Home?

When he was young, he wasn't afraid of finding himself with nothing but what he wore in a city that was new. Something changed. Now, when he thought of the doorways he had slept in, the rooftops, the subways and the ferries, he felt the hollowness. Without even being there, he felt that lonely pain. He was too old for that now. It probably happened in the past 5 years, this change, and really, most people wouldn't ever consider it a way to go. Homelessness was rough, and without an ambition, a dream to propel you through it you might get stuck. There wasn't a dream. The irony was, for all the ground he had covered, all he had traveled, he felt like he was where he began.

Without being actually homeless, sleeping in shelters or in squats, he was without anywhere he felt was home. A recording on a tape he used to listen to had a professor explaining that home wasn't a place, it was an idea, an abstract idea. It takes courage to believe in a home. Maybe for most people it wasn't anything of significance, but Jacob rarely felt that safety and surety that he associated with a home. So he checked the listings for jobs and kept his ear open for gigs that would let him satisfy the demands school made of him. It all felt like it was moving too slow. The most recent campaign had been a week or so, and was gathering momentum. Until he found a job and a room, he would be in the limbo he had known too much of.

He took his girlfriend's dog out sometimes. It struck him that he wouldn't even think of getting a dog, since he can't even take care of himself without fear. Something wasn't in him, he wasn't something that most everyone else was. Sure, he could get a job, a salary, and a lease, and maybe it would feel better, more like a home, but there would still be something fundamentally different about it all. He was always a visitor.

Elaine & Benjamin's First Date

(Not the worst) Thucydides' Mitylenian Debate

Cleon, in prosecution, presents the aggravating circumstance of Mitylene having revolted without having been oppressed by Athenian empire and, what may have been worse, allying themselves with the Spartan nemesis. Thucydides describes an interpretation of evidence, the Pelopennesian fleet having crossed the Aegean revealing the uncouth revolt to be premeditated. While the plebeians of Mitylene, under a Lacedaemonian Salaethus, having been armed faute de mieux, the expected Peloponnesian reinforcements tangled in distractions, did to their own credit immediately rise in insurrection against their officers and force the Mitylene leadership to end the revolt which represented a threat to Athens, this was not considered any substantial mitigation in what Thucydides sketches as a wrathful determination by the Athens council to execute all Mitylenian males and enslave all women and children. All of this presents a version of the scenario at the surface level, but as Diodotus articulates, it is not so cut and dry.

The penalty decreed, after the Athenians slept on it, seemed not in proportion to the crime. In considering the injustice in punishing all when among the set innocents should suffer, an appeal was scheduled. Cleon, from whom the original sentence and decree is said to have originated, makes a case to uphold said decree with Diodotus countering to reverse the decree. In spite of Cleon's sway, rather vicious reputation, and the loaded propositions of fault and impropriety among counsellors who could contrive to disagree with him, specifically that they work in deluded methods of sophism, or have sold their objectivity or allegiance, Diodotus proceeds to explain the complications involved in the determination of the Mitylenians' fate and to lay out how the advantage of Athens is compromised in Cleon's motion.

The real issue, as Diodotus insightfully states, "... is not justice, but how to make the Mitylenians useful to Athens." Diodotus makes the case that capital punishment for all, regardless of their rank or order in a revolting state, leads the logic that each man will fight to the death rather than consider a capitulation when it becomes available and clearly to advantage. This creates only more challenge and expense for Athens. What's more, if a scorched-earth policy is taken, no revenue will continue to flow, and that revenue is the very thing that lends Athens the influence she wields. Diodotus' final claim regards the working class, who by executing in this case are alienated. To do so would be to alienate the allies Athens can regard as friend in contrast to the oligarchy. Diodotus' line, in the language of his own conclusion, is rendered thus, "In short, I consider it far more useful for the preservation of our empire voluntarily to put up with injustice, than to put to death, however justly, those whom it is our interest to keep alive." He then intimates, in this ancient account, that the wheels of justice are better turned slowly, and carefully, in a remark that challenges Cleon's notion that "justice and expediency" are well matched.