"Why just read old stuff? People have learned so much more since then.

…

"You really think that people are less honest now than in the past? Do you really think people have changed that much?

-Deale, Towson, MD, by night

…

I do not think people have changed at all. Rather, our living conditions have altered significantly. This is more pronounced with the written word. The Word, particularly when written, when carved, chiseled, baked in clay, applied to sheep skin or marsh fiber with an inked goose quill was for all of the past ages sacred. Things were rarely written down anywhere. When they were written, it was with authority [religion], with agreement [treaty], after generations of recitation [poetry], under witness and judgement, with judges at Elis overseeing and validating the dictating of a victor’s deeds and particulars to the slave of the sculpture charged with creating the likeness of the athlete in wood or stone.

Modern and now postmodern people, even those who are illiterate—indeed, in my experience, more so when a person cannot read—have continued through my life, to regard the written word with expectation of import, even dread. This sense, in an age when most do not read the ancient texts, is increasingly imbued with emotion. Perhaps this is because of the legalistic nature of our society. This continues to intensify, in a way to return to an old reverence, a fear.

This reverence is continued with TV news and social media, as readers and listeners seek authoritative voices from their own HATE stream, those reactive leaders of their own fear team. Just as the ancients had seers and oracles who spoke in their language, oracles who sat on the podium long revered by their own lineage, the postmodern person imbibes his hate and fear, links his fate to that of many millions as one, based on the word. This is increasingly in the form of an authority passing judgment on the words or actions of a third party, known by neither the speaker or the listener, more often than not taken out of context, the lie by omission continuing central to our ever more misinformed condition.

Not trusting the authorities by nature, simply because they are the authorities, I have sought information from those who are centuries and ages dead, as they cannot have a goon place a gun to my head.

The power to mislead is eternal, you must think.

As did I.

When I read Victor Davis Hansen misleading by omission the fate of Ancient Thebes, by most historians claiming Herodotus was wrong about the Nile, Scythians, Ethiopians, Persian logistics, then finding evidence that he was correct, I understand that modern historians are lying. With every modern historian adopting the false term “indentured servant” to replace 38 actual period terms for early American forced labor, I know that I am dealing with a rejuvinating nest of vipers, a fraternity dedicated to twisting the Word.

But how does that make the ancient writers any better?

Since human nature remains the same, why are not all writers liars?

I am not a liar. I have written hundreds of books in part because I have spent no time lying that my last book is the most important purchasing decision you can make.

Lying is hard work and is done under scrutiny. That scrutiny is the reason for the lie stream from American Historians.

The legacy of sacred writing seems imbedded in us. This does make the news reporter, speech writer, news caster, novelist, social media influencer, OP/Ed writer, and screen writer something of a priest. Indeed, when book publishers and agents contact me with their largely dishonest and duplicitous sales pitches they do not refer to me as a writer or to my work as writing. They call me an influencer, which is the death of a writer to my mind.

I have tried to write as an informer, not an influencer, as a reporter not as a gossip, in an attempt to write closer to the truth in order to please my teacher, dead these 2347 years, whose name meant Best-purpose. He informed that while the historian reports merely facts, that the poet deals in truths. We live in a day when historians try to deal directly in Truth by arguing about facts, while often omitting facts inconvenient to their proposed truths.

There is a good reason for this. In the time of Herodotus, he declined to write on certain subjects as having been treated by so many others. Those other works have not survived. He was busy assembling facts for consideration: finder, explorer, reporter, interviewer.

This brings up the vast difference in the readership. Ancient writers wrote for one single audience, the elite members of their own ruling class. Only Aesop was a low class writer and his work was assigned to children. These same race, same language, horizontal fraternity members were in a scramble to catalogue and understand a world with limits, a world they did not wish to by infinite.

In stark contrast, the modern writer writes for numerous races up and down a many tiered social pyramid. We writers come from the bottom to the middle, with the most influential occupying the middle rungs. Like the scribe that wrote the account of Gilgamesh for his descendent, our writers write FOR the elite above, TO the Reader below. If we write in the interest of the elite, which may only be done by misinforming the reader, we are rewarded. If we write in the interest of the reader, and therefor against the interest of our masters, we are punished.

The ancient writers, in some cases differed in politics. They did not differ in class interest. The two perpetual enemies of ancient Greece, the Athenians and the Spartans, both cooperated to keep down their enemy’s underclass. The ancients, except perhaps for politicians like Caesar, who did write truthfully on military matters for which there were hundreds of literate witnesses, were honest in service to their mutual interest. The various USG spook agencies might lie to us at every second turn. But, I wager, that their internal memos are written to inform rather than mislead their co-conspiritors, as these are the tools by which we are strangled in the dark.

In Herodotus, Xenophon, Hesiod, Arrian and Tacitus, I have detected self editing for survival. I have not noticed the advancement of obviously false notions such as modern historical axioms that only Africans have been enslaved and that ancients always lied about army size and casualties.

I rely here in part on an advantage that only I hold, my only advantage as a writer, that I have written more than any living human. Think about something you have done more than anyone you know, and how easy it is for you compared to novices to spot something out of place.