Its none of our busness anyway what cultures of other countries do etc. Thats been the problem throughout history invading and trying to press opinions and ideals, On to cultures that would seem much older. No matter how barabaric they seem.
It todays society Barbaric things go on in our own back yards so who are we or anyone else to judge.
kenny
The Afghan Campaign
Moderator: pothos moderators
Hi, all! (But I regret that Marcus isn’t there!) 
A fiction writer has to extrapolate, in a sense, when he handles history, because our knowledge of historical truth is incomplete and, on the other hand, the writer has an agenda of his own; if, for example, he wants to insert a love story in the plot and no historic source gives the slightest hint as to what the life of a poor Sogdian girl was, he has to infer it from what is known of similar cultures or is still going on in some communities. For example, throwing the old and weak to the dogs can mean that in such a society human life is valued very little, still less valued than in Macedonia, as far as we know. The novelist has no proof of that, but the idea is not illogic or grossly biased.
Of course the novelist can cancel the love story in the first place, but I’m afraid that by a process of elimination he would end up cancelling the novel right away. As for cruelty and brutality, I, as an old disillusioned lady, am afraid that reality beats fiction by several lengths (that’s true also for Macedonians' mistreatment of foreign women of which admittedly we don’t see much in the novel).
Let me tell you a story (a short one): a boy of 19 is dining with some friends and one of his cousins. All of a sudden two killers rush in and kill the cousin: they are sent by a rival clan to settle an old grudge. The boy and his friends flee in terror. A month later the boy is killed while coming home from school; the investigators discover that his killing has been ordered by his own family, with his parents’ consent, to punish him for having failed to defend or help his kinsman. All this happened a month ago in an Italian town and was given much space in the newspapers; but to me it resembles something Pressfield has put into his novel. To sum up, I think that, as a novelist, he wasn’t particularly dishonest with what reality could have been, given that we know little of what reality was.
All the best
Azara
A fiction writer has to extrapolate, in a sense, when he handles history, because our knowledge of historical truth is incomplete and, on the other hand, the writer has an agenda of his own; if, for example, he wants to insert a love story in the plot and no historic source gives the slightest hint as to what the life of a poor Sogdian girl was, he has to infer it from what is known of similar cultures or is still going on in some communities. For example, throwing the old and weak to the dogs can mean that in such a society human life is valued very little, still less valued than in Macedonia, as far as we know. The novelist has no proof of that, but the idea is not illogic or grossly biased.
Of course the novelist can cancel the love story in the first place, but I’m afraid that by a process of elimination he would end up cancelling the novel right away. As for cruelty and brutality, I, as an old disillusioned lady, am afraid that reality beats fiction by several lengths (that’s true also for Macedonians' mistreatment of foreign women of which admittedly we don’t see much in the novel).
Let me tell you a story (a short one): a boy of 19 is dining with some friends and one of his cousins. All of a sudden two killers rush in and kill the cousin: they are sent by a rival clan to settle an old grudge. The boy and his friends flee in terror. A month later the boy is killed while coming home from school; the investigators discover that his killing has been ordered by his own family, with his parents’ consent, to punish him for having failed to defend or help his kinsman. All this happened a month ago in an Italian town and was given much space in the newspapers; but to me it resembles something Pressfield has put into his novel. To sum up, I think that, as a novelist, he wasn’t particularly dishonest with what reality could have been, given that we know little of what reality was.
All the best
Azara
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jasonxx