Latro and the Persian army

Andrew Bollen · 16 Jun 2003, 00:08 · from urth-v0306.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Andrew Bollen" <abollen at internode.on.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Latro and the Persian army
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 10:08:34 +1000
Message-ID: <urth-v0306-3466 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0306/3466.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>
> Crush responds:
> You have solved the puzzle yourself. Latro was an Immortal -- probably an
> officer among them on a tactical level. He could be merely an officer in
the
> Persian military, but it is unlikely that a foreigner would be permitted
> such a distinction. Foreigners were, however, preferred among bodyguard
> units as they considered less corruptible (Wolfe himself states in the
> introduction) -- consider Rome's Praetorian Guard. How this particular
Latin
> won a place with the Immortals is not explained, but Latro's knowledge of
> Zoroastrianism strongly suggests he spent some significant time in Persia
> (as opposed to being mustered in Egypt which the text suggests he went to
> first). I don't believe any of the Immortals were mentioned in Herodotus
by
> name.

Doesn't this get kind of explained in Latro's vision at Thermopylae? I don't
have time to search out the quote, but as I recall, we learn from this that
Latro is captain of a group of Romans, which has been given a position of
honor near the King, in the absence for whatever reason of the Immortals.
They front the desperate charge by Leonidas' band; I think we can probably
infer that Latro personally slays Leonidas.

It's not a stretch to imagine Mardonius granting the Romans an
Immortals-like position on the field at Plataea,  given this.

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net