you hear it. This enterprise quite simply frightened me. First, the material, ancient scrolls and fragments of scrolls, loose and disordered scraps of paper, in the old scripts that were the first receptacles of the transfer of ‘the mouth to ear’ mode of the first histories. A great pack of the stuff, and while there was some kind of order in it, it was not necessarily how I would have arranged it. Every time I took it up to consider my place in the story I was dismayed, not only by the scale of the task but because this tale was so far from me that I did not know how to interpret it.
And then I watched, in the nursery, this little scene. The girl, Lydia, was about four, the boy younger, perhaps two. Lydia must have observed a hundred times the protuberances in front of her brother, Titus, but on this day she stared at him and said, ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ Her face! She was intrigued, shocked, envious, repelled – she was gripped by strong contradictory emotions. I watched, and so did the slave girls. We knew that this was a momentous event.
At this Titus pushed forward his equipment, and began wagging his penis up and down, looking at her with lordly air. ‘It’s mine, it’s mine,’ he chanted and said, ‘And what have you got? You haven’t got anything.’
Lydia was standing looking down at her smooth front with the little pink cleft. ‘Why?’ she demanded of the girls, of me, of her brother. ‘Why have you got that, and I haven’t?’
‘It’s because you are a girl,’ says the little lord and master. ‘I am a boy and you are a girl.’
‘I think it’s ugly, you are horrible,’ she states, comes nearer to him, and says, ‘I want it.’
He swings his hips about, evading her probing hand, singing, ‘You can’t, you can’t, and so that’s that.’
‘I want to touch,’ she demands, and this time he leaves his protuberances just within reach, but withdraws them suddenly as her hand approaches.
‘Then I won’t let you look at mine,’ she says and turns herself round, hiding herself.
At which he sings, ‘I don’t care, why should I care, you’re just silly.’
‘I’m not silly,’ she half screams, and runs to the girls. ‘Why, why, why?’ she demands, as one whisks her up in her arms.
‘Don’t cry,’ says this nurse. ‘Don’t give him that satisfaction.’ ‘It’s not fair,’ sobs the child, and the other girl says, ‘But if you had that you wouldn’t know what to do with it,’ sending me a great wink, and a laugh. (But I have never been that kind of Master: perhaps she wished I were.)
And at that moment I knew I would at least try and take on this task, my history of that ancient, long-ago time. Scenes I had pondered over, thinking, but after these ages, how can you really understand what it meant when females and the males were together in that valley, while the eagles watched them, not knowing anything – and we Romans know so much – about why the girls were shaped like this, and the boys like that, let alone what it all meant.
They were driven by powerful instincts – and we do know how strong they are, nothing has changed there – but I keep coming back to a thought: that the boys seemed to be hungering for something, wanting something, needing – but did not know what it was their squirts wanted – forcing all the rest of themselves to want, to need.
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