I read LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS the year it came out and, for the first time, saw the potential within SF to sing. Le Guin has always been one of our strongest and most subversive voices. In my opinion, books like ALWAYS COMING HOME and THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST were overpowered by a very strong didactic streak: Le Guin talks about her "preachments," and I think she's right.

At the same time, she has always been a superb essayist, and if you follow her essays, you follow her thought patterns.

LAVINIA, frankly, blew me away just as LEFT HAND did 40 years ago. I minored in Latin and was a medieval specialist: Rome is a myth I grew up with, part of the Matter of Antiquity, which, as a twelfth-century Frenchman says, is wise. It evolves into church and Renaissance and modern history. Rome is a dream of order and austerity and engineering, and an actuality of Realpolitik, brutality, engineering and the occasional moment of sheer heroism. Rome has been an inspiration to poets, not least Dante and Shakespeare.

Le Guin, once again, is subversive. Lavinia's narrative voice is deliberately quiet, reserved as opposed to the brilliant clamor of Vergil's dactylic hexameter, which is for Latin what blank verse is to classic English. Told that without battle, there would be no heroes, she asks what the harm would be in that -- and she is the mother of Rome.

In LAVINIA, she shows herself not barraged with minutiae, but fully engaged with -pietas-, an untranslatable concept in which the household gods and hearth, right conduct, and endurance are nobler than Aeneas's occasional berserker fits (of which, Lavinia observes, he is ashamed afterward).

She meets her poet, Vergil, as he lies delirious and dying, calling for his book to be burnt. He, like Le Guin's protagonist, has roots deep in the earth of Italy. Lavinia mistakes him, at first, for an Etruscan. He lived during the clamor of the Second Triumvirate and the chaos of the Julio-Claudians. He can tell the difference. This is a Vergil closer to Dante's than to the epic Macchiavelli of Silenced's observations. This is a Vergil who knows Augustus for what he is, but is still mythmaking, even as he dies. Dante did right to put him in Limbo among the Righteous Heathens.

No, Rome knew itself not to be the Golden Age, but if it looked back to one, people like Lavinia and her father, and her son Aeneas Silvius, were as much its exemplars as Cincinnatus: they tended their hearths, their wool, and their fields and set examples of good conduct, and when they were not needed, they were quiet. And very wise.

In writing LAVINIA, Le Guin has taken on one of the -big- challenges, aligning her work with some of the greatest artists who have used it over the past several millennia. Will it stand the test of time? I'd love to see.

I'd like to read Pagels' book. But are you quite certain she expressed herself that bluntly? It doesn't sound like her other writings.

If you go back to the New Testament, Rome and Caesar are mentioned as a force to be contended with. Move a little forward to Josephus (70 CE), and you see precisely what Rome was capable of. As Caractacus says, "and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace." To me, that sounds like "we had to destroy the village to save it," but that's off topic.

Rome attacked the Middle East. It wasn't the first power to do so from the West: Alexander preceded it. It attacked and was invaded by North Africa in the Punic Wars. But the Middle East was also under attack from the East--the Persians and Parthians (who did a number on Crassus, one of the First Triumvirs) and, much later, by innumerable tribes of horsepeoples.

By that time, however, you had -two- Romes: the Eastern Empire and the remains of the Western one. Its secular reality fell in 476; Christianity took it up -- 800, and Charlemagne becomes Holy Roman Emperor and treats with Irene in Constantinople. That is less than a century later than the battle at which Charles Martel stopped the dar al Islam from moving further into Europe.

By the eleventh century, you have the Christian traumata of the Crusades -- all of them, not to mention the various factions in the Middle East moving one against the other.

It's a mess, if a glorious one. There are many things I'd blame on Augustus, but a traumatized Middle East a la Edward Said's ORIENTALISM isn't one of them.

I've read ALWAYS COMING HOME, "The Carrier Bag...etc.," "Ishi," and a great deal more, and I promise you, I do understand the philosophical underpinnings of the book and the "inconsistent Taoism" that underlies Le Guin's fiction, to use her own phrase.

It just didn't work for me. By contrast, I laughed my head off at the social satire in THE DISPOSSESSED. Both Urras and Anarres are dystopic in that: Le Guin herself calls the book an "ambiguous utopia," but both cultures are equally authoritarian, only in different ways. (She has confirmed this, by the way.)

She's a deeply thoughtful writer, so she's bound to stir up vehement opinions.

No sooner did I finish my post to Silenced than I remembered the Manichees and went out to order Pagels' book.

Win or lose, I think this is a lovely example of putting the game first. I respect Vince Lombardi, but sometimes winning isn't the only thing, or even the main thing.

Anyone remember Eddie the Eagle or the Jamaican bobsled team? Or the Red Sox (I'm a third-generation member of Red Sox Nation) giving Bill Buckner a World Series ring?

I think that's sportsmanship, despite the name, isn't limited to men or to women: it's limited to ethical athletes who'll go full out to win in other circumstances.