poem. Since for many people understanding why I have the reaction to a poem that I in fact have is part of the process of proper engagement with it, analysis may form part of the normal process of aesthetic appropriation.\n\nSimilarly, if I am a psychoanalyst I can in one sense \"criticise\" someone's behaviour by \"analysing\" it, that is, subjecting it to scrutiny of its origins, motives, symbolic associations, and so forth. I can do the same for a proposal for a piece of legislation. In the case of a human action or a piece of proposed legislation, \"analysis\" may go beyond tracing the internal structure of the proposed law and point out, for instance, what its consequences will be likely to be, what other measures will need to be taken in order to implement it, and so forth. I don't, it is true, usually call this \"criticism\" in English but rather \"analysis,\" but that seems a trivial or unimportant linguistic point.\n\nThe second of the four dimensions is one in which \"criticise\" means to have or adopt an attitude or to judge; usually the attitude in question is a determinedly negative one towards something, and so along this dimension \"criticise\" is related to terms like \"dislike,\" \"disapprove of,\" and so forth. It is in fact an exceedingly peculiar but undeniable fact that a term that originally (in the ancient world) referred merely to the process of separating that which was distinct, eventually developed in the direction of acquiring a distinctly negative connotation. To be sure, in this case there does seem to be a difference in at least our linguistic usage between the cases of forms of human action and cases of art in that it would be perfectly normal to speak of a \"critical\" attitude towards a work of art, meaning by that a discriminating attitude that resulted in a finally positive evaluation of it. On the other hand, we would, I think, never describe a laudatory or approving attitude towards a human action, a piece of legislation, or a social practice or institution as an instance of \"critique.\"\n\nWhat exactly does \"negative attitude\" mean in the above? One obvious thing it can mean is that I explicitly formulate a proposition to the effect that the (criticised) object (or action or institution) in question has some defect or that I dislike it, think it is unfit for purpose, reject it, will not tolerate it, and so on. I may formulate this proposition without ever uttering it, merely affirming it mentally, or I may state it repeatedly to all and sundry. Of course, though, I may develop a \"negative attitude\" towards something without ever formulating anything specifically in a proposition. As a result of long experience with some person I may come to dislike him or her intensely without ever becoming aware of this fact consciously and thus, a fortiori, without ever expressing this dislike in a proposition, even one I never verbally express. It would probably be a stretch of current English usage to say that this course of experience and its conclusion are a form of \"criticism\" or a \"critical process,\" but although they are an extension of the way we now usually speak, they are a comprehensible and, as it were, conservative extension. Finally, I might act in a certain way that could be construed as a form of criticism. To use the classic example drawn from one of the Icelandic sagas, suppose you as a host give me dinner and, as I take my leave, you ask, \"How was my dinner?\" If I thereupon vomit up the entire contents of my stomach on you, it does not seem utterly fanciful to see this as a kind of criticism-embodied-in-action (not words). Similarly, if I ostentatiously spit when I see you approach, or draw a moustache on your picture, or whistle a parody of your latest musical composition, or do a comic imitation of some of your mannerisms, these might be construed as very much like criticisms.\n\nSo when in 2011 a group of Egyptians and Saudis flew some airplanes into the two spectacularly ugly towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, knocking both towers down, but very strikingly not explaining why they were acting as they did, did that count as \"criticism\"?\n\nThis idea that I might criticise merely by acting without saying anything brings me to the third of my three dimensions. In cases of \"full-blown\" criticism, the first and second dimensions are explicitly connected. I would not usually think I had in front of me a case of \"criticism\"\u2014or at any rate of \"criticism\" in the full-blown sense\u2014if I simply tell you how the object is structured or if I simply express disapproval, or if I both have an analysis and have an evaluative attitude. To engage in criticism means not merely that I have an analysis and a judgement but that I cite structural or other aspects of the thing in question as reasons for my approval or disapproval, or I argue from the account I give of the object in question to my judgement about it. Obviously, in most cases the notion of \"argue\" here will encompass a significantly larger range of ways of acting than those usually countenanced by formal logic or by standard views about scientific inference.\n\nOf course, one might claim, and I think one would be right to claim, that the connection between structural analysis and evaluation in any case was deeper and more inherent than the previous account seemed to indicate. In most cases, after all, the analysis itself would not actually be performed in a strictly value-free way, without any influence of the values I held. Rather I would decide what parts it was relevant to separate out analytically by at least tacit reference to value judgements. This is no doubt true. However, it is no objection, if only because at least at the most superficial level it seems perfectly possible to defend Weber's distinction between what he calls \"aktuelles Werten\" and what he calls \"Wertbeziehung.\"\n\nThe fourth dimension is one in which \"criticise\" is connected with terms such as \"vote against\" or \"vote down\" a proposal, or \"to denounce\" an action or a person, or \"indict\" or \"prosecute\" a person. All of these things (\"indict,\" \"vote down,\" etc.) are in the first instance public actions. In any case these actions are not merely \"public\" but also institutional, that is, they are governed by specifiable practices of a certain kind. To \"indict\" someone (of a crime) is not to disapprove of or reject or distance oneself from what that person did on certain grounds that have to do with the way in which you think that action can be analysed, but it is to satisfy particular specific legal requirements that will be given by the legal system in force. This might mean shouting out \"Thief!\" in a bazaar, or pronouncing an accusation in front of a certain number of witnesses or a magistrate, or filing a written brief in a certain specified form, or whatever. Often in these formal contexts there must be a specified object of criticism (e.g., a person who is indicted as criminal, even if the name of that person is not known, as in British indictments of \"persons unknown\") and an institutional set of consequences. If you are successfully indicted, you pay a fine, go to jail, or come under the guillotine. The action in question formally specifies the person or thing criticised and will often connect it specifically with particular envisaged changes of status, actions, and so on. If I am a member of a prize committee, my vote must be for a particular work, and if enough others vote my way, the work I favour will receive the prize.\n\nIt is tempting to appeal here to the theory of speech acts that had some currency in the period between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s. There is usually a kind of associated institutional intention that goes with many of these actions. If I \"vote down\" a proposal, the institutional action I perform is, as it would be natural for us to say, \"expressive of\" my own, underlying (individual, \"mental\"), critically articulated disapproval of the proposal, or if I vote to give the prize to a certain work, that will usually be because I admire that work.\n\nThe relation of these \"institutional intentions\" to the real intentions of actual individual human beings (or groups) is, however, a highly complex matter, and probably more complicated than this immediate inclination of ours would suggest. On the one hand, it is probably correct that the whole mechanism we have developed for describing what we now call \"internal\" states of mind (and also of action) results from projecting terms that have more or less robust external referents when applied to public actions onto shadowy, invented \"internal\" states, mechanisms, events, and actions. As Hobbes would have put it, there are terms that have clear meaning \"in foro externo\"\u2014a process of \"deliberation\" is one in which the various members of a political assembly discuss with each other (out loud, usually in a public place, at a specified time) what is to be done. These terms can then be extended so as purportedly to apply \"in foro interno,\" that is, to merely mental phenomena of human individuals that are not necessarily ever expressed aloud.\n\nDespite all this, on the other hand, when such an institutional structure is formally established, this can allow the \"official\" intention embodied in the speech act to deviate significantly from the real psychic state of the person actually performing the action. Not every public prosecutor who initiates proceedings against someone who violates a law must actually disapprove of what the criminal has done. He (or she) might, as they say, \"just be doing my job.\" In various easily imaginable cases I may, a simple citizen eligible to vote or as a Member of Parliament, vote against something, for instance for tactical reasons, of which I do not really disapprove and would not (in itself) wish to criticise.\n\nIn some extreme cases the tail may even wag the dog. To give a very vivid instance of this, on the morning of August 21, 1968, forces of the Warsaw Pact, including the DDR, invaded the \u010cSSR in order to terminate the political and social experiments being carried out there under the leadership of Alexander Dub\u010dek. For various reasons, including probably tactical reasons, the official line of the SED\u2014the ruling Communist Party of the DDR\u2014up to the very evening before the invasion was that military action against a fraternal socialist country by the DDR was inconceivable, and reports of preparations for such an intervention were Western inventions, instances of black propaganda, or provocations. Unfortunately, a university lecturer named Roessler had a lecture at 7 am on the morning of August 21 and had neglected to listen to the news about the invasion. When asked by students in his lecture, all of whom had been listening to Western radio that morning, about what had happened, he defended what he took to be the official line, that military intervention against a fraternal socialist regime was unthinkable, and suggestions that it might even be contemplated were a provocation of the West. Roessler was then dismissed from his post for criticising the government. In a case like this it seems to me perfectly plausible, although I know that others will not find it so, to say that the unfortunate Roessler had criticised the SED and its policies. He had performed the public act of speaking against a decision the SED had made and implemented from a university lectern in front of numerous students. To be sure, in doing this he had in another sense no intention whatever of criticising the SED because he could assume that doing so would mean that he would lose his job (which is what occurred). Actually once one has proceeded thus far there is no reason not to add to this analysis. Perhaps the unlucky Roessler in the privacy of his own innermost thoughts really was a supporter of Dub\u010dek and critic of the SED but had enough sense never publicly to admit such a thing. In defending what he thought was the SED policy, he was performing what he thought was the required act of expressing public support for the SED's decision. It was just an accident that he had not appropriately kept up with the shifts in the official line, so he failed in his intention to support the party and in fact criticised it. He was, as it were, trying but failing to sell his conscience to political expedience.\n\nWe started with three questions, the third of which concerned the notion of \"constructive\" criticism. The intuition behind the idea of \"constructive\" criticism is that the object criticised should really be able to be improved by reference to a form of action guided by the criticism itself. The model here is that there are three items: a critic, an object (action, institution) criticised, and a \"target-agent\" to whom the criticism is addressed or directed. So I may criticise the medical authorities for permitting an unqualified surgeon to operate on the grounds that he killed my aunt in what was billed as a routine operation. The model here is that there are three items: a critic\u2014in this case, me\u2014an object (person, action, institution) criticised\u2014in this case, the complex fact that an incompetent surgeon killed my aunt\u2014and a \"target-agent\" to whom the criticism is addressed or directed\u2014in Britain this is the General Medical Council. It is constructive criticism to the extent to which the \"object\" could have been \"improved\"\u2014my aunt would not have died\u2014if the target-agent, the Medical Council, had been guided by what I am now saying, that is, had not allowed an incompetent surgeon to operate. The target-agent to whom the criticism is directed will be some individual (or some group of people) who stands in a special relation to the object criticised so that in criticising the object, the critic is also in some sense calling the attention of the target-agent to deficiencies in the object, which are thereby presented as being the target-agent's job to remedy. The most obvious reason for connecting criticism with a particular target-agent (or agents) is either: (a) that this person (or these people) can be held in some way responsible for the existing state of the object by virtue of which it is deemed worthy of being criticised or (b) that person (or these people) could, and ought, by adopting the criticism in question, act so as to improve the object and remove the grounds for the criticism. I merely note that the second and third of the three items may in some cases be the same. Instead of criticising the medical authorities for letting the surgeon operate, I could criticise him for operating when unqualified. Finally, if I were such a surgeon myself I could engage in self-criticism in which all three items were the same.\n\n\"Constructive\" criticism, then, goes beyond simple \"criticism\" in the third sense above in that simple \"criticism\" requires that one be able to specify what is wrong with the object, whereas constructive criticism requires in addition either the weaker condition that one could in some sense also specify what else would have to be changed in the world in order for the object to escape the criticism, or the stronger condition that one be able to specify what concrete steps the target-agent would have to undertake actually to remedy what is wrong.\n\nTo put what I wish to claim in another way, it is, it seems to me, one thing to say:\n\n(a) If this object lacked features ABC, it would escape criticism\n\nand quite another to say:\n\n(b) This\u2014{XYZ}\u2014is my positive alternative to the criticised object.\n\nStatement (a) is characteristic of what I have called \"argumentatively connected\" criticism. I disapprove of the object because I have reasons I can specify and they are ABC. It is my assumption that I can have (a) without (b), that is, that I can have the ability to specify in relatively general terms (\"criteria\" if one will) what is wrong with an object without necessarily being able to specify what particular configuration (of this object or one sufficiently like it) could exist that would escape condemnation by reference to those general criteria. A fortiori, I need not be able myself actually to produce an object or bring about a state of affairs that would escape the relevant criticism.\n\nI note that in English the notion of \"constructive criticism\" also often has the further implication:\n\n(a) that I can tell an appropriately constituted agent, the \"target-agent,\" how exactly he or she or they should go about producing an object or bringing about a state of affairs that is better.\n\nThink of this example: The world is overpopulated and resources are scarce. In addition, current policies of consumption are squandering existing resources and polluting the environment to an unacceptable extent. I now \"criticise\" the directors of British Petroleum (BP) for some policy their corporation has adopted. This is a form of \"criticism\" in the last and fullest sense I distinguished. The directors of BP are the target-agents because they are responsible for the current policy and (in some sense, although that would require considerable further analysis) \"could\" change it. I can point out to them features their policies would have to lack in order to escape the criticism I level at them. They would have to be less wasteful, more focused on satisfaction of real human needs, more likely to generate in consumers attitudes of prudence and moderation, and so forth. Now it might well be the case that such policies are not actually \"realistically\" possible given the fact that the energy sector is part of a capitalist economy where a certain motive and incentive structure is operative\u2014this is why I flagged \"could\" in \"could change <the policy>\" above. \"Could\" under what conditions? One could easily imagine, then, that the directors of BP (perfectly reasonably from their point of view) rejected my criticism as not \"constructive.\" The basic point of my criticism might well not only be one to which they \"could\" not respond, given the constraints of the market economy under which they operate, but also be one the blunting of which would require that they and their whole organisation simply not exist at all in anything like its present form. They might well respond that if they adopted more enlightened policies, the only effect that would have would be to put them out of business, and then their place would merely be taken by Shell or some other corporation with policies that were effectively indistinguishable from BP's. That would not only be of no benefit to the directors of Shell but would also not represent progress towards anything that the critic could reasonably count as \"progress.\" Why prefer Shell if they have the same polices as BP? The only solution might be that all entities like BP be abolished, which would require dismantling and reconstructing the whole economic system. If the economy were to be completely revamped to allow these deleterious policies to be avoided, then people like those on the board of directors would have a completely different social role; they would not be directors of international corporations but would have \"honest\" jobs (and hence would have completely different desires, beliefs, attitudes, powers, etc.). It is not difficult to see how the current directors of BP might well fail to see this as \"constructive criticism\" in the usual sense of that term. But then that might well be their problem. What might count as \"constructive\" for us, that is, what we, given who we are, could do about something, given our identities and possibilities, need not be the same as what is constructive for them (given their identity and situation). Appeal to the requirement that criticism be \"constructive\" can thus often have the function of trying to shift the onus probandi in a particular way. I, as critic, am required to formulate my criticism in a way that is shaped to the action-related demands of the target-agents. I must criticise them (and their actions, the institutions in which they participate, etc.) in a way that conforms to what \"they\" define as what they can \"reasonably\" be expected to do and results they can \"reasonably\" be expected to accept.\n\nI should emphasise that nothing in what I have said suggests that it is illicit or inappropriate for a person or group to lament unless they can specify in general terms what the exact cause of the complaint is, or\u2014an even stronger demand\u2014unless they can propose a remedy. There is a category of what Adorno sometimes calls \"creaturely suffering\" (das Leiden der Kreatur), the expression of which is always legitimate. I can perfectly \"reasonably\"\u2014\"reasonable\" is not exactly the word I want here, but I trust the reader understands\u2014lament about the brevity of life or the fact that I am dying of a very painful ailment, although I know that life must end sometime or other, and there is nothing anyone can do to alleviate my present pain or lengthen my time among humans. It is also perfectly possible to lament in this way without there being any target-agent to whom the complaint is specifically directed (so one can't use this as a backhanded argument for God's existence). One might not wish to call this properly \"criticism,\" but what term one uses for it is not really important, provided one recognises the legitimacy of such expressions of pain and frustration.\n\nAs far as the question of whether criticism must be constructive is concerned, it is important, it seems to me, to distinguish this question from a completely different, though equally important, topic, namely whether criticism can always be \"internal,\" that is, whether a completely satisfactory, comprehensive criticism can be conducted that appeals only to criteria that are in some sense \"internal to\"\u2014it would be important to specify in what sense exactly one meant by \"internal to\"\u2014the object criticised, or whether at some point it was necessary to appeal to \"external\" criteria. One can see that the distinction \"constructive\/not-constructive\" is different from \"internal\/external\" by noticing that forms of internal criticism can be either constructive or nonconstructive: I can show you on reasons internal to your own conceptual scheme that there are various deficiencies in the way you act that you (or someone else) can put right, but if your conceptual scheme is a complete mess, if it is \"internally contradictory\" in the way Marx, for instance, thinks that of nineteenth-century bankers is, then Marx thinks he is engaging in a form of \"internal criticism\" which, however, has in one sense an utterly nonconstructive result.\n\nThe capitalist economic system, Marx thinks, will collapse from internal contradictions. Marx intends this in the first instance as a historical and predictive form of criticism, not a moralising one, but it would be accompanied, as it were, by an ethical shadow. Again his criticism of the capitalist banking system as a whole might not be \"constructive\" for present-day bankers in that there may be nothing they could conceivably do, compatible with remaining who they are, namely bankers, to respond to the criticism, and no life they could lead, as bankers, after responding to it because to respond to it adequately would require their social role no longer to exist. In fact, if the system really is doomed, there might be nothing constructive anyone can do, Marx thinks, about such a system and its institutions. Still the criticism might be constructive for us, that is, for those of us who are not bankers, in that it could tell us what we need to do, and it could even be action-orienting for individual bankers (although not \"constructive\" for them as bankers) because, as individuals, particular bankers could always change their employment and try to get proper jobs.\n\nThis shows the extreme importance in criticism of notions like possibility and necessity, alternative identities and courses of action, which points in what framework are taken to be fixed and which are taken to be variable. This in turn raises important general issues about the malleability of human nature and institutions, and the possible limits of such malleability, utopianism, tragic or otherwise irresolvable forms of conflict, and the \"substitutivity\" of goods, services, practices, and institutions. Certainly the idea of \"constructive criticism\" seems to be closely connected with the notion of substitutivity. By \"substitutivity\" I mean in the simplest case that one object or process can stand in for or take the place of another. I can take the sugar cube out of the bowl with a special set of tongs, but if there are no tongs, I could also use a spoon (i.e., \"substitute\" a spoon for the tongs). Even if there is no spoon, I could in principle fall back on the use of my fingers, which is slightly less hygienic but no less effective. A standard kind of \"constructive criticism\" would be a case in which I tell a child not to take the sugar cube with its fingers, because that is unhygienic, but rather to use the tongs. Here I am saying that the tongs are a viable substitute for the use of fingers in this context, and one that has certain advantages. Similarly in many, although perhaps not strictly all, cases I can substitute a fork for a set of chopsticks or vice versa. Action-related forms of criticism would seem to depend very heavily on claims to the effect that the criticised object, process, institution, and so on could be replaced by some other, that is, that there is a possible substitute for it.\n\nThe idea of substituting one thing or process for another is deeply rooted in human social institutions and thinking, and it is not obvious how we could get along without it. Thus, in Sophocles' Antigone (ll. 905ff.), Antigone gives as the main reason for her determination to bury her dead brother, Polyneikes, that her brother is irreplaceable in contrast to a possible husband or child. If she lost a husband, she says, she could always get another; the same is true of a child, but, given that her mother and father are dead, there cannot be a substitute for her brother. For that matter one might argue that the very earliest work in the Western canon, The Iliad, is nothing but an extended meditation on what can and what cannot be substituted for what else. If Agamemnon has to give his slave girl up, who will replace her? Agamemnon claims later that not even his wife would be a satisfactory substitute. Is gold a good substitute for bronze (VI.235ff.) or armour worth nine oxen a good exchange for armour worth a hundred? Can Patroclos be an adequate substitute for Achilles on the field of battle? How about if he is wearing Achilles' armour? Is dead Hector a good substitute for live Patroclos?\n\nNevertheless, there is a certain \"natural\" tendency we have to fall for an illusion about substitutivity. This illusion is the view that items (things, processes, institutions, practices, etc.) can be treated for the purposes of substitution atomistically. This means that one can ignore the wider context within which the item in question stands and discuss possible substitutes to it relative to one narrowly specified use or function. It is not, however, the case that this narrow focus always makes sense. It is true that one can \"in principle\" use either the Western combination of knife, fork, and spoon or chopsticks for eating most of the normal kinds of food with which inhabitants of the European Union in the early twenty-first century will be confronted, but two qualifications need to be added. First, this assumes that the \"food\" in question will admit of being eaten in either way. This is true of rice, potatoes, and most vegetables but not, for instance, soup or honey, which can be eaten with a spoon but not with chopsticks. So one must take account of the way in which the item in question \"fits into\" a wider human context; if it is a utensil to eat, then it must fit into the kind of food that will be eaten and the way in which that food will be used is prepared. The second qualification concerns one specific aspect of the \"total context\" within which (potential) substitution might take place. Chopsticks might be usable \"in principle\" to eat rice, and they might even be actually usable by millions of people in the Orient and hundreds of thousands in the West, but they are not usable, and hence could not substitute for knife\/fork\/spoon, unless the agents who are to use them have a certain specific form of manual dexterity to operate chopsticks (or knife\/fork\/spoon). Part of the \"context\" that must be taken into account is the relevant forms of habitual human action. Heidegger makes this point with great clarity in Sein und Zeit when he speaks of most of the items in our world as being \"inherently\" not isolated items but elements of a larger context: such items are what Heidegger calls \"Zeuge\" in a \"Zeugganzes.\"\n\nThe case is perhaps even clearer if one takes a modern calculating computer and an abacus. In most everyday contexts an abacus is just as good as a computer, and vice versa, but it does not follow from that that I can simply replace every abacus with a calculator and forget about it. The calculator needs to be operated by someone, and people with the skills needed to perform calculations on the abacus will not necessarily know how to operate a computer. Similarly, if the abacus is the standard way of calculating in shops, it might be important not merely that one get the \"right\" answer to the calculation of an economic transaction but also that it be clearly visible to all concerned that the transaction be \"fair\" (according to whatever are the local ideas about that). Doing it on an abacus (in that society) might well be a way of showing to everyone that all is aboveboard. Punching keys on a computer in a society in which computers are used only by certain elite operators might not satisfy these demands.\n\nIt is easy to see how this argument can then be expanded, because there is not \"in principle\" any determinate, natural stopping place for relevance of features of the context to the possible substitutability. Or rather Heidegger draws from this the conclusion that there is only one nonarbitrary stopping point and that is my own death (or rather my relation-in-living to my own death). This is something that is not further contextualisable (for me), where substitutivity reaches its limits. Despite one \"natural\" way of reading the story of Alkestis, no one can die \"in my place,\" or rather even if she does in one sense die in my place, she does not die my death. I still have my own death to die; it will simply be an externally differently configured one.\n\nSo it makes no sense to think about substitutivity of items apart from their context and that context is open-ended. This may be one of the reasons why the scope of criticism seems naturally to expand and why repressive regimes often react hysterically to what seem to be very minor forms of criticism; once it starts there is no telling where it will go (and where it will end). One especially important aspect of this \"context\" is the cost of substitution, both of the new item that is to be provided and of the transition to the new mode of provision. Marie Antoinette famously failed to take the first point when she asked why the starving Parisians who were rioting because of lack of bread did not simply eat (the significantly more expensive but widely available) brioche. She ignored the price of brioche, which, apparently, even at the best of times was beyond the means of the Parisian poor. A computer is virtually certain to be more expensive than an abacus. Of course, if one were seriously contemplating such a substitution one would also have to consider the significant environmental degradation that producing computers represents, the cognitive and emotional deskilling that using them habitually entails, and so forth. One can, of course, construe \"price\" in a more general way to refer not merely to the monetary cost but to other less tangible costs: You might be able to make more money if you changed jobs, but that would require you to work weekends, and use of the computer might have the (virtually hidden) social cost of destroying the immediate visibility of certain properties of economic transactions (e.g., whether or not they were \"fair\" by whatever the local standards of \"fairness\" were).\n\nEven completely radical forms of political criticism will need at least to some extent to be committed to some kind of substitutivity. It will not, of course, be the case that one can atomistically compare a new structure of the stock market after the revolution with the structure before, because there may be no stock market after the revolution. There may be no banking system we could recognise, but there will still be forms of future-oriented cooperation, and at some sufficiently general level there will have to be a new way of providing foodstuffs to the population that will replace the old way. It might also be the case that it is possible only retrospectively to see that the new form of agricultural production really does \"substitute\" for an older form, but that is a different issue. The more one thinks about radical substitution, the more one must confront the question of the interconnection of human tastes\/desires\/needs on the one hand and ways through which these tastes are satisfied on the other. I mean by \"interconnection\" a relation of influence that is specifically construed as operating in both directions. Given that we have certain tastes, we wish to satisfy them in certain ways with certain objects, processes, and forms of human interaction, but those forms of interaction, processes, objects, and so forth in their turn strongly influence the tastes\/desires\/aspirations\/needs themselves. I may initially prefer my comfortable abacus and its role in everyday interactions with my peers. If a computer is forced on me, however, for whatever reason, as a substitute for the abacus, the continuing operation with the computer may finally change my taste and even generate in me a perverse new \"need,\" for example, for yet more technologically advanced (even if no more efficient) products. I become, as we say, \"hooked on gadgets.\" We can then restructure our industrial plant to produce ever new and shinier gadgets and initiate a self-reinforcing cycle.\n\nThis \"interconnection\" of production and consumption (as Marx would say) in the sphere of art was clearly noted by various nineteenth-century artists. Wagner's notion of a \"music of the future\" seems to belong here. Wagner thought that his music made people aware of deep needs or desires they had that were incompatible with the existing political order and that therefore were (and had to be) repressed by what he called \"the state.\" Thus the state required a stable family structure of a certain kind, one in which incest, for instance, was forbidden, but our sexual nature was anarchic. Die Walk\u00fcre dramatised and musicalised this tension. Listening to Wagner's music was thus a proto-revolutionary act because merely by becoming aware of those repressed desires we undermined the hold the state had on us. On the other hand, his music could be fully appreciated only by an audience that successfully completed that process of emancipation from political and religious repression. Certain works of art can create an audience that comes to have a taste for themselves. Late Beethoven string quartets are an acquired taste, and the only way to acquire the taste is to listen to them carefully. This makes the issue of substitutivity much more complex. You can't simply plug a Wagner music-drama into the repertory one evening in place of a Rossini opera, as if they were just different ways to satisfy the same human needs. There is even a crude economic recognition of this fact in that many opera houses will give ticket holders a refund if a different opera from the one scheduled is performed but not if there are changes to the cast. So the idea is that any other tenor is substitutable for Pavarotti, but Tosca is not substitutable for Turandot. Needless to say, this makes the issue of criticism even more complicated.\n\nThe more one emphasises simple substitutivity as a precondition of effective criticism, the less modern art would seem to be amenable at all to the kind of criticism we habitually use in politics. Perhaps in ancient times works of art were substitutable. When the singer appears in the Bronze Age Hall, he can sing one song or another, and although one may be artistically better, more appropriate, or more warmly received than another, basically they are interchangeable. Perhaps one singer (or one song) was in fact unique in the sense that it was discernibly much better than all others. We are used to the claim that some forms, at least of serious modern art, however, make an even stronger claim. Such specifically modernist works of art aspire not just to be unique\u2014better than all others but better relative to a common standard or set of criteria\u2014but also to be utterly original and completely different from all previous art. A particular modernist aesthetic also seems to present this as a categorical property of art, and a distinguishing characteristic of it in opposition to the objects of use and consumption we encounter in our everyday life. In Qu'est-ce que la lit\u00e9rature Sartre claimed that every work of art is trying to destroy every other work. This is a reaction to the neutralisation of art through its incorporation into museums and a tacit rejection of Andr\u00e9 Malraux's Mus\u00e9e Imaginaire. It is, however, equally closely connected with one of the least plausible and least appealing ideas of modernism, the idea that the \"work\" must be a full, all-encompassing cosmos like the Hegelian System, which at the same time depicted everything, supplanted all other attempts correctly to depict anything, and gave the canonical terms within which alone it should itself be understood and criticised. How can a work of art make itself absolutely nonsubstitutable? By exhausting the universe, encompassing everything and thus demoting every other work to a mere pale reflection of itself, or something \"subordinate,\" or by brutal destruction of the other.\n\nIt does seem, however, that the concept of \"criticism\" in the modern era can be seen to move in two rather different directions. First, criticism is connected with giving a definitive negative judgement on something according to the acknowledged standards. Here there will be a tendency to narrow the vocabulary used and the criteria. The model here is juridical. The judge does not much care about any number of properties of the action but wishes to construe it so as to give a legally binding definitive judgement on it. Is it larceny or not? The judge can give a positive or negative decision; the critic in this sense is a kind of relentlessly negative judge. The second direction is that taken by the notion of \"criticism\" in literature and the arts. Here the point is not to get a single definitive judgement according to narrow and focused criteria but to point things out to people, allowing them to enter into the work of art and, as we say, \"appreciate it.\" Here a critic is trying not to sharpen, restrict, and discipline the language but to enrich it, change it, reconfigure it so that it is able to serve to draw us into and permit us to see the point of new forms of human experience. Both of these are perfectly legitimate variants of the \"full-blown\" form of criticism.\n\nTo conclude, then, in response to the first two of our three questions, there is no single conception of \"criticism\" as traditional philosophy would like to require, but neither is the notion of \"criticism\" in any interesting sense unclear or merely diffuse. It has a variety of different uses, as do most concepts, but they are individually in no way deficient in clarity, and the whole array of uses can be organised around some paradigmatic cases and a set of structural and functional features, which have as much coherence as most other \"everyday\" (i.e., nontechnical) concepts have. The notion of \"constructive criticism\" is specifically connected with criticism in the realm of human ethical and political action and seems to have little relevance for the internal study of art, literature, or music as quasi-autonomous realms of modern human life, precisely because of its close connection with potentially \"substitutable\" forms of action (or \"products\"). This, however, may turn out to be a relatively superficial fact about contemporary high art that results from two contingent features of the way in which such high art and art criticism function in our society. First of all, it may have to do with the great emphasis put on the appreciation or consumption of art rather than on its production. Many theorists, mostly notably perhaps Nietzsche, have pointed out the deformation involved in thinking about art exclusively from the point of view of a viewer (or reader, or listener) confronting a finished work. What \"constructive\" comment can one make about a complex object that already exists and has the properties it has? Is one to imagine another, but different, completed work that \"better\" satisfies the spectator? In what way exactly? If, on the other hand, one imagines an artist standing, as it were, in the atelier of a fellow artist during the process of creation or elaboration, that is, while the work is in statu nascendi, one could imagine a set of collegial suggestions for how to continue. Perhaps the model should be that of a craftsman giving another aspiring craftsman advice on how to produce a ceramic pot with a spout that actually pours without spilling. The second feature of our notion of (at any rate \"high\") art that might be relevant is the extreme post-Romantic cult of originality and the associated rejection of craft production as a model for artistic creation. If each object must not merely be a uniquely skillful instance of satisfying recognised canons but a work that overthrows all existing standards and posits new and different criteria for its evaluation (which it itself uniquely formulates), then it is more difficult to see how \"constructive\" criticism of art could be possible under those circumstances.\n\nIn the political realm appeals to the need for \"constructive\" criticism can in principle represent a (generally laudable) attempt to remind those involved in some evaluation of human action of the need to remain aware of a kind of internal demand under which such criticism operates, namely of the need to keep Tschernyschevsky's (and later Lenin's) central question \"What is to be done?\" firmly in mind; in fact, however, the demand for \"constructive criticism\" in general functions as a repressive attempt to shift the onus probandi and divert attention from the possibility of radical criticism.\n5\n\nThe Loss of Meaning on the Left\n\nBy, at the latest, the final decade of the nineteenth century, many thinkers were diagnosing a deep malaise in Western culture, which expressed itself in various forms of individual and social disorientation. Thus, Durkheim claimed that increasing suicides rates were connected with the growth of what he called \"anomie,\" that is, with the fact that people were losing a certain kind of normative orientation they had once had. Suicide is an act performed by people who no longer know how they \"ought\" to deal with the various crises of human life. Durkheim's account might be seen as a kind of sociological confirmation of Nietzsche's speculations about a state of affairs in which \"the highest values\" that had in the past guided human actions\u2014the values embodied in Christianity and its various secular successors\u2014\"lost their value\" for people in the late nineteenth century, leaving them so confused, puzzled, and at a loss that they are in danger of being unable to discharge certain vital functions. In art, too, the emphasis on \"originality\" that was a characteristic of Romanticism led in some cases to a cult of the \"new\" that distanced works of art so much from traditional forms that they completely outstripped the ability of many audiences to recognise them as meaningful forms of \"art\" at all. How was one to react to something as different as the music of Sch\u00f6nberg or Joyce's Ulysses or cubism? What is one to look (or listen) for? By what standards is it to be evaluated? What is an appropriate response to the work? One might think of an imaginary threshold that is passed when people begin to react to new art not by thinking or saying \"That is bad music [painting, literature]\" but \"That is not music [painting, literature] at all.\" This experience of puzzlement, incomprehension, loss of control, and dislocation can be reflected in audiences' reactions to \"new\" art, but it can also become part of the artist's experience. At the very end of the nineteenth century the highly precocious Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote his influential Ein Brief des Lord Chandos in which he describes a process in which words themselves begin to lose their meaning for him and he becomes increasingly unable to put them together in an ordered way to express a coherent thought. This state of disorientation spreads and eventually becomes so entrenched that it disrupts the normal course of his life.\n\nMein Inneres aber mu\u00df ich Ihnen darlegen, eine Sonderbarkeit, eine Unart, wenn Sie wollen eine Krankheit meines Geistes.... [D]ie... Begriffe entziehen sich mir.... Es ist mir v\u00f6llig die F\u00e4higkeit abhanden gekommen, \u00fcber irgend etwas zusammenh\u00e4ngend zu sprechen oder zu denken.... Es wurden mir auch im famili\u00e4ren und hausbackenen Gespr\u00e4ch alle die Urteile, dieleichthin und mit schlafwandlerischer Sicherheit abgegeben zu werden pflegen, so bedenklich, da\u00df ich aufh\u00f6ren mu\u00dfte, an solchen Gespr\u00e4chen irgend teilzunehmen.\n\n[I must reveal to you something strange in my inner life, a bad habit, an illness of my spirit, if you wish.... Concepts escape my grasp.... I have completely lost the ability to speak or think about anything in a connected way. Even in the most banal conversations in the family all the judgements that I was accustomed to give easily and with the security of a sleepwalker, came to seem so questionable that I had to stop taking any part in such conversations.]\n\nA further imaginary threshold would be crossed when someone for the first time connected all these apparently diverse phenomena\u2014anomie, the problems artists experienced in attaining coherent artistic expression, the widening gap between what audiences can comprehend and what advanced artistic production can provide, various forms of psychic derangement, confusion about individual and social values and goals\u2014and subsumed them under a single concept: loss (or \"crisis\") of \"meaning.\" It is in fact very striking that what might seem to be such varied problems come to be conceptualised as loss of \"meaning.\" In the ancient world no one asked about \"the meaning of life\" or, for that matter, the \"meaning of art\" in the modern sense in which those questions are sometimes asked. To be sure, ancient philosophers asked questions about how one might best lead a human life, and some of them speculated about divine purposes and a possible continued life of the human soul after death, but these investigations were pursued under a variety of different rubrics, or as enquiries into \"the good,\" not \"the meaningful.\" Similarly, questions occasionally arose about \"the meaning\" of some particular artefact, as in the famous passage from Ovid's Ars amatoria in which a girl asks a boy which mountains and which rivers are represented by the floats in a triumphal procession. This section of the poem might be entitled \"How to pull girls at a Roman victory parade\":\n\nspectabunt laeti iuuvenes mixtaeque puellae,\n\ndiffundetque animos omnibus ista dies.\n\natque aliqua ex illis regum nomina quaeret,\n\nquae loca, qui montesquaeue ferantur aquae,\n\nomnia responde, nec tantum si qua rogabit;\n\net quae nescieris, ut bene nota refer.\n\nhis est Euphrates, praecinctus harundine frontem;\n\ncui coma dependet caerula Tigris erit;\n\nhos facito Armenios, haec est Danaeia Persis;\n\nurbs in Achaemeniis ualle ista fuit;\n\nille uel ille duces, et erunt quae nomina dicas,\n\nsi poteris,uere, si minus, apta tamen. (Ovid, Ars amatoria I.217ff.)\n\n[Happy young men and women will be watching all mixed together because such a day relaxes everyone's spirits. If some young lady from among the crowd asks you the names of the kings [led in procession or represented on the victory floats], what these places [represented] are, what these mountains and waters are called, give her an answer to every question, and keep on volunteering information even if she doesn't ask any further question. If you don't know, just refer [to the relevant information] as if it were well-known: \"This [you might say] is the Euphrates, with his forehead surrounded with reeds; this, with the blue hair hanging down, will be the Tigris; those must be Armenians, that is Danaean Persis; that will be a city in Achaemenis. This one and that one are leaders. Give them whatever names you will, their correct names, if you can, but, if not, at any rate names that seem suitable.]\n\nQuestions were also asked about the way art acted on humans, and the value it might have for us, but again these diverse questions were not construed as connected through a purportedly unitary concept of \"meaning.\" Is the fact that in the contemporary world these various things are construed to be connected in this way significant?\n\nI'd like to start the discussion by contrasting the treatment given by two different authors of two boys, each of whom is standing beside a pool. The first is Narcissus and the second an anonymous boy who is cited by Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics.\n\nAs presented by Ovid, the story of Narcissus, like that of Oedipus, has radically anti-Socratic implications. Narcissus's mother asks the blind seer Tiresias about his life prospects, and the seer, reprising, as it were, his role in the Oedipus plays, replies that Narcissus will be fine as long as he does not come to know himself:\n\nde quo consultus an esset\n\ntempora maturae visurus longa senectae,\n\nfatidicus vates \"si se non noverit\" inquit. (III.346\u201348)\n\n[<When his mother> consulted <Tiresias about whether Narcissus> would see a long and ripe old age, the prophetic seer said: \"If <i.e., provided that> he doesn't know himself.\"]\n\nOedipus cannot tolerate the truth about himself because it is too painful shaming; Narcissus, it turns out, because it is too absorbingly pleasurable. Narcissus was absorbed by his own image seen in a pool and fell in love with it. Even hearing the final phrases of his own words repeated back to him by Echo (a disembodied nymph who was enamoured of him) was not enough to spark his interest and bring him to reciprocate Echo's love. Only the full visual image of himself would do as a love-object. In the story, to love the self is not necessarily to approve of it in any normal sense; Narcissus, after all, seems to spend most of his time reproaching the image of himself for its failure fully to accede to his erotic advances, but he loves it nonetheless.\n\nHegel has a slightly different take on the boy-by-the-water.\n\n[Der Mensch befriedigt ein] allgemeine[s] und absolute[s] Bed\u00fcrfnis durch Ver\u00e4nderung der Au\u00dfendinge, welchen er das Siegel seines Inneren aufdr\u00fcckt und in ihnen nun seine eigenen Bestimmungen wiederfindet. Der Mensch tut dies um als freies Subjekt auch der Au\u00dfenwelt ihre spr\u00f6de Fremdheit zu nehmen und in der Gestalt der Dinge nur eine \u00e4u\u00dfere Realit\u00e4t seiner selbst zu genie\u00dfen. Schon der erste Trieb des Kindes tr\u00e4gt diese praktische Ver\u00e4nderung der Au\u00dfendinge in sich; der Knabe wirft Steine in den Strom und bewundert nun die Kreise, die im Wasser sich ziehen, als ein Werk, worin er die Anschauung des Seinigen gewinnt. Dieses Bed\u00fcrfnis geht durch die vielgestaltigsten Erscheinungen durch bis zu der Weise der Produktion seiner selbst in den Au\u00dfendingen, wie sie im Kunstwerk vorhanden ist.\n\n[Man satisfies a general and absolute need by changing [the form of] external things; he impresses the seal of his inner [life] onto them, and finds again in them his own determinations. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to take away from the external world its rigid foreign-ness and to enjoy in the form of things nothing but the external reality of himself. The very first impulse of the child bears within itself [an orientation towards] this [kind of] practical transformation of external things; the boy throws stones into the stream and then admires the circles that radiate in water, and he admires them as a work in which he has attained a way of seeing immediately something which is his own. This need is thorough-going through the most manifold appearances, and extends as far as the mode of production of himself in the external things which is present in the work of art.]\n\nHis boy does not lie down lazily next to a completely undisturbed pool he has accidentally come upon, seeing his own image only when he gets thirsty enough to try to drink from the pool, like Narcissus. The activity Hegel attributes to this boy is radically nonutilitarian\u2014he is not throwing stones into the stream to kill fish for dinner\u2014and it has no evident moral or ethical dimension\u2014it is not in any obvious way connected with his relations to other people, or with the satisfaction of any evident obligation or duty he might have to himself or to others. He throws the stones into a stream and admires the circles they form in the water because they are something he himself has produced; they are \"ein Werk, worin er die Anschauung des Seinigen gewinnt\" (\"a work in which he attains a direct perception of <something as> his own\"). In acting in this way, Hegel asserts, the boy is expressing his freedom and impressing his inner life onto objects in the external world. The impulse to practical transformation of the external world so that it can be seen as \"our kind of thing\" is a fundamental part of human life, an essential human need, Hegel claims, and it is connected with all the higher achievements of humanity, particularly art. Not only is Hegel's boy more active than the lethargic Narcissus, exercising at least some minimal human skills (picking up a stone and successfully hitting the water with it), but he must also perform a much more sophisticated cognitive feat than any with which Narcissus is confronted. Narcissus eventually recognises himself in the visual image in the pool, but this is as far as he gets, and he was not capable of recognising even his own words, when fragmentarily repeated by Echo. Hegel's boy, in contrast, succeeds in recognising something that has a completely different look or appearance from that of a small boy, namely a set of circling ripples in water, as (in some sense) \"his own\"; \"his own,\" not \"himself.\" The distinction is of great importance and being able to make it is a significant cognitive achievement. Finally, Narcissus's love of his image is so absorbing that the young boy loses all interest in anything else and languishes away. In contrast, the boy in the Hegelian story \"admires\" his work, but he is not said to \"love\" it with Narcissus's all-consuming, literally deadly, passion. Self-admiration may, then, be a form of self-love, but it is an attenuated form that allows for a certain distance and a certain contact with external reality.\n\nI want to suggest that Hegel's image is a good starting place for thinking about the phenomenon of meaning in modern society more generally, and in particular about the question of \"the meaning of life.\"\n\nTo elaborate this slightly, we can begin by noting three properties that the activity of the boy possesses and that we might think are likely to be relevant to making the activity \"meaningful\" for him. The activity satisfies three conditions. First of all, it is a temporally extended, intentional activity by the boy himself. Notice that Hegel does not speak of the boy accidentally dropping a stone into the water and being completely surprised by the result, nor is this a single unique episode of throwing a stone in the water. One must, I suggest, imagine the boy standing on the shore and repeatedly throwing stones, so that he builds up an internally coherent set of skills and expectations. He develops a rudimentary orientation towards at least one small segment of the world. Second, the activity must have a visible external result. These expectations and thus the orientation the boy develops must at least to some extent be the result of an activity directed at something that can be experienced as external, some state of affairs outside the boy. Furthermore, the boy's expectations must track reality at least in a minimal way. That is, one would perhaps hesitate to call the activity fully meaningful if it was based on a complete delusion about its own nature and its location in the world. For the boy to recognise himself meaningfully in the ripples, they must really exist, and not be the mere imaginings of a fevered brain.\n\nNarcissus does not fully satisfy this condition. A third condition is that the boy enjoy the process and admire the result. His orientation must contain some element of positive valuation or affirmation of self and the activity must in some sense be satisfactory to him.\n\nOne might think of this third condition as a specifically modern one. Saint-Just during the French Revolution notoriously remarked that \"happiness is a new idea in Europe\" and Hegel accepts a variant of this, although, for a variety of reasons, he does not use the terminology of \"happiness.\" Meaningfulness in the modern world must have a component that connects it with individual well-being.\n\nDas Recht der Besonderheit des Subjekts, sich befriedigt zu finden, oder, was dasselbe ist, das Recht der subjektiven Freiheit macht den Wende-und Mittelpunkt in dem Unterschiede des Altertums und der modernen Zeit.\n\n[<The recognition of> the right of particularity of the subject, the right to find itself satisfied, or, what amounts to the same thing, the right of subjective freedom is what constitutes the turning point [in the transition from] antiquity to modern time and the central point <of the modern era>.]\n\nOne might observe, quite correctly, that this seems to be two conditions: \"satisfaction\" (or \"welfare\" or \"individual happiness\") and subjective freedom. Hegel, however, takes these to be \"the same thing,\" presumably because modern people will not be satisfied if they are not subjectively free, so in theoretical contexts one can use either formulation (\"satisfaction of particularity\" or \"subjective freedom\") ad libitum. One can see the significance of this if one considers a premodern worldview, like traditionalist Calvinism. Calvinism is a specific Christian doctrine that gives an all-encompassing theory of human life both in this world and in a purported world human souls will inhabit after death. One central component of this worldview is that God has created each human soul and predetermined it to salvation or eternal damnation before it is even born. Those souls created by God for eternal damnation serve the function of glorifying his infinite justice because they are created as deserving this fate. Let us now assume that Calvinism is true, that is, that it tracks reality correctly. So if I am one of the damned, my life has a completely determinate \"sense\" or \"meaning\" that I might even be capable of grasping. I might know full well that I am a reprobate sinner and about to spend the rest of eternity being subject to the most horrible and exquisite tortures devised by God to demonstrate his justice. This is a life that is as full of \"meaning\" as it could possibly be. Perhaps everything in it, every particular event that occurs to me, is visibly part of a\u2014from my point of view utterly horrid\u2014plan to lead me to my well-deserved punishment. Needless to say, from the fact that my life is full of meaning in one sense, it does not follow that it is full of a positive meaning I can affirm. By virtue of adhering to Calvinism I may be fully oriented in this life, but it is not one I \"enjoy\" as the boy enjoys throwing stones into the water. So sometimes \"meaningful life\" means, as it properly ought, a life that exhibits a pattern and in which I can orient myself whether for good or ill. Sometimes \"meaningful life\" means one in which I have orientation that is true (or at least not false). In a further sense, my life is meaningful only if it presents my life as something having positive value for me.\n\nNote that even if Calvinism were to be true, and I were correctly to recognise myself as one of the \"Elect,\" not, as in the previous example, as one of the Damned, that is, I was one of those whose life could correctly be seen as having positive value, that would not suffice to give my life \"meaning\" in the fully modern sense because the meaning of my life would be one given it by God, not created by my own action. One might think of this as a fourth condition: the \"meaning\" in question must be something we ourselves create in the way the boy creates the ripples in the water, rather than something we simply find, pregiven in the world in the way we might find a vein of silver in a mine or a new species of ape in the rainforest. Clearly to say the boy \"creates\" the ripples is not to say he creates them ex nihilo; the water must preexist the ripples. Still the ripples are the effect of the boy's action and seen as such. Equally clearly, the project of distinguishing between what is \"found\" and what \"created\" is an exceedingly delicate one that may never admit of a universally satisfactory analysis.\n\nMarx, following in the line of Hegel and Feuerbach, expresses this modernist sensibility very well when he speaks of the need for modern man to be his own sun and \"circle around himself,\" that is, see himself as the source of what meaning there is, not have a form of meaningfulness imposed on him from an imaginary Other.\n\nDie Kritik der Religion entt\u00e4uscht den Menschen, damit er denke, handele, seine Wirklichkeit gestalte wie ein entt\u00e4uschter, zu Verstand gekommener Mensch, damit er sich um sich selbst und damit um seine wirkliche Sonne drehe. Die Religion ist nur die illusorische Sonne die sich um den Menschen bewegt, solange er sich nicht um sich selbst bewegt.\n\n[The critique of religion disappoints\/disillusions man, so that he might come to think, act, and form his reality like a disillusioned man, someone who has come to his senses, so that he comes to rotate around himself, and thus around his real sun. Religion is nothing but the illusory sun, which rotates around man, until such time as he rotates around himself.]\n\nMarx can also be thought to represent a continuation of a line of thought begun by Hegel (and, before him, by Herder) in a further respect. To return to Hegel's example, the subject of activity, the boy throwing stones, is an individual human person, but this must be a simplification for the purposes of exposition. After all, it is Hegel himself who sees it as one of his major theoretical advances to replace the old forms of discussing philosophical problems in terms either of particular human individuals and the psychology or abstract structures with the phenomenon he calls \"Geist,\" which is explicitly said to be an \"I that is a We and a We that is an I,\" that is, an inherently social phenomenon. The example presents a case of an individual acting and comporting himself in a certain way, but, of course, one would really also have to take account of the fact that virtually none of the phenomena connected with \"meaning\" are asocial.\n\nMarx emphasises the centrality of socially organised production, developing the thought that it makes no sense to think that any individual could lead a meaningful life, or for that matter any life at all that we could recognise as human, outside a social context. Put crudely, if the image of meaning and meaningful action is the boy throwing stones into the stream, exercising his power and impressing on the world an image of his control over it, the only way the boy will have sufficient mastery over the basic conditions of his real life will be if he has control over his socioeconomic life. His basic conditions of his socioeconomic life, however, are unlikely to be the sort of thing over which he as an individual is ever going to have any significant degree of power. Such control over the economy and social life as is possible is possible only if exercised in a conscious, collective way by the members of a group as a whole. The basic modality of that collective control must be power over nature and mastery over our productive capacities and economic life, a control exercised through science, technology, and politics. Collective productive activities, Marx concludes, are the kernel of a meaningful life. Furthermore, in a properly constituted economic and political order, the very distinction between instrumental and noninstrumental action can be broken down so that the boy can satisfy his absolute need and eat the fish he kills for dinner. Or rather the boy can be appropriately integrated into a work unit that collectively satisfies the absolute needs of the members of the work unit while providing fish for themselves and the other members of society. In a society in which work and collective social life was sufficiently satisfying, one might think, the very question of the \"meaning of life\" would not arise. The very fact that this question does arise for a particular person in a particular society is a sign that that question for that person (in that society) has no answer. \"The meaning of life\" ought not to be reified. To know \"the meaning of life\" does not mean to know any possible discursive answer that can be given to questions about life. Questions ostensibly about \"the meaning of life\" are really about whether the social processes are satisfactory or whether certain individuals have a certain capacity or skill, whether they \"know how\" to lead a life of a certain kind, and they exhibit this knowledge in the only way such knowledge can be exhibited: by actually leading such a life.\n\nAgainst this basically Hegelian-Marxist line of argument a series of anarchist and existentialist thinkers objected in the name of the subjective human freedom that is a component of the original synthesis. Hegel may say that \"satisfaction\" and \"subjective freedom\" are the same thing, but in fact in his theory of \"satisfaction\" comes to be interpreted as \"rational satisfaction,\" that is, only such satisfaction as the Hegelian system thinks is both actually accessible and rationally desirable, and \"subjective freedom\" comes to be reduced to the acceptance of that which is deemed rationally acceptable: \"Ubi rationale, ibi bene; ubi bene, ibi libenter.\" One may think of this rehabilitation of not necessarily rationalisable subjective freedom as a fifth condition for leading a fully meaningful life in the modern world. An individual may find meaningfulness in integration into the productive activity of a collectively organised society, but then again he may not. Whether it is likely that such integration will be satisfactory depends on many empirical factors, including details about how the society is organised, and perhaps features of personal temperament. But even if a social group is optimally well organised, it is not, or should not be, a foregone conclusion that that is what the individual will opt to do. Is he to be forced? Forced to lead a meaningful life against his will? Wouldn't that return us to a structure of externally imposed meaning not utterly different from Calvinism?\n\nThe reference to the anarchists\u2014I'm thinking particularly of Max Stirner, but of course there are also others\u2014brings the political dimension of this discussion to the fore. Many traditional philosophers did not think that taking a position on politics was an integral part of their philosophical view itself. The members of the Frankfurt School, however, did. Their relation to politics was part of their own self-conception as philosophers. The members of the school construed themselves as a basically Leftist position, that is, as standing in general very firmly in the intellectual, cultural, and political tradition of the European Enlightenment, continuing the Enlightenment tradition of secular rationalism, and affirming rather than resisting or subverting the French Revolution and its political outcome. It is perhaps not obvious\u2014in fact it is perhaps not at all enlightening to hold\u2014that the political world is best construed as a mono-dimensional spectrum of opinion ranging from Right to Left. Anarchists have notoriously been difficult to place on this spectrum. Nevertheless this way of thinking about politics as a matter of Right and Left is itself a result of the Revolution, and the Frankfurt School by and large accepted it. To be sure, Adorno thought that Enlightenment could not be construed as a singular historical event that was directed at attaining once and for all fixed goals that had some kind of transcendental standing; it had to be a continuous critical and self-critical process. \"Liberty, equality, fraternity\" was a powerful and humanly edifying slogan when directed in the eighteenth century against a firmly established feudal and clerical establishment, but a true development of the tradition of the Enlightenment would require one to assess not just the evident benefits the ideology of human equality has had for humanity but also the non-negligible price humanity has had to pay for these gains. To construe this historically specific configuration of conceptions of \"equal liberty\" as anything more than a step in a process, and in the twentieth century uncritically to absolutise these ideals in the form they happened to take in the late eighteenth century, can turn the process of Enlightenment against itself. The reasonable eighteenth-century demand for equality of all citizens before the law, which stands in opposition to the feudal regime of privilege, can in the twentieth century easily become a justification for a pernicious form of equality: the conformist equality of atomised consumers.\n\nOn the specific issue of the nature of \"meaning,\" the members of the Frankfurt School, roughly speaking, think that the characteristic right-wing position is the old-fashioned one that construes \"meaning\" as something that is fixed, external, exists \"out there\" in some sense objectively, and relative to which humans are passive recipients. So in the ancient forms of natural philosophy, the universe had \"meaning\" in itself as an ontological feature (or perhaps \"behind it\" in the form of Ideas). Then the meaning was imposed on Nature by the Christian God. Finally, Kant transforms the basic liberating idea of the Enlightenment\u2014the idea of free human activity as the origin and goal of everything\u2014into a reactionary structure. For Kant, we don't \"find\" meaning in the world, we impose it, but this imposition is not really \"free\" because (a) it is an etiolated kind of imposition through cognition alone, and (b) the form of that imposition is a set of a priori fixed structures of human subjectivity. What is common to all the positions in this strand is not only that \"we\" collectively are not in control of meaning but that \"meaning\" is defined in such a way that it becomes inconceivable that we ever come to be in control. Heidegger and his theory of man as at the mercy of \"Seinsgeschichte\" represents an extreme modern version of this. However, Soviet-style Marxism, by being based on a form of coerced meaning imposed on human individuals as a kind of politically enforced moral demand from the outside\u2014that they integrate themselves into and identify with a collective work process\u2014has some of the structure features of the Right.\n\nIn some sense there is nothing at all \"right-wing\" about recognising that some important features of the \"meaning\" of our lives are imposed on us rather than constituted. It is the case that each of us is a finite being who will one day die, and no amount of self-identification with \"species-being\" or with a continuing human collective can completely overcome this. To live as if we will never die is not to live a sensible life. This is, after all, just another way of formulating what I called the demand of \"realism,\" that our attitudes not be grossly incompatible with the truth. In contrast to the right-wing view about \"natural\" meaning, the members of the Frankfurt School take the left-wing option of seeing all meaning as socially constituted. However, they do acknowledge a certain kind of plausibility that resides in the right-wing view. Meaning is in fact socially constituted, but in our society it presents itself as if it were a natural phenomenon.\n\nAdorno, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Kierkegaard, had great sympathy for the central existentialist line and its criticism of Marxism. The category of individual, subjective freedom retains a particular saliency in his thinking. Marx was, in Adorno's view, excessively optimistic about the way in which individual freedom and the development of individual powers and capacities would be unproblematically connected with the further development of technological and economic powers in a society without private ownership of the means of production. Marx sought, in fact, to turn the whole world into a huge Victorian workhouse, and Soviet-style systems attempted rather successfully to do just that.\n\nFor Adorno in one sense the modern world is not characterised by a \"loss of sense\" or of meaning. Rather the world has too much meaning. Modern people don't, in Adorno's view, suffer from anomie, that is, from a complete lack of orientation in the social world, or rather that is not the correct way to analyse their situation. Rather they are threatened from excessive pressures towards conformism even in the normative realm and the realm of human spontaneity. They are given to understand by social institutions all too well what they \"ought\" to do, and most of them have very extensively internalised these imperatives. Everything in contemporary society is part of an incipient single closed system of capitalist rationality. Both of the two components of this diagnosis of our contemporary world are important for Adorno: It is a world essentially structured by both the capitalist form of economic production and instrumental rationality. One of the ways in which Adorno departs from the standard older forms of Marxism concerns his view about the relation between these two components. He seems often to argue that the capitalist form of production is best understood as a particular form that instrumental rationality takes under certain conditions, rather than itself constituting anything like the \"economic base.\" In fact Adorno was an early believer in what later came to be called the \"convergence\" theory. The demands of instrumental rationality were equally powerful in East and West and led to similar effects in both kinds of regime. This dominance of instrumental reason is part of the Enlightenment project, and the fact that when it establishes itself it has such deleterious consequences is another reason the Enlightenment must be enlightened about itself.\n\nThis system of universal instrumental rationality imposes itself on each individual item in the world and makes that item a mere instance of an abstract universal. Instead of cutting our own writing instruments from the quills of geese or other winged creatures, we use mass-produced items. The modern world is a world of \"das Immergleiche,\" that which is \"ever-the-same.\" This is connected with a loss of human experience. Of course, there would be no human experience if I were unable to experience different objects as instances of the same thing, in Kantian terms, to subsume them under the same concept. However, fully human experience is also, and must also in part be, experience of that which is qualitatively distinct. To be able to enjoy the nonreplicable, qualitatively specific aspects of experience is also a part of what it is for that experience to be one of happiness for me, or to be at all \"meaningful.\" For Adorno, when the Hegelian boy throws the stones into the stream, part of the point is that he experiences this as \"his\" experience in a uniquely individuated and indefinable way. Of course, the boy cannot say in what the uniqueness of that experience consists, although a literary artist like Proust might be able to represent it\u2014Adorno speaks of \"Prousts Darstellung... des absolut, unaufl\u00f6slich Individuierten.\" Human \"meaning,\" at any rate, is not \"verf\u00fcgbar,\" not producible, reproducible, or accessible at will, but is connected with and embedded in historically specific forms of human experience that are structured by unique human memories and anticipations. You cannot simply conjure real human meaning into existence by wishing it or through any form of simple manipulation. This aspect gets lost both because the objects we encounter become more and more the same and because we are increasingly trained to experience them only in a schematic way that does not go beyond subsuming them under crude general categories. In thus simply subsuming objects under pregiven schemata, I am acting not as the unique individual I am but as any-interchangeable-representative-of-a-human-subject-whatever. In this way a kind of meaning\u2014or perhaps Adorno might call it \"pseudo-meaning\"\u2014is created and maintained as the artefact, finally, of a subjectless system of economic development, but it is not an appropriately human form of meaning. In such a system human life does have a kind of meaning that is as \"objective\" as that which the Calvinist ascribed to it: that meaning is simply to be a cog in the wheel of economic production and reproduction. All human experience in such a social system reflects this basic fact.\n\nTo be sure, Adorno has been presenting something that he insists is merely a \"critical model\" of contemporary society, that is, his analysis concerns what he takes to be exceedingly powerful tendencies towards homogenisation and uniformity, and towards the formation of totally closed social systems. These \"models\" are intended to be exaggerated\u2014Adorno notoriously thought all truth had to contain a component of exaggeration\u2014and so they do not purport to give mirror-sharp images of existing reality. In one sense the fully closed, utterly homogeneous society could never be a reality. I use a particular kind of fountain pen produced by the Lamy Company in Heidelberg. Lamy may wish to turn each of its pens into an exact replica of each other, but it is contrary to the nature of reality for that ever to be fully successful. The tendency alone is important even though it will fail. This, however, leaves a small space for human experience and for the constitution of a certain kind of meaning for human life.\n\nIt is this space Adorno seeks to exploit. His only hope is that it might be possible to use existing accidental niches that have been overlooked by the capitalist system and are not yet integrated to resist. This is a negative strategy. It doesn't mean using these overlooked realms of experience as bases to launch some kind of transformation of the whole but simply to maintain them. Adorno was pessimistic about the possibility of political action. All action in the modern world is infected with instrumental rationality, and this would include any political action that tried to revolt against the demands of the system of instrumental rationality itself. The only possible meaning you could give your life in the twentieth century that is minimally realistic is to resist the social pressures towards uniformity and homogeneity in all areas, and to struggle against the subordination of human subjectivity and individual life to the demands of the maximisation of return on capital. That one embrace this life of negativity is not, of course, something that could be the object of coercion.\n\nDespite the highly individualistic, not to say idiosyncratic, nature of Adorno's views, in retrospect, they seem strikingly in tune with the mood of the ohne mich generation in the Federal Republic (of Germany): \"Go to World War III if you insist, but without me\" (ohne mich). As various people were quick to point out, it is not obvious how effective such an attitude could conceivably be in the face of what would have been the realities of war in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. If enough soldiers had refused to march to Smolensk, Kursk, or Stalingrad in the 1940s, perhaps this might have had some effect, but trying to sit back and \"sit out\" a nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was not an option that provided any prospects for survival in the Federal Republic (or the DDR) in the 1950s, given that the fingers on the relevant buttons would all be located in Washington and Moscow. Adorno's own attitude can look very much like a generalisation of this, although his preferred formulation was: \"nicht mitmachen\" (\"No collaboration\"), and it was extended far beyond participation in military activity of any kind. Can such negation by itself really ever be more than detachment or resignation and constitute a genuine form of resistance?\n\nThe two major areas in which such resistance is to some extent still possible are our two old friends: art and philosophy. Within certain limited circumstances art can articulate negatively what a meaningful life would look like. Roughly speaking, modern art is a promise of happiness because it shows that we can still experience the horrors of the modern world as horrors, and thus still have the capacity to experience the modern world as it \"really is,\" which in turn means we have retained the possibility of some grasp on a more satisfactory form of life. So the revulsion modern art causes is part of its point. It is supposed to be \"meaningless\" in the sense that it refuses to be subsumed under any established categories. These categories are at best mere mechanisms for allowing our economy and social world to run smoothly, although they present themselves as something much more than that. Successful modern art must be \"new\"\u2014this demand of the Romantic tradition is retained\u2014it must be autonomous, and it must be negative. It must disorient by making the members of the audience aware of the fact that they don't know what they are looking for in the work. They understand it when they see that that is its point and respond both by experiencing the horror and by in some sense understanding that that horror is nothing but a realistic transcription of the world we live in. The meaning of Kafka or Sch\u00f6nberg is that that is the way our world really is. There is a contradiction, or at any rate a tension, between Adorno's claim that modern art inherently disorients and his firm conviction that he finally knows what to look for and what the point is: the criticism of the closed world of capitalist instrumental rationality. Adorno goes to the opera to be predictably disoriented, knowing in advance that that is what he must look for as the point of the work. It isn't, then, completely surprising that modern art is threatened with two complementary existential threats: on the one hand, by the danger of degenerating into mere entertainment, and on the other hand, by a self-dissolution in the pursuit of ever more complex and radical forms of disorientation.\n\nIn the face of this analysis, it is not surprising that Adorno admits the possibility that art is at an end, and there is nothing but continued failure in our attempts to create \"sense\" in sight. Art might be, and might always have been, a necessary failure: a promise that inherently insinuated itself as the fulfillment of that of which it was the (mere) promise. \"In an emphatic sense,\" Adorno writes, \"no work of art can be a success\" and the same is true of a life. It is not entirely surprising that at the end of his life Adorno developed a fascination (which was not reciprocated) with Samuel Beckett, whose motto seems to have been: Try again, fail again, fail better.\n\nThere is a parallel philosophical project of tracing the discrepancy that exists everywhere between the attempt by the economic system as a whole to produce \"das Immergleiche\" and its claim that it has done so, on the one hand, and the reality of our world, on the other. Adorno calls this \"negative dialectics\" and it consists in confronting this image that society projects with the reality. In general terms, one can say that the project of negative dialectics consists in fastening on and drawing attention to the ways in which individual objects, institutions, and actions fail to be simply identically replicated instances of what they are advertised to be. Such a philosophical project is like art in that it is a kind of surrogate meaning. Art is not happiness, it is a \"promesse de bonheur,\" but a promise is inherently different from the state of satisfaction it promises, and philosophy is not full-bodied somatic happiness either, but at best what Adorno calls a \"bitteres Gl\u00fcck\"\u2014\"bitter happiness\"\u2014\"das bittere Gl\u00fcck des Erkennens\"\u2014the bitter happiness that consists in cognition. However, even a \"bitter\" happiness is not nothing and in any case it is probably all we have. Adorno thought of himself as a man of the Left, but perhaps his legacy is more ambiguous than that. I mean this as a genuinely open, not a rhetorical, question.\n\n\"The Loss of Meaning on the Left\" is itself an ambiguous title, allowing for two distinct interpretations. First, it might refer to an interpretation given by people on the Left of a certain general social phenomenon that we call \"loss of meaning\" and is perhaps similar to what Nietzsche called \"nihilism\": old structures of meaning\u2014religion, feudal or meritocratic hierarchies, family ties\u2014become implausible and no longer serve to give orientation in life. The Left has an analysis of this\u2014roughly speaking it is a natural concomitant of the development of a society with a certain kind of basic economic structure\u2014and it has one or a number of proposed therapeutic measures, most of which amount to a change in the basic economic structure initiated by political action of a certain type that is directed at giving immediate producers more control over their own activity. A second way of reading the title, though, is that people on the Left find increasingly that they have lost faith in the traditional diagnosis or in some part of the traditional recommended therapy. Either the malaise is not located in the economic structure, but is even more deep-seated, such as in the structure of rationality itself, or the form of political action traditionally recommended by those on the left is likely to be ineffective or even counterproductive. One can see the Frankfurt School itself as moving gradually from the first of these readings (in the writings of the early 1930s) to the second, culminating in Adorno's work of the 1960s. It is not clear to me that we have yet been able to move beyond this position.\n6\n\nAuthority: Some Fables\n\nWe are familiar with the observation that any number of Greek terms were thought by the Romans to have no proper Latin equivalent and had to be taken over wholesale, but in the third century (AD) a Roman senator from Asia Minor, Cassius Dio Cocceianus, in his history noted that there was one case in which the tables were turned: there was one Latin term for which there was no simple Greek equivalent. In a discussion of some of the reforms of senatorian practice implemented by Augustus he spoke of the \"auctoritas\" of the Roman Senate and added: \"\u1f11\u03bb\u03bb\u03b7\u03bd\u03af\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9 \u1f00\u03c5\u03c4\u1f78 [scilicet, \u03c4\u1f78 \u1f44\u03bd\u03bf\u03bc\u03b1 auctoritas] \u03ba\u03b1\u03b8\u03ac\u03c0\u03b1\u03be \u1f00\u03b4\u03c5\u03bd\u03b1\u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u1f10\u03c3\u03c4\u03af\u03bd\" [\"It is impossible to render 'auctoritas' in Greek with a single word\"]. Dio Cassius was himself a native speaker of Greek and so can be assumed to know what he was talking about. The question is what conclusion, if any, one should draw from this observation. If \"auctoritas\" is not merely a genuinely and uniquely Roman coinage, but one that cannot even be expressed in another language, might that mean that it was a mistake to apply it outside a Roman context, that any such application is inappropriate or at best \"metaphorical\"? Might we be able to learn to apply the term even if we can't translate it, or even if in some sense we do not understand it? In fact, later thinkers and language-users did use \"auctoritas\" (or terms clearly derivative from it in other languages) in non-Roman contexts, and one would be loath to say that this was always some kind of mistake.\n\nOr is it that \"auctoritas\" is simply a perhaps ideologically coloured conceptualisation of a universal human phenomenon, namely that some people in fact have more standing, prestige, and influence than others, they are able to get other people to follow their lead or do what they suggest or advise, or that some people \"ought\" (for whatever reason, for instance, because they have more knowledge, experience, and maturity) to have more influence than others or get people to do as they say? The Romans, then, were perhaps simply the first (in the West?) to focus attention to this, articulate it clearly, and give it a name. This would mean that there was nothing specifically Roman about the term or the associated concept. It is natural for us to employ (derivatives of) the Latin word because we still stand to some extent under the spell of Roman institutions, and the specific terms designating these institutions seem to have behind them a weight of tradition. Tapping into that tradition may give the illusion that by using a particular term one is giving a particularly lucid description or even explanation of what is really going on.\n\nIf, though, the phenomenon to which \"auctoritas\" refers really is a universal feature of human life, then shouldn't it be possible to give an adequate, if perhaps clumsy, analysis of this phenomenon without using this specific Roman term, for instance, by speaking of (well-deserved) influence, prestige, and so forth?\n\nDio does not, of course, say that \"auctoritas\" is absolutely untranslatable, that is, that there is no way to render it at all comprehensible to a non-Latin speaker. What he says is that it is impossible to render it in Greek \"\u03ba\u03b1\u03b8\u03ac\u03c0\u03b1\u03be,\" \"all at once,\" \"in one go.\" This can mean one of the following?\n\n(a) In every individual case in which the Latin term \"auctoritas\" is used, there is a clear succinct Greek equivalent\u2014\u1f00\u03be\u03af\u03c9\u03bc\u03b1 in one case, \u03ba\u1fe6\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 in another, \u1f10\u03be\u03bf\u03c5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 in a third\u2014different Greeks words in each case, but in each case a clear equivalent.\n\n(b) In some cases in which the Latin \"auctoritas\" is used, it is unclear which of two possible Greek terms is \"the\" equivalent (but it is also assumed that it must be one or the other, or be ambiguous between them; thus \"noga\" in many Slavic languages means either what we in English would call \"leg\" or what we would call \"foot\").\n\n(c) In some cases there is no one clear equivalent or an ambiguity between two or three, but nevertheless one can explain the term through a lengthy and appropriately circumstantial periphrasis. Thus Greek has two different words \u03bd\u03ad\u03bc\u03b5\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2 and \u03c6\u03d1\u03cc\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2 for a psychic phenomenon in which there is in English (and in Latin) only one word: \"[roughly:] envy\" (Latin: \"invidia\"). However, although I can't give \"equivalents\" of either of these two terms, I can give a periphrastic explanation: \"\u03bd\u03ad\u03bc\u03b5\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2\" is feeling pain at another's undeserved success; \"\u03c6\u03d1\u03cc\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2\" is feeling pain at another's success not because it is undeserved but because the other is your peer.\n\n(d) In some cases I might not be able to give even a periphrasis but would have to embark on a lengthy explanation. Just imagine trying to explain the terms referring to specific actions or events in a complicated game like cricket to someone to whom the game is unknown in a language like, say, Sami, which will not have had occasion to develop a technical vocabulary for it or \"ko\" to someone with no knowledge of the game of g\u00f4. This doesn't mean that \"ko\" must remain utterly mysterious to anyone who is not a speaker of Japanese and a g\u00f4-player, only that the term in question can be rendered comprehensible not by translating or paraphrasing individual sentences in which it occurs, but only through a lengthy global account of the point and the rules of the game as a whole and then a description of the position in a game to which \"ko\" refers. Of course, the distinction between \"periphrasis\" and \"explanation\" will not be hard and fast.\n\n(e) Two or more of the above.\n\nSo there is nothing deeply mysterious about a term being \"untranslatable at one go.\" The case would be different if there were to be some significant term that could not be made hermeneutically accessible to us in any way whatsoever, neither by translation, paraphrase, or \"explanation.\" If one strand of philosophical thinking, initiated by Quine in the 1960s and developed further by Davidson in the 1970s and 1980s, is correct, any meaningful term in a natural language will be translatable in this wide sense because, if it were not, we would have no reason to assume it was a meaningful term at all rather than a mere sound.\n\nThis may be thought to be correct but not directly relevant to the study of politics and history. What is important here is not just that terms can be rendered in some way comprehensible but how specifically they are internally configured. One tempting way to think about this would be to assume that there was something like a stock of semantic elements or basic units of meaning that could be put together in one way in one language and in other ways in others. So that if I say that \"mana\" and \"negara\" are not translatable (all at one go), this is compatible with my explaining to you that \"mana\" is supposed by certain people in the South Pacific region to refer to a kind of magical power instantiated in particular people, animals, plants, and places that makes it likely that they will be successful in their endeavours but also makes them potentially dangerous to, and hence to be avoided by, those who do not have \"mana\" themselves. Similarly, \"negara\" is a term for a South Asiatic \"court-centred\" polity that was organised in a particular way and made various political, legal, economic, and religious claims upon those subject to it. So in the case of \"mana\" we still in English have the concept of a \"magical power,\" although we don't use that term anymore except in historical or anthropological descriptions or as a criticism or a joke because we think such things don't exist, and we have the concepts of \"success,\" \"danger,\" and \"avoidance.\" We also have the concepts of a \"court,\" a \"polity,\" and of political, economic, and religious claims, although we don't perhaps recognise the particular \"religious\" claims associated with a \"negara\" and we don't have a single term that would refer to the conjunction of all these claims.\n\nAlthough it is tempting to speak as above of \"semantic elements,\" it is equally important to see that this idea is one of those images that are paedagogically useful in giving one a first approximative understanding (but can be highly misleading if taken in too literal-minded a way) and generate theories that will not survive sustained scrutiny. There are no naturally given, free-floating, language-independent \"semantic elements\" that are simply arranged differently in different languages. This image is useful because it helps me as a speaker of early twenty-first-century English to project some of my own categories in such a way as, perhaps, to begin to get a grip on what seem to me exotic ways of speaking, thinking, and acting. \" 'Mana' is a magic power\": this statement is correct as far as it goes in that this gives me a way of getting initial hermeneutic access to something that would otherwise be almost completely opaque to me, but do I and the inhabitants of some island in the South Pacific really share an \"elementary\" notion of such a power; it is just that they think it exists and I don't? Do we share the notion of \"power\"? The more one reflects on this, I submit, the less plausible it seems.\n\nIt is still a significant fact that the Romans had one simple Latin word, auctoritas, and presumably one concept, which they used to describe cases that a Greek would spontaneously have described using a variety of different Greek expressions. We are still confronted, then, with the same questions: Does this matter? If so, in what way and why? Perhaps discussion of some examples will help clarify this. Both ancient Greek and ancient Roman societies were strongly patriarchal. In these societies it was considered self-evident that women and children (and, of course, slaves) had to obey the man who was established as the head of the household\u2014in the ideal case, the monogamous husband of one of the women and father of her children. Obedience to the \"father\" was to be unconditional and was expected even when the father's command ran directly counter to the wishes and preferences, or even to the interests and needs, of the children or dependent women. The Romans used the phrase \"patria potestas,\" the father's power, the legally grounded and socially reenforced power to dispose of the economic resources of all members of the household group, to discipline members of the household, using force to get his commands obeyed, and even, in extremis, to dispose of their lives and freedom. In contrast the father's \"authority\" did not consist primarily in his legally constituted power to force the child to act in a certain way but had a different structure. The father was, and was supposed to be, a model, an exemplary source of advice and counsel that was to be heeded. This was true even in situations in which the father was not in a position to enforce or had no intention of enforcing compliance with his advice. To be sure, often a given paternal admonition will not have been easy to distinguish from an order, but that will not always have been the case and is, at any rate, a different question. The point is that there was a conceptual distinction between \"potestas\" and \"auctoritas,\" which, of course, does not preclude the possibility that in many concrete cases it would be hard to know which to apply.\n\nThe Greeks, it must be assumed, had an understanding of the general phenomenon (and the specific varieties) of power, whether physical ability or political, social, and legal power, and they had adequate linguistic resources to express these. If their society was in fact \"paternalistic,\" can it really be possible that they had no specific term to express paternal authority? Greek sources do have plenty to say about the power of the father but rather little about any property that seems at all like the Roman \"auctoritas patris.\" So in Aristotle's major discussion of the family we read that the father \"rules over the children in the way a king does\" (\u1f04\u03c1\u03c7\u03b5\u03b9... \u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u03c4\u03ad\u03ba\u03bd\u03c9\u03bd \u03b2\u03b1\u03c3\u03b9\u03bb\u03b9\u03ba\u1ff6\u03c2). This potentially harsh-sounding remark is almost immediately softened when Aristotle adds that this form of kingly rule (\u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae) is very different from the rule (also \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae) over slaves or over one's wife. The father's rule over his children was supposed to be oriented around the principles of benevolence towards that which belonged to him as his own (\u03c6\u03b9\u03bb\u03af\u03b1) and the prerogatives and privileges (two Latin words, but we have no better) that belonged to the father as an older person (\u03c0\u03c1\u03b5\u03c3\u03b2\u03b5\u03af\u03b1), so it is internally limited in some way.\n\nThis account seems to me to have greater similarity with \"patria potestas\" than with the \"auctoritas patris.\" After all, even the Roman father in the fullness of his powers was not supposed to rule over his children arbitrarily but was supposed to be guided by some notion of what was proper and appropriate.\n\nThis example shows some characteristic differences between older conceptions and the assumptions moderns would be likely to make. To be sure the father should use his power \"appropriately,\" but who judges what is appropriate, and is there anyone who is empowered to intervene to ensure that the limits of what is appropriate are not overstepped? Perhaps the ideal \"Sage\" (\u03c3\u03cc\u03c6\u03bf\u03c2; sapiens) is the final judge of what is \"appropriate\": an \"appropriate\" use is one of which such a Sage would approve. However, it does not follow from this that the Sage is or should be empowered to intervene. A fortiori the oppressed children would not be acting in a morally fully acceptable way to resist even inappropriate exercise of power. Many modern thinkers would be inclined to assume that if he (the father) is acting inappropriately\u2014whatever that means\u2014there must be someone who, as we would say, \"has a right\" to intervene; perhaps even the abused children are not just an object of understandable pity but \"have a right to resist.\" The use of the phrase \"must be\" in ethical contexts is often a sign that an ad hoc assumption is being smuggled into the discussion. The ancient situation is one that opens a space for a particular kind of tragedy, namely a misproportion between a discretionary power that can, admittedly, be used appropriately or inappropriately and the failure to specify any effective moral recourse to those who, being subject to this power, might be disadvantaged by its inappropriate use. The modern conception closes off this particular space by assuming a certain moral equality among people and by vesting in each individual a prima facie right to self-protection, which means a right \"in principle\" to resist. Of course merely assigning to individuals a \"moral right\" to self-protection will not always constitute a real practical defence, so once the assignment has taken place it is natural to look around for, or invent, an agency designed to enforce this right effectively.\n\nAncient rhetoric provides another example, when Quintilian discusses \"auctoritas\" in the context of various types of rhetorical argumentation:\n\nAdhibebitur extrinsecus in causam et auctoritas. haec secuti Graecos, a quibus \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9\u03c2 dicuntur, iudicia aut iudicationes vocant... si quid ita visum gentibus, populis, sapientibus viris, claris civibus, inlustribus poetis referri potest.\n\n[Appeal to \"authority\" can also be brought into a case from the outside. Those who follow the Greeks (who call these \"\u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9\u03c2\") call such appeals \"(appeals to) judgement... when one can bring to bear what seems good to tribes or peoples or wise men, famous citizens, or illustrious poets.]\n\nIn cases where the gods might condescend to give a clear sign, something that occurs only infrequently\u2014\"id rarum est\"\u2014but is not completely out of the question, Quintilian says one can even cite \"the authority of the gods\" (deorum auctoritas). A divine sign might have authority because the gods could be thought to have knowledge or forms of experience we lack and also because they might be powerful enough (and interested enough) to make the sign come true.\n\nThe parallel\u2014but, of course, temporally much earlier\u2014discussion of \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9\u03c2 in Aristotle's Rhetoric differs from Quintilian's in a number of significant ways. Among the argumentative strategies that orators repeatedly use (\u03c4\u03cc\u03c0\u03bf\u03b9), Aristotle says, is the appeal to the judgements people make:\n\n\u1f04\u03bb\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f10\u03ba \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b5\u03c9\u03c2 \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1\u1f76 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u1f22 \u1f41\u03bc\u03bf\u03af\u03bf\u03c5 \u1f22 \u1f10\u03bd\u03b1\u03bd\u03c4\u03af\u03bf\u03c5, \u03bc\u03ac\u03bb\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03b1 \u03bc\u1f72\u03bd \u03b5\u1f30 \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f00\u03b5\u03af, \u03b5\u1f30 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03bc\u03ae, \u03ac\u03bb\u03bb\u0309 \u03bf\u1f35 \u03b3\u03b5 \u03c0\u03bb\u03b5\u1fd6\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9, \u1f22 \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03bf\u1f76 \u1f22 \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2 \u1f22 \u03bf\u1f31 \u03c0\u03bb\u03b5\u1fd6\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9, \u1f22 \u1f00\u03b3\u03b1\u03b8\u03bf\u03af, \u1f22 \u03b5\u1f30 \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03bf\u1f76 \u03bf\u1f31 \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03bf\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2 \u1f22 \u03bf\u1f53\u03c2 \u1f00\u03c0\u03bf\u03b4\u03ad\u03c7\u03bf\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9 \u03bf\u1f31 \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03bf\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2, \u1f22 \u03bf\u1f37\u03c2 \u03bc\u1f74 \u03bf\u1f37\u03cc\u03bd \u03c4\u03b5 \u1f10\u03bd\u03b1\u03bd\u03c4\u03af\u03bf\u03bd \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd, \u03bf\u1f37\u03bf\u03bd \u03c4\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2 \u03ba\u03c5\u03c1\u03af\u03bf\u03b9\u03c2, \u1f22 \u03bf\u1f37\u03c2 \u03bc\u1f74 \u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u1f78\u03bd \u1f10\u03bd\u03b1\u03bd\u03c4\u03af\u03bf\u03bd \u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd, \u03bf\u1f37\u03bf\u03bd \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2 \u1f22 \u03c0\u03b1\u03c4\u03c1\u1f76 \u1f22 \u03b4\u03b9\u03b4\u03b1\u03c3\u03ba\u03ac\u03bb\u03bf\u03b9\u03c2. [1398b21\u201326]\n\n[Another topos is the appeal to the judgement (\u03ba\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2) of people about which cases are the same, which like each other, and which opposed to each other. This argument is most effective when everyone always judges in the way cited. If that is not the case, the argument can still have a certain power if most people judge in this way or wise men\u2014again all of them or most of them\u2014or good people, or when one can claim for a fact that those who are being addressed judge in this way or people whom they in turn trust or people whom one cannot contradict such as rulers, or when one can show that those people judge in this way from whose opinion it is considered \"not beautiful\" to deviate, such as the gods, one's own father, or one's teacher.]\n\nThe Romans thus had available to them a schema of rhetorical argument of the following form:\n\n1. Your father [or the god] has authority.\n\n1a. [That is why everyone else also judges that you ought to obey him.]\n\n2. Therefore you ought to obey him.\n\nThe closest parallel to this for the Greeks would have been:\n\n1. Everyone\u2014or at any rate most of the people who count, namely the serious, informed, and intelligent ones\u2014judge as follows:\n\nIt is not good\/fine\/noble (\u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03cc\u03bd) to fail to obey your father\n\n2. Therefore you should obey your father.\n\nMuch of the force of this \"argument\" is contained in the use of the term \u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03cc\u03bd, which has a distinctly positive but also highly unspecific meaning. All sorts of things can be called \u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03cc\u03bd: a lovely cloak, a favourable wind, a well-positioned and well-built harbour, useful tools, a spirited horse, particularly strong and well-made armour. The Greek conception that finds expression in a statement like: \"Many people judge it not to be a fine thing to fail to obey one's father\" seems exceedingly weak and mealymouthed compared to the monumentally weighty ascription of \"auctoritas\" to the Roman paterfamilias. This example illustrates a very striking difference between Greeks and Romans in the way in which the subjective and the objective dimensions are connected. The Romans ascribe a quasi-objective property to a particular subject: \"This man has auctoritas,\" whereas the Greeks report the subjective judgements of various people about what would constitute an objectively good (\u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03cc\u03bd) state of the world.\n\nSo it does seem that the Greeks lacked a concept that corresponded in any simple way to the Roman \"auctoritas.\" Was this a defect, a blind spot in their political thinking that was perhaps connected with various other deficiencies in the way they conducted themselves politically? After all, no Greek city, federation, tribe, or monarchy ever achieved the political success of the Roman Republic, although, of course, this is also a rather high standard to set. Or was it that the Greeks were simply clear-sighted and hardheaded? \"The father in fact has the power of a king over his children and most of the most experienced people also think that it is not a fine thing if his children disagree with his judgement.\" That, one might argue, simply, neatly, and comprehensively sums the situation up. Why not just leave it at that without inventing a property of \"auctoritas\" to be attributed to the father? The only point of this addendum would be to provide a mask for relations of power and suggesting that adventitious coincidence of subjective human judgements was something more than it actually was.\n\nTwo approaches to \"authority\" have already been mentioned and rejected: first, attempts that assume that one can give a merely arbitrary or constructed definition; second, attempts that appeal exclusively (and ahistorically) to our contemporary language. Neither of these two would give any kind of understanding. Rather I have suggested the need to start from the history of the term.\n\nThe early history of the concept of \"auctoritas,\" then, is both very dark and very complicated, but there seem to be two rather different ways in which it has been approached. The first model attempts to map the structure and functioning of the institutions and practices of the Roman Republic insofar as it is accessible to us through the extant literature, and then to locate \"auctoritas\" in that system. The second is founded on a speculative etymology of the word \"auctoritas\" in the light of comparative Indo-European philology.\n\nTo start with the first model, the Romans had a variety of political assemblies, differing ways of conferring political power, and different kinds of officials or magistrates, each with his recognised province. In contrast to the Roman father who, as we have seen, unified in his own person \"potestas\" and \"auctoritas,\" power and authority in the political realm were not always vested in the same persons or assemblies. There was a distinction made between the \"potestas\" the various different kinds of popular assemblies exercised and the \"auctoritas\" of the assembly of elite politicians, which was called the \"Senate.\" I suggest, then, that we look at what \"potestas\" and \"auctoritas\" meant in the context of these institutions.\n\nIn addition to the Senate and the popular assemblies there is a third element in the Roman republican structure: the popularly elected magistrates, who had \"imperium,\" a more or less independent and discretionary power within a certain domain, either geographical (pro-consul of Asia or of Sicily) or administrative (responsible for the corn supply or for aqueducts).\n\nA certain separation of powers was an important part of Roman republicanism; the system breaks down when a single individual (Octavian\/Augustus) accumulates in his own person a number of distinct powers, each of which by itself had good republican precedents but which previously had each been vested in a distinct person. It would be as if Berlusconi were to be at the same time president of the republic, prime minister, foreign minister, president of the Constitutional Court, head of the Carabinieri, finance minister, Sindicato of Rome, and pope (as well as being the richest individual in Italy and owning all the newspapers and radio stations), and were thus to consider himself a pillar of the republic because he did nothing that was not fully within the constitutional power of the occupant of one or another of these offices. Nevertheless, the principle of the separation of powers did not take the form to which we have become accustomed since the time of Montesquieu. Montesquieu distinguished legislative, executive, and judicial powers and proposed that they be located in separate offices or institutionally distinct parts of government. Trying to apply that particular form of analysis to the Roman Republic will generate only confusion. First of all, in Rome there was no separate, institutionally distinct \"judiciary\" in the modern sense and no professional judges. Legal cases were decided by one or another of the magistrates or their deputies or by arbitration conducted by umpires who were agreed on beforehand by both parties, or by referring a case to one or another of the existing assemblies or in other rather ad hoc ways. It would be completely false to think of the Senate as something like a modern legislative chamber. Its function was not to \"pass laws\" at all; if anything, that was one of the functions of one or another of the popular assemblies. Its function was also not to enforce or execute the laws; that was the job of the magistrates. Formally speaking, the Senate was a consultative institution whose responsibility was to give advice (consulta) when it had been asked a question. Most of us get our first\u2014and for some only\u2014glimpse of Roman politics through the writings of Cicero. Cicero, however, was in favour of a republic dominated by a universally pro-active Senate (with the cooperation of the boni in other Orders), and was not beyond allowing this political value-judgement to colour what he presents as a description of the formal mechanisms of Roman politics. It is important to note that there is another way of seeing the Senate and its place in the republican system. One can reasonably describe it in purely formal terms as having a distinctly more limited proper sphere of action and as being distinctly more passive. After all, as a consultative body it was not permanently in session but had to be specifically convoked by someone who wished to ask it for advice, usually one of the magistrates, and it was convoked to answer some specific question. In principle, it did not, then, even set its own agenda but responded to questions put to it by magistrates. It was, of course, possible for the senators to be as \"expansive\" as they wished in the discussion of questions once they were put to it, and it was also possible for prominent senators to prompt one of the magistrates to ask an appropriate question or solicit advice on a particular topic, but that is a separate issue. Every schoolchild remembers Cato's peculiar \"ceterum censeo.\" Whatever the question, we are told, Cato ended his discussion by saying, \"Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.\" This anecdote sums up in a nutshell both how the Senate was supposed to act and how it actually did act. It was supposed to answer the specific questions asked, so there was something odd and noteworthy that Cato kept deviating onto his pet subject, but also no one was empowered, or seemed inclined, to try to stop him.\n\nA magistrate could consult the Senate before, or after, he had proposed a law to one of the popular assemblies (and, of course, he need not consult the Senate at all). If the Senate approved of the proposal before it was enacted by the assembly, then one could see this as a kind of senatorial recommendation to the assembly. If approval is given after the proposal is passed, this could be seen as a kind of retrospective endorsement. To be sure, a proposal that had been approved by the Senate, either prospectively or retrospectively, could be thought to enjoy a certain normative perfection, but senatorial approval was not necessary for a law to be valid. Not even the most rabid proponent of senatorial interests was willing to deny this. Laws passed by a popular assembly had the force of law, even if the Senate had not given its approval (or if that approval had not even been sought). So one should also not apply to the Senate a model derived from the theory developed by supporters of the French parlements (courts of law located in some large cities) in the eighteenth century, namely that laws and decrees propounded by the king had no legal force unless \"registered,\" that is, accepted by the parlements and recorded in their books. In Rome it was perhaps rash to legislate without consulting the Senate and very rash to do something of which it disapproved. The Senate, after all, was composed of especially successful and experienced statesmen and politicians, many of whom had previously held very high magistracies, so it was natural to consider it a repository of a certain kind of practical knowledge, foresight, and judgement. That is not to say, of course, that the judgements on which its advice was based were infallible or that it did not represent to some extent the narrow self-interest of its members and its own interest as a distinct order of society. Nevertheless, with senatorial approval or without, provided the laws in question had been passed in a formally correct way in the popular assembly, they were still legally binding; valid, to be sure, \"without the authority of the Senate.\" \"Auctoritas\" was even the technical terms for a recommendation of the Senate that was turned down or not acted on by one of the assemblies and that therefore was not valid law.\n\nOne cannot, therefore, even say that the Senate was a place of obligatory consultation because no magistrate was required to consult the Senate, and certainly not required to follow its advice, and laws and decrees adopted against its explicit advice were perfectly legal and binding.\n\nAppeal to the Senate and its auctoritas was, therefore, nothing more than another way of summoning moral support or trying to acquire some extranormative weight for one's proposal or of taking out some kind of insurance in case of failure. Unfortunately, the insurance policy is not worth the paper it is printed on. Cicero learned this to his cost\u2014if he did not know already\u2014in the aftermath of his action against the Catalinarians. He had covered himself by acquiring a senatus consultum, the so-called senatus consultum ultimum to the effect that he, the consul, should see to it that the republic came to no harm, and he had a senatorial vote in favour of imposing the death penalty on the conspirators, but when he acted on that \"advice\" he could still be prosecuted for executing Roman citizens without trial. The Senatorial decision was still a consultum and had the standing of an expression of an opinion, not a legal warrant or an executive grant of immunity. \"I was [or, we were] only following the auctoritas of the Senate\" was never an acceptable excuse or exculpation for a magistrate or a popular assembly.\n\nWith that we come to the second of the two approaches to \"auctoritas.\" In his Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europ\u00e9ennes, \u00c9mile Benveniste starts from some claims about etymology. \"Auctoritas,\" he asserts, should be the property of someone who is an \"auctor.\" The substantive \"auctor,\" however, derives from the verb augeo (increase, swell, strengthen, cause to grow). So the archaic \"auctor\" is the initiator of some action or sequence of events, that is, someone who has the power and the warrant to begin and carry through some action, and \"auctoritas\" is the property of being such an initiator and executor of action. So in Roman law the auctor is a seller who must be physically able to give to the buyer the object purchased but must also stand security in case of doubt that he actually owns the object in question. One might be struck by what seems to be a conjunction of a merely factual and a quasi-normative statement\u2014power and warrant\u2014but to call this a \"conjunction\" might be taken to imply that there are two recognisably distinct \"things\" that are put together or conjoined\u2014the factual and the normative. It is at least just as likely, though, that what one has here is a description of an archaic situation, not in which two things that are distinguished are put together but in which they have not yet been clearly separated from each other.\n\nOn persiste \u00e0 traduire augeo par \"augmenter\"; c'est exact dans la langue classique, mais non au d\u00e9but de la tradition. Pour nous, \"augmenter\" \u00e9quivaut \u00e0 \"accro\u00eetre, rendre plus grand quelque chose qui existe d\u00e9j\u00e0.\" L\u00e0 est la difference, inaper\u00e7ue, avec augeo. Dans ses plus anciens emplois, augeo indique non le fait d'accro\u00eetre, ce qui existe, mais l'acte de produire hors de son propre sein; acte cr\u00e9ateur, qui fait surgir quelque chose d'un milieu nourricier et qui est le privil\u00e8ge des dieux ou des grandes forces naturelles, non des hommes.\n\nIt is almost superfluous to remark that the conception which Benveniste rejects, namely that the auctor \"rend plus grand quelque chose qui existe d\u00e9j\u00e0,\" corresponds precisely to the kind of function the Roman Senate seems to have had. It was not officially an initiator at all but rather an assembly which by approving of a proposal that had already been formulated by someone else increased the standing of that proposal. The magistrate who, having consulted the Senate and won their approval, could present a proposal to the popular assembly with an increased chance of its being accepted because the proposal was backed \"by the authority of the Senate.\" In contrast the archaic auctor envisaged in Benveniste's construction would have to possess in perhaps yet undistinguished unity the power to lay down rules (potestas), like that of the Roman popular assemblies, the warrant-enhancing auctoritas of the Senate, and the actual ability to enforce conformity to what had been laid down. It is not at all clear how exactly to think about these two models. This may be seen as an invitation to tell a \"just-so\" story that would allow one to visualise one possible form that the relation between them might have taken. The point of such stories is not, of course, to say what actually happened, but by studying their recurrent and plausible-seeming fantasies to try to map people's mental world. The assumption is that the semantics of such things as \"authority\" will have something to do with the way they imaginatively construe their world. One can, of course, deny this assumption or think that examining such a fiction is a very bad way to begin to think about \"authority\" or that this mode of proceeding must lead one astray or cannot be the final word on \"authority.\" I ask the reader to suspend disbelief for a moment. Suppose, then, that we enter that world of make-believe in which people might live \"in a state of nature,\" \"graze on the meadows of truth\" after death, truck and barter in a \"free market,\" or discuss their social institutions \"behind a veil of ignorance.\" The specific story about authority begins with an idealised conception of a primordial agent who possesses a large number of highly desirable and highly prized properties and initiates some important collective enterprise, founds a city, or institutes some important social institution. Think here of the stylised \"biographies\" of mythical Founders one finds in ancient literature, that is of figures like Theseus, Solon, Lykurgus (among the Greeks), or Romulus and Numa Pompilius (among the Romans). In the stories about these Founders a certain number of features recur. (1) The Founder in fact succeeded in the past in taking some kind of initiative, setting in motion some process or establishing some kind of practice or institution that continues. (2) The Founder had sufficient power and an appropriate normative warrant for initiating or founding whatever he does. (3) The Founder has at his disposal the competences, forms of knowledge, and moral and psychological properties needed for his undertaking, that is, he is able to continue to guide it skillfully in the right direction, that is, in the direction of some tangibly positive results. (4) The natural consequences of the obvious success of his initiative give the Founder standing, prestige, and influence at least among those who participate in the enterprise, identify with it, and benefit from it: they tend to listen carefully to him and to follow his advice.\n\nThe part of the above that is likely to seem most problematic to modern observers is (2). What is \"an appropriate normative warrant\"? Isn't the whole notion of \"normativity\" a contemporary creation, concocted from Christian and Kantian sources? Can it without serious anachronism be projected back onto the ancient world? Where, then, would an appropriate warrant come from? What is its relation to mere strength or force? Sometimes the warrant in question is presented as being clear, prospective, and unambiguous, such as in the case of Battos, who is sent off from Delphi with a direct, clear injunction from the god to go off and do something new, in this case found the city of Cyrene in Africa. Sometimes, however, the warrant is merely retrospective, as when the gods send a sign that confirms what has already been begun, Romulus and the eagles. Sometimes it is ambiguous (Aeneas). Sometimes, finally, it seems to be merely hypothetical (and retrospective): The continued prosperity of this city, one might think, shows that the gods \"must\" approve. Why \"must\" the gods approve and why in any case should the approval of the gods be the final word? In the archaic period, there are plenty of exemplary stories about (excessive) prosperity and success not being a sign of divine approval but a trigger of divine jealousy. If one asks why Zeus's approval is so important, the answer is likely, at any rate in the early period, to be couched in terms of his greater strength than other gods, his defeat of the Titans in the Great War, and so forth. The role of the gods in all of this is deeply ambiguous. Whereas it is probably not quite correct to say that might makes right, few things seem to speak as loudly as visible power and continuing success and prosperity. In a highly uncertain world, what higher \"warrant\" could one have than the example of visible continuing success? In particular, how can I reasonably fail to admire and emulate those who in establishing my form of life have conferred such signal and significant benefits on me?\n\nThe story up to now has been couched in terms of a single Founder, but there is no reason in principle\u2014other than a human aesthetic preference for having a human individual at the centre of a story\u2014for something similar not to hold for a group. If the Spartans had Lykurgos, the Romans had the mos maiorum. What is to be done, however, if the four conditions mentioned above (power, success, other abilities, prestige) are not co-instantiated at the same time in one given individual or in one determinate group? What if one person or group has the effective power, another great skill and experience, and yet another high prestige? And what if these individuals and group interact in a variety of different ways over time? What, to put it differently, if there is no single, closed Bildungsroman of a unitary individual or group who has or instantiates \"authority\" that can be run through schematically in the imagination in a relatively clear narrative way? What if there is only a (real) history of \"authority\"?\n\nOddly enough, given what is often said about the fundamentally \"ahistorical\" nature of Greek thought, considerations like this would probably have left them unmoved. After all, \"authority\" played no role in their imaginative and conceptual life. We bump up again against the question why that should have been the case, although perhaps by this point I will have impressed on the reader sufficiently the peculiarity of the concept of \"authority\" to leave room for the possibility that the question should be reversed: Why and how could the Romans have come up with such an oddity?\n\nUntil the middle of the nineteenth century, one could argue, \"Greece\" was no more than a mere geographical name. The various spaces occupied by speakers of Hellenic dialects never achieved political unity apart from the fragile and ephemeral empire of Alexander until the Romans took them over in the first century before Christ. In these spaces there lived a variety of different groups who put forward conflicting, heterogeneous, and variously grounded claims to different kinds of knowledge and to different types of power. There were different groups of people who called themselves (and were called by other people) \"the good,\" people who claimed wisdom for themselves (and to whom wisdom was attributed by others), \"rulers,\" aristocrats, citizens. There were varying majorities in the different tiny city-states and other constituencies (\"most Athenians think...\"; \"most doctors would prescribe...\"; \"most rowers in the fleet agreed...\"). Fathers generally had power over their children, but Zeus himself had been able to turn the tables on his own father, and that had clearly been a good thing. What is striking in this world is variety and diversity; what would prompt one to assume that some particular people or occupants of some particular roles had an \"objective\" authority? In Rome, in contrast, centralisation of power\u2014\"centralisation\" relative to what one would have found in Greece\u2014seems to have been a fact of life from early on. The \"Fathers\" formed a political and social elite, owned extensive property, monopolised the most important priesthoods, provided the candidates for magistratures, served as military leaders, and sat with their peers in the Senate. They were the auctores par excellence. Eventually the plebs was able to limit their overwhelming predominance and acquire for itself both legislative power and, through popularly elected magistrates, indirect executive power. Auctoritas was what remained to the Senate as a kind of shadow of its former prevalency. Although some political philosophers seem to connect the uses of the imagination with the production of unrealistic fantasies about a utopian future, Hegel and Marx (and Freud for that matter) were right to emphasise that the more usual role of the imagination in politics was to reinforce the hold of the past over the present.\n\nIf the Roman concept of auctoritas was shimmeringly indefinite, the modern concept seems simply to be polysemous. One can distinguish several kinds of authority: personal, moral, discretionary, and cognitive.\n\nPersonal authority is a sociopsychological property of a concrete individual, more rarely of a very small group. A person has \"authority\" in this sense if he or she in fact impresses others as being especially competent, firm of purpose, self-confident, willing to give orders and used to seeing them obeyed. In emergency situations people who have this property, which is sometimes also called \"charisma,\" can be especially valuable. Moral authority generally derives from having led, and being seen to have led, a morally exemplary life. One can easily imagine situations in which someone who has the sociopsychological property of personal authority does not also have any particular moral authority. Moral authority is a more fine-grained but also more encompassing phenomenon than \"charisma\" because it has to do not with such things as efficiently organising specific forms of action in situations of urgency but with more general and potentially reflective overall judgements about the good, the praiseworthy, that which is to be avoided at all costs. Since there is such human disagreement on what a good life is, as well as significant disagreement on what a \"moral\" life is, it is hard to agree on examples of holders of moral authority. Perhaps among contemporaries someone like Nelson Mandela would come closest to instantiating the ideal of a person with very widely recognised moral authority.\n\nSince the world is unpredictable, most societies have found it advisable to give to some specified members \"discretionary\" power, that is, the power to judge a situation that demanded action and take what means they thought appropriate, using even means that were at other times not part of the normal or permissible repertory. The most extreme example of this was perhaps the Roman Senate's consultum ultimum mentioned above, but any ordinary policeman even in a Western European society is invested with a wide range of discretionary powers, including restricting or redirecting the flow of vehicular traffic, stopping and searching suspicious characters, and ordering groups of people to disperse. Because discretionary powers are so easy to misuse, they are usually hedged around with conditions, restrictions, and potential sanctions, but although these limitations and controls may be more or less effective, they cannot ever be so strong as completely to regulate the discretionary element without destroying the advantages it brings with it\u2014the ability to react systematically precisely to that which is unforeseen and therefore cannot be antecedently regulated in detail.\n\nFinally there is the cognitive authority of the expert. A physician has studied at a medical school, has passed a certain number of qualifying examinations, and has had some experience in treating the ill; a craftsman has shown his ability repeatedly by discharging a variety of different commissions to a very high standard; the art dealer can (almost) always tell you who painted a certain painting he has never seen before (without looking at the signature), and he immediately spots forgeries (although he can't always tell you exactly how he does that); the taxi driver of long standing can give you reliable directions (provided you are in a motor car; the city might look different to someone on foot).\n\nIn addition to all these modern usages of \"authority\" there is a further one, which seems especially characteristic of the modern world in contrast to the ancient (although there are perhaps some isolated instances of the \"modern\" usage in antiquity). This is the sense in which, for instance, in certain legal contexts a lawyer may speak for me, that is, in my place because I \"have authorised him\" to do so. I give him (or her) this \"authority\" usually by participating in some recognised process, such as signing a formal document, by which what he or she says or does comes to have the same standing in the legal system as what I might say or do. What is crucial here is that \"authority\" in this sense is thought to be transferable in a way that other forms of authority, such as moral or personal authority, are not. The lawyer needs this transferred or derivative authority because he would otherwise not have what we call \"(the) authority (to do x, y, and z)\" no matter what other personal, moral, or cognitive capacities he might have. Although in many cases the grant of a certain authority may be limited to particular domains\u2014the agent whom I might authorise to buy books for me in a foreign country, that is, as we would say, to buy them \"on my account,\" will not thereby be able to enrol me in the army, use money in my account to fund even worthwhile political causes, or buy lottery tickets in my name\u2014the agent will in general be construed as being able to exercise some measure of discretion. This notion of a transferable, discretionary warrant makes sense in commercial transactions, but it comes into its own in the modern period.\n\nIn the ancient world there were, of course, noncommercial cases in which one person \"spoke for\" another. Thus a herald in one sense \"speaks for\" someone else, but the herald has no discretionary power. The same is true of certain priestesses, who may speak for the god, although they do not themselves even know what they are\/he is saying. A professional speechwriter may have composed a defence for presentation at a trial, but the speech will be presented by the defendant himself\u2014the Athenian model\u2014or an advocate may make a speech in support of a certain case\u2014the Roman model. Still, it makes a big difference whether Lysias writes a speech that I present at my trial, Cicero speaks in my favour, or a modern lawyer speaks for me, that is, instead of, or in place of, me. Finally, one would be exceedingly ill-advised to ignore what the pro-consul demands just because Rome is far away. However, the main reason to assume that the pro-consul in some sense \"speaks for Rome\" is that he has what the Romans called imperium (and an army at his back), not what they would have called auctoritas.\n\nIn the end, then, one is left with the three possibilities. First, there is Benveniste's archaic ideal of a plenipotent, maximally competent primordial \"auctor\" who is an absolute, unitary source of power and legitimacy and is construed as independent of and prior to a specific institutional structure, indeed as \"founding\" it. Second, there is an institutionally specific concept that arises naturally from thinking about the practices of the Roman Republic. Certain persons in certain roles or positions or certain bodies are conceived to embody a special competence at deliberating or giving advice by virtue of these positions. This advice is not infallible or unlimited, but it is construed as good as the best available, even if because of the overall structure of the system concerned, the advice has had no effect (because the person or agency who has the authority to give it has no appropriate institutional power). Third, there is the \"Hellenic\" conception, which does even bother to try to construe the multifarious, diverse collection of different phenomena, which we, following the Romans, call \"authority,\" as a single, unitary, theoretically coherent domain at all. What the Romans called auctoritas is just to be analysed as a series of diverse forms of human behaviour (imitation of the powerful, submission to the influence of a patriarchal father, consultation of experts) and different kinds of claims that some people make (to obedience, collaboration, belief, etc.) and others accept or reject, the whole process in each case located in a particular constellation of individual and institutional power, competence, and \"normativity\" and in a world of varying possibilities and necessities. Influence, obedience, expert knowledge, prestige, skill, and the varying ways in which people can be morally exemplary are not all cut back to fit the same single pattern of \"authority.\"\n7\n\nA Note on Lying\n\nIt has often seemed odd to me that lying, meaning the intentional telling of what one knows to be false as the truth, has had such a bad press in the modern world, and I can explain this only by the persistence of bog-Christian attitudes. Christianity is, after all, intended to appeal to simple souls whose speech was to be \"Yea, yea\" and \"nay, nay\" with everything else consigned to the category of the \"evil\" (\u1f14\u03c3\u03c4\u03c9 \u03b4\u1f72 \u1f41 \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f51\u03bc\u1ff6\u03bd \u03bd\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bd\u03b1\u03af, \u03bf\u1f52 \u03bf\u1f54\u2022 \u03c4\u1f78 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c3\u1f78\u03bd \u03c4\u03bf\u03cd\u03c4\u03c9\u03bd \u1f10\u03ba \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bd\u03b7\u03c1\u03bf\u1fe6 \u1f10\u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03bd; Matt. 5:37). In claiming that lying has had a bad press I do not, of course, mean to say that I think it is a good thing, merely that it is not clear to me that it deserves the uniquely reprehensible status sometimes assigned to it, and that in some contexts there is more to be said for it than is often acknowledged. In a way the fact that a government feels the need to lie to its population can be seen as a progressive trait. Governments that were utterly sure of themselves and their own power and ruthless in their use of it would not need to lie. So the fact that they need to lie can, it seems to me, not unreasonably be seen as a kind of advance on a state of primitive brutality in which force and the threat of force could be used. To be sure, Christianity has traditionally argued the opposite, so that Dante, for instance, places liars and evil counsellors lower down in Hell than the violent. The reason for this is presumably that lying is a perversion of a higher human capacity, that for speaking the truth, and it is worse to corrupt a great possible good than simply to act in a brutal way. It is possible, of course, to be of two minds about this. So one question I would suggest we ask is: Is lying always and in all contexts an absolute evil? Even if the alternative is the direct use of force? A second question is: Is lying, meaning by that term the intentional assertion of something one knows to be untrue, necessarily worse for the liar than telling an untruth one does not know is untrue? Finally, is being lied to necessarily worse for a person than being told an untruth by someone who is himself taken in by it? I submit not that lying is sometimes clearly a good but that in all three of these cases the jury is still out.\n\nIt has often been noted that ancient Greek philosophers were obsessed with the issue of the distinction between appearance and reality but showed relatively little interest in lying versus truth-telling, and in particular showed no tendency to think of the distinction between the two as indicating a basic moral issue. In general the idea that under all circumstances it is categorically wrong to lie and that lying is a sign of having a bad character, as distinct from the thought that it is painful to be taken advantage of because one has fallen for a plausible lie, seems a relatively late development. Thus in the so-called archaic period Odysseus is generally, if not universally, admired for being such a consummate liar. Achilles, we know\u2014because he tells us\u2014does not like duplicitous people, but then this seems to be an idiosyncratic part of his individual character. In a well-known passage in the Odyssey the goddess Athena appears in the semblance of a young herdsman to Odysseus and asks him who he is, but when he embarks on a characteristically lengthy, detailed, and completely untrue story, she interrupts him to say that part of the reason she is devoted to him is that he is so like her, so good and plausible a liar that if she were not a goddess and even more quick-witted than he is, he might even pull the wool over her eyes.\n\n\u03ba\u03b5\u03c1\u03b4\u03b1\u03bb\u03ad\u03bf\u03c2 \u03ba\u0309 \u03b5\u1f34\u03b7 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f10\u03c0\u03af\u03ba\u03bb\u03bf\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f45\u03c2 \u03c3\u03b5 \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03ad\u03bb\u03b8\u03bf\u03b9\n\n\u1f10\u03bd \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c3\u03c3\u03b9 \u03b4\u03cc\u03bb\u03bf\u03b9\u03c3\u03b9, \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03b5\u1f30 \u03b8\u03b5\u1f78\u03c2 \u1f00\u03bd\u03c4\u03b9\u03ac\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9\u03b5.\n\n\u03c3\u03c7\u03ad\u03c4\u03bb\u03b9\u03b5, \u03c0\u03bf\u03b9\u03ba\u03b9\u03bb\u03bf\u03bc\u1fc6\u03c4\u03b1, \u03b4\u03cc\u03bb\u03c9\u03bd \u1f06\u03c4\u0309, \u03bf\u1f50\u03ba \u1f04\u03c1\u0309 \u1f14\u03bc\u03b5\u03bb\u03bb\u03b5\u03c2,\n\n\u03bf\u1f50\u03b4\u0309 \u03b5\u03bd \u03c3\u1fc7 \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1 \u1f10\u1f7c\u03bd \u03b3\u03b1\u03af\u1fc3, \u03bb\u03ae\u03be\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd \u1f00\u03c0\u03b1\u03c4\u03ac\u03c9\u03bd\n\n\u03bc\u03cd\u03b8\u03c9\u03bd \u03c4\u03b5 \u03ba\u03bb\u03bf\u03c0\u03af\u03c9\u03bd, \u03bf\u1f35 \u03c4\u03bf\u03b9 \u03c0\u03b5\u03b4\u03cc\u03b8\u03b5\u03bd \u03c6\u03af\u03bb\u03bf\u03b9 \u03b5\u1f30\u03c3\u03af\u03bd.\n\n\u1f00\u03bb\u03bb\u0309 \u1f04\u03b3\u03b5, \u03bc\u03ae\u03ba\u03b5\u03c4\u03b9 \u03c4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03c4\u03b1 \u03bb\u03b5\u03b3\u03ce\u03bc\u03b5\u03b8\u03b1, \u03b5\u1f30\u03b4\u03cc\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2 \u1f04\u03bc\u03c6\u03c9\n\n\u03ba\u03ad\u03c1\u03b4\u03b5\u0309, \u1f10\u03c0\u03b5\u1f76 \u03c3\u1f7a \u03bc\u03ad\u03bd \u1f10\u03c3\u03c3\u03b9 \u03b2\u03c1\u03bf\u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u1f44\u03c7\u0309 \u1f04\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f01\u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03c9\u03bd\n\n\u03b2\u03bf\u03c5\u03bb\u1fc7 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bc\u03cd\u03b8\u03bf\u03b9\u03c3\u03b9\u03bd, \u1f10\u03b3\u1f7c \u03b4\u0309 \u1f10\u03bd \u03c0\u1fb6\u03c3\u03b9 \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c3\u03b9\n\n\u03bc\u03ae\u03c4\u03b9 \u03c4\u03b5 \u03ba\u03bb\u03ad\u03bf\u03bc\u03b1\u03b9 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03ba\u03ad\u03c1\u03b4\u03b5\u03c3\u03b9\u03bd\n\nAnyone, even a god, who could get past you in any kind of scam [\u03b4\u03cc\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2] would have to be wily [\u03ba\u03b5\u03c1\u03b4\u03b1\u03bb\u03ad\u03bf\u03c2] and duplicitous [\u1f10\u03c0\u03af-\u03ba\u03bb\u03bf\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2]. You're a hard one, crafty [\u03c0\u03bf\u03b9\u03ba\u03b9\u03bb\u03bf-\u03bc\u03ae\u03c4\u03b7\u03c2] and addicted to scamming [\u03b4\u03cc\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2]; you won't let up in deceiving and deploying those duplicitous [\u03ba\u03bb\u03cc\u03c0\u03b9\u03bf\u03c2] words that come natural to you, even though you are [back home] in your own land. Both of us are past masters at getting around people [\u03b5\u1f30\u03b4\u03cc\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2 \u1f04\u03bc\u03c6\u03c9 \u03ba\u03ad\u03c1\u03b4\u03b5\u0309\u03b1], you are by far the best among all mortals at deciding what to do and telling stories, and among the gods I'm famous for my nous [\u03bc\u1fc6\u03c4\u03b9\u03c2] and my eye for the main chance [\u03ba\u03ad\u03c1\u03b4\u03b5\u0309\u03b1], so let's not continue this kind of discussion any further. (Odyssey XIII.296\u201399)\n\nThis duplicitousness seems to have very deep roots and to run in the family because Odysseus's grandfather Autolykos was a favourite of the god Hermes, who made him an exceptionally gifted thief and \"swearer of oaths.\"\n\n\u0391\u1f50\u03c4\u03cc\u03bb\u03c5\u03ba\u03bf[\u03c2]...\n\n... \u1f43\u03c2 \u1f00\u03bd\u03b8\u03c1\u03ce\u03c0\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2 \u1f10\u03ba\u03ad\u03b1\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\n\n\u03ba\u03bb\u03b5\u03c0\u03c4\u03bf\u03c3\u03cd\u03bd\u1fc3 \u03b8\u0309 \u1f45\u03c1\u03ba\u1ff3 \u03c4\u03b5\u2022 \u03b8\u03ad\u03bf\u03c2 \u03b4\u03ad \u03bf\u1f31 \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u1f78\u03c2 \u1f14\u03b4\u03c9\u03ba\u03b5\u03bd\n\n\u1f19\u03c1\u03bc\u03b5\u03af\u03b1\u03c2\u2022 \u03c4\u1ff7 \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u03ba\u03b5\u03c7\u03b1\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03ad\u03bd\u03b1 \u03bc\u03b7\u03c1\u03af\u03b1 \u03ba\u03b1\u1fd6\u03b5\u03bd\n\n\u1f00\u03c1\u03bd\u1ff6\u03bd \u1f20\u03b4\u0309 \u1f10\u03c1\u03af\u03c6\u03c9\u03bd\u2022 \u1f41 \u03b4\u03ad \u03bf\u1f31 \u03c0\u03c1\u03cc\u03c6\u03c1\u03c9\u03bd \u1f05\u03bc\u0309 \u1f40\u03c0\u03ae\u03b4\u03b5\u03b9.\n\nAutolykos... who surpassed all men both in thievery and in the swearing of oaths. The god Hermes himself gave him this gift for to please him Autolykos has burned the thigh bones of lambs and kids, so Hermes was well-disposed to him and stood by him. (Odyssey XIX.394\u201398)\n\nNo Greek thought that either Autolykos or Odysseus had the gift of dissembling speech \"from the evil one\" (\u1f10\u03ba \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bd\u03b7\u03c1\u03bf\u1fe6 in the passage from Matthew cited above); rather they had received it from the god Hermes and the goddess Athena.\n\nIn contrast to what a modern reader might expect, the two-hundred-odd pages of a modern edition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics contains discussions of all kinds of virtues and vices (moderation, justice, perversion, courage, brutality, etc.), but only about two of them are devoted to truthfulness and its opposite (1127a13\u2013b18). Even when truthfulness and the lack of truthfulness are discussed, these are not construed exclusively or even primarily as ways of saying or failing to say that which one considers to be the truth, but rather as failures of ways of living (\u1f00\u03bb\u03b7\u03b8\u03b5\u03c5\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u1f78\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u1ff7 \u03b2\u03af\u1ff3 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u1ff7 \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u1ff3 [\"truthful both in his way of living and in his speech\"] 1127a24). So a person who exhibits this vice is construed as one who habitually lives in a way that goes beyond or falls short of his own real merits, part of which may be that he fails to find the mean in speech between making claims for himself that are overly grandiose (\u1f00\u03bb\u03b1\u03b6\u03bf\u03bd\u03b5\u03af\u03b1) and being too modest or self-deprecating (\u03b5\u03af\u03c1\u03c9\u03bd\u03b5\u03af\u03b1). To live in an overly grand style, or too modestly, is not obviously a form of lying. Similarly, modern readers seldom fail to be struck by Plato's insouciance in the matter of what has come to be called the Noble Lie (Republic 414B\u20135D). Poets are to be banished from the city because they confuse the real and the merely apparent, and that is intolerable, but the philosopher-kings, who know reality and the truth and hence can lie to the populace in the interests of maintaining the city in a good state, can, of course, lie with impunity.\n\nThere is a kind of failure vis-\u00e0-vis the truth that Greek philosophers worried about, but it was not failure to tell the truth which one knew. Greek philosophers were concerned with failure to see the truth because one was taken in by mere appearances.\n\nClassical philosophers did not in general worry about lying or truth-telling and certainly did not take true speech as a general touchstone of moral character. However, as Foucault recently taught us, there was one specific context in which a certain type of truth-telling was discussed and in fact highly praised. This was the virtue of \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03c1\u03b7\u03c3\u03af\u03b1, which, as the name indicates (\u03c0\u1fb6\u03bd + \u1fe5\u1fc6\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2), is not really the virtue of speaking the truth rather than a direct lie but of speaking out and saying everything, as opposed to keeping silent or saying only what will be acceptable to one's interlocutor. We might call it \"outspokenness.\" Thus in Euripides' Bacchae, Pentheus, the young ruler of Thebes, has begun to act so much like a classic stage tyrant that even the Chorus says\n\n\u03c4\u03b1\u03c1\u03b2\u1ff6 \u03bc\u1f72\u03bd \u03b5\u1f30\u03c0\u03b5\u1fd6\u03bd \u03c4\u03bf\u1f7a\u03c2 \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2 \u1f10\u03bb\u03b5\u03c5\u03b8\u03ad\u03c1\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2\n\n\u03c0\u03c1\u1f78\u03c2 \u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u03c4\u03cd\u03c1\u03b1\u03bd\u03bd\u03bf\u03bd, \u1f00\u03bb\u03bb\u0309 \u1f45\u03bc\u03c9\u03c2 \u03b5\u1f30\u03c1\u03ae\u03c3\u03b5\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9\u2022\n\n\u0394\u03b9\u03cc\u03bd\u03c5\u03c3\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f25\u03c3\u03c3\u03c9\u03bd \u03bf\u1f50\u03b4\u03b5\u03bd\u1f78\u03c2 \u03d1\u03b5\u1ff6\u03bd \u1f14\u03c6\u03c5.\n\nI am afraid to speak free words to a tyrant, but nonetheless it shall be said: Dionysus is inferior to none of the gods. (ll. 775\u201377)\n\nWhen a messenger appears who has witnessed something he knows Pentheus very much wishes not to be the case, he hesitates and asks Pentheus whether he wishes really to hear the whole story.\n\n\u03b8\u03ad\u03bb\u03c9 \u03b4\u0309 \u1f00\u03ba\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9, \u03c0\u03cc\u03c4\u03b5\u03c1\u03ac \u03c3\u03bf\u03b9 \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03c1\u03b7\u03c3\u03af\u1fb3\n\n\u03c6\u03c1\u03ac\u03c3\u03c9 \u03c4\u1f70 \u03ba\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b8\u03b5\u03bd \u1f22 \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03bd \u03c3\u03c4\u03b5\u03b9\u03bb\u03ce\u03bc\u03b5\u03b8\u03b1\n\n\u03c4\u1f78 \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u03c4\u03ac\u03c7\u03bf\u03c2 \u03c3\u03bf\u03c5 \u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u03c6\u03c1\u03b5\u03bd\u1ff6\u03bd \u03b4\u03ad\u03b4\u03bf\u03b9\u03ba\u0309, \u1f04\u03bd\u03b1\u03be,\n\n\u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u03bf\u1f50\u03be\u03cd\u03b8\u03c5\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u1f78 \u03b2\u03b1\u03c3\u03b9\u03bb\u03b9\u03ba\u1f78\u03bd \u03bb\u03af\u03b1\u03bd.\n\nI wish to know whether I should tell you what happened out there outspokenly, or whether I should hold my peace. I am afraid of the quickness of your temper, Lord. It is exceedingly sharp when roused and very kingly. (ll. 668\u201371)\n\nHere the political and social context is all-important. This truth-telling in the sense of \"outspokenness\" is an act of moral and political courage, telling someone in a position of power\u2014and is known not to be averse to using that power if displeased\u2014something he does not wish to hear. \"Outspokenness\" as opposed to discretion, timidity, silence, telling only the acceptable part of the full story, is a completely different thing from speaking the literal truth as opposed to saying out loud what one knows is factually false.\n\nThis might be taken to throw doubt on the claim, which has its origin, I believe, in the work the twentieth-century journalist Hannah Arendt, that the liar is the political man; the truth-teller not.\n\nWhile the liar is a man of action, the truth teller.... most emphatically is not.... The liar... is an actor by nature... he wants to change the world.\n\nThere seem to be two slightly different ideas operating here, both of which are incorrect, or at least extremely misleading. The first is that the \"truth\" is simple, just out there for all to see, and so seeing it and telling it is just a matter of recording what anyone can see is self-evidently there. The second is that the decision to tell the truth is simple or apolitical, in contrast to the highly political action of lying. To say that truth-telling is nonpolitical means presumably that it is not based on a calculation about its possible effects on the distribution of power, or an active concern to change the political situation; in contrast, presumably, I lie for a particular political effect.\n\nTo start with the first of the two misconceptions, that of the simplicity of the truth. In contrast to this, I would contend that what is \"out there\" is usually a farrago of truths, half truths, misperceptions, indifferent appearance, and illusion that needs to be seriously processed before one can accept any of it as \"real.\" Think of the contents of a daily newspaper or the opinions expressed in a pub. One specifically modern form of social control is to allow free expression of all opinions, thus creating a chaotic landscape of informational overload in which politically important facts simply get lost in the welter of surrounding nonsense, and important connections cannot be made. As the Greeks put it, truth \"is deep down in the well\"\u2014you have to look for it and extract it\u2014it doesn't lie there on the street in the sun waiting to be observed by anyone who glances in its general direction. That means that to see and recognise the truth requires the exercise of a certain kind of systematic violence on the inchoate and formless mass of undifferentiated appearance, wishful thinking, fantasy, and half truth in which we live most of our lives. Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century spoke of a will-to-truth that was necessary to explain how we came to be able to get access to the true and keep a firm grip on it, and he, correctly I think, emphasised the amount of asceticism that was required of a human being to resist our natural impulse to wishful thinking and see the world as it is rather than as we would like it to be.\n\nThe second misconception is that telling the truth is in some deep sense \"apolitical.\" Certainly ancient \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03c1\u03b7\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 was not a form of mere speculation but rather a kind of politics. Discovering, expressing, and implementing the truth is not a way of stepping out of the messy realm of power and politics altogether but, to some extent at least, a way of acting within it.\n\nThe characteristic modern struggle, then, is not between those who tell a factual lie or a factual Big Lie, and might even try completely to defactualise the world, on the one hand, and those who bear witness to a simple truth, on the other, but between those who wish to keep politically active populations in a state of \"doxa,\" mere undifferentiated shifting opinion, that is, a world in which masses of truth and falsity are inextricably interconnected, in which, for instance, all the facts are in some sense available, but they are so distributed that no one can put them together coherently. Ancient models are better at analysing this than Christian ones.\n\nEven if one is interested not in the distinction between mere appearance and reality but in some psychological property of \"truthfulness,\" it isn't clear that any exclusive emphasis on lying is appropriate. Straightforward lying about factual truths\u2014saying explicitly of some object one knows to be made of brass that it is not made of brass but, for instance, of gold\u2014is only one particular instance of the human Duplicity. Christian ethics focuses on this one kind of case, but it is easy to see that cases like this by no means exhaust the almost infinite variety of forms of deception. Thus, to return to Odysseus's grandfather, when Autolykos is described as someone who \"excels all men in <the swearing of> oaths\" (Odyssey XIX 396), this probably does not mean that he swore strictly oaths that were strictly false. He did not swear to give someone two sheep tomorrow and then fail to do that. Rather he was capable of formulating oaths he could literally keep while at the same time seriously disadvantaging the other party in a way they did not expect. Christianity, obsessed as it is with straight-forward speech, is also obsessed with lying. The direct lie, however, is by no means the only, or even the most important, aspect of a whole archipelago of related phenomena.\n\nThe specifically \"modern\" danger is not the Big Lie: the straight-forward intentional assertion of a nontruth that is known to be a nontruth, such as that Trotsky was in the pay of the Gestapo and plotted to kill Stalin or that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. To worry about \"lying\" can be a way of diverting attention from other aspects of the situation and focusing it on such phenomena as sincerity with which the belief is held and affirmed. Did he really believe what he said? If he really did sincerely believe it, can he be said to have been \"lying\"? Perhaps it is instead just a harmless mistake. Politically, and arguably even morally, this is usually of distinctly subordinate importance. Blair's problem was not that he intentionally told the public something he knew was not true but that he had no interest at all in the category of \"truth,\" only in his own religiously based moral intuitions and in what forms of speech would be politically effective. An opportunistic fantast is not exactly a liar, but this is not obviously to his moral or political credit. The characteristic strategy for politicians in the modern world in any case is not to tell a direct lie but to sow confusion. Political manipulation nowadays is more likely to be a subtle blend of keeping the pieces of a puzzle apart so they do not cohere, deemphasizing some things that are important, diverting attention to other things, deniably suggesting connections that do not exist, distracting people's attention, wishful thinking in the evaluation of evidence, and so forth. None of these is interestingly analysed by the model of conscious suppression of strict factual truth.\n\nSo my conclusion is that trying to understand modern, twenty-first-century politics under the category of \"the lie\" is a very superficial way to proceed, encouraging na\u00efve moralising and discouraging serious thought. It is better to look at the pathologies of contemporary politics as a series of differentially structured complex conjunctions of cognitive, psychological, moral, and political failures of a different kind, conscious deception, insouciance, unconscious self-deception, wishful thinking, lack of attention, lethargy, distraction, suppression of dissent, and inertia. This whole domain is deeply structured by the play of powerful agents pursuing their own interests in relatively unscrupulous ways, using threats, bribery, and direct force. In this context direct lies may, of course, be told, but the focus, if one wishes to understand, should be on the context, not individual psychology. The difference between truth and its opposites, and between more admirable and less admirable forms of politics, is not a difference between a disembodied realm of ideal discourse and the sordid world of interests, powers, and complex motives but a distinction within this latter world\u2014the real one we in any case always inhabit. Moralisation is no substitute for historical and institutional analysis.\n8\n\nPolitics and Architecture\n\nIn 2001 some of the faculties of the University of Frankfurt began to move physically from the often shoddy and distinctly rundown-looking postwar accommodation that had served them since the early 1950s into an architecturally spectacular set of buildings designed by Hans Poelzig in the late 1920s and set in a large park with an impressive view over downtown Frankfurt. Unfortunately, these buildings, known collectively as the Poelzig-Bau, had served as the corporate headquarters of I. G. Farben between 1931 and the occupation of the city by the U.S. Army in March 1945. What this means is that in 2009 a student could find that he or she was taking a seminar on Descartes, on Rimbaud, or on early church history in the very rooms in which in the early 1940s gas chambers and crematoria for extermination camps were designed. In the period between 1945 and 1995 the complex served as the headquarters of General Eisenhower and then of the Fifth U.S. Army. When the U.S. military moved out upon German reunification, the question arose as to what to do about the huge I. G. Farben complex, and it was only after a certain amount of political wrangling that the decision was taken to move the university into it. There was finally a sense that if the complex was not simply to be torn down, it would have to be symbolically detoxified, but how could that be done? The solution finally reached was that a permanent exhibition about its history would be installed in the building, which would be as uncompromisingly truthful about its past as possible, the main building itself would retain the historical name I. G.-Farben-Haus, and the large and impressive open space one encounters upon first entering the building, which is now the student caf\u00e9 but in the late 1940s was the antechamber of Eisenhower's offices, would be named the Eisenhower Rotunda. Finally, one of the squares on the new campus would be named after a former forced labourer in one of the I. G. Farben Works: Norbert Wollheim, a name that has special resonance for a philosopher because it is the surname of an important British philosopher, Richard Wollheim, who participated in the liberation of Belsen in World War II. It is possible, in fact almost inevitable, that there will be no consensus on whether this series of decisions and actions was in fact appropriate and adequate\u2014that is in the nature of a complex historical and political process like this one\u2014but I would ask you now to accept for the sake of argument my view that this was a reasonable and laudable attempt to deal with a difficult situation. Let me, however, now engage in some counterfactual history. Suppose the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe had not been the traditionally conservative Eisenhower but Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur, who was during the same period effectively Supreme Commander in the Pacific. MacArthur was a man of extreme right-wing political views who came to be notorious for his persistent advocacy of the use of nuclear weapons against the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War. MacArthur saw this as a prelude to the extension of the war to be conducted with nuclear weapons into China proper, which he also advocated. When he failed to obtain authorisation for this policy, because President Harry Truman refused to countenance it, he tried in various ways to use his military position to undermine or circumvent the civilian political apparatus in the United States until Truman was finally forced to dismiss him from his post. I suggest that naming the entrance to Poelzig's complex the MacArthur Rotunda would not have had the same effect of at least partially rehabilitating the building. On one final note, I should mention that parts of the Poelzig-Bau served as the headquarters of the CIA in Germany and in the 1970s and 1980s was the object of three terrorist attacks probably by members of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), a splinter group that had its origin in the German Student Movement of the late 1960s. In a bomb attack by the RAF on May 11, 1972, one U.S. officer was killed and thirteen others wounded.\n\nI would not now be discussing this case at all if I did not think that the Poelzig-Bau was a most impressive piece of architecture. However, the more I think about this, the more difficult it seems to me to separate the strictly architectural aspects of my reaction to this building from the historical and political, and, what is more, I do not think that this is so unusual.\n\nThe very term \"architecture\" itself suggests a closer connection with politics than might be thought to be the case with any of the other arts or crafts. The Greek word \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03b9\u03c4\u03ad\u03ba\u03c4\u03c9\u03bd signifies the person who is in charge of and has control over builders. \u1f04\u03c1\u03c7\u03c9\/\u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae in fact is one of the usual terms for a political relation of domination. On the very first page of his treatise on the good human life, Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle appeals to the example of the architect to discuss the notion, especially important for him, of the hierarchical relation of human activities one to another and the differential forms of value that such hierarchically ordered activities have. The study of ethics, for Aristotle, is subordinated to that of politics just as the builders are subordinated to the architect. This metaphor of the \"architectonic\" is one that recurs in many later views to refer to relations of subordination between different parts of a theory. Such relations may, of course, be ones of mere logical, epistemological, or paedagogical dependence or of pragmatic subordination rather than specifically political subjection. It is not, in any case, as easy as it might initially seem to say exactly what a \"political\" relation, for instance, a relation of political subordination in the relevant sense, is.\n\nIt has often been pointed out that there is a basic ambiguity in the concept of \"politics.\" There is what I will call a \"wider,\" \"broader,\" or \"less specific\" construal of the term and a narrower or more specific construal. In the broader and less specific sense, \"politics\" means simply any human activity of structuring or directing or coordinating the actions of a group. So we can speak of a \"politics\" of the family or gender politics. The actions of different human beings can be \"coordinated\" in any number of different ways. Thus if one thinks of a preindustrial society living in a small mountain valley, there may be a very high degree of \"coordination,\" in the sense of simple regularity, exhibited by the members of that society. For instance, if there is only one pass over the mountains, it might well be the case that virtually anyone who ever tries to leave the valley in the winter does so through this pass. This is certainly a regularity we might observe to hold, but it is not in itself an archetypically political phenomenon because we think that using this pass to exit from the valley is a matter of simple necessity. That one goes through this exit, if one leaves at all, is not anything that is \"in our power\" or \"up to us,\" and that means it is not itself a political matter but simply a natural fact. In addition, however, to such \"natural\" coordination there is also coordination that results from specific forms of human intervention such as persuasion, emulation, or coercion, and these are the characteristics of politics.\n\nThus when certain philosophers have called freedom a precondition of politics or politics a \"realm of freedom,\" they are most sympathetically understood as making not some kind of ontological claim but rather describing a way of looking at the world. \"Politics,\" that is, especially in this first wide sense, is best understood as referring not to a special domain, like biology or astronomy, but to a way of seeing or considering the human world. The basic statement in politics is not: \"This is a political phenomenon\" as parallel to \"This is an organic (or inorganic) compound\" or \"this is a prime number.\" Rather the paradigmatic claim is \"this is a political question or issue.\" \"This is a political matter\" means it is a matter considered in some sense to be potentially in our power and up for decision, and which we have some potential interest in dealing with in one way rather than another.\n\nIf this is right, three further things would seem to follow. First, although in a primitive society the weather might simply be a given, not in itself a matter for political discussion, the question of what we might do about the weather can well be a political issue: Do we distribute umbrellas to everyone or not? Do we put up a communal awning or tarpaulin on poles over the village green? Or do we let everyone fend for themselves?\n\nSecond, what is a political question or issue is itself historically variable in a way in which the question, say, what is an organic compound or what is the sum of two numbers is not. What is political changes with changes in what we can and could do. In preindustrial times the weather is not in itself a political issue, subject to the caveats just mentioned above, but if we were able technologically to change and control the meteorological conditions, then it might very well become a political matter, in the weak sense, whether it rains on a certain day or not. That would mean that someone had decided to make it rain on that day or had failed to decide anything, leaving it up, as we might say, to \"nature.\" Note that in the preindustrial period people were not failing to decide on the weather, since they had no control over it; it was just there as a brute fact, a matter not of politics but of natural necessity.\n\nThird, suppose it really is the case that politics concerns things that are either in fact in our power or at any rate that we could imagine might come to be in our power, and suppose then further that any state of affairs that cannot be other than it is (such as whether a certain number is prime) stands outside the domain of political deliberation. If, then, I have a special interest in maintaining some feature of the present social or political regime, for instance, because it differentially benefits me, I may have a strong interest in trying to present this feature as a part of the order of \"natural necessity.\" Think of Margaret Thatcher's constant refrains about the ineluctable necessity of tolerating unemployment as a means to controlling inflation or of bowing to the imperatives of the market. This is the point at which it is sometimes tempting to appeal to claims about the objectivity of scientific results, and, of course, there often are well-supported scientific results that are relevant to political decisions, but it is also the case that sometimes political agents have a strong motivation for presenting as the only possible reading what is in fact only one specific reading of the existing evidence among others, namely the reading that seems to give support to their own projects and interests. The appeal to \"objectivity,\" whether justified or not, is so effective because it is responsive to deep-seated and perfectly comprehensible human needs. We seem to have good inductive reasons to cultivate our existing desire not to be grossly deceived about the world in which we live, if only because in most cases we have found that complete illusions turn out to have very painful consequences for us. This comprehensible desire for what we call \"objective truth\" can often come into a sometimes slightly unholy connection with our human need to find, or invent, determinacy, stability, and fixity at almost any cost. The world is unstable and insecure, and our life in it is uncertain. It is painful for us to confront this fact. It also is exhausting having constantly to calculate again, to exercise context-dependent judgement or reopen questions apparently definitively settled. In the face of \"objectivity\" we can relax and succumb to inertia, simplifying some aspects of the painful process of decision by leaving it, as it were, up to reality itself. Unless the shoe pinches us very badly so that we cannot overlook it, we would like to think the form of the shoe that happens to be customary in our society is the natural one or the \"objectively\" given one. The idea that humans \"naturally\" like \"freedom\" or \"choice,\" if that means that they like continually to have to exercise their unbridled judgement or make decisions under the conditions of great uncertainty, is unfounded. This does not mean, of course, that they like to be in painful bondage, and much of human life is an attempt to find a path through the world that is responsive to the two forces of avoidance of novelty and choice and avoidance of the painful consequences of failing to revise one's beliefs and attitudes when that is necessary.\n\nSo much, then, for the first, the wider and weaker, which does not, of course, mean \"less important,\" of the two concepts of politics. \"Politics\" in this wider sense is a matter of any form of coordinating action regardless of the means used to achieve this coordination. Our more usual, or what I will call the \"narrower,\" concept of politics contains some further components in addition to those that constitute \"politics\" in the wider sense. These are that the \"political\" coordination of social action makes use of at least the threat of recourse to coercion, force, or violence, and that there is some appeal to systematic forms of legitimation. So in the wider sense of \"politics\" I can speak of the politics in a chess club as people jockey for influence, a certain kind of power, and a certain advancement through established offices. However, this structure is not directly connected to the possible use of force. The chairman of the chess club may make decisions about who plays which game against whom in which room and at what time, may adjudicate disagreements, and so forth, and in these matters his word may be Law, but he cannot whip, or probably even threaten to whip, any of the members or lock them up against their will. On the other hand, a gangster can assault me, lock me up, and take away my possessions by force but does not make a claim that what he is doing is either morally good or politically legitimate. The full and narrower sense of politics comes into play only when the use of force or the threat of the use of force is a possibility, and when the potential recourse to coercion, force, or violence is presented as being not merely a fact to be accepted but in some way \"legitimate.\" The major agency in the modern world that makes this claim to legitimate use of coercive power is the state. \"Political\" in the narrow sense means having to do with coordination of action through the use of state power or with the attempt to influence, infiltrate, or put oneself into a position to exercise that state power.\n\n\"Architecture,\" too, is a term that is used ambiguously, although the ambiguities are comparatively harmless. Thus it can either mean a certain skill, craft, or artistic ability or the exercise of that skill or craft in the activity of designing and constructing physical objects of a certain kind. Or finally it can refer to the objects thus designed and constructed themselves. Architecture seems to be different from many of the other arts in several ways. First, architectural objects are palpably physical and inherently public: they are large objects, literally almost always bigger than any individual person, and they stand out, form physical obstacles to free movement, and shape the very space in which we live. Of necessity, then, they affect us in a way that is different from the way in which most novels, pieces of music, or easel paintings affect us. If I do not like the novel or poem I am reading, I can shut the book; if the picture displeases me, I can turn my head away. I cannot so easily exit from a large cathedral in which I find myself placed or change the properties of the houses that face onto the streets down which I must pass to get to the city centre. This at least mildly and potentially more coercive feature of architectural objects makes them more political than the products of the other arts. It could, of course, be argued that every painting I see shapes my perception in a potentially permanent way and therefore makes me see everything in the world in a different way. Still I do not usually have to look at any particular painting, but I do have to live in whatever building or part of the city I happen to live in. I can, of course, choose to live in one kind of building rather than another and can change the building I live in either by moving or by reconstructing it, but I cannot in the twenty-first century simply do without some built surroundings, as I can do without easel paintings. It is, of course, true that this difference between architecture and other arts became even more pronounced during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when forms of literature, music, and aspects of the graphic arts became highly privatised, than it was in some previous periods. Thus in the ancient world the basic form of consumption of what we now call \"literature\" would not have been silent reading in an empty room but the massive choral singing and dancing that was characteristic of the performance of a tragedy in Athens, or a public performance of epic by a rhapsode, or the reading of a speech or dialogue by a slave to a group of gentlemen of leisure. Still a constructed object like a house had in one obvious sense a firmer place as an opaque, solid, intransigent, three-dimensional part of the public fabric of a city than any ephemeral grouping of citizens did.\n\nThere is, therefore, an important further political issue here. Should buildings be unobtrusive, retreating into the background to allow agents to pursue their own self-chosen goals, as far as possible without apparent obstruction? If one has the view that any building in one way or another structures the space in which it stands, then this might seem slightly dishonest, a way of covering up what is in fact a choice about structuration and allowing it to pass unnoticed. The building may come to be taken as \"a fact of nature\" in the urban landscape rather than the result of distinct intervention. Surely, however, one might think, the consequence of this should not be that buildings should be hyperassertive, constantly calling attention to themselves and their effects. There is no optimal resolution to this tension. Perhaps for that reason reflecting on and theorising about architecture will always have a place in our intellectual life.\n\nFurthermore, given the persistence of the material from which most buildings are made, the structuration of the environment they produce also extends into the indefinite future and thus concerns an indeterminate number of \"anonymous\" other humans, who by the very nature of the case cannot be consulted. Completed architectural works now impose on future people a way of living by channelling the way human activities will be able to proceed. It is, then, coercing them at any rate in a minimal sense, making it easier for them to live in this way, and more difficult for them to live in that way, so any present construction is an act of political faith in a certain possible future.\n\nArchitecture has also often been held to be different from other arts in that it straddles the distinction between craft and fine art, between producing practical objects of use in a relatively predictable way, which is assumed to be the basic characteristic of a craft, and producing potentially unique aesthetic objects, which is associated with our modern idea of fine art. This dichotomy might also be associated with the distinction between being a \"mere\" builder and being a proper architect. There is a functional dimension in architecture and an expressive dimension, and much of the discussion at least during the past two centuries or so has revolved around the proper understanding of each of these dimensions and, most important perhaps, the proper relation between the two of them.\n\nIt is also an important fact about our society that people do not simply engage in the activity of designing and building, but some of them also do this as a profession, and in our society \"profession\" designates a very specific social role with associated legal rights, social and legal duties, and expectations. As a professional architect in our society, one is embarking on a life of entering into contracts with people to build things that they, within certain limits, specify. This immediately raises straightforwardly political issues. Do you enter into contract with just anyone, on what conditions, for whose benefit? Last month I happened to meet and have a conversation with a German engineer whose family had built up the oldest and largest cement works in Central Europe (Dyckerhoff) and who were understandably very proud of the extremely high quality of their cement. During World War II they had provided the cement for the building of the \"West Wall,\" the line of German fortifications on the coast of Western Europe designed to protect the Continent from Anglo-American invasion. When my new acquaintance's grandfather was called to account for this by the U.S. occupation authorities after the war, the elderly patriarch produced the original set of specifications and contracts for the building of the large pediment on which the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor rests. In these contracts it was specified that the pediment must be made of Dyckerhoff cement (\"or cement of similar quality,\" as the contract apparently specified). In fact Dyckerhoff & Co. provided the eight thousand \"bins\" of cement from which the pediment was constructed. This line of response was apparently immediately accepted by the occupation forces without further question. Regardless of what one might think of the substantive rights and wrongs in this case, the issue is not whether the occupation forces ought to have accepted what might seem to us to be something too pathetically weak even to be called an \"argument.\" It was merely an attempt, successful as it turned out, by the accused to evoke certain sufficiently strong positive sacral associations in the mind of the accusers as to blind them and deprive them of the use of whatever weak ratiocinative faculties they may have had in the first place. The real question, however, is what this tells us about the nature of our own conceptual space. These are in no sense irrelevant or unimportant questions, but they have more to do with the social role \"architect\" than with the inherent nature of what the architect does. We might think that a doctor is, or should be, by virtue of his or her very role immune from politics. A military doctor should care for all the wounded on the battlefield, friend or foe, and civilised countries make it a point of pride to provide equal care for all combatants and for civilian victims including those who are now usually subsumed under the rubric \"collateral damage.\" This does not mean that there is no politics in being a doctor but only that we have decided that it would be a good idea, not an idea proposed to us by any notion of \"justice\" but by such notions as humanity, decency, charity, benevolence, and also probably by various utilitarian calculations, artificially to insulate the practitioners of the medical profession from making certain everyday political discriminations.\n\nThere is yet a further way in which architecture was traditionally distinct from other arts, and this is in the more inherently social, and potentially political, nature of the activity itself\u2014the activity of collective building. Aristotle's architect had the power to exercise a kind of social control, namely to give orders to the people who actually do the building. This power was not arbitrary, it did not come from nowhere, and it was not unlimited. It was a power based on the authority purportedly provided by knowledge (and perhaps also secondarily by experience, although many builders have more experience of construction than younger architects do). This immediately raises the question of what kind of knowledge there can be in this area. This question is especially pressing for architecture, more perhaps than for many other areas of human endeavour because precisely of the binary nature of the enterprise, that of designing and producing practically useful and aesthetically pleasing buildings. We do not have much difficulty in understanding the kind of knowledge that will contribute to making it likely that the building will be useful. It will have to stand up, and the technical discipline of statics gives us a relatively straightforward answer to that. But what notion of \"knowledge\" underlies the claim of the architect to produce an object of great expressive value?\n\nThe problem for the architect, then, is that if his authority is based on knowledge, the builder and engineer also have that, but if what makes him distinct from the (mere) builder, and hence entitled to some special kind of authority, is the aesthetic or expressive dimension of the product, that seems more reasonably to be construed as having to do with faculties like that of \"taste\" rather than with any form of knowledge. How does \"taste\" give authority? It is completely unclear what kind of authority an architect can deploy and in particular whether the architect has any coercive authority at all.\n\nIn the previous discussion of \"politics\" in the narrow sense, I left one important aspect of the concept unexplored. I spoke in a vague way about politics as being a realm of coercion, force, or violence, as if these three things were the same, or at any rate did not need to be distinguished. It is not obvious, though, that coercion and violence are at all the same thing. I can be reasonably said to have been \"coerced\" to do something in many kinds of circumstances even if no one uses anything we would naturally call \"violence.\" If you lure me into a room and lock the door, you have forced me or coerced me into staying in that room until you unlock it, but you do not seem to have used \"violence\" on me in the same way you would have had you picked me up and thrust me into the room. Similarly, it does not seem odd to say that by lying to me you can \"force\" me to do various things, in the sense that if I believe you, I might think I have no alternative to the course of action you wish me to take. Still, it seems a stretch of our current linguistic usage to call \"lying\" a form of violence.\n\nA further relevant distinction is that between active and passive or doing and permitting\/allowing to occur. This distinction is highly controversial among philosophers, or rather it is controversial whether it has any deeper significance. At an everyday level it is perfectly clear:\n\n(a) active: I push you into the water so that you drown\n\n(b) passive: I fail to respond to your cries for help even though I easily could\n\nThe reason this distinction is of relevance to this discussion is that political theory, especially of a liberal kind, has tried to focus on active, even deliberate human intervention. Politics, then, is construed as in the first instance about preventing other people from actively using violence on others. The result, however, is to skew the political realm. This is especially important for architecture because a building was historically an archetypically inert but persistent structure. I, or rather the builders, may have been active in putting it up, but once it was up, it was just there, and could be expected to stay there, if it was properly built, for a very long time. It can change its function over time, as when buildings originally constructed as fortresses become prisons, so whose deliberate intentions are significant, the person who built or those who now use? It is the very geometric structure of the building that forces people to act in one way rather than another, and also to fail to act in certain ways; if the structure works, it prevents the inmates from \"escaping.\" This passive nature makes coercion \"softer\" and harder to see, as it were, from the outside, although not to feel, if one actually must live in such a structure. It makes it also no less effective, and the question is whether it is not equally reprehensible.\n\nI have spoken of important ambiguities in the concept of \"politics\" and of various different ways in which we speak of \"architecture\" as a skill, an activity, a kind of object, or a profession. It will then come as no surprise that I also think that the concept of \"justice\" is multiply ambiguous. I would like to distinguish at least four rather distinct notions.\n\nFirst of all, \"just\" designates that which accords with existing, established, legal codes. Second, we call that \"just\" which accords with what we\u2014whoever \"we\" in each case happen to be\u2014think \"ought\" to be the enforced legal code. Third, \"justice\" is used simply, as Aristotle put it, to refer to \"all the human excellences together.\" That is, in this third sense \"just\" refers in a rather indeterminate way to that which is socially excellent, desirable, and so on in whatever sense and for whatever reason. I note that it is extremely important not to confuse this third sense of the term with the second because there might well be things we think are socially desirable that we also think cannot for various reasons be formulated in a legal code. Thus I might think it highly desirable that people in a society be grateful to those from whom they have received benefits, but I might also think it completely wrong for this to be formulated as a requirement of any kind of legal code. First of all, a legal code must be enforceable by reference to external indicators, and I might think \"gratitude\" is not the kind of thing that is sufficiently close to any external indicators to figure in a legal code. Second, I might think that precisely an important part of the value of gratitude is that it be exhibited without it being the case that it is legally required and would be sanctioned. Its virtue is that it is extralegal, not forced, and so forth.\n\nThe fourth conception of justice is one that focuses on questions of distribution. There has recently been significant disagreement among theorists about what it is that is supposed to be distributed, whether goods, welfare, opportunity, or the possibilities of agency, and there is a similar disagreement about whether the principles of distribution should be some version of equality or of proportionality, for instance, that goods and benefits should be distributed equally to each or to each proportionally to their perceived merit or contribution, whatever \"merit\" or \"contribution\" means.\n\nRecently (meaning during the past forty years or so) there has been a strong tendency to understand politics in a highly artificial, restrictive, and impoverished way. Following John Rawls, many theorists have essentially tried to construe politics as a form of human behaviour devoted primarily to the attempt to realise one particular social ideal, the ideal of justice. They have then further eviscerated the concept of \"justice\" so as to construe it merely as some general property of the distribution of goods and services in society.\n\nI think that this multiple ambiguity in the concept of \"justice\" has been a source of almost inestimable confusion. If \"justice\" is used in the third sense, namely that is just which is in any sense socially desirable, then, of course, it is no news that all politics is about justice. It is no news because it is just a tautology. However, it is easy to move, without noticing it, from that tautology to something that is by no means a tautology, namely to the claim that all politics is appropriately construed as concerned with the equitable or proportional distribution of preexisting goods and benefits.\n\nIf one starts from the notion of politics I sketched at the beginning, it is not difficult to see that not all politics is about justice but also at least about the coordination of action, the exercise of influence, and the control of the use of force (among other things). Arguably, \"justice\" is not even one of the more important human values that can be instantiated in the political or social sphere. This is particularly clear in emergency situations, but, putting them aside, think, for instance, of welfare, efficiency, humanity, activity, security, dignity, and decency, not to mention creativity, a sense of self-affirmation, and aesthetic grace. All of these are important social virtues, and none of them is self-evidently completely detached from the world of the political (at least in the wider sense).\n\nIn short, then, two associations of the concept of \"justice\" seem to me unfortunate and unhelpful in the context of architecture. The first is the presumption that justice will have something to do with codes, rules, and conformity to such existing codes or, for that matter, with conformity to a better set of ideal rules. The second is that justice has to do with properties of distribution of goods that are considered to exist antecedently. When Marx in the nineteenth century attacked the focused attention the political theory of his day turned on \"justice,\" it was because justice-centred theories took the goods in question at face value, as objects that had come into existence in ways that it was irrelevant to discuss. Rather, Marx suggested that political theory should look carefully at the activities through which such goods were produced in the first place and at the social relations that structured those productive processes. These, he thought, were the most important features of any society, and the rules of distribution, that is both justice in the sense of conformity to a legal code and justice in the sense of some scheme of distribution, were secondary. What I would like to suggest is that architecture would do well to concentrate on the generation and fostering of varieties of free activity and on the structure of the relations that will hold between the humans who need to interact, rather than on justice in the sense of either conformity to some code or the distribution of goods.\n\nIt has become commonplace nowadays to assume that justice is fundamental to our notions of societal order, that is, to the order sustained between ourselves without recourse to force. When I say I disagree with this, I do not mean to say that I think that this assertion is incorrect in the sense in which it is, for instance, incorrect to think that the sun moves around the earth. Rather I disagree with it because it gives the strong impression of being a clear substantive claim, but on closer inspection it turns out to be no such thing. On some of the readings it expresses an unobjectionable or even tautological claim. If what it means is, \"We tend to use the word 'justice' to refer to whatever we discover is essential to the maintenance of our social order,\" then this may be true, but it is uninteresting. Even here, to be sure, one might wonder whether we wish to say that justice is whatever is fundamental to our existing social order or whether what we really have in mind is that justice refers to what would be essential to some ideally desirable order we can envisage. The trivial readings of this claim about \"justice\" are, however, easily confused with other uses in which the statement expresses a highly contentful and controversial claim, for instance, that equal (or proportional) distribution of goods is in fact fundamental to our social order or to an ideally \"good\" social order. In addition, I might add, what is so special about \"our\" notions of societal order? Are we to be satisfied merely with recognising that they are the conceptions we, for whatever reasons\u2014good, bad, or indifferent\u2014happen to have acquired?\n\nNote, too, that this formulation seems to make the tacit assumption that societal order is good in itself, and \"our\" conception of social order especially good, and that force plays no major constitutive part in our society. I take it that tacitly this includes the threat of the use of force. What if some use of force turns out actually to be required to maintain \"our\" social order? This possibility does not seem even to be canvassed. So there is a highly specific set of liberal assumptions built into the very way in which this text is formulated that I, for one, would be inclined to reject.\n\nI spoke earlier about our horror at the uncertainty of human life, about the vertigo we experience in the face of the indeterminate, and about our anxiety at having to exercise judgement and decide in each case afresh how to act towards our world. This is part of the strongest motivation for the focus of politics on the concept of \"justice,\" as it is part of the motivation to cling with limpet-like inertia to theories we have once committed ourselves to, even when they have revealed themselves to be seriously flawed. This is also part of the origin of our tendency to exaggerate the level of determinate objectivity we have been able to discern in our world. To start from \"justice\" gives one the illusion that there is at least one distinct kind of determinate thing out there to which all the multiform indeterminacies and incommensurabilities of our forms of valuation can be reduced. If that were the case, we think, to some extent we would not need to exercise judgement. This, however, is exactly the problem with trying to reduce politics to discussion of \"justice.\" This does not, in turn, in any way imply that political discussion is merely indeterminate or merely a matter of arbitrary choice. There are things that at any given time we have no real alternative but to accept, and valuing one thing is often really incompatible with valuing something else equally. No one can be a champion boxer in the morning and a subtle and accomplished violinist in the evening. Merely employing the term \"justice\" to cover whatever we find of value will not in itself either solve any problems or cause there to be more unity and coherence among what we value than there otherwise would be.\n\nTo return once again to Aristotle, he thought that politics was in itself a constructive and \"architectonic\" activity. It was really about creating the conditions for free, valuable action and the social genesis of the right kind of person, the proper citizen of the city-state. Aristotle also thought that the city-state was the only social form within which the highest and most complex kinds of human activities could be carried out. One can accept Aristotle's general claim that politics and (by extension) architecture are about enabling positively valued forms of collective human activity and about creating a certain kind or type of person without necessarily accepting his hierarchical views about human activities or the further claim that the most valuable life is possible only within the rigid format of an ancient city-state.\n\nOf course, the routine tasks of everyday building have to go forward, and of course architects have to honour their contracts, take care for whom and with whom they build and what effects their building will have on the minimal provision of necessary goods, but architecture might also be seen, and has in the past been seen, to have an aspirational component, to be attempting to be \"constructive\" in more than just the literal sense. In the nineteenth century some philosophers spoke of the basic task of the architect as being to build a dwelling suitable for God. We twenty-first-century atheists don't use this kind of religious language anymore, but it is not difficult even for us to associate a clear and plausible meaning with that thought. Architects should try to create structures that by channelling human energies in novel ways focus and intensify some of them while thwarting and dispersing others. We have a variety of complex reasons for judging that the intensification of some activities has made our lives richer and more worthwhile, or that, alternatively, it has been a huge mistake. Thus we judge that forms of human interaction, of relation to self and other, have become more or less efficient, more or less focused and intense, more or less socially aware and benevolent, more or less constructive in relation to other valued outcomes, and so forth. Some of these ways of evaluating it we call \"moral.\" Also there is no particular reason to expect that the standards or criteria we now use for judging will never change. In some cases they will change as a result of interventions we make. If I were an architect it would be the high point of my life to discover that people who antecedently knew, as it were, all there was to know about the building I designed for them and who thought they had good reason to detest it came through living in it to change their minds and love it. I would have helped them change their way of looking at the world, their standards for evaluating what is good, and their taste. Perhaps one could appeal to various systematic considerations to argue that some particular change had not been for the better\u2014after all, sheer habituation has caused people to come to think they liked some extremely peculiar things\u2014but the argument would need to be made in detail and evaluated on its merits.\n\nNot all the evaluative standards we use in political philosophy, then, can reasonably be thought to be subordinated to a single notion of \"justice.\" If the demand that architecture should take account of \"justice\" is merely an exhortation to architects to look beyond their fees and consider the different ways, for good or for ill, in which their buildings will be used, and the different ways in which those buildings will encourage or discourage certain uses, then this is unobjectionable, but also rather trivial. To put emphasis on its aspirational and humanly constructive component is to try to think about architecture in a way that very much goes beyond the framework of thoughts about \"justice.\"\n9\n\nThe Future of Theological Ethics\n\nIf one looks at a human society from a sufficient distance, it presents itself as a complex structure of informal practices and formal institutions, such as armies, churches, families, corporations, political parties, and so forth. These institutions are kept alive by the participation of human individuals, but they also structure and give substance and content to the lives individuals lead. A life outside a set of structured social institutions is for all save the most unusual individuals not much of a life at all. Despite this, it is individuals rather than institutions that have come historically to occupy centre stage in much of traditional philosophy and, I daresay, theology.\n\nIndividuals in complex societies swim in a veritable sea of social expectations and claims that are made on them by overlapping institutions. I am legally obliged to repay my debts even to reprehensible financial institutions (that is, to virtually any now in existence), my friends expect me to treat them decently, I should cover my nose and mouth if I sneeze in a public place, in some societies religious groups may require me to attend services regularly, and so forth. These claims are of differing kind and origin, and of differing degrees of peremptoriness. Most of them are accompanied by\u2014or can easily be provided with\u2014a(n ostensible) \"reason.\" I should cover my nose when I sneeze because this prevents the spread of germs; I should vote in the General Election because the stability and legitimacy of our polity depends to some degree on at least minimal levels of participation; and so forth. Giving one \"reason\" is often not the end of the story but merely gives rise to another question and a request for a further reason. Why should I wish my society to have stability and legitimacy?\n\nPhilosophy begins when Socrates tries to construe the asking for and giving of reasons as a freestanding domain that can be treated purely on its own terms. The question that exercised Socrates is what life the individual should lead, which eventually gets transformed into the question of which individual action from among those available to me I ought to perform. Socrates, or at any rate some of his immediate followers, called this method of scrutiny via a (purportedly) self-contained process of the presentation of reasons, the critical questioning of those reasons, and the attempt to respond to critical objections, \"dialectic.\" Behind the dialectic lay the Socratic demand for \"autonomy\" of enquiry, that is, the demand for a form of discussion that was self-contained and did not depend on the support of any other discipline or form of external authority, or on the constant inflow of the results of new empirical research. The hold that this demand has exercised on Western thought should not be underestimated.\n\nSo the initial situation that is assumed in Socratic discussion is like that of an autonomous consumer in the ideal world of neoliberal economic theory who is faced with a free choice among an array of options. The ideal consumer is assumed to be autonomous in his or her choices, that is, able and willing to choose for herself or himself, and adequately informed about the nature of the product chosen and about his or her own preferences and interests. The participant in Socratic dialectic is similarly assumed to be in a position to bring up and discuss any opinion or belief freely without needing any further (mere) information or support for any external authority, and to be able to settle on and adopt whatever views eventually recommend themselves. To be sure, Socrates' interlocutors need to satisfy an additional condition that does not hold for the consumers. The consumer need only choose; Socrates' interlocutor must choose and also give an account of his\/her choice that will stand up to Socratic argumentative scrutiny.\n\nThere are, however, one might imagine, a number of important features about human life that the Socratic form of reflection ignores or seriously underestimates. These features can be grouped into three broad categories: information, autonomy, and action. First of all, one can ask whether I ever have adequate information about how I should live that is in any enlightening way like the adequate information I might have about the limited choice of some human product. More important, one might ask whether it is sensible to isolate the asking for and giving of reasons for action from the process of acquiring further information or knowledge. Perhaps \"ethics\" and \"scientific enquiry\" cannot be as neatly distinguished, or pursued as independently of each other, as Socrates seems to presuppose.\n\nThe second kind of question concerns autonomy. Am I really an autonomous chooser? If I am, how did I become one? Why do I find myself with these preferences and confronted with these options rather than others? Is it always for the best for me to construe myself (and others) as such autonomous choosers? What if communal coherence is more important than individual autonomy? What implications does it have for society if some people begin to see themselves as completely autonomous choosers? What does it mean if everyone sees him- or herself as such a chooser? What does it mean if everyone sees him- or herself as nothing but autonomous choosers? The Athenians were sufficiently worried about this to kill Socrates, and it seems pretty clear that they were right to see him as a threat to their way of life.\n\nFurthermore, human life may not really be so easily divided into two distinct parts: first, an early limited period when I am \"growing up\" and thus subject, for instance, to parental (and other) authority, and then a period of \"mature autonomy\" when I am not, and may not permit myself to be, subject to anyone's authority at all. However, even as an adult if I wish to learn Arabic, I am dependent on the authority of native speakers, I am forced to trust in the expertise of the medical profession every time I go to see a physician, and I depend on the testimony of others every time I trust what I read in a book about a country or city I have never myself visited or about any historical event. It is conceivable, then, that there is some less perspicuous, but more intimate, interconnection between autonomy, expertise, authority, and testimony than the Socratic model suggests. Perhaps, just as it might be good to construe the discussion of reasons and the acquisition of new knowledge as related sides of a single process rather than two utterly distinct things, it might also be good to see autonomy, trust in expertise, and dependence on authority as ways of describing interrelated phases in a process of moral development rather than distinct, self-contained modes of life.\n\nFinally, Socratic dialogue is considered to be isolated from the world of events and the requirements of action. Plato's dialogues, to be sure, are full of people hurrying off when the discussion gets too hot, and this realistic touch is part of their overwhelming literary charm, but the ideal type to which Socratic dialogue aspires is something more like the Symposium in which the narrator wakes up the following morning to find Socrates and his interlocutors still at it, or the discussion in the Republic which because of its very length could not have run its course during a single night. Human life is not usually like this, however. At some point the cruise missiles begin to fall on the city centre, the sailors in the naval base riot, one's interlocutor is guillotined, Judas arrives in the garden with a group of armed men, or the security forces, to everyone's surprise, refuse to fire on the demonstrators. The proper conclusion to be drawn from this is not, of course, that it makes no sense to discuss the possible reasons for action at leisure and for as long as it takes but that it is unlikely to be clear at any given point in history to what extent events and the demands of action have informed or deformed any given line of argument.\n\nHegel suggests that traditional philosophical ethics in the Socratic mould tells us both too much and too little. In \"normal\" situations it is redundant\u2014as Hegel says, if you want to know what to do, ask your local priest or your lawyer\u2014and extraordinary situations are characterised by the breakdown of precisely those tacitly presupposed structures that give the usual form of \"philosophical\" reasoning its purchase. How, in addition, is one to know whether any given situation is \"normal\" or \"extraordinary\"? If Christianity is right, the Incarnation is an extraordinary event that brings about a radical change in human nature and its possibilities so as to render the wisdom of the philosophers' \"folly\" (\u03bc\u03c9\u03c1\u03af\u03b1). If Marx is right, forms of rationality are bound up with social forms in a way that does not permit simple extraction of a substantive universal form of \"Reason.\" It is no refutation of either of these views to appeal to an assumption it rejects, namely to the universal validity of argumentative forms that have their origin in Socrates' dialectical analysis of Greek common sense. Thus for Christians there is a \"revelation\" that is fully accessible only through faith\u2014which not everyone has\u2014and for Marx the results of Socratic \"dialectic\" depend on what bits of knowledge and opinion are the starting point, and certain forms of knowledge\u2014such as knowledge that human labour can be construed as a sequence of homogeneous, temporally extended units of exercised labour power\u2014are available only in certain highly developed societies, because only in such societies does labour take that visible form. This does not, of course, mean that Christianity or Marxism automatically wins the argument, just that the discussion is not already settled before it has properly begun.\n\nWhether considerations like these open a space for a \"theological ethics\" depends in part on what one might mean by that term. Does \"theological ethics\" constitute what we might call a natural kind\u2014that is, do all forms of theological ethics have something important in common that distinguishes them from nontheological forms of ethics\u2014or is \"theological ethics\" just a term that collects a number of different positions that really have little in common but are grouped together only as a convenience to contrast them with something else, such as \"secular\" or \"nontheological\" (or \"nonreligious\" or \"nonmonotheistic\") ethics? By virtue of what does an ethics count as \"theological\"? Does theology give us merely a new way of understanding (and perhaps \"grounding\") what we already recognise as \"our common, agreed-on morality,\" or does it require us to change our moral beliefs and practices?\n\nThat is, is there such a thing as a corpus or code of what Trotsky calls \"generally recognized... elementary moral principles... [which are] necessary for the life of every collective body\" and which, therefore, are common to the adherents of the various religions and to atheists? Is it then the case that only some theological assumptions will allow humans to understand these principles, so that we atheists are just internally confused and don't understand the nature of our own form of life? Or perhaps there is more than one way to understand common morality: as it were, as the law of the city of man and as the law of the city of god (although the moral code itself is the same). This might be a bit like Rawls's dream: a common morality (in his case a political morality) that is agreed on, although understood in different ways by the members of different religious and secular groups who comprise the society. Or is it that we all understand the common principles of morality well enough but only theological analysis will \"justify\" these principles to us? (If that is the case, what does \"justify\" mean, and does it mean the same thing in \"justify to an adherent of religion\" and \"justify to an atheist\"?)\n\nA further possible claim is that there is a common core of shared human morality, but theology allows us to supplement this with an additional set of additional demands or ideals. Thus: \"They said to you of old 'Do not kill', but I say to you 'Do not even be angry.' \" Or is it the case that there is no common moral code for all people, and so the theological project is not merely greater understanding or firmer justification of what we all agree on but revolutionary change in our moral views. Theology is necessary for us to see that we must change the way we live and evaluate ways of life.\n\nOr is theology not directly relevant to the whole of our moral life, but merely to a special sector of it, constituting the origin or ground of some new demands or ideals we would otherwise have no access to? So might there be special theologically based demands of ritual purity or symbolic manipulations of ritual objects that did not much impinge on everyday life but were thought to be important, like the fetishistic treatment of flags or other symbols in certain forms of contemporary civic religion?\n\nIn any of the above-mentioned cases it would be of extreme importance for the prospective proponent of a theological ethics to be able to say what exactly \"ground\" means when one speaks of theology as \"grounding\" a form of ethics. In this context it is not sufficient to make a vague gesture in the direction of \"anti-foundationalism.\" \"Anti-foundationalism\" does not mean abandoning all attempts to give an account of what one believes or practices.\n\nOne might well ask whether Christian ethics can sustain a commitment to global justice. Does \"sustaining commitment\" here refer to some kind of psychological, motivational, or social process or to something more like giving a valid justification or giving a good reason? (Or to all of these? If all of them, how are they related?)\n\nTo whom is theological ethics addressed? One might think that there are several distinct audiences and that theological ethics has a number of different tasks. First, there are people who are already Christians. The task of theological ethics here would be to give such people theological reasons to be concerned with social justice. Second, there are those who are not Christians but who have an interest in social justice. Here the task would be, presumably, to show that an interest makes sense only if one accepts certain theological views. Thus, I think I already have reason to be committed to social justice, although I have no theological beliefs. Am I being incoherent? Would I only understand myself and my commitment correctly or fully if I had the right theological views? Would the right theological views give me, in some sense, \"more and better reasons\" than I already have to favour social justice? What exactly would that \"more\" amount to? A third possible audience would be all persons of good will, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack of affiliation, and theological ethics here might also address the task of exploring the possible modes of practical cooperation between believers and nonbelievers.\n\nI believe that Christian theologians use the term \"apologetics\" to refer to discipline directed at giving some kind of justification or defence of Christianity to nonbelievers. However, I would note that even this way of construing the discipline contains within itself an initial structuring of the discussion that not all will find appropriate. Plato (and Xenophon) could write \"Apologies\" for Socrates because he was accused in a court of specified crimes. To assume that the task for a Christian theologian is to \"defend\" Christianity against some specified set of theoretical objections to it seems slightly unmotivated. Parish-pump atheists still exist, but I suspect that the real danger for religious believers nowadays is not counterbelief or theoretical objections but indifference. Richard Rorty, whose grandfather was a Social-Gospel theologian and whose father was a Communist poet, notoriously claimed that he was neither a believer, nor an atheist, nor an agnostic because all of those were considered positions one could take on religion; he simply wished not to have to take a position on this topic one way or another at all. In his own inimitable phrase he simply wished people would completely stop talking about religion, whether they wished to defend, to attack, or to reform it. This increase in sheer brute indifference\u2014Why should we care one way or the other?\u2014rather than active unbelief or unwillingness to listen seems to me to be the social phenomenon that constitutes the greatest threat to traditional forms of monotheism.\n\nSome theologians seem admirably aware of the political dimension of the task of addressing and coordinating the potential action of believers and nonbelievers, but if shared (or parallel) religious experiences are neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding of or commitment to equal human dignity, then the political task of coordination seems rather anodyne. We seem to be just back to the old liberal treadmill of \"seeking consensus among people of good will, but different opinions.\" There is perhaps nothing wrong with liberalism, if, for instance, the alternative is some form of extreme authoritarian despotism, but one would hope both philosophically and politically for something more and a bit stronger than that.\n\nFurthermore, what is the relation between \"theological ethics\" and \"religious ethics\"? Prima facie, after all, if one thinks of theology as a systematic and discursive treatment of certain beliefs, and religion as having to do with human modes of experience and action, institutions, and forms of cultivation, worship, or reverence, then it is easy to imagine the theological and the religious as diverging.\n\nA theology has to have something like an argumentative structure. Simply sitting around meditating, occasionally muttering \"Oum, oum, oum,\" or shouting out loudly \"alleluia\" or \"alahu akhbar\" in moments of excitement may (or may not) be a worthy form of religious activity, but it is not yet a \"theology.\" To put it crudely, anything correctly called an \"-ology\" has to be structured around something like what the Greeks called \"\u03bb\u00f3\u03b3o\u03c2\" that is, it must be something like an argument, a dialectical sequence, a set of logically connected propositions or something like what we now call a \"science\" (in the broadest possible sense), and it is not self-evidently clear that all forms of religious experience require or even admit of such treatment.\n\nThus in the ancient world the Epicureans had what was in one sense a \"theological ethics\" in that they thought that if you wished to lead a good life, you had to have the correct theoretical views about the gods. The view of the Epicureans, though, was that the gods were indifferent to humans and therefore were completely inappropriate objects of reverence or fear. So that would be an instance of a theology without a religion. But equally there might be religious views or views about religion that were non- or anti-theological. Thus the modern world has seen a number of anti-theological thinkers, for instance, the Pascal of the \"God of Abraham, not of the philosophers\"; Feuerbach, who proposed religious practices based on a fully re-anthropologised theology; Heidegger, who construed early Christianity as a religion without a theology and envisaged a kind of quasi-religious, but atheological ethics; and finally Wittgenstein, who seems to have thought that some religious experiences were very important but that there was nothing one could say about them. All of these thinkers were trying to rehabilitate the unvarnished religious life against what they took to be the distortions of it by theology. Roughly speaking, it seems plausible that the more vivid, explicit, and restrictive a view you have about what counts as \"theology,\" the more likely it is that some people will reject the claim that any particular theological view is adequate to encompassing their religious form of life.\n\nPerhaps a theologian might wish to try to emphasise the role of theology in sustaining cultural and community identity. Here I would like to point out what seems to me a significant structural difference between traditional Christian theology and the various claims that are made about modern \"cultural identity.\" In the modern period \"cultures\" are thought of as being plural, constructed, and nonobligatory, even if one also thinks that many cultures have a tendency to secrete around themselves claims to uniqueness, to being \"natural,\" to being superior to all others, and so forth. Traditional Christian theology, though, unless I am mistaken, was committed to presenting not one of a plurality of possible ways of living but a unique, non-negotiable truth. It is hard to see how these two perspectives can effortlessly be combined. I would urge resistance to the temptation to reconfigure theological beliefs as mere cultural formations: if \"theological ethics\" is going to have any purchase at all, it will have to make some claims to truth that go beyond merely saying \"This is my cultural identity.\" The letters of Saint Paul, however, strongly suggest that Christianity at least is not supposed to be a cultural identity at all but something else.\n\nIs it really theology in the sense of an argumentatively structured set of general beliefs that gives the impetus to social ethics or is it religion in the broader sense of the general ethos associated with a set of human practices?\n\nI have always found it very odd that mainstream Roman Catholicism clings so fervently to the philosophy of Thomas, given that the philosophical framework he inherited from Aristotle has certain signal defects for any Christian. So although Aristotle had a concept of development, in the sense in which, for instance, an acorn develops into a tree, he had no concept of \"history,\" at least not in the robust sense in which many Christians have understood \"history\" (Heilsgeschichte). Again, the Incarnation, so the Christian view went, changed human nature radically and qualitatively. Thus one's location in a uniquely specified historical time sequence\u2014before the Incarnation or after\u2014makes a tremendous difference to what kind of life one can lead, and thus to morality. It is hard to see how this archetypically Christian view can be accommodated within an Aristotelian account of a historically uniform human nature.\n\nAristotle's lack of a concept of history was a serious defect, but his lack of another concept that has become central for modern thought was actually a great advantage, because that concept is confused and we are better off without it. I am speaking, of course, of the concept of the \"will,\" which is very strikingly lacking in Aristotle, and which luxuriates in proto-baroque splendour in the philosophy of Aquinas, throwing out its obfuscating tendrils in all directions. Although Aristotle had no concept of the \"will,\" he had a concept of human choice and that is all that one really needs. Roughly speaking for Aristotle, if I do X and have not been externally coerced into doing it, that will be because (a) I chose to do X (\u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03b1\u03af\u03c1\u03b5\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2), or (b) because I acted on some impulse (\u1f10\u03c0\u03b9\u03b8\u03c5\u03bc\u03af\u03b1). That is for Aristotle the end of the story. There is no \"choosing\" to act from choice or from impulse, and nothing like the modern \"will\" is involved in the process. The only thing Aristotle has to say beyond that is that if I am a good (\"virtuous\") person I will generally choose rather than act on impulse, and the reason for that will be that I have natural aptitude to become a good person and have had the right upbringing. However, if I am a good person, I will\u2014to put it paradoxically\u2014have no \"choice\" about acting out of choice rather than impulse. That I habitually act from such choice is just what it is to be a good person. A good person, therefore, is not \"free\" in any interesting sense (apart from the political sense of not being someone's slave). There is no room for \"the will\" or \"freedom\" in this construction. \"The will\" is constructed and introduced as a concept by the Stoics as an anti-Aristotelian invention to allow them to say something Aristotle never would have said, namely that the good person is \"free.\" It is thus much to be regretted that Thomas took this confused nonstarter of a concept \"will\" out of its context in anti-Aristotelian thinking and tried to graft it into a basically Aristotelian framework. Western philosophy suffered from the depredations of trying to make sense of the fictitious faculty \"the will\" until the time of Nietzsche.\n\nFinally, accepting Aristotelianism means Christianity gets itself unnecessarily involved in trying to offer an alternative cosmology to natural science; this, however, is an argument it lost long ago, so it would seem more honest to acknowledge that and draw the consequences.\n\nMy first and narrower suspicion, then, is that if there is a future for theological ethics in the Roman Catholic tradition it will certainly not be Thomist. My wider conclusion is a strong suspicion that whatever the prospects of religion in the future, those of the purported discipline of \"theological\" ethics are doubtful, if only because of the strong categoricity of our conceptions of reason and argument. It is hard to see how anything could conform to them, as \"theology\" is supposed to do, while yet being appropriately distinctive. What over a thousand years of strenuous exertion has signally failed to find is probably not there.\n10\n\nDid Williams Do Ethics?\n\nBernard Williams came to bury ethics, not to criticize or revise it. He did not, of course, mean by that that there was nothing in traditional forms of ethical thinking (or nothing in traditional moral injunctions) that was of any substance or of any use or significance for human life. He did, however, think that the traditional notion of \"ethics,\" namely as an autonomous, knowledge-based, reflective, discursive doctrine that could give completely general and rationally persuasive answers to the question, \"How should one live?\" was unsalvageable.\n\nWhat, then, should replace ethics? First of all, perhaps nothing will or should replace it. Instead of a single hegemonic discipline, which gave us answers or the framework for finding answers to the question how one should one live, there will just be a variety of different things. Perhaps human life is characterised by a welter of different goods that form no cognizable unity; perhaps the very idea of a single, or a single dominant, notion of \"normativity\" just is a mistake. After all, the very term \"normativity\" is a recent invention\u2014it has no entry in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its currency as a technical term in philosophy can scarcely date back to a period earlier than the 1980s. The fact\/value or \"is\"\/\"ought\" distinction is older than that, and the adjective \"normative\" has sporadic earlier uses, but the idea that there was a single \"thing\" or phenomenon that could be designated by the single term \"normativity\" may be thought to represent not a mere verbal quirk but a not-insignificant step in giving the discussion of substantive issues a particular turn or slant or structure.\n\nPerhaps then instead of any kind of single overarching \"normativity,\" all there is are simply different\u2014and possibly changing\u2014human practices with different goals, associated conceptions of excellence, and resultant goods; and human life consists of an art or skill in negotiating a way through, which is partly constituted by these practices, partly a matter of making use of them for other ends. What replaces ethics then is not another intellectual discipline but forms of action, which may be skillfully or less skillfully performed. The art or skill involved, however, might not\u2014without significant loss\u2014be reducible to anything like the object of a cognitive discipline. Nietzsche in some of his moods seems to take a tack like this, adding that the art or skill in question would have an extremely strong component of a type we would be likely to call \"aesthetic,\" and that the human emotions of admiration and disgust would play a constitutive role in it.\n\nThe basic idea that ethics as a purportedly freestanding philosophical enterprise was a mistake is not in itself novel or unusual. I once heard the president of a large and very well-regarded university, whom I will call \"Zmith,\" ask the academic members of one of his advisory boards why his university needed departments of philosophy and political science at all. After all, he remarked, the university had a flourishing law school and a distinguished department of economics, and surely they could satisfy any reasonable human cognitive need. Zmith's remark was, to be sure, part of a micropolitics of bullying, of trying to intimidate the assembled academics and show them who was boss, but it would have had no chance of being effective if there had not been at least the shadow of a suspicion that Zmith might actually believe what he was saying and that some other influential people might come to believe it, too. Compare this case with that in which Zmith asked why a philosophy department was needed because his university already had a renowned archaeology programme and a music school. Actually, the idea that ethics as a subdiscipline of philosophy might simply be replaced by something else, by some part of economics or law (or some combination of both), is not in itself completely daft. It would, of course, require some changes in the existing disciplines of law and economics. It would require law to stop being the kind of cognitively disabling enterprise it now is, designed to turn intelligent young people into pliable mouthpieces for corporations; and it would require economics to establish at least some tenuous, nonwhimsical cognitive relations with the real world of a kind it has not yet been able to manage, but that might be possible, if the world itself changed. This, of course, is an old idea of Marxism, that if the basic economic structure could be rationally and transparently organized, it would be possible to have a proper theory of economics rather than the current hocus-pocus, and that would render a separate ethics as a philosophical discipline otiose. There might be some low-level \"ethical principles,\" as Trotsky suggests, but they would be commonsense rules of thumb about how people best get along together, known clearly to everyone and having the status of banalities, not profound philosophical truths.\n\nWilliams did not take this line, but rather one that arguably had its origin in Aristotle, who begins one of his ethical treatises by describing ethics as a subordinate part of political science. What should replace philosophical ethics, in Williams's view, was politics. This, of course, makes his view completely different from the Marxist view, which is that in a free and developed society, \"politics\" as we know it would not exist, only administration. That is not to say, I take it, that there will be a relatively abstract political philosophy, a fixed theory of a more or less traditionalist kind, and that a subordinate part of this will be devoted to individuals in society, but rather that ethics will be replaced by \"real politics.\" Politics has its own dignity, imposes its own demands on action, and both opportunistically consumes and fecundly generates concepts, convictions, theories, and forms of reflection. Some of these will concern individuals, their properties, dispositions, aspirations, and modes of behaviour; and these might be called \"ethical,\" but they have no standing on their own. When Williams says that politics should replace ethics, he does not, of course, mean by \"politics\" either a purportedly nonintentional and fully value-free form of human action or the object of a value-neutered pure science. Politics clearly is concerned with human agents who have goals, intentions, values, and conceptions of the good, and the study of politics will itself also be informed by forms of evaluation that will not necessarily be the same as those of the agents being studied. Traditional ethics, though, makes the mistake of trying to isolate these goals, intentions, and forms of evaluation and construe them as the possible subjects of a distinct discipline. In addition, when Williams says that politics should replace ethics, he does not mean \"should\" in a (strictly) ethical sense. Rather, he thinks that ethics always has in fact been a part of politics. Historically, any given ethics has usually been the theoretically congealed residue of a previous political practice that represents an attempt on the part of that past to stretch its dead hand out over the future. So \"should\" means that, overall, it is likely to be better for us to recognize this than to continue to pretend it is not the case. This, Williams thought, was the significance of Nietzsche and constituted one of the important reasons for studying the ancient world. Nietzsche had first allowed us to see the politics behind the superficial appearance of autonomy in ethics, and he had seen it most clearly in evidence in his study of the ancients. We cannot go back to ancient conceptions or institutions\u2014Williams was historicist enough to think that this was virtually self-evident\u2014and we wouldn't want to practice ancient-style politics even if per impossibile we could do so. But by studying the ancients, we can learn one of the few rather general truths accessible to us in this area, namely, a truth about the primacy of politics. The very fact that Plato struggles with such relentless energy to establish the standing and authority of something\u2014philosophy\u2014that is purportedly prior to politics might actually be taken to reinforce this lesson from the ancient world.\n\nIf we cannot go back to ancient politics, what would a modern politics look like? One common way of proceeding is through so-called democratic theory: modern politics is democratic politics, and we can explain, understand, and criticize it with reference to the ideals of \"democracy.\" Of course, if politics is really an art, there may be narrow limits to the kind of positive account one could give here. A monograph-length treatment of modern politics by Williams was never forthcoming; perhaps the book on Nietzsche he seems to have been planning to write at the end of his life would have contained some material about this, but of course we shall never know\u2014but if there had been a book, I would have expected it to be very historical in its approach and to have little in common with approaches based on \"democratic theory.\"\n\nWilliams took the central question of ethics to be that of Socrates, which he formulates as \"How should one live?\" but which one might gloss as \"How is it needful to live?\" (\u03c4\u03af\u03bd\u03b1 \u03c4\u03c1\u03cc\u03c0\u03bf\u03bd \u03c7\u03c1\u1f74 \u03b6\u1fc6\u03bd; Politeia 352d). I merely note en passant that there are other possible questions one could take as lying at the heart of the Socratic search. These include: \"What is the good life?\" \"What is the 'happy' (or successful or flourishing) life?\" and \"Who am I?\" One rather austere or minimalist way of trying to answer the question \"How is it needful to live?\" might be: How it is needful [for me] to live is what needs to happen in order that I live at all. Thus Voltaire complained to the royal censor who proposed to destroy his livelihood by banning the (satirical) publications on which his income depended: \"Mais, Monsieur, il faut bien que je vive.\" This historically recurrent type of complaint is not, as one might expect, an indefeasible moral argument but has as its irrefutable response the reply of the censor: \"Je n'en vois pas la necessit\u00e9.\" This dramatic scenario\u2014which is played and replayed through the centuries between Carthaginians and Romans (\"Carthago delenda est\"), Louis Capet and Robespierre (\"Louis doit mourir parce qu'il faut que la patrie vive\"), Herero tribesmen and German colonial administrators, the Ukrainian peasantry and Stalin\u2014with different roles assigned historically to different individual and collective actors, and agents acted upon by others, has a first-person reflexive correlate. One might even say that the formula for any kind of human progress, not just for progressive and revolutionary change, is the thought that \"What would be for the best would be if we\u2014and people like us\u2014simply did not exist.\" So before the establishment of the National Health Service in Britain, one can imagine large swathes of the population thinking that it was necessary for them to live in a certain way, for instance to learn to make hard choices between buying food and buying medical care for the members of their family; but they might also be capable of reflecting that it would be for the best if people of their kind\u2014people who needed to learn what they had to learn and who then had to act accordingly\u2014simply did not exist. Equally, one could imagine slaveholders or bankers or property developers thinking that it would be better for people like themselves not to exist. For that matter, one could imagine a \"free man\" in a society with slavery thinking that it was no criticism of him that he did not live the life of a slave but that also it would nevertheless be better for his whole class of people not to exist in the sense that it was defined, as the class it was, only by contrast to the enslaved population.\n\nWilliams used to say that the United States was the most eighteenth-century country in the world; it was, he thought, politically, socially, and culturally caught in a kind of time-warp, an apparently eternal present that was actually represented by some point in time in the 1790s. Williams never expatiated on what exactly he meant by this statement\u2014I assume that the reason for this was he thought that this was a particular kind of interpretative statement: if you did see the point of it, you required no further elaboration because it would immediately ring true to certain experiences you had had, putting them in a certain intelligible order; and if you didn't see the point of it immediately, then no amount of further elaboration on his part would convince you. And then the statement might actually have a more potential long-term effect, if it was simply dropped so as to shatter on the floor like a huge bit of unwanted crockery and the noise was allowed to reverberate through the room sans commentaire. Presumably part of what he meant, though, was that the country had never been able to move beyond a particularly archaic form of the struggle of the Enlightenment with its enemies. Nothing after Adam Smith and Kant really survived the Middle Passage to take root on the western side of the Atlantic, so the culture was stuck in a state of trench warfare between a party that identified itself (in some way or another) with Enlightenment Reason (either through commitment to the ideal rationality of \"free markets,\" to technologically rational solutions to all problems, or to vapid Kantian \"norms\") and an obscurantist religious fundamentalism that was all the more dark for defining itself in contrast to reason. The relatively recent formation of a united front between some religious fundamentalists and free-marketeers is a politically significant development, a shift in a local tactical alliance, but it is not yet clear that it has any further significance.\n\nTo say that the United States is an eighteenth-century country is to give a historical interpretation and perhaps also express an attitude, but it is not, of course, to make a moral judgement in the technical sense in which some have wanted to construe the term \"moral judgement.\" It is not to say that the population is vicious or the institutions corrupt. It is not the kind of statement one is liable to encounter in a book on \"ethics\" but rather the sort of thing someone like Herodotus would have said (if he had had a suitable concept of history and historical framework at his disposal). In his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, Williams tries to develop a theory about the relation between factual data and interpretation, which has always struck me as very close to the theory of the \"constellation\" one finds in Benjamin and Adorno. The stars that compose a constellation are physical objects of a certain kind and each has a set of empirically specifiable properties, a location in the sky, a certain relative magnitude, perhaps a colour. A constellation is not a mere collection but an organization of a set of stars into a recognizable and perhaps significant pattern: a bear, a hunter, a wagon, a set of twins. One cannot, of course, create constellations ad libitum, using stars that are not already there, putting together stars that are too far apart from the human eye to see synoptically, or creating patterns that make no sense to us. So we\u2014and what we are, as the historically located creatures we happen to be\u2014partly determine what constellations there can be (for us) by virtue of setting out the limits of what can make sense to us. \"What can make sense to us\" is neither completely pre-given nor fully indeterminate, and to the extent to which we can change it, this can be done only over time, and probably only collectively. The sheerly physical data about the distribution of stars does not require us to group them into this set of constellations rather than some other, and in fact does not require us to group them into any constellations whatever. We don't invent or create stars by organizing them into constellations. Still\u2014and this is the claim Adorno and Benjamin make\u2014at any rate, in the realm of collective human action, culture, and politics, we are guided by constellations, not by the analogues of raw or theoretically manipulated astrophysical data, and there is no real alternative to that. It just is not possible to do without something like constellations. Similarly, Williams thought that there were facts that had the hard, unmalleable character we usually attribute to them and that could be discovered by \"empirical\" means (whatever they turn out to be). The U.S. Constitution had x-number of articles and article z was passed on such-and-such a day. On the other hand, the \"positivist\" dream that one could dispense with any interpretation and simply let the facts speak for themselves was just that\u2014a dream. Similarly, no set of \"facts\" requires one to adopt a particular interpretation, but no interpretation that anyone would take seriously simply floats unconnectedly above the data or connects them in merely arbitrary ways.\n\nWilliams must have known that in asserting that the United States was an eighteenth-century country he was doing something that was very close to committing a modern American analogue of the crimen maiestatis by violating a central taboo of the state religion that holds the country together. This requires one always to assume that the United States, at least in some idealized form, is the very model for modernity, progress, rationality, and so forth\u2014not something itself to be evaluated. Of course, one can criticize individual performances of the government or even subordinate institutions, but only as a form of internal criticism, that is, only relative to the absolute assumption that the performance or the institution is a momentary falling short of the ideals the United States itself proclaims and fundamentally instantiates. I recall Williams making this claim in a series of lectures at Princeton in the 1980s\u2014and the audible intake of breath among the members of the audience. I suppose that he was not being gratuitously offensive but was trying to make a constructive political intervention aimed at warning those of them who were susceptible to using their theoretical imagination at all that the exceptional conjunction of geography and history that had permitted the unparalleled prosperity particularly of the period between 1945 and 1975 would provide only a brief respite from history. Presumably, Williams saw that, by the mid-1980s, the layers of insulation were wearing sufficiently thin for him to propose to his audience that it might be advisable to prepare for the changes that were inevitably coming, even if this required them to think what was for them almost unthinkable.\n\nPerhaps political and historical interpretations like this are a part of \"moral and ethical thinking\" in the wider sense which Williams tacitly accepts, and which he contrasts with the traditional academic study of \"philosophical ethics.\" Williams, of course, as the last part of his comment on Christine Korsgaard's Tanner Lectures indicates, does seem to have considerable sympathy for historicist ways of thinking, that is, for parallelization of \"individual rational reflection and historical development\"; and he had himself taken account of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least to the extent of being a serious student of Nietzsche, for whom the meaning of the individual human life is a central concern. It is not, however, obvious that he ever really gave Hegel a proper chance, and figures like Heidegger and Adorno\u2014not to mention Deleuze and Guatarri\u2014were effectively outside his ken, meaning not, of course, that he didn't in some sense \"know\" who they were but that they were not sufficiently close to him in temperament and traditional intellectual formation for him to have interacted with them in a philosophically productive way. To be sure, in 2002 he agreed, after a certain amount of coaxing, to come and give a paper at the Frankfurt Conference on Adorno, which was to take place in 2003, but his final illness and death brought that possible line of development to a close. The argument that finally convinced Williams to come to Frankfurt was not the one for which I had had the highest hopes, namely, that he would find in Adorno, if he looked closely, a philosopher who was as interested as he was in taking up a position equidistant from the self-serving \"liberalism\" of the Anglo-American political world and the brutal practices of \"really-existing socialism.\" This line of thought had no purchase, because I had completely misunderstood Williams. I took his adoption of some of the vocabulary and the motifs of liberalism to be a bit of intellectual realpolitik or perhaps protective coloration, but this was a complete misconception, based no doubt on an incorrect, wishful projection of my own attitudes onto a philosopher whose work I admired. Even to the end of his life, Williams showed flashes of what are now called \"Old Labour\" attitudes\u2014\"profits\" for him were always inherently suspect and the fact that a particular legal, administrative, or economic reform would result in large profits for a corporation or a private individual was prima facie a good reason to oppose it. However, it was also the case that he felt as naturally comfortable paddling about in the tepid and slimy puddle created by Locke, J. S. Mill, and Isaiah Berlin as he did in most other places. In general, he was a man who was remarkably comfortable in his own skin and who fit in easily with the existing world of politics and academic society, despite his high scepticism about many of the purported theoretical pillars of that world. This, in fact, was perhaps one of the basic ways in which he was different from Adorno, who notoriously lived a life of great, not to say extreme, self-indulgence but made a point of not feeling comfortable in it. Adorno, in fact, insisted that it was a sign of minimal human decency \"not to be at home\" in the world of late capitalism.\n\nWhat did finally move Williams to think it might be a good idea to come to Frankfurt was the prospect of discussions of Adorno's views on Wagner and on the philosophy of music. Williams had a keen interest in music, particularly opera, and was steeped in the music of Wagner. One of my most vivid recollections of him is of discussing with him the concept of \"pornography\" while he hummed \"The Ride of the Valkyries\" and spun his two hands around, imitating an old-style propeller-plane about to take off. The last lecture I heard him deliver was on Wagner's Ring in the Cambridge Music Faculty. He had placed behind him the full University Orchestra\u2014about a hundred players\u2014who sat silent and immobile onstage during his lecture. After he finished speaking, Williams withdrew to a large high-backed chair with thick green upholstery and cushions, to the right of the players, and sat listening intently as the orchestra played Siegfried's Funeral Music. The chair was so large and Williams in his elder years had shrunk physically so much that he seemed like a kind of Bloomsbury Mime\u2014Mime, the proper name of the dwarf in Siegfried, not the English word for a kind of silent actor\u2014squatting on a throne in the afterlife, while looking down and listening in order to discover what had finally become of his nemesis Siegfried.\n\nWhat interested Williams was the relation between political and moral success and failure in Wagner's Ring, and aesthetic success (or failure). Clearly, if Siegfried is intended to be a model, or even a specimen, of the Young Hegelian emancipated human being, free from the world of conventional morality and commercial \"contracts\" (Vertr\u00e4ge)\u2014that is, if one will, from Adam Smith and Kant\u2014which still cripples Wotan, he is not a very convincing advertisement for the future. He is brutal, uncouth, empty-headed, and often simply nasty, and his life is a series of violent episodes that end in nothing much. Much of what he does, he does out of pig-ignorance or because he is being manipulated by others for their own ends. Few of his actions have the long-term or even medium-term results he intends, and few of them end pleasantly for him. Presumably he enjoys sleeping with Br\u00fcnnhilde (when he finally takes off her breastplate and discovers she is a woman like his mother and not a man); this interlude, however, seems to be very short-lived indeed\u2014although, given that it takes place, as it were, \"off-stage\" between the end of Siegfried and the beginning of G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung, one cannot actually be sure; but the composer of Tristan (Act 2) would certainly have had at his disposal the artistic means to indicate a lengthy period of happy dalliance, had he so wished. Instead of that, before you know it, Siegfried is off down the Rhine \"zu neuen Taten,\" as Br\u00fcnnhilde sings (und neuen Katastrophen, as we may add). This is the rather gloomy interpretation that Williams propounded. The question for him, then, was why the funeral music for such a \"gescheiterte Existenz\" was still so profoundly moving, despite the fact that it celebrated a \"hero\" whose heroism was of a particularly empty kind. This sense of the impressive combined with the not-really-fully-substantial recurs in discussions of Wagner's work. The musicologist John Deathridge describes the music for the entry of the gods into Valhalla at the end of Rheingold as \"triumphant, but decidedly hollow.\" Many listeners have this experience of it, and, in fact, it is possible that this effect was intended by Wagner. Despite his own megalomaniac tendencies and the desire for total domination of the audience, Wagner was perfectly capable of producing calculated effects of distancing within the overall aesthetic experience. After all, the \"intellectual\" in Rheingold, Loge, interrupts the relatively smooth-flowing waves of D-flat major to remark that the gods are so deluded and so self-destructive that he is almost embarrassed to associate with them (\"Ihrem Ende eilen sie zu, \/ die so stark im Bestehen sich w\u00e4hnen. \/ Fast sch\u00e4me ich mich, \/ mit ihnen zu schaffen\"; Rheingold, bars 3807\u201312).\n\nSiegfried's life and death are not, of course, meaningless in the sense that they have no important effects in the world. After all, G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung ends with the image of Valhalla\u2014that is, the capitalist world in which we all still live\u2014in flames. That is one good result of what Siegfried has done, although it is not anything he intended. Wagner reports in his autobiography that as he stood with his friend Bakunin on the barricade in Dresden during the revolution of 1848, Bakunin explained to him at great length and in detail why the joy in destruction was also a creative joy. Williams, of course, had studied Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy very carefully and had a keen appreciation of ancient tragedy, but the Dionysian pleasure of the child on the beach who enjoys smashing up the sand castle he has just built seemed to play no role in his writings on politics, which generally still breathe the air of the usual liberal platitudes. Williams's cheerful disposition and his successful life in the more comfortable regions of the Anglo-American establishment put him at some distance from a visceral sympathy with Bakunin. In this, too, he differed significantly from Adorno, who was much less impressed with Wagner's music as music than Williams was, and was therefore less puzzled than Williams by the (apparent) discrepancy between the failed and empty \"heroism\" of Siegfried and the quality of Wagner's musical treatment of it.\n\nThere is, of course, another obvious way to read Siegfried's character and fate, which is different from the one Williams favours. Williams's interpretation depends on hearing the music as basically celebratory rather than merely elegiac, and so it was perfectly appropriate that his lecture ended with a performance of the passage. If one takes it as something closer to a threnody than a eulogy, it is possible to connect it not with Wagner's failure to present a fully convincing New Man but as a melancholy comment not on Siegfried in particular but on the whole world of the Ring. That Siegfried and his life are so unsatisfactory can be seen not as a form of failure on Wagner's part\u2014failure to create a plausible artistic image of the new and emancipated individual\u2014but rather as a success in representing what Wagner intended to represent. Perhaps Wagner's intention is precisely to dramatize the necessary failure of individual heroism and of manipulative projects of individual emancipation like those Wotan seeks to realize. Perhaps individual emancipation will never in our historical period and our economic system be able to develop into anything but the radically defective version of \"empty heroism\" we find in Siegfried. One might, that is, take the Ring to instantiate one of Adorno's more spectacular claims, namely \"Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.\" \"There is no 'right life' in the false life\" (i.e., there is no way for any individual to lead a \"right\/good life\" in a social formation that is itself repressive, duplicitous, and alienated). Adorno uses \"false\" in a nonpropositional way, as the Rhine-maidens do when they describe the whole world of the gods as \"falsch und feig\": \"Traulich und treu \/ ist's nur in der Tiefe; \/ falsch und feig \/ ist, was da oben sich freut!\" (Rheingold, bars 3858\u201368). \"Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen\" is Adorno's version of the old maxim that one cannot be communist man in a capitalist society. This, then, is part of the reason it would be a mistake to try to think about the case of Williams, or that of Adorno, through the lens of the moral category of \"hypocrisy\" in any straightforward way. The moral category designates an individual failing of some kind, which makes some sense primarily in contrast, for instance, to possible sincerity, but what is at issue here is a structural feature of society\u2014if in fact Adorno is right\u2014which makes a fully satisfactory life of complete consistency and sincerity impossible. One can analyse the different ways in which individuals deal with this impossible situation, and even have a more or a less sympathetic reaction to their predicament and to their perhaps different ways of responding to it. If Adorno is right, their predicament is also our predicament and, more pointedly\u2014for me\u2014my predicament. Analysing this situation and discussing attempts to deal with it\u2014all of which are, Adorno believes, failures\u2014seems a very different matter from merely diagnosing \"hypocrisy.\" Had he been able to come to Frankfurt, it seems unlikely that Williams would have been able to avoid taking some explicit position on this.\n\nAt the beginning of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams writes that his position differs from that of most others in that he is more sceptical about the powers of philosophy and about ethical thought as a whole than most of his contemporaries are (3). At the end, however, after holing below the waterline views that depend on too robust a theory of human nature or of rationality, Williams finds himself left with three sparks of optimism: optimism about truth, optimism about truthfulness, and optimism about \"the meaning of individual life\" (198). To lead a life in which a commitment to truth and truthfulness (of one kind or another) plays an important role (to one degree or other) is, of course, a less rigorous demand than living the Stoic or Kantian \"life of reason.\" Even if we are capable of truth and capable of truthfulness, and even if these are important human goals, they are not the only human goals or possibly even the most important ones. As Nietzsche pointed out, the pursuit of truth for its own sake as a value in itself above all others requires a very peculiar configuration of the human soul, one that is not in all its incarnations irresistibly attractive.\n\nAdorno shared Williams's high regard for Nietzsche, remarking in the 1930s that there was \"more truth in the Genealogy of Morality than in [Bukharin's] ABC of Communism.\" However, one of the points of Minima Moralia is that a Nietzschean focus on the individual life as an independent unit of meaningfulness is inappropriate in the social world in which we live, so Williams's relative optimism about the meaningfulness of such a life is not something that should be taken for granted.\n\nWilliams took an extremely dim view of the powers of reason to persuade. He once told me he had only one time in his life seen a case of a person convinced to give up a deeply held belief by the force of rational argumentation. This was when he was the chairman of the Royal Commission on Pornography, one of whose members was a former military man who was completely uninterested in any restrictions on sexual relations between humans or the depiction of such relations but was deeply anxious about bestiality. Men and women could do what they wanted with each other, as far as he was concerned, but what about pictures of men with sheep or cows; surely that could not be allowed. He was finally convinced in a lengthy, emotion-filled session that various arguments that he himself had presented implied that there should be no legal regulation of representations of bestiality either. This man's conversion by the sheer power of reason was so unique in Williams's experience that he never forgot it. Nevertheless, I had high hopes for Williams's own motivational sensitivity to argument and thought that when confronted with Adorno's views in a form in which he could recognize them, he would himself gradually move closer to a more fully socially contextual and less individualist view of meaning and significance in human life.\n\nThis leaves us with no answers and a number of open questions, a result that should not in itself be lethally discouraging if Socrates rather than Kant or Bentham is one's guiding star. Socrates' enquiry is still pre-dogmatic, and although it can be seen as in some sense the origin of \"ethics\" as a discipline, it still stands outside the closed circle that ethics becomes. \"How should one live?\" is amenable to a collective response and the quest for such a response is potentially open-ended.\n\nAmong the open issues is the Hegelian\/Marxist question about the very possibility of a cognitively significant study of the meaningfulness of a mere individual life, if that is undertaken without reference to the wider social context. On at least one reading of the main thrust of this tradition, the question of the meaningfulness of individual life is by no means a universal one but rather arises only under specific social conditions; and what answers, if any, are available to it also depend on historical circumstances. For Marx, in particular\u2014if the question even arises as a \"real\" question, that is, one that grips people\u2014that in turn means that society is deficient. If society was fundamentally in order, the question of meaningfulness would not even arise: either it would be truly incomprehensible or it would be experienced by those living in the society as a merely peculiar oddity, or a form of mental disease, not as something with an existential grip on them. From the fact that in the Soviet era this thought was misused to incarcerate political dissidents in mental institutions, it does not follow that no version of the underlying thought is at all sensible. That the question of the meaningfulness of life does not arise, of course, would not mean that human life in such a society would be a bowl of cherries, for there is presumably a difference\u2014all the difference in the world, some might think\u2014between being sad and being existentially gripped by the meaninglessness of it all.\n\nSo the short, and perhaps all too obvious, answer to the question posed at the start of this chapter is \"yes\" and \"no\": at least during his mature period, which started in the 1980s, Williams was not doing \"ethics,\" if one means by that trying to provide a fully general, rationally based doctrine (a Lehre) that would answer the question \"How should one live?\" Certainly there could be no general doctrine of the good life or of how to live that was based on either of the two traditional central concepts: human nature (as the Aristotelian tradition would have it) or \"rationality\" (in the modern world, perhaps most closely associated with one or another form of Kantianism).\n\n\"How should one live?\" might itself be more ambiguous than traditionally thought, and in any one of its incarnations might be only one of a variety of different practical questions we might sensibly ask, not the hegemonic one dominating all others. All of these questions will have a distinct political dimension, and if one were to insist that part of the point of \"How should one live?\" is that the answer to it would have to give us a general orientation in life that in some sense trumps others, the way to discuss that question would be through a study of history and politics, and the only \"answer\" to this would not be a doctrine but a form of political engagement. \"Universal Reason\" or abstract rationality, to the extent to which it was meaningful at all, was too thin and anodyne to be of any substantial help here. So the forms of traditional ethics Williams is furthest away from are Kantianism, Divine Command versions of Christianity, and utilitarianism; and the form that is closest to him would be some form of Aristotle, or of that modern extended version of Aristotle that Hegel developed. What would, however, finally constitute a barrier between Aristotle and Williams would be the recognition of the role of history. Aristotle had a notion of teleological development, to be sure, but no notion of history and certainly nothing even remotely like the modern idea of a \"historical consciousness.\" This meant that there were very strict limits to an Aristotelian's ability to be fully and appropriately aware of his or her own location in the world and to his or her ability to take a nondogmatic view. Hegel in one sense did know about history, but also assumed it was closed, and connected it with an implausibly powerful and determinate notion of Reason. Ethics, or rather Moralit\u00e4t and Sittlichkeit, play an appropriately subordinate role in Hegel's system, and one might argue that Hegel's achievement lay precisely in showing that a construct like \"the System\" in all its glory was the price one would have to pay for retaining a determinate \"philosophical ethics\" of any kind in the modern world. Suppose now we decided to abandon the narrow limitations imposed on us by traditional ideas of what a \"philosophical ethics\" could (and must) be. Then one could imagine ways of orienting ourselves in the world that went beyond the sorts of things envisaged and discussed in traditional forms of ethics. So general discussions about ourselves, our world, and our place in that world might come to encompass not just the usual tired discussions about what is rational, what has utility, or what is right but also such things as what is an \"eighteenth-century\" social and cultural system, and whether the United States essentially instantiated such a system, whether Siegfried's funeral music was celebratory, elegiac, or something else, and what that might tell us about certain conceptions of individualism. These discussions could be perfectly legitimate successors to the original Socratic enquiry, without being forms of thought that could sensibly be pursued within the confines of philosophical ethics.\n\nIt is Plato's claim that there can be no secure discrimination between good and bad without something like a philosophical ethics, and most philosophers for two thousand years accepted this claim. As Williams points out, though, there seems to be reason to have\u2014to put it mildly\u2014strong reservations about this claim. In the Ion (537a\u2013b), Plato's Socrates discusses the passage in Homer's Iliad (23.335\u201340) in which Nestor gives Antilochus advice about chariot racing: When you come to the turning post, lean over to the left of the horses, and be sure not to graze the posts with your wheel. Socrates gets the rhapsode Ion to admit that a charioteer would know better than a poet whether this is good advice or not, but the next step in Plato's argument, about which he is very coy at the end of Ion but which comes out very clearly in other dialogues, is that a philosopher who ex officio is an expert in ethical theorizing would know even better than a charioteer whether this is good advice. This further step in no way follows and is inherently highly implausible.\n\n\"Ethics\" in the sense he finds objectionable is defined by Williams as motivated by a tacit affirmative answer to the question: \"[Is there] beyond some things that human beings have themselves shaped... anything at all that is intrinsically shaped to human interests, in particular to human beings' ethical interests?\" Western \"ethics\" holds that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations. Sophocles and Thucydides, by contrast, are alike in leaving us with no such sense. Each of them represents human beings as dealing sensibly, foolishly, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes nobly with a world that is only partially intelligible to human agency and in itself not well adjusted to ethical aspirations.\n\nThe assumption on which \"ethics\" rests, that \"at some level of the world's constitution there is something to be discovered that makes ultimate sense of our concerns,\" is illusory.\n\nOn the other hand, the demise of ethics as a philosophical discipline will still leave much of our usual evaluative discourse unaffected. Achilles will still be able to berate Agamemnon as a dog-eyed bundle of shamelessness, ever-greedy for gain (Iliad l.148\u201371), Solon, feigning madness, will still call upon the Athenians to fight for Salamis (Fragment 2), Pindar will still proclaim the respective virtues of water and gold (Olympian 1), and Thucydides will still be able to discuss the merits of the grand strategy of Perikles during the war with the Peloponnesians (2.59\u201365) and the character of Nikias (7.86).\n\nWilliams was very taken with Goethe's translation of the beginning of the gospel of Saint John, \u03ad\u03bd \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u1fc7 \u1f26\u03bd \u1f41 \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03db as \"Im Anfang war die Tat,\" but that is only half the story. The other half is given by Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach: \"Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt darauf an, sie zu ver\u00e4ndern\" (11). We are not, of course, now in a situation in which it is realistically possible for us to envisage any fundamental change in our world that we could ourselves bring about by our own efforts. That perhaps is part of the reason so much of contemporary philosophy seems merely scholastic. Since I also suppose that the operation of various long-term processes will soon make most of the people in the world significantly worse off than they now are, this situation of enforced immobility is extremely unlikely to last long. There is, to be sure, no guarantee that, in the future, constructive change, whatever that will turn out to mean, will in any way be open to us.\n11\n\nThe Wisdom of Oedipus and the Idea of a Moral Cosmos\n\nIn the spring of 1989 the distinguished philosopher Bernard Williams gave the Sather Lectures to the Department of Classics at the University of California at Berkeley, and these lectures were in due course published under the title Shame and Necessity. Many people, including me, consider this to be Williams's finest book, and it is a striking fact about it that it both begins and ends with quotations from the poet Pindar. The exergue, the very first part of the printed book a reader will encounter, is three very famous lines from a poem that Pindar seems to have written very late in his life, the Eighth Pythian. In fact there is some reason to believe that this poem is not just late but the very last poem by Pindar that is extant.\n\n\u1f10\u03c0\u03b1\u03bc\u03ad\u03c1\u03bf\u03b9\u2022 \u03c4\u03af \u03b4\u03ad \u03c4\u03b9\u03c2; \u03c4\u03af \u03b4\u0309 \u03bf\u1f54 \u03c4\u03b9\u03c2; \u03c3\u03ba\u03b9\u1fb6\u03c2 \u1f44\u03bd\u03b1\u03c1\n\n\u1f04\u03bd\u03b8\u03c1\u03c9\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2. \u1f00\u03bb\u03bb\u0309 \u1f43\u03c4\u03b1\u03bd \u03b1\u1f34\u03b3\u03bb\u03b1 \u03b4\u03b9\u03cc\u03c3\u03b4\u03bf\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f14\u03bb\u03b8\u1fc3\n\n\u03bb\u03b1\u03bc\u03c0\u03c1\u1f78\u03bd \u03c6\u03ad\u03b3\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f14\u03c0\u03b5\u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03bd \u1f00\u03bd\u03b4\u03c1\u03c9\u03bd \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bc\u03b5\u03af\u03bb\u03b9\u03c7\u03bf\u03c2 \u03b1\u1f30\u03ce\u03bd [ll. 95\u201397]\n\nWilliams leaves these three lines in Greek without translating them. They aren't actually cryptic in the way in which some parts of poems by Pindar are. That is, it is not the case that one does not know at all what they mean; the general sense is clear, but the mode of expression is exceedingly condensed, polysemous in detail, and pleasingly harsh. Pindar has been drawing the listeners' attention to the instability of good fortune, prosperity, and the pleasures of life (\u03c4\u1f78 \u03c4\u03b5\u03c1\u03c0\u03bd\u03cc\u03bd, l. 93), then comes the cited passage. A prose paraphrase might run:\n\nWe humans have a very brief time of life; we live for only one day. What then can any human being ever finally amount to? And what is forever beyond our grasp? Man is the shadow of a dream. But when a god gives him glory, a bright light plays over him and the span of his life is easy to bear.\n\nIt is easy to romanticise \"last words,\" for instance, to assume that one can find distilled in them the wisdom of a lifetime. We are not, however, absolutely sure whether this is a \"late\" poem by Pindar, and a fortiori we can't be sure it is the last even of his extant works. Why, in any case, assume that final thoughts are better than earlier ones? However this might be, the sentiments expressed here do not seem to be in any special sense the specific products of the reflections at the end of a long and active life, but are meant to formulate an attitude towards life and the world that we can trace everywhere in Pindar's work from the earliest to the latest poems (whichever these are): Human life is essentially both insubstantial and grim; if this seems not to be the case in some particular instance, that is because something outside our control\u2014a god\u2014has for a brief moment given some individual the gift of shining a ray of light on him; we know that that light won't last.\n\nIn contrast to the exergue, which might, but more likely does not contain some special \"last words\" of Pindar, it is natural to think that the very last words of a book are intended to be particularly important, perhaps, in a book of philosophy, to be something like a conclusion. Williams ends Shame and Necessity with a passage from Pindar's Fourth Pythian, which is cited in his own translation\n\nTake to heart what may be learned from Oedipus:\n\nIf someone with a sharp axe\n\nhacks off the boughs of a great oak tree,\n\nand spoils its handsome shape;\n\nalthough its fruit has failed, yet it can give an account of itself if it comes later to a winter fire,\n\nor if it rests on the pillars of some palace\n\nand does a sad task among foreign walls,\n\nwhen there is nothing left in the place it came from.\n\nThis is a peculiar way for Williams to end his book for several reasons. First, it is strange that a major philosopher like Williams would end his own book with someone else's words. In addition, although it is not absolutely unprecedented, it is not exactly usual and customary for a philosopher to end a book by citing a bit of poetry; after all, ever since Plato philosophers have repeatedly tried to establish themselves as practitioners of a discipline which, whatever its form and content, was certainly not a kind of \"poetry.\" Finally, it is extremely odd to end a philosophy book, especially a book of \"analytic philosophy\"\u2014if one accepts that that term has any distinct meaning and that Williams belongs to the tradition of analytic philosophy\u2014with a literary fragment that is itself rather obscure. Analytic philosophy prides itself on its commitment to clarity, so conceivably it might begin with some traditional dark and difficult sayings with the intention of \"clarifying\" them during the course of its own treatment, but it wouldn't, as it were, lead up to and conclude with an enigma. So what exactly does this fragment from Pindar mean and why is it there?\n\nOne of the main theses Williams propounds in all his work on the ancient world is that we cannot go back to a past world and shouldn't even regret too much that we cannot do that. But, he says, \"if we find things of special beauty and power in what has survived from that world, it is encouraging to think we might move beyond marvelling at them, to putting them, or bits of them, to modern uses. An image of Pindar's is right.\" Then comes the text just cited above. I should like to ask first what Williams takes this image of Pindar's to mean and why he thinks it is marvellous and \"right,\" and then say a few words about \"modern uses\" to which it might be put.\n\nThe meaning and significance of the image becomes clear only in the context of the poem as a whole. The Fourth Pythian is an epinikion, a choral poem for public performance celebrating the victory in the chariot race won at the Pythian Games by Arkesilaos, the king of Cyrene, which was a small Greek \u03c0\u03cc\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2 in Libya on the north coast of Africa. It is by far the longest choral poem that has survived from antiquity, comprising thirteen triads, and its political character is also particularly explicit. This ode has an extremely complex structure, and a proper account of it as a work of literature would need to reflect that, but for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to say that it falls into two very unequal parts. I assume here that it is legitimate to divide up texts in different ways depending on the interpreter's purpose. The first part is the standard Pindaric praise of Arkesilaos and his family, mixing together what we would distinguish as real historical stories about his illustrious recent ancestors and the colonisation of the city of Cyrene with what we would call \"mythical stories\" about the exploits of some of his supposed further ancestors back to the time of the Argonauts. The emphasis in this first part is on the continuity of the family to which Arkesilaos belonged and the divine origin of their claim to rule Cyrene. Pindar tells the story of an extremely convoluted series of adventures, peregrinations, and migrations, including the acquisition of a magic clod of earth from a god, a prophecy, and an oracle all documenting the warrant that Arkesilaos's family has to rule Libya, that is, he gives what one might call a \"positive\" genealogy of the Cyrenaic monarchy and Arkesilaos as king.\n\nThis first part is in itself longer, about twice as long in fact, as most of the other epinikia by Pindar that have survived, so, as it were, he could easily have stopped there. However, he does not, and after a brief transition passage Pindar talks directly to Arkesilaos about the current political situation in his kingdom. There obviously has been a stasis, an attempted uprising or coup d'\u00e9tat that has failed, and as a result various aristocrats have been exiled. Although Arkesilaos and the monarchy have survived the coup, the political situation still seems very unsettled. Pindar, or at any rate the \"I\" of the poem, makes a direct appeal to Arkesilaos to heal the political troubles by recalling one of the exiled nobles, Damophilus, to Cyrene. The passage that Williams cites constitutes the point of transition from the first to the second part. So the basic structure is:\n\nPart I: Arkesilaos comes from an illustrious family and has a god-given warrant to rule Cyrene. In addition to this, the gods have made him quick of understanding.\n\nTransition: This is the passage Williams cites at the end of Shame and Necessity: So if, Arkesilaos, you are as quick of understanding as your ancestors were, learn from Oedipus.\n\nPart II: You can be your own physician for the troubles that beset you [\u1f10\u03c3\u03c3\u1f76 \u03b4'\u1f30\u03b1\u03c4\u1f74\u03c1 \u1f10\u03c0\u03b9\u03ba\u03b1\u03b9\u03c1\u03cc\u03c4\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2 (270)]; recall Damophilus from exile; despite everything, he is a good man. This will heal your polis.\n\nTo turn then to the passage Williams himself cites, the Greek text reads:\n\n\u03b3\u03bd\u1ff6\u03d1\u03b9 \u03bd\u1fe6\u03bd \u03c4\u1f70\u03bd \u039f\u1f30\u03b4\u03b9\u03c0\u03cc\u03b4\u03b1 \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b1\u03bd\u2022 \u03b5\u1f30\n\n\u03b3\u03ac\u03c1 \u03c4\u03b9\u03c2 \u1f44\u03b6\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2 \u1f40\u03be\u03c5\u03c4\u03cc\u03bc\u1ff3 \u03c0\u03b5\u03bb\u03ad\u03ba\u03b5\u03b9\n\n\u1f10\u03be\u03b5\u03c1\u03b5\u03af\u03c8\u03b5\u03b9\u03b5\u03bd \u03bc\u03b5\u03b3\u03ac\u03bb\u03b1\u03c2 \u03b4\u03c1\u03c5\u03cc\u03c2, \u03b1\u1f30\u03c3\u03c7\u03cd -\n\n\u03bd\u03bf\u03b9 \u03b4\u03ad \u03bf\u1f31 \u03b8\u03b1\u03b7\u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u03b5\u1f36\u03b4\u03bf\u03c2,\n\n\u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c6\u03b8\u03b9\u03bd\u03cc\u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f10\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c3\u03b1 \u03b4\u03b9\u03b4\u03bf\u1fd6 \u03c8\u1fb6\u03c6\u03bf\u03bd \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1\u2032 \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u1fb6\u03c2,\n\n\u03b5\u1f34 \u03c0\u03bf\u03c4\u03b5 \u03c7\u03b5\u03b9\u03bc\u03ad\u03c1\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd \u03c0\u1fe6\u03c1 \u1f10\u03be\u03af\u03ba\u03b7\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9 \u03bb\u03bf\u03af\u03c3\u03b8\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd,\n\n\u1f22 \u03c3\u1f7a\u03bd \u1f40\u03c1\u03b8\u03b1\u1fd6\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b9\u03cc\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03c3\u03b9\u03bd\n\n\u03b4\u03b5\u03c3\u03c0\u03bf\u03c3\u03cd\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9\u03c3\u03b9\u03bd \u1f10\u03c1\u03b5\u03b9\u03b4\u03bf\u03bc\u03ad\u03bd\u03b1\n\n\u03bc\u03cc\u03c7\u03b8\u03bf\u03bd \u1f04\u03bb\u03bb\u03bf\u03b9\u03c2 \u1f00\u03bc\u03c6\u03ad\u03c0\u03b5\u03b9 \u03b4\u03cd\u03c3\u03c4\u03b1\u03bd\u03bf\u03bd \u1f10\u03bd \u03c4\u03b5\u03af\u03c7\u03b5\u03c3\u03b9\u03bd,\n\n\u1f11\u1f78\u03bd \u1f10\u03c1\u03b7\u03bc\u03ce\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9\u03c3\u03b1\u03b1 \u03c7\u1ff6\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd\n\nOne immediately striking thing about Williams's version is that he seems to have translated the first line in a slightly idiosyncratic way: \u03b3\u03bd\u1ff6\u03d1\u03b9 \u03bd\u1fe6\u03bd \u03c4\u1f70\u03bd \u039f\u1f30\u03b4\u03b9\u03c0\u03cc\u03b4\u03b1 \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b1\u03bd becomes not, as one might expect, \"know the wisdom of Oedipus\" but \"take to heart what may be learned from Oedipus.\" What exactly is going on here? The term \"wisdom,\" which stands out vividly in the original, becomes invisible in the translation.\n\nWhat, then, is this wisdom of Oedipus, what should Arkesilaos learn from it, and what might we be able to learn from it? I suggest there are three possible ways of understanding \"the wisdom of Oedipus.\"\n\nFirst, then, the expression \"the wisdom of Oedipus\" raises the expectation that we will be told the content of that \"wisdom,\" given perhaps a summary of all Oedipus had learned about life in a single pithy saying. This is not in itself an inherently unreasonable expectation. Interspersed with the praise of rulers and athletes, we find in Pindar's epinikia a rather large number of short, pithy, often slightly obscure or ambiguous general observations about the world, nuggets of wisdom, such as\n\n\u039d\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f41 \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03c9\u03bd \u03b2\u03b1\u03c3\u03b9\u03bb\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2\n\n\u03b8\u03bd\u03b1\u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u03c4\u03b5 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f00\u03b8\u03b1\u03bd\u03ac\u03c4\u03c9\u03bd\n\n[\"Customary usage is the King of both mortals and immortals\" (Fr. 169)]\n\n\u03c3\u03ba\u03b9\u1fb6\u03c2 \u1f44\u03bd\u03b1\u03c1 \u1f04\u03bd\u03b8\u03c1\u03c9\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2\n\n[\"Man is the shadow of a dream\" (Pythian VIII, 95\u201396)]\n\n\u03c0\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u03b4\u2032 \u1f00\u03c0\u03af\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c2 \u03bf\u1f50\u03b4\u03ad\u03bd\n\n[\"Nothing seems trustworthy to those who are themselves untrustworthy\" (Fr. 233)]\n\nWisdom-literature in general already had a long history by the time of Pindar. Thus Nietzsche cites the purported archaic \"wisdom of Silenus\" that life is inherently not worth living for humans, but even earlier writers than the ones whom Nietzsche cites recognised a pantheon of seven wise men\u2014they didn't agree on who these seven wise men were, but they were sure there were seven of them\u2014and many of these men were associated with one or more particular pithy sayings summing up their respective forms of wisdom. These ranged from the profound (\"Nothing in excess\"; \"Know thyself\") through the homely (\"Keep control of your tongue, your belly and your private parts\"; \"Resist anger\"; \"Honour old age\"; \"Don't laugh at someone who is down on their luck\") to the cryptic or, frankly, weird. Thus Pythagoras had time between bouts of mathematical mania to issue specimens of wisdom such as \"Abstain from beans.\" We don't know why he thought that only the bean-free life was worth living for man because he does not tell us, but then that is a general characteristic of much of this literature. It only occasionally gives any reason for the gem of wisdom. Diogenes Laertius cites Aristotle as giving five different reasons, including that beans look like the genitals, that each one was \"like the nature of the universe\" (\u03c4\u1f96 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u1f45\u03bb\u03bf\u03c5 \u03d5\u03cd\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9 \u1f45\u03bc\u03bf\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd; D.L. viii.34), and that they are an inherently oligarchical food because they were used in some cities for choosing rulers, and Diogenes himself adds a sixth, namely their tendency to produce flatulence. The huge variety of reasons makes it clear that people did not really know and were just making up plausible-sounding theories for a prohibition whose original significance was lost. Some of these bits of wisdom had esoteric meaning. Thus we are told that \"Don't poke the fire with your knife\" was a saying of Pythagoras. As any little boy knows, there is good reason not to poke a fire with one's knife because the heat of the fire can destroy the tempering of the blade and make it dull. We are told, however, that this really meant: Don't further irritate someone who is already angry. Perhaps the prohibition of beans also had such an esoteric meaning.\n\nNot all expressions of wisdom took the form of prohibitions or injunctions. Thus a sixth-century sage named Phokulides had the archaically charming habit of starting his pithy sayings, which were in verse, with the phrase using his own name and telling you that this is what he thinks: \"This, too, is <a wise saying of> Phokulides.\" This would be a bit like Confucius saying in his own voice: \"Confucius, he say.\" Some of Phokulides' gnomic verses do contain straightforward imperatives or warnings, but others take a less directly injunctive form, for instance,\n\n\u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u03cc\u03b4\u03b5 \u03a6\u03c9\u03ba\u03c5\u03bb\u03af\u03b4\u03bf\u03c5\u2022 \u03c0\u03cc\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2 \u1f10\u03bd \u03c3\u03ba\u03bf\u03c0\u03ad\u03bb\u03c9\u03b9 \u03ba\u03b1\u03c4\u1f70 \u03ba\u03cc\u03c3\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\n\n\u03bf\u1f30\u03ba\u03b5\u1fe6\u03c3\u03b1 \u03c3\u03bc\u03b9\u03ba\u03c1\u1f74 \u03ba\u03c1\u03ad\u03c3\u03c3\u03c9\u03bd \u039d\u03af\u03bd\u03bf\u03c5 \u1f00\u03c6\u03c1\u03b1\u03b9\u03bd\u03bf\u03cd\u03c3\u03b7\u03c2\n\n[This, too, is <a wise saying> of Phokulides: a polis on a rocky outcrop that is living according to proper order, even if it is small, is stronger than imprudent Nineveh.]\n\nThis saying does not tell you what to do to maintain good order in a polis\u2014or how to establish a polis if you do not happen already to live in one\u2014but it does give you a way of orienting yourself in action by presenting a comparative evaluation of two structures.\n\nThis notion of \"good or proper order\" is understandably central to early Greek thought. The expression Phokulides uses, \u03ba\u03b1\u03c4\u1f70 \u03ba\u03cc\u03c3\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u2014\"in good order\" or \"conforming to the proper order\"\u2014is clearly very old and appears, for example, with great frequency in the Homeric epics. There it is often used to describe the effective marshalling of troops for battle: they are arranged in good and proper order for battle. An expression from the same root is used as part of a formulaic description of a leader. Thus, Agamemnon and Menelaus are \u03b4\u03cd\u03c9 \u03ba\u03bf\u03c3\u03bc\u03ae\u03c4\u03bf\u03c1\u03b5 \u03bb\u03b1\u1ff6\u03bd (Il. I.16 [OCT, but punctuation changed]), two marshallers of the people. \"Cosmos\" usually carries with it laudatory overtones, that is, it is a good order. The same word \"cosmos\" is also used to refer to ornaments or adornments of the kind worn by women or put on the harnesses of horses. So it is an inherently beautiful, attractive, or otherwise pleasing kind of order. Diogenes Laertius tells us that the bean-fearing Pythagoras was the first to use the word \"cosmos\" to refer to the sky or the heavens (\u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u03bf\u1f50\u03c1\u03b1\u03bd\u03cc\u03bd, D.L. viii.48). We have no idea, of course, whether this is right. Diogenes is a notoriously relatively late and highly dodgy source, there are serious doubts in fact about whether Pythagoras ever existed, and so a fortiori there must be doubts about whether he used the word kosmos in any sense at all; and even if we knew he did exist and did use the word in some more extensive way, we would not be sure what exactly he meant by it. It is, I think, significant that contrary to what one might have expected, the word kosmos does not occur in Hesiod. Even if Diogenes is completely wrong about Pythagoras, it is important that he has the feeling that it is not natural, self-evident, or universally accepted that one may use the word \"cosmos\" in a more general way, that is, not merely to describe a certain trinket, or a particular form of order in a particular army or city, but to refer to the sky, the heavens, or indeed the world as a whole considered as a unitary, attractively ordered structure. Rather than being obvious, this, he thinks, needs some further explanation, and he thinks there was a time when people did not use \"cosmos\" to refer to the world as a whole, as they did by his time. So there has been, he thinks, a change that is a significant enough conceptual change to require some account of how and when that happened.\n\nHistorians of philosophy have shown a strong tendency to backdate the idea that the physical world at any rate is a unitary whole, sometimes as far back as Thales. I'm not erudite enough to have an interesting opinion on this, so I shall not discuss it, but when some Greek probably in the sixth or very early fifth century BC, whoever he was, first looked out at everything and called it a unitary, attractive structure, something changed. When this idea gradually ceased to be the esoteric speculation of an isolated individual and began to put down roots and have an effect on the wider culture and society, this represents a significant transformation. There had been various stories about what our world was like and how it emerged, about the nature of the gods, about the origin of various human families, about the fate of notable human individuals and groups, and, of course, all humans, as far as we can tell, make certain general assumptions, often unarticulated assumptions, about how the world in which they live is constituted. What is, as it were, added by the use of the concept \"cosmos\" is that all these stories are to be embedded in a single structure that has the property of coherence. They all have finally to fit together beautifully. Once one has the idea that the world constitutes a cosmos, it seems a small further step to think that its beautiful order will be accessible to us in some way: we will be able to see that order or reason our way to some kind of noetic apprehension of it.\n\nEven if many people now might be inclined retrospectively to focus on the importance of construing the physical, biological, and astronomical world as a (unitary) cosmos, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that there is an analogue to this conception in thinking about morality. We can imagine our moral lives as constituting something like a cosmos. Just as, correctly understood, the parts of the material universe cohere nicely, so we might also suppose that our own moral views, correctly understood, were fundamentally unitary, coherent, and accessible to us through reflection, or at any rate that our central beliefs could be put in order\u2014with some minor revisions that we can come to see are necessary\u2014by straightforward means (including simple empirical observation of consequences and reflection). I emphasise that there are (at least) two distinct strands in this. The first is that we can become at least minimally self-transparent to ourselves morally; we can come to know what our moral beliefs are. The second is that these beliefs, or at least an important central core of these beliefs, will turn out to be, or, perhaps with some slight revision, can viably be made to be coherent with each other. If the world of human morality is to form a cosmos, however, one might think it is not enough that all our beliefs about values, principles of action, duties, and so forth can be made coherent and rationally transparent and intelligible to us. The world we encounter must make sense to us and be intelligible as one in which it is possible to live in a way conformable to at least our minimal ethical expectations, aspirations, and demands. The world must, as Williams puts it, be at least minimally \"adjusted to [human] ethical aspirations,\" that is, \"at some level of the world's constitution there is something to be discovered that makes ultimate sense of our concerns.\" To speak of \"the world's constitution\" here also implies that what makes ultimate sense of our concerns has some property of being natural or metaphysically necessary; it is not an accidental or contingent trait or one merely imposed on an inherently indifferent or recalcitrant world. The compatibility of world and morality is out there to be discovered, not something we (or anyone) invent or construct. One might think of this as a third strand in a view of the world as a moral cosmos in the fullest possible sense. The particular way in which the world makes moral sense may be highly complex and the object of sharply diverging speculation, but at some level there must, if the world is a moral cosmos, be a connection between the way the world fundamentally is and our own deepest human interests, particularly our ethical interests.\n\nSince the idea of a \"moral cosmos\" comprises these three elements, the rejection of any one of the three would indicate that this conception was not fully present. Thus if one thinks that self-knowledge is seriously limited so that in some important sense one cannot know what one's own deepest moral beliefs are, this would be toxic for any conception of the world as a moral cosmos. Or if one thought that one's moral beliefs could not be organised into a single more or less stable, consistent system, perhaps because some of them were just irremediably contradictory or were too fluid and kept changing under scrutiny, this, too, would rule out any view of the world as a moral cosmos. Finally, if the external world exhibits no particular morally relevant order at all, if that order is merely local or very fragmentary, or if it is clear that \"nature\" will seriously or even actively thwart us in our attempt to lead a morally good life, the world we live in is not a cosmos.\n\nThere is a traditional conception according to which philosophy is structured around the pursuit of \"wisdom\" of a certain kind. What \"wisdom\" is that? Williams describes the main line of traditional philosophy not as a kind of principled and realistic attempt to come to terms with our world as it is but as a form of addiction to the production and propagation of fantasies of a certain kind. Philosophy, and especially moral philosophy, has exhibited an almost pathologically compulsive need to give humans good news about their situation in the world. \"Good news\" in Greek, of course is \"\u03b5\u1f50\u03b1\u03b3\u03b3\u03ad\u03bb\u03bb\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd,\" so one might say that Williams's project in life was to stop moral philosophy from continuing to be quite as evangelical as it had been in the past. What, though, is the content of the \"gospel\" philosophy has preached? In a word, it is that our world constitutes a \"moral cosmos.\"\n\nFor Williams, the acquisition of this conception that our world is a moral cosmos is a major turning point in intellectual history. There is, he says, a deep \"ditch\" between archaic forms of thought such as those of Pindar, Sophocles, and Thucydides, which distinctly lack the conception of the world as a moral cosmos, and \"philosophical theories\" such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, all of whom in one way or another are committed to this conception. Of course, the \"gospel\" a philosopher preaches can be, as it were, \"thicker,\" more detailed and substantial, and more pleasant for us, or less so. Hegel constitutes one of the extreme poles. On his view, we can come to see that the whole universe, including the world of politics and history, is rational and systematically ordered in such a way as to be amenable to our real interests and aspirations, and thus is potentially a \"home\" for us. Kant has perhaps the thinnest and most minimalist version of the gospel: We cannot know that the external world of nature would even in principle show itself to be malleable to our ethical aspirations, and this is to some extent chastening. On the other hand, however, we can know first that nature has a systematic and rational structure and second that our ethical life is fully coherent, fully intelligible to us, and under our control. We can't know what the actual outcome of our action in the world will be, but, Kant holds, that is morally not relevant because we can know clearly what our duty is and this is morally sufficient. Furthermore, we can have not \"knowledge\" but a rationally grounded hope that all will turn out for the best if only we do our duty.\n\nOne must resist the tendency to think of there being a smooth historical progression from \"tragedy\" to \"philosophy.\" This is not correct because, for one thing, although one of the major tragedians, Aeschylus, does seems to have a very robust sense of the universe as a moral cosmos, in this he seems very different from Sophocles (and also Thucydides). There is, however, a more important reason to reject this way of seeing things. Sophoclean tragedy is about kings and heroic figures\u2014Ajax, Heracles, Creon, Oedipus\u2014but it is also in a deep sense \"realistic\": it is about people (eventually) facing up to the dire situations in which they actually find themselves without flinching and making difficult choices. (Old) comedy, on the other hand, deals with ordinary folk, but it is also an inherently exaggerated and fantastical genre. Archetypically a comedy begins with a disturbed, disordered, and painful situation, for instance a state of war, which is highly unsatisfactory for the protagonist, who is not in any way heroic. In many of the plays of Aristophanes the \"war\" in question is a real one and they were first presented during the Great War between Athens and Sparta. The comic protagonist has a \"bright idea\" that is imaginative but utterly absurd: end the war by making an individual separate peace with the Spartans (Acharians), breed a huge dung-beetle and fly him up to heaven to get peace from Zeus (Peace), have the women go on a sex-strike until the men make peace (Lysistrata), or build a new city of peace in the sky and support it by charging the gods a toll to fly around in heaven (Birds). Each comedy ends, notoriously, with a vivid \"resolution,\" a return of order, or a happy ending often characterised in relatively crude and down-to-earth terms as peace, lots of eating and drinking, music, dancing, and lots of sex. (Old) comedy thus in one way also tells us a kind of \"good news\" that is absent from Sophoclean tragedy\u2014despite appearances we can get back to a life with lots of creature comforts\u2014but only through inventing and activating a bizarre, ludic, and utterly unrealistic mechanism (e.g., founding a \"city-in-the-clouds\"). Philosophy is not the \"natural\" successor of tragedy but, if anything, of comedy. It is a kind of comedy without the humour. The \"resolution\" or \"happy ending\" philosophy envisages is perhaps less Rabelaisian than that of Old Comedy: rationally moderated \u03b5\u1f50\u03b4\u03b1\u03b9\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u03af\u03b1, psychological \u1f00\u03c4\u03b1\u03c1\u03b1\u03be\u03af\u03b1, or metaphysical Vers\u00f6hnung instead of eating, drinking, marriage, feasting, and orgies, but the means are equally delusional and fanciful. Comedy tells us that Trugaios can get out of the painful reality of the Peloponnesian War by mounting his giant dung-beetle; philosophy makes the parallel claim that you can attain harmony, success, and happiness in the world by believing in Reason or God or Duty or Geist or the Ideas. What replaces the jokes is po-faced ratiocination sprinkled with occasional sanctimonious effusions. The two most egregious examples of this are Seneca (whom Nietzsche unforgettably calls the \"Toreador der Tugend\") and Kant (\"Duty! you sublime grand name, you who have nothing attractive about you which would flatter, but who require subjugation.... what is your worthy origin, where does one find the root of your noble decent?\"), but they stand instar omnium.\n\nWhere does this leave the wisdom of Oedipus? This first approach to his wisdom appears to have led nowhere, except to see that whatever the wisdom of Oedipus is, it is not like the evangelical annunciation of the existence of a moral cosmos that is the content of most forms of philosophy. Pindar does not in fact give us any nugget of distilled Oedipean wisdom of any kind that can be formulated in a single pithy saying. Pindar cannot, of course, express by direct assertion in a pithy saying the fact that he lacks the concept of a moral cosmos or that he rejects the idea that human life constitutes a cosmos, if the concept of a moral cosmos is really a later human acquisition.\n\nA second possibility, then, is that Oedipus's wisdom consists in the mastery of a practical skill that cannot be easily summed up in a single saying or a body of doctrine, like the skill of a good diplomat, a good old-style carpenter, or a good military leader. Pindar repeatedly refers to his own skill as a poet as his \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b1, which equally requires the discerning composition of a work that is appropriate to the occasion for which it is commissioned.\n\nThinking about \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b1 in this way immediately mobilises a second expectation: If one asks what notable cognitive skill did Oedipus have, one likely answer will be that he was good at guessing riddles. As Williams notes, the ancient scholiast takes this reference to \"the wisdom of Oedipus\" in exactly this sense, when he remarks on this passage: \u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03c4\u03c1\u03ad\u03c0\u03b5\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u1f08\u03c1\u03ba\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03bb\u03b1\u03bf\u03bd \u1f41 \u03a0\u03b9\u03bd\u03b4\u03ac\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u03c3\u03c5\u03bd\u03bf\u03c1\u1fb6\u03bd \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03c4\u1f78 \u03b1\u1f34\u03bd\u03b9\u03b3\u03bc\u03b1. \u03c4\u1f78 \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u039f\u1f30\u03b4\u03b9\u03c0\u03cc\u03b4\u03b1 \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b1\u03bd \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c4\u03bf \u03b2\u03bf\u03cd\u03bb\u03b5\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9, \u1f45\u03c4\u03b9 \u03ba\u1f00\u03ba\u03b5\u1fd6\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2 \u03c4\u1f78 \u03c4\u1fc6\u03c2 \u03a3\u03c6\u1fd6\u03b3\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 \u03b1\u1f34\u03bd\u03b9\u03b3\u03bc\u03b1 \u1f14\u03bb\u03c5\u03c3\u03b5\u03bd. [\"Pindar is trying to get Arkesilaos to see the relevance of his riddle. The phrase 'wisdom of Oedipus' refers to the fact that he, too, was able to solve a riddle, that of the Sphinx.\"] So the scholiast takes the whole image of the oak that is chopped down and then used in the fire or as a part of a building as a \"riddle.\" In the version of the story with which most of us are familiar, there is both a problem and a riddle. The riddle is the question the Sphinx asks; the problem is that she kills people if they can't answer her riddle. These are connected, but they are not the same thing. It is one thing to exercise the relatively detached cognitive capacity that allows one to find the answer to a riddle; this is like doing a crossword puzzle, or solving an anagram, or proving a proposition in elementary logic. It is another to solve a pressing practical problem that requires one to respond to the exigencies of some current situation. Just as these two things are combined in the Sphinx's questioning, so they are also combined in Oedipus's response. He solved the riddle of the Sphinx by applying it to the present situation and himself, and discovered that by solving the riddle he had also resolved the problem, because the Sphinx killed herself when her riddle didn't terminally stump him. In addition, as has often been pointed out, Oedipus was himself the solution to the riddle: He was the thing that walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening (namely a human being). So the progression would be:\n\n(a) You, Arkesilaos, have the problem of governing this unruly city.\n\n(b) You come from a family renowned for their good counsel, so learn to solve my riddle, as Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx.\n\n(c) Like Oedipus, you can yourself be the solution to your problem; just realise that Damophilus is like that oak log I have just described; the log is displaced but still useful. Recall Damophilus and use him well.\n\nThe parallel is not exact because solving Pindar's riddle is not at the same time solving the problem of stasis in Kyrene, and there seem to be two parties to Pindar's riddle\u2014Arkesilaos and Damophilus\u2014rather than one. Still there is sufficient similarity to support the comparison and the image.\n\nWilliams does not completely reject the view put forward by the scholiast, but he also argues that there is another, a third, possible way of reading this passage that makes it, in his words, \"more interesting.\" The third possibility is that what is called \"the wisdom of Oedipus\" is not a detachable skill that Oedipus exercises, such as guessing riddles, but rather that we can acquire wisdom of some kind by observing under the right circumstances the way in which he acts. So think of the phrase \"learn the wisdom of Oedipus\" as meaning \"learn wisdom from thinking about the actions and fate of Oedipus.\" Of course, I can learn wisdom even from studying a case of someone who does not himself instantiate wisdom. I can, for instance, to some extent learn wisdom by observing the mistake of exercising or failure to exercise wisdom, just as I can learn something about the importance of avoiding indecisiveness in war by studying the actions and fate of Nikias in Sicily or, for that matter, just as I can learn the importance of informed knowledge and moderation in aggression by studying the folly of the Athenian decision to send a military expedition to Sicily in the first place.\n\nNote that Williams's reading need not imply that Oedipus is not in his own way wise, merely that in this context the point is not whether or not he is wise but whether or not Arkesilaos can make a \"wise modern use\" of thinking about Oedipus's life and fate. Pindar then gives Arkesilaos an indication of how he should learn from Oedipus. This indication is not in the form of a discursive explanation of Oedipus's fate or the explicit drawing of a moral from it but in the form of an image. You can learn from Oedipus if you think of him and his life as figured in the fate of the oak tree. Let me for the purposes of analysis distinguish two aspects of Oedipus-as-oak-tree. First of all, the oak tree is described as absolutely separated from anything that could be called the \"natural\" conditions of flourishing. It has been cut down with violence, its natural beauty has been defiled, its fruit has withered, it has been taken away from its natural place and thus left that place desolate.\n\nAristotle, who is one of the most thoroughgoing and explicit theorists of the moral cosmos, tended to think of human moral life as analogous to biological phenomena. Humans and their environment are \"naturally\" suited to each other. A good human being is one who functions well in that environment, and thereby does well and fares well (\u03b5\u1f56 \u03c0\u03c1\u03ac\u03c4\u03c4\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd means both of these things in Greek). One does well and fares well if one is fully realising one's nature and thus flourishing. Part of that nature, if one is a human being, may consist in having the right kind of life, ideally in a polis, and having the right beliefs, among them beliefs about how humans should act. An oak tree is good if it fares well, that is, flourishes, but, given its nature, it need not have the right beliefs of any kind. It flourishes if it grows tall and broad and produces, in the right season, lots of green leaves and acorns. Its \"nature\" is to produce further oak trees, not to burn in a fire. From the point of view of the oak tree, then, the situation in which it has had its branches lopped off, has no \"fruit\" (acorns), and is either burning in a fire or supporting a roof is about as far removed from one in which the world shows itself to be a cosmos as one could possibly imagine. Its deepest interest and aspiration, an interest in its own flourishing, has been shown to be a matter of utter indifference to the most powerful forces that structure its world.\n\nYou might say that although the oak is not itself flourishing, its consumption in the fire is causing the life of the householder in whose fireplace it burns to flourish. The failure of the oak to produce acorns and reproduce itself is part of the ability of the householder to live in warmth, cook his food, and so forth. Well, what if the householder is Oedipus? He doesn't look to be exactly flourishing either. Look, then, philosophers will say, not at him but at the polis. Perhaps his catastrophic life is necessary that the polis may flourish. One could continue in this way, appealing at each stage to \"the bigger picture.\" In fact, philosophers are likely to say, one must in principle be able to continue in this way until one gets a final picture. Kant, oddly enough, was the one of the four philosophers whom Williams cites who experienced the greatest theoretical discomfort with this procedure. He knew that the idea of a final picture, and thus of a cosmos, didn't make sense, and so we could never know that the world was compatible with the demands of morality. The fact that we could never know this, however, terrified him, and so he reintroduced the harmony between the world and our moral sense not as an object of knowledge but as a mere postulated object of faith and hope. Kant, could not, of course, even conceive of the possibility that our moral sentiments themselves might not form a single coherent system. To the main line of the philosophers the archaic thinkers might be imagined to reply: we don't know the final big picture, don't even know if it exists, and to the extent to which we can speculate about it, it seems very different from your conception. It is not notably characterised by coherence and moral order but by conflict, ignorance, and accident. When Plato proposes that this world of shame, confusion, sterility, and so forth must end in some bigger more harmonious whole that in some sense we can picture or describe in logoi, Pindar might respond by saying: Why \"must\"? Yours is a poetic phantasy, like various of mine, but less plausible.\n\nThe second aspect of the comparison refers not so much to the external circumstances but to the judgements we make, respectively, about the oak tree and Oedipus. The oak log and Oedipus are clearly being cited here as positive exempla. They are to be admired and emulated. Pindar presents that judgement pointedly when he \"writes\":\n\n\u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c6\u03b8\u03b9\u03bd\u03cc\u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f10\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c3\u03b1 \u03b4\u03b9\u03b4\u03bf\u1fd6 \u03c8\u1fb6\u03c6\u03bf\u03bd \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1' \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u1fb6\u03c2\n\nWilliams translates this as:\n\n\"Although its fruit has failed, yet it <the oak tree> can give an account of itself.\"\n\nWilliams was a more than competent scholar of Greek so this translation is not wrong, but it is to be noted that \"give an account of\" has become for us the standard translation of a philosophical phrase repeatedly used by the Platonic Socrates: \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03bd \u03b4\u03b9\u03b4\u03cc\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9, which means to give a discursive account of oneself that justifies what one thinks or does by reference to good reasons. When Williams writes that the oak tree (and Oedipus) give an account of themselves, however, this is meant not in the sense in which Socrates asks people to give an account of themselves but in the sense in which we speak of a boxer giving a good account of himself in the ring. We might also say he \"showed his mettle\" or \"showed what he was made of.\" This does not mean that the boxer can explain or justify anything or that he has won the match. In place of a \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 Pindar here speaks of a \u03c8\u1fc6\u03c6\u03bf\u03c2: \u03b4\u03b9\u03b4\u03bf\u1fd6 \u03c8\u1fb6\u03c6\u03bf\u03bd \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1\u2032 \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u1fb6\u03c2. (In the following I shall use the Attic form of Pindar's Doric \u03c8\u1fb6\u03c6\u03bf\u03c2, because it will be more familiar to most contemporary readers of Greek.)\n\nA \u03c8\u1fc6\u03c6\u03bf\u03c2 is a small stone, and then by extension it came to mean a vote since such stones were also used as counters of various kinds, for instance, in board games, and then in various kinds of decision procedures. The fundamental fact about a decision taken by casting a vote, however, is that under normal circumstances to give a vote is not to give an account in the platonic sense. In voting for candidate X I need not give any account of why I am doing that. I don't have to have reasons; a vote is usually opaque, a black box. Part of the reason democratic politics is so obscure is that a vote does not carry its own reason on its sleeve, and in fact it is valid even if the voter has no reason and has cast it at random or for utterly indiscernible, perverse, or irrelevant reasons.\n\nPhilologists, however, tell us that \u03b4\u03b9\u03b4\u03cc\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c8\u1fc6\u03c6\u03bf\u03bd does not mean, as one might expect if one is coming to the text with assumptions derived from the structure of English, \"give a judgement,\" that is, vote for (or against) something\u2014that, apparently, would be \u03c6\u03ad\u03c1\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd \u03c8\u1fc6\u03c6\u03bf\u03bd\u2014but rather it means \"submit to a vote\" or \"put a case to a vote.\" That is, the oak, when it holds up the roof (or even when it burns in the fire), allows and invites people to judge it and see what kind of thing it is. The boxer who goes into the ring allows one to judge his mettle, see what kind of account of himself he can give.\n\nThe implication of this line is not just that the oak tree puts forward its case and submits to judgement but that the judgement made will be positive. The log is presented here in the poem, after all, as a kind of model to be emulated. So the notional \"judges\" will vote that this is a \"good\" log because it burns well in the fire or supports a ceiling well (despite the fact that it has no leaves or precisely because of this). The log is judged to be doing well\/faring well (\u03b5\u1f56 \u03c0\u03c1\u03ac\u03c4\u03c4\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd again, vide supra). Who, however, is imagined to be doing the judging and from what point of view? In a world that is not a moral cosmos there may be no absolutely definitive, authoritative answer to these questions. Some humans see it this way; others that way; the Olympians gods see it this other way; various chthonic agents, Furies, demons, and so forth have their own different views; perhaps Fate herself has a view, but that is just one more view among many. Nevertheless even if it ends up in the fire the log has done well and passes the judgement with high marks, even if that is merely based on an accidental conjunction of points of view that do not always coincide or a contingent preponderance of ballots cast for different reasons. That is not nothing.\n\nThis is not to say that the oak might not fail to receive a good judgement, just as the boxer can fail to give a good account of himself in the ring. This sense of \"failure\" is distinct from technical failure in the \"competitive\" sense. The boxer may show his mettle but lose the match, but he may also win the match and still have put up a poor showing. Perhaps his opponent was even worse than he was, or perhaps he wins on a technicality. Similarly, Pindar canvasses two possible outcomes for the oak log: the fire or serve as a roof support. Both of these can be seen (by humans) as useful functions. What about the possibility, however, that the oak branch is stripped off but then dropped accidently and simply allowed to rot in the place where it falls, or what if the oak branch when it is stripped from a seemingly healthy tree shows itself to be internally rotten? The oak then does not obviously give a very good account of itself. Part of the reason Pindar mentions only the two (potentially constructive) outcomes, the fire or the roof beam, is perhaps that the epinikion is inherently a poem of praise and so always focused on positive achievement, even though Pindar is aware that such achievement is exceptional, easily destroyed, and dependent on factors outside anyone's control. Pindar is not an evangelist and his form of praise, with its great emphasis on a \u03c6\u03c5\u03ac (good natural endowment) and \u03ba\u03b1\u03b9\u03c1\u03cc\u03c2 ([skill in choosing] the nonrecurring opportune moment to act), is not equivalent to, or dependent on, philosophical \"good news.\"\n\nIn a famous essay Williams analysed the career of the painter Paul Gauguin as an instance of what he called \"moral luck.\" Gauguin abandoned his wife and child to a life of poverty in order to pursue a life of painting in the South Seas. By the normal standards of accepted morality he is to be condemned for doing this. However, he had the moral luck that he turned out to be exceptionally talented at painting and that he lived long enough to realise that talent in a series of highly impressive works. The fact that he did turn out to have great talent and did produce a body of marvellous work affects, Williams claims, the judgement\u2014even the moral judgement\u2014we will make on him. Pindar's example of the oak log is much more radical than this. After all, Gauguin wanted to paint, and he turned out to achieve extraordinary things. The oak log \"wanted,\" if one can use that expression\u2014and since the whole passage depends on what later rhetorical theory would call \"personification\" there is no reason not to use that expression\u2014to stay on the mountain and produce acorns. Similarly, the oak tree is a kind of model not just when it does something extraordinary, like holding up a palace roof, but even when it does something completely commonplace, like burning in the fire, something any old bundle of twigs or even a bit of rubbish can do.\n\nOedipus's case, too, is even more complex than Gauguin's. Gauguin got what he wanted: he lived the life of a painter, and in that sense his life was a success by his own standards. There is no obvious sense in which Oedipus's life was a \"success\" from his own point of view, and it is hard to see that he has \"flourished\" in any sense recognisable by himself or other humans: he did solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and that is a singular achievement, but he ends up like the oak tree as a shameful sight, enmeshed in a web of violence bereft of descendants. Nevertheless he can put himself forward like the oak tree in the hope, presumably, that others will vote that he was a sad plaything of fate and has made the best he could of the situation in which he found himself, that of acting under truly weird circumstances over which he had no control. One might say, though, what does \"giving the best account of himself\" mean if not that we, the notional \"judges\" who are to cast our ballots wither for him or against him, judge him by certain standards, criteria, perhaps rules? These will be standards we use. So giving the vote to him is not just random but follows rules or principles. If this is the case, then it might be possible theoretically to specify those rules. Of course that is correct, but then one would have merely the set of rules a certain person or group of people use. Other human individuals or other groups might use other rules. There might be different groups of gods (Olympians and chthonic deities) who were in conflict with each other and whose moral views differed. Even within a single group, for instance, the Olympian gods, some particular gods might enforce on humans different rules from those that other gods would wish to enforce\u2014think of Euripides' Hippolytus\u2014and even if the Olympians all agreed with each other, their evaluations might differ from or conflict with ours\u2014think of the treatment of Heracles in Sophocles' Trachiniai and Euripides' Hercules Furens\u2014and even if all the diverse kinds of gods and all men agreed on some set of rules for distributing votes about who is to be admired, there is no reason to assume the world is set up so as to be amenable to these rules, whatever \"amenable\" might mean. After all, it is not as if anyone in this period thought that the world as a whole was \"created\" by any one of the gods; rather we repeatedly find suggestions that there are forms of \"necessity\" active in the world to which both gods and men are subject, and \"necessity,\" powerful as it is, is not usually moralised.\n\nDamophilus is in a situation similar to that of the oak tree (or to Oedipus). He, too, has been ripped out of the natural context for his human flourishing and is making the best of it. Arkesilaos is not a stripped branch with no fruit (\u03c6\u03b8\u03b9\u03bd\u03cc\u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2); he has been successful in retaining his throne in \"fruitful\" Libya (\u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03c0\u03bf\u03c6\u03cc\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u039b\u03b9\u03b2\u03cd\u03b1, line 6) despite civil unrest and an attempted coup, and he has plucked the fruit (\u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03c0\u03cc\u03c2) of a Pythian victory. Even he, though, even if he \"deserves\" it, cannot count on his continuing success and good fortune. No one can because our world is not a moral cosmos. Human forms of valuation have neither consistency, coherence, nor any particular purchase on reality.\n\nI have always found it striking and important that although Pindar wrote a large number of victory odes and was obviously keen on athletics and fascinated by athletic success, he is also wise enough never, as far as I know, to compare human life to a race. In an Olympic or Pythian race there was a clear \"point of view,\" a clear set of judges and clear rules: those who started before the starting order was given were whipped and disqualified; the first one over the goal got a wreath; the others slunk home in shame (Ol. VIII.65\u201370). This might be crude\u2014there was a distinction in some events between those for men and for boys, but still all boys raced together without further handicaps\u2014and brutal, but it was regulated. Human life is distinctly not like that. It is not that life is completely chaotic, that we can find no order whatever in any part of it, or even that we cannot give ourselves good rules of thumb, such as \u03bc\u03b7\u03b4\u1f72\u03bd \u1f04\u03b3\u03b1\u03bd, which will hold in a number of different circumstances, although not with Kantian universality. We can construct small islands of rules and \"good order\" such as that which holds in Phokulides' \"polis on the rocky outcrop\"\u2014such a polis then is a small cosmos\u2014but that is a local order (i.e., it does not hold, nor had anything analogous held in Nineveh), it won't last forever\u2014where are those little poleis today\u2014it won't always survive external assault or internal stasis. Furthermore, it is constructed and maintained (for as long as it is maintained) by dint of great human exertion; it not \"found.\"\n\nPindar in fact seems rather to suggest that we cannot even expect to be able always to create local order by our own unaided efforts. Just after the passage Williams cites from the Fourth Pythian, Pindar has his chorus sing\n\n\u1fe5\u1fb4\u03b4\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd \u03bc\u1f72\u03bd \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u03c0\u03cc\u03bb\u03b9\u03bd \u03c3\u03b5\u1fd6\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f00\u03c6\u03b1\u03c5\u03c1\u03bf\u03c4\u03ad\u03c1\u03bf\u03b9\u03c2\u00b7\n\n\u1f00\u03bb\u03bb\u1fbd \u1f10\u03c0\u1f76 \u03c7\u03ce\u03c1\u03b1\u03c2 \u03b1\u1f56\u03c4\u03b9\u03c2 \u1f15\u03c3\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9 \u03b4\u03c5\u03c3\u03c0\u03b1\u03bb\u1f72\u03c2 \u03b4\u1f74 \u03b3\u03af\u03bd\u03b5\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9, \u1f10\u03be\u03b1\u03c0\u03af\u03bd\u03b1\u03c2\n\n\u03b5\u1f30 \u03bc\u1f74 \u03b8\u03b5\u1f78\u03c2 \u1f01\u03b3\u03b5\u03bc\u03cc\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03c3\u03b9 \u03ba\u03c5\u03b2\u03b5\u03c1\u03bd\u03b7\u03c4\u1f74\u03c1 \u03b3\u03ad\u03bd\u03b7\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9 [ll. 272\u201374]\n\n[It is easy even for feeble people to shake and throw down the city  \nBut very difficult to set it back up on its feet again  \nUnless suddenly a god acts as the steersmen for the leaders]\n\nNote that this does not say that a god will always come to the aid of those trying to put the city back into order, or even that if the leaders are good and skillful some god will come to their aid. Rather, I suggest, than asserting that the world is a moral cosmos, this seems rather to indicate how much distance separates Pindar from any such idea.\n\nTo what \"modern use,\" then, can we put any of these archaic ideas? I don't like the term \"use\" in this context because it suggests that one can detach individual concepts or conceptions from their original context and apply them atomistically to pre-given problems. It suggests that there is a detachable \"wisdom\" to be found in them that can be extracted. It might be that one can learn something from thinking about the life and works of these archaic figures, Pindar, Sophocles, and Thucydides in the first instance, without it being the case that what one learns can be \"used\" in any direct way. This is in one way like, but in another unlike, the situation of Arkesilaos. Arkesilaos, on Williams's reading, can \"learn\" something from Oedipus although that is not a formulatable piece of \"wisdom,\" and perhaps the same is true of us when we read Pindar or Sophocles. However, Arkesilaos is presented by Pindar with a clearly structured issue and a favoured policy or course of action: Learn from Oedipus and recall Damophilus from exile. Our situation may be different in that we do not know exactly what our \"issues\" are.\n\nWilliams certainly thought, as his friend and sometime teacher Isaiah Berlin did, that the idea of a moral cosmos was by no means dead in the modern world. One might describe it as having gone into hiding. It is perhaps a thought which for its proper formulation depends on a particular metaphysical language that is out of fashion in the modern world. Nevertheless, the idea of our world as constituting a moral cosmos continued to exercise a considerable influence from its invisible lair. No Kantian and few mainstream liberals could envisage that our moral intuitions and our values might not form a beautiful whole but that on the contrary they irremediably conflict with each other.\n\nI first read Pindar's Fourth Pythian in 1968, when as a student in Freiburg\/Br. in Germany I took an Oberseminar on the poem in the Classics Faculty. This, of course, was a momentous year. In January the T\u00eat Offensive took place, which made it clear that the United States would eventually lose its colonial war in Indochina. Then Europe was convulsed by the upsurge of anarcho-syndicalist activism, which goes by the name \"May 68\" and which at the time seemed to be the beginning of something significant but in retrospect marked the beginning of the end of an era. Finally in August the forces of the Warsaw Pact invaded the \u010cSSR, demonstrating that the Soviet system of the time was incapable of internal reform. This turned out in retrospect, I think, to be a particularly propitious time to be reading Pindar. We are familiar with what are now called \"win-win\" situations, but 1968 was a kind of \"lose-lose\" situation in Western Europe and the United States. Whatever your view about the world or about rationality, it was hard to see the situation as one in which rational structures were successfully reproducing themselves, or the world was showing itself amenable to our ethical life, or things were moving in a positive constructive direction. Whatever the world was, it certainly did not resemble a rational cosmos. Having reason on your side was not much of an advantage, if in fact you could discern where reason lay.\n\nNo one can force philosophers to hold particular views, and this is especially true with regard to ethics. If a philosopher, at any rate a sophisticated philosopher, denies the existence of the external world, one can be moderately sure that such a philosopher will have much to tell one about what he or she exactly means by \"deny,\" \"existence,\" \"external,\" and \"world,\" and probably a lot to tell one about a variety of other matters. Still it is possible to follow Dr. Johnson and \"refute\" this thesis by kicking a stone. This will not end the argument if the philosopher in question is at all worth his or her salt, but, especially in a public forum, Dr. Johnson's is unlikely to be entirely without effect, even if one feels inclined to denigrate this effect by calling it \"merely rhetorical.\"\n\nWhat about the issue under discussion here, the existence of a moral cosmos? Williams holds the general view that ethics is characterised by a weaker degree of \"objectivity\" than science. In the absence of any strong notion of objectivity in matters of ethical theory, one can easily imagine moral philosophers adopting the \"dig-in-your-heels, hunker-down, and grit-your-teeth\" approach in their desperate attempt to hold onto the idea that our basic moral beliefs are transparently accessible to us and consistent with each other. After all, it is not difficult to attain at least a strong semblance of coherence in one's views if one is willing simply to discard large swathes of one's beliefs, and this is all the easier the looser the fit between \"moral beliefs\" and the world. Most philosophers of a certain age will have memories of the Primitive-Utilitarians who used to infest odd corners of neglected departments. They would attempt to vindicate the ultimate coherence of ethics by simple dogged persistence, by holding fast to their preferred version of utilitarianism and refusing to budge from it, despite the gruesome and counterintuitive consequences of their view. You simply couldn't talk these people out of their view because, when all else failed, they simply stopped listening or accepted any unpalatable consequence of their view that one pointed out. \"Yes, we should redistribute body parts ad libitum if it will maximize utility,\" they would say. One had the sense that at some level they must have known the disrepute into which they brought themselves by brazenly accepting these consequences, but they apparently learned to tolerate this psychic pain this must have caused, while retaining an impassive countenance. Nowadays it is likely to be Kantians who adopt this teeth-grinding attitude: \"You must never lie, just because you must never; if you don't admit that you are not being rational.\" This method will allow one to continue to affirm the existence of a coherent moral cosmos, if one wishes and one can tolerate the price one must pay. Instead of conducting endless and compulsive discussions of the possibility of a pure amoralist, perhaps it might make more sense for us to think about this phenomenon and what it tells us about moral life (apart from the fact that some of its theorists are pathological cases). That reasoning in fact utterly fails here is not completely insignificant.\n\nIt is a mistake to expect the world to make moral or human sense. That it does not is something one must simply accept. One might be tempted here to assert this as the contents of a new kind of wisdom, a wisdom of modesty, self-restraint, and acceptance. This is certainly not Pindar's way for two reasons. First, his career as a poet is dominated by the praise not of lowly men who know their own limits but of aristocrats who glory in their self-assertion, grandeur, and external success, in the \u03bb\u03b1\u03bc\u03c0\u03c1\u1f78\u03bd \u03c6\u03ad\u03b3\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 that plays around them (even if just for a moment) when they win the race. Second, the wisdom of acceptance is not real solution, and its value can easily be overestimated:\n\n\u03a4\u03af \u1f14\u03bb\u03c0\u03b5\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03af\u03b1\u03bd \u1f14\u03bc\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd, \u1f03\u03bd \u1f40\u03bb\u03af\u03b3\u03bf\u03bd \u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\n\n\u1f00\u03bd\u1f74\u03c1 \u1f51\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1 \u1f00\u03bd\u03b4\u03c1\u1f78\u03c2 \u1f34\u03c3\u03c7\u03b5\u03b9;\n\n\u03bf\u1f50 \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u1f14\u03c3\u03b8' \u1f45\u03c0\u03c9\u03c2 \u03c4\u1f70 \u03b8\u03b5\u1ff6\u03bd\n\n\u03b2\u03bf\u03c5\u03bb\u03b5\u03cd\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4' \u1f10\u03c1\u03b5\u03c5\u03bd\u03ac\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9 \u03b2\u03c1\u03bf\u03c4\u03ad\u1fb3 \u03d5\u03c1\u03ad\u03bd\u03b9\u2022\n\n[What do you expect wisdom to be, in which\n\nOne man surpasses another only by a little?\n\nFor there is no way for the mortal mind\n\nto find out what the gods plan] [Fr. 61 (33) Paeanes]\n\nSo grim is our situation that not even having wisdom will do us much good. The term I have rendered as \"expect\" (\u1f14\u03bb\u03c0\u03b5\u03b1\u03b9) is etymologically closely associated with the word that eventually establishes itself as the term for \"hope\" (\u1f14\u03bb\u03c0\u03b9\u03c2). The \"good news\" philosophy preaches is a message of deceptive \"hope\" to which Pindar, Sophocles, and Thucydides did not fall victim.\n12\n\nWho Was the First Philosopher?\n\nOne might think that this question has no answer because it is badly formulated. It might, that is to say, be thought to make two incorrect assumptions. First, it seems to assume that \"philosophy\" is an individual or even solitary activity like swimming the Tiber or bringing down a particular kind of bird with a boomerang. Provided we can agree on rough and ready \"definitions\" of the entities and activities in question\u2014homo sapiens, not one of our near simian relatives; \"swimming,\" not \"floating\" or \"being borne along by the current\"; \"boomerang,\" not \"stick\" (and this is a big \"if\")\u2014we could in principle answer these questions, although, for contingent epistemic reasons we are unlikely actually to know who this was in either case. On the other hand, it would make no sense even in principle to ask \"Who was the very first chess player?\" because playing chess requires two people. As Hegel pointed out, it is a mistake to think of the history of philosophy as a series of activities performed by a succession of individual men or as the result of such an activity; it is inherently a collective social enterprise. The model for philosophy is not Thales noting that the waters of the Nile rise at the same time every year and wondering why that might be the case\u2014that is perhaps (one of) the origin(s) of science. The paradigm for philosophy is the encounter between Socrates and Euthyphro, who is on the way to indict his father for the murder of a slave. This encounter becomes an instance of philosophising when Socrates asks Euthyphro what's up, and, more important, when Euthyphro enters into extended conversation with Socrates and tries to respond to his questions. Extended monological speeches \u00e0 la Protagoras or Gorgias may or may not be edifying, but whatever else they might be they are definitely not philosophy, which consists of a joint attempt to thrash out some agreed-on conclusion in discussion, whether that attempt is successful or fails. In any case, as in chess, it takes (at least) two to philosophise. Friedrich Schlegel gets the emphasis wrong in praising the importance of \"Symphilosophie\" only to the extent to which his use of this term suggests that the social dimension is a mere desideratum, as if there could be such a thing\u2014albeit a slightly deficient thing\u2014as philosophy that was not a collective activity.\n\nNietzsche was not so keen on the idea of philosophy as a social enterprise, preferring a more traditionalist and heroic conception, but he can be seen as raising a second kind of objection to the initial question. He criticises all forms of analysis of any continuing human practise that refer it to a purported unique \"origin.\" He is especially scathing about attributing the origin of enduring institutions to individual \"founders\": Christianity \"founded\" by Jesus, democracy \"founded\" by Cleisthenes, philosophy \"founded\" by Thales, Pythagoras, or Socrates. It is deeply misguided to look for a single origin for anything that has had extended historical significance. The \"genealogical\" mode of arguing, in which purportedly unitary \"origins\" are shown in reality to be contingent conjunctions of diverse and varied antecedents, is now a commonplace. It is a development of a strand in Nietzsche's thought one might call \"positivist.\" Nietzsche himself, after all, emphasised that \"genealogy\" as he practised it was a \"grey\" science with affinities to the driest kind of archival research. This conception of what he was trying to do is somewhat at odds with his actual practise. If \"genealogy\" really is a form of quasi-archival history rather than, for instance, a philosophical fairy tale something like \"state of nature\" narratives one finds in some philosophical works, or the description of historical process using something like a series of Weberian ideal types, then it should be possible to ask and answer the questions: Who exactly are \"the masters\" and \"the slaves\" in the narrative? When precisely did the \"slave uprising\" take place? Notoriously there is no answer to these questions, and Nietzsche treats this as no objection to his account. Perhaps it is the constant shift between levels of analysis\u2014from discussions of \"masters\" where it is left open whether they are Arab, Japanese, or Germanic aristocrats to the concrete details of early Roman history\u2014which constitutes part of the point of the exercise. However, in addition to these two modes, the archival and the ideal typical, the early Nietzsche recognised another possibility that only very gradually came to be sidelined in his thinking and perhaps never completely lost its grip on his imagination. Richard Wagner had wanted to replace conceptual and historical thinking with what he called \"mythic\" thought. As a dramatist Wagner was particularly keen on removing the historical element in theatre. Shakespeare's historical plays, Wagner thought, were the worst kind of literature; drama must deal not with real, and thus contingent, historical figures and their vicissitudes, like Henry V, but with \"mythic\" figures like Oedipus, Siegfried, or King Lear. It was one of the glories of Attic tragedy, in stark contrast to comedy, that it did not in general deal with real history or present onstage real historical characters. The Persians (about the Persian Wars, which were part of contemporary memory at the time the play was written) was apparently to be considered an exception, and even The Persians mentions no individual Greek by name. \"Myth\" formulated not what had happened to occur but inherent structures of meaningfulness. Henri V happened to win at Agincourt, but what happened to Tristan and Isolde, to Siegmund and Sieglinde, or to Siegfried and Wotan was not simply an accident: there is a kind of necessity about the way in which primordial eros breaks down any existing social relationships and about the way in which the primordial aggression that characterises the relation between son and father can express itself in violence. In Wagner's view what he called \"the state\" was a coercive structure that controlled and repressed these basic human urges and the form the coercion took was to make us unaware of our own real nature. The state could continue to exist only to the extent to which it was capable of continuing successfully to keep us in ignorance about this \"mythical\" level of human existence. His own work, he thought, derived its power from his ability to tap these primitive human urges that were present in everyone and bring them to the awareness of the members of his audience. To this extent his operas were all by their very nature politically revolutionary.\n\nEarly in his life Nietzsche was close to Wagner's views about myth, though, of course, he held them in a highly metaphysical and radically de-politicised form: In The Birth of Tragedy he strove to overcome conceptual and historical forms of thinking and replace them with mythology. The Birth of Tragedy, a work that even in its very literary form, for instance its lack of footnotes, rejects the existing standards of scholarship, is organised not as a proper history or an analytic account of tragedy but as a mythic narrative of the doings of \"Apollo,\" \"Dionysus,\" and \"Socrates\" (who in this account is transformed from a real denizen of the deme of Alopeke to a mythic figure, just as, presumably the historical Iranian king H\u02d8\u0161ay\u0101r\u0161\u0101 becomes the \"mythic\" \"Xerxes\" in The Persians). \"Apollo,\" \"Dionysus,\" and \"Socrates\" are intended to be neither real historical individuals like Henry V nor mere names for what are actually abstract conceptual structures, such as \"the drive to encompass more and more material\" (Stofftrieb) and \"the drive to impose unity\" (Formtrieb), which Schiller took to be the basic constituents of human nature. A \"mythic\" treatment is a narrative in which a figure with some distinctive individual characteristics (such as Heracles) is involved in an encounter with other such figures (such as Admetus, Alcestis, and Death). \"Lear\" is to some extent \"defined,\" if one wishes to think about it in this way, by his own characteristics and by the nexus of his encounters with others (his daughters); it is this nexus that has a kind of necessity. Myth exhibits recurrent narrative patterns, but the individual story need not be strictly invariant; one of the most striking features of ancient myths is precisely that they have no single canonical form but are flexible and can be reconfigured in a variety of different ways, each one of which is expressive of an aspect of human nature or a kind of human necessity. Each author could write his own Oedipus within certain limits that are antecedently indeterminate. So although a proper history would not pinpoint a single origin of the human practise we call \"philosophy,\" there is no reason one could not give a mythic account that sums up in a concentrated form some of the salient characteristics of the practise.\n\nIn this spirit I would like to suggest that the \"origin\" of philosophy might be taken to lie in the encounter between the aboriginal philosophical couple: Oedipus and the Sphinx. Neither one, then, is the originator of philosophy because philosophy is inherently an interaction of a certain kind between two animate entities who can speak with each other and act with or on each other. I say \"animate entity\" rather than \"human being\" because the Sphinx is not a human being but on most accounts half woman and half lioness (often with wings). The interaction between Oedipus and the Sphinx is an odd mixture of the utterly frivolous and the deadly serious, of the accidental and the essential. What could be more contingent than a meeting on a road? Yet the meeting seems to generate from itself its own internal necessity. The Sphinx asks a question that is also a riddle, that is, she proposes a kind of game, but also kills anyone who loses the game by failing to solve the riddle. Generally we think of a \"game\" as something one can chose to play or not, but the Sphinx leaves one no choice. It is assumed that she is endowed with enough strength and willingness to use violence so that there can be no question of \"overcoming\" her in a simple fight. She subjects herself to a limitation on the use of that strength; she could simply kill travellers, no questions asked, but she does not do that. Rather she transforms what might otherwise be a straightforward physical struggle, which we have reason to believe she would always win, into a contest of wits and commits herself not to use her overwhelming force if bested. When Oedipus does come up with the right answer, she not only spares him but kills herself. She makes the question (and the answer) a matter of life or death for Oedipus, and then for herself. Was her own death in the envisaged circumstances a part of the \"rules of the game\" as initially specified (by her) from the start, or did she simply improvise and make up the final logical conclusion of the game, her self-destruction, when she found herself bested? Why did she start the game in the first place? Did she actually know the answer to the riddle before Oedipus told it to her or merely recognise that what he said could count (or \"must count\"?) as an answer, when he said it? Did she make up a question she thought had no answer in order to be able to kill travellers under the specious appearance of giving them a \"fair\" chance? When Oedipus shows that he knows the answer, or at any rate gives an answer she cannot dismiss, the conclusion she draws, killing herself, does have a weird archaic consistency, even if it was not originally envisaged as even a possibility. By doing so, she founds philosophy. Was there any other possible outcome? Could she simply have let Oedipus go and retired from the question-asking business? Or taken Oedipus to live with her to the mountains and perhaps father a race of preternaturally intelligent sphinxes? Probably not. The riddle was: \"What walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening?\" and the answer was \"man\"\u2014as baby, adult, and old-man-with-a-stick (not \"sphinx\"), and Oedipus not only gave the correct answer but also instantiated it. The correct answer is, then, just a true description or proper analysis of what he himself is. If Oedipus had failed to give the right answer, he would also not himself have instantiated it because he would have died before reaching the stage at which he would need to use a stick.\n\nThe encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx might be thought to count as the origin of philosophy in part because in it two things seem inextricably intertwined: the solution of a riddle and an existential issue of life-or-death importance. The Sphinx has imposed the existential dimension on the encounter, to be sure, so perhaps it is only really a philosophical encounter in the full sense if we think of her not as an individual person but as kind of force of nature or metaphysical principle. It is philosophy only if the solution of the riddle is also a matter of life-and-death that is necessarily imposed on us by the nature of the world we live in, not the result of a random encounter with an individual. Philosophy that reduces itself to mere riddle solving loses its traditional importance, and, eventually, its raison d'\u00eatre.\n\nIs it perhaps relevant that the Sphinx herself seems to us not to exhibit a \"natural unity\" but to be a biological \"creole,\" a bifurcated being only presenting herself as a unity? How does she seem to herself? Does she think of herself as a natural unity? Does it matter what she thinks? After all, we humans, in the person of Oedipus, won. Is her creole nature part of the explanation for her murderous hostility to the people of Thebes and for her habit of asking off-beat questions? Her question suggests that although we may see ourselves as natural unity, it is possible to see us as just as deeply creole as she is: we are, after all (correctly), described (by her) as three in one. Oedipus must in some sense not merely know what sort of creature he is but also how a creature like him would look to a Sphinx. Who is to say what is to count as \"natural unity,\" what as a mere appearance, and what as narcissism? Philosophy exists in the state of emotional tension and cognitive motion between the moment when Oedipus can be seen coming up the road from Corinth\u2014or rather the moment when the first nameless traveller appears, since Oedipus was not the first to have an erotically tinged meeting with the Golden-Strangler-Girl-of-Thebes\u2014and the final sad but \"logical\" denouement. When the answer is formulated and revealed, the encounter (and philosophy) is over. This is perhaps why Nietzsche calls Oedipus \"the last philosopher,\" condemned to speak only with himself. How can he ask questions without a partner? Recollection lacks the essential frisson of the real thing because if you can recollect, you have survived, and part of the point of the encounter is that that is not yet assured. Oedipus is not only the last philosopher but also \"the last man.\" As Nietzsche's Zarathustra says about the dead tightrope walker, the Sphinx perished in the course of discharging a self-chosen, and in her case indeed self-invented, profession that turned out to be dangerous, and there is nothing contemptible in that. Did Oedipus realise that his profession of \"knowing\" could be equally dangerous? Would he have been so keen to discover the cause of the plague in Thebes, and his own origins, if he had not met the Sphinx?\n13\n\nA World without Why\n\nI have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative, or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories, and arguments. I thereby help turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace that protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable partly because I don't think finally that this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations that would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is an open area within which it is possible that some of these young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some minimal mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. The remaining 5 percent of my job, by the way, what I would call the actual \"philosophical\" part, is almost invisible from the outside, totally unclassifiable in any schema known to me, and quantitatively in any case so insignificant that it can more or less be ignored.\n\nSo the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic, and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail\u2014the endlessly repeated shouts of \"why,\" the rebuttals, calls for \"evidence,\" qualifications, and quibbles\u2014stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole. I suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of this densely woven tissue of \"arguments,\" most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavoury; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether. Unsurprisingly, Plato had a name for people like me when I am in this mood: \u03bc\u03b9\u03c3\u03cc\u03bb\u03bf\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2, a hater of reasoning. I comfort myself for being on the wrong side of Plato by thinking that I am also, at any rate, never unaware of the potentially questionable nature of this desire. One might be inherently suspicious of what is clearly the luxury complaint of someone who occupies what is in effect a very privileged position in a rich society; those suffering from debilitating diseases, struggling to get access to clean water, or trying desperately to avoid the systematic attentions of a repressive state apparatus or the more or less random violence of armed gangs in regions where public order has broken down might well be thought to have more pressing concerns. To that extent perhaps my reaction does not throw a morally flattering light on me. That does not, however, exhaust the objective disquiet my impulse causes me.\n\nThe problem with \"N'importe o\u00f9 hors de ce monde\" (\"Anywhere outside this world\") is not merely that such a place is hard to find. A world utterly without \"why\" can have one or the other of two very different aspects. It can seem a deeply contemplative, even if not necessarily thoroughly pleasant, place, as in the poem by the seventeenth-century Silesian mystic Angelus Silesius:\n\nDie Ros' is ohn' Warum; sie bl\u00fchet weil sie bl\u00fchet.\n\nSie acht' nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht ob man sie siehet.\n\n[The rose is without why; she blossoms because she blossoms.\n\nShe pays no attention to herself, does not ask if anyone sees her.]\n\nThe rose may have a thorn and her self-less insouciance will perhaps be barely distinguishable from cold indifference; still, this vision of reality as freed completely from the subordination of any of its parts to purpose or functionality might have some aesthetic appeal. The other, potentially diabolical, aspect of this construction is the one that presented itself to Primo Levi when he realised that in Auschwitz there was no \"why\" (\"Hier gibt es kein 'Warum' \" [\"Here there is no 'why' \"]). Levi's experience, of course, was not really of a place in which there was no \"why\" at all. The SS officers with whom he came into contact had a variety of reasons for what they did and what they allowed to happen. Some of these reasons, to be sure, were unreflective and conflicting, some perhaps fantastic and delusional, many were deeply malicious, but that is a different thing. It was not in fact that an extermination camp had no \"why\" whatever but that those in control of Levi's fate were in no way required or inclined to give him any reasons for anything that occurred. A world in which reason was utterly inaccessible to the individual might at best be an approximation of one possible form a \"world without why\" could take.\n\nOur networks of institutionally anchored universal ratiocination are hard to escape. How in fact could one get out, assuming one wanted to? Offhand, I can think of three possible ways. First, one could be clever enough to turn the why-game against itself from within. This has been the dream of any number of philosophers including, most notably, Hegel and Heidegger. This way out does not recommend itself to me because I am not clever enough to trod this path successfully but also because even if successful, who would notice? The second possibility is action. One deed is worth any number of words. A deed can cut through\u2014I always think of this with the French word trancher\u2014the spider's web of bogus rationalisations and create not merely new words but new facts. Unfortunately, this second course of action requires very significant amounts of courage as well as practical skills of various kinds, neither of which I possess. The courage in question, by the way, is not merely personal fearlessness in the face of threats to oneself but also the moral courage to face the possibility that one's actions, which, if they are going to be effective at all, will certainly be almost completely out of one's own control as far as their actual consequences are concerned, may turn out to inflict great suffering on the wrong people (even assuming one were to know for certain who these are).\n\nThe third possibility is the invitation, in particular one to observe, look at, or consider something. One kind of thing one can be invited to consider is a juxtaposition: masses of anonymous people storming the Winter Palace and two stone lions standing up on their pedestals, or the prime minister oleaginously addressing the House of Commons and a pile of bodies in a ditch in Iraq. By putting two (or more) separate \"things\" next to each other and inviting people to look at them together, one is not necessarily asking or trying to answer the question \"why.\" A poem may cause someone to ask a question or to initiate a line of reflection, or even to develop some hypothesis or theory, but then a clap of thunder or a sudden pain in the chest may do the same; that does not make either the pain or the poem a theory or a \"line of argument.\" A word in a good poem is not a concept. Since neither a picture nor a poem is an argument, neither is a suitable object for counterargument. \"La terre est bleue comme une orange\" [\"The earth is blue like an orange\"] is not best understood as \"asserting a proposition.\" Neither is\n\nDer Nordost wehet,\n\nDer liebste unter den Winden\n\nMir, weil er feurigen Geist\n\nUnd gute Fahrt verheisset den Schiffern.\n\n[The northwest wind blows,\n\nthe dearest of the winds\n\nto be because he promises\n\nfiery spirits and good passage to sailors.]\n\nNor finally even:\n\nVer erat, et morbo Romae languebat inerti\n\nOrbilius.\n\n[It was spring and in Rome Orbilius was suffering  \nfrom a debilitating sickness.]\n\nYou can't refute an invitation (although you can refuse it, closing your mind and heart to it): it makes no claim. At the end of all the talk, the poem, if it is good enough, is still standing there, waiting. An invitation has neither the direct constructive or coercive power of action nor the indirect coercive power of ratiocination\u2014Habermas's \"eigent\u00fcmlich zwangloser Zwang des besseren Argumentes\" (\"peculiarly uncoercive coercion of the better argument\"). If one is lucky enough to live in a society in which a sphere of \"free\" artistic activity is permitted to exist, no one is forced to look at one's picture, listen to one's poem, or read one's novel. Still the work of art need not be without effect on those who accept its invitation.\n\nSimple juxtaposition of external objects, persons, or events not usually seen together has a number of variants that are perhaps no less interesting and \"compelling\" (to use the peculiar expression that seems natural here). Rather than allowing the sewing machine to encounter an umbrella on the dissecting table, one can invite the reader to pay attention to something usually overlooked or taken for granted, which seems to have a unity that upon inspection dissolves. The world can occasionally turn itself inside out or upside down. No one who lived even in complete personal security through the period of the Vietnam War could thereafter ever hear the sound of a helicopter in exactly the same way again.\n\n**Invitation**\n\nShall we go to the sand-pits?\n\nYes, let's go to the sand-pits.\n\nWill the air be fresh and clear\n\nover the sand-pits?\n\nDepending on the season, the time\n\nof day, and the weather\n\nthe air will be cool, sultry, or mild\n\nover the sand-pits.\n\nShall we whistle and get a drink\n\nat the sand-pits?\n\nWhistling and drinking are de rigueur\n\nat the sand-pits.\n\nWill there be a crowd\n\nat the sand-pits?\n\nThere is almost invariably a crowd\n\nat the sand-pits.\n\nShall we take our whips\n\nto the sand-pits?\n\nIn what tree have you parked\n\nyour brain, imbecile?\n\nWithout whips what would be the point\n\nof the sand-pits?\n\n* * *\n\nArthur Schopenhauer, \"\u00dcber die Universit\u00e4ts-Philosophie\" (1850)\n\nPaul Celan, \"Der Meridian\" (1960)\n\nPlato, Phaedo 89d (fourth century BC)\n\nCharles Baudelaire, Le spleen de Paris (1869)\n\nAngelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler), Der Cherubinische Wandersmann (1657) Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947)\n\nJacques Derrida, \"Les fins de l'homme\" (1967)\n\nG.W.F. Hegel, System der Wissenschaft, Erster Teil, Die Ph\u00e4nomenologie des Geistes: Vorrede (1807)\n\nMartin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (1957)\n\nBertold Brecht, \"Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters\" (1935) Paul Eluard, L'amour la po\u00e9sie (1929)\n\nFriedrich H\u00f6lderlin, \"Andenken\" (1806)\n\nArthur Rimbaud, \"Ver erat\" (1869)\n\nIsidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautr\u00e9amont, Les chants de Maldoror (1869)\n\nT. W. Adorno, \"Parataxis\" (1964)\n\nGeorg B\u00fcchner, \"Lenz\" (1835)\nNotes\n\nPREFACE\n\n1. Marx, following Feuerbach, correctly maintains that this is the correct order: first social needs, then language and cognition. See Die Deutsche Ideologie MEW (Berlin, 1983), 3:13\u201377.\n\n2. For criticism of this assumption, see David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago, 2004).\n\n3. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920); see also his The Quest for Certainty (London, 1929).\n\n4. See, for instance, the appeal to \"autonomy\" that is exaggerated almost to the point of senselessness in R. P. Wolff 's In Defence of Anarchism (New York, 1970).\n\n5. This is not exactly right because there were the Stoics who seem to have planted the seed for the modern obsession. See Michael Frede, A Free Will (Berkeley, 2011). Still they were one philosophical school and their views did not represent an almost universally shared cultural obsession.\n\n6. See Aeschylus, Persai 402ff; Herodotus I.62, 95; Plutarch, Vita Titi Flaminii, etc. Further references in Kurt Raaflaub, \"Zum Freiheitsbegriff der Griechen,\" in E. Welskopf, Soziale Typenbegriffe im alten Griechenland (Berlin, 1981), vol. 4; also Raaflaub, Die Entdeckung der Freiheit (Munich, 1985).\n\n7. Ch. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Ideal at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge, 1968). See also Malcolm Schofield, \"Liberty, Equality, and Authority: Theory and Practice in the Later Roman Republic\" (forthcoming).\n\n8. And another school, the Cynics, adopted an ideal of practical \"self-sufficiency,\" which eventually seems to have developed into a more metaphysically laden notion.\n\n9. That the Greeks used \"autonomy\" to designate only a limited, essentially negative, and social property, see Martin Ostwald, Autonomia: Its Genesis and Early History (Chico, CA, 1982).\n\n10. Sophocles, Antigone ll. 450ff.\n\n11. E. E. Evans-Pritchard notoriously used the local poison-oracle in making everyday decisions when he was working among the Azande and claimed that in retrospect he thought this was as reasonable a way to conduct such affairs as any other would have been. See his Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937).\n\n12. I merely point out that I am really using the same \"philosophical must\" to which I drew attention earlier in this chapter. I am, after all, essentially saying that there \"must\" be a place for trust, respect, etc., in human life. I invite the reader to reflect on this.\n\n13. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Vertrauen und Gewalt (Hamburg edition, 2012); Martin Hartmann, Die Praxis des Vertrauens (Berlin, 2011).\n\n14. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten in Werke (Darmstadt, 1963), 4:36.\n\n15. M. Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (Paris, 2008) and \"Qu'est-ce que les lumi\u00e8res,\" in Dits et \u00e9crits (Paris, 1994), 571\u201378.\n\n1: GOALS, ORIGINS, DISCIPLINES\n\nI am particularly grateful to Richard Raatzsch and to the other members of the Cambridger Philosophisches Forschungskolloquium for comments on an early version of this text. A very much abbreviated version was presented at the conference \"Changing the Humanities\/The Humanities Changing\" at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Literature in July 2009.\n\n1. Wilhelm Windelband, \"Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,\" Pr\u00e4ludien (T\u00fcbingen, 1919), 1:136\u201361.\n\n2. Klaus K\u00f6hnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1993).\n\n3. I use the Monro\/Allen Oxford Classical Text (OCT), translation by R. Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), sometimes slightly modified.\n\n4. One of the many fascinating aspects of this passage is that it contains what may be one of the first references to writing in Western literature. One of Glaukos's ancestors, Bellerophontes, is exiled from home and takes refuge with King Proitos. As the consequence of an intrigue, Proitos decides he needs to kill Bellerophontes, but he doesn't dare. We are not explicitly told why he doesn't dare, but one might surmise it is because in the Homeric world it was considered wrong to kill someone to whom you had once offered refuge. Proitos sends Bellerophontes off to a neighbouring king, carrying with him a folded tablet on which are inscribed, incised, drawn, or painted (\u03b3\u03c1\u03ac\u03c8\u03b1\u03c2, 6.169) some signs or marks that will bring him death (\u03c3\u03ae\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03b1 \u03bb\u03c5\u03b3\u03c1\u03ac... \u03b8\u03c5\u03bc\u03bf\u03c3\u03b8\u03cc\u03c1\u03b1 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03bb\u03ac, 6.168\u201369) when the neighbouring king sees them. I have often wondered whether the very unclarity about what is painted or scratched on those tablets might not be part of the point. We don't know whether they are the words \"KILL BEARER IMMEDIATELY\" (KTEINEI\u0398EPONTAA\u038e\u0398I) or rather something more indirect and suggestive, such as pictures of a stick-man with a spear in his back or a skull and crossbones. If this is a case of writing and writing is still a novel, unfamiliar, and slightly puzzling phenomenon, sending someone off with a written warrant for his own death might be a very good way of generating a form of self-deception that would allow one to believe one has distanced oneself from what eventually happens. Not just \"I didn't know the gun was loaded\" but \"How was I to know that that tiny tube could really kill at a distance?\" The written or painted image is a kind of obscure black box: how could I know it would work?\n\n5. See also Raymond Geuss, \"Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,\" in R. Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton, 2005), 219\u201334.\n\n6. George Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994).\n\n7. Diogenes Laertius 8.8.\n\n8. Protagoras 318a\u2013b.\n\n9. See Plato's Gorgias.\n\n10. Protagoras 339\u201347.\n\n11. Protagoras 320\u201328.\n\n12. See the position attributed to \"a philosopher\" in Longinus's De sublimitate, ch. 44 (OCT, ed. Russell).\n\n13. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen \u00fcber die Geschichte der Philosophie, Werke, vol. 18, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 202\u20139.\n\n14. Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg, Stil und Gedanke (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 33\u201334.\n\n15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A852\/B880\u2013A856\/B884. The history of reason gets four pages out of 850 or so. See also Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden k\u00fcnftigen Metaphysik, \"Vorrede.\"\n\n16. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 50\u201357, 119\u201322 (Ak.).\n\n17. Most clearly in Schopenhauer; see his essay \"\u00dcber die Universit\u00e4ts-Philosophie,\" in Parerga et Paralipomena in S\u00e4mtliche Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 4:173\u2013242.\n\n18. This is only one half of the story for Hegel. He also thinks that philosophy is in some sense a form of \"absolute\" spirit. The relation between philosophy as a historical formation and as a systematic, absolute enterprise is at the heart of his complex views.\n\n19. G.W.F. Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems des Philosophie, Werke, vol. 2, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 20\u201325.\n\n20. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie in Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin, 1968), 1:378\u201380.\n\n21. See T. W. Adorno et al., eds., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie (Berlin, 1969).\n\n22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral in Friedrich Nietzsche: S\u00e4mtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin, 1967), 5:245\u2013413; see also \"Genealogy as Critique,\" in Geuss, Outside Ethics, 153\u201361.\n\n23. Saint Paul, after all, in a slightly bizarre passage (Romans) seems to claim that the point of the Jewish Law was to increase consciousness of sin; one can hold that Christianity generates the sense of sin to which its message of redemption from sin is purportedly the only adequate response.\n\n24. I mention only one of the presentable philosophical reasons for the demise of this Hegelian tradition. This should not be taken to imply a denial of political, economic, and social causes, which were in fact probably more important.\n\n25. Phaedo (OCT) 96a\u201399d.\n\n26. See W. Burkert, \"Platon oder Pythagoras,\" Hermes 88 (1960): 159\u201377.\n\n27. Tusculan Disputations (OCT) 5.4.10\u201311.\n\n28. See Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 5:245\u2013413; also \"Nietzsche and Genealogy\" in R. Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History (Cambridge, 1999), 1\u201328.\n\n29. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 5:254.\n\n30. This gives one the ancient triadic division of philosophy into physics, ethics, and dialectics (or logic). See, for instance, Diogenes Laertius 7.39 and Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (OCT) 5.24.68\u201372.\n\n31. Vitruvius, De architectura 1.1.8, 10.12.2.\n\n32. The OED gives a first isolated instance in 1702, then a series from the mid-nineteenth century.\n\n33. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), 398.\n\n2: VIX INTELLEGITUR\n\n1. Orator ad M. Brutum 9.30\u201331.\n\n2. See \"Second Letter to Ammaeus,\" in Dionysius of Halicarnassus: The Three Literary Letters, ed. William Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1901), 136. See also the useful general discussion of obscurity in Greek in the Roberts edition of Dionysius's On Literary Composition (New York, 1910), appendix A, pp. 335\u201341.\n\n3. Philosophische Untersuchungen \u00a7 71.\n\n4. Cited in Cicero, De divinatione II.56.116, who points out the inherent implausibility of the Greek god Apollo addressing a king of Epirus in a Latin hexameter.\n\n5. That means, of course, the exact Latin words Ennius ascribes to the god. I am not at all interested in the historical accuracy of the stories told about Pyrrhus, who seems to have been the kind of charismatic figure who attracted to his person all manner of mythic accretions.\n\n6. The importance of seeing certain kinds of apparently very general statements as in fact particular responses to specific questions was emphasised by R. G. Collingwood. See his An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940).\n\n7. Plato's Charmides mentions a third (164\u201365), but this has been more or less ignored in subsequent discussion.\n\n8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Trag\u00f6die in Friedrich Nietzsche: S\u00e4mtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari, 1:40\u201341.\n\n9. Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 397.\n\n10. The classic study of ambiguity, of course, is still William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930).\n\n11. Compare Aeneas's \"Italiam non sponte sequor\" (Aeneid IV.361).\n\n12. T. W. Adorno, \u00c4sthetische Theorie (Berlin, 1970), 182\u201393.\n\n13. Only later (Aeneid VI.847\u201353) does Aeneas find out definitively from his father in the underworld that nothing like this is intended.\n\n14. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Trag\u00f6die, 1:35.\n\n15. Lucretius, De rerum natura I.1\u20132.\n\n16. Similar thoughts are found in David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (originally 1777).\n\n17. De E Delphico 385B.\n\n18. This idea of divine revelation as being progressive and presented with a primarily paedagogical intention becomes important in certain Enlightenment views, e.g., in G. E. Lessing's Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1777; Ditzingen, 1967).\n\n19. Plato, Socratis Apologia 20\u201324.\n\n20. Agamemnon 174\u201377.\n\n21. Actually in Delphi there seems at some periods to have been a fourth agent, a college of priests who wrote down what the priestess, the Pythia, said and passed the written text to the oracle-seeker. Putting in a further layer of intermediaries, of course, makes it that much easier to protect the god from accusations of ignorance or bias: Apollo spoke the truth, but the priestess misheard it or mispronounced it, or the priest who wrote down what the Pythia said misinterpreted what she said, or falsified it in his own interest, or had been bribed, etc. The passage in Aeneid (Book III) is a departure from this standard case because Vergil goes out of his way to emphasise that the Trojans heard the very voice of the god, not of any intermediary. Presumably this, too, is part of Vergil's attempt to present the oracle as maximally authoritative and not subject to falsification or distortion through a chain of intermediaries.\n\n22. Clearest perhaps in H\u00f6lderlin's poem \"Wie wenn am Feiertage\" (written in late 1799 or early 1800) in H\u00f6lderlin: S\u00e4mtliche Gedichte, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt\/M., 2005), 239\u201341. For Rimbaud, see his letter to P. Demeny of May 15, 1871, in Oeuvres compl\u00e8tes (Paris, 1972), 249\u201354.\n\n23. Despite my general reservations about the concept of \"evil,\" it is useful here. See my Politics and the Imagination (Princeton, 2009), 182\u201384.\n\n24. G.W.F. Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie in Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt\/M., 1971), vol. 7, \"Vorrede,\" pp. 26\u201327. See also Theodor Adorno, \"Skoteinos,\" in his Aspekte der Hegelschen Philosophie (Frankfurt\/M., 1963), \"Parataxis,\" in Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt\/M., 1965), and Minima Moralia, \u00a7\u00a7 5, 44, 50.\n\n25. Paul Celan, Der Meridian: T\u00fcbinger Ausgabe (Frankfurt\/M., 1999), 85.\n\n26. Ibid., 7, 84.\n\n27. \"[E]mphatisch <kann> kein Kunstwerk gelingen\" [\"No work of art can be a success in an emphatic sense of the term 'success' \"]. Adorno, \u00c4sthetische Theorie, 87.\n\n3: MARXISM AND THE ETHOS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY\n\nIn all my thinking about the subject matter of this chapter I have been deeply influenced by discussions with the members of the Cambridger Forschungskolloquium, especially Richard Raatzsch. I am also very grateful to the members of the audience at UCD for their resistance to some of the glibber parts of the original version of this chapter.\n\n1. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, 1981), esp. 103\u201313, 238\u201345.\n\n2. See P. Bourdieu, La distinction (Paris, 1979).\n\n3. See Nietzsche, S\u00e4mtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, 12:350.\n\n4. One of the central parts of Foucault's analysis of the difference between ancient and Christian forms of ethics is that the former are not necessarily proposed as having relevance to everyone: slaves are not even candidates for leading a good life. See Michel Foucault, L'histoire de la sexualit\u00e9: L'usage des plaisirs (Paris, 1984).\n\n5. Much of what we now call \"ancient religion\"\u2014a usage that already to some extent represents an anachronistic, retrospective construction, which forces a variety of phenomena into a fixed format derived from later monotheistic patterns of thought\u2014did not even aspire to be all-encompassing or tell any kind of truth about the whole world or all of human life. For an almost random selection of relevant works, see Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods (Berkeley, 2008); Polyumnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1999); and Moses Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA, 1992).\n\n6. The meaning of \"universalist\" might not, of course, be limited to the two components cited, by way of example, in the text. It hardly requires stating, I hope, that discussion of \"universalism\" in this context does not imply any special privileging of Kantian or Habermasian perspectives.\n\n7. Hegel's way of putting this point is usually that religion is a matter of \"Vorstellung\" (\"representation\") rather than \"Begriff\" (\"concept\"), which is the realm of philosophy. Thus, he writes, \"In den Religionen haben die V\u00f6lker allerdings niedergelegt, wie sie sich das Wesen der Welt, die Substanz der Natur und des Geistes vorstellten, und wie das Verh\u00e4ltnis des Menschen zu demselben\" (Hegel, Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, 1:82 [Vorlesungen \u00fcber die Geschichte der Religion I]. The contrast here is that philosophy does not \"represent,\" for instance, the \"essence of the world\" but \"grasps it in a concept\" [\"In der Philosophie wird das Wesen der Welt nicht vorgestellt, sondern begriffen\"]. Even when religion presents \"deep, sublime, speculative thoughts,\" which are not mere images, it presents them as objects of external devotion (\"Andacht\") rather than as argumentatively structured processes that we grasp \"from the inside\" by enacting. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, 18:83\u201392.\n\n8. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, 18:84.\n\n9. Christian theologians have long discussed this issue, and many of these discussions are highly enlightening, even when finally unsatisfactory. The three most important discussions since the eighteenth century seem to me to have been those of Lessing, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Analogues to some of the problems that arise here have reemerged in Alain Badiou's L'ethique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal (Paris, 1998) and Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme (Paris, 1997). How can what Badiou calls an \"event\" (which like the French Revolution occurred at a particular time and place) have the appropriate kind of universality? Isn't \"fidelity\" to such an event like commitment to the content of a historically specific form of religious revelation? I can merely state here that for various reasons having to do with the detailed structure of his views I do not think this is as serious a difficulty for Badiou as the parallel problem is for advocates of revealed religion. There is a second possible strand of argument here, associated with Nietzsche rather than with Hegel, which emphasises not inherent limitation of the human image-making capacity but the claim that Christianity is committed to specific substantive delusions that it also has a tendency, in the long run, to undermine. Nietzsche was of the opinion that this process of self-destruction was essentially complete by the end of the nineteenth century. For this view, see Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 5:247\u2013412.\n\n10. The most conceptually interesting and enlightening modern discussion of \"sects\" is that of Max Weber. See esp. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (T\u00fcbingen, 1972), 721\u201326. I should mention, however, that my usage of \"sect\" deviates slightly from his. I take the term as a quasi-empirical description of a state of affairs in which one group is in fact \"cut off\" (seco\/sectum) from a catholic community or from other groups. For Weber, an elitist rejection of free and open access to the religious community is constitutive for being a \"sect.\" Thus he writes, \"[Eine 'Sekte' ist eine Gemeinschaft].... welche ihrem Sinn und Wesen nach notwendig auf Universalit\u00e4t verzichten... mu\u00df... weil sie ein aristokratisches Gebilde: ein Verein der religi\u00f6s voll Qualifizierten und nur ihrer sein will\" (721).\n\n11. See \"Epilogue: 1953, 1968, 1995: Three Perspectives,\" in Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism, ed. Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson (Leiden, 2008), 419\u201321.\n\n12. Professor Joseph Raz has proposed a \"perfectionist\" liberalism that is not obviously subject to this particular line of criticism. See his The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986).\n\n13. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), 131\u201354.\n\n14. MEW Erg. 1.522, 536, 540, etc.\n\n15. Karl Marx, Grundrisse zur Kritik der politischen \u00d6konomie (Berlin, 1953), 387.\n\n16. See Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York, 1967), 177\u201382.\n\n17. On Marx's theory of needs, see Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London, 1976), and Ian Fraser, Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need (Edinburgh, 1998); see also Lawrence Hamilton, The Political Philosophy of Needs (Cambridge, 2003).\n\n18. MEW Erg. 1.544, 546.\n\n19. Note the almost compulsive use of \"Gegenstand\" and \"gegenst\u00e4ndlich\" in the relevant passage (MEW Erg. 1.539\u201342). The model here is human relation to \"objects.\"\n\n20. MEW Erg. 1.539\u201342.\n\n21. The classic expression of this Humboldtian strand is Die Deutsche Ideologie MEW, vol. 3, see esp. pp. 32\u201334, 74\u201375, 206, and note that Marx was aware of the dangers of \"one-sided\" or fixated development (see MEW 3:238\u201339).\n\n22. MEW Erg. 1.542.\n\n23. Alasdair MacIntyre, \"The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken,\" in Artifacts, Representations, and Social Practice, ed. Carol Gould and Robert Cohen (Dordrecht, 1994), 277\u201390.\n\n24. This is the thesis of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialektik der Aufkl\u00e4rung (Frankfurt\/M., 1969), esp. pp. 9\u201349. See also Adorno, Minima Moralia, \u00a7 100, pp. 206\u20138.\n\n25. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (T\u00fcbingen, 1963), \u00a7\u00a7 45\u201353, pp. 231\u201367.\n\n26. Obviously the view presented here is incompatible with another often used metaphor, that of life as a \"journey\" from determinate place A to determinate place B, a metaphor that found its most exquisite development in Dante's Comedy. The Comedy would repay close study in this context, but here I mention only two aspects that seem to me of importance. First, the lives of all those whom Dante encounters are seen as in some way summed up in some single image: Paolo and Francesca buffeted by the unending wind of desire, the sodomites running an eternal race over a desert, Ulysses in his flame. Can every human life really be summed up without remainder in such a single image? Is nothing lost by this? Second, it is not, it seems to me, a merely aesthetic fact that the \"failures\" in Inferno are so much more interesting than the saints in Paradiso.\n\n27. Contra MacIntyre. See After Virtue, esp. chapter 15, pp. 190\u2013209.\n\n28. A further serious problem for any contemporary rehabilitation of Aristotle is the complete absence in his work of any real sense of history as something that matters. He has, to be sure, some trivial remarks about how human inventions have accumulated, some comments about the comparative history of \"constitutions,\" and the odd observation to the effect that human desires develop over time, but none of this amounts to nearly enough to accommodate the modern keen \"historischer Sinn\" that developed in the nineteenth century, an awareness that the past was, to put it very crudely, \"qualitatively\" different from the present. His outline history of previous Greek philosophy in book 1 of Metaphysics is in itself a sufficient testimonial to his irremediably \"presentist\" attitude. It has also always seemed paradoxical to me that Christians could try to find a foundation for their beliefs in an Aristotelian framework. After all, it is central to Christianity not merely that a divine revelation took place at some particular time, thus fundamentally changing the moral universe in which people lived, but also that at some specific point in the past God was incarnated. This is most plausibly interpreted as meaning that the very quality of human time changes.\n\n29. John Dewey and Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York, 1969), 48. To be sure, if one looks at the context within which Trotsky writes this, one will perhaps have doubts about his understanding of \"dialectics.\" He writes: \"From the Marxist point of view the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and to the abolition of the power of one person over another.... That is permissible, which really leads to the liberation of humanity. Since this end can be achieved only through revolution, the liberating morality of the proletariat of necessity is endowed with a revolutionary character.... It deduces a rule of conduct from the laws of the development of society, thus primarily from the class struggle, this law of all laws.\" \"Deduction of a rule of conduct\" from any one \"law of all laws\" seems contrary to the spirit of dialectic.\n\n30. Dewey and Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.\n\n31. See G.W.F. Hegel, Ph\u00e4nomenologie des Geistes in Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, vol. 3; also Marx, MEW Erg. 1, pp. 568\u201388.\n\n4: MUST CRITICISM BE CONSTRUCTIVE?\n\n1. If one wished to multiply distinctions, one could actually distinguish three items here: (a) analysis, (b) judgement, and (c) specifically negative evaluative judgement. For the sake of simplicity I shall refrain from pursuing this here.\n\n2. Max Weber, \"Der Sinn der 'Wertfreiheit' der soziologischen und \u00f6konomischen Wissenschaften,\" in Gesammelte Aufs\u00e4tze zur Wissenschaftslehre (T\u00fcbingen, 1973), 489\u2013540.\n\n3. Leviathan chapter XV.\n\n4. See Stefan Wolle, Der Traum der Revolte: Die DDR 1968 (Berlin: Links, 2008), 194ff. This real incident was given a literary treatment in Christoph Hein's Der Tangospieler (Frankfurt\/M., 1989).\n\n5. What I am saying, then, is that there are at least three distinct things that must be distinguished here: (1) what I (\"in foro interno\") support and what I criticize; (2) the public act of support (or criticism) I think I am performing (\"in foro externo\"); and (3) the public act of criticism (or support) I in fact succeed in performing. Proponents of the theory of speech acts generally tend to conflate (2) and (3) presumably on the grounds that one cannot \"unintentionally\" perform a speech act. First of all, I am not at all sure whether it is right that one cannot in general perform a speech act or something very much like a speech act unintentionally. Can't I insult you without intending to do so, or indeed intending anything at all by my action? In fact isn't it a particularly bruising kind of insult if I fail to have any intentions towards you at all, acting as if you were simply not there? Note here that there is a difference between (a) knowing full well you are there and will be insulted and yet acting as if you were not there and (b) really having no concern one way or another for your presence. The second is no less insulting (in some contexts) that the former. Second, even if I cannot for technical reasons be said to perform a speech act, I can certainly intend to perform a speech act, and even believe while doing it that I am performing it and yet fail to do so, as in the case of Roessler. Roessler was not acting \"unintentionally\"; he simply was actually doing what was, in a very important sense, the very reverse of what he intended to do, criticising the SED rather than supporting it.\n\n6. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt\/M., 1966), 25\u201327, 200ff., 352\u201364.\n\n7. For a recent discussion, see David Graeber, Debt (New York, 2011).\n\n8. In thinking about all these examples, which are perhaps not ideally suited to illustrate my point, one should abstract from the fact that most humans naturally have fingers and opposable thumbs that can also (in emergencies) be used to transfer food to the mouth.\n\n9. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, \u00a7\u00a7 14-8 (T\u00fcbingen, 1963), 63\u201389.\n\n10. Ibid., \u00a7\u00a7 46\u201353, 235\u201367.\n\n11. See Karl Marx, Deutsche Ideologie: Feuerbach (MEW I.3), 13\u201377.\n\n12. Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama (Ditzingen, 1994), 132\u2013219. I merely note that one implication of this would seem to be that no performance can be fully successful. In our repressive society works will not be able to performed and apprehended fully; on the other hand, if we were to live in a society fully freed of \"state\" repression, the work would not have the immediate impact and relevance it now has. If we were freed of repression, would we still be gripped? This might suggest that great art is inherently a transitional phenomenon or, as Adorno thought, that the very idea of complete success for a work of art was incoherent.\n\n13. See Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism (Princeton, 2002).\n\n14. See Homer, Hymnorum III.166\u201373.\n\n15. It is, of course, slightly ironic, at any rate for someone who adopts the perspective proposed in this essay, that What Is to Be Done? is the title of a novel (N. G. Tschernyschevsky, Was tun? [Berlin, 1986]).\n\n5: THE LOSS OF MEANING ON THE LEFT\n\nThis is a slightly revised version of remarks made at the conference \"Sinnstiftung und Sinnverlust an der Schwelle zum 20. Jahrhundert,\" which took place in Copenhagen in February 2008. I am very grateful to Dr. Karin Wolgast and Dr. Ulrich Knappe for the kind invitation to speak at this conference and for a number of helpful suggestions that enabled me to improve my original draft. I am also very grateful to Richard Raatzsch for a number of extremely illuminating discussions of the topics treated here.\n\n1. Emile Durkheim, Le suicide (Paris, 1897).\n\n2. Friedrich Nietzsche: S\u00e4mtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari, 13:49 (11[99]).\n\n3. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (Oxford, 1972).\n\n4. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ein Brief in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt\/M., 1984), 31:45\u201355.\n\n5. Ovid, Metamorphoses III.343\u2013510, ed. Anderson (Leipzig, 1996). One might think of this story as one of the last expressions of what Nietzsche called \"the tragic world view\" (see Die Geburt der Trag\u00f6die, 1:11\u2013156), which was obliterated by what we know as \"philosophy.\"\n\n6. Note, too, a further anti-Socratic element of the story: Narcissus knows he is being fooled by his own image (\"iste ego sum! nec me mea fallit imago\" [III.463]), but his insight into this truth is utterly without effect.\n\n7. Ovid, Metamorphoses III.454\u201355.\n\n8. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, vol. 13 [Vorlesungen \u00fcber \u00c4sthetik I], p. 51.\n\n9. Ovid, Metamorphoses III.407\u201314.\n\n10. \"Der Knabe... bewundert die Kreise.\" Hegel, Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, 13:51. In a slightly earlier passage on the same page humans are said to wish to \"enjoy\" (genie\u00dfen) in things the external reality of themselves (\"in der Gestalt der Dinge nur die \u00e4u\u00dfere Realit\u00e4t seiner selbst zu genie\u00dfen\").\n\n11. It should be clear that I am not engaging in strict historical exegesis of Hegel's text but am using this passage as an expository device and that my account of it moves over in a way I hope is seamless from more or less direct interpretation of his position to an appropriating use of this text to formulate a set of conditions I think reflective people in Western Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century would find plausible as descriptions of what they would find \"meaningful.\" This does, however, clearly require a certain amount of pressing on Hegel's text, generally in the direction of a more empiricist reading of it than he would have endorsed. I am especially grateful to Richard Raatzsch for putting this point to me with great clarity and force.\n\n12. \"Le bonheur est une id\u00e9e neuve en Europe,\" in Oeuvres compl\u00e8tes, ed. Michel Duval (Paris, 1984), 715.\n\n13. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien zur Philosophie des Rechts, \u00a7 124Z, in Werke (Frankfurt\/M., 1970), 7:233.\n\n14. Karl Marx, \"Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung,\" MEW 1.379.\n\n15. As Wittgenstein memorably put it in a famous passage from the Tractatus (6.521): \"Die L\u00f6sung des Problems des Lebens merkt man am Verschwinden dieses Problems. (Ist nicht dies der Grund, warum Menschen, denen der Sinn des Lebens nach langen Zweifeln klar wurde, warum diese dann nicht sagen konnten, worin dieser Sinn bestand.).\" See also Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life (Oxford, 2007). Since the 1950s philosophers have distinguished two forms of knowledge or \"understanding.\" The first is the discursive or theoretical form of it, which consists in being able to give a prepositional account of the thing in question. I understand the science of mechanics if I can formulate the basic laws of the subject, and explain and use them. This form of knowledge is sometimes simply called \"knowing-that.\" The second kind of understanding is one that expresses itself in certain skillful practical ability to act, that is a form of \"knowing-how.\" So I can say I know how to swim, meaning that if you put me in the water, I won't sink and will be able to move myself in virtually any direction I want. It is an obvious mistake to confuse this practical ability or skill with the mastery of a set of propositions. I can know the theorems that describe human buoyancy without being able actually to swim, and I can know how to swim without knowing any particular proposition.\n\n16. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 364.\n\n17. Ibid., 364\u201366.\n\n18. See the subtitles of his two volumes: Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt\/M., 1963) and Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2 (Frankfurt\/M., 1969).\n\n19. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 164\u201367, 266.\n\n20. Adorno, \u00c4sthetische Theorie, 87; Adorno, Minima Moralia, \u00a7 18.\n\n21. \"F\u00fcr den der nicht mitmacht, besteht die Gefahr, da\u00df er sich f\u00fcr besser h\u00e4lt als die anderen.... [w\u00e4hrend er vor diesen nichts voraus hat] als die Einsicht in seine Verstricktheit und das Gl\u00fcck der winzigen Freiheit, die im Erkennen als solchem liegt.\" Adorno, Minima Moralia, \u00a7 6, pp. 22\u201323. (\"The person who does not collaborate runs the risk of thinking he is better than other people.... whereas he has no advantage over them apart from the insight into the fact that he is implicated [in society and its evils] and the happiness which consists in the tiny freedom that lies in cognition as such.\")\n\n22. Friedrich Nietzsche: S\u00e4mtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari, 5:402\u20138.\n\n6: AUTHORITY: SOME FABLES\n\n1. A phenomenon discussed at great length (with special reference to philosophy) by Cicero. See, for instance, his Tusculan Disputations.\n\n2. Dio Cassius 55.3. See the bilingual Greek\/French edition edited and translated by Freyburger and Roddaz (Les Belles Lettres, 1994) or the Greek\/English edition by Cary and Forster (Loeb, Harvard, 1914).\n\n3. Gregory Bateson, Naven (Cambridge, 1936).\n\n4. See R. Heinze, Vom Geist des R\u00f6mertums (Leipzig, 1938), 1\u201324.\n\n5. See G. Agamben, Auzsnahmezustand (Frankfurt\/M., 2004), 88\u2013104.\n\n6. Robert Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford, 2005), chapter 4, pp. 84ff.\n\n7. Emile Durkheim, Les formes \u00e9l\u00e9mentaires de la vie r\u00e9ligieuse (Paris, 1960).\n\n8. Aristotle, Politica 1259b1.\n\n9. Aristotle on the \u03c3\u03c0\u03bf\u03c5\u03b4\u03b1\u03b9\u03cc\u03c2 in EN 1099a\u2013b.\n\n10. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1973), V.11.36\u201341.\n\n11. See also R. Heinze, Vom Geist des R\u00f6mertums (Leipzig, 1938), 1\u201324.\n\n12. LSJ, s.v.\n\n13. For a simple survey, see A. Lintott, The Constitutions of the Roman Republic (Oxford, 1999).\n\n14. Montesquieu, L'esprit des lois (Paris, 1993).\n\n15. See Andr\u00e8 Magdelain, Ius Imperium Auctoritas (Rome, 1990), 385.\n\n16. See Julian Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754\u201374 (Cambridge, 1995). Thanks to my colleague Michael Sonenscher for the reference to this.\n\n17. \u00c9mile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europe\u00e9nnes, vol. 2, S. 149 (Paris, 1969).\n\n18. For some parallel discussion of colonialist foundations, see essay 11 in this volume.\n\n19. Freud is particularly good on the relation between real and imaginary \"success\" (and \"failure\") in some of these early Foundation myths. See S. Freud, Studien-Ausgabe (Frankfurt\/M., 1974), vol. 9.\n\n20. See essay 11 in this volume.\n\n21. End of Book I of Iliad.\n\n22. Hesiod, Theogony.\n\n23. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Morale, 5:327\u201329.\n\n24. Theognis 53\u201358; Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 5:257\u201389.\n\n25. Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion (Cambridge, 2001).\n\n26. See R. Raatzsch's excellent Autorit\u00e4t und Autonomie (Munster, 2007).\n\n27. It is, of course, anything but obvious what counts as a \"commercial context.\" Anthropologists have shown that in most \"premodern\" societies \"commercial transactions\" did not take place in the kind of abstract, self-contained sphere modern economists tend to assume must always have existed. See the recent marvelous Debt by Graeber.\n\n28. See essay 2 in this volume.\n\n29. See also R. Geuss, \"Wer das Sagen hat,\" Mittelweg 36 (December 2011\/January 2012): 1\u201310.\n\n7: A NOTE ON LYING\n\n1. Iliad VIII.312ff.\n\n2. See also Nietzsche on \u03c0\u03bf\u03bd\u03b7\u03c1\u03cc\u03c2, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 5:272.\n\n3. See esp. M. Foucault, Le courage de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 (Paris, 2009).\n\n4. Compare the experience of Evans-Pritchard with a population in the Sudan who exhibit a very different attitude toward truth-telling (as cited in Graeber, Debt, 96\u201397).\n\n5. The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. with introduction by Peter Baehr (New York, 2000), 563.\n\n6. See Herbert Marcuse, \"Repressive Tolerance,\" in Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, 1965).\n\n7. If Arendt had been paying attention to Heidegger in the right way in the 1930s, she could have learned this from him. See Martin Heidegger, Einf\u00fchrung in die Metaphysik (T\u00fcbingen, 1957; originally lectures in 1935), esp. pp. 112ff.\n\n8: POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE\n\n1. See Von der Gr\u00fcneburg zum Campus Westend, brochure by University of Frankfurt (2007) to accompany the permanent exhibition in the I. G.-Farben-Haus. I am also grateful to Professor Axel Honneth of the Philosophisches Institut of the University of Frankfurt for discussion of some of these issues.\n\n2. EN 1094a\u20131095a, 1141b; Metaphysica 980a\u2013981b.\n\n3. Nietzsche, S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 1:875\u201390, 5:15\u201339, 6:88\u201397, and passim.\n\n4. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (Berlin, 1977).\n\n5. This line of thought has been very fruitfully developed by Zeev Emmerich in recent, as yet unpublished work, and in general I am very indebted to him for discussions of the topics in this chapter.\n\n6. For what is still one of the most interesting discussions of this topic, see Friedrich Schiller, \u00dcber die \u00e4sthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, ed. Fricke and G\u00f6pfert (Munich, 1967), vol. 5.\n\n7. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris, 1975).\n\n8. EN 1129b\u201330.\n\n9. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971).\n\n10. See MEW, 19:18\u201322; Erg\u00e4nzungsband 1, pp. 534\u201335.\n\n11. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Berlin, 1974), 5\u201319.\n\n12. See ibid., 387\u201388.\n\n13. See Hegel, Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, 14:266\u201372.\n\n14. See Nietzsche, S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 3:524\u201325.\n\n15. Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London, 1970) and Justice Is Conflict (London, 1999).\n\n9: THE FUTURE OF THEOLOGICAL ETHICS\n\n1. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, 18:496\u2013516.\n\n2. For instance, Euthyphro 15e.\n\n3. Symposium 223d.\n\n4. For instance, Condorcet. In his speech Der Meridian, Paul Celan describes Georg B\u00fcchner's play Dantons Tod, which is set in the period of the Terror during the French Revolution. Celan describes a scene in which various characters, associates of Danton, discuss the nature of art. Such discussions, Celan says, can be continued indefinitely \"unless interrupted\" (wenn nichts dazwischenkommt). However, in this case\u2014and Celan's discussion suggests that this is the archetypical case\u2014something does interrupt (es kommt was dazwischen) the discussion, the arrest of the participants, who are tried and guillotined. See P. Celan, Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt\/M., 1988).\n\n5. 1 Cor. 1:19.\n\n6. See K. Marx, Das Kapital, vol. I.I.1.3 (\"Die Wertform oder der Tauschwert\").\n\n7. J. Dewey and L. Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York, 1973).\n\n8. Matt. 5:22.\n\n9. Personal communication with Richard Rorty.\n\n10. Gal. 3:26\u201329. See also A. Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme (Paris, 1997).\n\n11. Rom. 12:2; John 1:12.\n\n12. See A. Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982); M. Frede, A Free Will (Berkeley, 2011); Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, 1993), esp. chapter 2.\n\n13. This discussion follows Frede, A Free Will.\n\n14. I merely note that Aristotle also has no concept of \"evil,\" although he does have a concept of bad. This is probably connected to the absence of \"will\" in his thinking. If one thinks one cannot do without the concept of \"evil\" one would have to try to reconfigure it without reference to a \"will.\" I have some suggestions in that direction in my \"The Future of Evil,\" in Essays on Nietzsche's \"Genealogy of Morality,\" ed. S. May (Cambridge, 2011).\n\n15. If Feuerbach and Marx are right and religions are forms of imaginary compensation for human suffering and the lack of a clear perspective for dealing with them realistically, then one would expect religious belief and practice to increase as Western economies increasingly falter, just as the collapse of the political movements for social change in the West in the mid-1970s led to a resurgence of religion.\n\n10: DID WILLIAMS DO ETHICS?\n\nI am grateful to Damian Freeman, Istvan Hont, Tom Stern, and especially to Robert Pippin for discussions and comments on an earlier version of this chapter.\n\n1. Zmith somewhat spoiled the effect by drinking Diet Coke during the meeting. It turns out that it is very hard to feel intimidated by someone who drinks Diet Coke. One thinks of Cicero's remark about Julius Caesar: \"Sometimes I think he is a serious danger to the Republic, but then I observe the way he curls his sparse forelock around his finger and I think, 'Can such a man be a danger?' \"\n\n2. Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, et al., Their Morals and Ours (New York, 1973).\n\n3. EN 1094\u201395. I am greatly indebted to Istvan Hont for invaluable assistance, particularly for discussion of the material in this paragraph. See Bernard Williams, \"In the Beginning Was the Deed,\" in In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. G. Hawthorn (Princeton, 2005), 18\u201329.\n\n4. See Apology.\n\n5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, \u00c9mile; ou De l'\u00e9ducation, ed. F. Richard and P. Richard (Paris, 1964), 223. See also Hegel, Grundlinien zur Rechtsphilosophie, \u00a7 126 Z.\n\n6. Speech at the Convention, December 3, 1792.\n\n7. Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes! (Granta 1996), 149.\n\n8. Christine Korsgaard et al., The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996), 217\u201318.\n\n9. Adorno, Minima Moralia, \u00a7 18.\n\n10. Some of the material from chapter later appeared in \"Wagner and the Transcendence of Politics,\" in Bernard Williams, On Opera (New Haven, 2006), 70\u201389.\n\n11. John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley, 2008), 52. The use of the term \"hollow\" with reference to this particular passage is so frequent in the literature as to be almost a clich\u00e9. See also Michael Tanner, The Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner (London, 2010), 154 (\"stunningly grand and hollow\"); also Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's \"Ring\" (London, 1979): \"this 'triumphant' ending is a temporary and hollow one\" (238).\n\n12. Warren Darcy, Wagner's \"Das Rheingold\" (Oxford, 1993), 208\u201314.\n\n13. Richard Wagner, Mein Leben, vol. 2 (Munich, 1911).\n\n14. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Trag\u00f6die, \u00a7 24.\n\n15. T. W. Adorno, Versuch \u00fcber Wagner (Frankfurt am Main 1974, c. 1952).\n\n16. Adorno, Minima Moralia, \u00a7 18.\n\n17. Briefwechsel, 1928\u20131940: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 370.\n\n18. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 163.\n\n19. Ibid.\n\n11: THE WISDOM OF OEDIPUS AND THE IDEA OF A MORAL COSMOS\n\nMy thanks to Peter Agush, Lorna Finlayson, Hilary Gaskin, Chris Kassam, Domenic O'Mahony, Richard Raatzsch, Tom Stern, and Paul Woodruff for exceedingly helpful discussions of the topics of this chapter, as well as to the members of the Literature Seminar in the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge for many constructive suggestions.\n\n1. The only other major works of modern philosophy I can think of that end in this way are Hegel's Ph\u00e4nomenologie des Geistes and Heidegger's Einf\u00fchrung in die Metaphysik. That Williams's book originated as a series of lectures to a Classics Faculty goes some way towards making it less peculiar that the poet cited is Pindar, rather than Schiller or H\u00f6lderlin, or some appropriate English-language poet, but this still doesn't really explain why discursive prose gives way at the end to a metrically expressed image. Ending with a bit of poetry might also be expected to be associated with a cognitive and hermeneutic relaxation at the end of a difficult work, but that is clearly not the case here.\n\n2. Republic 607b.\n\n3. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 167.\n\n4. I intentionally say that we would distinguish between historical and mythical tales because, of course, Pindar himself shows no sign of making any such distinction, and, as Williams points out in a well-known chapter of Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, 2002, 149\u201372), he really couldn't have made such a distinction because there really was no such thing as \"proper\" history until the work of Thucydides, a generation after Pindar's death.\n\n5. We are relatively well informed about the history of Cyrene because of book 4 of Herodotus's Histories.\n\n6. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Trag\u00f6die, \u00a7 3 in S\u00e4mlitche Werke, 1:35.\n\n7. All of the examples in this paragraph are from Diogenes Laertius (lives of Thales, Chilon, Pythagoras).\n\n8. Anthologia lyra graeca, ed. Diehl.\n\n9. \"There are serious doubts in fact about whether Pythagoras ever existed\" means what such statements usually mean with reference to the ancient world. That is, there is a traditional body of lore about a particular person, attributing to that person some signal achievements. To say that that person did not exist is to say that there was not a single person with that name and those properties who accomplished all those things. Thus \"Homer did not exist\" does not mean that there was never any Greek named Homer who wrote some poems but that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not the work of a single blind poet of that name who lived in the eighth century BC in Ionia. This, of course, does not mean than no one wrote the Iliad. See Martin West, The Making of the Iliad (Oxford, 2012).\n\n10. Martin Heidegger, \"Die Zeit des Weltbildes,\" in Holzwege (Frankfurt\/M., 1963). Heracleitos has a very strong claim to being a major participant in this story. See his Fragment 30 Diels\/Kranz Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Zurich, 1951), 157.\n\n11. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 164.\n\n12. He does this at the beginning of his essay on Sophocles' Trachiniae in The Sense of the Past (Princeton, 2006), 49ff.\n\n13. On \"hope,\" see Geuss, Outside Ethics, 224\u201325. However, see also Michael Theunissen, Pindar: Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit (Beck, 2008), 307\u201399.\n\n14. Friedrich Nietzsche, G\u00f6tzen-D\u00e4mmerung' Streifz\u00fcge eines Unzeitgem\u00e4ssen, \u00a7 1, in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 6:111. Further judgements about Seneca's style: reading him is \"like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce\" (nineteenth century); he \"writes as a Boare does pisse, scilicet by jirkes\" (seventeenth century), both cited in edition of de otio and de brevitate vitae, ed. G. D. Williams (Cambridge, 2003), 26.\n\n15. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (at the end of book 1 of part 1). I can assure those who do not read German that the original is even more unctuous and rebarbative than this suggests. Kant is one of the few major philosophers whose style translators generally improve. In the original the full sentence from which this segment is taken runs to over a dozen lines and constitutes a full paragraph.\n\n16. Pindar, Ol. 11.8ff., Ol. 2.147ff., P. 4.248ff., etc.\n\n17. Scholia vetera in Pindari carmina (Stuttgart, 1997), ed. Drachmann, vol. 2.\n\n18. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 217n64.\n\n19. Obviously the description of the stripped oak log reminds one of Il. I.233ff. where Achilles swears on a sceptre made of just such a stripped oak branch that the Greeks will one day come to realise that they need him.\n\n20. If there is as much to be said for the pre-philosophical view as this essay argues, it would not be surprising to find, especially in certain early post-Socratic philosophers, traces of a recognition of those aspects of the world to which Sophocles, Pindar, and Thucydides are most sensitive. In Aristotle this takes the form of his recognition of \"the fate of Priam\" as a perpetual possibility (EN 1099b\u20131101b).\n\n21. Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt\/M., 1951).\n\n22. Basil L. Gildersleeve, Pindar: Olympian and Pythian Odes (Cambridge reprint of edition of 1885), 301; Bruce Braswell, A Commentary on the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar (Berlin, 1988), 365.\n\n23. Pindar is in fact an archetypical example of one aspect of what Nietzsche called a \"master morality\" in contrast to a \"slave morality.\" The first is focused on praising positive achievement while simply ignoring or passing over in silence failure; the second is centrally concerned to censure vice. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und B\u00f6se, \u00a7\u00a7 257\u201396 in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 5:205\u201340 and Zur Genealogie der Moral' Erste Abhandlung, \u00a7\u00a7 1\u201317 in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 5:257\u201389.\n\n24. Bernard Williams, \"Moral Luck,\" in his Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981), 20\u201340. Roger Crisp has pointed out (private communication) that the \"Gaugin\" who figures in Williams's essay is really a character who appears in S. Maugham's novel The Moon and Six-Pence, not the real painter of that name.\n\n25. We don't know what exact version of the Oedipus story Pindar, who after all was himself a local boy from Thebes, presupposes here. The early history of the story is extremely complex and obscure, and Greeks in general allowed themselves great freedom in mixing motifs, adding or dropping details of the old stories, or for that matter simply making things up. Thus in various older versions of the story, such as that in Homer, Oedipus is not presented as having been driven out of Thebes but continues to rule there, and in many of the extant versions of the story before it was taken over by the Athenian dramatists Oedipus's two sons, Polyneikes and Eteocles, are not the sons of Oedipus's wife\/mother but, apparently, of a second wife named Eurygeneia. So one must be careful about projecting back into Pindar details derived from other or later treatments of the Oedipus myth, such as that of Sophocles, which Pindar, given that he was about twenty years older than Sophocles, is unlikely to have known. There is only one other place in the extant work in which Pindar speaks of Oedipus, and that is the Second Olympian, which merely states that he killed his father and that a Fury caused his own sons to kill each other. The only further possible reference to a story about Oedipus occurs in one of the fragments where there is a reference to a \"young woman's riddle <spoken from> savage jaws,\" which might possibly refer to the Sphinx. See Jebb's introduction to his edition of OT.\n\n26. Actually one did survive: Thersandros. See Pindar, Ol. II.47.\n\n27. It is also true and important that no one was forced to compete; we do not in the same sense volunteer to be born and live.\n\n28. Even if the order in the world is now underwritten by Zeus, if Hesiod is to be believed it is still a fragmentary, local, and constructed order. The order is not in any way natural, necessary, or metaphysically grounded but is imposed by Zeus after a war in which he must overturn the old order completely and overcome the titans by military force. The defeated Titans still rage underground. See Hesiod, Theogonia ll. 617\u2013719; Pindar, First Pythian, ll. 13\u201328.\n\n29. Bernard Williams, \"Conflicts of Values,\" in The Idea of Freedom, ed. A. Ryan (Oxford, 1979).\n\n30. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1985), chapter 8.\n\n31. See p. 221 [Eighth Pythian 97].\n\n32. See also Geuss, \"Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,\" 219\u201333.\n\n12: WHO WAS THE FIRST PHILOSOPHER?\n\n1. Hegel construed philosophy as a form of what he called \"absolute spirit,\" that is, as something that inherently could not be understood as a way in which a social group reflected on itself. See G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklop\u00e4die der philosophischen Wissenschaften, \u00a7\u00a7 552\u201377, in Werke in zwanzig B\u00e4nden, 353\u201395.\n\n2. Friedrich Schlegel, Athen\u00e4umsfragmente, Fragment 112 in Friedrich Schlegel, Werke in zwei B\u00e4nden (Berlin, 1980), 1:204.\n\n3. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 1:799\u2013872.\n\n4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral: Zweite Abhandlung, \u00a7\u00a7 12-3, in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 5:313\u201318.\n\n5. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral: \"Vorrede \u00a7 7\" in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 5:254ff.\n\n6. Ibid., 5:275.\n\n7. Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama (Reclam).\n\n8. As everyone who has studied ancient theatre knows, there was also an earlier play, The Sack of Miletos by Phrynicus, on a (painful) topic of recent Greek history. Wagner was rather widely read in ancient literature\u2014he apparently sometimes read Aeschylus aloud to his family in the evenings\u2014but I don't know whether he would have been aware of this.\n\n9. The question that this immediately raises is why it would not be possible to turn \"Henry V\" into the same kind of mythical figure as \"Xerxes\" or \"Socrates,\" or rather whether that is not just what Shakespeare tried to do.\n\n10. Schiller, \u00dcber die \u00e4sthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen.\n\n11. See essay 11 in this volume.\n\n12. Ignoring for the moment the complication that would be introduced by the wings.\n\n13. Nietzsche, S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 7:460ff.\n\n14. Ibid.\n\n15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra: Zarathustra's Vorrede, \u00a7 6, in S\u00e4mtliche Werke, 4:S.21ff.\nIndex\n\nABC of Communism, The,\n\naccount, give an, , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013\n\nAchilles, , , , , 254n19\n\nAdmetus,\n\nAdorno, Theodor, , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013,\n\nAeneas, \u2013, ,\n\nAeneid, \u2013, 241n21\n\nAeschylus, ,\n\naesthetic, the, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , \u2013,\n\nAgamemnon, , ,\n\nAgincourt,\n\nAjax,\n\nAlcestis, ,\n\nAlcibiades,\n\nalienation, \u2013\n\nambiguity, x, \u2013, , , , , , \u2013,\n\nanarchism, , , , \u2013,\n\nAnchises, ,\n\nAngelus Silesius, ,\n\nanomie,\n\nAntigone,\n\nAntigone,\n\nAntilochus,\n\napologetics,\n\nappearance and reality, \u2013\n\nAquinas, Thomas,\n\narchitecture, , \u2013\n\narchive, \u2013\n\nArendt, Hannah,\n\nArgonauts, the,\n\nargumentation, xii, , , , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013, . See also rationcination; reason\n\nAristophanes, xii, ; Acharnians, ; Birds, ; Lysistrata, ; Peace,\n\nAristotle, xi, , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , ,\n\nArkesilaos, \u2013, \u2013, ,\n\nArmy, U.S., \u2013\n\nart, , , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013, , , ,\n\naspirations, x, , , , , ,\n\nAugustine, St., xiii\n\nAugustus, Emperor, , ,\n\nAuschwitz,\n\nauthority, x\u2013xvi, \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013,\n\nAutolykos, ,\n\nautonomy, as property of a discipline or realm of human life, , , , , \u2013,\n\nautonomy, as property of a human individual or group, xii\u2013xv, \u2013, \u2013, 237n4, 237n9. See also freedom\n\nAzande, 237n11\n\nBadiou, Alain, 243n9\n\nBakunin, Mikhail, ,\n\nBaudelaire, Charles,\n\nbeans, avoidance of, \u2013\n\nBeckett, Samuel,\n\nBellerophontes, , , 238n4\n\nbelles lettres, les, ,\n\nBenjamin, Walter, \u2013\n\nBentham, Jeremy,\n\nBenveniste, \u00c9mile \u2013,\n\nBerkeley, University of California at,\n\nBerlin, Isaiah, ,\n\nbest, the. See good, the\n\nbestiality,\n\nBirth of Tragedy, The, ,\n\nBlair, Tony, , ,\n\nBrecht, Bertold, ,\n\nBrief des Lord Chandos, Ein,\n\nBrown, Gordon,\n\nBr\u00fcnnhilde,\n\nB\u00fcchner, Georg,\n\nBukharin, Nikolai,\n\nCalvinism, \u2013, ,\n\nCambridge Music Faculty,\n\nCambridge University Orchestra,\n\ncamps, concentration, \u2013. See also Auschwitz\n\ncapitalism, , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, \u2013,\n\n\"Carthago delanda est,\" ,\n\nCatholicism, Roman, , \u2013\n\nCato, \u2013\n\nCelan, Paul, \u2013, , 251n4\n\nchoice, , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , , ,\n\nChristianity, \u2013, , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, ,\n\nchurch, x\u2013xi, \u2013,\n\nCIA,\n\nCicero, , \u2013, , , ,\n\nclarity, , , \u2013, \u2013,\n\nClaudius, Emperor,\n\nCleisthenes,\n\ncoercion, xi, xiv, , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013,\n\ncoherence, , , , , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, , , , \u2013\n\ncomedy, ,\n\nConfucius,\n\nconsistency, xi, , , , ,\n\nconstellation, \u2013\n\nconsumer goods, \u2013\n\nconsumerism,\n\nconsumers, , ,\n\nconsumption, , , , , \u2013, , , \u2013, , . See also production\n\ncontext, ix, xiv, \u2013, , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, 249n27\n\ncosmos, , , \u2013\n\nCreon,\n\ncriticism, xiv, xvi, \u2013, , , , , \u2013, , , , , ,\n\n\u010cSSR, ,\n\nCynics, 237n8\n\nCyrene, ,\n\nDamophilus, , , ,\n\nDante, , 244n26\n\nDavidson, Donald,\n\nDDR, \u2013\n\nDeathridge, John,\n\nDeleuze, Gilles,\n\ndemocracy, xiii, \u2013, , , ,\n\ndemocratic theory,\n\nDerrida, Jacques,\n\nDescartes, Ren\u00e9,\n\ndesirable, , , \u2013\n\ndesires, x\u2013xi, , , , \u2013, , , , , . See also preference\n\nDewey, John, xii, , 237n3\n\nDido,\n\nDio Cassius,\n\nDiogenes Laertius, \u2013\n\nDiomedes, \u2013,\n\nDionysius of Halicarnassos,\n\ndiscipline, x\u2013xii, xvi, , , ,\n\ndisciplines, \u2013, , , , , \u2013, , ,\n\nDucasse, Isidore,\n\nDurkheim, Emile,\n\nDyckerhoff & Co.,\n\neconomic development, , , \u2013,\n\neconomic power, , ,\n\neconomics, , , \u2013\n\neconomic structure, x, , , , , , , , \u2013, , , ,\n\neconomic transaction, \u2013,\n\nefficiency, ,\n\nEisenhower, Dwight, \u2013\n\nEluard, Paul,\n\nends and means, \u2013\n\nEnlightenment, the, xv\u2013xvi, , , , 241n18\n\nEnnius, ,\n\nEpicureans,\n\nethical ideals, , ,\n\nethical interests, ,\n\nethical life, , ,\n\nethical shadow,\n\nethical theorizing, ,\n\nethical thinking, xii, , ,\n\nethics, xii\u2013xv, \u2013, , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , 242n4; Christian, , ; philosophical, , , , ; religious, ; theological, \u2013. See also moral philosophy\n\nEthics and the Limits of Philosophy, \u2013\n\nEuripides: Bacchae, ; Hercules Furens, : Hippolytus,\n\nEuthyphro, \u2013\n\nEvans-Pritchard, E. E., 237n11\n\nevil, , \u2013, , 251n14\n\nfailure, , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013, , 249n19\n\nfairy tale, . See also just-so story; myth\n\nfaith, , , , . See also hope\n\nfate, , , , , , , , , , , 254n20\n\nFeuerbach, Ludwig, , , , 237n1, 251n15\n\nFoucault, Michel, xv, , , 238n15\n\nFrankfurt, University of, \u2013 Frankfurt Conference on Adorno, \u2013\n\nFrankfurt School, \u2013, \u2013\n\nFrede, Michael, 237n5\n\nfreedom, xii\u2013xiv, xvi, , , , , \u2013, , , \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , 237n5. See also autonomy; liberty\n\nfree market, , ,\n\nFrege, Gottlob, \u2013\n\nFreiburg\/Br., Classics Faculty at University of,\n\nFrench Revolution, , 251n4\n\nFreud, Sigmund,\n\nFuneral Music, Siegfried's, \u2013,\n\nGauguin, Paul,\n\ngenealogy, \u2013, , ,\n\nGenealogy of Morality, The,\n\nGlaukos, \u2013, , ,\n\ngod(s), x, xiv, , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; Abraham's, ; Christian, , , , , \u2013, , , ; chthonic, ,\n\ngods, Greco-Roman: Apollo, \u2013, , , ; Athena, , ; Death, ; Dionysus, ; Hermes, \u2013; Olympian, , ; Penates, ; Venus, \u2013; Zeus, , 255n28\n\ngods, Wagner's: Loge, ; Wotan, ,\n\nGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von,\n\ngood, the, xiii, , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013, , , , \u2013\n\nGorgias,\n\ngospels, \u2013, ; Christian, xi, xv, , , ,\n\nGraeber, David, 237n2\n\nGuatarri, F\u00e9lix,\n\nHabermas, J\u00fcrgen, ,\n\nHague, The,\n\nHartmann, Martin, 238n13\n\nHector,\n\nHegel, G.W.F., xv, , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , , , , , , , , 239n18\n\nHeidegger, Martin, , , , , ,\n\nHeilsgeschichte,\n\nHenry V, \u2013\n\nHeracles, , ,\n\nheresy, \u2013\n\nHerodotus, xii, , 237n6\n\nheroism, , , , , \u2013, ,\n\nHesiod, \u2013, , , 255n28\n\nHistorical School, the,\n\nhistory, , , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, 239n15, 244n28, 253n4\n\nHobbes, Thomas,\n\nHofmannsthal, Hugo Von,\n\nH\u00f6lderlin, Friedrich, ,\n\nHomer, , , , ,\n\nhope, , , , , , , , , . See also faith\n\nhumanities, the, , , \u2013\n\nhypocrisy,\n\nideology, x, , , , , \u2013, ,\n\nI. G. Farben, \u2013\n\nIliad, \u2013, , \u2013, , 254n9, 254n19\n\nimagination, \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , , 251n15\n\nimperium, xiii, , ,\n\ninterests, , , , , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , \u2013,\n\ninterpretation, xiii\u2013xiv, , \u2013, \u2013, , , , \u2013, \u2013, ,\n\nIon,\n\nJesuits,\n\nJesus, , ,\n\nJohnson, Samuel,\n\nJudas,\n\njustice, , , \u2013, ; as fairness,\n\njust-so story, . See also fairy tale; myth\n\nKant, Immanuel, xiii\u2013xv, \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , 238n14\n\nKierkegaard, S\u00f8ren,\n\nknowledge, x\u2013xi, xiii, , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , 248n15\n\nK\u00f6hnke, K.laus 238n2.\n\nKorsgaard, Christine,\n\nKraus, Karl,\n\nlabour, , , . See also production; work\n\nLabour, Old. See Old Labour\n\nlaw, xiv, , , , , \u2013, , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , \u2013, , , , , ,  law school,\n\nlawyer, \u2013,\n\nLear, King, \u2013\n\nlegal code. See law\n\nlegal system. See law\n\nLehre,\n\nLenin, Vladimir Ilyich,\n\nLevi, Primo, ,\n\nliberalism, \u2013, , \u2013, ,\n\nliberty, xiii, , 237n7. See also freedom life: architect's, , ; bean-free, ; everyday, , , \u2013, , ; form\/way of, , \u2013, \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, ; good\/ethical\/moral, , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , ; human, x\u2013xi, xiv\u2013xvi, , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , 244n26; inner, \u2013; meaningful, , \u2013, , \u2013; religious, ; social and political, xi, xv, , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , , \u2013,\n\nLivy,\n\nLocke, John,\n\nLucretius,\n\nlying, \u2013,\n\nLysias,\n\nMacArthur, Douglas,\n\nMacIntyre, Alasdair, \u2013\n\nMalraux, Andr\u00e9,\n\nmana, \u2013\n\nMandela, Nelson,\n\nMarx, Karl, , \u2013, , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , 237n1, 251n15\n\nMarxism, \u2013, ,\n\nMay ,\n\nmeaning, , , \u2013, ,\n\nmeaningfulness, , , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, 247n11\n\nmeaninglessness, , ,\n\nmeans. See ends and means\n\nMenelaus,\n\nMenger, Carl,\n\nMetaphysics, Aristotle's,\n\nMiddle Passage, the,\n\nMill, John Stuart,\n\nMime,\n\nMinima Moralia,\n\nMontesquieu,\n\nmoral authority, xii, , , , \u2013\n\nmoral collapse,\n\nmoral cosmos. See cosmos\n\nmoral development, xv, \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013, , , 245n29\n\nMoralit\u00e4t,\n\nmorality, , , , , , , , 255n23\n\nmoralization, , , \u2013,\n\nmoral judgement, ,\n\nmoral philosophy, \u2013, , , ,\n\nmoral values, xiii\u2013xv, , , , , , , , , , , , , \u2013, ,\n\nMrs. Dalloway,\n\nMus\u00e9e de l'Homme,\n\n\"must,\" the philosophical, xi, xiv, , 238n12\n\nmyth, , , , , \u2013, 253n4, 256n9. See also fairy tale; just-so story\n\nNarcissus, \u2013\n\nnarrative, \u2013, , , , , , , \u2013\n\nnecessities, ix\u2013xi, \u2013, , , \u2013\n\nneeds, ix\u2013xi, , \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , , , 237n1\n\nNegara,\n\nNero, xii\n\nNestor,\n\nNicomachean Ethics, \u2013, ,\n\nNietzsche, Friedrich, , , , \u2013, , , , , , , , , , , , , , \u2013,\n\nnihilism, , ,\n\nNikias, ,\n\nNineveh, ,\n\nnormativity, x\u2013xi, , , , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , , , \u2013,\n\nobjective, , , , , , \u2013, , ,\n\nobjectivity, \u2013, ,\n\nobscurity, . See also clarity\n\nobservation, , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nOdysseus, \u2013,\n\nOdyssey, \u2013,\n\nOedipus, , , , , , \u2013, , , \u2013, 255n25; wisdom of, \u2013, \u2013\n\nOld Labour,\n\noptimism, ,\n\noracles, xiv, \u2013, , , 237n11, 241n21\n\norder, good, \u2013\n\norigins, , \u2013, , , \u2013\n\nOstwald, Martin, 237n9\n\noutspokenness,\n\nOvid, \u2013\n\nParmenides,\n\nPascal, Blaise,\n\nPatroklos,\n\nPaul, St., xi, , , , 240n23\n\nPavarotti, Luciano,\n\nPentheus,\n\nPersians, The, \u2013\n\npessimism, ,\n\nphilosophy, xii, , \u2013, , , , , , \u2013\n\nPhokulides, \u2013,\n\nPindar, , \u2013, , , , ;\n\nFragment , \u2013; Fragment , ; Fragment , ; Eighth Pythian, \u2013, ; Fourth Pythian, \u2013; Olympian I,\n\nPlato, xii, \u2013, , , , , , , , , , , , ; Charmides, ; Ion, , \u2013; Phaedo, , ; Protagoras, \u2013; Republic, , , ; Symposium, ,\n\nPlutarch, , 237n6\n\nPoelzig, Hans, \u2013\n\nPoelzig-Bau, \u2013\n\npolis, , , ,\n\npolitics, , , , , , \u2013, , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , ; ancient, , , ; democratic, , , ; and ethics, , \u2013, , \u2013; Greek, \u2013, , ; modern, , \u2013,\n\nPolyneikes,\n\npons asinorum,\n\npositivism, , , ,\n\npotestas, , , ; patria, ,\n\npower, x, , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , ,\n\npractice, , , , , ,\n\npreference, x, , , , . See also desirex\n\nproduction, , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, , , , , . See also labour; work\n\nProtagoras,\n\nPyrrhus, King, \u2013\n\nPythagoras, \u2013,\n\nQuine, Willard Van Orman,\n\nQuintilian,\n\nRaaflaub, Kurt, 237n6\n\nRabelais, Fran\u00e7ois,\n\nRAF (Rote Armee Fraktion),\n\nratiocination, x, xii, , , , \u2013, , , \u2013\n\nrationality, , , , , , \u2013, ; capitalist, , ; instrumental, , , \u2013, ,\n\nRawls, John, ,\n\nreason, , , , , \u2013, , , , 239n15\n\nReemtsma, Jan Philipp, 238n13\n\nreligion, , \u2013, , , , , 242n5\n\nrepression, \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013\n\nrevelation, divine, , , 241n18\n\nrhetoric, \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013,\n\nriddle, , \u2013, \u2013\n\nRimbaud, Arthur, , ,\n\nRobespierre, Maximilien de,\n\nRorty, Richard,\n\nRousseau, Jean-Jacques,\n\nSaddam Hussein,\n\nSaint-Just, louis Antoine de,\n\nSartre. Jean-Paul, ,\n\nSather Lectures,\n\nSchiller, Friedrich,\n\nSchlegel, Friedrich,\n\nSchofield, Malcolm, 237n7\n\nSchopenhauer, Arthur,\n\nsciences: idiographic, , , ; nomothetic,\n\nSED, \u2013\n\nself-knowledge, ,\n\nself-sufficiency, 237n8\n\nSenate, Roman, xiv, , , \u2013, \u2013\n\nSeneca,\n\nShame and Necessity, ,\n\nSiegfried, \u2013,\n\nSieglinde,\n\nSiegmund,\n\nSilenus: wisdom of, ,\n\nSittlichkeit,\n\nskill, , , , , ,\n\nslaves, xii, , , , , , , , , , 242n4\n\nSmith, Adam, ,\n\nSocrates, xii, \u2013, \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, 247n6\n\nSolon,\n\nsophists, the, xii,\n\nSophocles, , , , , , 237n10\n\nSphinx, the, \u2013, , \u2013\n\nSS [= Schutzstaffel],\n\nStalin, ,\n\nStirner, Max,\n\nStoics, , , 237n5\n\nsubstitutivity, , \u2013,\n\nsuccess, , , 242n27, 246n12, 249n19. See also failure\n\nT\u00eat Offensive, . See also war:\n\nIndochinese\n\nThales of Miletus, \u2013, , \u2013, , \u2013\n\nThatcher, Margaret,\n\nTheogonia, \u2013\n\ntheology, xiv, \u2013\n\nTheses on Feuerbach, ,\n\nthinking, conceptual, history, or mythic, \u2013\n\nThomism,\n\nThucydides, , \u2013, , , , ,\n\nTosca,\n\nTrachiniae,\n\ntragedy, , , ,\n\nTristan,\n\nTrojans, \u2013\n\nTrotsky, Leon, , , ,\n\nTrugaios,\n\nTruman, Harry,\n\ntruth, , , , , , \u2013, , , , ,\n\nTruth and Truthfulness,\n\ntruth-telling, 250n4. See also lying\n\nTschernyschevsky, N. G.,  Turandot,\n\nUlysses,\n\nutopia, , ,\n\nValhalla,\n\nValkyries, Ride of,\n\nVarro,\n\nVates, \u2013, ,\n\nVirgil, . See also Aeneid Vitruvius,\n\nVoltaire,\n\nWagner, Richard, \u2013, \u2013, \u2013; on \"the state,\" \u2013. Works: G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung, ; Das Rheingold, ; Der Ring des Nibelungen, \u2013; Siegfried, ; Tristan, ; Die Walk\u00fcre,\n\nwar: Indochinese, , ; Korean, ; Peleponnesian, , , , ; Persian, , Pyrrhus's, , ; World War(s), , , , ; Zeus's Great,\n\nwar criminal,\n\nWarsaw Pact, \u2013,\n\nWeber, Max, ,\n\nWelskopf, E., 237n6\n\nwill, concept of the, \u2013, 251n14\n\nWilliams, Bernard, \u2013, \u2013, , , ; on ethics as discipline, \u2013, , \u2013; on ethics and politics, \u2013; on Gauguin, ; on Pindar, \u2013, \u2013, ; on United States as eighteenth-century society, \u2013; on Wagner, \u2013; on the world as moral cosmos, \u2013\n\nWindelband, Wilhelm, \u2013, , 238n1\n\nWinter Palace,\n\nWirszubski, Ch., 237n7\n\nwisdom, \u2013, , \u2013. See also Oedipus: wisdom of; Silenus: wisdom of wishful thinking, \u2013, \u2013,\n\nWittgenstein, Ludwig, , , ,\n\nWolff, R. P., 237n4\n\nWollheim, Norbert,\n\nWollheim, Richard,\n\nwork, ix\u2013x, \u2013, , , \u2013, , . See also labour; production\n\nworldview, \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , , 247n5\n\nwriting, 238n4\n\nXenophon,\n\nXerxes,\n\nZarathustra, \n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nALONE WITH GOD\n\nPublished by David C Cook\n\n4050 Lee Vance View\n\nColorado Springs, CO 80918 U.S.A.\n\nDavid C Cook Distribution Canada\n\n55 Woodslee Avenue, Paris, Ontario, Canada N3L 3E5\n\nDavid C Cook U.K., Kingsway Communications\n\nEastbourne, East Sussex BN23 6NT, England\n\nThe graphic circle C logo is a registered trademark of David C Cook.\n\nAll rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes,\n\nno part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form\n\nwithout written permission from the publisher.\n\nUnless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, \u00a9 Copyright 1960, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version\u00ae, NIV\u00ae. Copyright \u00a9 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc\u2122. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.\n\nLCCN 2011926834\n\nISBN 978-0-7814-0586-7\n\neISBN 978-1-4347-6671-7\n\n\u00a9 1981, 2011 John MacArthur Jr.\n\nPublished in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates, Inc.\n\nFirst edition titled Jesus' Pattern of Prayer published by Chariot Victor in 1981 \u00a9 John MacArthur Jr., ISBN 0-8024-4962-X.\n\nThe Team: Alex Field, Sarah Schultz, Jack Campbell, Karen Athen\n\nCover Design: Amy Kiechlin Konyndyk\n\nCover Photo: iStockphoto 2613138\n\nThird Edition 2011\nCONTENTS\n\nIntroduction\n\nPart One: The Attitude of Prayer\n\n. A Heart Set on God\n\n. Seeking the Lord in Secret\n\nPart Two: The Pattern of Prayer\n\n. \"Our Father\"\n\n. \"Hallowed Be Your Name\"\n\n. \"Your Kingdom Come\"\n\n. \"Your Will Be Done\"\n\n. \"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread\"\n\n. \"Forgive Us Our Debts\"\n\n. \"Deliver Us from Evil\"\n\nPart Three: Prayer in Action\n\n. Praying for the Right Things\n\n. Praying for the Lost\n\nDiscussion Guide\nINTRODUCTION\n\nMartyn Lloyd-Jones once wrote, \"Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.\"1 Commentator J. Oswald Sanders had this lofty view of prayer:\n\nNo spiritual exercise is such a blending of complexity and simplicity. It is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try, yet the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on high. It is as appropriate to the aged philosopher as to the little child. It is the ejaculation of a moment and the attitude of a lifetime. It is the expression of the rest of faith and of the fight of faith. It is an agony and an ecstasy. It is submissive and yet importunate. In the one moment it lays hold of God and binds the devil. It can be focused on a single objective and it can roam the world. It can be abject confession and rapt adoration. It invests puny man with a sort of omnipotence.2\n\nThe essence of prayer is simply talking to God as you would to a beloved friend\u2014without pretense or flippancy. Yet it is in that very attitude toward prayer so many believers have trouble. That is because communion with God is so vital and prayer so effective in the fulfillment of God's plan, the enemy attempts constantly to introduce errors into our understanding of and commitment to prayer. Every generation faces the necessity to reprioritize and purify a corrupted or confused perception of prayer. For many, prayer has been replaced with pragmatic action. Function overrides fellowship with God; busyness crowds out communication. For others, prayer lacks a sense of awe and respect. Their efforts are flippant, disrespectful, and irreverent. Then there are those who believe prayer is designed to make demands and claims on God. They attempt to force Him to do what they believe He should do for them. Finally, for some, prayer is nothing more than a routine ritual.\n\nYou may view prayer with the utmost respect, yet you find your own practice lacks purpose and vitality, so you don't spend time with God like you know you should. While there are many reasons Christians struggle to pray, I believe there is one overriding factor. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote:\n\nIt is the highest activity of the human soul, and therefore it is at the same time the ultimate test of a man's true spiritual condition. There is nothing that tells the truth about us as Christian people so much as our prayer life.... Ultimately, therefore, a man discovers the real condition of his spiritual life when he examines himself in private, when he is alone with God.... And have we not all known what it is to find that, somehow, we have less to say to God when we are alone than when we are in the presence of others? It should not be so; but it often is. So that it is when we have left the realm of activities and outward dealings with other people, and are alone with God, that we really know where we stand in a spiritual sense.3\n\nAlone with God\u2014such an opportunity should be the Christian's one great desire. How sad that so many believers spend brief amounts of time with Him, or don't go to Him at all, because they have so little to say.\n\nMany years ago when I preached through Matthew's gospel at Grace Community Church, specifically chapter 6 and the portion most commonly known as the \"Lord's Prayer,\" it so revolutionized people's praying that I took the opportunity to write a book on the subject. Titled Jesus' Pattern of Prayer, it dealt exclusively with the pattern Jesus set for prayer in Matthew 6, which is so foundational to all our understanding of prayer.4 This new edition, called Alone with God, has allowed me the opportunity to publish it again with David C Cook.\n\nBut this book is more than a simple revision of the chapters from the original; I have also added several chapters made up of various passages from the New Testament that should broaden and enhance your understanding of prayer. While Jesus' pattern for prayer occupies the central portion of the book, you need to understand what the Holy Spirit\u2013inspired New Testament writers built on that foundation.\n\nThe first part will examine the attitude all believers should have regarding their communication with God. All Christians ought to necessarily have their hearts focused on God so that communion with Him is an everyday, natural function of their lives. The first chapter will define and examine this vital need for us to be praying without ceasing. At the same time, we all need to guard against praying with the wrong attitude. That was what plagued the Pharisees, who viewed prayer as a means to show off their spirituality rather than as a humble opportunity to glorify God.\n\nTo correct the disciples' tainted perspective of prayer gleaned from those hypocritical religious leaders, Jesus offered a pattern that gave a comprehensive view of all the essential elements of righteous prayer, every one of which centers on God. This central portion of the book will cover each phrase of our Lord's pattern of prayer. From beginning to end, you'll discover that Jesus focuses our attention on God\u2014on His adoration, worthiness, and glory.\n\nTo help you apply what you have learned, the final two chapters of the book will examine the specific things all believers should pray for. What you read may surprise you, for just as a father must correct his child's priorities in life, God must do the same with regard to our practice of prayer.\n\nIt is my prayer for you that when you have completed your journey through this book, you'll rediscover the power and passion that time spent alone with God can bring. I also hope you'll understand that prayer is not an attempt to get God to agree with you or provide for your selfish desires but that it is both an affirmation of His sovereignty, righteousness, and majesty and an exercise to conform your desires and purposes to His will and glory.\n\nNotes\n\n1 Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979), 2:45.\n\n2 J. Oswald Sanders, Effective Prayer (Chicago: Moody, 1969), 7.\n\n3 Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, 2:45.\n\n4 John MacArthur Jr., Jesus' Pattern of Prayer (Chicago: Moody, 1981).\nPart One\n\nTHE ATTITUDE OF PRAYER\n1\n\nA HEART SET ON GOD\n\nFor Christians, prayer is like breathing. You don't have to think to breathe because the atmosphere exerts pressure on your lungs and forces you to breathe. That's why it is more difficult to hold your breath than it is to breathe. Similarly, when you're born into the family of God, you enter into a spiritual atmosphere wherein God's presence and grace exert pressure, or influence, on your life. Prayer is the normal response to that pressure. As believers, we all have entered the divine atmosphere to breathe the air of prayer. Only then can we survive in the darkness of the world.\n\nUnfortunately, many believers hold their spiritual breaths for long periods, thinking brief moments with God are sufficient to allow them to survive. But such restricting of their spiritual intake is caused by sinful desires. The fact is, every believer must be continually in the presence of God, constantly breathing in His truths to be fully functional.\n\nBecause ours is such a free and prosperous society, it is easier for Christians to feel secure by presuming on instead of depending on God's grace. Too many believers become satisfied with physical blessings and have little desire for spiritual blessings. Having become so dependent on their physical resources, they feel little need for spiritual resources. When programs, methods, and money produce impressive results, there is an inclination to confuse human success with divine blessing. Christians can actually behave like practical humanists, living as if God were not necessary. When that happens, passionate longing for God and yearning for His help will be missing\u2014along with His empowerment. Because of this great and common danger, Paul urged believers to \"pray at all times\" (Eph. 6:18) and to \"devote yourselves to prayer\" (Col. 4:2). Continual, persistent, incessant prayer is an essential part of Christian living, and it flows out of dependence on God.\n\nThe Frequency of Prayer\n\nJesus' earthly ministry was remarkably brief: barely three years long. Yet in those three years, as must have been true in His earlier life, He spent a great amount of time in prayer. The Gospels report that Jesus habitually rose early in the morning, often before daybreak, to commune with His Father. In the evening, He would frequently go to the Mount of Olives or some other quiet spot to pray, usually alone. Prayer was the spiritual air that Jesus breathed every day of His life. He practiced an unending communion between Himself and the Father.\n\nHe urged His disciples to do the same. He said, \"Keep on the alert at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are about to take place\" (Luke 21:36).\n\nThe early church learned that lesson and carried on Christ's commitment to continual, unceasing prayer. Even before the day of Pentecost, the 120 disciples gathered in the upper room and \"with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer\" (Acts 1:14). That didn't change even when 3,000 were added to their number on the day of Pentecost (2:42). When the apostles were led to structure the church so that ministry could be accomplished effectively, they said, \"We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word\" (6:4).\n\nThroughout his life, the apostle Paul exemplified this commitment to prayer. Read the benedictions to many of his epistles and you'll discover that praying for his fellow believers was his daily practice. To the Roman believers he said, \"God... is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you, always in my prayers making request\" (Rom. 1:9\u201310; cf. 1 Cor. 1:4; Eph. 5:20; Phil. 1:4; Col. 1:3; 1 Thess. 1:2; 2 Thess. 1:3, 11; Philem. v. 4). His prayers for believers often occupied him both \"night and day\" (1 Thess. 3:10; 2 Tim. 1:3).\n\nBecause he prayed for them so continually, Paul was able to exhort his readers to pray that way as well. He urged the Thessalonians to \"pray without ceasing\" (1 Thess. 5:17). He commanded the Philippians to stop being anxious and instead \"in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God\" (4:6). He encouraged the Colossians to \"devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving\" (4:2; cf. Rom. 12:12). And to help the Ephesians arm themselves to combat the spiritual darkness in the world around them, he said, \"With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints\" (6:18). Unceasing, incessant prayer is essential to the vitality of a believer's relationship to the Lord and his ability to function in the world.\n\nA Way of Life\n\nAs a child, I used to wonder how anyone could pray without ceasing. I pictured Christians walking around with hands folded, heads bowed, and eyes closed, bumping into everything. While certain postures and specific times set aside for prayer have an important bearing on our communication with God, to \"pray at all times\" obviously does not mean we are to pray in formal or noticeable ways every waking moment. And it does not mean we are to devote ourselves to reciting ritualistic patterns and forms of prayer.\n\nTo \"pray without ceasing\" basically refers to recurring prayer, not nonstop talking. Thus it is to be our way of life\u2014we're to be continually in an attitude of prayer.\n\nFamous nineteenth-century preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon offered this vivid picture of what praying at all times means:\n\nLike the old knights, always in warfare, not always on their steeds dashing forward with their lances in rest to unhorse an adversary, but always wearing their weapons where they could readily reach them, and always ready to encounter wounds or death for the sake of the cause which they championed. Those grim warriors often slept in their armour; so even when we sleep, we are still to be in the spirit of prayer, so that if perchance we wake in the night we may still be with God. Our soul, having received the divine centripetal influence which makes it seek its heavenly centre, should be evermore naturally rising towards God himself. Our heart is to be like those beacons and watchtowers which were prepared along the coast of England when the invasion of the Armada was hourly expected, not always blazing, but with the wood always dry, and the match always there, the whole pile being ready to blaze up at the appointed moment. Our souls should be in such a condition that ejaculatory prayer should be very frequent with us. No need to pause in business and leave the counter, and fall down upon the knees; the spirit should send up its silent, short, swift petitions to the throne of grace.\n\nA Christian should carry the weapon of all prayer like a drawn sword in his hand. We should never sheathe our supplications. Never may our hearts be like an unlimbered gun, with everything to be done to it before it can thunder on the foe, but it should be like a piece of cannon, loaded and primed, only requiring the fire that it may be discharged. The soul should be not always in the exercise of prayer, but always in the energy of prayer; not always actually praying, but always intentionally praying.1 [DG]\n\nI think of praying at all times as living in continual God consciousness, where everything we see and experience becomes a kind of prayer, lived in deep awareness of and surrender to our Heavenly Father. It is something I share with my Best Friend\u2014something I instantly communicate with God. To obey this exhortation means that, when we are tempted, we hold the temptation before God and ask for His help. When we experience something good and beautiful, we immediately thank the Lord for it. When we see evil around us, we ask God to make it right and to allow us to help accomplish that, if it is according to His will. When we meet someone who does not know Christ, we pray for God to draw that person to Himself and to use us as faithful witnesses. When we encounter trouble, we turn to God as our Deliverer.\n\nThus life becomes a continually ascending prayer: All life's thoughts, deeds, and circumstances become opportunities to commune with our Heavenly Father. In that way, we constantly set our minds \"on the things above, not on the things that are on earth\" (Col. 3:2).\n\nFellowship with God\n\nSince the ultimate purpose of our salvation is to glorify God and to bring us into intimate, rich fellowship with Him, failure to seek God in prayer is to deny that purpose. \"What we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also,\" said the apostle John, \"so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ\" (1 John 1:3).\n\nImagine spending an entire workday with your best friend at your side. You would no doubt acknowledge his presence throughout the day by introducing him to your friends or business associates and talking to him about the various activities of the day. But how would your friend feel if you never talked to him or acknowledged his presence? Yet that's how we treat the Lord when we fail to pray. If we communicated with our friends as infrequently as some of us communicate with the Lord, those friends might soon disappear.\n\nOur fellowship with God is not meant to wait until we are in heaven. God's greatest desire, and our greatest need, is to be in constant fellowship with Him now, and there is no greater expression or experience of fellowship than prayer.\n\nIn one of his classic works on prayer, Purpose in Prayer, nineteenth-century pastor E. M. Bounds provided us with this reminder of how we must cultivate our fellowship with the Lord:\n\nPrayer is not a meaningless function or duty to be crowded into the busy or the weary ends of the day, and we are not obeying our Lord's command when we content ourselves with a few minutes upon our knees in the morning rush or late at night when the faculties, tired with the tasks of the day, call out for rest. God is always within call, it is true; His ear is ever attentive to the cry of His child, but we can never get to know Him if we use the vehicle of prayer as we use the telephone, for a few words of hurried conversation. Intimacy requires development. We can never know God as it is our privilege to know Him, by brief and fragmentary and unconsidered repetitions of intercessions that are requests for personal favors and nothing more. That is not the way in which we can come into communication with heaven's King. \"The goal of prayer is the ear of God,\" a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued and continuous waiting upon Him, pouring out our heart to Him and permitting Him to speak to us. Only by so doing can we expect to know Him, and as we come to know Him better we shall spend more time in His presence and find that presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.2\n\nThe Ways and Means of Prayer\n\nIn Ephesians 6:18, Paul says we are to pray with \"all prayer and petition.\" The Greek word translated \"prayer\" (also in 1 Thess. 5:17) is the most common New Testament word for prayer and refers to general requests. The word translated \"petition\" refers to specific prayers. Paul's use of both words suggests our necessary involvement in all kinds of prayer, every form that is appropriate.\n\nThe Posture\n\nTo pray all the time necessitates being in various positions, because you will never be in the same position all day. In the Bible, people prayed while standing (Gen. 24:12\u201314), lifting up their hands (1 Tim. 2:8), sitting (Judg. 20:26 NIV), kneeling (Mark 1:40), looking upward (John 17:1), bowing down (Ex. 34:8), placing their heads between their knees (1 Kings 18:42), beating their breasts (Luke 18:13), and facing the temple (Dan. 6:10).\n\nThe Circumstances\n\nWhile some people today think prayer ought to be very formal, the Bible documents that people prayed in many different circumstances. They prayed while wearing sackcloth (Ps. 35:13), sitting in ashes (Job 1:20\u201321; 2:8), crying tears (Ps. 6:6), throwing dust on their heads (Josh. 7:6), tearing their garments (1 Kings 21:27), fasting (Deut. 9:18), sighing (Ps. 6:4\u20136), groaning (Ezra 9:4\u201315), crying out loud (Heb. 5:7), sweating blood (Luke 22:44), agonizing with broken hearts (Ps. 34:18), making a vow (Acts 18:18), making sacrifices (Ps. 20:1\u20133), and singing songs (Acts 16:25).\n\nThe Place\n\nThe Bible records people praying in all sorts of places as well: in battle (2 Chron. 13:14\u201315), in a cave (1 Kings 19:9\u201310), in a closet (Matt. 6:6), in a garden (Matt. 26:36\u201344), on a mountainside (Luke 6:12), by a river (Acts 16:13), by the sea (Acts 21:5\u20136), in the street (Matt. 6:5), in the temple (1 Kings 8:22\u201353), in bed (Ps. 4:3\u20134), in a home (Acts 9:39\u201340), in the stomach of a fish (Jonah 2:1\u201310), on a housetop (Acts 10:9), in a prison (Acts 16:23\u201326), in the wilderness (Luke 5:16), and on a cross (Luke 23:33\u201334, 46). In 1 Timothy 2:8, Paul said, \"I want the men in every place to pray.\" For the faithful, Spirit-filled Christian, every place becomes a place of prayer.\n\nThe Time\n\nAt a pastors' conference I attended some years ago, one man preached on the subject of morning prayer. To support his point, he read various passages that show people praying in the morning. As he did, I looked up all the Scriptures that show people praying three times a day (Dan. 6:10), in the evening (1 Kings 18:36), before meals (Matt. 14:19), after meals (Deut. 8:10), at the ninth hour or 3:00 p.m. (Acts 3:1), at bedtime (Ps. 4:4), at midnight (Acts 16:25), day and night (Luke 2:37; 18:7), often (Luke 5:33), when they're young (Jer. 3:4), when they're old (Dan. 9:2\u201319), when they're in trouble (2 Kings 19:3\u20134), all day long (Ps. 86:3), and always (Luke 18:1; 1 Thess. 5:17).\n\nPrayer is fitting at any time, in any posture, in any place, under any circumstance, and in any attire. It is to be a total way of life\u2014an open and continual communion with God. After having embraced all the infinite resources that are yours in Christ, don't ever think you're no longer dependent on the moment-by-moment power of God.\n\nCoincidental Attitudes\n\nThroughout his life, the believer senses his insufficiency; thus he lives in total dependence on God. As long as you feel that insufficiency and dependence on God, you will pray without ceasing. At the same time, you also know you are the beneficiary of tremendous blessings from God. That's why Paul instructed the Thessalonians to \"rejoice always\" and \"give thanks\" in everything in their unceasing prayers (1 Thess. 5:16\u201318). That reflects a beautiful balance in our communion with God. While we offer specific petitions for our needs and the needs of others, at the same time we can rejoice and give thanks\u2014not just for His specific answers, but also for the abundant blessing He pours out to us each and every day.\n\nFervency in Prayer\n\nSince communication with God is to occur throughout the day, don't imagine that precludes the need for passion in your prayers. Paul commanded the Colossians, \"Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it\" (4:2), and he warned the Ephesians to \"be on the alert with all perseverance and petition\" as they prayed (6:18). For prayer to accomplish what God wants in our lives, it must be an all-consuming practice that makes alertness and perseverance its most valuable commodities.\n\nAlertness\n\nIn its most basic sense, Paul's command to keep alert means to stay awake and not fall asleep during prayer. In Gethsemane shortly before His betrayal, Jesus asked Peter, James, and John to keep watch while He prayed (Matt. 26:38). He returned soon after only to find them already asleep, so He said to Peter, \"So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak\" (vv. 40\u201341). It is impossible to pray while sleeping\u2014you must be awake and alert to talk to God, just as you are when talking with anyone.\n\nPaul's instruction, both in Colossians 4:2 and Ephesians 6:18, encompasses more than mere physical alertness, however. Believers should also look for those things they ought to be praying about. Evidently Peter learned this deeper truth from his failure to stay awake, for he wrote in his first epistle, \"Be of sound judgment and sober spirit for the purpose of prayer\" (4:7).\n\nChristians sometimes pray vague, general prayers that are difficult for God to answer because they do not really ask for anything specific. That's why specific prayer is so important. While general requests can be appropriate in certain instances, it is through His answers to specific prayers that we see God put His love and power on display. Jesus promised, \"Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it\" (John 14:13\u201314).\n\nThose believers who continually seek the Lord have specific concerns; if you are not alert to the specific problems and needs of other believers, you can't pray about them specifically and earnestly. But when you do, you can watch for God's answer, rejoice in it when it comes, and then offer Him your thankful praise.\n\nPerseverance\n\nUnfortunately, most believers never get serious about prayer until a problem occurs in their lives or in the life of someone they love. Then they are inclined to pray intently, specifically, and persistently. But Paul says we are to always pray that way and to \"be on the alert with all perseverance\" (Eph. 6:18). The Greek word translated \"perseverance\" and in the command \"devote yourselves\" (Col. 4:2) is from proskartere\u00f8 [ ], a compound word made up of kartere\u00f8 [ ] (\"to be steadfast\" or \"to endure\") and an added preposition that intensifies the meaning. The verb means \"to be courageously persistent,\" \"to hold fast and not let go.\" It is used of Moses' faithful endurance when he led the children of Israel out of Egypt (Heb. 11:27). To be devoted to prayer is to earnestly, courageously, and persistently bring everything, especially the needs of others, before God. Sensitivity to the problems and needs of others, including other believers who are facing trials and hardships, will lead us to pray for them \"night and day\" as Paul did for Timothy (2 Tim. 1:3).\n\nOur Lord's Example\n\nJesus Himself was the epitome of perseverance in prayer. Hebrews 5:7 says, \"In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death.\" That verse is a commentary on our Lord's prayer life while on earth\u2014a life characterized by passionate prayers offered with great intensity and agony. Although Scripture does not chronicle the details of His prayers, we can be sure that He persevered in them, even if it took all night (Luke 6:12).\n\nThe greatest illustration of His intensity in prayer took place in the garden prior to His death. Luke wrote, \"He knelt down and began to pray, saying, 'Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.'... And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground\" (22:41\u201342, 44). In Matthew's version of this same event, we find that Jesus petitioned God three times (26:36\u201346). That was one fervent, prolonged prayer experience, so much so that during it the disciples fell asleep several times.\n\nOur Lord performed many mighty works when He was on earth, yet in none of them is there any apparent expenditure of energy. Although the Scripture says virtue went out of Him, there is no record that would indicate He had to exert any effort to perform His miracles. Only when He prayed do we see Him agonize and toil over His petitions, even to the point of sweating great drops of blood. Such persistence is foreign to us, yet it is that kind of intensity Christ wanted the disciples to learn from two parables He taught them.\n\nOur Lord's Parables\n\nAmong the many parables of our Lord, two stand out as different from the others. While the other parables relate to God by comparison, those He gave in Luke 11 and 18 relate to God by contrast. They illustrate people who are unlike God, and in so doing, these parables make a strong case for the value of persistent praying.\n\nHe said to them, \"Suppose one of you has a friend, and goes to him at midnight and says to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has come to me from a journey, and I have nothing to set before him'; and from inside he answers and says, 'Do not bother me; the door has already been shut and my children and I are in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.' I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs. So I say to you, ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it will be opened.\" (Luke 11:5\u201310)\n\nNow He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart, saying, \"In a certain city there was a judge who did not fear God and did not respect man. There was a widow in that city, and she kept coming to him, saying, 'Give me legal protection from my opponent.' For a while he was unwilling; but afterward he said to himself, 'Even though I do not fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection, otherwise by continually coming she will wear me out.'\" And the Lord said, \"Hear what the unrighteous judge said; now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly.\" (Luke 18:1\u20138)\n\nThe contrast between God and the reluctant friend and unjust judge is obvious. If such unwilling and sinful humans will honor persistence, how much more will our holy, loving Heavenly Father? If you don't get an immediate answer to your request, or if events don't turn out exactly or as quickly as you hoped they would, our Lord's word to us is, \"Don't lose heart.\" Just keep praying without ceasing and don't give up. Keep knocking. Keep asking. Keep seeking.\n\nSpurgeon offered this insight to the importance of our persistence:\n\nIf we would prevail, we must persist; we must continue incessantly and constantly, and know no pause to our prayer till we win the mercy to the fullest possible extent. \"Men ought always to pray.\" Week by week, month by month, year by year; the conversion of that dear child is to be the father's main plea. The bringing in of that unconverted husband is to lie upon the wife's heart night and day till she gets it; she is not to take even ten or twenty years of unsuccessful prayer as a reason why she should cease; she is to set God no times nor seasons, but so long as there is life in her and life in the dear object of her solicitude, she is to continue still to plead with the mighty God of Jacob. The pastor is not to seek a blessing on his people occasionally, and then in receiving a measure of it to desist from further intercession, but he is to continue vehemently without pause, without restraining his energies, to cry aloud and spare not till the windows of heaven be opened and a blessing be given too large for him to house. But, brethren, how many times we ask of God, and have not because we do not wait long enough at the door! We knock a time or two at the gate of mercy, and as no friendly messenger opens the door, we go our ways. Too many prayers are like boys' runaway knocks, given, and then the giver is away before the door can be opened. O for grace to stand foot to foot with the angel of God, and never, never, never relax our hold; feeling that the cause we plead is one in which we must be successful, for souls depend on it, the glory of God is connected with it, the state of our fellow men is in jeopardy. If we could have given up in prayer our own lives and the lives of those dearest to us, yet the souls of men we cannot give up, we must urge and plead again and again until we obtain the answer.3\n\nWhen Paul commands us to pray without ceasing, he is simply supporting the principle Jesus taught in Luke 11 and 18 that prayer is to be incessant. We are not heard for our many words but for the cries of our hearts. The man who came to his friend to ask for bread did not recite some formula request; he pleaded for what he needed. The same is true for the widow\u2014she cried out for protection to one who had the power to answer her request. Persistent, continual prayer that comes from the innermost part of your being is what moves the heart of our compassionate, loving God.\n\nPower\n\nThe most important and pervasive thought Paul gave about prayer was that it should be \"in the Spirit\" (Eph. 6:18; cf. Jude v. 20). This qualification has nothing to do with speaking in tongues, nor with some other ecstatic or supernatural activity. To pray in the Spirit is to pray in the name of Christ\u2014that is, to pray consistent with His nature and will. To pray in the Spirit is to pray in complete agreement with the Spirit, who \"helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words [real words unuttered, not non-words uttered]; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God\" (Rom. 8:26\u201327). Zechariah 12:10 calls the Holy Spirit the \"Spirit of grace and of supplication.\" Just as we are to pray continually, know that the Holy Spirit continually prays for us. When we pray in the Spirit, we align our minds and desires with His mind and desires, which are consistent with the will of the Father and the Son.\n\nHow do you make your prayers consistent with the Spirit? By walking in the fullness of the Spirit. As your life is filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18) and as you walk in obedience to Him, He will govern your thoughts so your prayers will be in harmony with His. As you submit to the Holy Spirit, obey His Word, and rely on His leading and strength, you will be drawn into close and deep fellowship with the Father and the Son.\n\nOur lives must reflect a continual commitment to the constant exercise of prayer. All that you learn about God should drive you into His presence. Make that your goal as you take every aspect of your life to Him in prayer.\n\nNotes\n\n1 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Parables of Our Lord (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979), 434\u201335.\n\n2 E. M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer (Chicago: Moody, n.d.), 53\u201354.\n\n3 Spurgeon, Parables of Our Lord, 436\u201337.\n2\n\nSEEKING THE LORD IN SECRET\n\nThe greatest danger to persistent, effective prayer is the habit of performance without passion. Seventeenth-century Puritan pastor John Preston captured the essence of this danger in these words:\n\nIf it is performed in a formal or customary and overly manner, you would be as good to omit it altogether; for the Lord takes our prayers not by number but by weight. When it is an outward picture, a dead carcass of prayer, when there is no life, no fervency in it, God does not regard it. Do not be deceived in this, it is a very common deception. It may be a man's conscience would be upon him, if he should omit it altogether. Therefore, when he does something, his heart is satisfied, and so he grows worse and worse. Therefore, consider that the very doing of the duty is not that which the Lord heeds, but He will have it so performed that the end may be obtained and that the thing for which you pray may be effected.\n\nIf a man sends his servant to go to such a place, it is not his going to and fro that he regards, but he would have him to dispatch the business. So it is in all other works. He does not care about the formality of performance, but he would have the thing so done that it may be of use to him. If you send a servant to make a fire for you, and he goes and lays some green wood together and puts a few coals underneath, this is not to make a fire for you. He must either get dry wood, or he must blow until it burns and is fit for use.\n\nSo when your hearts are unfit, when they are like green wood, when you come to warm them and to quicken them by prayer to God, it may be you post over this duty, and leave your hearts as cold and distempered as they were before. My beloved, this is not to perform this duty. The duty is effectually performed when your hearts are wrought upon by it, and when they are brought to a better tune and temper than they were before.\n\nIf you find sinful lusts, your business there is to work them out by prayer, to reason the matter, to expostulate the thing before the Lord, and not to give over until you have set all the wheels of your soul right, until you have made your hearts perfect with God. And, if you find your hearts cleaving too much to the world, you must wean them and take them off. If you find a deadness and unaptness, an indisposition in you, you must lift up your souls to the Lord and not give over until you are quickened. And this is to perform the duty in such a manner as the Lord accepts, otherwise it is hypocritical performance; for this is hypocrisy, when a man is not willing to let the duty go altogether, nor yet is willing to perform it fervently, and in a quick and zealous manner.\n\nHe that omits it altogether is a profane person, and he that performs it zealously, and to purpose, is a holy man; but a hypocrite goes between both. He would do something at it, but he will not do it thoroughly. And, therefore, if you find you have carelessly performed this duty from day to day, that you have performed it in a negligent, perfunctory manner, know that it is a hypocritical performance. Therefore, when we spend so much time exhorting you to a constant course in this duty, remember still that you must perform it in such a manner that may have heat and life in it, that it may be acceptable to God.1\n\nSadly, all believers can relate in some degree to Preston's indicting words. Nothing is so sacred that Satan will not invade it. In fact, the more sacred something is, the more he desires to profane it. Surely few things please him more than to come between believers and their Lord during the sacred intimacy of prayer. Sin will follow us into the very presence of God; and no sin is more powerful or destructive than pride. In those moments when we would come before the Lord in worship and purity of heart, we may be tempted to worship ourselves. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote:\n\nWe tend to think of sin as we see it in rags and in the gutters of life. We look at a drunkard, poor fellow, and we say, there is sin. But that is not the essence of sin. To have a real picture and understanding of sin, you must look at some great saint, some unusually devout and devoted man, look at him there on his knees in the very presence of God. Even there self is intruding itself, and the temptation is for him to think about himself, to think pleasantly and pleasurably about himself and to really be worshipping himself rather than God. That, not the other, is the true picture of sin. The other is sin, of course, but there you do not see it at its acme, you do not see it in its essence. Or to put it in another form, if you really want to understand something about the nature of Satan and his activities, the thing is not to go to the dregs or the gutters of life. If you really want to know something about Satan, go away to that wilderness where our Lord spent forty days and forty nights. That's the true picture of Satan, where you see him tempting the very Son of God.2\n\nSin leads us to take shortcuts in all the Christian disciplines, and when we succumb to its temptation often enough, hypocrisy becomes the pattern of our lives without our realizing it. Because hypocrisy is such a subtle and destructive danger to vital Christian living, our Lord was quick to condemn its many adherents. During His earthly life, the group guiltiest of it was the Jewish religious leaders\u2014those whom you would normally expect to be His greatest supporters were actually His greatest enemies. That's because His righteous words and deeds condemned their own unrighteous practices. To protect His followers from their evil influence, Jesus said, \"Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy\" (Luke 12:1).\n\nThe Pharisees, through their rabbinic tradition, had succeeded in corrupting and perverting all the good things God had taught the nation of Israel, including their practice of prayer. No religion has ever had a higher standard and priority for prayer than Judaism. As God's chosen people, the Jews were the recipients of His written Word, \"entrusted with the oracles of God\" (Rom. 3:2). No other people as a race or as a nation has ever been so favored by God or had such direct communication with Him.\n\nThe Jewish Perspective on Prayer\n\nOld Testament Jews desired to pray because they believed God wanted them to approach Him. They didn't fear God the way pagans did their gods. In fact, the rabbis said that the Holy One yearns for the prayers of the righteous. They undoubtedly got that truth from Psalm 145:18, which says, \"The LORD is near to all who call upon Him\" (cf. Ps. 91:15). No true Jew with a right spirit ever doubted God's priority for prayer. The rabbis rightly believed prayer was not only communication with God but also a mighty weapon that released His power.\n\nThe Essence of Their Understanding\n\nThe Word of God makes clear that God wanted to hear the prayers of the people. Psalm 65:2 says, \"O You who hear prayer, to You all men come.\" The Midrash, a Jewish commentary on portions of the Old Testament, says this about Psalm 65:2: \"A mortal man cannot grasp the conversation of two people speaking at the same time, but with God it is not so. All pray before Him, and He understands and receives all their prayers\" (Rabbah 21.4). Men may become tired of listening to people, but God's ears are never satiated; He is never wearied by men's prayers.\n\nThe Jewish teachers went even further, teaching the people to pray constantly and avoid the habit of praying only when they were desperate. The Talmud, the codification of rabbinic traditions, says, \"Honour the physician before you have need of him.... The Holy One says, just as it is my office to cause the rain and the dew to fall, and make the plants to grow to sustain man, so art thou bounden to pray before me, and to praise me in accordance with my works; thou shalt not say, I am in prosperity, wherefore shall I pray? But when misfortune befalls me then will I come and supplicate\" (Sanhedrin 44b). That is the right perspective. Prayer was not to be used just for emergency appeals; it was to be an unbroken conversation built around a living, loving fellowship with God.\n\nThe Elements of Their Prayers\n\nThe Jews believed their prayers should incorporate the following elements:\n\nLoving Praise\n\nThe psalmist said, \"I will bless the LORD at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth\" (Ps. 34:1). Psalm 51:15 says, \"O Lord, open my lips, that my mouth may declare Your praise.\"\n\nGratitude and Thanksgiving\n\nJonah said, \"I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving\" (Jonah 2:9). In a relationship with the God of heavenly resources, there will always be something to thank Him for.\n\nReverence\n\nThe Old Testament saints didn't flippantly rush into God's presence, treating Him as if He were a man. They came before Him with reverence, recognizing that when they prayed, they were coming face-to-face with Almighty God. The prophet Isaiah saw the Lord in a vision \"sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple\" (6:1). His response was, \"I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts\" (v. 5).\n\nPatient Obedience\n\nOld Testament Jews believed it was wrong to pray if their hearts were not right. Psalm 119 affirms that throughout its 176 verses. A true Jew had no reservations\u2014he approached God with a spirit of obedience, desiring to please Him.\n\nConfession\n\nGodly Old Testament Jews knew that they were unclean and that when they came before God in prayer, they had to purge themselves of sin. That was David's perspective when he said, \"Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD? And who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart\" (Ps. 24:3\u20134). Only those who have dealt with their sins have the right to enter God's presence.\n\nUnselfishness\n\nThe Jews had a sense of solidarity that we don't understand. They were national\u2014a theocracy ruled by God. That Israel still exists as a nation shows how vitally they have clung to the preservation of that national identity. As a result, their prayers encompassed the good of the community and were not isolated to the individual. For example, the rabbis asked God not to listen to the prayer of a traveler. That's because he might pray for an easy journey with good weather and accommodating skies when the people in that vicinity actually needed rain for their crops.\n\nMany of us come to God with personal pronouns in our prayers: I, me, and my. We tell the Lord about our needs and problems without thinking of others in the body of Christ. But we need to be willing to sacrifice what seems best for ourselves because God has a greater plan for the whole.\n\nHumility\n\nA true Jew went before the Lord in prayer to submit himself to the will of God. The greatest illustration of that came from the heart of the truest Jew who ever lived: Jesus. In His prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, He said to the Father, \"Not My will, but Yours be done\" (Luke 22:42). When we pray, instead of asking the Lord to do our will, we should conform ourselves to His will. We are to ask Him to work His will through us and give us the grace to enjoy it.\n\nPerseverance\n\nTrue believing Old Testament Jews taught that prayer was to be persistent. After the children of Israel had worshipped the golden calf, Moses prayed for forty days in a row that God would forgive them (Deut. 9:25\u201326). He persevered in prayer.\n\nThe Rabbinic Perversion of Prayer\n\nIn spite of such a great heritage of prayer, several faults subtly crept into Israel's prayer life (as identified by William Barclay in his helpful discussion in The Gospel of Matthew).3\n\nPrayer Became Ritualized\n\nThe wording and forms of prayer were set, and they were then simply read or repeated from memory. Prayers easily became a routine, semiconscious religious exercise, able to be recited without any mental or passionate involvement by the individual.\n\nThe most common formalized prayers were the Shema (a composite of selected phrases from Deut. 6:4\u20139; 11:13\u201321; and Num. 15:37\u201341) and the Shemon\u2211h <esray [ ] (\"The Eighteen\"), which incorporated eighteen prayers for various occasions. Both prayers were to be offered every day, regardless of where the people were or what they were doing. Faithful Jews even prayed all eighteen prayers of the Shemon\u2211h <esray [ ] each morning, afternoon, and evening.\n\nThree basic attitudes characterized the people who offered formalized prayers. Those Jews who had sincere hearts used the time of prayer to worship and glorify God. Some approached it indifferently, perfunctorily mumbling their way through the words as quickly as possible. Others, like the scribes and Pharisees, recited the prayers meticulously, making sure to enunciate every word and syllable perfectly.\n\nPrescribed Prayers\n\nThe Jews developed prayers for every object and occasion, including light, darkness, fire, rain, the new moon, travel, good news, and bad news. I'm sure their original intent was to bring every aspect of their lives into God's presence, but they undermined that noble goal by compartmentalizing the prayers.\n\nBy limiting prayer to specific times and occasions, the Jews turned prayer into a habit that focused on a prescribed topic or situation, not on genuine desire or need. In spite of that, some faithful Jews like Daniel used those times as reminders to approach God in sincerity with a pure heart (Dan. 6:10).\n\nLong Prayers\n\nThe religious leaders esteemed long prayers, believing that a prayer's sanctity and effectiveness were in direct proportion to its length. Jesus warned of the scribes who \"for appearance's sake offer long prayers\" (Mark 12:40). While a long prayer is not necessarily insincere, it does lend itself to dangerous tendencies like pretense, repetition, and rote. We are subject to the same temptations today, all too often confusing verbosity with meaning and length with sincerity.\n\nMeaningless Repetitions\n\nOne of the Jews' worst faults was adopting the pagan religions' practice of meaningless repetition, just as the prophets of Baal in their contest with Elijah \"called on the name of Baal from morning until noon,\" even raving \"until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice\" (1 Kings 18:26, 29). Hour after hour they repeated the same phrase, trying by the quantity of their words and the intensity with which they were spoken to make their god hear and respond.\n\nTo Be Seen and Heard by Men\n\nWhile the other faults are not necessarily wrong in themselves, having simply been carried to extremes and used in meaningless ways, the desire to use prayer as an opportunity to parade one's spirituality before men is intrinsically evil because it both originates in and is intended to satisfy pride. As we noted earlier in this chapter, the motive of sinful self-glory is the ultimate perversion of prayer. It robs prayer of its primary purpose: to glorify God (John 14:13).\n\nThe Condemnation by Christ\n\nIn Matthew 6:5\u20138, in the midst of His discussion of the contrast between true and false righteousness, Jesus condemned the Pharisees' practice of prayer in two specific areas: self-centered prayer and prayer that had no meaning. Each area manifests one or more of the faults that had so corrupted true prayer in the life of the nation.\n\nSelf-Centered Prayer\n\nSince pride was at its root, our Lord first dealt with those who prayed to exhibit their supposed spirituality before men. \"When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full\" (Matt. 6:5). Prayer that focuses on self is always hypocritical because every true prayer focuses on God.\n\nThe term hypocrite originally referred to Greek actors who wore masks that portrayed in exaggerated ways the roles they were dramatizing. Thus hypocrites are pretenders\u2014persons who are playing a role. The only thing you truly know about them is the false image that disguises their real beliefs and feelings.\n\nThe False Audience: Men\n\nThe hypocritical scribes and Pharisees prayed for the same reason they did everything else: to attract attention and bring honor to themselves. That was the essence of their righteousness, which Jesus said had no part in His kingdom (Matt. 5:20).\n\nOn the surface, Jesus' condemnation of their practice of prayer seems unwarranted. Certainly there was nothing wrong with standing and praying in the synagogues. Standing was the most common position for prayer in first-century Israel, and the synagogues were the most appropriate and logical places for public prayers to be offered. As long as the prayer was sincere, it was suitable. Even the practice of praying at the \"street corners\" was not wrong in itself\u2014that was actually a normal place for prayer. At the appointed hour for prayer, devout Jews would stop wherever they were, even if they were walking along the street.\n\nThe real evil of these hypocritical worshippers, however, was not the location of their prayers but their desire to display themselves \"so that they may be seen by men.\" The Greek word for street refers to a wide, major street and the street's corner. The scribes and Pharisees made a point of praying where a crowd was most likely to gather. Whatever place might afford the largest audience, that's where you would find these hypocrites.\n\nIn their desire to exalt themselves before their fellow Jews, the scribes and Pharisees were guilty of pride. They were like the Pharisee in Jesus' parable, who \"stood and was praying this to himself\" (Luke 18:11). God had no part in their pious activity. As a result, they had \"their reward in full.\" Since they were concerned only about the reward men could give, that's all they received.\n\nIt's imperative we take to heart Jesus' warning in Matthew 6:5. To develop intimacy with anyone requires openness and sincerity, and that certainly applies to our relationship with God. If you ever want to experience power and passion in your communication with the Lord, you must begin by making sure your motives are like those of the publican in Luke 18:13\u201314, who approached God with a humble and penitent attitude.\n\nThe True Audience: God\n\nIn contrast to the hypocritical practice of the day, Jesus instructed His followers: \"When you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you\" (Matt. 6:6). Notice that the Lord gave no prescribed time or occasion for prayer. All He said was, \"When you pray,\" thus giving us great latitude to pray at all times.\n\nTo make as great a contrast as possible between God's pattern for prayer and that which was practiced by the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus said that when you pray, \"go into your inner room.\" That could refer to any small room or chamber, even a storage closet. Such rooms were often secret and used to store and protect valuables. But Jesus' point was not about the proper location to pray; rather, it was about attitude. If the true worshipper found it necessary, he should find the most secluded, private place available to avoid the temptation to show off. When he got there, he should close the door to keep out all distractions, so he could concentrate on God and pray to Him and Him alone.\n\nI will never forget one day when my oldest son, Matthew, was only five years old. I was walking down the hall of our home when I heard his voice coming from our bedroom. I couldn't quite make out what he was saying, so I moved to a spot just outside the room. No one was in the room with him. He was lying on our bed praying. He had something on his heart that he wanted to say to God, so he went to a room all alone and prayed. It didn't matter to him that no one could see him because he wasn't talking to an audience; he was talking honestly with God.\n\nMuch of our prayer lives should take place literally in secret. Jesus regularly left His disciples so He could find places to be alone as He prayed. Our family and friends may be aware of times when we are praying, but what we say is meant for God, not them. Certainly there are occasions when public prayer also edifies those who hear because it represents their feelings and needs. But even those prayers convey a certain intimacy because God is the focus of the requests. When a person's heart is right and concentrated on God, public prayer will in a profound way close one up alone in the presence of God, making it no different in motive than a prayer offered in the most private of places.\n\nWhen we pray with the right attitude, \"[our] Father who sees what is done in secret will reward [us].\" The most important secret He sees is not the words we say in the privacy of our rooms, but the thoughts we have in the privacy of our hearts. Those are the secrets He is most concerned about. And when He sees that He is the true focus of our prayers, we will receive the reward only He can give. Jesus doesn't tell us what that reward will be, but we do know that God will faithfully and unfailingly bless those who come to Him in sincerity and humility.\n\nMeaningless Prayer\n\nThe hypocritical prayers of the scribes and Pharisees were offered not only in the wrong spirit but also with meaningless words. They had no substance, no significant content. To be acceptable to God, prayers must be genuine expressions of worship and of heartfelt requests and petitions.\n\nFalse Content: Meaningless Repetition\n\nThe practice of using meaningless repetition in prayer was common in many pagan religions in Jesus' day, as it is in many religions today. Thus His warning was clear: \"When you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words\" (Matt. 6:7). The phrase use meaningless repetition is the translation from the Greek text of one word that refers to idle, thoughtless chatter.\n\nThe Jews had picked up this practice from the Gentiles, who believed that the value of prayer was largely a matter of quantity, supposing \"they [would] be heard for their many words.\" They believed their deities first had to be aroused, then cajoled, intimidated, and finally badgered into listening and answering.\n\nPrayer was simply a matter of religious ceremony to the Gentiles, and it became that way for the Jews as well. Since no effort is required in those types of prayer, those who followed that practice could be totally indifferent to the prayer's content. But worse than that, they were indifferent to real communion with God.\n\nEach of us would do well to heed our Lord's warning here. We have all been guilty of repeating the same prayers meal after meal and meeting after meeting\u2014with little or no thought of God or what we are saying. Prayer that is thoughtless and detached is offensive to God and should be offensive to us.\n\nLet me add one qualification, however. Jesus is not forbidding the repetition of genuine requests. In the first chapter, we looked at those verses that declare the value of persistent prayer. Honest, properly motivated repetition of needs or praise is not wrong. But the mindless, indifferent recital of spiritual-sounding incantations or magical formulas is.\n\nTrue Content: Sincere Requests\n\nIn contrast to those who use meaningless repetition, Jesus said, \"Do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him\" (Matt. 6:8). God's purpose in prayer is not for us to inform or persuade Him to respond to our needs but to open sincere and continual lines of communication with Him. Prayer, more than anything else, is sharing the needs, burdens, and hungers of our hearts with a God who cares. He wants to hear us and commune with us more than we could ever want to commune with Him, because His love for us is so much greater than our love for Him.\n\nHow should you respond to these important words from our Lord? If you are ever to know power and passion in your prayer life, you need to pray with a devout heart\u2014with a pure motive seeking only the glory of God. You also need to pray with a humble heart, seeking only the attention of God, not men. Finally, you need to pray with a confident heart, knowing full well that God already knows what you need. If you go to God on those terms, He will reward you in ways you could never imagine, and you'll learn the value of being alone with God.\n\nNotes\n\n1 John Preston, The Puritans on Prayer (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1995), 25\u201326.\n\n2 Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, 2:22\u201323.\n\n3 William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1958), 1:191\u201398.\nPart Two\n\nTHE PATTERN OF PRAYER\n3\n\n\"OUR FATHER\"\n\nNineteenth-century pastor and author E. M. Bounds, who is well-known for his writings on the subject of prayer, said it best, \"Prayer honors God; it dishonors self.\"1 The scribes and Pharisees never understood that truth, and I fear the same is true for much of today's church.\n\nThe waves of our indulgent, selfish, materialistic society have washed ashore on Christian theology in many forms, including the prosperity gospel. Although the Bible teaches that God is sovereign and man is His servant, the prosperity gospel implies the opposite. Teaching that claims we can demand things of God is spiritual justification for self-indulgence. It perverts prayer and takes the Lord's name in vain. It is unbiblical, ungodly, and is not directed by the Holy Spirit.\n\nPrayer begins and ends not with the needs of man but with the glory of God (John 14:13). It should be concerned primarily with who God is, what He wants, and how He can be glorified. Those who teach otherwise are not preoccupied with the extension of Christ's kingdom or the glory of God's name but with the enlargement of their own empires and the fulfillment of their own selfish desires. Such teaching attacks the heart of Christian truth\u2014the very character of God.\n\nTo believe that God is really like some genie, waiting to grant our every desire, flies in the face of Scripture's clear teaching. Many Old Testament saints certainly had just cause to plead with God to take them out of harrowing circumstances, yet they sought to glorify God and follow His will.\n\nRecalling what happened while he was inside a great fish, Jonah said, \"I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to You, into Your holy temple.... I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving. That which I have vowed I will pay. Salvation is from the LORD\" (Jonah 2:7, 9). When Jonah seemingly had good cause to demand God to get him out of the fish, he simply extolled the character of God.\n\nDaniel was often in dangerous situations because of his strategic role within the pagan Babylonian society. In his concern over Judah's captivity, he prayed, \"Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments, we have sinned\" (Dan. 9:4\u20135). He began his prayer by affirming the nature and character of God.\n\nThe prophet Jeremiah lived the majority of his life in frustration and confusion, all the while weeping with a broken heart over his people. While he could have easily despaired over his ministry, he never became preoccupied with his own painful circumstances. Instead he would pray and extol the glory, name, and works of God (e.g., Jer. 32:17\u201323).\n\nThose Old Testament saints knew they were to recognize God in His rightful place and bring their wills into conformity with His. And that's just what Jesus taught the disciples when He said, \"Pray, then, in this way\" (Matt. 6:9). In fewer than seventy words, we find a masterpiece of the infinite mind of God, who alone could compress every conceivable element of true prayer into such a brief and simple form\u2014a form that even a young child can understand but the most mature believer cannot fully comprehend:\n\nOur Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen. (vv. 9\u201313)\n\nJesus presented this prayer as a bold contrast to the substandard, unacceptable prayers common to the religious leaders of His day, which we considered in the last chapter. After warning the disciples of the perversion that had so corrupted Jewish prayer life, our Lord gave a divine pattern so all believers could pray in a way that is pleasing to God.\n\nJesus' Pattern for Prayer\n\nThis prayer, often called the \"Lord's Prayer,\" when it could be more accurately titled the \"Disciples' Prayer,\" is not a set group of words to repeat. When Christ said to \"pray, then, in this way,\" He didn't mean to pray with His exact words. His intention was to give the disciples a pattern for the structure of their own prayers, especially since He had just warned them of the dangers of meaningless repetition. That doesn't mean we shouldn't recite it, as we do with so many passages in Scripture. Memorizing it is actually helpful so we can meditate on its truths as we formulate our own thoughts. The prayer is mainly a model we can use to give direction to our own praise, adoration, and petitions. It is not a substitute for our own prayers but a guide for them.\n\nThe initial benefit of this prayer is the way it exhibits the believer's relationship with God. \"Our Father\" presents the father-child relationship; \"hallowed be Your name,\" the deity-worshipper; \"Your kingdom come,\" the sovereign-subject; \"Your will be done,\" the master-servant; \"give us this day our daily bread,\" the benefactor-beneficiary; \"forgive us our debts,\" the savior-sinner; and \"do not lead us into temptation,\" the guide-pilgrim.\n\nThis prayer also defines the attitude and spirit we ought to have. \"Our\" reflects unselfishness; \"Father,\" family devotion; \"hallowed be Your name,\" reverence; \"Your kingdom come,\" loyalty; \"Your will be done,\" submission; \"give us this day our daily bread,\" dependence; \"forgive us our debts,\" penitence; \"do not lead us into temptation,\" humility; \"Yours is the kingdom,\" triumph; \"and the glory,\" exultation; and \"forever,\" hope.\n\nIn similar ways, the prayer can be outlined to emphasize the balance of God's glory and our need. It can also show the threefold purpose of prayer: to hallow God's name, to usher in His kingdom, and to do His will. And it details our present provision (daily bread), past pardon (forgiveness of sins), and future protection (safety from temptation).\n\nNo matter how perfect a pattern this is, we must remember our Lord's previous warning about our attitude in prayer. If our hearts are not right, even the Disciples' Prayer can fall into misuse. So how do you make sure you have the right heart attitude? Just make sure you focus on God. That's why this prayer is such a helpful model. Every phrase and petition focuses on God\u2014on His person, His attributes, and His works. You prevent your prayers from being hypocritical or mechanical when you focus on God, not on yourself.\n\nTrue prayer comes from humble people who express absolute dependence on God. That's what our Lord wants in our prayers. The more we think true thoughts about God, the more we will seek to glorify Him in our prayers. Commentator John Stott said, \"When we come to God in prayer, we do not come hypocritically like play actors seeking the applause of men, nor mechanically like pagan babblers, whose mind is not in their mutterings, but thoughtfully, humbly and trustfully like little children to their Father.\"2\n\nGod Is Our Father\n\nFather is probably the most common term we use in prayer, and rightly so, for that follows the pattern Jesus set. Prayer should always begin with the recognition that God is our Father, the One who gave us life and who loves, cares for, provides for, and protects us.\n\nThe fact that God is our Father means that only believers in Christ are children in His family. Admittedly, Malachi wrote, \"Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us?\" (Mal. 2:10), and Paul did say to the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill, \"As even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His children'\" (Acts 17:28). But Scripture makes it perfectly clear that God is the Father of unbelievers only in creation.\n\nSpiritually, unbelievers have another father. In His severest condemnation of the Jewish leaders who opposed Him, Jesus said, \"You are of your father the devil\" (John 8:44). First John 3 clearly characterizes two families: the children of God and the children of the devil. The former do not continue to commit sin; the latter do. The apostle Paul made a clear distinction between the children of light and the children of darkness (Eph. 5:8).\n\nThere is simply not just one spiritual family of mankind under one universal fatherhood of God. Second Peter 1:4 says that only those who believe have been made \"partakers of the divine nature.\" It is only to those who receive Him that Jesus gives \"the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name\" (John 1:12). Thus we can go to God as His beloved children.\n\nThe Jewish Perspective of God\n\nWhereas \"our Father\" declares a wonderful intimacy between God and His children, most of the world in Jesus' day worshipped gods who were characterized as distant and fearsome. That eventually became the Jewish perspective of God. Because of their continual disobedience to God throughout the centuries, including tolerating pagan gods, the Jews severed any true relationship they had with God as their Father. To them He had become little more than a relic of the past, a remote being who once called and guided their ancestors.\n\nBut those faithful Jews, both in our Lord's time and before, knew God as their Father. Isaiah saw Him that way. To deal with the nation's sinfulness, he prayed:\n\nYou were angry, for we sinned, we continued in them a long time; and shall we be saved? For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; and all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on Your name, who arouses himself to take hold of You; for You have hidden Your face from us and have delivered us into the power of our iniquities. But now, O LORD, You are our Father. (Isa. 64:5\u20138)\n\nIsaiah reminded them of the comforting reality that God was their Father and that He would take care of them.\n\nThe Jews in the Old Testament saw five basic elements that encompassed the fatherhood of God.\n\nAs Father of the Nation\n\nFirst Chronicles 29:10 gives God the title \"LORD God of Israel our father.\" That identifies Him as Father of the nation.\n\nAs a Father Who Is Near\n\nA father is closer than an uncle or a cousin or a friend or a neighbor. Psalm 68, while using dramatic language to refer to the grandeur of God's power, simply says that God is \"a father of the fatherless\" (v. 5).\n\nAs a Gracious Father\n\nA father is forgiving, tenderhearted, merciful, and gracious to His children, which is very true of God: \"Just as a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him\" (Ps. 103:13).\n\nAs a Guiding Father\n\nA father leads his children and gives them wisdom and instruction. That was also true of God's relationship to Israel. He said of them, \"With weeping they will come, and by supplication I will lead them; I will make them walk by streams of waters, on a straight path in which they will not stumble; for I am a father to Israel\" (Jer. 31:9).\n\nAs a Father Who Requires Obedience\n\nBecause God was their Father, the people were required to obey Him. Deuteronomy 32:6 reiterates that: \"Do you thus repay the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? Is not He your Father who has bought you?\"\n\nThe Biblical Perspective of God\n\nWhen Jesus arrived on the scene, He reintroduced His Jewish audience to God as a loving, beneficent Father to those who know, love, and obey Him. In the Sermon on the Mount, He taught them that the Father takes care of the needs of His children:\n\nAsk, and it will be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! (Matt. 7:7\u201311)\n\nJesus reaffirmed to them what their Scripture taught and what faithful, godly Jews had always believed: God is the Father in heaven to those who trust in Him.\n\nIn all His prayers, Jesus used the title Father, except when He was on the cross bearing the sin of the world and was forsaken by God (Matt. 27:46). Though the text of Matthew 6:9 uses the Greek word Pat\u2211r [ ], Jesus likely used the Aramaic word Abba since that is the language He and the majority of Palestinian Jews commonly spoke. Since Abba is equivalent to our term Daddy, Jesus would have used it to emphasize the personal and intimate relationship God has with His children.\n\nTo be able to approach God in prayer as our loving Heavenly Father implies several things.\n\nIt Dispels Fear\n\nMissionaries report that, because so many individuals live in fear of their gods, one of the greatest gifts Christianity ever brings to primitive societies is the certainty that God is a loving, caring Father. The invented false gods of false religions are typically characterized as vengeful and jealous, and their worshippers must take desperate measures to appease them. But knowing that the true God is our Father dispels all such fear.\n\nIt Encourages Hope\n\nIn the midst of a hostile world that's falling apart, God is our Father, and He'll take care of our future. If an earthly father will spare no effort to help and protect his children, how much more will our Heavenly Father love, protect, and help us (Matt. 7:11)?\n\nIt Removes Loneliness\n\nEven if we are rejected and abandoned by family, friends, or even fellow believers, we know that our Heavenly Father will never leave us (Heb. 13:5). To drive away loneliness, God's presence is all a believer ever needs.\n\nPaul Tournier, a Christian physician, wrote in his A Doctor's Casebook in the Light of the Bible:\n\nThere was one patient of mine, the youngest daughter in a large family which the father found it difficult to support. One day she heard her father mutter despairingly, referring to her, \"We could well have done without that one.\" That is precisely what God can never say. He is a loving Father to every one of His children.3\n\nIt Defeats Selfishness\n\nJesus included all of God's children in His pattern for prayer. This is evident in His plural-pronoun usage from the very first phrase, our Father, and on throughout the prayer. Jesus began with the words our Father because our prayers should embrace the entire community of the faithful. Remember that Ephesians 6:18 says we are to pray for \"all the saints.\" We are to pray holding up to God what is best for all, not just for one.\n\nIt Provides Resources\n\nGod is \"our Father who is in heaven.\" All the resources of heaven are available to us when we trust God as our heavenly supplier. He \"has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ\" (Eph. 1:3). Commentator Arthur W. Pink wrote:\n\nIf God is in heaven then prayer needs to be a thing of the heart and not of the lips, for no physical voice on earth can rend the skies, but sighs and groans will reach the ears of God. If we are to pray to God in heaven, then our souls must be detached from all the earth. If we pray to God in heaven, then faith must wing our petitions.4\n\nWhatever you seek, whether it's peace, fellowship, knowledge, victory, or boldness, God has an abundant supply in the heavenlies. We need only ask our Father for it.\n\nIt Demands Obedience\n\nIf Jesus, as God's true Son, came down from heaven not to do His own will but His Father's (John 6:38), how much more are we, as adopted children, to do only His will? Obedience to God is one of the supreme marks of our relationship to Him as children.\n\nYet in His grace, God loves and cares for His children even when they are disobedient. The story Jesus told in Luke 15 would be better titled the parable of the loving father rather than the prodigal son. The father in the story represents our Heavenly Father, who can forgive and rejoice over both a self-righteous son who remains moral and upright and a rebellious son who becomes dissolute, wanders away, but then returns.\n\nWhen you begin your prayers by calling on \"Our Father who is in heaven,\" you indicate your eagerness to go to Him as a child, knowing He loves you. And you'll find that He is eager to lend His ear, His power, and His eternal blessing to the requests of His children if it serves them best and further reveals His purpose and glory.\n\nNotes\n\n1 Bounds, Purpose in Prayer, 43.\n\n2 John Stott, Christian CounterCulture: The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1979), 151\u201352.\n\n3 Paul Tournier, A Doctor's Casebook in the Light of the Bible, cited in William Barclay, The Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer for Every Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 172.\n\n4 Arthur W. Pink, An Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1950), 161.\n4\n\n\"HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME\"\n\nThroughout the centuries, no names have endured more abuse than those belonging to our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. Whether used in an epithet or curse, in casual or formal conversation, in secular or theological discussions, their names are more often treated with disrespect than with respect or exaltation. Martyn Lloyd-Jones offered this insightful perspective on how we use God's name:\n\nWhat unworthy ideas and notions this world has of God! If you test your ideas of God by the teaching of the Scriptures you will see at a glance what I mean. We lack even a due sense of the greatness and the might and the majesty of God. Listen to men arguing about God, and notice how glibly they use the term.... It is indeed almost alarming to observe the way in which we all tend to use the name of God. We obviously do not realize that we are talking about the ever blessed, eternal, and absolute, almighty God. There is a sense in which we should take our shoes off our feet whenever we use the name.1\n\nWhile we may cringe and actually voice displeasure when we hear someone taking God's name in vain, we would do well to examine our own heart attitude. Indifference and lack of respect due His name from those who love Him may be just as heinous a sin.\n\nUnfortunately, it is this latter problem that often plagues Christianity. When believers have a low view of God, everything focuses on meeting felt needs within the body of Christ. When the church adopts such a perspective, it often offers people nothing more than spiritual placebos. It centers on psychology, self-esteem, entertainment, and a myriad of other diversions to attempt to meet perceived and felt needs.\n\nIt is essential, however, that the church and each individual believer in it understand they exist to bring glory to God. When you know and glorify God, the needs of your life will be met: \"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom\" (Prov. 9:10). But many believers don't revere God; their very actions prove their irreverence. Instead of trembling at God's Word, they twist His truths or supplant them with worldly philosophies.\n\nChristians actually need to be confronted by their real need\u2014an understanding of God's holiness and their own sinfulness\u2014so they can be usable to Him for His glory. When we have a right relationship to God, every aspect of our lives will settle into its divinely ordained place. That does not mean we are to ignore people's problems\u2014we are to be just as concerned about them as God is. But there must be a balance, and it begins with a high view of God. We must take God seriously and respect Him completely.\n\nWith that in mind, you can understand why prayer is ever and always, first and foremost, a recognition of God's majestic glory and our submission to it. All our petitions, all our needs, and all our problems are subject to Him. God is to have priority in every aspect of our lives, and certainly in our times of deepest communion with Him. Prayer is not to be a casual routine that gives passing homage to God; it is to be a profound experience that should open up great dimensions of reverence, awe, appreciation, honor, and adoration.\n\nThe Significance of God's Name\n\nHow appropriate then that the first petition in our Lord's pattern for prayer focuses on God: \"hallowed be Your name\" (Matt. 6:9). Commentator Arthur W. Pink said, \"How clearly then is the fundamental duty of prayer set forth. Self and all its needs must be given a secondary place, and the Lord freely accorded the preeminence in our thoughts and supplications. This petition must take the precedence, for the glory of God's great name is the ultimate end of all things.\"2 Even though He is our loving Father, who desires to meet our needs through His heavenly resources, our first petition is not to be for our benefit, but His. Thus \"hallowed be Your name\" is a warning against self-seeking prayer because it completely encompasses God's nature and man's response to it. Jesus wasn't reciting some nice words about God. Instead, He opened a whole dimension of respect, reverence, glory, and worship for God.\n\nThe most familiar Hebrew name for God is Yahweh, and it first appears in Exodus 3:14, where God said, \"I AM WHO I AM.\" The other familiar name for God is Adonai, which means the \"Lord God.\" Because they considered God's name sacred, the Jews would not actually pronounce Yahweh. Eventually Old Testament Jews took the consonants from Yahweh and the vowels from Adonai to form Jehovah. While taking such great pains to honor the sacredness of God's name, they thought little of dishonoring His person or disobeying His Word, thus making a mockery of their effort.\n\nBy focusing our thoughts on God's name, our Lord is teaching us that God's name signifies much more than His titles; it represents all that He is\u2014His character, plan, and will. Certainly the Jews should have understood that, because in Old Testament times, names stood for more than just titles.\n\nA Character Reference\n\nIn Scripture, a person's name represented his character. While God characterized him as \"a man after His own heart\" (1 Sam. 13:14), David also developed a good reputation among the people: \"The commanders of the Philistines went out to battle, and it happened as often as they went out, that David behaved himself more wisely than all the servants of Saul. So his name was highly esteemed\" (18:30). The fact that his name was esteemed meant he himself was esteemed. When we say that someone has a good name, we mean there is something about his character worthy of our praise.\n\nWhen Moses went up on Mount Sinai to receive the commandments for the second time, he \"called upon the name of the LORD. Then the LORD passed by in front of him and proclaimed, 'The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin'\" (Ex. 34:5\u20137). The name of God is the composite of all the characteristics listed in verses 6\u20137.\n\nOur love and trust of God are not based on His names or titles, but on that reality behind those names: His character. David said, \"Those who know Your name will put their trust in You, for You, O LORD, have not forsaken those who seek You\" (Ps. 9:10). God's name is esteemed in His faithfulness.\n\nIn the typical form of Hebrew poetry, God's righteousness and His name are often typified as parallel, showing their equivalence. Thus David declared, \"I will give thanks to the LORD according to His righteousness and will sing praise to the name of the LORD Most High\" (Ps. 7:17). When the psalmist said, \"Some boast in chariots and some in horses, but we will boast in the name of the LORD, our God\" (20:7), he had much more in mind than God's title; he was referring to the fullness of God's person.\n\nWhen Christ came into the world, people\u2014especially the disciples\u2014had the opportunity to see God's character in person. In His High Priestly Prayer, Jesus said to the Father, \"I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me\" (John 17:6). He didn't need to tell them about God's name, but He did need to reveal God's character to them. John 1:14 tells how that was accomplished: \"The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.\" Christ manifested God to the disciples through His own righteous life. That's why he told Philip, \"He who has seen Me has seen the Father\" (John 14:9).\n\nTo apply the concept of hallowing God's name to your prayers, here is a sample you could use: \"Our Father, who loves us and cares for us, and who has in heaven supplies to meet our every need; may Your person, Your identity, Your character, Your nature, Your attributes, Your reputation, Your very being itself be hallowed.\" To hallow God's name is not some glib phrase inserted into a prayer ritual; it is your opportunity to glorify Him by acknowledging the greatness and wonder of His character.\n\nIt's All in a Name\n\nEach of the many Old Testament names and titles of God shows a different facet of His character and its expression in His will. He is called, for example, Elohim, \"the Creator God\"; El Elyon, \"possessor of heaven and earth\"; JehovahJireh, \"the Lord will provide\"; JehovahNissi, \"the Lord our banner\"; JehovahRapha, \"the Lord that healeth\"; JehovahShalom, \"the Lord our peace\"; JehovahRaah, \"the Lord our Shepherd\"; JehovahTsidkenu, \"the Lord our righteousness\"; JehovahSabaoth, \"the Lord of hosts\"; JehovahShama, \"the Lord is present and near\"; and JehovahMaqodeshkim, which means \"the Lord sanctifieth thee.\" All those names speak of God's attributes. Thus they tell us not only who He is but also what He is like.\n\nJesus Himself provides the clearest teaching about what God's name means: His very name, Jesus Christ, is God's greatest name, and it encompasses His role as Lord, Savior, and King. As Jesus Christ, God drew to Himself many other names, including: the Bread of Life (John 6:35), the Living Water (John 4:10), the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6), the Resurrection (John 11:25), the Good Shepherd (John 10:11), the Branch (Isa. 4:2), the Bright Morning Star (Rev. 22:16), the Lamb of God (John 1:29), and many more. One Old Testament passage in particular lists several names for Him, each one a designation of His nature: \"Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace\" (Isa. 9:6). Jesus' life was the perfect manifestation of God's name.\n\nHoly Is His Name\n\nHaving looked at the significance of God's name, we need to turn our attention to the meaning of the word hallow. It is actually an archaic English word used to translate a form of the Greek word hagiaz\u00f8 [ ], which means \"to make holy.\" Words from the same Greek root are translated holy, saint, sanctify, and sanctification.\n\nGod commands His people to be holy (1 Peter 1:16), but only God Himself is actually holy. To pray \"hallowed be Your name\" is to attribute to God the holiness that already is, and has always been, supremely and uniquely His. To hallow God's name is to revere, honor, glorify, and obey Him as the one and only completely perfect God. When we do, we remind ourselves of the important difference between us and Him. God lives in a different sphere than we do. He is holy and undefiled, but we are sinners. Only through His gracious provision of Jesus Christ and His payment for the penalty of our sin are we even able to approach Him. We agree with John Calvin, who said that God should have His own honor, of which He is so worthy, and that we should never think or speak of Him without the greatest veneration.3\n\nFailure to Honor God\n\nIn spite of all the shallow trends that plague much of current Christianity, there is still nothing more disturbing than a failure to recognize the most central truth about God: He is holy. It is the only one of His attributes repeated three times in the heavenly realm (Isa. 6:3). Failure to give God the reverence and honor He so richly deserves can result in devastating consequences. The following narrative shows what can happen when even one of God's greatest servants doesn't treat Him with the respect due His name:\n\nThen the sons of Israel, the whole congregation, came to the wilderness of Zin in the first month; and the people stayed at Kadesh.... There was no water for the congregation, and they assembled themselves against Moses and Aaron. The people thus contended with Moses and spoke, saying, \"If only we had perished when our brothers perished before the LORD! Why then have you brought the LORD's assembly into this wilderness, for us and our beasts to die here? Why have you made us come up from Egypt, to bring us in to this wretched place? It is not a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, nor is there water to drink.\" Then Moses and Aaron came in from the presence of the assembly to the doorway of the tent of meeting, and fell on their faces. Then the glory of the LORD appeared to them; and the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, \"Take the rod; and you and your brother Aaron assemble the congregation and speak to the rock before their eyes, that it may yield its water. You shall thus bring forth water for them out of the rock and let the congregation and their beasts drink.\" So Moses took the rod from before the LORD, just as He had commanded him; and Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly before the rock. And he said to them, \"Listen now, you rebels; shall we bring forth water for you out of this rock?\" Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod; and water came forth abundantly, and the congregation and their beasts drank. But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, \"Because you have not believed Me, to treat Me as holy in the sight of the sons of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them.\" (Num. 20:1\u201312)\n\nMoses dishonored God before the Israelites because he struck the rock, in direct disobedience to God. Moses' actions drew the attention of the people to himself, perhaps to make them think he had something to do with the miracle. But by stealing the glory from God and failing to honor Him, both Moses and Aaron were not allowed to enter the Promised Land.\n\nThe catalog of others who dishonored God is numerous. The following is only a small sampling:\n\n\u2022 Saul did not submit himself to God, but in impatience and self-styled disobedience, he failed to follow all of God's instructions (1 Sam. 15:11), so God removed him from the throne.\n\n\u2022 Uzzah failed to recognize the majesty of God's holiness by daring to defy God's instructions (Num. 4:15, 19\u201320). God struck him down for his irreverence (2 Sam. 6:7).\n\n\u2022 Uzziah became proud, acted in a corrupt manner, was unfaithful to the Lord, and in an affront to God's holiness, entered the temple to burn incense. God struck him with leprosy (2 Chron. 26:16\u201323).\n\n\u2022 Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Spirit. By sinning against the holiness of God in such a way, they lost their lives within hours of their deceit (Acts 5:1\u201311).\n\n\u2022 The Corinthians ate of the bread and drank from the cup in an unholy manner during the Lord's Supper (1 Cor. 11:27\u201330). As a result, many became sick, and some even died.\n\nGod does not always deal as immediately and directly in physical ways with those who fail to uphold His holy character. But there will always be some consequence. Here are a few of the main ones: It gives the enemy an opportunity to blaspheme God. That is what Nathan told David (2 Sam. 12:14; cf. Ezek. 20:39; 1 Tim. 5:14; 6:1). God's Word is dishonored (Titus 2:5). Sin can disqualify you from further service in the King's court. Saul is the classic illustration of that (1 Sam. 15:23). You can lose your life or well-being (Acts 5:5, 10). God may withhold spiritual blessings (Num. 20:1\u201312). God's anger is invoked (Isa. 5:25). God's Spirit is grieved (Isa. 63:10).\n\nThe Fear of the Lord Is Not an Option\n\nThe psalmist asked, \"Who may dwell on Your holy hill?\" (Ps. 15:1). The answer is simply, \"He who walks with integrity, and works righteousness, and speaks truth in his heart\" (v. 2). There is no greater need today than for believers once again to ascend the platform of fearing God.\n\nA. W. Tozer said it well: \"No religion has been greater than its idea of God.\" That gem has a corollary: No church is greater than its reverent awe of holy God. He is holy and demands recognition as such. Although most believers know that intellectually, I'm afraid very few realize what that means practically.\n\nClearly the fear of God is not optional: \"Live in the fear of the LORD always\" (Prov. 23:17); \"fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell\" (Matt. 10:28); \"in all things obey... fearing the Lord\" (Col. 3:22). Central to the book of Proverbs is the Hebrew word yare, which refers to fear and honor. Solomon used it eighteen times.\n\nGod has always called His people to have such a perspective of the awesomeness of His holiness:\n\n\u2022 The fear of God pressed Manoah to expect instant death because he had seen God (Judg. 13:22).\n\n\u2022 Upon seeing the magnitude of God's holiness, Job repented and retracted all that he had foolishly said (Job 42:5\u20136).\n\n\u2022 Standing in the presence of God's holiness, Isaiah pronounced a curse on himself, \"Woe is me, for I am ruined!\" (Isa. 6:5).\n\n\u2022 Habakkuk trembled at the voice of holy God (Hab. 3:16).\n\n\u2022 The restored remnant feared the Lord when they heard His holy word spoken by the prophet Haggai (Hag. 1:12).\n\n\u2022 During our Lord's earthly ministry, the disciples often came face-to-face with His power and holiness. On one occasion when they were crossing the Sea of Galilee, a storm appeared. Although they were afraid of the storm, they feared greatly (literally \"feared a great fear\") when Jesus calmed the storm (Mark 4:41). They became much more fearful of the presence and power of God than they were of the deadly storm. Stained by the sin of unbelief, Peter implored his sinless Lord to depart from him (Luke 5:8). John, James, and Peter fell on their faces and were exceedingly afraid when they heard the voice of God (Matt. 17:6).\n\n\u2022 People in an unbelieving community begged Christ to leave their region because they feared His holy power (Mark 5:17).\n\n\u2022 The Jerusalem church was in deep awe of God's holiness (Acts 2:43; 5:5, 11), and throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, the churches continued on in fear of the Lord (Acts 9:31).\n\n\u2022 Beholding the magnificence of the glorified Christ, John fell in fear at His feet as a dead man (Rev. 1:17).\n\nIn each of those examples, God's presence produced the \"anxiety of holiness.\" As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, that is an attitude largely missing in our method-oriented, pragmatic day. And it is especially missing in our prayers. To revive it, we must pursue holiness in the fear of God. That has always been God's desire for His people: \"I am the LORD your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy\" (Lev. 11:44). Peter echoed that plea: \"But like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy'\" (1 Peter 1:15\u201316; cf. Lev. 19:2). Today the challenge for Christ's church is this: \"Let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God\" (2 Cor. 7:1).\n\nHow to Hallow God's Name\n\nHallowing God's name, like every other manifestation of righteousness, begins in the heart. The apostle Peter said to \"sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts\" (1 Peter 3:15). When we sanctify Christ in our hearts, we will also sanctify Him in our lives. Let's look at some practical ways you can do just that and also make sure God is hallowed in your prayer life.\n\nAcknowledge God Exists\n\nHebrews 11:6 says, \"He who comes to God must believe that He is.\" To the honest and open mind, God is self-evident. Philosopher Immanuel Kant had many strange ideas about God, but he was absolutely right when he said, \"The moral law within us and the starry heavens above us\" drive us to God.4 But that is not enough\u2014you can believe God exists and still not hallow His name.\n\nKnow the Truth about God\n\nMany people claim they believe in God, but they don't hallow His name because they don't have true knowledge of who He is. Discovering and believing truth about God demonstrates reverence for Him; willing ignorance or believing wrong doctrine demonstrates irreverence.\n\nSome people think that taking God's name in vain is swearing or cursing only, but that is not the case. You can take the name of the Lord in vain every time you think a thought about God that's not true, or when you doubt Him, disbelieve Him, and question Him. The early church father Origen said in his rebuttal to the Greek philosopher Celsus that the man who brings into his concept of God ideas that have no place there takes the name of the Lord God in vain.5\n\nSome claim that God is harsh and vindictive, accusing Him of being unloving, of indiscriminately banishing people to an eternal hell\u2014a national ally of Israel who slaughters other nations. Job fell into that same accusatory sin when he said, \"You have become cruel to me\" (Job 30:21). We cannot revere a God whose character and will we do not know or care about. Even when we know and revere Him, that is still not enough.\n\nBe Aware of His Presence\n\nAs I stated in the first chapter, if we are to be faithful believers, we must live every day of our lives in a continual state of God consciousness. Spasmodic reflection does not hallow God's name. I am sure He is on the thoughts of many right after a Sunday morning worship service, but what about later that day and throughout the week? Those are the times you must consciously draw Him into every daily thought, word, and activity if you would truly hallow God's name. That was David's focus: \"I have set the LORD continually before me\" (Ps. 16:8). But that is still not enough to truly hallow God's name.\n\nLive in Obedience\n\nOur Father's name is most hallowed when we behave in conformity to His will. For Christians to live in disobedience to God is the ultimate in taking His name in vain, claiming as Lord someone we're not even willing to follow. Jesus warned, \"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter\" (Matt. 7:21).\n\nWhen we disobey God, we diminish our capacity to revere His name and be a vehicle for manifesting His holiness. We will succeed in hallowing God's name, however, when we eat, drink, and do everything else to His glory (1 Cor. 10:31). We also honor His name when we attract others to Him because of our commitment. We are to \"let [our] light shine before men in such a way that they may see [our] good works, and glorify [our] Father who is in heaven\" (Matt. 5:16).\n\nWhen you have the right thoughts about God and live righteously, you will hallow His name. Psalm 34:3 sums up the teaching of this phrase with this exhortation: \"O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt His name together.\"\n\nThe next time you pray, I hope you see yourself entering the very throne room of God, a holy place, where He is to be honored. Don't be afraid when you enter that time of solitude with the God of heaven\u2014just be sure you approach that time with the respect due His most holy name.\n\nNotes\n\n1 Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, 2:60\u201361.\n\n2 Pink, Exposition Sermon, 161\u201362.\n\n3 John Calvin, cited in A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979), 318.\n\n4 Immanuel Kant, cited by William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 1:208.\n\n5 Origen, Contra Celsus, book 1, chapter 25.\n5\n\n\"YOUR KINGDOM COME\"\n\nIn recent years, we have witnessed the rapid decline of more than 150 years of strong Christian biblical influence in this country. A few years ago someone suggested that we were living in post-Christian America. Although it struggles to deserve a nominal Christian label, today it is more like sub-Christian America. People attend religious services and say they believe in God, but at best they adhere to a practical atheism and situational morality. Whatever vestiges of Christian religion still remain in our culture have become weak and compromising, if not cultic and apostate.\n\nOur nation now affirms, through its legislative bodies and courts, a distinctively anti-Christian agenda. Anything singularly Christian has been virtually swept away under the aegis of equal rights and moral freedom. The divine standards and biblical morality that our nation once embraced are assaulted constantly. Moral freedom now reigns. Materialism and the breakdown of the family are epidemic. Abortions, sexual evils, drugs, and crime are rampant. And our leaders are at a loss to know what to do because there are no standards left to provide controls for these problems.\n\nFor those of us who remember the great revival of the '70s, the debauchery of modern times is especially saddening. But that sadness, if left unchecked, can lead to resentment\u2014particularly toward those in control of the government, the media, and society who encourage an anti-Christian agenda.\n\nWhat concerns me most, however, is the open hostility that resentment with our nation's leadership often fosters. When that attitude merges with the perspective that Christians ought to impact the culture by legislating morality, the church is severely diverted from its main purpose. Although changing our society by calling it back to a safer morality is a noble goal, this has never been Christ's goal for His church.\n\nThe church has but one mission in this world: to lead people destined to spend eternity in hell to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and an eternity in heaven. If people die in a communist government or a democracy, under a tyrant or a benevolent dictator, believing homosexuality is right or wrong, or believing abortion is a woman's fundamental right to choose or simply mass murder, that has no bearing on where they will spend eternity. If they never knew Christ and never embraced Him as their Lord and Savior, they will spend eternity in hell.\n\n\"My kingdom is not of this world,\" Jesus told Pilate. \"If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews\" (John 18:36). No human kingdom or society can ever merge with God's kingdom, even partially. Sinful man cannot be a part of the divine reign. That's why we can never advance God's kingdom by trying to improve the morals of our society.\n\nGood and noble causes may be worthy of support, but they have no impact in helping to usher in the earthly kingdom of Jesus Christ. At best they can only retard the corruption that will always and inevitably characterize human societies and kingdoms.\n\nAmerica has but one destiny: to go the way of all the other nations. No human kingdom will endure forever because built into it are the sinful seeds of its own destruction: \"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people\" (Prov. 14:34); \"In the generations gone by He permitted all the nations to go their own ways\" (Acts 14:16).\n\nWhile all the kingdoms of the world, including America, rise and fall, the gates of hell will never prevail against God's kingdom (Matt. 16:18). You may be frustrated by our nation's immoral agenda and its animosity toward God, but you can be confident that even now Christ is building His church. One day the Lord will return to establish His own perfect kingdom. That's when we will finally realize what we have so anxiously longed for and what the disciples of Christ in the first century desired: to see Christ rule on the earth and the people of the world bow to Him.\n\nEighteenth-century hymn writer Frances Havergal beautifully captured that sentiment in these words to Christ in \"His Coming to Glory\":\n\nOh, the joy to see Thee reigning,\n\nThee, my own beloved Lord!\n\nEvery tongue Thy name confessing,\n\nWorship, honor, glory, blessing\n\nBrought to Thee with glad accord;\n\nThee, my Master and my Friend,\n\nVindicated and enthroned;\n\nUnto earth's remotest end\n\nGlorified, adored, and owned.\n\nThe Promise of God\n\nThe one who has the right to rule and reign is none other than the King Himself, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ. Psalm 2:6\u20138 says of Him, \"I have installed My King upon Zion, My holy mountain. I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to Me, 'You are My Son, today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance, and the very ends of the earth as Your possession.'\" Isaiah 9:6 says, \"The government will rest on His shoulders.\" Jesus Christ is the One who fulfilled the promise of a coming King. He is the Messiah\u2014the \"anointed one.\" He is the hope of Israel, the hope of the church, and the hope of the world.\n\nIn one of his dreams, Daniel saw a statue representing the kingdoms of the world smashed to pieces by a flying stone, which represents Christ (Dan. 2:34\u201335). Then the stone filled the whole earth. The symbolism is clear: Christ ultimately crushes the kingdoms of men and establishes His own.\n\nChrist is inseparable from His kingdom. The holy purpose of God is to exalt Christ in the consummation of history when the Son rules and reigns in His kingdom. The Jewish Talmud is right in saying that the prayer in which there is no mention of the kingdom of God is not a prayer at all (Berakoth 21a).\n\nOur New Priority\n\nOur greatest desire as believers should be to see the Lord reigning as King in His kingdom, having the honor and authority that have always been His but that He has not yet come to claim. That leads to the second petition in our pattern of prayer from Matthew 6:10. To pray \"Your kingdom come\" is to pray for God's program to be fulfilled\u2014for Christ to come and reign.\n\nWhen you sincerely believe and genuinely confess Christ as Lord, you are confirming that the direction of your life is aimed at His exaltation. Your own causes are valid only insofar as they agree with the eternal causes of God revealed in Christ. When I pray, \"Your kingdom come,\" I am saying to God's Holy Spirit, \"Spirit of Christ within me, take control and do what You will for Your glory.\" A true child of God won't be preoccupied with his own plans and desires but with the determinate program of God, revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.\n\nDealing with Self\n\nIn spite of our desire to be preoccupied with God's kingdom, our prayers are usually self-centered. We focus on our needs, our plans, and our aspirations. We are often like tiny infants, who know no world but that of their own feelings and wants. Our lives are an unending struggle against our old sinful habits, with their constant and unrelenting focus on self.\n\nEven problems and issues others face can cloud our supreme concern for God's kingdom. It is our responsibility to pray for our families, pastors, missionaries, national and other leaders, and many other people and things. But in every case, our prayers should be for God to accomplish His will in and through those people\u2014that they would think, speak, and act in accordance with His will.\n\nThe kingdom must be at the heart of our prayers. Before we go bursting into His presence with all our petitions, we need to stop long enough to consider His causes and His kingdom. We must affirm our yearning that He be glorified in His purposes.\n\nDealing with Satan\n\nAs soon as we desire to live a holy life for Christ, we run into a massive conflict. The greatest opposition to Christ's kingdom, and the greatest opposition to Christian living, is the kingdom of this present world, which Satan rules. The next time you begin to resent the latest victory for the ungodly agenda in our country, consider the source. The essence of Satan's kingdom has always been opposition to God's kingdom and God's people. Satan will challenge every believer's effort to live a holy and God-honoring life.\n\nA Kingdom Not of This World\n\nThe Greek word translated \"kingdom\" (basileia) does not primarily refer to a geographical territory but to sovereignty and dominion. Therefore when we pray, \"Your kingdom come,\" we are praying for God's rule on earth to begin as Christ assumes His rightful place as ruler of the earth. \"Come\" translates the aorist active imperative form of erchomai, indicating a sudden, instantaneous coming (cf. Matt. 24:27). It is the coming of His millennial kingdom (Rev. 20:4) we are to pray for.\n\nIt Belongs to God\n\nThe kingdom we are praying for is unique because it doesn't belong to any earthly monarch; it belongs to \"our Father who is in heaven\" (Matt. 6:9). As believers, we are no longer of this world (John 17:14). Our primary interest has been translated out of this world, and our real citizenship is now in heaven (Phil. 3:20). We are but sojourners and pilgrims (1 Peter 1:17), waiting to enter a city whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 11:10).\n\nGod's kingdom is not at all like the manmade kingdoms of this world. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, MedoPersia, Greece, and Rome are no longer world powers\u2014their time in the spotlight was brief. Alexander the Great had one of the greatest empires in the entire history of the world, but it too is gone. All the once-great civilizations are extinct.\n\nWhat Daniel said in reference to the end of the Babylonian empire could refer to all the nations of the world: \"God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it.... You have been weighed on the scales and found deficient.... Your kingdom has been divided and given over to the Medes and Persians\" (Dan. 5:26\u201328). Earthly kingdoms go the way of all flesh\u2014the degenerating power of sin causes inevitable decay and destruction.\n\nBut the kingdom of God is bigger than any nation. Our Lord said to \"seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you\" (Matt. 6:33). He will take care of all our needs\u2014clothing, shelter, and food\u2014when we seek His kingdom. So we should pray, \"Lord, do whatever advances Your kingdom and brings about Your reign.\"\n\nChrist Is the Ruler\n\nThe kingdom of God, or of heaven, was the heart of Jesus' message. It is the gospel\u2014the Good News of the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Wherever He went, Jesus preached the message of salvation. He even said, \"I must preach the kingdom... for I was sent for this purpose\" (Luke 4:43). The reign of Christ is nothing less than the apex of human history. Jesus spent three years with the disciples teaching them about the kingdom. After He died and rose again, He appeared to them over a period of forty days, giving them commandments pertaining to the kingdom of God (Acts 1:2\u20133).\n\nJesus spoke of God's kingdom in three ways: past, present, and future. It is past in that it embodied Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Matt. 8:11). It was present during Jesus' own earthly ministry in that He was the true King living in the midst of the people (Luke 17:21). But the particular focus of our prayers is on the kingdom that is yet to come.\n\nAs we saw earlier, Jesus characterized the kingdom as not of this world (John 18:36). But what kind of kingdom is it, and how can it be here yet still be in the future? We need to examine two aspects of the kingdom: It is both universal and earthly.\n\nThe Universal Aspect\n\nGod is the ruler of the universe. He created it, He controls it, and He holds it together. James Orr commented, \"There is therefore recognized in Scripture... a natural and universal kingdom or dominion of God embracing all objects, persons, and events, all doings of individuals and nations, all operations and changes of nature and history, absolutely without exception.\"1 God's is an \"everlasting kingdom\" (Ps. 145:13), and even now \"His sovereignty rules over all\" (103:19). God is the universal King, and He mediates His rulership through His Son, by whom He made the worlds, and of whom it is said, \"He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together\" (Col. 1:17).\n\nThe Earthly Aspect\n\nWhen Jesus said, \"Your kingdom come\" in His model prayer, He was saying in effect, \"May the universal kingdom established in heaven come to earth.\" Notice the last words in Matthew 6:10: \"on earth as it is in heaven.\" That is typical Hebrew parallelism, and it can relate to the first three petitions in the Disciples' Prayer. We could say, \"Hallowed be Your name on earth as it is in heaven. Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.\"\n\nSince God is not now ruling on earth as He rules in heaven, we are to pray for the divine earthly kingdom to come\u2014for Christ to return and establish His earthly kingdom, put down sin, and enforce obedience to God's will. The Lord will then rule \"with a rod of iron\" (Rev. 2:27). After a thousand years His earthly kingdom will merge into His eternal kingdom, and there will be no distinction between His rule on earth and His rule in heaven.\n\nBringing God's Kingdom to Earth\n\nThe best way to translate the phrase Your kingdom come is: \"Let Your kingdom come now.\" What features lead to the consummation of His rule on earth?\n\nThe Conversion of Unbelievers\n\nIn a present and limited, but real and miraculous, way, God's kingdom is coming to earth each time a new soul is brought into the kingdom. Thus \"Your kingdom come\" is an evangelistic prayer.\n\nPresently Christ's kingdom exists on earth internally in the hearts and minds of believers. We ought to pray for God's kingdom to increase. Praying for the kingdom to come, in this sense, is praying for the salvation of souls. The kingdom is the sphere of salvation entered by repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.\n\nConversion to God's kingdom begins with an invitation. In Matthew 22, Jesus likened the kingdom of heaven to a man hosting a large wedding banquet. The man sent out invitations to the guests. When those who were invited initially refused to come, the man said, \"Go therefore to the main highways, and as many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast\" (v. 9). Christ's invitation is worldwide.\n\nThis invitation into the kingdom of God demands repentance. Jesus said, \"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand\" (Matt. 4:17; cf. Mark 1:14\u201315). And that requires a willing response on the part of the hearer. Jesus once told a scribe, \"You are not far from the kingdom of God\" (Mark 12:34). While he had knowledge about salvation, he had not made any conscious choice to receive it. Knowledge of the kingdom goes only so far. If people desire Christ to rule in their hearts and minds, they must respond to what they know.\n\nJesus said, \"Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness\" (Matt. 6:33). People who truly desire to know Christ will respond to the invitation by seeking Christ with all their hearts. Luke 16:16 says, \"The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John; since that time the gospel of the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it.\" The Greek word translated \"forcing\" means \"to enter violently.\" When a person with a right heart sees the value of God's kingdom, he rushes to grasp it. The kingdom of heaven is of such infinite value that it is like \"a treasure hidden in the field\" or a \"pearl of great value,\" which a person sells all his possessions to buy (Matt. 13:44\u201346).\n\nThe Commitment of Believers\n\nThe desire of those already converted should be to allow the Lord to rule in their lives now, just as He rules in heaven. We frequently come to crossroads in our lives where we have to choose between doing God's will or our own. That's when we need to affirm our commitment to God's causes. Since Christ is Lord, we must submit to His lordship. In Romans 14:17, the apostle Paul said, \"The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.\" When you commit yourself to the virtues the Spirit wants to produce in your life, you will pray that your life will honor and glorify your Father in heaven.\n\nThe Commencement of Christ's Earthly Rule\n\nOne day the heavens will split open and Jesus will descend onto the Mount of Olives to establish His kingdom (Zech. 14:4). He will reign for a thousand years (Rev. 20:4) and rule with a rod of iron (Rev. 19:15). At that time the prayer \"Your kingdom come\" will be answered. Christ will reign in righteousness, justice, truth, and peace. He will rule on the earth on the throne of David in the city of Jerusalem and will set right the curses that have plagued this earth. Like Peter, I look for and seek to hasten the day when He comes. And I say with the apostle John, \"Come, Lord Jesus\" (Rev. 22:20). I hope that will be your request every time you pray.\n\nNotes\n\n1 James Orr, cited by Alva J. McClain, The Greatness of the Kingdom (Winona Lake, IN: BMH, 1980), 22.\n6\n\n\"YOUR WILL BE DONE\"\n\nOne of the dilemmas Christians have debated for centuries is whether God accomplishes His will regardless if we pray or don't pray. When we pray sincerely and persistently as Christ has taught us\u2014can our will override God's? When we don't pray, does His will fail? The plain fact is none of us can comprehend precisely how prayer functions in the infinite mind and plan of God. What seems like a hopeless mystery to us is no problem to God. But that doesn't mean theologians have not attempted to solve this dilemma.\n\nTwo basic doctrinal views have been offered to bring understanding to this question. One view emphasizes God's sovereignty and in its extreme application holds that God will work according to His perfect will regardless of how people pray or even whether they pray. Thus prayer is nothing more than tuning in to God's will. At the opposite extreme is the view that maintains God's actions pertaining to us are determined largely by our prayers. Our persistent pleading will make God do for us what He wouldn't otherwise do. Pastor and author James Montgomery Boice related the following humorous story about how this paradox confounds even our greatest spiritual leaders:\n\nAt one point in the course of their very influential ministries George Whitefield, the Calvinist evangelist, and John Wesley, the Arminian evangelist, were preaching together in the daytime and rooming together in the same boarding house each night. One evening after a particularly strenuous day the two of them returned to the boarding house exhausted and prepared for bed. When they were ready each knelt beside the bed to pray. Whitefield, the Calvinist, prayed like this, \"Lord, we thank Thee for all those with whom we spoke today, and we rejoice that their lives and destinies are entirely in Thy hand. Honor our efforts according to Thy perfect will. Amen.\" He rose from his knees and got into bed. Wesley, who had hardly gotten past the invocation of his prayer in this length of time, looked up from his side of the bed and said, \"Mr. Whitefield, is this where your Calvinism leads you?\" Then he put his head down and went on praying. Whitefield stayed in bed and went to sleep. About two hours later Whitefield woke up, and there was Wesley still on his knees beside the bed. So Whitefield got up and went around the bed to where Wesley was kneeling. When he got there he found Wesley asleep. He shook him by the shoulder and said to him, \"Mr. Wesley, is this where your Arminianism leads you?\"1\n\nLike Whitefield and Wesley, we cannot begin to fathom the divine working that makes prayer effective. The Bible is unequivocal about God's absolute sovereignty, yet within His sovereignty, He commands us to exercise our responsible wills in certain areas, including beseeching Him in prayer. If God did not act in response to prayer, Jesus' teaching about prayer would be futile and meaningless and all commands to pray pointless. Our task is not to solve the dilemma of how God's sovereignty works with human responsibility but to believe and act on what God commands us about prayer.\n\nTo pray for God's will to be accomplished is the subject of our Lord's third petition in His pattern for prayer. After asking for God's name to be hallowed and His kingdom to come, Jesus said we are to pray, \"Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven\" (Matt. 6:10). When we pray, we are to pray in accord with God's will. His will is to become our will. We are also praying for His will to prevail all over the earth, just as it does in heaven.\n\nDavid prayed with the attitude of the third petition when he said, \"I delight to do Your will, O my God\" (Ps. 40:8). That was Christ's attitude as well: \"My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me\" (John 4:34; cf. Matt. 12:50; John 6:38).\n\nIs God's Will Inevitable?\n\nUnfortunately many people, including believers, don't have this same attitude toward the third petition of the Disciples' Prayer.\n\nBitter Resentment\n\nSome professed believers resent what they see as the imposition of God's will\u2014a divine dictator working out His sovereign, selfish will on His people. They pray out of a sense of compulsion, believing they cannot escape from the inevitable. Commentator William Barclay said:\n\nA man may say, \"Thy will be done,\" in a tone of defeated resignation. He may say it, not because he wishes to say it, but because he has accepted the fact that he cannot possibly say anything else; he may say it because he has accepted the fact that God is too strong for him, and that it is useless to batter his head against the walls of the universe.2\n\nEleventh-century Persian poet Omar Khayy\u00e1m had a similar perspective of God. In the Rub\u00e1iy\u00e1t, a collection of his four-lined epigrams, he wrote:\n\nBut helpless Pieces of the Game He plays\n\nUpon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days;\n\nHither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,\n\nAnd one by one back in the Closet lays.\n\nThe Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,\n\nBut Here or There as strikes the Player goes;\n\nAnd He that tossed you down into the Field,\n\nHe knows about it all\u2014He knows\u2014He knows! (vv. 69\u201370)\n\nThis Persian poet viewed God as a checker player with total power over the playing pieces, moving them at His whim and putting them in the closet when He was done. The poet also saw God as a polo player with a mallet and man as the ball that has absolutely no choice about how it is hit or where it goes. But such a perspective reflects a lack of knowledge about how God truly interacts with His people.\n\nPassive Resignation\n\nOther believers, however, don't resent God's will. They view Him as their loving, caring Father who has only their best in mind. Yet they also are resigned to His will as the inevitable, unchangeable, and irresistible force in their lives, thus they think their prayers will not make a difference. They pray for His will to be done only because He has commanded them to do so. But that's certainly not a prayer of faith; it's more like a prayer of capitulation. Believers who pray that way accept God's will with a defeatist attitude.\n\nToo many believers have weak prayer lives because they don't believe their prayers accomplish anything. They petition the Lord for something and then forget about it, acting as if they knew in advance that God wouldn't be at all compelled to grant what they requested. Even in the early days of the church, when faith generally was strong and vital, prayer could be passive and unexpectant. When the apostle Peter was imprisoned in Jerusalem, a group of concerned believers met at the house of Mary, John Mark's mother, to pray for his release (Acts 12:12). As they were doing so, an angel of the Lord miraculously delivered Peter from his chains (vv. 7\u201310). While the believers were still praying, Peter arrived at the house and knocked on the door. A servant girl named Rhoda answered the door, and upon recognizing Peter's voice, she turned around and rushed to tell the others before letting Peter in (vv. 13\u201314). The others did not believe her, however, until they finally let Peter in. Then \"they saw him and were amazed\" (v. 16). They apparently had been praying for what they did not really believe would happen.\n\nPrayer is not a vain duty to be performed for the sake of obedience only. That may seem like a good motive, but its effect is no different from the hypocritical Pharisees who prayed for show. We must pray in faith, believing that our prayers do make a difference to God. To guard against such passive and unspiritual resignation, Jesus told the disciples the parable of the importunate widow \"to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart\" (Luke 18:1).\n\nIs God's Will Alive and Well on Earth?\n\nAsking \"Your will be done on earth\" indicates that God's will is not always done on earth. That is also true of some other elements of this prayer. We pray \"Hallowed be Your name,\" yet God's name is infrequently hallowed here. We ask for His kingdom to come, yet there are many who reject His reign. Thus His will is not inevitable. In fact, lack of faithful prayer inhibits God's will because in His wise and gracious plan, prayer is essential to the proper working of His will on earth.\n\nThe Impact of Sin\n\nGod is sovereign, but He is not independently deterministic. Too many believers look at God's sovereignty in a fatalistic way, thinking that whatever will be will be. They view every tragedy as coming from God's hand, whether it's personal, such as a loved one's death or illness, or universal, as in an earthquake or flood. But such an attitude destroys faithful prayer and faithful obedience. That is not a high view of God's sovereignty but a destructive and unbiblical view of it.\n\nThe entire course of events, and circumstances, is ordained by God, and that includes allowing the cause of all life's tragedies\u2014sin. To see God as ultimately sovereign, we must agree that He meant for sin to happen. He planned for it\u2014it could not have caught Him by surprise and spoiled His original program. Thus evil and all its consequences were included in God's eternal decree before the foundation of the world.\n\nYet we cannot consider God as the author or originator of sin. The apostle John said, \"God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all\" (1 John 1:5; cf. James 1:13). God did not authorize sin; neither does He condone or approve of it. He could never be the cause or agent of sin. He only permits evil agents to do their deeds, then overrules the evil for His own wise and holy ends. Certainly it is not God's will that people die, so He sent Christ to earth to destroy death. It is not His will that people go to hell, so He sent His Son to take the penalty of sin on Himself that men might escape hell. The apostle Peter said, \"The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance\" (2 Peter 3:9). That sin exists on earth and causes such horrible consequences is not evidence of God's desire to see sin abound but of His patience in allowing more opportunity for people to turn to Him for salvation. Thus we can determine that God's purposes in permitting evil are always good.3\n\nA tension will always exist between God's sovereignty and man's will; therefore, we should not try to resolve it by modifying what He says about either reality. God is sovereign, but He gives us choices. And it is in His sovereignty that He commands us to pray, \"Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven\" (Matt. 6:10).\n\nRighteous Rebellion\n\nIn the first chapter we examined Jesus' parable of the widow and the unjust judge (Luke 18:1\u20138). She certainly was not willing to accept her circumstances as they were, but persisted in pleading with the judge to deal with her problem. We need to possess that same perspective when praying for God's will to be done on earth. Theologian David Wells said, \"To come to an acceptance of life 'as it is,' to accept it on its own terms\u2014which means acknowledging the inevitability of the way it works\u2014is to surrender a Christian view of God.\"4\n\nA part of the right understanding of and attitude toward God's will is what might be called a sense of righteous rebellion. To be dedicated to God's will necessitates being opposed to Satan's. To pray \"Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven\" is to rebel against the notion that sin is normal and inevitable and therefore should be tolerated. When you are wholly committed to seeing God's will done on earth, you will rebel against the world system of ungodliness. You will renounce all things that dishonor and reject Christ. And you will also confront the disobedience of believers. Impotence in prayer leads us, however unwillingly, to strike a truce with evil. When you accept what is, you abandon a Christian view of God and His plan for redemptive history.\n\nJesus knew in advance what would happen to Him, but He did not accept each situation as inevitable or irresistible. He preached and acted against sin. When His Father's house was profaned, \"He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers, and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, 'Take these things away; stop making My Father's house a place of business'\" (John 2:15\u201316; cf. Matt. 21:12\u201313).\n\nTo pray for God's will to be done on earth is to rebel against the idea, promulgated even among some evangelicals, that virtually every wicked, corrupt thing we do or is done to us is somehow God's holy will and should be accepted from His hand with thanksgiving. But nothing wicked or sinful ever comes from the hand of God, only from the hand of Satan. When we pray for righteousness, we pray against wickedness.\n\nAt this point, I must add a word of caution lest you take this idea of rebellion against the evil in our world too far.\n\nWhile we should react negatively against evil and entreat God to accomplish His will here, we should not attempt to carry out God's will for Him. As we noted in chapter 5, it is not our responsibility, neither should it be our goal, to change the culture by trying to establish God's kingdom on earth. Neither are we to rid our culture of its evil practices by using civil disobedience to rebel against it. Such rebellion is disobedience to God and His Word (Rom. 13:1\u20135; 1 Peter 2:13\u201317). Instead, let your rebellion be manifested in your prayers and those activities that are righteous and allowable under the law.\n\nTo pray for God's will to be done is to pray for Satan's will to be undone. It is to cry with David, \"Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered, and let those who hate Him flee before Him\" (Ps. 68:1). And we plead with the saints under God's altar, \"How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?\" (Rev. 6:10).\n\nI wish that was the perspective of every believer. What has happened to our passion for what is right? God loves heroic faith\u2014He wants us to storm His throne.\n\nIs God's Will Your Will?\n\nUnfortunately, our own will is often the problem in seeking His will. Because we live in a culture that prides itself on ease and comfort, we desire a piece of that big pie. As a result, we tend to perceive prayer as important only for making a difference in our circumstances rather than for the difference it can make in us and for God's glory. Thus when God doesn't answer our prayers as we wish right away, we lose the passion necessary to persevere in intercession.\n\nIf you want to have that passion in your prayers, you need to realize that the real benefit of prayer is not the changes God may make in your circumstances but the changes He will make in you and in your perception of them. When He draws you into conformity to His blessed person and will, your circumstances, no matter how insurmountable they may have appeared at first, will no longer be your priority. That's because your attitude about them will be different.\n\nWhen your prayers are rooted in your faith in God\u2014when you believe He will hear and answer your prayers\u2014you are praying with the right attitude and perspective. The greatest hindrance to prayer is not lack of technique, lack of biblical knowledge, or even lack of enthusiasm for the Lord's work, but lack of faith. We simply do not pray with the expectation that our prayers will make a difference in our lives, in the church, or in the world.\n\nThe Specifics of His Will\n\nTo help you understand more about this critical issue, we need to examine three distinct aspects of God's will as He reveals it to us in His Word.\n\nGod's Comprehensive Will\n\nThis refers to God's will of purpose\u2014His vast, all-inclusive, tolerating will expressed in the unfolding of His sovereign plan in the entire universe, including heaven, hell, and earth. This aspect of God's will allows sin to run its course and Satan to have his way for a season. But in His appointed time, sin's course and Satan's way will end exactly according to God's plan and foreknowledge.\n\nIsaiah wrote about God's ultimate will, saying, \"The LORD of hosts has sworn saying, 'Surely, just as I have intended so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand.... This is the plan devised against the whole earth; and this is the hand that is stretched out against all the nations. For the LORD of hosts has planned, and who can frustrate it?'\" (Isa. 14:24, 26\u201327). Whatever God purposes to do will come to pass, and no one can hinder that plan.\n\n\"We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose\" (Rom. 8:28). Although God does not will evil, He takes the things that happen in history and in our lives and puts them together for good. And of course His greatest plan is the salvation of His people: \"We have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will\" (Eph. 1:11). God's great purpose is for a redeemed people, for a unified church, a body of saints for eternity.\n\nHow do we pray in accord with God's comprehensive will? By joyously joining in affirming and awaiting the accomplishment of His divine plans. Although we know that someday Christ will complete His church out of this world to be with Him just as God planned, we are to pray in anticipation of that great hour and for God to hasten the coming of it.\n\nGod's Compassionate Will\n\nThis aspect of God's will refers to His heart's desire, which is within the scope of His comprehensive will and completely consistent with it, although it is more specific and focused. Unlike God's comprehensive will, however, His desires are not always fulfilled. In fact, our present age attests that Satan's desires are realized more often than God's.\n\nJesus desired Jerusalem's salvation, and He prayed, preached, healed, and ministered to that end: \"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem.... I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it!\" (Luke 13:34). But what was the typical response to Jesus? Few believed Him; most rejected Him; and some even crucified Him. That Jesus said \"You are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life\" (John 5:40) is a sad commentary on the choice of unbelief and the rejection of His offer of abundant life.\n\nGod, our Savior, \"desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth\" (1 Tim. 2:4). He does not wish for \"any to perish but for all to come to repentance\" (2 Peter 3:9). Unfortunately, that desire is not fulfilled in the lives of the majority of people. Instead they reject Christ, and the most the Lord will do for them is weep (Jer. 13:17).\n\nGod's Commanding Will\n\nThis aspect of His will relates directly to His children, because only they have the capacity to obey. God's ardent desire is that we who are His children obey Him completely and immediately with willing hearts. About our obedience Paul wrote:\n\nDo you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. (Rom. 6:16\u201318)\n\nSince we are God's servants, it is only natural that we obey His commanding will. As Peter said, \"We must obey God rather than men\" (Acts 5:29).\n\nWhen you pray \"Your will be done,\" you are praying for three things: the consummation of the world and the use of sin's consequences for God's eternal plan, the salvation of people who don't know God, and the obedience of every believer to God's commands.\n\nWhen we studied the phrase \"Your kingdom come,\" we learned the kingdom comes to earth in three ways: through the conversion of unbelievers; by the commitment of believers to live according to righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit; and at the second coming of Christ when He establishes His earthly rule. I see a parallel between those three elements and the three aspects of God's will we just looked at. God's comprehensive will embraces the ultimate end of man's dominion on earth and the return of Christ to set up an eternal kingdom. His compassionate will embraces the conversion of unbelievers. And His commanding will demands commitment from His people.\n\nConforming to His Will\n\nOur own pride is the major obstacle we must overcome before we can pray for God's will to be done in our lives. Pride caused Satan to rebel against God, and pride causes unbelievers to reject God and believers to disobey Him. To accept and pray for God's will in sincerity and faith, you must abandon your own will for the sake of God's. The apostle Paul told us how to do that:\n\nTherefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12:1\u20132)\n\nUntil you lay your life on God's altar as a living sacrifice\u2014until your will is dead\u2014God's will won't be manifest in your life.\n\nWhen we pray in faith and in conformity to God's will, our prayer is a sanctifying grace that changes our lives dramatically. Thus prayer is a means of progressive sanctification. John Hannah, associate professor of historical theology at Dallas Theological Seminary, said, \"The end of prayer is not so much tangible answers as a deepening life of dependency.... The call to prayer is a call primarily to love, submission, and obedience... the avenue of sweet, intimate, and intense fellowship of the soul with the infinite Creator.\"5 That's what being alone with God is all about. You'll realize power and passion in it when you are completely dependent on God and live in obedience to His will.\n\nAuthor Philip Keller, while visiting in Pakistan, read Jeremiah 18:2, which says, \"Arise and go down to the potter's house, and there I will announce My words to you.\" So he and a missionary went to a potter's house in that city. In his book A Layman Looks at the Lord's Prayer, he wrote:\n\nIn sincerity and earnestness I asked the old master craftsman to show me every step in the creation of a masterpiece.... On his shelves were gleaming goblets, lovely vases, and exquisite bowls of breathtaking beauty.\n\nThen, crooking a bony finger toward me, he led the way to a small, dark, closed shed at the back of his shop. When he opened its rickety door, a repulsive, overpowering stench of decaying matter engulfed me. For a moment I stepped back from the edge of the gaping dark pit in the floor of the shed. \"This is where the work begins!\" he said, kneeling down beside the black, nauseating hole. With his long, thin arm, he reached down into the darkness. His slim, skilled fingers felt around amid the lumpy clay, searching for a fragment of material exactly suited to his task.\n\n\"I add special kinds of grass to the mud,\" he remarked. \"As it rots and decays, its organic content increases the colloidal quality of the clay. Then it sticks together better.\" Finally his knowing hands brought up a lump of dark mud from the horrible pit where the clay had been tramped and mixed for hours by his hard, bony feet.\n\nWith tremendous impact the first verses from Psalm 40 came to my heart. In a new and suddenly illuminating way I saw what the psalmist meant when he wrote long ago, \"I waited patiently for the LORD, and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay.\" As carefully as the potter selected his clay, so God used special care in choosing me....\n\nThe great slab of granite, carved from the rough rock of the high Hindu Kush mountains behind his home, whirled quietly. It was operated by a very crude, treadle-like device that was moved by his feet, very much like our antique sewing machines.\n\nAs the stone gathered momentum, I was taken in memory to Jeremiah 18:3. \"Then I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels.\"\n\nBut what stood out most before my mind at this point was the fact that beside the potter's stool, on either side of him, stood two basins of water. Not once did he touch the clay, now spinning swiftly at the center of the wheel, without first dipping his hands in the water. As he began to apply his delicate fingers and smooth palms to the mound of mud, it was always through the medium of the moisture of his hands. And it was fascinating to see how swiftly but surely the clay responded to the pressure applied to it through those moistened hands. Silently, smoothly, the form of a graceful goblet began to take shape beneath those hands. The water was the medium through which the master craftsman's will and wishes were being transmitted to the clay. His will actually was being done in earth.\n\nFor me this was a most moving demonstration of the simple, yet mysterious truth that my Father's will and wishes are expressed and transmitted to me through the water of His own Word....\n\nSuddenly, as I watched, to my utter astonishment, I saw the stone stop. Why? I looked closely. The potter removed a small particle of grit from the goblet.... Then just as suddenly the stone stopped again. He removed another hard object....\n\nSuddenly he stopped the stone again. He pointed disconsolately to a deep, ragged gouge that cut and scarred the goblet's side. It was ruined beyond repair! In dismay he crushed it down beneath his hands....\n\n\"And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter\" (Jer. 18:4). Seldom had any lesson come home to me with such tremendous clarity and force. Why was this rare and beautiful masterpiece ruined in the master's hands? Because he had run into resistance. It was like a thunderclap of truth bursting about me!\n\nWhy is my Father's will\u2014His intention to turn out truly beautiful people\u2014brought to nought again and again? Why, despite His best efforts and endless patience with human beings, do they end up a disaster? Simply because they resist His will.\n\nThe sobering, searching, searing question I had to ask myself in the humble surroundings of that simple potter's shed was this: Am I going to be a piece of fine china or just a finger bowl? Is my life going to be a gorgeous goblet fit to hold the fine wine of God's very life from which others can drink and be refreshed? Or am I going to be just a crude finger bowl in which passersby will dabble their fingers briefly then pass on and forget about it? It was one of the most solemn moments in all of my spiritual experiences.\n\n\"Father, Thy will be done in earth [in clay], in me, as it is done in heaven.\"6\n\nNotes\n\n1 James Montgomery Boice, The Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1972), 183\u201384.\n\n2 William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 1:212\n\n3 For a more detailed treatment of this topic, please see my book The Vanishing Conscience (Dallas: Word, 1994), 105\u201324.\n\n4 David Wells, \"Prayer: Rebelling against the Status Quo,\" Christianity Today, November 2, 1979, 33.\n\n5 John Hannah, \"Prayer and the Sovereignty of God,\" Bibliotheca Sacra, October\u2013December 1979, 353.\n\n6 Philip Keller, A Layman Looks at the Lord's Prayer (Chicago: Moody, 1985), 92\u201397.\n7\n\n\"GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD\"\n\nEvery child faces a life of dependence from the moment he is conceived. At the very start of his new life, he must look to his mother for nourishment in the womb. Once he is born, he is dependent on his parents for food, clothing, and shelter. He cannot provide any of those resources for himself. Unlike other earthly creatures, he can't even come to his mother; she has to come to him.\n\nAn infant is also incapable of caring for himself in terms of cleanliness. He is dependent on his mother and father to give him baths, clip his nails, comb his hair, and otherwise make him presentable. Once he becomes more mobile, the child is incapable of determining what is safe or harmful. Without his parents' guidance, he could fall down stairs, burn himself, eat something poisonous\u2014any of which could permanently disable him or even kill him. No one would argue the necessity for round-the-clock care for infants.\n\nIn much the same way, Christians are like infants when it comes to total dependence on God. Just like infants, we are ultimately dependent on God for food, clothing, and shelter. Just as infants get dirty throughout the day, we live in a world of sin that pollutes our walk with Christ. While our Lord has paid the penalty for our sins past, present, and future, we still sin each day. We need to come to God confessing our sins so He will cleanse them and restore us to fellowship with Him. And just as infants desperately need the protection of their parents from harmful things, we are dependent on God to guard us from the circumstances in our lives that can hurt our spiritual walks.\n\nPraying for Our Needs\n\nThus the second group of three petitions the Lord gives in His model prayer should not surprise us. After focusing our attention on our Heavenly Father, Jesus then showed us how to pray for our own special needs in this world: \"Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil\" (Matt. 6:11\u201313). Although this second section of the prayer deals with man's need, it doesn't set God aside\u2014He is also exalted here. The fact that God is the One who gives us our daily bread, forgives our debts, and keeps us from temptation is an expression of His power and grace. Thus He glorifies Himself by meeting those needs in our lives.\n\nOf those three petitions, the Lord somewhat surprisingly told us to pray first for our physical needs, not our spiritual needs. Martyn Lloyd-Jones captures the essence of these three petitions:\n\nClearly the first thing that is necessary is that we must be enabled to continue our existence in this world. We are alive and we must be kept alive. The very fact of my existence and being are involved, so the first petition deals with the needs of our physical frame, and our Lord starts with that. He then goes on to deal with the need of cleansing from the defilement and guilt of sin; and, lastly, with the need for being kept from sin and its power. That is the true way to look at man's life. I am alive and I must be kept alive. But then I am conscious of guilt and unworthiness, and feel the need to be cleansed from that. Then I think of the future and realize that I need to be delivered from certain things that face me there.... The sum of it all is that ultimately there is nothing in the whole realm of Scripture which so plainly shows us our entire dependence upon God as does this prayer, and especially these three petitions. The only thing that really matters for us is that we know God as our Father. If we only knew God like this our problems would be solved already and we would realize our utter dependence upon Him and go to Him daily as children to their Father.1\n\nAs we examine these three petitions, I hope you will be instructed and motivated to go to Him daily and seek His provision for your needs.\n\nBread and Our Physical Needs\n\nPraying for God to give them their daily bread may at first seem irrelevant to many believers in our country who don't have to speculate where their next meal is coming from.\n\nWhy should they ask God for what they already have, and in great abundance? What would be a completely understandable request by Christians in many African or Asian countries seems irrelevant to a well-fed American. So what application does this request have for believers who have abundance? Five key elements of the petition will provide the answer.\n\nThe Necessity of Life\n\nThe Greek word translated bread not only represents food but is also symbolic of all our physical needs. Theologian John Stott has observed that to Martin Luther, \"everything necessary for the preservation of this life is bread, including food, a healthy body, good weather, house, home, wife, children, good government, and peace.\"2 Please make note, however, that our Lord is referring to physical necessities, not luxuries; if God so chooses to bless any of us with luxuries, it is purely by His good grace.\n\nIt thrills me to know that the God who created the entire universe, who is the God of space, time, and eternity, who is infinitely holy and completely self-sufficient, should care about supplying my physical needs. Just as loving human fathers want to provide for the needs of their children, so God is concerned that we receive enough food to eat, clothes to wear, and a place to rest.\n\nThis petition is more than just a request for physical needs, however. Above all it recognizes and affirms that every good thing we have comes from the hand of God graciously (James 1:17). This is why it is as appropriate for those who have abundance as for those who suffer lack. Although we may not always be on the edge of hunger, we can always be thankful for everything God provides and avoid being presumptuous.\n\nThe Source of Our Provision\n\nWhen all our needs are met and all is well in our lives, we tend to take credit for what we have, to feel that we carry our own loads. We work hard to earn the money we need to buy food and clothes, pay our rent or mortgage. But even the hardest-working individual owes all he earns to God's provision. Moses reminded Israel that God \"is giving you power to make wealth\" (Deut. 8:18).\n\nOur life, breath, health, possessions, talents, and opportunities all originate from resources God has created and made available to man. Everything we have is from God: It is He who brings the rain to make things grow, causes the seasons to change, produces the minerals that make the soil fertile, provides the natural resources we use to propel ourselves around, and provides the animals and plants from which we make our clothing and food. Our daily bread\u2014the necessities of physical life\u2014are all from God.\n\nIn the garden of Eden, God provided for Adam and Eve even before He created them. After He made and blessed them, He said, \"Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you\" (Gen. 1:29). Since that time He has continued to provide an abundance of food for mankind, in almost unlimited variety.\n\nYet the apostle Paul told us \"The Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith... and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer\" (1 Tim. 4:1, 3\u20135). The Word of God sanctifies (sets apart from God) all food, and we sanctify it when we receive it with thankful prayer.\n\nDo you have that attitude? Are you truly thankful to God for your food when you bow your head and say a prayer before a meal? For many of us, sadly, the prayer we offer to God before we eat is usually quick and indifferent\u2014we're just making sure to do our duty. Such an attitude reveals the sin of indifference and ingratitude for God's gifts. Thomas Watson, a great Puritan with a heart for God, wrote:\n\nIf all be a gift, see the odious ingratitude of men who sin against their giver! God feeds them, and they fight against him; he gives them bread, and they give him affronts. How unworthy is this! Should we not cry shame of him who had a friend always feeding him with money, and yet he should betray and injure him? Thus ungratefully do sinners deal with God; they not only forget his mercies, but abuse them. \"When I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery\" (Jer. 5:7). Oh, how horrid is it to sin against a bountiful God!\u2014to strike the hands that relieve us!3\n\nNever presuming on the grace of God's provisions and thanking Him for His daily kindness in meeting your physical needs fulfills the spirit of the petition, \"Give us this day our daily bread.\" Realizing that God alone is the source of those provisions gives Him glory.\n\nThe Heart of the Petition\n\nThe heart of this petition is expressed in the word give because it recognizes the need of the petitioner. Even though God may have already provided the necessity, we ask Him for it in recognition of His past and present provision, as well as in trust for His future supply.\n\nJesus' instruction and our petitions in this model prayer are valid only because God has promised to provide for His people. We could not expect God to give what He has not promised\u2014that would be presumptuous. But we can pray confidently because God has promised to supply abundantly.\n\nIn Psalm 37, David counseled us to trust in God's promise to provide for our needs.\n\nTrust in the LORD and do good; dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness. Delight yourself in the LORD; and He will give you the desires of your heart.... Yet a little while and the wicked man will be no more.... But the humble will inherit the land and will delight themselves in abundant prosperity.... I have been young, and now I am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his descendants begging bread. (vv. 3\u20134, 10\u201311, 25)\n\nOne passage that refers to both the spiritual and physical aspects of our lives is 2 Corinthians 9. The context of this passage refers to believers' generosity concerning the needs of the saints: We are to give \"not grudgingly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver\" (v. 7). As we reveal our own desire to provide for the needs of others (v. 6), God \"who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness\" (v. 10). When you invest in God's kingdom, He will provide not only spiritual fruit but also bread for food.\n\nThe Unrighteous Need Not Apply\n\nGod's physical provision is a biblical promise, but only to those who belong to Him\u2014the \"us\" of Matthew 6:11. Notice that David is speaking to believers in Psalm 37: They \"trust in the LORD\" (v. 3), \"delight... in the LORD\" (v. 4), \"commit [their] way to the LORD\" (v. 5), and \"rest in the LORD and wait patiently for Him\" (v. 7). For the righteous there is promise; for the unrighteous there is judgment: \"The LORD knows the days of the blameless; and their inheritance will be forever. They will not be ashamed in the time of evil, and in the days of famine they will have abundance. But the wicked will perish; and the enemies of the LORD will be like the glory of the pastures, they vanish\u2014like smoke they vanish away\" (vv. 18\u201320).\n\nJesus said, \"Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times as much at this time and in the age to come, eternal life\" (Luke 18:29\u201330). God irrevocably commits Himself to meet the essential needs of His own.\n\nA Low View of Life\n\nThe greatest cause of famine and its attendant diseases in the world is not poor agricultural practices or poor economic and political policies. Nor is the root problem lack of scientific and technological resources or even overpopulation. Those problems only aggravate the basic problem, which is spiritual.\n\nThose parts of the world that have no Christian roots or heritage invariably place a low value on human life. The great poverty and starvation in India, for example, may be laid at the feet of Hinduism, the pagan religion that spawned a host of other religions, including Shintoism and Buddhism. Those religious systems and similar ones spiritually enslave much of the Eastern world, and their influence is gradually spreading to the West.\n\nBecause of Hinduism's belief in reincarnation, all animals are considered to be incarnations either of men or deities.\n\nCows are held especially sacred because supposedly they are incarnated deities, of which Hinduism has 330 million. These cows aggravate the food shortage because they consume 20 percent of India's total food supply. Even rats and mice, which eat 15 percent, are not killed because they might be someone's reincarnated relatives.\n\nJust as paganism is the great plague of India, Africa, and many other parts of the world, Christianity has been the blessing of the West. Europe and the United States, though never fully Christian in any biblical sense, have been immeasurably blessed because of the Christian influence on political, social, and economic philosophy and policy. However, the degraded view of human life, as evidenced in the growing legal and social approval of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, and now so widely reflected in the low view of the family, has severely weakened that influence.\n\nA High View of God\n\nWithout a proper view of God, there cannot exist a proper view of man. Those who have that right perspective of God also have a right relationship to Him through Jesus Christ, who promised us the provisions of our Heavenly Father. He said:\n\nDo not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?... For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matt. 6:25, 32\u201333)\n\nAs you focus on spiritual matters, God will take care of your physical needs.\n\nSometimes God has provided for His children through miraculous means, but His primary way of provision is through work (2 Thess. 3:10\u201312). And He has given us the energy, resources, and opportunity to do so. For those who for whatever legitimate reason are unable to work, He provides care through those who can work. Whether He does so directly or indirectly, God is always the source of our physical well-being. He makes the earth produce what we need, and He gives us the ability to procure it.\n\nOne Day at a Time\n\nIt is \"this day\" that we ask God to supply our needs. We are to rely on the Lord one day at a time. To accept the Lord's provision for the present day, without concern for our needs or welfare tomorrow, is a testimony of our contentment in His goodness and faithfulness.\n\nPrayer focuses on God as the One who supplies. It acknowledges that He is the source of all our physical needs, and it teaches us to live one day at a time in the confidence that He will meet those needs.\n\nNotes\n\n1 Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, 2:68\u201369.\n\n2 Stott, Christian CounterCulture, 149.\n\n3 Thomas Watson, The Lord's Prayer (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1972), 197.\n8\n\n\"FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS\"\n\nThere is an unusual epitaph on a large headstone in a cemetery outside of New York City. The name of the person in the grave is not on the headstone. There is no mention of when the person was born or when the person died. Nor does it indicate anything about the person being a beloved mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, son, or daughter. Just one word stretches across the headstone: Forgiven. Clearly the most significant fact of this individual's life was the peace he or she knew as a result of God's forgiveness.\n\nHenry Ward Beecher, a popular nineteenth-century American preacher, said:\n\nLet me saw off a branch from one of the trees that is now budding in my garden, and all summer long there will be an ugly scar where the gash has been made; but by next autumn it will be perfectly covered over by the growing; and by the following autumn it will be hidden out of sight; and in four or five years there will be but a slight scar to show where it has been; and in ten or twenty years you would never suspect that there had been an amputation. Trees know how to overgrow their injuries, and hide them: and love does not wait so long as trees do.1\n\nThe apostle Peter said \"love covers a multitude of sins\" (1 Peter 4:8), and one of the most important ways it does that is by forgiveness.\n\nThe most essential, blessed, and yet most costly thing God ever did was to provide man the forgiveness of sin. It is most essential because it keeps us from hell and gives us joy in this life. It is most blessed because it introduces us into an eternal fellowship with God. And it is most costly because the Son of God gave up His life so that we might live.\n\nJohn Stott, in his book Confess Your Sins, quoted the head of a large British mental home: \"I could dismiss half my patients tomorrow if they could be assured of forgiveness.\"2 Deliverance from guilt by real forgiveness is man's deepest spiritual need. Apart from it, he can't enter into a relationship with God that produces peace and hope. He is holy, and His \"eyes are too pure to approve evil, and [He] can not look on wickedness with favor\" (Hab. 1:13). \"Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts,\" said Isaiah (Isa. 6:3). Holy God cannot possibly entertain a relationship with unholy men unless there is forgiveness of sin.\n\nThat's why our Lord makes it the next topic in His pattern for prayer: \"Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors\" (Matt. 6:12). Verses 14\u201315 serve as a footnote: \"For if you forgive men for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.\"\n\nSin Is the Problem\n\nForgiveness of sin is the greatest need of the human heart because sin has a twofold effect: It promises to damn people forever while at the same time robbing them of the fullness of life by burdening the conscience with unrelenting guilt. Ultimately sin separates man from God, thus it is unquestionably the principal enemy and greatest problem of man.\n\nThe apostle Paul captured the impact of sin when he quoted several Old Testament passages in his letter to Christians in Rome: \"There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one\" (Rom. 3:10\u201312; cf. Ps. 14:1\u20133; 53:1\u20134). He then concluded, \"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God\" (Rom. 3:23).\n\nThe Work of Sin\n\nSin is the monarch that rules the heart of every man. It is the first lord of the soul, and its virus has contaminated every living being. Sin is the degenerative power in the human stream that makes man susceptible to disease, illness, death, and hell. It is the culprit in every broken marriage, disrupted home, shattered friendship, argument, pain, sorrow, and death. No wonder Scripture compares it to the venom of a snake and the stench of death (Rom. 3:13).\n\nSin is the moral and spiritual disease for which man has no cure. \"Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good who are accustomed to do evil\" (Jer. 13:23).\n\n\u2022 Sin dominates the mind. Romans 1:21 indicates that people have reprobate minds given over to evil and lust.\n\n\u2022 Sin dominates the will. According to Jeremiah 44:15\u201317, people desire to do evil because their wills are controlled by sin.\n\n\u2022 Sin dominates the emotions and the affections. Natural people do not want their sins cured because they love darkness rather than light (John 3:19).\n\n\u2022 Sin brings men under the control of Satan. Ephesians 2:2 teaches that people are guided by \"the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.\"\n\n\u2022 Sin brings people under divine wrath. According to Ephesians 2:3, unsaved people are \"children of wrath.\"\n\n\u2022 Sin subjects men to misery. Job said, \"Man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward\" (Job 5:7). \"'There is no peace for the wicked,' says the LORD\" (Isa. 48:22).\n\nThe Forms of Sin\n\nFive Greek words are typically used by the New Testament writers to refer to some aspect of sin.\n\nHamartia is the most common and carries the root idea of missing the mark. Sin misses the mark of God's standard of righteousness.\n\nParapt\u00f8ma [ ], often rendered \"trespass,\" is the sin of slipping or falling and results more from carelessness than from intentional disobedience.\n\nParabasis refers to stepping across the line, going beyond the limits prescribed by God. It is often translated \"transgression.\" This sin is more conscious and intentional.\n\nAnomia means \"lawlessness\" and is an even more intentional and flagrant sin. It describes direct and open rebellion against God and His will.\n\nOpheil\u2211ma [ ] is the word used in Matthew 6:12. The verb form is used most often to refer to moral or spiritual debts. Sin is a moral or spiritual debt to God that must be paid. In his account of this prayer, Luke uses hamartia (\"sins\"; Luke 11:4), clearly indicating that the reference is to sin, not to financial debt. Matthew probably used opheil\u2211ma [ ] because it corresponded to the most common Aramaic term for sin used by Jews of that day, a term that also represented moral or spiritual debt to God.\n\nThose who trust in Christ have received God's pardon for sin and are saved from eternal hell. Since the Disciples' Prayer is a model for believers to use, the debts referred to there are those incurred by Christians when they sin. Immeasurably more important than our need for daily bread is our need for continual forgiveness of sin. Arthur W. Pink wrote:\n\nAs it is contrary to the holiness of God, sin is a defilement, a dishonor, and a reproach to us as it is a violation of His law. It is a crime, and as to the guilt which we contact thereby, it is a debt. As creatures we owe a debt of obedience unto our maker and governor, and through failure to render the same on account of our rank disobedience, we have incurred a debt of punishment; and it is for this that we implore a divine pardon.3\n\nAs a result of our unrelenting sin, we owe a massive debt to God that we could not even begin to pay, much like the debt owed by the unfaithful servant (Matt. 18). Anyone who desires to come to God must do so recognizing the severity of his sin and the magnitude of his debt.\n\nForgiveness Is the Solution\n\nSince man's severest problem is sin, his greatest need is forgiveness\u2014and that is exactly what God provides. Though we have been forgiven the ultimate penalty of sin through salvation in Christ, we need to experience God's regular forgiveness for the sins we continue to commit. The importance of this distinction will become clearer as we look at the two kinds of forgiveness that we may label judicial and parental.\n\nJudicial Forgiveness\n\nBelievers receive God's judicial forgiveness the moment they trust Christ as their Savior from sin. Such forgiveness is comprehensive in the reality of justification, by which God declares us righteous in His Son. As a result, we are no longer under judgment, condemned to die, nor any longer destined for hell. Paul said, \"Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus\" (Rom. 8:1). The eternal judge has declared us pardoned, justified, and righteous. No one, human or satanic, can condemn us or permanently lay any charge against us (vv. 33\u201334).\n\nThe extent of this forgiveness is mindboggling. God said, \"Their sin I will remember no more\" (Jer. 31:34). David wrote, \"As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us\" (Ps. 103:12). And Isaiah gave the reason: \"The LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him [Christ]\" (Isa. 53:6; cf. 1 Peter 2:24).\n\nGod could not pass by our sin unless He placed the punishment for it on someone else, and that is why Christ died. God has forgiven us (in essence eliminated) our sins based on that onetime sacrifice of Christ on the cross. It was there that He bore our punishment, took our guilt, and paid the penalty for our sin. The moment you place your faith in Christ, your sin is put on Him and His righteousness is put on you, and God judicially declares you justified (Rom. 3:24\u201326; 2 Cor. 5:21). By that act of judicial forgiveness, all our sins\u2014past, present, and future\u2014are completely forgiven.4\n\nParental Forgiveness\n\nUnfortunately we still fall into sinful behavior because we have not yet been made perfect. In Philippians 3, Paul revealed this distinction when he wrote that through faith in Christ he had received the righteousness of God apart from the law; yet, he added that he had not yet attained a perfect standard of holiness practically (vv. 7\u201314). So we constantly require forgiveness\u2014the kind that is graciously offered by our Heavenly Father. The apostle John warned us, \"If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness\" (1 John 1:8\u20139).\n\nSo sin, while it is forgiven judicially, is still a reality in a Christian's life. A decreasing frequency of sin, along with an increasing sensitivity to it, should characterize every Christian's walk. And while our sins today and in the future don't change our standing before God, they do affect the intimacy and joy in our relationship with Him.\n\nFor example, if one of your children sinned by disobeying you, that wouldn't change your relationship\u2014you are still his father or mother, ready to forgive instantly. But until he comes to you to confess his disobedience, the prior intimacy will not be restored.\n\nDuring the Last Supper, Jesus began washing the disciples' feet as a demonstration of the humble, serving spirit that should characterize any of His servants. At first Peter refused, but when Jesus said, \"If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me,\" Peter went to the other extreme and wanted a complete bath. Jesus replied, \"He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean\" (John 13:5\u201310).\n\nJesus' act of foot washing was more than an example of humility; it was also a picture of the forgiveness God gives in His repeated cleansing of those who are already saved. Dirt on the feet symbolizes the daily surface contamination from sin that we experience as we walk through life. Sin does not, and cannot, make us entirely dirty, because we have been permanently cleansed. The judicial purging that occurs at regeneration needs no repetition, but the practical purification is necessary every day because daily we fall short of God's perfect holiness.\n\nAs Judge, God is eager to forgive sinners, and as Father He is even more eager to keep on forgiving His children. Hundreds of years before Christ, Nehemiah wrote, \"You are a God of forgiveness, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness\" (Neh. 9:17). As vast and pervasive as the sin of man is, the magnitude of God's forgiveness is far greater. Where sin abounds, God's grace abounds even more.\n\nSomewhere in our prayers, after we have asked for His name to be hallowed, His kingdom to come, and His will to be done\u2014and after we have acknowledged that God is the source of our physical and daily sustenance\u2014we need to face the fact that our feet are dirty. As long as we have unconfessed sins in our lives, we will lose fullness of joy and intimacy in our communion with God. Thus the petition \"Forgive us our debts\" is simply our pleading to God to cleanse us moment by moment when we confess our sins to Him.\n\nDonald Grey Barnhouse, in a conversation with a college professor, told this story that illustrates the magnitude of loving forgiveness:\n\nA man had lived a life of great sin but had been converted, and eventually had come to marry a fine Christian woman. He had confided to her the nature of his past life in a few words. As he had told her these things, the wife had taken his head in her hands and had drawn him to her shoulder and had kissed him, saying, \"John, I want you to understand something very plainly. I know my Bible well, and therefore I know the subtlety of sin and the devices of sin working in the human heart. I know you are a thoroughly converted man, John, but I know that you still have an old nature, and that you are not yet as fully instructed in the ways of God as you soon will be. The Devil will do all he can to wreck your Christian life, and he will see to it that temptations of every kind will be put in your way. The day might come\u2014please God that it never shall\u2014when you will succumb to temptation and fall into sin. Immediately the Devil will tell you that it is no use trying, that you might as well continue on in the way of sin, and that above all you are not to tell me because it will hurt me. But, John, I want you to know that here in my arms is your home. When I married you, I married your old nature as well as your new nature, and I want you to know there is full pardon and forgiveness in advance for any evil that may ever come into your life.\"\n\nDr. Barnhouse said that when he finished the story, the college professor lifted up his eyes reverently and said, \"My God! If anything would ever keep a man straight, that [kind of forgiving love] would be it!\"5\n\nConfession Is Good for the Soul\n\nAsking for forgiveness implies confession. As the apostle John explained, \"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness\" (1 John 1:9). To confess means basically to agree with, and when we confess our sins, we agree with God that they are wicked, evil, and defiling and have no part in those who belong to Him.\n\nIt is difficult to confess sins. It's especially hard to get a child to admit he did something wrong. When I was a little boy, another boy and I vandalized a school in an Indiana town where my father was holding a revival meeting. In an attempt to discover who the culprits were, some people went from house to house, seeking information about the perpetrators. When they came to the house where my family was staying, my father and the owner of the house (the other boy's father) answered the door. One of the people asked them if the other boy and I knew anything about the vandalism. I held my father's hand and put on my most angelic face, doing everything I could to show that I was as spiritual as my evangelist father. Both my father and the other father assured the inquirers that we were wonderful boys and would not have been involved in such activity. It took ten years before I built up enough courage to tell my father what had really happened.\n\nBoth Satan and our prideful nature fight against any kind of admission to wrongdoing. But confession is the only way to a free and joyful life. Proverbs 28:13 says, \"He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion.\" John Stott says, \"One of the surest antidotes to this process of moral hardening is the disciplined practice of uncovering our sins of thought and outlook, as well as word and deed, and the repentant forsaking of them.\"6\n\nIf you don't confess your sins, you will become hardened. I've seen Christians\u2014judicially forgiven and eternally secure\u2014who are hardened, impenitent, and insensitive to sin. Consequently, they are also without joy because they don't have a loving, intimate fellowship with God. They have blocked out joy and fellowship with the barricade of their unconfessed sin.\n\nThe true Christian does not see God's promise of forgiveness as a license to sin, a way to abuse His love and presume on His grace. Rather, he sees God's gracious forgiveness as the means to spiritual growth and sanctification. He continually thanks God for His great love and willingness to forgive.\n\nConfession of sin is also crucial because it gives God glory when He chastens the disobedient Christian. Such a positive response to His discipline removes any potential complaint of unfairness because the sinner is admitting that he deserves what God gives.\n\nForgiving Others Is the Ultimate Test\n\nJesus gives us the prerequisite for forgiving others in the words \"as we also have forgiven our debtors\" (Matt. 6:12). The principle is simple but sobering: If we have forgiven, we will be forgiven; if we have not forgiven, we will not be forgiven.\n\nReasons for Forgiving Others\n\nWe should forgive one another for several reasons.\n\nA Characteristic of the Saints\n\nAs citizens of God's kingdom, we are blessed and receive mercy because we ourselves are merciful (Matt. 5:7). We are to love even our enemies because we have the nature of our Heavenly Father residing in us. Just before giving this model prayer, Jesus instructed His audience, \"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven\" (Matt. 5:43\u201345). Blessing those who persecute you is tantamount to forgiveness. By loving your enemies, you manifest that you are a child of God.\n\nForgiveness is the mark of a truly regenerate heart. When a Christian fails to forgive someone else, he sets himself up as a higher judge than God and even calls into question the reality of his faith.\n\nChrist's Example\n\nThe apostle Paul instructed us to \"be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you\" (Eph. 4:32). John told us, \"The one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked\" (1 John 2:6). Jesus Himself is our pattern for forgiveness. On behalf of those who drove the nails through His hands, spit in His face, mocked Him, and crushed a crown of thorns onto His head, Jesus said, \"Father, forgive them\" (Luke 23:34). He is our role model. The severity of any offense toward us cannot match what Christ endured. The writer of Hebrews said, \"You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin\" (12:4).\n\nExpresses the Highest Virtue of Man\n\nPeople display the majesty of their creation in the image of God when they forgive. Proverbs 19:11 says, \"A man's discretion makes him slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression.\"\n\nFrees the Conscience of Guilt\n\nUnforgiveness not only stands as a barrier to God's forgiveness but also interferes with peace of mind, happiness, satisfaction, and even the proper functioning of the body. According to 2 Corinthians 2:10\u201311, when we have an unforgiving heart, we give Satan an advantage over us.\n\nBenefits the Body of Believers\n\nProbably few things have so short-circuited the power of the church as unresolved conflicts among its members. The psalmist warned, \"If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear\" (Ps. 66:18). The Holy Spirit cannot work freely among those who carry grudges and harbor resentment (Matt. 5:23\u201324).\n\nDelivers from God's Discipline\n\nWhere there is an unforgiving spirit, there is sin; and where there is sin, there will be chastening. Hebrews 12:6 says, \"Those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.\" Unrepentant sin in the church at Corinth caused many believers to be weak, sick, and even to die (1 Cor. 11:30).\n\nActivates God's Forgiveness\n\nThe activation of God's forgiveness is probably the most important reason we must forgive others. This reason is so vital that Jesus reinforced it at the close of His pattern for prayer (Matt. 6:14\u201315). Nothing in the Christian life is more important than forgiveness\u2014our forgiveness of others and God's forgiveness of us. Because God deals with us just as we deal with others, we are to forgive others as freely and graciously as God forgives us.\n\nThe Proof of a Forgiving Spirit\n\nAs a kind of postscript to the Disciples' Prayer, Matthew 6:14\u201315 is our Savior's own commentary on the petition of verse 12\u2014the only petition He provides additional insight into. Obviously the truths here are vitally important: \"For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.\"\n\nThe first part of the principle is positive: \"If you forgive others for their transgressions.\" Believers should forgive as those who have received judicial forgiveness from God. When your heart is filled with such a forgiving spirit, \"your heavenly Father will also forgive you.\" Believers cannot know the parental forgiveness of God, which keeps fellowship with the Lord rich and blessings from Him profuse, apart from forgiving others in heart and word.\n\nThe verb translated \"forgive\" (aphi\u00efmi) means literally \"to hurl away.\" Paul had that in mind when he wrote, \"I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost [of sinners], Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience\" (1 Tim. 1:16; cf. Matt. 7:11). An unforgiving spirit not only is inconsistent for one who has been totally forgiven by God, but it also bears the chastening of God rather than His mercy.\n\nOur Lord illustrated the unmerciful response in the parable of the man forgiven a massive debt (Matt. 18:21\u201335). \"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he had begun to settle them, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him\" (vv. 23\u201324). One talent was equal to six thousand denarii, and laborers earned one denarius each working day. This slave would have had to work six days a week for one thousand weeks (slightly more than nineteen years) to earn just one talent.\n\nYou can well imagine that \"he did not have the means to repay, [so] his lord commanded him to be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and repayment to be made. So the slave fell to the ground and prostrated himself before him, saying, 'Have patience with me and I will repay you everything'\" (vv. 25\u201326). His debt was massive and would have been impossible for him to repay. Yet \"the lord of that slave felt compassion and released him and forgave him the debt\" (v. 27). In the symbolism of the parable, the man is forgiven of his unpayable debt, which represents sin, and he finds mercy from the king, which represents salvation. Yet the man abuses this wondrous gift:\n\nThat slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and he seized him and began to choke him, saying, \"Pay back what you owe.\" So his fellow slave fell to the ground and began to plead with him, saying, \"Have patience with me and I will repay you.\" But he was unwilling and went and threw him in prison until he should pay back what was owed. (vv. 28\u201330)\n\nThis debt, while a significant sum (three months' wages), could have been repaid, but it was a trifling amount compared to what the other slave owed. The Lord described what happened next:\n\nWhen his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were deeply grieved and came and reported to their lord all that had happened. Then summoning him, his lord said to him, \"You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way that I had mercy on you?\" And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart. (vv. 31\u201335)\n\nThat is a picture of someone who eagerly receives God's forgiveness but is unwilling to forgive others. I hope you're not holding any grudges and that you have not forgotten the great mercy you have received from God.\n\nMatthew 6:15 captures the essence of this parable and its meaning for believers: \"If you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.\" The sin of an unforgiving heart and a bitter spirit (Heb. 12:15) forfeits blessing and invites chastening.\n\nEvery believer must seek to manifest the forgiving spirit of Joseph (Gen. 50:19\u201321) and of Stephen (Acts 7:60) as often as needed. To receive pardon from the perfectly holy God and then refuse to pardon others when we are sinful people is the epitome in abuse of mercy. And \"judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment\" (James 2:13).\n\nWhat have we learned? We have an ongoing problem: sin. It interrupts our fellowship and usefulness to our Lord. God's provision for that sin is continual forgiveness. We receive it by confessing our sin. And the prerequisite is that we forgive others. An unforgiving Christian is a proud, selfish person who has forgotten that his sins have been washed away. Learn to confess, and before you confess, learn to forgive. Then we can confidently seek God in the solitude of our hearts and ask Him to forgive us each day.\n\nNotes\n\n1 Henry Ward Beecher, cited in Encyclopedia of 2585 Illustrations (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, n.d.), 260.\n\n2 John Stott, Confess Your Sins (Waco, TX: Word, 1974), 73.\n\n3 Pink, Exposition Sermon, 163\u201364.\n\n4 For an in-depth treatment of this critical topic, please refer to my book Faith Works (Dallas: Word, 1993), 87\u2013104.\n\n5 Donald Grey Barnhouse, God's Methods for Holy Living (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1951), 72\u201374.\n\n6 Stott, Confess Your Sins, 19.\n9\n\n\"DELIVER US FROM EVIL\"\n\nWe live in a fallen world that continually bombards us with the reality of sin and its consequences. We can see it first in the natural world. Volcanoes, earthquakes, fires, floods, pestilences, and accidents are increasing with alarming regularity, threatening the survival of mankind.\n\nThe intellectual world in particular assaults our faith. Man is constantly seeking the truth but is unable to find it. His judgments are partial and unfair. His tampering with relative thinking leads to inevitable destruction. Man is propelled by his own self-bias. Logic is ruled by pride, intellects are ruled by lust, and material gain makes liars out of men. Human opinions are on a continual collision course with each other. He has erected fortresses of ideology that are set against truth and God.\n\nGrief and anxiety characterize the emotional world of man. His inability to control destructive attitudes devastates his spirit, and his soul is chafed by his conflicts with others. Envy stings him, hate embitters him, and greed eats away at him like a canker. His affections are misplaced, his love is trampled, and his confidence is betrayed. Rich people step on the poor, and the poor seek to dethrone the rich. Prisons, hospitals, and mental institutions mark the moral and emotional upheaval of man.\n\nBut without doubt, the darkest part of man's world is his spiritual life. He is out of harmony with God. The machinery of man's moral nature is visibly out of gear. He is running out of sync with God's divine plan. Evil tendencies dominate man from his tainted, fallen ancestry.\n\nThere is seemingly no escape in this world from this for the sincere believer. Wherever we turn, we are confronted by pervasive culture in the fallen world. On top of all that, Satan relentlessly attacks our faith. With such knowledge we must pray, \"Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil\" (Matt. 6:13).\n\nTemptation or Trial?\n\nThis sixth petition encouragingly speaks of God's protection. At first glance, the interpretation of its meaning seems simple enough: We ask God to keep us out of trouble. But on closer examination, this request is not so simple, and the interpretation is keyed by one word in the Greek text.\n\nPeirasmos (\"temptation\") is basically a neutral word in Greek, having no necessary connotation either of good or evil, as does our English temptation, which refers to inducement to evil. The Greek root deals with a testing or a proving, and from that meaning are derived the related meanings of trial and temptation. Here it seems to parallel the term evil, indicating that it has in view enticement to sin.\n\nThe Interpretative Problem\n\nGod's holiness and goodness will not allow His leading anyone, certainly not one of His children, into a place or experience in which they would purposely be induced to commit sin. James attested to this: \"Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone\" (James 1:13).\n\nYet James had just said previously, \"Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials [peirasmos], knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance\" (vv. 2\u20133). Obviously we are faced with an interpretative problem as to whether peirasmos in Matthew 6:13 should be translated \"temptation\" or \"trial.\" As James told us, God does not tempt. So why ask Him not to do what He would never do anyway? Yet James said we should rejoice when trials come and not seek to avoid them. So why should we pray, \"Do not lead us into temptation\"?\n\nThe Paradoxical Solution\n\nI affirm with Chrysostom, the early church father, that the solution to this issue is that Jesus is not dealing with logic or theology but with a natural appeal of human weakness as it faces danger (Homily 19:10). We all desire to avoid the danger and trouble that sin creates. This petition is thus the expression of the redeemed soul that so despises and fears sin that it wants to escape all prospects of falling into it, choosing to avoid rather than having to defeat temptation.\n\nHere is another paradox of Scripture. We know trials are a means to our growing spiritually, morally, and emotionally. Christian character is strengthened by trials. Yet we have no desire to be in a place where the trial might lead to sin. So while we resist trials, we realize that they will strengthen us because they exercise our spiritual muscles.\n\nEven Jesus, when He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, first asked, \"My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me,\" before He said, \"yet not as I will, but as You will\" (Matt. 26:39). Jesus was horrified at the prospect of taking sin upon Himself, yet He was willing to endure it to fulfill the will of His Father, which was to bring about the redemption of sinners who embrace the Son.\n\nOur proper reaction to times of temptation is similar to Christ's, but for us it is primarily a matter of self-distrust. When we honestly look at the power of sin and at our own weakness and sinful propensities, we shudder at the danger of temptation or even trial. That was what James was getting at when he said, \"Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death\" (James 1:14\u201315).\n\nThis petition is thus another plea for God to provide what we in ourselves do not have. It is an appeal to God to place a watch over our eyes, our ears, our mouths, our feet, and our hands\u2014that in whatever we see, hear, or say, and in any place we go and in anything we do, He will protect us from sin. And when we are tempted, we need to remember that \"every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow\" (James 1:17).\n\nPass or Fail?\n\nWhen we speak of a trial or test, we will either pass or fail. Thus every trial God allows can turn into a temptation. Long after Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, he told them, \"You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good\" (Gen. 50:20). Every struggle and trial we experience is allowed by God to test us, to exercise our spiritual muscles, and to help us mature (cf. 1 Peter 5:10). But if you don't commit the situation to God and stand in His strength, Satan will turn it into a temptation. He will entice your lusts and may draw you into sin.\n\nDealing with Trials\n\nWe are not certain that, like Joseph, we will be completely submissive to and dependent on God in our trials. The implication of this part of the prayer seems to be: \"Lord, don't ever lead us into a trial that will present such a temptation that we will not be able to resist it. Rather, deliver us from any trial that would bring evil on us as a natural consequence. Don't put us into something we can't handle.\" This is laying claim to the promise, \"God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it\" (1 Cor. 10:13).\n\nWhile God won't tempt us to sin, He will bring things into our lives that become tests for us. When you pass a certain magazine, book, movie theater, or program on your television, that can be a test to reveal your spiritual strength. If you fail, it will turn into a temptation that incites your lust and draws you into sin.\n\nIf you're terminated from your job, that may be a test. How are you going to handle it? If you take it joyously and commit your situation to the Lord, you will pass the test. But Satan will tempt you to complain and perhaps to do all you can to ruin your boss's reputation.\n\nMatthew 4:1 says Jesus was \"led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.\" To God it was a test to prove Christ's virtue; for Satan it was a temptation to destroy His virtue. Job said, \"When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold\" (Job 23:10). He approached his trial the right way. Peter said, \"In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ\" (1 Peter 1:6\u20137).\n\nThe Lord orders our lives so that we will never be tempted without the strength to resist (1 Cor. 10:13). He uses our trials to help us trust Him more and strengthen others who go through the same trial later. He also uses them to drive us to His Word and to prayer.\n\nThe petition in Matthew 6:13 is a safeguard against presumption and a false sense of security and self-sufficiency. We know that we will never have arrived spiritually and that we will never be free of the danger of sin until we are with the Lord. As our dear Lord prayed for us in His great intercessory prayer, we want, at all costs, to be kept from the evil one (John 17:15).\n\nDealing with Temptation\n\nWhen we sincerely pray \"Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil,\" we also declare our submission to God's Word, which is our protection from sin. James 4:7 gives us a simple command: \"Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.\" Submitting to God is submitting to His Word: \"Your word I have treasured in my heart, that I may not sin against You\" (Ps. 119:11). So the believer prays to be kept from overwhelming solicitation into sin, and if he falls into it, he prays to be rescued from it.\n\nIn a cursed world where we are continually battered by wickedness all around us, we confess our inadequacy to deal with such evil. We confess the weakness of our flesh and the absolute impotency of human resources to combat sin and rescue us from its clutches. Above all we confess our need for the protection and deliverance of our loving Heavenly Father.\n\nWill God honor the petition in Matthew 6:13? According to 1 Corinthians 10:13, He will. God will never allow us to experience trials that are more than we can handle. That is seen in Matthew 6:13 in the phrase \"deliver us from evil.\" God will never let us be tempted above what we are able to endure. That's His promise, and if we meet the condition of that promise, we can claim it. What is the condition? Submit yourself to the Lord and resist the devil.\n\nWhat have we learned from the Lord's Prayer? All that we need is available to us. First we are to give God His rightful place. Then we can bring our needs to Him, and He will meet them through His limitless, eternal supply. An unknown author summarized well the impact of this pattern for prayer:\n\nI cannot say \"our\" if I live only for myself in a spiritual, watertight compartment.\n\nI cannot say \"Father\" if I do not endeavor each day to act like His child. I cannot say \"who art in heaven\" if I am laying up no treasure there. I cannot say \"hallowed be Thy name\" if I am not striving for holiness.\n\nI cannot say \"Thy kingdom come\" if I am not doing all in my power to hasten that wonderful day.\n\nI cannot say \"Thy will be done\" if I am disobedient to His Word. I cannot say \"on earth as it is in heaven\" if I will not serve Him here and now. I cannot say \"give us... our daily bread\" if I am dishonest or an \"under-the-counter\" shopper. I cannot say \"forgive us our debts\" if I harbor a grudge against anyone.\n\nI cannot say \"lead us not into temptation\" if I deliberately place myself in its path.\n\nI cannot say \"deliver us from evil\" if I do not put on the whole armor of God.\n\nI cannot say \"Thine is the kingdom\" if I do not give to the King the loyalty due Him as a faithful subject.\n\nI cannot attribute to Him \"the power\" if I fear what men may do.\n\nI cannot ascribe to Him \"the glory\" if I am seeking honor only for myself.\n\nI cannot say \"forever\" if the horizon of my life is bounded completely by the things of time.\n\nAs you commit to following this pattern for all your prayers, your entire Christian walk will be revolutionized, not just your prayer life. No longer will you lack for something to say in prayer. Being alone with God will never be the same.\nPart Three\n\nPRAYER IN ACTION\n10\n\nPRAYING FOR THE RIGHT THINGS\n\nWhen you pray, what do you typically pray for? If we were to take a survey of the evangelical church today on the topics most often prayed for, we would discover that most prayers are often misdirected, shortsighted, and selfish. We typically pray for health, happiness, and success. We pray for personal comfort. We pray for solutions to remedy all the physical problems of life, such as: healing, a place to live, a job, a car, a husband, a wife, children, a promotion, more money, and so on. As important as those things are, in some respects (especially to the people in need), they are low on the priority list in God's kingdom. Jesus said we are not to be anxious about what we eat, drink, or wear when we know God supplies them all (Matt. 6:25\u201333). Our priority must be with the advancement of God's kingdom.\n\nWe live in a world that knows little about what's truly valuable. People all around us are pursuing things that have no lasting value. That pursuit is ably treated by Anton Chekhov in his classic short story The Bet. This story gives us great insight into the value system of most people.\n\nThe plot involves a wager between two educated men regarding solitary confinement. A wealthy, middle-aged banker believed the death penalty was a more humane penalty than solitary confinement because \"an executioner kills at once, solitary confinement kills gradually.\" One of his guests at a party, a young lawyer of twenty-five, disagreed, saying, \"To live under any conditions is better than not to live at all.\"\n\nAngered, the banker impulsively responded with a bet of two million rubles that the younger man could not last five years in solitary confinement. The lawyer was so convinced of his endurance that he announced he would stay fifteen years alone instead of only five.\n\nThe arrangements were made, and the young man moved into a separate building on the grounds of the banker's large estate. He was allowed no visitors or newspapers. He could write letters but receive none. There were guards watching to make sure he never violated the agreement, but they were placed so that he could never see another human being from his windows. He received his food in silence through a small opening where he could not see those who served him. Everything else he wanted\u2014books, certain foods, musical instruments, etc.\u2014was granted by special written request.\n\nDuring the first year his guards could hear him playing the piano at almost any hour, and he asked for many books, mostly novels and other light reading. The next year the music ceased, and he requested the works of various classical authors. In the sixth year of his isolation, he began to study languages and soon had mastered six. After the tenth year of his confinement, the prisoner sat motionless at the table and read the New Testament. After more than a year's saturation of the Bible, he began to study the history of religion and works on theology.\n\nThe second half of the story focuses on the night before the noon deadline when the lawyer would win the bet. The banker was now at the end of his career. His risky speculations and impetuosity had gradually undermined his business. The once self-confident millionaire was now a second-rate banker, and it would destroy him to pay off the wager. Angry at his foolishness and jealous of the soon-to-be-wealthy lawyer who was now only forty, the old banker determined to kill his opponent and frame the guard with the murder. Slipping into the man's room, he found him asleep at the table and noticed a letter the lawyer had written to him. He picked it up and read the following:\n\nTomorrow at twelve o'clock I shall be free... but before leaving this room... I find it necessary to say a few words to you. With a clear conscience, and before God, who sees me, I declare to you that I despise freedom and life and health and all that your books call the joys of this world.... I know I am wiser than you all.... And I despise all your books, I despise all earthly blessings and wisdom. All is worthless and false, hollow and deceiving like the mirage. You may be proud, wise and beautiful, but death will wipe you away from the face of the earth, as it does the mice that live beneath your floor; and your heirs, your history, your immortal geniuses will freeze or burn with the destruction of the earth. You have gone mad and are not following the right path. You take falsehood for truth, and deformity for beauty. To prove to you how I despise all that you value I renounce the two million on which I looked, at one time, as the opening of paradise for me, and which I now scorn. To deprive myself of the right to receive them, I will leave my prison five hours before the appointed time, and by so doing break the terms of our compact.\n\nThe banker read the lines, replaced the paper on the table, kissed the strange, sleeping man, and with tears in his eyes quietly left the house. Chekhov wrote, \"Never before, not even after sustaining serious losses on change, had he despised himself as he did at that moment.\" His tears kept him awake the rest of the night. And at seven the next morning, he was informed by the watchmen that they had seen the man crawl through a window, go to the gate, and then disappear. [DG]\n\nSome people have to learn the hard way what is of value, and there are some who never learn.\n\nWe have just spent several chapters learning what is of value in our prayers. Jesus' pattern for prayer in Matthew 6:9\u201315 gave us the framework on which we can build our own practice of prayer. In these two remaining chapters, we will look at the specific spiritual issues that ought to be the focus of our prayers. These issues will expand and flesh out the pattern Jesus gave. To understand such vital matters, we will need to explore what the apostle Paul taught concerning them.\n\nPaul knew what was important in the Christian life. His prayers for the saints are striking for their exclusive treatment of spiritual concerns. One of his prayers in particular stands out for its simplicity and its depth: \"We pray for you always, that our God will count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power\" (2 Thess. 1:11). Paul often focused his prayers on the issues that would abound to the spiritual benefit of the saints. Here he had three wishes for the Thessalonians: worthiness, fulfillment, and powerful service.\n\nThe Resource\n\nBefore we look at those three requests and their implications, we need to consider briefly the resource of all spiritual blessing. Most of what Paul desired for the saints he knew he could obtain only by prayer. He did not turn to human ingenuity or some program; he turned to God. Paul was a faithful shepherd who taught God's people whenever and wherever he could the importance of obeying His commands. But that in itself was not enough\u2014he had to turn to God, who alone could prompt that obedience in the people. Paul knew that God desires to sanctify His people, and that was his desire as well. Therefore, he prayed for the things God wanted to accomplish in His people.\n\nIf you want to pray for one another, don't pray for the physical necessities only\u2014make it your priority to pray for the important spiritual issues of life because they are of the greatest concern to God. His ultimate purpose is to conform you to the image of Jesus Christ. The little tests and trials in life are important only insofar as they reveal your greater spiritual need. God is most concerned about your response and attitude toward events that occur in your life.\n\nFor Paul, and for any mature Christian, prayer is a permanent state of mind by which the promises and purposes of God, the spiritual well-being of His people, the advance of His gospel, and the growth of His church are passionately desired. What concerns the Lord must concern you if you truly desire to glorify Him in your life.\n\nThe Requests\n\nPaul's prayer for the Thessalonians contains three vital and dynamic spiritual issues that are critical for all believers: \"That our God will count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power\" (2 Thess. 1:11). Worthiness refers to spiritual character. It should be our desire that the Lord would make us the kind of people we ought to be. Fulfillment speaks of God bringing about in our lives every holy longing. And power is necessary for our service to be truly effective. When you pray for your loved ones or for fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, pray for their worthiness, fulfillment, and power in service. When those issues are the priorities of our prayers and our patterns of obedience, God will be honored.\n\nWorthiness\n\nPaul's first request is that God \"will count you worthy of your calling.\" This is a broad request that encompasses our Christian character. If we claim to belong to Christ, we need to live in such a way that honors Him.\n\nThe phrase your calling is a rich New Testament concept that always, in the epistles, refers to the effectual saving call that results in regeneration. This is not a call to repent or believe. It is the calling Paul described in Romans: \"Whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified; He also glorified\" (Rom. 8:30). Here, calling takes its place in the flow of salvation\u2014the \"calling\" that activates in time the election in eternity past. And it is an irrevocable call (Rom. 11:29). In his first epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul discussed the importance of this calling: \"So that you would walk in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory\" (1 Thess. 2:12).\n\nPaul's point is clear. Believers have been called to salvation\u2014to bear the name Christian and become identified as God's people. So he prayed for us to be deserving of bearing Christ's name.\n\nWorthiness in Position\n\nAll are worthy of death and unworthy of salvation. That was true of us before God saved us. Thus we can conclude that God saves the unworthy and makes them worthy. That is our position in Christ. Just as you were declared righteous in the righteousness of Christ, so you were called worthy because of His righteousness. You didn't earn your righteousness; neither did you earn your worthiness\u2014it is all yours through God's grace gift only. So in your positional standing before God you are worthy.\n\nWorthiness in Practice\n\nIt is in the practical sense that Paul asked God to count us worthy of our calling. God wants you to bear His name honorably, and He will use your suffering to accomplish that goal: \"This is a plain indication of God's righteous judgment so that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which indeed you are suffering\" (2 Thess. 1:5). The suffering He ushers into your life peels away the flesh and drives you to Himself. And that ultimately brings spiritual maturity.\n\nTo be counted worthy of our calling should be the prayer of every believer. We all should desire that no believer bring reproach on Christ or dishonor His name. Paul had to specifically address a group of people in the church at Thessalonica who were doing that very thing: \"We command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from every brother who leads an unruly life and not according to the tradition which you received from us\" (2 Thess. 3:6). Some believers evidently were not obedient to God's Word and the teaching of the apostles and were leading an unruly life instead. In fact, some were \"leading an undisciplined life, doing no work at all, but acting like busybodies\" (v. 11). They may have been worthy in their positional standing before Christ, but they certainly weren't living in a way that practically honored Him.\n\nYou and I have an immeasurable privilege and responsibility to bear the name of Christ in a worthy manner. This was a consistent theme throughout Paul's epistles. To the Ephesians he wrote, \"Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance to one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace\" (Eph. 4:1\u20133).\n\nTo the Philippians he said, \"Only conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ... standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel; in no way alarmed by your opponents\" (Phil. 1:27\u201328).\n\nAnd to the Colossians he wrote, \"That you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might\" (Col. 1:10\u201311). Each of those passages gives us some insight into the particulars of a worthy walk\u2014a life we should strive to follow and characteristics we should ask God to make prevalent in all our lives.\n\nThe following is a New Testament list of all that is encompassed in a worthy walk:\n\n\u2022 Humility (Eph. 4:2\u20133)\n\n\u2022 Purity (Rom. 13:13)\n\n\u2022 Contentment (1 Cor. 7:17)\n\n\u2022 Faith (2 Cor. 5:7)\n\n\u2022 Righteousness (Eph. 2:10)\n\n\u2022 Unity (Phil. 1:27)\n\n\u2022 Gentleness (Eph. 4:2)\n\n\u2022 Patience (Col. 1:11)\n\n\u2022 Love (Eph. 5:2)\n\n\u2022 Joy (Col. 1:11)\n\n\u2022 Thankfulness (Col. 1:3)\n\n\u2022 Light (Eph. 5:8\u20139)\n\n\u2022 Knowledge (Col. 1:10)\n\n\u2022 Wisdom (Eph. 5:15\u201316)\n\n\u2022 Truth (3 John vv. 3\u20134)\n\n\u2022 Fruitfulness (Col. 1:10)\n\nIf you truly belong to Christ, you ought to walk as He walked (1 John 2:6).\n\nFulfillment\n\nPaul's second request is for God to \"fulfill every desire for goodness.\" The Greek word translated \"fulfill\" (plero\u00f8 [ ]) means \"to accomplish.\" So Paul is asking God to accomplish in our lives every desire that is good by His definition.\n\nThe Psalms often reflect this desire. David prayed, \"You have given him his heart's desire, and You have not withheld the request of his lips. For You meet him with the blessings of good things\" (Ps. 21:2\u20133). He also said, \"Delight yourself in the LORD; and He will give you the desires of your heart\" (37:4). Will God give you everything your heart desires? He will as long as your delight is in Him and your desires are His desires. This bold statement verifies that truth: \"The LORD will accomplish what concerns me\" (138:8). How could David be so confident? Because his agenda was the same as God's agenda.\n\nI'm sure many people assume God is reluctant to make anyone happy\u2014that He receives some measure of satisfaction by leaving people in permanent misery to remind them He's stringent and demanding. But that's not true at all. God wants to give you the desire of your heart as long as your desire is consistent with His. Psalm 145:16 indicates that God satisfies the desire of every living thing. God is generous and gracious. He longs to give His children what they desire, but only when it is a righteous desire.\n\nPower\n\nPaul's third request is for God to \"fulfill... the work of faith with power.\" The Thessalonian believers already were involved in the work of faith (2 Thess. 1:3\u20135). Their faith was real because it produced fruit. But Paul wanted to see them enlarge their faith, so he prayed for their faith to be more powerful.\n\nPaul prayed that way for the Ephesians: \"That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man\" (Eph. 3:16). The power of God is released in you when you allow God's Word to dominate your life (Col. 3:16).\n\nWhat you pray for your spouse, for your children, for your friends, for the people you love should not be limited to temporal things. Instead ask God to make their work of faith powerful, fulfill their longings for goodness, and cause their lives to be worthy to bear the name of Christ.\n\nThe Reason\n\nOur reason to pray for such spiritual benefits is a fairly obvious one\u2014one that we have affirmed again and again in this book: \"so that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ\" (2 Thess. 1:12). That is the ultimate reason we do anything in the Christian life. If that isn't our ultimate goal, we're focusing too much on ourselves (cf. John 14:13\u201314).\n\nWe pray for each other to be worthy of our calling because Christ's reputation is at stake. That was Daniel's perspective when he prayed, \"O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and take action! For Your own sake, O my God, do not delay, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name\" (Dan. 9:19).\n\nOne of the primary excuses people give for rejecting Christianity is hypocrisy manifest in the Christians they have met. Thus Paul prayed that we will be the opposite of hypocrites\u2014that we will bring honor to the name of Christ and lead unbelievers to Him as a result. That's why Jesus said, \"Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven\" (Matt. 5:16). Paul's desire here is expressed no better than in his second epistle to the Corinthians: \"As for Titus, he is my partner and fellow worker among you; as for our brethren, they are messengers of the churches, a glory to Christ\" (2 Cor. 8:23).\n\nI hope you'll begin to give priority to the important spiritual matters. But to do so is not easy since our tendency is to focus on the temporal. However, placing spiritual concerns first is a sacrifice well worth making. To help you, consider the following example of sacrifice:\n\nThe Pony Express was a private express company that carried mail by an organized relay of horseback riders. The eastern end was St. Joseph, Missouri, and the western terminal was in Sacramento, California. The cost of sending a letter by Pony Express was $2.50 an ounce. If the weather and horses held out and the Indians held off, that letter would complete the entire two-thousand-mile journey in a speedy ten days, as did the report of Lincoln's inaugural address.\n\nIt may surprise you that the Pony Express was only in operation from April 3, 1860 to November 18, 1861\u2014just seventeen months. When the telegraph line was completed between the two cities, the service was no longer needed.\n\nBeing a rider for the Pony Express was a tough job. You were expected to ride seventy-five to one hundred miles a day, changing horses every fifteen to twenty-five miles. Other than the mail, the only baggage you carried contained a few provisions, including a kit of flour, cornmeal, and bacon. In case of danger, you also had a medical pack of turpentine, borax, and cream of tartar. In order to travel light and to increase speed of mobility during Indian attacks, the men always rode in shirtsleeves, even during the fierce winter weather.\n\nHow would you recruit volunteers for this hazardous job? An 1860 San Francisco newspaper printed this ad for the Pony Express: \"WANTED: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk daily. Orphans preferred.\"1\n\nNotes\n\n1 Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1991), 115\u201316.\n11\n\nPRAYING FOR THE LOST\n\nCharles Spurgeon related well the priority all Christians must give to praying for the lost:\n\nThe soul-winner must be a master of the art of prayer. You cannot bring souls to God if you go not to God yourself. You must get your battle-ax, and your weapons of war, from the armoury of sacred communication with Christ. If you are much alone with Jesus, you will catch His Spirit; you will be fired with the flame that burned in His breast, and consumed His life. You will weep with the tears that fell upon Jerusalem when He saw it perishing; and if you cannot speak so eloquently as He did, yet shall there be about what you say somewhat of the same power which in Him thrilled the hearts and awoke the consciences of men. My dear hearers, especially you members of the church, I am always so anxious lest any of you should begin to lie upon your oars, and take things easy in the matters of God's kingdom. There are some of you\u2014I bless you, and I bless God at the remembrance of you\u2014who are in season, and out of season, in earnest for winning souls, and you are the truly wise; but I fear there are others whose hands are slack, who are satisfied to let me preach, but do not themselves preach; who take these seats, and occupy these pews, and hope the cause goes well, but that is all they do.1\n\nWhat Christian does not pray for the salvation of friends and loved ones who do not know the Lord? Yet we must have a broader outlook than that. Scripture supports the perspective that we should all pray for the lost in general.\n\nThe Bible gives several examples of prayer for those outside salvation. In Numbers 14:19, Moses prayed, \"Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of Your lovingkindness, just as You also hast forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.\" He cried out to God for the forgiveness of the sinning Israelites.\n\nSamuel the prophet also prayed for Israel's salvation. In 1 Samuel 7:3\u20135 we read:\n\nThen Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel, saying, \"If you return to the LORD with all your heart, remove the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you and direct your hearts to the LORD and serve Him alone; and He will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines.\" So the sons of Israel removed the Baals and the Ashtaroth and served the LORD alone. Then Samuel said, \"Gather all Israel to Mizpah, and I will pray to the LORD for you.\"\n\nLater in 1 Samuel, after rebuking them for their sin in demanding a king, he said, \"Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by ceasing to pray for you; but I will instruct you in the good and right way\" (12:23).\n\nThe New Testament relates the testimony of Stephen. While being stoned to death, he prayed what amounted to a prayer for his executioners' salvation: \"They went on stoning Stephen as he called upon the Lord and said, 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!' Then falling on his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, 'Lord, do not hold this sin against them!' Having said this, he fell asleep\" (Acts 7:59\u201360).\n\nPaul had a deep desire for the salvation of his fellow Israelites. He expressed that desire in Romans 9:1\u20134: \"I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites.\" That deep concern could not help but find expression in his prayer life: \"Brethren, my heart's desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation\" (Rom. 10:1).\n\nThe Bible, then, clearly expresses the appropriateness and propriety of praying for the lost. In addition to the examples noted above, evangelistic praying is the express teaching of 1 Timothy 2:1\u20138. These verses are polemical in nature; they confront a problem in the Ephesian church. Since Paul here commanded prayer for the lost, we may conclude that such praying had slipped from the priority it should have been at Ephesus.\n\nSince the scope of the gospel call is universal, Paul showed the need to pray for all men. The goal of the church, like Israel before it, is to reach the world with the saving truth of God. Israel failed to be the faithful nation by which God could reach the world, and the responsibility has been passed to the church. Paul wrote out of concern that the exclusivity that caused Israel to fail in her mission should not cripple the church. However, history shows that the church has, in fact, become content with itself and often neglectful of sinners.\n\nThe central function of the church on earth is to reach the lost. Paul knew that the Ephesians would never do that as long as they maintained their selfish exclusivism. To carry out their mission in the world, they must be made to understand the breadth of the gospel call. And the first feature in understanding that is to come to grips with evangelistic praying.\n\nThe Nature of Evangelistic Prayer\n\nPaul wrote, \"First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made\" (1 Tim. 2:1). While the first three terms Paul uses are virtually synonymous, there are among them some subtle shades of meaning that enrich our concept of prayer. Entreaties refers to prayer that arises from a sense of need. Knowing what is lacking, we plead with God to supply it. As we look out on the masses of lost humanity, the enormity of the need should drive us to our knees in evangelistic prayer.\n\nThe seventeenth-century English Puritan Richard Baxter wrote:\n\nOh, if you have the hearts of Christians or of men in you, let them yearn towards your poor ignorant, ungodly neighbours. Alas, there is but a step betwixt them and death and hell; many hundred diseases are waiting ready to seize on them, and if they die unregenerate, they are lost forever. Have you hearts of rock, that cannot pity men in such a case as this? If you believe not the Word of God, and the danger of sinners, why are you Christians yourselves? If you do believe it, why do you not bestir yourself to the helping of others? Do you not care who is damned, so you be saved? If so, you have sufficient cause to pity yourselves, for it is a frame of spirit utterly inconsistent with grace.... Dost thou live close by them, or meet them in the streets, or labour with them, or travel with them, or sit and talk with them, and say nothing to them of their souls, or the life to come? If their houses were on fire, thou wouldst run and help them; and wilt thou not help them when their souls are almost at the fire of hell?2\n\nPrayers refers simply to prayer in general. Unlike entreaties, in Scripture the term is used only in reference to God. It thus carries with it a unique element of worship and reverence. Prayer for the lost is ultimately directed at God as an act of worship, because the salvation of sinners causes them to give glory to Him.\n\nThe Greek word translated petitions comes from a root word meaning \"to fall in with someone.\" The verb form is used to speak of both Christ's and the Spirit's intercession for us (Heb. 7:25; Rom. 8:26). The Members of the Trinity identify with our needs and become involved in our struggles, revealing empathy, sympathy, and compassion. Praying for the lost should never be cold, detached, or impersonal, like a public defender assigned to represent a defendant. Understanding the depths of their misery and pain, and their coming doom, we must cry to God for the salvation of sinners.\n\nThanksgivings is the fourth element in evangelistic prayers. We pray with a spirit of gratitude to God that the gospel offer has been extended, that we have the privilege of reaching the lost with that gospel, and that some respond with faith and repentance.\n\nThese four nuances enrich our prayers as we pray effectively for the lost. If they are missing, we need to examine our hearts. Do we fully realize the desperate condition the lost are in? Do we really want to see God glorified by the salvation of souls? Do we sympathize with the compelling reality of their lost souls, both for time and eternity? Are we thankful the gospel message is extended to all and for our privilege of sharing it? If those components are lacking in our hearts, we will be indifferent. Often we are indifferent simply because we are not obedient to those urgings.\n\nThe Scope of Evangelistic Prayer\n\nWe are to offer those prayers \"on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority\" (1 Tim. 2:1\u20132). As we discovered in the previous chapter, our prayers are all too often narrowly confined to personal needs and wants and rarely extend beyond those of our immediate circle of friends and family. In sharp contrast, however, Paul called for evangelistic prayer \"on behalf of all men.\" There is no place for selfishness or exclusivity. We are not to try to limit either the gospel call or our evangelistic prayers to the elect. After all, we have no means of knowing who the elect are until they respond to the gospel call. Moreover, we are told that God desires all to be saved (2:4). He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather delights when sinners turn from their evil ways and live (Ezek. 33:11). So prayer for the salvation of the lost is perfectly consistent with the heart of God. He has commanded all men to repent (Acts 17:30). We must pray that they will do so, and that they will embrace the salvation offered to all (Titus 2:11).\n\nOut of the universal group of \"all men,\" Paul specifically singled out some who might otherwise be neglected in evangelistic prayer: \"kings and all who are in authority.\" Because ancient (and modern) rulers are so often tyrannical, and even disrespectful of the Lord and His people, they are targets of bitterness and animosity. They are also remote, not part of the everyday lives of believers. Hence there is a tendency to be indifferent toward them.\n\nTo neglect them is a serious sin because of the authority and responsibility leaders have. Paul's injunction here called for the Ephesian assembly to pray for the emperor, who at that time was the cruel and vicious blasphemer Nero. Although he was a vile, debauched persecutor of the faith, they were still to pray for his redemption. For the sake of their eternal souls, we should pray that all \"kings and all who are in authority\" would repent of their sins and believe the gospel.\n\nPaul did not command us to pray for the removal from office of evil rulers or those with whom we disagree politically. We are to be loyal and submissive to our government (Rom. 13:1\u20135; 1 Peter 2:17). If the church today took the effort it spends on political maneuvering and lobbying and poured that energy into intercessory prayer, we might see a profound impact on our nation. We all too often forget that \"the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses\" (2 Cor. 10:4). The key to changing a nation is the salvation of sinners, and that calls for faithful prayer.\n\nThe Benefit of Evangelistic Prayer\n\nThe benefit to praying for the lost is actually quite profound: \"so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity\" (1 Tim. 2:2). Prayer for those in authority will create societal conditions favorable for the church's evangelistic efforts. First of all, when believers are committed to praying for all their leaders, it removes any thought of rebellion or resistance against them. Instead the people of Christ are turned into peacemakers, not reactionaries. As Paul wrote to Titus:\n\nRemind them to be subject to rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed, to malign no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing every consideration for all men. For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. (Titus 3:1\u20133)\n\nHere Paul again called the believers to tranquility and submissiveness to the pagan or apostate governments over them. We can do so because we understand that they are sinners like we used to be, incapable of righteousness.\n\nWhen believers begin to pray unceasingly for the lost, especially their troublesome leaders, unbelievers begin to see Christians as virtuous, peace-loving, compassionate, and transcendent, seeking after their welfare. Once unsaved people realize we pose no threat to society, it is easier for us to be treated as welcome friends. And as more come to saving faith through the prayers of Christians, the favorable conditions for the church could increase.\n\nThe Absence of Disturbance\n\nThe church that is obedient to this mandate will \"lead a tranquil and quiet life.\" The Greek words translated \"tranquil\" and \"quiet\" are rare adjectives. The former, appearing only here in the New Testament, refers to the absence of outside disturbances. The latter, appearing only here and in 1 Peter 3:4, refers to the absence of internal disturbances. When the church manifests its love and goodness toward all and pours itself into compassionate, concerned prayer for the lost, it will lessen the hostility that may exist toward it. As a result, the saints may enjoy freedom from both internal and external disturbances.\n\nThe church, while remaining uncompromising in its commitment to the truth, is not to be the agitator and disrupter of the national life. That is the clear teaching of Scripture. If we are persecuted, it must be for Christ's sake, for the sake of righteous living (cf. 1 Peter 2:13\u201323).\n\nIn 1 Thessalonians 4:11, Paul commanded the Thessalonian believers \"to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands.\" Christians are to be known for their quiet demeanor, not for making disturbances. Unbelievers should see us as quiet, loyal, diligent, virtuous people. Although we may hate the evil world system that is the enemy of God, we are not to see those in it as our personal enemies. They are captives of the real enemy, the devil (cf. 2 Tim. 2:24\u201326). They are not our enemies; they are our mission field.\n\nThe Presence of Holiness\n\nTo promote a \"tranquil and quiet life,\" believers must pursue \"godliness and dignity.\" Godliness translates \"eusebeia,\" a common word in the Pastoral Epistles. It carries the idea of reverence toward God. Believers should live for the majesty, holiness, love, and glory of God.\n\nSemnot\u2211s [ ], translated \"dignity,\" could be translated \"moral earnestness.\" Godliness can refer to a proper attitude, dignity to proper behavior. Thus believers are to be marked by a commitment to morality; holy motives must result in holy behavior. Both contribute to the tranquility and quietness of our lives.\n\nThat is not to say, however, that the Christian life will be free of problems. \"Indeed,\" Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:12, \"all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.\" The Christian life is a war against Satan and the forces of evil. Paul himself was beaten and imprisoned for his faith. His point in this passage, however, is that if we incur animosity and suffer persecution, it is to be for nothing other than our godly attitude and behavior. We must not provoke negative responses by being a disruptive force in society.\n\nThe Reasons for Evangelistic Prayer\n\nWhy should we pray for the lost? Paul gave the answer in one of the most powerful and dramatic passages in all Scripture on the saving purpose of God:\n\nThis is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying) as a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. (1 Tim. 2:3\u20137)\n\nMorally Right\n\nGod defines prayer for the lost as the noble and spiritually proper thing to do, and our consciences agree. The lost suffer the agony of sin, shame, and meaninglessness in this life and the unrelenting agony of eternal hell in the life to come. Knowing that, our most excellent task is to pray for their salvation.\n\nSome might argue the contrary, pointing out that Jesus said in John 17:9, \"I do not ask on behalf of the world.\" But there, Christ was praying as the great High Priest for God's elect. Because He is the sovereign, omniscient Deity, His prayer was specific in a way ours cannot be. He was praying exclusively for the salvation of those whom He loved and chose before the foundation of the world to be partakers of every spiritual blessing (Eph. 1:3\u20134). \"The world\" was specifically excluded from the saving design of His prayer.\n\nOur prayers, however, are not the prayers of a high priest; we pray as ambassadors of Christ, whose task it is to beseech men and women on His behalf to be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:20). We are therefore commanded to offer our \"entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings... on behalf of all men\" (1 Tim. 2:1). Our earnest desire ought to be for the salvation of all sinners (cf. Rom. 9:3; 10:1). We are not to try to limit evangelism to the elect.\n\nThere are three reasons we must not limit our evangelism. First, we are commanded to preach to everyone in the world (Matt. 28:19\u201320; Mark 16:15; Luke 24:46\u201347). Second, God's decree of election is secret. We do not know who the elect are and have no way of knowing until they respond to the gospel. Third, the scope of God's evangelistic purposes is broader than election. \"Many are called, but few are chosen\" (Matt. 22:14). Even Jesus' High Priestly Prayer embraces the world in this important regard. Our Lord prayed for unity among the elect so that the truth of the gospel would be made clear to the world: \"that the world may believe that You sent Me... that the world may know that You sent Me\" (John 17:21, 23). God's call to all sinners is a bona fide and sincere invitation to salvation: \"'As I live!' declares the Lord GOD, 'I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then will you die, O house of Israel?'\" (Ezek. 33:11).\n\nConsistent with God's Desire\n\nIn some inscrutable sense, God's desire for the world's salvation is different from His eternal saving purpose. We can understand this to some degree from a human perspective; after all, our purposes frequently differ from our desires. We may desire, for example, to spend a day at leisure, yet a higher purpose compels us to go to work instead. Similarly God's saving purposes transcend His desires. (There is a crucial difference, of course: We might be compelled by circumstances beyond our control to choose what we do not desire. But God's choices are determined by nothing other than His own sovereign, eternal purpose.)\n\nGod genuinely \"desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.\" Yet, in \"the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord\" (Eph. 3:11), He chose only the elect \"out of the world\" (John 17:6) and passed over the rest, leaving them to the damning consequences of their sin (cf. Rom. 1:18\u201332). The culpability for their damnation rests entirely on them because of their sin and rejection of God. God is not to blame for their unbelief.\n\nSince God \"desires all men to be saved,\" we are not required to ascertain that a person is elect before praying for that person's salvation. God alone knows who all the elect are (2 Tim. 2:19). We may pray \"on behalf of all men\" with full assurance that such prayers are \"good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior.\" After all, \"The LORD is gracious and merciful; slow to anger and great in lovingkindness. The LORD is good to all, and His mercies are over all His works\" (Ps. 145:8\u20139).\n\nThe Lord eagerly accepts prayer for the lost because it is consistent with His desire for their salvation. Such prayer is also consistent with His nature as Savior. His saving character is manifested through His Son, Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5\u20136).\n\nGod is the \"Savior of all men\" in a temporal sense, but \"especially of believers\" in an eternal sense (1 Tim. 4:10).\n\nWhen God \"desires all men to be saved,\" He is being consistent with who He is. In Isaiah 45:22, God said, \"Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth.\" Isaiah 55:1 invites \"every one who thirsts\" to \"come to the waters\" of salvation. Again, in Ezekiel 18:23, 32, God stated very clearly that He does not desire that the wicked should perish but that they would sincerely repent (cf. 33:11). In the New Testament, Peter wrote, \"The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance\" (2 Peter 3:9).\n\nNo true biblical theology can teach that God takes pleasure in the damnation of the wicked. Yet, even so, God will receive glory even in the just condemnation of unbelievers (cf. Rom. 9:22\u201323). How His electing grace and predestined purpose can stand beside His love for the world and desire that the gospel be preached to all people, still holding them responsible for their own rejection and condemnation, is a divine mystery. The Scriptures affirm God's love for the world, His displeasure in judging sinners, His desire for all to hear the gospel and be saved. They also teach that every sinner is incapable yet responsible to believe and will be damned if he does not. Crowning the Scriptures' teaching on this matter is the great truth that God has elected all believers and loved them before the world began.\n\nTo \"come to the knowledge of the truth\" speaks of salvation. Epign\u00f8sis [ ] (\"knowledge\") is used four times in the Pastoral Epistles (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Tim. 2:25; 3:7; Titus 1:1), and in each occurrence it refers to the true knowledge that brings about salvation. Far from desiring their damnation, God desires the lost to come to a saving knowledge of the truth.\n\nSome have argued that 1 Timothy 2:3\u20137 teaches universalism. If God desires the salvation of all men, they argue, then all will be saved, or God won't get what He wants. Others argue that what God wills comes to pass, because \"all men\" refers to all classes of people, not every individual. Neither of those positions is necessary, however. We must distinguish between God's will of decree (His eternal purpose) and His will expressed as desire. Desire is not from boulomai, which would be more likely to express God's will of decree, but from thel\u00f8 [ ], which Paul used in 1 Timothy 2 and can refer to God's will of desire. This is precisely the distinction theologians often make between God's secret will and His revealed will.\n\nGod desires many things that He does not decree. It was never God's desire that sin exist; yet the undeniable existence of sin proves that even it fulfills His eternal purposes (Isa. 46:10)\u2014though in no sense is He the author of sin (James 1:13).\n\nJesus lamented over Jerusalem, \"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling\" (Matt. 23:37). John Murray and Ned B. Stonehouse wrote, \"We have found that God Himself expresses an ardent desire for the fulfillment of certain things which He has not decreed in His inscrutable counsel to come to pass.\"3 God desires all men to be saved. It is their willful rejection of Him that sends them to hell. The biblical truths of election and predestination do not cancel man's moral responsibility.\n\nReflects the Uniqueness of God\n\nOne of the most fundamental teachings of Scripture is that \"there is one God\" (cf. Deut. 4:35, 39; Isa. 43:10; 1 Cor. 8:4, 6). That runs counter to the pluralistic religiosity of our world, which rejects the concept of any exclusive religious truth. We are taught by the over-tolerant spirit of our age that the gods of the Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus are to be considered equally valid. If that were true, there would be many ways of salvation and hence no need for evangelism. But since there is only one true God, then He is the One in whom all must believe to be saved (1 Tim. 2:5). There is no other name under heaven by which sinners may be saved (Acts 4:12). Evangelistic prayer recognizes that all must come to the one true God.\n\nConsistent with the Person of Christ\n\nNot only is there only one God, but \"one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.\" Mediator refers to one who intervenes between two individuals to restore peace or ratify a covenant. The concept of a mediator is seen in Job's lament: \"There is no umpire between us, who may lay his hand upon us both\" (Job 9:33). Because Christ is the only mediator, all must come to God through Him (Acts 4:12). There isn't an endless series of aeons, or subgods, as the Gnostics taught. We do not approach God through the intercession of angels, saints, or Mary. Only through \"the man Christ Jesus\" can people draw near to God. Hebrews 8:6 calls Him \"the mediator of a better covenant,\" while Hebrews 9:15 and 12:24 describe Him as the mediator of the new covenant. Everyone who comes to God must come through Him.\n\nReflects the Fullness of Christ's Atonement\n\nOur Lord freely gave His life when He died for our sins. In John 10:17\u201318, He said:\n\nFor this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father.\n\nHe voluntarily went to the cross and gave all of Himself, not merely something He possessed.\n\nRansom is a rich theological term describing Christ's substitutionary death for us. It is not the simple word for \"ransom,\" lutron, but antilutron, with the added preposition intensifying the meaning. Christ did not merely pay a ransom to free us; He became the victim in our place. He died our death and bore our sin. He gave Himself.\n\nThe phrase gave Himself as a ransom for all is a comment on the sufficiency of the atonement, not its design. To apply a well-known epigram, the ransom paid by Christ to God for the satisfaction of His justice is sufficient for all but efficacious for the elect only. Christ's atonement is therefore unlimited as to its sufficiency but limited as to its application. Real benefits accrue \"for all\" because of Christ's all-sufficient atoning work. The gospel may be preached indiscriminately to all (Mark 16:15); the water of life and the offer of divine mercy are extended freely to all (Rev. 22:17); Christ is set forth as Savior for all to embrace (1 Tim. 4:10; 1 John 4:14). Moreover, in a temporal sense, when Adam and Eve sinned, the entire race was spared from immediate destruction and judgment (a privilege not afforded to the angels who fell\u2014Heb. 2:16), and individual sinners now experience common grace and delay in God's judgment on their sins. Nineteenth-century theologian William G. T. Shedd wrote:\n\nThe atonement is sufficient in value to expiate the sin of all men indiscriminately; and this fact should be stated because it is a fact. There are no claims of justice not yet satisfied; there is no sin of man for which an infinite atonement has not been provided.... Therefore the call to \"come\" is universal.4\n\nThat does not mean that all will be saved. Christ's death was sufficient to cover the sins of all men, but it is applied to the elect alone. The price paid was infinite\u2014it was sufficient for all. \"Christ's expiation... is a divine act. It is indivisible, inexhaustible, sufficient in itself to cover the guilt of all the sins that will ever be committed on earth.\"5 Therefore salvation can sincerely and legitimately be offered to all, though only the elect will respond. Shedd continued, \"The extent to which a medicine is offered is not limited by the number of persons favorably disposed to buy it and use it. Its adaptation to disease is the sole consideration in selling it, and consequently it is offered to everybody.\"6\n\nIt is crucial to understand that the atoning work of Christ fully accomplishes everything God declared He would accomplish in eternity past with regard to the salvation of sinners. God's sovereign purposes are not thwarted in any degree by the unbelief of those who spurn Christ. The atonement of Christ does not represent a failed attempt to save anyone who will not be saved. All those whom God purposed to save from eternity past will be saved (cf. John 17:12). Yet, it is worth reiterating once more that while God's saving purpose is limited to the elect, His desire for the salvation of sinners is as broad as the human race. He \"desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.\" So Christ \"gave Himself as a ransom [sufficient] for all.\" How graphically the atoning work of Christ reveals to us the heart of God for the salvation of sinners!\n\nThat is why Paul referred to the atonement as \"the testimony given [by Christ] at the proper time.\" This thought precisely parallels Galatians 4:4\u20135: \"But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law.\" Christ \"gave Himself as a ransom\" at exactly \"the proper time\" in God's redemptive plan. His redemptive work is the most eloquent testimony ever borne to God's saving desire for sinners. Evangelistic prayer for all men therefore reflects the heart of God and honors Christ's work on the cross.\n\nIn Accord with Paul's Divine Commission\n\nPaul wrote, \"For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle\" (1 Tim. 2:7). Paul's divine commission was based on the great truths that God is our Savior, Christ is our mediator, and Christ gave Himself as a ransom, as discussed in the preceding verses. Preacher derives from the verb k\u2211russ\u00f8 [ ], which means \"to herald, proclaim, or speak publicly.\" The ancient world had no news media, so announcements were made in the city squares. Paul was a public herald proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. An apostle was a messenger, sent on behalf of Christ. If the gospel message were exclusive, that would have undercut Paul's calling.\n\nWe too are called to proclaim the gospel to the lost world. That call, like Paul's divine commission, is based on God's desire that all be saved. Evangelistic prayer acknowledges our responsibility.\n\nThe greatest example of evangelistic praying is our Lord Himself. Isaiah 53:12 tells us He \"interceded for the transgressors.\" On the cross He prayed, \"Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing\" (Luke 23:34). God answered those prayers with three thousand converts on the day of Pentecost and countless thousands more through the centuries.\n\nDo you pray for the lost like that? Do you have the passion that inspired John Knox to cry out, \"Give me Scotland or I die\"? Is your attitude that of George Whitefield, who prayed, \"O Lord, give me souls or take my soul\"? Can you, like Henry Martyn, say, \"I cannot endure existence if Jesus is to be so dishonored\"?\n\nGod honors your prayers for the lost. Standing among those who killed Stephen was a young man named Saul of Tarsus. Could it be that the great apostle's salvation was in answer to Stephen's prayer, \"Lord, do not hold this sin against them!\" (Acts 7:60)? Evangelism begins with prayer.\n\nAre you prepared to be alone with God? You are now armed to go into His presence with much to talk about. Jesus has given you the pattern to use, and the apostle Paul has provided you with a list of priorities. I hope you'll discover real power and passion as you pray according to these realities. As a result, may you grow to be more like Christ and to see many of the elect enter into the kingdom.\n\nNotes\n\n1 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Soul Winner (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 246\u201347.\n\n2 Richard Baxter, cited in I. D. E. Thomas, ed., A Puritan Golden Treasury (Edinburgh, Scotland: Banner of Truth, 1977), 92\u201393.\n\n3 John Murray and Ned B. Stonehouse, The Free Offer of the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1979), 26.\n\n4 William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1980), 2:482.\n\n5 R. L. Dabney, The Five Points of Calvinism (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle, 1992), 61.\n\n6 Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:482.\nDISCUSSION GUIDE\n\nFor Personal Study\n\nSettle into your favorite chair with your Bible, a pen or pencil, and this book. Read a chapter of this book, marking portions that seem significant to you. Write in the margins. Note where you agree, disagree, or question the author. Look up the referenced Scripture passages. Then turn to the questions listed in this discussion guide. If you want to trace your progress with a written record, use a notebook to record your answers, thoughts, feelings, and further questions. Refer to the text and to the Scriptures as you allow the questions to enlarge your thinking. And pray. Ask God to give you a discerning mind for truth, an active concern for others, and a greater love for Himself.\n\nFor Group Study\n\nPlan Ahead\n\nBefore meeting with your group, read and mark the chapter as if you were preparing for personal study. Glance through the questions, making mental notes of how you might contribute to your group's discussion. Bring a Bible and the text to your meeting.\n\nArrange an Environment That Promotes Discussion\n\nComfortable chairs arranged in a casual circle invite people to talk with each other. Then say, \"We are here to listen and respond to each other\u2014and to learn together.\" If you are the leader, simply be sure to sit where you can have eye contact with each person.\n\nPromptness Counts\n\nTime is as valuable to many people as money. If the group runs late (because of a late start), these people will feel as robbed as if you had picked their pockets. So, unless you have a mutual agreement, begin and end on time.\n\nInvolve Everyone\n\nGroup learning works best if everyone participates more or less equally. If you are a natural talker, pause before you enter the conversation. Then ask a quiet person what he or she thinks. If you are a natural listener, don't hesitate to jump into the discussion. Others will benefit from your thoughts\u2014but only if you speak them. If you are the leader, be careful not to dominate the session. Of course, you will have thought about the study ahead of time, but don't assume that people are present just to hear you\u2014as flattering as that may feel. Instead, help group members make their own discoveries. Ask the questions, but insert your own ideas only as they are needed to fill gaps.\n\nPace the Study\n\nThe questions for each session are designed to last about one hour. Early questions form the framework for later discussion, so don't rush by so quickly that you miss a valuable foundation. Later questions, however, often speak of the here and now. Thus don't dawdle so long at the beginning that you leave no time to \"get personal.\" While the leader must take responsibility for timing the flow of questions, it is the job of each person in the group to assist in keeping the study moving at an even pace.\n\nPray for Each Other\u2014Together or Alone\n\nThen watch God's hand at work in all of your lives. Notice that each session includes the following features:\n\nSession Topic\u2014a brief statement summarizing the session.\n\nCommunity Builder\u2014an activity to get acquainted with the session topic and\/or with each other.\n\nQuestions\u2014a list of questions to encourage individual or group discovery and application.\n\nPrayer Focus\u2014suggestions for turning one's learning into prayer.\n\nOptional Activities\u2014supplemental ideas that will enhance the study.\n\nAssignment\u2014activities or preparation to complete prior to the next session.\n1\n\nA HEART SET ON GOD\n\nSession Topic\n\nA believer whose heart is set on God will cultivate a constant attitude of prayer throughout each day.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. Today's society presents us with many options for how to spend our free time. Name one activity you like to do for leisure. Do you think this ever consumes too much of your time?\n\n2. Are you a morning or an evening person? Or does time of day not affect your alertness? How does your answer influence when you spend extended time in prayer?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. Is breathing a good illustration of what prayer ought to be like? Why or why not?\n\n2. Why would any Christian want to behave like a practical humanist? Name and discuss several things (programs, methods, resources) that you think could lead to such action.\n\n3. How did the miraculous events on the day of Pentecost affect the prayer practices of the early church (Acts 1\u20142; 6:4)?\n\n4. What did you envision when you first heard the statement \"Pray without ceasing\"? Was this different from your current understanding of 1 Thessalonians 5:17? If so, how?\n\n5. How does the wording at the beginning of Ephesians 6:18 help explain the all-encompassing nature of prayer?\n\n6. What two important but contrasting lessons can we learn from the prayer time in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:36\u201346; Luke 22:40\u201346)?\n\n7. How are the parables in Luke 11:5\u201310 and 18:1\u20138 different from the other ones Jesus told?\n\n8. What is so significant about praying \"in the Spirit\"? (See Rom. 8:26\u201327.)\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Pray that, as you start this study, God would help you and each member of your group to become more aware of the need for daily prayer.\n\n\u2022 Resolve to set aside enough time at the end of each meeting to pray as a group and follow up on previous weeks' prayer requests.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Reread the long quotation from Charles Spurgeon in the section titled \"A Way of Life.\" Try rewriting it in more contemporary language. Use at least one modern illustration that would exemplify the truth of how prayer ought to be a way of life.\n\n2. Keep a prayer journal over the next month. Record lists of things and people you need to pray for. Also leave room for writing down answers to prayer. Share with a Christian friend at least one of the answers the Lord gives.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Memorize Ephesians 6:18.\n\n2. Read chapter 2 of Alone with God.\n2\n\nSEEKING THE LORD IN SECRET\n\nSession Topic\n\nGod wants us to approach Him in prayer with humility, openness, and sincerity, not with pride and hypocrisy like the Pharisees.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. Share what your favorite kind of getaway spot is (one where you can be alone). Some might want to describe more specifically where theirs is and what it's like.\n\n2. We all dislike insincerity and contrived approaches in everyday life. Can you think of an experience (perhaps with an overzealous salesperson) that was especially irritating for you?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What was the Old Testament view of the importance of prayer? (See Ps. 65:2; 91:15; 145:18.)\n\n2. How did the prophet Isaiah model the trait of reverence when he was face-to-face with God? (See Isa. 6.)\n\n3. Did the Jews have a sense of solidarity? If so, what was it based on, and how did it affect their prayer lives?\n\n4. What were some characteristics and attitudes of ritualized prayer? What are the names of the two most common formal prayers used by the Jews?\n\n5. Do you have the tendency to offer public prayers that are too long? If so, look again at Jesus' warning in Mark 12:40 and consider some ways you might streamline your prayers.\n\n6. What sin was at the heart of the Pharisees' approach to prayer (Matt. 6:5)?\n\n7. What prayer trait did the Jews borrow from the Gentiles? Did it enhance or detract from the content of prayers offered to God?\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Set aside some time during the coming week to examine your motives for prayer. Ask God to reveal to you the things that may hinder your regular prayer times.\n\n\u2022 Do you have a quiet place where you can go to pray? If not, ask God to provide a spot where you can get away from everything else and be with Him. If you have such a place, thank Him for providing it.\n\n\u2022 The discipline of daily prayer can become monotonous. Ask the Lord to give you renewed strength and fresh desire to be faithful in prayer.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Go to your church library or local Christian bookstore and obtain another book about prayer. Read it over the next few weeks and write down those things that might supplement the theme of Alone with God.\n\n2. Most of us receive at least a couple of prayer letters from missionaries or Christian ministries. Reread several recent ones and evaluate them on how well they present their prayer requests. Do you feel they are self-centered, or do they seek to put the attention on God? Write down your thoughts.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Read Matthew 6:8\u201313 and Luke 11:1\u20134. Notice the differences in context and wording of the Lord's Prayer.\n\n2. Read chapter 3 of Alone with God.\n3\n\n\"OUR FATHER\"\n\nSession Topic\n\nPrayer should always begin and end with the recognition that we can and ought to glorify God as our Father.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. Some church traditions recite the Lord's Prayer every week as part of the worship service. Do you think this practice is scriptural? Why or why not?\n\n2. Several years ago, Bible commentator J. B. Phillips wrote a book titled Your God Is Too Small. Do people still expect too little of God today? Or do they make too many demands of Him when praying?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What great truth did Jonah, Daniel, and Jeremiah exemplify in their prayers? Look again at Jonah 2, Daniel 9, and Jeremiah 32.\n\n2. What is a more accurate title we could give to the Lord's Prayer?\n\n3. Reconstruct one of the outlines or patterns of the prayer that you believe best shows Jesus' purpose in sharing it with the disciples. Why do you favor the one you chose?\n\n4. What distinguishes the children of light from the children of darkness? (See Eph. 5:8; 2 Peter 1:4.)\n\n5. What five elements encompassed the fatherhood of God for Old Testament Jews? To which one or ones do you think believers today can most easily relate?\n\n6. What word for father did Jesus often use when referring to God? What does it mean in English?\n\n7. Read Matthew 7:7\u201311 again. What do you find most helpful or comforting from this passage?\n\n8. What are the benefits of having God as our Father? How would you arrange them in order of importance?\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Not everyone has a good relationship with (or good memories of) his or her earthly father. Pray and thank God that He is always available to be a loving Heavenly Father.\n\n\u2022 What has been the focus of your recent prayer times? If it has been too self-centered, ask the Lord to help your prayer be more centered on Him.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Do a brief study of the person and attributes of God. Read a standard work on the subject, such as A. W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy or Arthur W. Pink's The Attributes of God. Take some notes on your reading and tell the group what was most profitable from your study.\n\n2. Read Psalm 139 and meditate on what it says about God's omnipresence and omniscience. Record some key verses to remember.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Begin memorizing Matthew 6:9\u201313.\n\n2. Read chapter 4 of Alone with God.\n4\n\n\"HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME\"\n\nSession Topic\n\nWhen Christians approach God in prayer, they are to remind themselves of His holiness and the greatness of His name.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. How do you respond when you hear someone use the Lord's name in vain? Do you think, as a rule, it is better just to ignore the remark or to admonish the person?\n\n2. People's names are important to them. Share, if you can, some interesting fact about your name or the selection of a child's name.\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What is the primary reason for the existence of the church and each individual within it?\n\n2. What is the most familiar Hebrew name for God? (See Ex. 3:14.) Why did the Jews not say that name out loud?\n\n3. In Scripture, names were more than mere titles. What more important thing are they representative of or equated with?\n\n4. How did Jesus reveal God's character to His disciples? (See John 1:14; 14:9.)\n\n5. What Old Testament verse lists more names for Jesus Christ than any New Testament verse?\n\n6. What contemporary words can be used as synonyms for hallowed? What do they tell us about our relationship with God?\n\n7. What is the most central truth, or most important attribute, concerning God (Isa. 6:3)?\n\n8. Nine \"anxieties of holiness\" are listed under the section titled \"The Fear of the Lord Is Not an Option.\" Which ones do you think are the most difficult to deal with and why?\n\n9. What three truths must be grasped in order to fully \"hallow\" God's name?\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 How has your zeal for the dignity of God's name and your progress in the pursuit of your own sanctification been lately? Spend some time in prayer reviewing your attitudes. Ask God to forgive your indifference and increase your desire to know Him.\n\n\u2022 How respectful are you of the good names (reputations) of fellow Christians, especially those who are leaders in your church? Pray that you would be faithful in this regard and that those leaders would present good testimonies in the community.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Write each Hebrew name for God, with its English translation, on a separate piece of paper or index card. Try memorizing the meanings of all eleven terms. Look up and record the Old Testament passages in which they are used.\n\n2. Have you ever experienced an \"anxiety of holiness\"? It could have occurred when you became a Christian or at some later date. Give a short testimony to that experience at your next study meeting. You might want to recount someone else's experience (one who is not part of your present group) if you feel that it is more appropriate or timelier. If you do not share a testimony with the group, write out your recollections as a prayer or \"open letter\" of thankfulness to God.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Continue to work on memorizing Matthew 6:9\u201313. Review some portion of it every day.\n\n2. Read chapter 5 of Alone with God.\n5\n\n\"YOUR KINGDOM COME\"\n\nSession Topic\n\nOur prayers should support the establishment of God's kingdom and the rule of Christ within it.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. What is one thing about today's American culture that greatly concerns you? How does this thing contribute to the post-Christian or anti-Christian atmosphere in our country?\n\n2. Do you have any future plans or visions for your career, your family, or your personal improvement? How does the amount of time spent on those hopes compare with the time you give to church and furthering God's kingdom? Is it hard to maintain a balance?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What is the church's chief mission in this world? What kinds of influences seek to divert it from that mission?\n\n2. Is it valid for a Christian to bring his or her own concerns and causes before God in prayer? What is the only thing that gives them validity?\n\n3. What poses the greatest opposition to Christ's kingdom and Christian living?\n\n4. What is a common characteristic of all the great empires that have existed throughout world history?\n\n5. Of the three temporal aspects\u2014past, present, and future\u2014of God's kingdom, which is to be our main focus in prayer?\n\n6. What can help us reconcile the seemingly contrasting truths that God's kingdom can be present now but also coming in the future?\n\n7. What are the two main features related to the kingdom's coming to earth now?\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Pray for our nation and its culture. Ask God to turn people's hearts away from sin and toward Him.\n\n\u2022 Thank God for the wonderful privilege of being a member of His kingdom. Pray for several people by name whom you know are not part of God's kingdom.\n\n\u2022 What are your priorities in relation to serving in and helping further God's kingdom? If they need to be more in line with God's, ask Him for the wisdom and guidance to make the necessary adjustments.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Do some additional study on the nature of God's kingdom. For a view of how the kingdom contrasts with the world's system, read Martyn Lloyd-Jones' Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, focusing especially on the chapters dealing with Matthew 6\u20147. For guidance on how believers ought to live in God's kingdom today, read my book Kingdom Living Here and Now.\n\n2. Read and study the parables of the kingdom in Matthew 13:1\u201352. Summarize in your own words the theme or themes of the passage. Record the similarities and differences you notice among the various kingdom parables.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Review your memorization work on Matthew 6:9\u201313. Begin learning Psalm 2:6\u20138 as well.\n\n2. Read chapter 6 of Alone with God.\n6\n\n\"YOUR WILL BE DONE\"\n\nSession Topic\n\nWhen we pray, our wills are to agree with God's will, and we are to desire for His will to be accomplished throughout the world.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. How have you tended to see the effects of your prayers: more from the standpoint of your own persuasiveness or from the standpoint of how God answered your petitions? Explain your answer.\n\n2. Describe a recent example of how you strongly wanted your own way in a situation. Did your attitude create difficulties for you or others?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. How did David (Ps. 40:8) and Jesus (John 4:34) show that they were familiar with the attitude of the third petition?\n\n2. How would you describe poet Omar Khayy\u00e1m's view of God? Think of one or two adjectives that would be appropriate.\n\n3. What does the story in Acts 12 tell us about the vulnerability of the early church's prayer life? (See esp. vv. 1\u201317.)\n\n4. In regard to life's course of events, what tension has always existed between God and man? How have you resolved this tension in your own mind?\n\n5. How and when did Jesus demonstrate a sense of righteous rebellion regarding God's will?\n\n6. When it comes to seeing a difference or having a change occur, how do most Christians view prayer? What attitude needs to replace this view?\n\n7. What three aspects of God's will are discussed toward the end of this chapter? Name one or two main distinctives of each aspect.\n\n8. How can prayer be a means of progressive sanctification? Can you think of an example when it worked that way in your life or in the life of a loved one?\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Pray and ask God to conform your heart and mind to His will in everything. If you are struggling with His will in a certain situation, pray about that especially.\n\n\u2022 Is there a violation against God's will about which your action could make a positive difference? If so, pray for wisdom and courage to take the appropriate action.\n\n\u2022 Spend some time next week thanking God for the many ways His will is being accomplished around the world.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Do some additional study on God's purposes in permitting evil. Read pages 105\u2013124 of my book The Vanishing Conscience and write down the key points of that section.\n\n2. Read Philip Keller's A Layman Looks at the Lord's Prayer. Be alert for topics of discussion that are additional to those covered in Alone with God.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Memorize Romans 12:1\u20132.\n\n2. Read chapter 7 of Alone with God.\n7\n\n\"GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD\"\n\nSession Topic\n\nBecause God has promised to provide all our physical needs, we can pray confidently and thankfully to Him that He will supply these provisions each day.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. Most of us have some dreams about owning material goods that would be additional to our daily essentials. Is it wrong to pray for such things?\n\n2. Has there been any time recently when you were not in a position of relative abundance? If so, what were some ways the Lord met your needs for daily bread?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What is a believer's dependence on God analogous to in a family context?\n\n2. What kinds of needs does the term bread encompass?\n\n3. What are some practical and commonplace ways people deny that God is the source of all they have?\n\n4. Is concern for the environment and for technological tools to manage natural resources unhealthy? How can we balance these concerns with the recognition that everything we have is from God?\n\n5. What fact makes the title of this chapter a valid petition? (See Ps. 37:3\u20134, 10\u201311, 25.)\n\n6. How have non-Christian religions generally contributed to the lack of daily bread in some parts of the world? What specific example is given in this chapter?\n\n7. God can certainly provide for us through miraculous means, but how does He normally supply our needs (2 Thess. 3:10\u201312)?\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Do you know of missionaries who might be struggling to meet their own daily needs or the daily needs of the people to whom they minister? Set aside some special time to pray for them today.\n\n\u2022 Pray that God would help you and others in your study group live one day at a time and trust God to meet your daily needs.\n\n\u2022 Give thanks to the Lord that He has given you, His child, all the basic provisions you need.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Do a brief study of 2 Corinthians 9. Review the ways you are sharing your resources and making spiritual investments for God's work. Do you need to improve your efforts or add some that you have been omitting?\n\n2. Volunteer some of your time in the coming weeks to a local food pantry, homeless shelter, or similar agency. (If your community has none of these, pray for an opportunity to help a family in your church who may be in need of material support.)\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Try reciting all of Matthew 6:9\u201313. If you're not quite ready, continue to review and memorize.\n\n2. Read chapter 8 of Alone with God.\n8\n\n\"FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS\"\n\nSession Topic\n\nBecause Christians continue to sin, we need to pray daily for the forgiveness of sins that only God, our loving Father, can provide.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. What do you find to be the most intolerable character trait in others? What could make it easier to deal with such persons and forgive them?\n\n2. When is the last time you felt great relief at having a financial debt paid off? Describe your experience. What lessons can you draw from this and apply to spiritual forgiveness?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What twofold reason makes God's forgiveness of our sins so significant for us? How does the quote from John Stott relate to this reason?\n\n2. What six negative effects does sin have on our spiritual well-being? What other bad side effects does it have on our physical health and social well-being?\n\n3. What five Greek words are most often used to denote the various aspects of sin? Which word or words best capture the meaning to you?\n\n4. Describe in your own words the magnitude of God's judicial forgiveness. To whom is such forgiveness available?\n\n5. Why do believers still have a need for God's parental forgiveness?\n\n6. What important truths does Jesus' act of foot washing symbolize?\n\n7. What benefits do we receive when we confess our sins? What happens when we do not? What makes confession so hard?\n\n8. What simple principle shows us that forgiving others is the ultimate test for Christians?\n\n9. Seven reasons for forgiving others are presented in this chapter. Which three do you and your group think are most significant? As a group, discuss your reasoning and look at relevant Scripture verses.\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Give thanks to the Lord for His marvelous solution to the problem of sin.\n\n\u2022 The apostle Paul told us to examine ourselves (2 Cor. 13:5). This is especially appropriate to do before partaking of the Lord's Supper. Before the next observance of Communion at your church, examine your heart and bring any unconfessed sins before the Lord for His forgiveness.\n\n\u2022 How is your forgiving spirit toward other Christians? If there is a grudge or unconfessed sin between you and another believer, ask for forgiveness now and pray for the opportunity to make things right with the other person.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Read John Stott's book Confess Your Sins. Record your comments, thoughts, and questions as you read. Write a brief synopsis of the book's theme and main points.\n\n2. Do a word study of forgiveness or one of the terms for sin. If possible, use a dictionary of New Testament words, a Bible encyclopedia, or a dictionary of theology as well as a concordance.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Read and meditate on Matthew 18. Notice the many admonitions it contains about sin, confession, and forgiveness.\n\n2. Review Matthew 6:9\u201313. Are you able to recite it easily?\n\n3. Read chapter 9 of Alone with God.\n9\n\n\"DELIVER US FROM EVIL\"\n\nSession Topic\n\nIt is all right for us to ask God to protect us from sin as we encounter life's various trials and troubles.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. What do you believe is the biggest challenge from the world that keeps Christians from succeeding in their walks with God? What are some reasons for your answer?\n\n2. On a scale of 0 to 10, how would you rate yourself in confronting difficulties and dangers? 0: You try to avoid confrontation whenever possible because you always seem to fail. 10: You look forward to such challenges and wish more would come your way. Or are you somewhere in between?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What kind of word is the Greek for \"temptation\" in Matthew 6:13? How does it differ from the English connotation?\n\n2. How can we best reconcile what the sixth petition says with the admonitions and explanations in James 1?\n\n3. Does every trial necessarily have to turn into a temptation? If not, what is the key factor that prevents this from happening?\n\n4. What common thread of truth runs through Job 23:10; 1 Corinthians 10:13; and 1 Peter 1:6\u20137?\n\n5. What is the ultimate key in dealing successfully with temptation? (See Ps. 119:11; James 4:7.)\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Thank the Lord that, by the Holy Spirit's power, evil is restrained from being even more rampant than it already is.\n\n\u2022 Do you have an ongoing struggle with a particular temptation or sin? Lay claim to the promise in 1 Corinthians 10:13 and ask God for strength to resist temptation the next time it comes.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Do a comparative study of Matthew 4:1\u201311 and Luke 4:1\u201313, two accounts of Jesus' temptation in the desert. Notice the similarity between the accounts. What Old Testament references do both passages quote?\n\n2. Over the next month during your personal devotional time, look for verses that attest to the power of God's Word to overcome evil. Make a list of these verses and select several for memorization. (Try to include this exercise in your regular reading and study time.)\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Complete your memorization work on Matthew 6:9\u201313. Review it as many times as necessary in order to recite it at your next group study.\n\n2. Read chapter 10 of Alone with God.\n10\n\nPRAYING FOR THE RIGHT THINGS\n\nSession Topic\n\nIf we are truly praying for the right things, we will focus our prayer requests on what pertains to God's kingdom and our own spiritual growth.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. What two or three categories most typically dominate the prayer requests offered during the average church prayer meeting? Are most requests in line with God's priorities?\n\n2. How would you assess your value system right now regarding possessions? What item(s) would be especially hard to give up? Is there something else that would be easy to do without?\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What kind of disillusionment came to the young lawyer in the Anton Chekhov story? What happened as a result of his disenchantment?\n\n2. Throughout the recorded prayers of the apostle Paul, what was his primary concern?\n\n3. In Paul's epistles, what does the phrase your calling always refer to?\n\n4. What basic area does the concept of worthiness encompass? What are some practical ways in which you could test your own worthiness?\n\n5. Why is it so important for Christians to walk worthily? What are some of the negative results of not walking worthily?\n\n6. How could David be so bold in his desire for true spiritual fulfillment?\n\n7. What is a primary reason that many unbelievers continue to reject Christianity? How can we behave so that people around us do not reject the truth? (See Matt. 5:16.)\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 Our prayer requests are often off target from what God would want them to be. Review the main things you have prayed for recently. Eliminate those that are self-centered, and ask God to help you focus on the right things.\n\n\u2022 Spend some time thanking the Lord that He is concerned about your spiritual growth and that He provides resources to assist in that growth.\n\n\u2022 Each day during the coming week pray for a different person in your group that he or she would walk worthy of the Christian profession.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. The New Testament contains thirty-three prayers of the apostle Paul. Pick out at least ten of these to read and study in more depth. (Many of them are fairly brief.) Make a list of the key elements contained in Paul's prayers.\n\n2. Refer to the list of characteristics that manifest a worthy Christian walk. Choose seven (one for each day of the week) and write them, along with their verses, on individual index cards. Meditate on one each day next week.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Memorize one of the verses from the list of worthy-walk traits.\n\n2. Read chapter 11 of Alone with God.\n11\n\nPRAYING FOR THE LOST\n\nSession Topic\n\nIn order to be involved in reaching the lost, we first need to understand the essentials of evangelistic praying.\n\nCommunity Builder (Choose One)\n\n1. Do you find it difficult to pray for those in authority, such as world and national leaders? Why is it easy to forget such people in our prayers?\n\n2. Sometimes people are converted to Christ after being the subject of prayers for many years. If someone in your group knows the details of such a case, have them share it with the entire group.\n\nGroup Discovery Questions\n\n1. What expression in Romans 9:1\u20134 demonstrates the apostle Paul's strong desire to see his fellow Jews saved?\n\n2. What are the four terms Paul uses in 1 Timothy 2:1 concerning evangelistic praying? Give an example of how the different shades of meaning could be applied to various needs.\n\n3. What are several ways that praying for the salvation of all the lost is consistent with God's heart? (See Ezek. 33:11; Acts 17:30; 1 Tim. 2:4.)\n\n4. Has the political activism of some Christian groups in recent years made any difference in reaching the lost? What truth from 2 Corinthians 10:4 is often forgotten?\n\n5. What favorable conditions in our nation and society will the church and individual believers see as a result of faithfulness in evangelistic prayer?\n\n6. How is our task of praying for the lost different from Jesus' prayer in John 17? (Compare v. 9 with 2 Cor. 5:20.)\n\n7. How ought God's eternal saving purpose, coupled with His desire that no one perish, be a comfort to us in our praying for and witnessing to the lost? (See 2 Tim. 2:19.)\n\n8. How should the uniqueness of God give us incentive to pray for the lost?\n\n9. Spend some time discussing the nature of Christ's atonement. How can it be unlimited in sufficiency but limited in application?\n\n10. Upon what truths was Paul's commission as an apostle and preacher based? How does that relate to the responsibility God has given us?\n\nPrayer Focus\n\n\u2022 How diligent have you been during the past year to pray for unsaved friends and relatives? Ask the Lord to help you maintain or if necessary, improve your efforts.\n\n\u2022 Choose the name of one unsaved person, perhaps a family member, and devote extra time during the coming month to praying for his or her salvation.\n\n\u2022 Express your thanks to God for His great salvation and for His marvelous love in drawing you to Himself.\n\nOptional Activities\n\n1. Read J. I. Packer's Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God or Charles Spurgeon's The Soul Winner. Look for insights on how you can apply what the book says to your evangelistic activities (witnessing as well as praying).\n\n2. If you know a missionary pastor who is engaged in church planting, write him a letter and tell him of your prayer support. Share some of the principles you learned in this chapter and assure him of your prayers for the people he is seeking to reach with the Lord's help.\n\nAssignment\n\n1. Review your memory work on Matthew 6:9\u201313. Try to finish memorizing it in the next week or two if you were unable to complete the assignment earlier.\n\n2. Begin memorizing 1 Timothy 2:1\u20136. Give yourself a goal for when you will have the complete passage learned.\n JOHN MACARTHUR JR. is the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, president of The Master's College and Seminary, and featured teacher with the Grace to You media ministry. With over four decades in the ministry, John has written dozens of best-selling books, including The MacArthur Study Bible and The Gospel According to Jesus.\n\nwww.davidccook.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}