# Digest urth.v002.n005 *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 19 Jun 1997* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Alice Turner *19 Jun 1997, 22:11* I'm not going to respond just now to cephalo's interesting post re the patterning of women (though what he says is more true than not, i.e. Dorcas=Io=Mint as Purity, and you can carry that through), but in the Soldier books, Latro never knows the black man's name, even temporarily, till late on, and neither do we (what was it---Seven Lions Yawning?), and also, not recalling their names, he commonly refers to people this way, i.e Io=my slave. This works amusingly as Eurykles metamorphoses. It's true that he describes Silenus as black, but isn't that just a way of reminding readers that he was Dionysus's tutor on Mt. Nyssa in Africa, and that the gods were imported from all over the Mediterranean? It didn't seem derogatory to me, especially since all the painted and sculpted Sileni I've seen have somewhat African features (of course, since they played buffoons in the plays, this probably was intended to be derogatory, but it is certainly a convention). -alga- ---