“Everything has poison. It is the dosage that decides whether we live or we die…”

– Paracelsus – Swiss alchemist (1493-1541), father of toxicology

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Mithridates VI of Pontus (foreground center in purple robe), in his ‘toxicology’ lab, about to administer an antidote to a slave, minutes after he has forced the poor wretch to swallow belladona (c 70BC)

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Just as present-day governments commission geological surveys for oil, back in 70 BC, Mithridates VI (a.k.a. ‘Mitsy’ in this blog) had his minions scour the countryside for poisonous plants and minerals, to develop poisons from.

Mitsy had a research facility that had only one assistant – a herbalist by the name of Crataeus. So guarded was Mitsy about the stuff he was concocting that he had Crataeus’s family locked up under permanent house arrest 24/7, to be executed summarily in case Crataeus betrayed him.

The house that Crataeus and his family were locked up in was an opulent palace that didn’t want for any pleasure that came to his mind. If Crataeus’s wife wanted one of those well hung nubian slaves to orally stimulate her, she just had to say the word.

Mitsy researched all sorts of poisonous herbs, like hemlock, aconite, deadly nightshade (belladonna), castor, hellebore, azalea, rhododendron, realgar (arsenic), mercury and sulphur, to name just a few. He had Crataeus blend and mix the powders and pastes and then fed the concoctions to captured prisoners and slaves. And while some of those unfortunate suckers were monitored for symptoms and duration of survival prior to death, others were put on an antidote regimen, to test the antidotes that he simultaneously engineered.

Countless prisoners and slaves died horrible deaths as a result of Mitsy’s experimentations. By today’s sensibilities, Mithridates would be recognized as a psychotic mass murderer, on par with prominent Nazis like the infamous bio-weapons expert, Walter Schreiber and the endurance medicine researcher, Josef Mengele, registered physicians who practiced a craft similar to Mitsy’s during the Second World War.

But those were the times that Mitsy grew up in. A man interprets morality as he sees it. Mitsy recognized his own mother’s treachery when she poisoned his father. Life inside any royal household in those times was an all-pervasive mantle of suspicion, conspiracy, treachery, intrigue and paranoia and Mitsy lived in the midst of all that.

In that milieu, poisoning happened to be the preferred method of assassination. There was no such thing as forensic science and poisons left no trace. You could spike a guy’s wine with arsenic and pass the death off as cardiac arrest and no one would be the wiser.

Even when an assassination was carried out in broad daylight before hundreds of witnesses, the justice system in the ancient world perceived it as a crime if the folks that mattered saw it as such. Delivering his corny “Romans, countrymen and lovers, lend me your ears….” monologue in front of thousands of Romans, Brutus convinced them that killing Caesar was the right thing to do. And he walked away, unscathed. For the moment, that is. Until Octavian and Anthony wupped his ass at Philipi and he told his aide to hold his sword while he ran into it, dying a long and excruciating death.

Hold it right there, before you fact check me. The “lend me your ears” bit was from Mark Anthony’s rebuttal monologue, not Brutus’s words.

Who gives a shit anyway?

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Most white guys believe that the ancient ‘civilized’ world was Europe and its language was Latin. We’ll humor them and not correct them for now, since this is not a piece on race relations. It is thought that the 5th to the 2nd centuries BC had been a period of heightened consciousness – of discipline, obedience and the rule of law, the standards set by first the Greeks and then the Romans.

Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, things slid into an age of decadence and greed for the next 400 years, starting the 1^st century AD with the ascendence of the Julio-Claudian Emperors (Augustus –> Tiberius –> Caligula –> Claudius –> Nero) when everyone who was anyone was either poisoning or being poisoned, making this form of killing a sort of status symbol. You were a nobody if you simply died of old age.

During this period, women of the elite gained tremendous notoriety as poisoners. Noblemen had multiple wives and concubines and these women were all conniving to ensure that the inheritance went to their biological sons. Queens did likewise, to ensure that they could rule as regent until little Billy(us) Bob(inus) came of age and was crowned the king.

The first Roman Emperor Augustus’s wife, Livia Drusila, was reported to be quite a terror with poison. The historian Cassius Dio wrote that when Augustus got paranoid that someone in the palace was trying to kill him, he began eating only fresh figs that he plucked with his own hands straight from the trees in his private courtyard. According to Dio, Livia outwitted her husband by smearing poison directly onto the figs while they were still hanging on the branches. That evening dinner, she safely ate the untainted ones herself, while Augustus chomped on the smeared ones and within hours went toes up. Livia is also alleged to have orchestrated the poisonings of a number of Augustus’s grandchildren, in her single-minded zeal to get her son from a previous marriage, Tiberius, to the throne. Incidentally, Jesus was crucified during Tiberius’ reign.

Then there was the infamous trio, Canidia, Martina and Locusta, who poisoned their way through the entire Julio-Claudian dynasty and its court.

Not much is known about Canidia except that she was a vicious contract killer who poisoned hundreds of Roman noblemen for cash. Canidia is thought to have helped Livia murder Augustus. It was when she began thinking she was invincible and started taking money from both sides, that she met a gruesome end, eviscerated alive and strung up in public. No painless drifting off to death by poisoning for Canidia dear, no siree.

By the way, the dreaded ‘chairman’ of Murder Incorporated, mafia don Albert Anastasia, was killed for a very similar reason. If you are a contract killer you should know better than to profit from both sides, is the moral.

Now about Martina. On Tiberius’ orders, Martina poisoned his nephew and heir, Germanicus. A highly competent general posted in Germania, Germanicus was winning battle after battle, expanding Rome’s influence over central and eastern Europe. To his troops and to the Roman populace, Germanicus was the Roman version of Alexander the Great. Unfortunately in ancient Rome it didn’t pay to be more popular than the emperor, unless you could back it up with the Praetorian Guards’ muscle.

Tiberius was getting antsy at all the adulation being heaped on Germanicus, so he had Martina recruit a trusted henchman named Piso to poison Germanicus with a special “delayed-action” concoction over a period of 15 days, making it look like he simply took ill and gradually died. Those days contracting an unknown illness and dying from it was commonplace, so no one batted an eyelid. Martina would have fitted in perfectly at the erstwhile KGB’s First Chief Directorate, now known as the FSB’s “Criminalist Institute”.

And then there was Locusta. On the orders of Agrippina the Younger – empress to Claudius, Locusta poisoned his son from his marriage to Messalina, Britannicus, whom he had named after the island he had invaded and annexed – present day Britain.  Agrippina wanted her own biological son, Nero, to be emperor. So, when it began to seem like Claudius would go on forever, she had Locusta poison him. Nero was crowned and he later signed Locusta up on a lifetime contract as a sorta “court-appointed poisoner”.

Alas, Locusta too met with a horrible death. Soon as Nero was dead (assisted suicide), his successor, Galba, had Locusta arrested, raped and beheaded in public.

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The spread of Christianity did not seem to slow down greed even a bit. By 400AD, the Dark Ages – also known as the Middle Ages or Medieval Period – set in. It was a period of moral recession that wiped out every bit of enlightenment that had been attained through the early Greco-Roman civilization.

Christianity could do nothing to arrest the onset of the Dark Ages. Religion in fact is credited by some, to have been the catalyst which fueled the Dark Ages, rather than being the provider of enlightenment. Christianity brought with it religious bigotry and officially sanctioned oppression and even wholesale genocide by its overseers – the Catholic Church.

If I had met Jesus Christ then personally I would have told him, “Cut it the proselytizing, Dude. If Pontius Pilate summons you, be more diplomatic, make that deal with him.”

Wouldn’t a live Jesus Christ have been better for the future of the world than a dead one?

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It was as if civilization pressed a reset button and went back to the wantonness of 5000BC. The Dark Ages lasted right up until the Renaissance in the mid-17^th century. Through all the chaos, poisons kept playing a central role in the mayhem. Indeed, a whole dynasty of Catholic Popes, the infamous Borgias of the 15^th century, thrived on the art of poisoning. The murderous patriarch of the family, Rodrigo Borgia, battered and slammed his way to the Papacy, becoming Pope Alexander VI. He made his equally murderous son, Cesare a cardinal even while he was running  an organized crime syndicate at the time.

The Borgias entertained frequently. With word having already spread about their prowess with arsenic, guests who were invited to dinner at the Borgia residence considered the invitation a death sentence. Refusal meant almost certain arrest and death and so did acceptance of their invitations. In Italy, arsenic came to be known as “polvere dell’eredita” (the inheritance powder).

Arsenic had many qualities that endeared it to the calculating mind of the medieval murderer. It looked harmless, like a sack of sugar. It was tasteless and odorless and it mixed easily in food. The symptoms it produced, diarrhea and vomiting, look much like ordinary food poisoning from petrified meat, something very common in those days.

Through the ages arsenic has been the poison of choice the world over. In 1752, 31-yr old spinster, Mary Blandy, was convicted and hanged for murdering her father with it. She admitted to mixing a powder in his tea cup to sweeten his attitude toward her romantic liaison with a lazy lout her father couldn’t stand. On the scaffold, about to be hanged, her knicker showing when strong winds whipped up her skirt, Mary instructed the hangman not to hang her too high, “for the sake of decency.” Reminds me of Saddam Hussein, at the gallows seconds before the plunge, asking his executioners to brush his hair back.

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Enough about the Romans and Christianity for now. I know how short your attention span is, so let’s get back to Mitsy.

Mitsy was a paranoiac. Those days every monarch had to be one, in order to carry on living. Fearing being poisoned with some unknown new concoction, he set out to perfect a “universal” theriac or antidote, after he gained the throne. After many tests which wiped out an entire prison population, he finally settled on a universal antidote. He named it Mithridatium and carried it with him in a tiny marble jar wherever he went.

However, the more he solidified his position on the throne, the more paranoid Mitsy got. The assuring presence of mithridatium didn’t help. Mitsy was smart enough to realize that new poisons were being created by others every frigging day and mithridatium needed constant upgrades if it had to remain effective, much like anti-virus software today.

Meanwhile, Mitsy began noticing something interesting. The few slaves whom he had administered smaller doses of his test potions over time, they not only survived but recovered quickly, even when given heavier doses later on. He realized that they had developed immunity toward the poison. He began consuming sub-lethal doses of all kinds of poisons with the belief that this would build up his immunity against them. As to how far he was successful is debatable, though the principle of immunity through controlled ingestion of the very substance you want to be immune from is an accepted concept today.

Mitsy’s immunization through self-application routine gave birth to a new kind of practice that got a name Mithridatism : protecting oneself against a poison by gradually self-administering non-lethal amounts. As far as is known, Mitsy was the first to discover this form of immunization. Today it is practiced universally, though not on poisons, since poisoning is no longer an effective way to kill and not be caught. Mithridatism is practiced today against viral and bacterial infections and goes by the name : vaccination.

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Mithridatism had been in vogue in other parts of the world at the time as well. In ancient India, Emperor Chandragupta Maurya (340–295 BCE), ordered the regular administering of poison in small amounts to specially hand-picked, extremely pretty pubescent young girls as they were growing up, gradually making them immune to the deadly substance. A number of maidens died as the dosage wasn’t always appropriate but Old Chandy didn’t give a fuck. Whether they lived or died, their parents went home rich beyond their dreams. A sorta win-win situation if one didn’t consider the young lass in it.

The girls who got the doses were called vishakanyas (visha – poison, kanya – maiden). Vishakanyas found employment with the wealthy elite as assassins. The modus operandi was a simple one. A Vishakanya would be told to seduce a nobleman who had been marked for murder. She would invite the sucker to share a pitcher of wine with her before engaging in torrid sex. Witnessing her drinking from the same pitcher, the victim would assume it was safe and he would drink up. While she survived, he would writhe in agony before he raised the daisies. 

The moral : when a woman invites you over for a drink, be sure to fuck her first.

Take it easy, this post is x-rated. Leave your prim and propahness at the door before you enter this blog. Here we talk dirty and have a belly laf over it. Sex is funnier than you think.

As a child in India, I remember watching in awe while a snake charmer nonchalantly shoved his hand inside a sack filled with cobras, drawing one out and toying with it, pressing it’s jaws so they would reluctantly open and you’d see it’s fangs. Sometimes he’d deliver sharp whacks on it’s head with his open palm and you could see the cobra getting pissed off, it’s head flattening into a broad hood, it’s upper lip quivering as it retracted, baring a purple-pink gum with two large fangs, it’s forked tongue flailing wildly, while it issued a hissing snarl. After a few whacks, unable to stand the humiliation any longer, the cobra repeatedly lashed out with lightning speed and stick it’s fangs into him.

It was a fucking cobra, the most venomous snake in the world and yet, nothing ever happened to the guy! He had been bitten so many times that he was completely immune to cobra venom.

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I have covered Mitsy’s death in Part-1, so if you haven’t already read it, read it before I send over a lactating vishakanya to get you.

The poison Mitsy took as Pompey’s forces closed in was not going to be sufficient to kill him, given his lifelong immunization through his own practice of mithridatism. But Mitsy had to have known that the poison wouldn’t kill him.

Historians suggest he had secretly developed a deadly fast-acting ‘poison-x’ for which he had deliberately not created an antidote. It had one potential user – him. So, why didn’t he use that poison when the Romans were closing in?

Here’s what I think happened. Mitsy couldn’t find it. It must have been one of the first instances of shit happening.

In the end, with the Romans at the city walls, Mitsy got his aide to run him through with his pearl-handled sword. That’s another weird way to commit suicide – asking your secretary to clutch your sword tightly in both hands pointing out and then sprinting across the room and impaling yourself on it. Jesus H!

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Legend has it that two thousand years after Mitsy committed suicide – around the time Crimea became a part of the Soviet Union in 1921, Russian archeologists unearthed a small earthenware pot that was filled with some kind of a powder, at the site where Mitsy is believed to have taken his life.

When the Soviet archeologist left the pot on top of a table and went out for lunch, his cat came in and sniffed around. On his return, Chuchukin found the cat dead under the table and the jar lying on it’s side open.

Minute amounts of the powder found inside the pot were tested and found to contain some of the deadliest herbs known to mankind – aconite, hellebore, belladonna, thorn apple and hemlock. However, 86% by weight was an unknown element that later on proved to be highly toxic thallium, a colorless, odorless and tasteless substance that is now known as the “poisoner’s poison”.

The pot was rushed to the Kamera (Russian for ‘chamber’), a highly secretive facility within the Active Measures section of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate where research was ongoing to find a poison that could kill quickly and leave no trace. Kamera had begun work in 1921, under Lenin’s Cheka, the Soviet secret police agency which would later transform into the KGB, now known as the FSB.

The lab report on the ingredients of the powder was being prepared when one of the technicians, the man who had gathered up the spilled powder from the table, collapsed from a heart attack. Later on, a pinch the size of a pin head, when administered to an otherwise healthy Sevostlag gulag inmate who was serving a life sentence without parole, killed him within two minutes. An invasive forensic autopsy showed no signs other than that of a heart attack.

That the contents of that little pot unearthed on the shore of the Black Sea were still potent after two milennia was testimony to Mithridates’ prowess as a toxicologist. Little could he have known though, that his ‘magic bullet’ would find use 2000 years later, with the Cheka-NKVD-KGB-FSB juggernaut. The Russians would then take poisoning even further, to more exotic agents like high energy alpha particle radiating Polonium-210 that changes the very DNA of the victim, causing irreversible organ failure.

As for Mithridates’ antidotes, Mithridatium was still available at apothecary outlets in Italy as recently as the 1930s.

“And its one,two,three,four, what are we fightin’ for // Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam // So five,six,seven,eight, open up the pearly gates //  There ain’t time ta wonder why, whoopie!! We’re all gonna die…

”Come on mothers, throughout the land, pack yore boys off to Vietnam // Come on Dads, don’t hesitate, to send off your boys before its too late // Be the first ones in your blocks, to bring your son back in a box”

Country Joe (1972)

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That’s enough country music. Let’s get back to the here and now.

Among US Military combatants, the demographic whose members are the most susceptible to PTSD seemed in the beginning to be the most unlikely, given the fact that these fighters never have to smell the burning flesh of innocents and the cordite of the battlefield.

Meet the new-age warriors of today – the drone pilots.

Although a soldier, a drone pilot leads a life that is just like ordinary working civilians. He signs in 9am, he sits on a tall straight backed seat in front of a large screen, inside a climate controlled hut at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Thanks to technology, he doesn’t have to be present where the action is.

In the pilot’s right fist is a video game style joystick which controls the flight of an MQ9 Reaper drone, it’s single tail mounted 900-hp Honeywell turbine engine keeping it flying in a lazy figure ‘8’ pattern 20000 ft above an arid Iraqi hamlet. His colleague sitting right next has an almost identical set-up that controls the munitions (which are considerable).

The Reaper got it’s name from the “Grim Reaper” which is a euphemistic term that we use for death. A very apt name indeed and its because of the laser guided AGM-114 Hellfire missile slung under it’s belly that can hit a target with an accuracy of 25cms. Detonated, the high explosive in it’s nose will wipe out everything within 50 metres all around the strike point. At maximum payload capacity, the Reaper can stay aloft for 14 hours at a stretch. This one still has 5 hours to go, having taken off 9 hours prior, from a strip in Djibouti, in the horn of Africa where the CIA has bribed the local government and coerced it into providing space to build a base.

Up front, just below it’s chin, the Reaper has a hyper-sensitive infra-red camera that can detect the heat signature of a human body from an altitude of 4 miles. The camera is not sophisticated enough to tell between a boy playing with a stick and a militant brandishing an AK-47, but those who are flying the Reaper really don’t care. There are no rules of engagement that the drone pilot has to worry about. It’s just a cut and dried two-man chain of command. In under 10 seconds, the pilot will get the go-ahead, “This one looks like a bad guy. He’s moving around suspiciously. Burn the m…ther f…cker.” That’s all that it takes.

A slight pressure from the pilot’s thumb will send down a 100-lb high explosive-tipped laser guided Hellfire missile which will bore down on the target at 1.5 times the speed of sound and annihilate people who have done him, his family or his nation personally no harm. The target will not sense even a whisper, since the projectile is supersonic.

After his shift gets over, the drone pilot will strut out into the dazzling Nevada sun and drive home in the F-350 truck that he has souped up with his considerable overtime pay. He will be filled with a sense of having accomplished something, ie: eliminating a “bad guy”.

At home, the drone pilot has work to do – like taking his kids out for their little league baseball and maybe a slice of pizza after.

“Intrepid” drone pilots, picking targets between swigs of Moka and bites of donuts with sprinklies on them

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“Hey, Bud, I think that was a kid in there.”

“Take it easy. Relax. We’ll say it was a goat…..”

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All within a span of 24 hours, a drone pilot will careen between two vastly different lives –one, in which he will engage in wholesale slaughter where women and children often get vaporized and the other, in which he goes home and leads the life of a typical “all-American family”. Day in and day out.

In the beginning, the drone pilot finds his bizarre bipolar existence thrilling. He develops a sense of playing God, instantly vaporizing people at will. But the adrenaline high is short-lived. All the wanton killing of faceless people thousands of miles away destroys his sense of humanity and ultimately gives way to massive guilt at the enormity of the mayhem that he willingly unleashes. He finds it increasingly difficult to square how what he is doing can “save American lives”.

Like it or not, we all have a moral compass “factory installed” within us. Most drone pilots suffer from a variant of PTSD known as “moral injury”. It is the injury to a person’s conscience and moral values from a morally repugnant act that can induce profound guilt.

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In all fairness, some strong arguments against the ‘just war’ theory also exist.

Many believe that the premise that a morally justified war is psychologically clean and therefore PTSD-free, is a myth.  They argue that there were in fact comparable numbers of the PTSD-afflicted among WW2 vets too. The vets just didn’t know they had it, calling it simply, ‘shell shock’ or ‘battle fatigue’. Unaware that PTSD was a sickness that needed treatment, they kept it to themselves and just sort of muddled along, trying to make the best of what post-war life had to offer them.

I still believe that the good guys and the oppressed tend to suffer less from PTSD. What helps them is the moral high ground.

Take the Vietnamese, for example. In those 11 years that they fought the American invaders, nearly 1.6 million gave up their lives. They suffered horrible burns from Napalm and they were consumed by Agent Orange. Countless others died in massacres such as the one at the hamlet of Mai Lai in 1968, when American soldiers went berserk, killing hundreds of innocent villagers. We recall Tây Vinh, Gò Dài, Binh Tai, Tinh Son, Bình Hòa and last but not the least, ‘Operation Speedy Express’ which was a macabre ‘reverse hearts and minds’ effort that killed 11000 innocent Vietnamese villagers. The list of known massacres committed by the US troops in Vietnam is long and grotesque.

In comparison, the American deaths from the Vietnam War were 52000, lesser by a factor of 1 in 32. The incidences of PTSD among the Americans would naturally be expected to be in the same proportion, but it is just the opposite, as per a research funded by and American non-profit, The American-Vietnamese Friendship Foundation, presented in 2005. The study found that as against 35% for American vets, only 19% of the Vietnamese vets were found to have PTSD.

”American-Vietnamese Friendship Foundation”. Irony, isn’t it? The nation that, by it’s brute power, devastates also has in it people with real guilt, real conscience.

Interestingly, a similar trend was noticed in another study comparing British and American WW2 vets. It was observed that the number of Americans suffering from ‘combat fatigue’ (they didn’t call it PTSD then) was double that of the British. That was believed to be because the British and the Vietnamese had one thing in common. They were fighting for their very survival. Perhaps having a solid reason to fight staved off PTSD in both cases.

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And then there are the holocaust survivors. Most holocaust survivors have rebuilt their lives. Almost to the very last man, they have picked up the pieces and moved on to build successful careers in business and industry wherever they settled after the war. I’m not saying they didn’t have the occasional nightmare. They did, but they chose to look beyond.

When the state of Israel was still young, it was teeming with holocaust survivors. Out of a total Jewish population in 1948 of 806000, holocaust survivors made up 250000, which means that one out if three Israelis was a holocaust survivor – a walking skeleton with a damaged psych.

If any one group of people were expected to suffer from massive long-term PTSD, it was the Holocaust-surviving Jewish settlers in Israeli. Instead, just the opposite happened in Israel. They farmed the arid land, set up its cutting-edge industry and built one of the world’s most feared defence forces. It fought off murderous neighbours on all sides and took the battle into their territory.

Fighting for their survival and building a nation at the same time kept the holocaust survivors in Israel busy and saved their nation from becoming a basket case. Stray incidences of PTSD did begin to crop up in the 1980s, when the holocaust survivors began leading retired lives with very little to occupy them and in some cases, became lonesome, with a spouse dead and nobody to talk to and a tiny percentage of them began having nightmares related to PTSD.

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My elder bro, an intellectual, sent me this excerpt from an essay by an Indian journalist, Mukul Sharma, that kinda resonated somewhere within my head…..

“Does the universe care about what we do or what happens to us or whether we live or die?

If we were to believe hard-core amoral nihilists who say that the universe is just a physical phenomenon with no spiritual component, that events are random and have no deeper meaning or purpose and that there are no consequences to our actions, then the answer is obviously no.

Yet, even if that were true, it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t care about the universe because, unlike it, we have evolved into sapient creatures that are capable of wonder and love. Meaning, we can infuse it with the same whether it cares or not. In fact, with that kind of involvement on our part, who cares whether it cares or not?

If we were to do that, we could begin living in a basically spiritual universe, ordered by feelings of good and bad; a cosmic

order that would in turn, underpin and motivate all our actions. It would be like a moral force where our actions have definite effects that we carry with us. In this respect, its meaning would then be close to the Hindu concept of Karma.

The notion of a moral universe would also buttress spirituality and form the basis for kindness, compassion, altruism and caring for others. This is because it places a value on human life and living things that goes beyond what seems suitable if we regard people and living things merely as a collection of atoms, and essentially no different from any other unfeeling, non-sentient structures such as rocks soil, mountains or planets”.

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I am an atheist but I believe in a “moral universe”, a universe that distinguishes between good and evil and ultimately rewards morality.

How can we stop a soldier and make him think of  a moral universe? How can we make him ask, “what am I fighting for?’

She slid open a panel in the door of the limo. There was a whole bar in it.

“What’s your poison?” she asked, her eyelids heavy with mascara.

“Life,” I grunted, trying to look tough.

“Oh, that? It’ll kill you. Unless you live it the way I do,” she giggled and reached out and place her hand on my thigh…..

– Excerpt from “No orchids for Miss Blandish” (James Hadley Chase)

 

Mithridates VI, The Louvre, Paris

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James Hadley Chase’s novels are masterpieces of the fast-paced crime genre. Every time I took a train to some place in India, I stopped at the AH Wheeler kiosk on the rail station platform to pick up a Hadley Chase. Time flew when I had a slim paperback Hadley Chase tucked in my coat pocket.

But don’t pay any attention to the excerpt on top of the bust. It has nothing to do with the context of this post. I put it there because I used to love James Hadley Chase’s writing. Put bluntly, inserting this kinda blurb is called jerking off the reader. I apologize but the temptation was too great. Besides, this is my blog and I’ll do what I want.

Perhaps there is a parallel. The guy this post is all about also did what he wanted. He was one of only a handful who had the chutzpah to thumb their noses at the mighty Roman Republic and bring it close to the brink of collapse. The great Carthagian general, Hannibal (247-182BC) was one and then there was the Thracian slave called Kirk Douglas….. I beg your pardon, I meant Spartacus (109-73 BC).

There was another man whom the world hardly speaks of today – ruler of a tiny state called Pontus on the southern banks of the Black Sea, in present-day Turkey. He was an apothecary, a scientist, a conqueror, a king and a polymath who spoke 30 languages. The Pontics loved him. The Cappadocians begged him to take over their kingdom, the Galatians offered him fealty, the Greeks worshipped him……

And the mighty Romans, they feared him.

Meet King Mithridates VI of Pontus (120-63BC). If you don’t have any objections, I’ll call him “Mitsy”.

In the history books, Mitsy is an obscure figure. I bet you never heard of the guy before. That’s cool, because neither did I. The reason why he does not find prominent mention in history books is because historians of antiquity, like Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Polybius, Tacitus, Livy and others who were members of the Roman elite, dismissed him as a minor Robin Hood-style brigand who in the end got what was coming to him.

Another possible reason why Mitsy never found the spotlight was because Spartacus usurped it. Around the same point in time, the famous revolt of slaves under Spartacus was unfolding right there in the heart of the Italian peninsula. Spartacus’s story was a big deal because at that point in time one out of every three inhabitants of the Italian peninsula was a slave.

Forced obscurity however does not diminish Mitsy’s greatness in any way. There was a time when he was feared and hailed as the ‘Hannibal of the East’, a sobriquet that he earned by constantly launching lightning attacks on neighboring Roman satrapies and thereby challenging the hegemony of Rome.

Maybe instead of wasting his time writing fiction about an inconsequential medieval Germanic prince named Hamlet or a treacherous illegitimate son named Brutus, if Shakespeare had penned a tragedy on Mitsy’s life, he would be a household name by now.

Mitsy is believed to have directly descended from both, Darius the Great of Persia and one of Alexander the Great’s three Generals, Seleucus I (founder of the Seleucid Empire after Alexander’s death). It is possible. You have no idea how much fucking was going on among the elite in those days. If you conquered another kingdom, the first thing you and your generals did was fuck the king’s wife, his sisters, his daughters and his sisters’ daughters (and sons) while your soldiers fucked the maids and the farm girls. Darius married anyone he found it fit to fuck. That is why he had 365 wives, one for each day of the year.

So, for Mitsy to have mixed Persian and Greek ancestry is entirely possible.

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When he was just 12, Mitsy’s mommy, Queen Laodice VI killed his dad, Mithridates V, by serving him wine with datura mixed in it. Datura is a deadly flowering plant that is otherwise known as ‘devil’s trumpet’.

The king dead, Laodice seized power as regent, since Mitsy and his younger bro, Chrestus, were still minors. Don’t be unduly alarmed. Treacherous queens were more common among the elite than cholesterol. If you don’t believe me, read my post The Power Moms of Ancient Rome .

Unfortunately for Mitsy, Laodice favored Chrestus over him. Love for the youngest child is a sentiment that most parents have even today. Take me, I was the darling of my mom, being the youngest. I could do no wrong and I was one huge pain in the ass. But of course, my mother never plotted to poison my two elder bros, though sometimes after they’d beaten me up for being a pest, I wished she had.

Mitsy realized that his mother’s preference for his younger bro could not be a good thing. Being the oldest son, he was the heir apparent, but mommy wanted Chrestus to be king, so she decided that Mitsy had to be done away with. Aren’t you glad to be born in the modern age? Imagine growing up wondering if your bro was going to run an axe through the backa yore head in your sleep or if your mummy was going to mix belladona in your birthday cake?

Turns out, Mitsy’s fears were justified. Laodice had indeed been plotting to poison him and word about her machinations somehow got to him. But before his mom could carry out her plan, he escaped into the wilderness, built a wooden shack and began living off the land.

After three years of living in exile, word got to Mitsy that his mum was beginning to cozy up with the Roman General, Pompey’s forces. Remember Pompey? One of the famed triumvirate with Julius Caesar and Crassus? That Pompey. Rome was moving forces close to Pontus with the goal of permanently crushing its opposition to Roman rule.

Fortune favors the brave. Resentment at the sellout to the Romans was growing against Laodice and Mitsy chose the day and threw the dice. He returned and the first thing he did was to have his mom and younger bro executed and claim the throne.

The second thing that Mitsy did upon becoming King was to marry his 16-year old sister, also named Laodice, probably Laodice VII. Marrying sisters was common among kings those days, done to preserve the bloodline and ensure that there wouldn’t be any succession issues anytime, since there wouldn’t be any in-laws. In a weird way, it was taken as being quite normal because the match was made at birth.

This can be another ‘imagine that’ moment but marrying one’s sister is so out of the pale nowadays that I think I’ll just sigh and leave it that.

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What Mitsy’s mom did was well understood among the elite of the ancient dog-eat-dog world. She had very little choice. She could either be ambitious and ruthless and live a short but spectacular life or she could be passive and be relegated to her chambers to live out a boring ceremonial life and/or be invaded, raped and enslaved and lead a short and torturous life. Either way, life was short in those days. You could consider yourself fortunate if you reached forty unscathed. It is difficult for us in the 21st century to imagine just how much aggression and treachery, subjugation and misery was around in those days.

Obviously Misty’s mom chose short but spectacular. And so did Mitsy. Almost immediately after gaining the throne, he set about expanding his empire. Around him was a vast region of tiny states barely managing to survive against the threat of invasion from Rome as well as those vicious horsemen from the plains. At any given point in time, someone was planning to invade you. The land surrounding Pontus encompassed Anatolia and Asia Minor (today’s Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia).

The kingdom of Pontus, superimposed on a region of present-day Turkey on the southern shore of the Black Sea.

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Mitsy began a long series of battles with the neighboring states of Bythnia, Cappadocia, Armenia and Colchis, some of which, like Bythnia, wanted to align themselves with Rome. And he won them all.

Alarmed at Mitry’s empire-building ambitions, Rome declared war on Pontus, throwing into battle three of it’s greatest generals – Sulla, Lucullus and Marius and sparking off the two and half decade long Mithridatic Wars (88-63BC).

Initially Mitsy was on a roll, winning battle after battle against the Roman legions. In the neighboring Roman protectorate of Anatolia, he set about ethnically cleansing the whole population, of all Roman inhabitants, men, women and children, as retribution for Rome’s aggression. The bloodbath lasted a week and in total, 80,000 innocents died at his hands, as per the historian, Clesus. Mitsy was lucky there were no such things as international war crimes tribunals in those days.

Mitsy was, like many rulers of his genre, a creature of the times. He thought nothing of slaughtering civilians, took countless slaves and was particularly brutal toward his enemies. Like the future Christian hordes during the Crusades, Mitsy too a typical take-no-prisoners kind of guy. On the other hand, he was hailed by Greeks and Persians and the other small states that felt threatened by Rome, as a savior from Roman occupation.

Mitsy likened himself to his illustrious ancestor, Alexander the Great. He had the same ethos as the great Macedonian. While he enslaved when he felt like it, he also freed folk that had been slaves under the Romans and often freed prisoners of war who swore allegiance. He shared his wealth with his troops, cancelled debts, expanded citizens’ rights and tried to bring in the kind of justice system that Alexander had established.

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Eventually however, the Romans got to Mitsy. Betrayed by his own son, Pharnesces II, facing certain defeat at the hands of the legendary Pompey’s forces, he took his own life. (Rome had pledged to Pharnesces the keys to Pontus if he turned it into a satrapy, a promise that was not kept in the end.)

Mitsy’s first suicide attempt – by poisoning – failed. Through the course of his extensive research on poisons (details in Part-2), he had been consuming all sorts of toxic stuff as a self-appointed test subject and had gradually developed a solid immunity.

Writhing in pain, his immune body refusing to shut down, Mitsy ordered his personal bodyguard to run him through with his pearl-handled stiletto.

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Mithridates VI was a great rebel and fighter but he is remembered the most for the body of research that he carried out throughout his reign on the art of killing by poison as well as finding antidotes to prevent death from poisons.

The 15th century Swiss-German chemist, Paracelsus, is widely believed to be the father of toxicology, but it is actually Mithridates’ scientific experiments with plant, animal, and mineral poisons (and their antidotes) that became a sort of gold standard in the science of toxicology for more than 2000 years.

You won’t believe this but an all-in-one antidote called Mithridatium that Mitsy had perfected around 66BC, is still available at some naturopathy and apothecary outlets in Rome.

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ps : There’s a Part-2 coming up. It’s all about MitridatesVI’s poisonous life. So if you want a Phd in toxicology, hang on, watch this space.

“I strode up to the stake and examined the dead man, impaled and naked, stripped of dignity. The stake had entered his anus and protruded through his gaping mouth, his face a death mask, frozen in a look of horror. It filled me with a warmth even the best wine cannot bring…”

– Vlad III(1428-1477) – ruler of Wallachia (present day Romania)

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“The Deluge” – A depiction of all those who didn’t have a reservation on Noah’s Ark

-Gustave Doré (1866)

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According to the Book of Genesis, God awoke one day and said he’d had enough. Humankind’s misdeeds had grown out of control and something drastic had to be done. Like a reset.

So God decided to return the Earth to it’s pre-Creation watery chaos by flooding it. No one knows why God chose Noah but I have my own theory about it. God must have asked a passing cherub, “Hey, Shorty, so who is the go-to guy down there who can help reset the world, d’you know?”

The cherub was in a hurry. He had an appointment at the mechanic’s. The ball joints inside his wings were not articulating well. Impatiently he replied,”No”.

“That’s right, Noah!!” God cried. Trust me, that’s real history. I doubt if Noah ever realized how lucky he was, with a name like that. If it had been say, Dick, he’d be toast.

The above might look like I am being inappropriate, making fun of a religion. That’s exactly right. I am making fun of Christianity, just as I make fun of all other religions, especially my own, Hinduism. Ridiculous beliefs need to be laughed at. If you don’t like it, you can go f__, carry out intercourse with your own self.

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Convinced that a reset was the only way, God ordered Noah to build a huge wooden vessel that the Bible calls the “ark”. The word has grown into something Christians associate with holiness and piety. As ludicrous as Noah’s Ark is the “Ark of the Covenant” which is supposed to house the original tablets God gave Moses with the Ten Commandments scribed on them, eight of which admonish us not to commit sins that are not even considered crimes anymore by almost all democratic nations of the world.

God waited till Noah had finished building the ark and had loaded a pair of every living being for resettlement in a future virtuous utopia. Then he boomed, “Watch this, Noahkins!” and he flooded the earth, killing every living being that had not been chosen. Even an earthworm, who had never possessed the capacity to discern between right and wrong and therefore could not have committed any misdeed, drowned.

That’s right, all animals that weren’t on the ark that day, drowned or had their heads smashed against the rocks by the waves and then drowned. FOR NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN.

What can one call such an extinction-level annihilation? Whatever God’s act is called is entirely irrelevant. What is relevant is that three thousand years after the ‘reset’, absolutely nothing has changed. Look at the world today. Where is that virtuous utopia?

But hang on. There are among us 4.2 billion suckers – the Abrahamics (Christians, Jews and Muslims) – who believe that it was a good thing God did what he did. Me, I think God had ample opportunity to do things more humanely with love, but instead, he chose annihilation. To this day God has gotten away with it and as long as we have right wing evangelical kooks, mullahs and gurus, it’ll stay that way.

Pray to this God? I wouldn’t, even if you held a fucking gun to my head. I think God is a psychopath and given his craving of adulation, a narcissistic psychopath.

Of all the religious crap I have ever read, the story of Noah is the crappiest.

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At the time of the deluge, Noah is said to have been 500 years old. God must have prescribed Noah some special kinda viagra, because no sooner had the flood waters receded, Noah and his wife began fucking each other silly. They had to repopulate the world with virtuous humans, remember? “Dear, come back to bed. God said fuck. Hurry.” (In Aramaic of course).

Alas, the post-deluge world turned out to be even more blood thirsty. The Book of Samuel details what God commanded King Saul of Israel to do to the Amalekites, a nomadic tribe that had settled in the Negev desert, who minded their own business and had their own religious beliefs. When the Amalekites spotted hordes of Israelis crossing the desert (which they considered their territory), they understood it to be an invasion and attacked.

The Amalekites hadn’t known that the Israelis were God’s favorites – his “chosen people”, on their way to “the promised land”. Long story short, God was pissed that his chosen people had been attacked by a bunch of heathens who didn’t even pray to him. According to the Book of Samuel, he roared at Saul, “Destroy all that they have. Do not spare them. Kill both, man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

Saul did carry out God’s command but only partially. He killed all the humans and only the sickly animals. He believed that killing perfectly healthy animals that could help with farming and provide much needed nourishment, was itself a sin and he decided to rear them instead. To beg God’s pardon and satiate his blood lust, Saul offered God a sacrifice or two.

But Saul didn’t know the extent of God’s blood thirst. When God said kill everything, he meant kill everything. Saul’s sacrifices didn’t work. God was apoplectic.

There are many theories on how Saul died (like him committing suicide by falling on his sword, etc) but let me choose the one that is the sexiest…..

On hearing that Saul had disobeyed him, God ordered the then reigning prophet, Samuel, to expel him. Cast out in the wilderness, he was never heard from again. Thus the founder of the State of Israel and its first monarch, King Saul, passed into history, a friendless and ragged man. All because he hadn’t slaughtered innocent animals.

All three holy books of the Abrahamic faiths, the Holy Bible, the Holy Quran and the Holy Tora record in gory detail all the times that God has encouraged, exhorted, commanded and rewarded actions of extreme violence.

The Hindu scriptures are not far behind in violence either. Remember the purple God, Krishna, with the deceptively beatific smile and the circular saw with jagged teeth that he balances on his index finger. It flies off on its own and slices off the heads of his enemies and whirls back to his finger. (The fact that the saw hasn’t sliced off Krishna’s finger by accident might indicate it has some sort of advanced docking radar.)

That PTSD took five millennia to be recognized as a problem, is astonishing. Since the Gods are the ones responsible for most of it.

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Participating in gut-wrenching brutality on a day-to-day basis had been commonplace (maybe even the norm), from the first settlement at Jericho right up to the Renaissance. Victorious invaders were expected to rape, enslave, pillage and burn. Absolute ruthlessness was the only way for monarchs to maintain order. Good governance was another word for ruling by terror. Physical and mental trauma must have been part and parcel of daily life.

The great Mongol chieftain, Genghiz Khan, at the gates of the besieged Jin Dynasty city of Xi Xia in 1209, had this to say to his troops….“Nothing should make you happier than to chop off the head of your enemy, burn his temples, snatch away his gold and enjoy his wives and his daughters and savor his despair.”

Genghiz Khan didn’t pause to consider if winning the hearts and minds of the conquered people instead wouldn’t have been a better idea. It might not have even occurred to him.

But then maybe, the common folk in conquered lands in those times hadn’t really known what being governed by a benevolent ruler was. They might have taken Genghiz Khan to be weak if he had shown them any mercy or empathy. Those were brutal times, when mothers had to give up their 6-year old sons to be trained as warriors.

Genghiz Khan’s armies, during the seige of Xi Xia (1209)

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The Khan practiced what he preached. He was not being unduly cruel as per the perceptions of the time. He was just following the norm through the ages. Annihilation – Genghiz Khan style was by then already a well-established war-craft, 4000 years after God’s “Project Reset”.

Take Babylon 680BC, when the city fell to the mighty Assyrian King Sennacherib. You wouldn’t want to be there. Sennacherib’s account of the plunder went thus….

“…I leveled the city and its houses from the foundations to the top, I destroyed them, and I consumed them with fire. I tore down and removed the outer and inner walls, the temples and ziggurats built of brick, and dumped the rubble in the Arahtu canal. And after I destroyed Babylon, smashed its gods and massacred its population, I tore up its soil and threw it into the Euphrates so that it was carried by the river down to the sea…”

(Sennacherib’s was a more labor-intensive method of destruction than the ‘Little Boy’ or the ‘Fat Man’, but the effect on the psych of those at the receiving end must have been about the same.)

So much mayhem but do the history books mention any PTSD among the hoi polloi of either Babylon or Xi Xia? Heck, for millennia empires and city-states were constantly rising and falling, plundered by rampaging marauders from the surrounding grasslands. Being treated brutally, having dear ones raped and ravaged right in front of their eyes, seeing blood and gore, these were almost a weekly occurrence in most ‘civilized’ regions of the ancient world.

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I’d imagine that in ancient times, around 95% of the world population must have lived constantly under the threat of serious physical and mental trauma. And yet, we have not turned out severely flawed, have we? In fact, the world on the whole appears to have shaped up quite well over the centuries and we – the descendants of aggressors and victims alike, seem to have not only shaken off the trauma but progressed by leaps and bounds. Today, we go about our lives in a state of peace and prosperity, governed by laws – an existence that Sennacherib or Genghiz Khan could never have imagined possible.

 

The Roman Emperor, Nero, standing over his mother, Agrippina the Younger’s corpse. The painter intended to show Nero grief-stricken, even though in First Century AD Rome, the grapevine had it that, Nero was fed up with her domineering, meddling ways and had had her assassinated by a hired Libyan assassin.

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(If you have the feeling you have seen the above pic somewhere before, I poached it from an earlier post titled,”The impressionists and their genitalia envy“. Do read it. It’s all about how impressionists liked to paint bare tits and tiny dicks.)

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Before I tell you about all the power moms of ancient Rome, let’s take a closer look at the emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that the power moms assassinated….

Augustus : 27 BC – AD 14 (First emperor of Rome / Julius Caesar’s stepson) :

Most likely poisoned by wife, Livia, so her son from an earlier marriage, Tiberius, could be emperor and she could sorta run things for him. Livia Drvsilla was one of the most Machiavellian women of her time, destroying her enemies while managing to retain friendly relations with those of the elite that mattered and that included the Praetorian Guard.

Oh yeah, if you wanted go up the pecking order in Ancient Rome, you had to have the Praetorian Guard (aka the Emperor’s personal security) in your corner. They were the king makers, no question about it. And if one of them wanted to be emperor himself (which happened often), you simply stood back and let him, unless you wanted to slog in an arsenic-laced gold mine for the next two decades as a day labourer.

Perhaps it was because all the patronage she bestowed that Livia was the only Roman power mom who got away with murder and died a natural death.

Let’s back up a bit. Augustus, in spite of having fucked thousands of women as Emperor, couldn’t manage to have a son and thereby an heir. A male heir was a big deal those days. So Augie did the next best thing – he designated his two grandsons as his heirs.

This was millenia prior to the discovery of stuff like penicillin or antibiotics. It was a time when going down with even a sore throat and a cough could kill you. Pasteurization and refrigeration weren’t even concepts and you could easily end up consuming putrefied meat which could bring you down with salmonella and sure death.

Heck, you could die of a stomach ache in those days.

Augustus’s grandsons didn’t survive into the double digits. They most likely died of typhoid and he was left trying to figure out a way to secure his lineage. That was when Livia began badgering him to adopt Tiberius, her son from a previous marriage. Augustus couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Tiberius but Livia was persistent.

Alas, in ancient Rome signing adoption papers was akin to signing your own death warrant. Historians agree that, no sooner had the ink on the adoption papers dried, Livia fed Augustus poisoned figs and as soon as Augie began raising the daisies, she had Tiberius installed.

Tiberius turned out to be a corrupt cross-dresser and sexual deviant and would go on to be emperor around the time Jesus Christ was crucified.

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Tiberius   : AD 14 – AD 37 (Augustus’s stepson) :

Smothered to death with a sofa cushion by a Praetorian Guardsman while another impaled him with a cyanide-tipped spear up his ass. I am absolutely not kidding – it did go up his ass. The 1st Century AD historian, Pliny the Elder, wrote that Agrippina the Elder (granddaughter of Augustus, mother of Caligula) orchestrated the killing. She wanted her son to be Emperor so she could be the power behind the throne. She succeeded, choosing an apt method. Tiberius was known to sodomize light-skinned Tunisian boys, so the cyanide-tipped enema.

Caligula   : AD 37 – AD 41  (Augustus’s great grandson) : Turned out to be another asshole. Stabbed to death by his Praetorian Guards, because he was an asshole. During one of his drunken binges, he made his horse, Incitatus, a Consul. Consul in those days was a position that reported directly to the Emperor, a very big deal. Let me give you a parallel….

Imagine General Michael E. Kurilla, the guy who head’s America’s CENTCOM (United States Central Command), a military jurisdiction that covers the whole of the Middle East, including West Asia, up to Iran and Afghanistan and in the south, Egypt. Now imagine that these are conquered lands and General Kurilla has the power of life and death over the inhabitants of this vast region. He would then be exactly what a Consul in the Roman Empire used to be and Caligula made his horse a Consul. Wouldn’t you say Caligula was an asshole?

Caligula might still have gotten away with being a jerk but this time his Power Mom, Agrippina the Elder wasn’t around to save his ass. You see, she had already been incarcerated and beaten and starved to death by one of Tiberius’s henchmen, a horrible guy called Lucius Aelius Sejanus, as revenge for killing Tiberius. Let me introduce Sejanus to you…

If you have been paying attention, the term “Praetorian Guard” has popped up in the text above. The Praetorian Guard was an elite unit whose members initially served as personal bodyguards of Emperor Augustus. Over successive generations however, they gradually expanded and evolved into a powerful entity that owned vast tracts of real estate and farmland, ran businesses, poked their noses into Roman statecraft and foreign policy, assassinated emperors and chose and installed their successors. The Praetorian Guard was much like Saddam’s Republican Guard Corps or Iran’s Quds Force. These modern day parallels don’t target their masters though. They terrorize all others.

Roman emperors came to depend on their Praetorian Guards to keep them in power and at the same time, they feared their power. The Prefect of the Praetorian Guard in Tiberius’s reign was that guy, Sejanus and he wanted vengeance for the killing of his boss, Tiberius.

In the movie, “Gladiator” Tomas Arana was Quintus Laetus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, who in the end refuses to come to the aid of his emperor (Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus).

Claudius  : AD 41 – AD 54  (Mark Antony’s grandson) :

Perhaps the only just and reformist emperor of ancient Rome (aside from Marcus Aurelius two centuries later). Claudius was the 1st Century equivalent of 15th Century English monarch, King Richard-III. While Dicky was known to be a great king, he was a hunchback who suffered from a spinal condition known today as scoliosis. Naturally his appearance made him a singularly unattractive man. Claudius too looked like a fucking bozo. He had a perpetually running nose and an embarrassing stutter.

The historian, Tacitus wrote that the only thing that saved Claudius from assassination was his apparent harmlessness. After Caligula was killed by the Praetorian Guard, they came looking for him. Fearing a purge, afraid that he would be murdered next, Claudius hid behind the drapes in his bedroom, but the guardsmen found him. Claudius fell to his knees, begging for his life, but amazingly, instead of killing him they bowed and proclaimed him Emperor!

Claudius, begging for his life and the Praetorian Guard, bowing and swearing allegiance

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The Praetorian Guard expected Claudius to rule as a figurehead but he surprised everyone, turning out to be an astute leader and a great conqueror. Claudius was the Roman Emperor who annexed Britain and gave it it’s name – Britannia. Maybe being handicapped makes one try harder and leads your adversaries to underestimate you, to their detriment.

Being good however didn’t help Claudius in the long run. He was married  to a power hungry siren, Agrippina the Younger, a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, great granddaughter to Augustus, granddaughter to Tiberius, daughter of Agrippina the Elder.

Agrippina the Younger was one particular Roman power mom who always fascinated me. Large breasted and exceptionally beautiful, she rose to become one of the most powerful women in the Roman Empire ever.

I am not sure if Grippy had large breasts. I just like women in my blog posts to have large breasts and even if they didn’t actually have large breasts historically, my blog endows them with big jugs and if my post says she had large breasts, she had large breasts, period.

While still in her teens, Grippy plotted against her own brother, the Emperor Caligula and when discovered, managed to escape execution by seducing him into a ménage à trois with another sister. I like a free thinking flower girl. She married her uncle, Emperor Claudius and attempted to inveigle her way into a position of influence but Claudius was smart. He kept her at an arms length.

Maybe not too smart. Like her mom before her, Grippy the Younger too had plans for her son, an immoral 17-year old alcoholic prick whippersnapper called Nero. Not content to wait, one moonlit night when Claudius was settling down to dinner, Agrippina fed him a deadly herb called atropa belladonna (known today as ‘nightshade’).

Exit stage up, O great Claudius. Enter stage left : all round asshole – Nero.

Nero        : AD 54 – AD 68  (Claudius’s stepson) : Started off as Claudius’s great-nephew and then adopted as his stepson. Turned out to be a flaming asshole, run through with his own sword by his secretary on his orders. Why? Earlier that day, the senate had declared him ‘enemy of the state’ because he had turned out to be an asshole. And trust me, he really was an asshole. He fiddled while Rome burned to the ground on his orders.

This time, his power mom, Agrippina the Younger, wasn’t there to save his ass. She had already been murdered by him for interfering too much in his governing.

The sentence that the Senate passed required him to be beaten to death by the Praetorian Guard. Obviously Nero saw being run through as a quicker and less painful option.

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You saw any of the emperors die in bed of old age? Naah, assassinations were the norm in those days.

Like in the Mafia. Except for Joseph Bonanno and Carlo Gambino, almost all mafia capos were ‘whacked’ and for the same reason – succession. But of course, they weren’t killed by Machiavellian machinations of power moms, like their 1st century ancestors were.

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Oh yeah, poisons were a big deal in those days. There was no forensic science then, so you could poison someone and pass it off as a stomach ache and no one was the wiser. Members of the elite financed and maintained hidden laboratories, churning out ever more exotic poisons.

What separated the men from the boys was the ability to develop antidotes in case you were poisoned. You had to have the resources to pay highly qualified chemists to develop not only the poisons but also their antidotes, just in case. And you had to be rich enough to have a dungeon full of slaves to try your concoctions out on.

The chemists led lavish lives. As long as they produced potent poisons, they were rewarded handsomely, awarded vast estates and armies of Nubian slaves. But often those lavish lives were short ones. A chemist could be executed on just the suspicion of leaking secrets to adversaries or he could be killed out of spite for moonlighting for another nobleman. In the end, most chemists were put to death when their masters died.

One of the more well known chemists of the time was a broad named Locusta. She was the go-to girl for Rome’s power moms. A favorite of Nero’s, she was executed by his successor, Servius Galba, the moment Nero was assassinated. Galba himself was beaten to death by the Praetorian Guard a year later.

Aren’t you glad you weren’t living in ancient Rome? Phew! Who says the world is a more violent place now, eh?

Cows are cuddly, I’ll hand you that. Check out a cow at close quarters and her eyes will blow you away, so beautiful are they….large, with long eyelashes, those eyes are trusting, serene, all comprehending – as if she is saying to you, “I know you need my body for your daily nourishment, your survival. Don’t beat yourself up with guilt when you use me – I completely understand….”

One Sunday, last summer, a colleague and I had to be at work finishing a project that we had to present, Monday. Around 3 pm we were done, when Marie-André said she was going over to her parents’ at St. Bruno, a farming community on Montreal’s south shore. She suggested I come along and check out what a typical Quebec farm looks like from up close. Marie-André’s dad is a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel who rears cattle and sheep.

I couldn’t resist the invitation.

The farm has around a hundred head of cattle and fifty odd sheep and these animals are having a ball. Judging by its neatness, one get’s the impression that the farm really knows how to look after the animals. They are healthy and they are organic. They are raised exclusively for meat.

Marie-André’s dad went to great lengths explaining that the animals are killed very humanely, without cruelty. “I could have fifty pounds of sirloin, chuck and ribs ready for you to pick up this fall. Pick your animal and I’ll call you when it is all shrink-wrapped and ready,” he said.

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Most folks feel very strongly about animal suffering and yet we all seem to get along fine with the idea that we can kill and eat them. Looking at the cows, lazily grazing across a lush green meadow, I wondered how both those feelings could be held within one’s conscience at the same time. And when I wonder, I Google and therefore this piece.

Sometimes seeking an answer to certain questions have a habit of broadening the issue until it becomes an unmanageable web of little but important angles.

Australian moral philosopher, Peter Singer, currently a professor of ‘bioethics’ in Princeton University, is also author of Animal liberation. I picked up a copy last summer but left it after fifty pages since it isn’t exactly my kind of reading. But his arguments are convincing.

The central message of the book is that even though there are far more differences between a chimpanzee and an earthworm, than there are between a chimp and a human, we humans still lump the ape and the worm together as ‘animals’ while we see ourselves as privileged – above all other species. Therefore while we find it not okay to kill a human, it is fine to kill another species of animal.

Singer argues that we should treat killing animals as an ethical issue because there is no ‘red line’ between humans and non-humans. He explains this by going into an analogy, substituting the word ‘species’ with the word ‘race’ – so when a white man looks at another white man and says ‘he is like me, so I’ll treat only him and folks like him as I treat my own’, it should be acceptable and appropriate, but it isn’t – it is racism.

Again, suppose we consider a really intelligent orangutan, like say, Clyde, in the 1978 Clint Eastwood movie “Every which way but loose”. Clyde is a trained pet who acts like he is almost human. Orangutans are known to be highly intelligent and display human-like social behavior patterns.

Now if you compare Clyde with say, a child suffering from acute Down Syndrome or a cognitively impaired woman stricken by Alzheimers, it is quite possible that the orangutan would trump the human in all those qualities that we pride in ourselves as setting us apart from animals. And yet we would treat that child or that woman with far more deference than we would treat Clyde.

So, do we have to lose any sleep over killing a cow to eat it’s meat? One argument is – no, humans have evolved with mouths, teeth and digestive systems that are specifically designed to eat meat and therefore we should not worry about the morality of it. But some behavioral scientists take exception to this sweeping statement on how we were designed to eat other animals. Since men have evolved to be stronger, should it then be natural for them to dominate over women?

Spreading the net wider, if one went by the ‘evolved to dominate’ assumption, then slavery was a natural instinct, wasn’t it? Of course it was. White folks were better in every way – they were stronger than the impoverished negro villagers of Africa, had better technology, better weaponry, were healthier and better educated. So, the argument that those white folks in America simply evolved to lord it over the Negros would seem quite reasonable, if one went by the evolved-to-dominate theory. But slavery is universally condemned, as it should be.

It is also not true that we need to eat meat, for our sustenance. Any nutritionist will confirm that meat consumption is not absolutely essential. Take India for instance – almost 35% of all Indians, that is around 400 million people, are vegetarians.

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Now about the morality in killing other animals – how does one justify the killing of animals, on moral grounds?

Peter Singer suggests we consider a hypothesis. He says that, for argument’s sake, let us assume that all sheep and cows are reared on farms like Marie-André’s dad’s, where animals are treated humanely, right up until the time they are slaughtered – painlessly – for food. Let us further assume that up until the last instant, the cow or lamb is unaware that it is going to be killed and is therefore it’s usual happy, normal, cud-chewing self.

So we have put aside the question of cruelty toward those animals and their suffering. In those perfect conditions, is there anything wrong with killing an animal for it’s meat? I don’t really know but the trip to Marie-André’s dad’s farm did throw up interesting arguments…….

When we had come upon him, the old man had been walking a bullock toward the tailgate of a pickup truck that had a tall rectangular wooden enclosure in the back. He had opened the gate of the pen and solemnly herded the animal forward, seeming sombre and deferential toward it. “I’ve done this a million times but it is still saddening,” he said.

“Why so? Guilt – that he has to die?” I asked.

“I guess you could call it that.”

“But wasn’t he just like one of those other faceless animals in your farm?”

He turned sharply, almost as if I had offended him by calling the beast faceless. “I know each one by name. This one is Gucci. She came to us one stormy night in 2011. She has this habit of coming up silently behind and giving you a gentle nudge and then brushing past, as if to say,’ It’s been a while and I’m famished. How about some chow, big guy?’

Chuckling to himself, the old man guided Gucci up a slanting ramp onto the back of the pickup. He stooped to carefully arrange a bed of hay and some fodder and emerged, closing the tailgate firmly behind him. “When you live among them, feed them, look after them, it dawns on you that they all have distinct personalities,” his voice was gravelly, filled with emotion.

Then he said something that sounded strange but which I later realized could be absolutely true – “If humans didn’t rear cows and lambs for meat, milk, leather, etc, these animals might not have existed at all. Given how fragile, harmless and vulnerable they are, they would probably have been rendered extinct by carnivorous predators long ago.”

I was amazed at the idea. “So, maybe, we have done them a favor and they should thank us for letting them live and exist this long at least – is that what you are saying?” My tone must have sounded incredulous.

“Why, of course. At least they have had some existence – comfortable, disease-free lives inside a farm where food is abundant and a vet comes and checks them every now and then. Isn’t it better than not having existed at all? As long as they have no inkling that they’ll be killed and so long as they are killed painlessly, I don’t see why killing them is morally wrong.” he replied.

“So, a lamb is better off living for a year and then being killed for it’s meat, than not having lived at all. Should he thank us for the opportunity?” My incredulity grew and I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.

‘Absolutely,” he replied. “A morally good action is one that maximizes happiness (which we do by looking after the animals’ needs while they are alive) and which minimizes pain (which we ensure, by killing them painlessly).”

By this time, I was willing to take up their invitation to stay for supper, so interesting a man was Marie-André’s father.

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I did stay for supper and the steak was succulent. It had been breathing just that morning. I felt a tinge of guilt eating it. Aren’t animals’ rights – the right to live and not be killed – the same as humans’ rights? Moral philosophers like Peter Singer believe that they are.

Marie-André’s father admits that each cow and lamb behaves differently, as individuals. To someone like me, visiting the farm, they might all look and behave alike but to someone who interacts with them on a daily basis, they are individually identifiable, with distinct personalities. He senses that they have the sentience – the capacity to feel. They respond when called by name and they act in a manner that clearly indicates that they have memories. At times they clearly are happy and playful, says he.

Therefore, judging by the old man’s own admission, what happens to his cows and lambs in the future matters to them and, given a choice, they would like to live as long as they possibly can.

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Jeff McMahan, another moral philosopher who teaches at Oxford, has found a way to draw a line between those animals that should not be killed and those that can be killed without suffering moral injury. He says that there are living beings that are – unlike cows and lambs – unaware of their past, present or future. They do not have a narrative. Like worms, for instance. I have never heard of any moral dilemma attached to the killing of a worm.

McMahan recommends that before we kill an animal, we need to ask ourselves ‘ how psychologically connected is it, to it’s future self?’ The more connected it is, the more morally unacceptable it is – to deprive the animal of that future.

My religion, Hinduism, has never encouraged any debate on animal slaughter, at least not one that I have read about. Hinduism bans killing cows not because it considers killing another living being immoral but simply because Hindu scriptures say cows are sacred, period.

The hypocrisy shows when one considers the fact that, while Hinduism reveres cows and bans cow slaughter, it is totally indifferent about buffalo slaughter, even if buffalos are from the same taxonomic classification as cows. But we know why that is. It’s simple – cows are white and buffaloes are black. Indian society equates white with good/revered and black with bad/inferior.

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A male colleague at work is an avid hunter who believes that hunting must be as humane as possible. Before he skins and cleans his kill, Francois lays his open palm gently on the rump of the whitetail and says,” I apologize for this but it had to be done for my sustenance and that of my family. I promise I won’t waste any of your flesh….” He makes himself believe that without the kill, he and his family would die of starvation.

Francois always takes careful aim so he won’t just wound the whitetail and let it skimp away only to drop from exhaustion and lie dying a mile away, writhing in pain in the thick brush or somehow survive and live out the rest of it’s life a cripple, unable to outrun and therefore be set upon and torn apart by a coyote or wolf pack.

Francois doesn’t pull the trigger until he is certain he’ll drop the animal in it’s tracks. With his bolt-action Ruger, he waits until he has the animal within 15-20 feet, facing broadside. Once he has the animal positioned perfectly, he shoots through the near-side shoulder. The high-powered 129-grain projectile snaps the spinal cord and takes out the upper lung area (and maybe even the forelegs) and exits through the opposite shoulder. It’s hard for even the toughest buck to remain standing after a hit like that. The animal remains transfixed for a few moments – in ‘hydrostatic shock’ – and then collapses in a heap, literally not knowing what hit him.

Francois is the most ‘ethical’ hunter I know. The whitetail might differ though.

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After supper, as Marie-André’s dad lead me out to my car, I decided to place an order for one of Gucci’s rumps.

“But Grandpa, where’s God?”

– Boy who ventured into the main hall of the US Supreme Court and stared at the friezes of famous law makers from ancient times

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A section of the carved friezes in the great hall of the US Supreme Court, depicting legendary law makers. The friezes are meant to represent justice, liberty and peace. There’s Moses, second from right, clutching those laughably useless Ten Commandments. 

Occupying nearly the highest point of the luminous, gold-edged hall, above the 30-foot Ionic columns, the friezes inspire awe. When Sherman Minton, a Supreme Court justice from 1949 to 1956, pointed out each historic figure to his grandson, the 10-year-old listened in silence and then asked in puzzlement, “But Grandpa, where’s God?”

Indeed. Looking at today’s America, the question does reverberate….Where is God?

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The US Supreme Court building is an imposing sight, ringed by pillars, it’s walls covered with carvings and quotes and bas reliefs. There’s sheer white marble as far as the eyes can see and great big Ionic pillars that rival the Acropolis. The ceilings are high and the marble staircase – it appears to lead directly up to the heavens.

It is not really a court by the definition of the word. Rather, the US Supreme Court is a hyper-partisan institution whose members are not really concerned with delivering justice as mandated by the American constitution. They are nominated and installed solely to pander to partisan political interests, by whoever happens to be in power with a majority in the Senate. There is this continuous tug-of-war between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, when the conflict should be about proving crime and upholding innocence.

Over the past century, the US Supreme Court has delivered such travesties of justice and held up such emblems of hate and bigotry, that to outsiders like me the US Supreme Court seems more like a sick joke rather than a symbol of the rule of law. And yet, even storied liberal political commentators like Fareed Zakaria have refused to criticize it, insisting on calling it “the last bastion of the free world that is above the political frey.” Flowery words. But then, America and its millionaire media personalities have always believed in perceptions, rather than the reality.

If you spoke with an Indian or a Chinese or even a Brit and asked if they knew the names of even one of their Supreme Court justices, you’d draw a blank. An Indian judge performs his task without fanfare and is rarely quoted or mentioned, other than when major cases are being argued in front of them. Even then, I doubt if any member of the Indian or Chinese public would pay much attention to who the judge actually was.

Not the Americans. Americans might not be able to name all 50 states in the US or which countries are their neighbors, but they sure know their Supreme Court judges. To them, the Supreme Court must be perceived to be this great big haloed institution. A hush must fall over everyone when the US Supreme Court is mentioned.

Just imagine, documented evidence and reams of witness testimony make it clear that at least two of the nine US Supreme court justices have been sexual predators and they continue to sit on the bench, despite the evidence. I am referring to Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. Two more are actually owned by billionaires.

Hey, ten out the first twelve US presidents were slave holders. Nearly every speaker of the US House of Representatives was a slave holder. 18 of the first thirty-one US Supreme Court justices were slave holders.

Which direction do you think the US constitution would go, from the very beginning that this cesspool formed? What can Americans really expect from this court? Justice?

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And then, there are those grandiose wall friezes. The nine sitting justices (who enjoy cushy lifetime appointments) are not the only presiding presence. High above the mahogany bench, are friezes with the figures of 18 historical lawmakers from different races and ethnicity, dating to as far back as 5800BC (give or take).

The South Wall Frieze depicts personalities from the ancient pre-Christian world. It includes Menes, Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus, Solon, Draco, Confucius, and Octavian.

The North Wall Frieze shows lawgivers from the Middle Ages on and includes representations of Justinian, Muhammad, Charlemagne, John of England, Louis IX of France, Hugo Grotius, Sir William Blackstone, John Marshall, and Napoleon.

The courtroom of the US Supreme Court, the three friezes of those 18 lawmakers, high up on the walls. 

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The friezes are meant not only to honor the above mentioned historical figures but also to depict diverse legal tradition and heritage from around the world that have directly or indirectly shaped the concept of what Americans perceive to be law and justice in America. For Americans, those 18 dudes on the friezes are the gold standard of justice, law and order.

Now let’s take a closer look at some of these 18 dudes and judge for ourselves whether they really are the great judicial geniuses that America idolizes…..

Menes (c. 3100 B.C.)

The first Pharaoh of Egypt’s first dynasty, Menes single-handedly created the world’s the first nation-state. Centralized government, through a coherent set of laws, was born. Menes did many great things but, like all great men, Menes had his quirks. At his Temple of Ptah in Memphis, Menes liked to offer human sacrifices to the Gods “whenever the Gods demanded it”. And that was on a pretty regular basis. Like once, maybe twice, a day. And don’t hold your breath over who made the shortlist of the sacrificial suckers – slaves, of course. Egyptian gods were particularly slave thirsty.

What if one of Menes’ slaves came alive and traveled through time to the US Supreme Court, to be confronted by the frieze of Menes up there on the wall? Would he be pleased?

Hammurabi (c. 1792-1750 B.C.)

Reigning in Babylon, Hammurabi produced the first surviving set of laws. A compilation of legal procedure and penalties, the ‘Code of Hammurabi’ covered all civil and criminal disputes and reflected the belief that law can be fixed and certain, rather than a series of random responses by political leaders to various forms of conduct.

And boy oh boy, were they laws. Here is a sampling….

If a man has stolen goods from a temple or house, put him to death and he that received the stolen property, put him to death too.

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If a woman has loafed around, neglecting her house, not caring for her husband’s needs, drown that woman in the river

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If a man is in debt and is unable to pay his creditors, take away his properties, his wives, sons or daughters. Use them, deliver them up for “servitude”

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If a boy steals talents from his father’s money bag, his hands shall be “hewn”

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Imagine Hammurabi as one of the nine American Supreme Court justices. Would this be a courtroom or would it be a body-parts wholesale business?

Moses (c. 1270 B.C.)

According to biblical accounts, the great Hebrew prophet delivered his people from slavery and received the Ten Commandments. His figure on the frieze is meant to suggest existence of a higher authority, beyond human control. There are just a few things that escape reason…..

It is virtually certain that, had Moses chosen to remain in his position as Prince of Egypt, he would have succeeded the great Pharaoh, Seti I, to the Egyptian throne, since the old man had already chosen him, over his own biological son, Ramases II. Had he hung in there and succeeded Seti-I, Moses could have, from his position of power, accomplished a great deal of good for his people – the Jews – a people who had by then developed the uncanny ability to get screwed into an art form. Moses, as Pharaoh, might have been able to elevate the Jews to the status of full citizens.

In any case, looking at Israel, a nation that is constantly under turmoil and the ever growing scourge of Antisemitism in the non-Jewish world today, one gets the feeling that Moses ultimately failed.

Now let’s look at the Ten Commandments. Aside from the fact that most of the commandments are no longer considered cognizable offenses in almost all courts of law in the modern free world, Moses can’t take credit for them, anyway – you see, Moses didn’t think them up. They were handed to him by God, remember?

So why is messenger boy up there in those friezes?

Solomon (c. 992-953 B.C.)

Regarded as a great king of Israel, Solomon’s name is synonymous with judicial wisdom. When two women came to him, both claiming to be the mother of the same child, Solomon determined who was the mother by watching the women’s responses to his suggestion that he cut the baby in half and give each a share. One woman agreed to the proposal while the other yielded her claim, thereby proving through her concern, that she was the real mother.

Great, but here’s the thing – King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Any woman he took a fancy to, whether she was already married or not, had to be his. Some of them later turned him toward idol worship and orgiastic drinking parties. Being predisposed to debauchery, Solomon wholehearted took part in bacchanalian galas.

King Solomon’s descent into sin has been recorded in the Bible. What is Soly doing up there in the US Supreme Court? No, wait, its the perfect spot for a philanderer like him!!

Lycurgus (c. 800 B.C.)

A leading statesman of Sparta in ancient Greece, Lycurgus guided reform of the Spartan constitution and instituted more efficient public administration. All his reforms were directed towards the three Spartan virtues: equality among citizens. Note the word ‘citizens’. Since slaves weren’t considered citizens, they didn’t figure in the equality gravy train. The other two values were austerity and military fitness.

According to legend, Lycurgus believed that the most serious crime of all was retreat in a conflict. He had never bloodied his own hands in battle, I hasten to add. Even so, at first glance Lycurgus seems like the only one who deserves a place at the US Supreme Court frieze.

There is just one tiny little problem – Historians are still debating whether he really existed or was just part of a mythological legend, like Achilles and Hector and Thetis and Zeus, yada, yada, yada.

Solon (c. 638-559 B.C.)

The Athenian, whose name survives as a synonym for “legislator,” codified the laws of the Greeks and is credited with laying the foundation for the world’s first ‘democracy’.

Wait till you hear what the word ‘democracy’ meant to the Greeks. Solon ended exclusive autocratic control of the government, substituting it for an elitist version of democracy in which a cabal of wealthy citizens governed, somewhat akin to the Senate of ancient Rome, prior to the Julio-Claudian era.

Great, haven’t I heard something like this being called an oligarchy? So, where is the real justice for the common folk here?

Draco (late 600s B.C.)

Another prominent legislator in Athens, Draco was the first to write an Athenian code of laws. The problem is that Draco knew of only one punishment for all crimes, even the most trivial – death. You swiped your neighbor’s strawberries and the next thing you knew, you were sleeping with the fishes. It is not for nothing that today the term for harsh and cruel laws is ‘Draconian’.

Draco sure does merit a permanent spot at any US court. He’d have loved to administer justice in the US. Cops randomly shooting unarmed folk would have warmed the cockles of his heart. If Draco could make it to the Supreme Court chamber walls, so could they.

Octavian (63 B.C.-14 A.D.)

The first dictator of Rome, Augustus Caesar single-handedly put an end to collective decision-making in the Roman Senate, killing what little democratic process there was.  A singularly dour individual, he was a vainglorious man. Forever ready to go to war (like the Americans today), he chose ‘Imperator’ (victorious commander) as his first name – Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus. As in the case of Solon, the laws that we lionize Octavian for, were meant to make life for the wealthy and well-connected easy. The slaves, who constituted as much as 30% of the population inside the Roman Empire did not figure in this Octavian dude’s jurisprudence. Neither did the free commoners.

Muhammad (570-632)

He was a loner, a man who liked to be by himself. I am such a man myself. Like him, I too like to find myself in a secluded hilltop, gazing down at my surroundings or staring up at the night sky. In fact, we do have a grassy knoll behind our backyard, where I like to spend late summer evenings sometimes. I am just plain unlucky that the Angel Gabriel hasn’t appeared before me. Maybe he knows that I’ll tell him to go fuck himself.

But if Angel Gabriel does appear before me, surely I cannot take credit for what he asks me to note down and convey to my fellow humans? After all, am I not pretty much like a secretary who takes shorthand?

Just like Moses, Mohammad too was only the accidental messenger. He was not the lawmaker, God was. And pretty much like Moses, he left his community in a much worse shape than when he founded it.

King John (1166-1216)

The last time I heard the words “Magna Carta” was when Barack Obama eulogized the Brits in his speech at Westminster Hall sometime around 2011. For 800 years, Magna Carta has been something most Brits are proud of and it is still the most popular term used in eulogies and speeches by foreign dignitaries wanting to suck Brit cock.

Ruler of England from 1199 to 1216, King John’s claim to fame was the Magna Carta, a document which was supposed to have elevated the importance of individual rights and the concept of due process – the idea that laws must be administered in the same way for all.

The only problem is that King John didn’t write the Magna Carta on his own. He had to be persuaded, with the threat of a coup-de-tat. Imagine a group of the richest and most powerful people in the country who are tired of paying high taxes, having their rights restricted by government – a cabal of robber barons who think the King is an asshole and detest him. Imagine that they get together and agree to use their wealth to force the government to behave the way they want it to behave.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s the way it has always been, and probably always will be. Wealth is power, even in governments supposedly of, by and for the people. The Magna Carta barons were analogous to wealthy campaign donors, corporations or Super PACs using their wealth to gain special privileges.

Consider this one clause in this ‘revered’ document so often cited as the foundation for the rule of law and ‘a jury of your peers’……

“… no freeman ought to be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, or privileges, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, or deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.”

Equal rights and the rule of law for all freemen. Cool, right? Except for another tiny fact. The word ‘freeman’ had a very narrow definition and meant the wealthy barons, no one else. All others – the serfs, the infantrymen, the farmers, the blacksmiths, the bakers and the road layers – worked for them or were outright owned by them as bonded labor. Equal rights, my ass.

In any case, King John was a greedy and cruel monarch who was hated by 99.999% of his subjects, nobles and serfs alike. With King John, nobody’s wife was safe. When your approval rating is 0.001%, should your likeness be on a frieze in the highest court of the world’s most haloed democracy?

Louis IX (1213-1270)

King of France from 1226 to 1270, Louis IX led the seventh and eighth crusades against the Muslims, in the process of which he came to hold, albeit temporarily, vast tracts of territory that belonged to the Muslims. He was known to exhort his troops on the battlefield not to take any prisoners. The King was even canonized as Saint Louis, for these acts of aggression, by the Catholic Church. By that yardstick, I would think that today the late head of ISIS, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, has a similar right to being accorded a place on that US Supreme Court frieze.

John Marshall (1755-1835)

In 1820, the U.S. Revenue Service cutter Dallas seized a slave ship that was carrying a ‘cargo’ of 281 African slaves, some of the claimed owners being Portuguese and Spanish. The U.S. Supreme Court heard five days of arguments before packed courtrooms. On the fifth day, the Chief Justice himself delivered the unanimous opinion, beginning by stating that he himself did not find any moral fault with slavery. He then went into some legal ‘spin’, declaring the slave trade a violation of natural law but not the law of nations, meaning that it may be wrong but is legal where protected by legislation.

Since the international slave trade was by then deemed illegal in the United States, slaves bound there were released, but since it was legal in Portugal and Spain, slaves of those owners were returned to bondage.

Guess who that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was – John Marshall, a slave-owner himself. Oh yeah, John Marshall should definitely be up there in the frieze, no?

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

Emperor of France, Napoleon is celebrated and demonized for his warfare. But his legacy in the law is an 1804 civil code that influenced laws in Europe, Latin America and, to a lesser degree, the United States. Louisiana’s unique civil code traces to the Napoleonic Code. Among its overriding principles were personal freedom, the ability to make contracts, equality among citizens and an end to church control of civilian institutions.

Too bad that those for whom his civil code was meant, didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of the legislation, thanks to his almost insatiable thirst for raw unprovoked military aggression. Thousands upon thousands of his soldiers trusted in him and he simply rode them off the cliff, waging foolhardy invasions of neighboring countries.

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I heard that the sculptor of the Supreme Court friezes got a crick in the neck and stopped, otherwise he had plans of fitting in Genghiz Khan, Lynndie England and Mohammad Bin Salman too, in the frieze

So, a recap… A cursory glance will tell you that 9 of the 18 gents up there on the friezes, were either slave-holders themselves, actively abetted slavery or at best found ‘nothing wrong’ in the owning of slaves.

In a way, I can understand the friezes in the US Supreme Court. They are in fact quite apt, for an institution that has constantly lied to it’s black, latino and aboriginal citizens over the past century, making them believe that it’s justice was accessible to them all, quoting those flowery words of the constitution to tell them that they counted, that they were free.

But I am not impressed by the sham presented by the cavernous room, the red carpets, the marble pillars and the grandiose friezes. They can all go fuck themselves.

It takes more to deliver true justice, than shitty wall carvings.

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In the above painting by Luca Ferrari [1605-1654], Roman Emperor Nero is standing with his arms outstretched over his dying mother, Agrippina the Younger.

Nero is like, “What the fuck happened here, I say? I was gone only a minute, for fuck’s sakes!” And then, knowing Nero’s proclivities….”Wow, get a load of mom’s jugs, will ya!”

It is more likely that the painter intended to show Nero appear grief-stricken, even though 1st century AD Roman grapevine suggested he actually had had her assassinated by a hired Libyan assassin, because she was on a power-behind-the-throne trip and had gone a bit too far undermining him.

Plutarch told me all this.

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Let’s look at Agrippina’s two jigglipoos with a critical eye – no sag, no overt heaviness, no hand grenade-sized nipples, non-existent aureoles. Pure and virtuous, not naughty and seductive. They’re just not enough of a palmful……

That painting is a disgrace.

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A 19th Century oil, ‘Liberty Leading the People’, (Delacroix 1830), depicting liberty in the form of a bare breasted woman leading the charge against the French King Charles X’s forces.

Certainly not the recommended outfit for hand to hand combat. But she won. The French monarch abdicated.

No wonder King Chuck lost. If I were there, facing off with this woman, would I give a fuck about fighting? Look at those boobies. Musta spilled out when a bayonet accidentally snipped a strap. Again, no sag, no obscene bulge, no plum nipples, armpits shaved, just runa-the-mill plain and guileless, not saucy.

They are the “Oops, sorry they just fell out” kind, not the “Come and get it, Tiger” kind. The men around her don’t seem aroused at all. They appear to be saying matter-of-factly,” Cover yoreself, Libby honey and let’s go kick some butt”.

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Faust, lying spent after a night of pleasure with multiple nymphs, with the Satan standing over him (Falero 1880).

No, Satan isn’t saying, “Now, Fausti-boy, remember the deal”. The Satan is actually apologetic, his head bowed in shame as Faust falls asleep in sheer boredom. And Satan is saying, “Sorry bud, they’re all I had. If you wanted real tits, didn’t you know all broads with big tits go ta heaven?”

Again, the breasts Falero has painted are helter skelter, disorganized and plain. Rogers and Hammerstein would have observed, “They are flibbertigibits, they are willow-the-wisps, they are lambs.”

Yawwwn. I’ve never been so bored writing a post. Tennis anyone?

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And don’t even get me started on paintings of Aphrodite, or Penthesilia, the queen of the Amazons or Venus or Helen of Troy. Tits, tits and more tits. All less than ordinary. Personally I like tits so large that they give me a crick in my jaws when I try to orally stimulate ’em.

Then there’s the male nudity thing in art, where the obsession is with penises……. shamefully little peanut richards. Muscular men with tiny dickies.

Michelangelo’s “David”. Just take a look at his tiddlytoo. So tiny. If you held up your pinkie in front of it, you’d block the view totally. Of course, it can be inspiring to a certain demographic – men who have tiny penises. Like “look, you can have wee little richards and still be able ta slay Goliaths.

Michelangelo’s famous fresco “The Creation of Adam”. If I had had a richard like Adam’s, I would be bullied outa boarding school.

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Classical painters insisted on painting tiny richards. Maybe they didn’t want dick-envy so they painted richards that were smaller than theirs’. I am willing to bet you never saw a renaissance painting that had a hunk with a 12-inch boner.

I recently visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and I really think they should name the joint “Montreal Museum of unimpressive tit and dick pics”.

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But honestly, what’s with all this nudity thing that early impressionists were so obsessed with? Please, I know all that crap about symbolism, aesthetics and the ethereal beauty of the human body. I get that their focus was not on eroticism but on natural beauty. The impressionists did not count on teenaged boys in the shower three centuries later, trying to make something more outa their paintings. I was one of them.

All I want to know is how a guy like Rembrandt could sit through all those sessions with those gorgeous nudes and not end up with an erection? I guess he just strapped his boner to his inner thigh and kept repeating,”aesthetics first…aesthetics first…aesthetics first…aesthetics first…aesthetics first…”

But why the mundane tits and tiny dicks?

If I had been a Duke in 17th Century Italy awarding an impressionist a commission, I would tell him, “So go ahead and paint tits and dicks all you like – even in unusual settings like the battlefield or the farmer’s market, I don’t care. But please paint ’em big is all I ask, with richards that can knock on a castle door and nipples that can crack your skull if you bump into them.”

I reached for AI. DeepSeek says it all started with the ancient Greeks. The raunchy Greek vase painter, Aristophanes, thought that the ideal male should have a little ‘psolí’. The Greeks equated small richards to rationality and control and large cocks to idiocy and impetuousness.

I don’t give a flying fuck about rationality and control. I wanted so much to be an impetuous idiot. Sigh….look what I got.

“The first thing that Almighty Lord did was plant a garden……” – Anonymous

A trip to the Montreal Jardin Botanique de Montréal leaves one kinda unfulfilled. When it’s time to leave after spending the day there, one is always left feeling like, ‘Hope I didn’t miss anything’.

There’s simply so much to see in this 75-acre picture postcard Garden of Eden.

Besides, how do you decide just how long you need to spend at each section – the rolling Chrysanthemum beds crowded with red-yellow, blue-purple and angel white Chrysanthemums so huge that if they were any bigger, they would have their own atmosphere, gravity and moons. Or the gushing brook that’s stuffed with colorful bass and overfed rainbow trout that brazenly waddle up and pout at you and let you caress them before they say ‘stop touching me’, wriggle free and scoot away.

Or the sunflower section? You thought there were only them inch sized sunflowers on God’s earth? Nope, the Jardin Botanique has those but they also have ones that are a foot in diameter, teeming with bees that look like salesmen exchanging stories of great deals at the sports bar I go to Friday nights.

Or the weeds section? Oh yeah, the much maligned weeds. Weeds are plants too, some even having their own pretty flowers. It’s only that they appear at places you don’t want them ta be in. Just because they are hardy, need no maintenance to survive and multiply like crazy, they are considered evil. Personally I love weeds because I love the underdog, like. The Jardin Botanique has a whole section here that teems with buttercups, goldenrods, thistles, catnips, jasmines, milkweed and of course, dandelions.

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Then there’s the book. I always have a book with me wherever I go. I can’t stand being somewhere by myself with nothing ta read. I’m fidgety, but that’s okay. All geniuses are fidgety people.

Today I am rereading “The girl with the dragon tattoo”. It’s not the ideal book for a trip to the botanical gardens but it’s so fucking interesting, I can’t put it down, so I brought it along. I am fascinated by Lizbeth Salander. She is unruly, unwashed, probably has bad breath but I am turned on by her. I  picture her savagely squeezing me with her vaginal muscles while I have torid sex with her. Wild, tightly coiled women drive me nuts.

How did this post turn to sex? It was supposed to be about flowers for Christ’s sakes. I was wanting ta write a post on my visit to the Botanical Gardens and here I am, with a stiffening richard the lion heart, thinking of fucking Lizbeth. (Maybe I really want to fuck Rooney Mara).

Wherever you go, you have to choose the book you want ta take with you very carefully. If you are in a doctor’s waiting room, take something comic, like a Richard Gordon, an Emma Bombeck or a Wodehouse. Nothing too racy like a Jackie Collins or else you might fail ta hear the nurse call out your name and even if you don’t, the doc might decide you have high BP. Don’t take Nevile Shute either or else you’ll be stuck being told you have hypotension. A long train journey or a trans-Atlantic flight is true crime / serial killer time. You need the hours ta fly. But if you’re on the bus or the subway, try not to read at all lest you miss your stop. Just watch the girls and day dream like I do.

The Jardin is strewn with reclining wooden armchairs and my ambition is to find the right spot where I can settle and read. As I make my way from one section to the next, I am constantly scoping it out for the armchair that is positioned just right for a long delicious read.

Alas, in the end I don’t actually get ta spend much time reading, because I have been spending the whole time looking for that perfect spot. And by the time I have found it, it’s nearing closing time. What a jerko di tutti jerki I am.

With a half hour ta go before the gates close, I end up at the Restaurant Organique. Soon as I enter, I feel the pure oxygen in there. I munch a vegan sandwich and an ice cold melon kombucha. All 100% organic. The food is excruciatingly healthy, something that my body simply isn’t used to. But I’m famished so I eat it anyway.

The girl at the counter is a picture of health. Plump, baby blue eyes, pink-cheeks, boisterously vivaciously bouncy. I tell her I want ta adopt her and she blushes and laughs, displaying pearly white teeth.

That’s one of the advantages of being an old man. You flirt audaciously and instead of being offended, they blush.