Quo usque tandem

Parallels with ancient Rome

I am warped for life, having been taught Latin, ancient Greek and classical history in school. You might call it a privileged education, and I have to thank my parents for sending me there. Even though I didn’t go to University but to sea, it gave me my knack of languages and a wide horizon, including an insatiable interest in history.

I am not the first to see the parallels between Donald Trump and an erratic Roman emperor, nor will I be the last. Search the internet for the combination of names, and you will find many references, such as this one. I had prepared a treatise on Donald Trump and the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero, but to be honest I am so sick of seeing his hateful face in the media, that perhaps I should desist. 

https://claridadpuertorico.com/caligula-trump-y-el-premio-nobel/

So let me write something about ancient Rome, indicate a few parallels and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The Roman Republic

Rome was founded around 753BC and initially comprised a few settlements around the Palatine hill and surrounding farmland in a region called Latium. The first 250 years it was a kingdom, during which formative years the foundations were laid for the later republic as the settlement developed into a large town. The final king of Rome was Tarquinius Superbus, who ruled as a tyrant. Tarquin's reign, according to the Wikipedia article, is remembered for his use of violence and intimidation to control the population, and his disrespect for Roman tradition and the Senate. In the present-day context it rings a bell, doesn’t it?

After Tarquin was overthrown, the Senate and its elected leaders, the Consuls, were in power. It goes too far to try and describe in a few words the intricacies of the Roman Republic, the class society that Rome was and its complicated political system. The Republic effectively was an elected oligarchy, where powerful families dominated the key positions. They were in a perpetual state of war with their neighbours in the Italian peninsula and everyone else in the Mediterranean. Politics within the Republic had violent traits: some influential politicians didn’t hesitate to silence or murder opponents using armed gangs.

The story of Rome at the end of the Republic was admirably written by Colleen McCullough, who has studied in depth the period from Gaius Marius (another villain) to Emperor Augustus.

Catiline and the lost election of 63 BC

During the final years of the republic, a senator called Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline) tried to topple the Consuls and the Senate. One of the elected Consuls, Marcus Tullius Cicero, a famous orator, tackled him in the Senate.

The Wikipedia article on Catiline says the following:

The first speech was given in the senate, where Cicero accused a senator, Catiline, of leading a plot to overthrow the republic; in response, Catiline withdrew from the city and joined an uprising in Etruria. The next two speeches were given before the people, with Cicero justifying his actions as well as relating further news of the conspiracy...

Cicero accusing Catiline in 63 BC

Cesare Maccari from Instagram, via Wikipedia

It all revolved around an electoral issue - in 63 BC, Catiline had run for Consul, promoting a populist agenda, but had been defeated by Cicero and didn’t accept the result (nothing new then!). To all accounts Catiline then tried to overthrow the Republic in the following year. He was killed in an armed encounter in January, 62 BC (note that the BC years are numbered backwards).

Catiline's name became synonymous with treasonous rebellion. Gaius Sallustius Crispus, in his work on the conspiracy (Bellum Catilinae) describes Catiline as an example of the Republic’s moral decline, although not just as a perpetrator but also as a victim of intrigue, perhaps pointing the finger at the system rather than the person.

Quo usque tandem

Years ago, when one of my sons completed a classical education similar to mine, the school arranged an excursion to Rome for interested parents, accompanied by a few of the teachers giving us a wonderful in-depth explanation of ancient Rome. The most hilarious moment was when one of them, with the group gathered round in the Curia, the restored Senate building on the Forum, imitated Marcus Tullius Cicero, roaring the first line of his speech against Catiline:

"Quo usque tandem, Catilina, abuteris patientia nostra?"

 

It fairly echoed around the building, but the security men must have been warned beforehand, because we weren’t arrested. Here are the full opening lines of the speech against Catiline by Cicero in 63 BC. 

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? 

Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? 

Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?

For how long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience? 

How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? 

When will that unbridled arrogance come to an end?

Mad emperors

The Roman Empire effectively started with the adopted son of the dictator Gaius Julius Caesar, a man named Gaius Octavius, aka Augustus, who won the power struggle following the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC, and founded the Julian-Claudian dynasty of Roman emperors.

The tale of the emperors is well described in I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and the sequel Claudius the God.

The emperors succeeding Augustus in the first Century AD (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero) suffered from the madness peculiar to absolute power. Caligula used the motto oderint dum metuant - they hate me because they fear me. Well, we know a few others of that type. 

Caligula

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ny_Carlsberg_Glyptotek 

He is said to have appointed his horse Incitatus as a consul, just because he had the power to, and in doing so ridiculed the Senate and the office of Consul as useless institutions. DOGE avant la lettre? And Nero, after the death of his mother Agrippina who had kept him on a short leash, was susceptible to prodigious flattery. A century previously, Catilina tried to turn an election by rebellion. Throw Tarquin, Catiline and the mad emperors all into one, and you’ll have… exactly, Donald Trump! 

I’m not sure what moves Trump and I don’t think I want to know. In one year he bombed eight countries in three continents, cast his net at Venezuela, Greenland and Mauritius, and whoever opposes him, he blackmails with import tariffs. His latest tantrums are blaming Norway for not awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize (which Norway has no sway in), and letting the EU suffer for not giving up Greenland. Ira principis mors est - the wrath of the Leader means death. Not literally, I hope.

Quo usque tandem, Donald, abuteris patientia nostra?

Sallust seems to implicate that Catiline wasn’t just a perpetrator but also an exponent of the Roman Republican system. That is equally applicable to the United States. Looking at the complicated election system and its almost Roman susceptibility to money and power play, it is no surprise that three times in a row presidents were elected of doubtful capability: Trump, of whom I said enough, Joe Biden, who definitely was past his prime, and now again Trump.

One year down, three to go in this perfect storm, hoping he doesn’t wreck us all. And the one we’ll have to watch is the man waiting in the shadows: J.D.Vance.

Christmas Eve at sea

Is there still hope? Last week I sat at a Christmas concert with a choir and a brass band. The music was beautiful, but I couldn’t really enjoy it with the image in my mind of children in Gaza. Is there still hope for them, sitting hungry and cold in wet tents, blockaded and targeted by an occupying force? The so-called ‘truce’ in Gaza is a dead letter. Or is there for the people of Ukraine, terrorised by another rogue state bombing the energy supply in the cold of winter. Or for the people of Sudan and East Congo, whom the world has turned its back upon?

 

flooded tents in Gaza, December 2025. Source: CNN.

No peace on earth, and as much as last year I had great difficulty thinking of something hopeful to write for Christmas. Until I remembered a coastal trip at sea in a cargo vessel in the middle of winter, fifty years ago, and decided to turn it into a Christmas tale, adding a little bit of fiction.

The star

It is 5pm, Christmas Eve 1975, in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Hafen in Hamburg. The loading is done, the harbour cranes are deserted and stand as silent sentries along the dark quay. In a few places there is a lonely spotlight illuminating the warehouses. There is a frost, there is snow in the air and the wind is in the north, a biting force 7 or 8 with insidious gusts that chill me to the bone. I have only been on deck for an hour, but I don’t feel my toes anymore.

I go along the hatches as the boatswain is busy pulling them shut. The heavy steel pontoons tumble over the hatchway with the sound of thunder, and roll into place, each connected to its neighbour by chains. Others are busy lowering the cargo derricks.

Against all expectation, we will be in harbour  for Christmas in Bremerhaven. A day off for the entire crew! I am eagerly anticipating the Christmas dinner we’ll have tomorrow night. But the short stretch at sea from the Elbe to the Weser doesn’t spell much good - there will be a swell outside just where it meets the raging ebb from the Elbe and becomes a succession of steep rollers. The boatswain has already secured the cargo in the holds.

 

The pilot is ordered for seven o’clock. I go for a quick meal before I have to prepare the bridge for departure, pull the battledress over my sweater, on my shoulders the narrow gold band of a fourth officer, the junior in rank aboard. By now it is six o’clock, I unlock the wheelhouse, check the navigation lights, the air horn in the foremast and the compasses, I switch on the radar and lay out the river chart in the wheelhouse. I ring the engine room to test the telegraph. The pointer follows whatever I order on the telegraph, so all is well. The Old Man comes up and studies the charts, then the First Mate.

The Captain glances at me. ‘Number Four, will you fetch the pilot at the gangway? He is due any moment.’

‘Yes, Captain.’ I descend the stairs to the main deck and wait, stamping my feet against the cold. A taxi appears on the quay, a civilian with a briefcase and a German skipper’s cap gets out and comes up the gangway.

‘Guten Abend, Herr Lotse.’

‘Guten Abend, Steuermann. Zeigen Sie mir den Weg, bitte.’ Show me the way, please.

Two men haul up the gangway as we go in, through the corridor and up the stairs to the bridge. Meanwhile in the accommodation the call goes out: ‘fore and aft stations, fore and aft.’ The third mate comes running down, walkie-talkie in hand. Up on the bridge the Captain welcomes the pilot. The inky black water outboard mirrors the lights of the pair of tugs we have ordered. The Third and his men hasten forward, the Second aft.

The First, using his walkie-talkie, orders to single up - remove all the warps until we’re tied up with nothing but a headrope and a spring fore and aft. The tugs give out their hawsers, the wind pushes us against the quay. The cold draught creeps into my trouser legs as I am at my station near the engine telegraph.

‘Vorne und hinten los,’ the pilot says out on the bridge wing - let go fore and aft. He talks to the tug skippers through his own radio. The tugs gingerly tighten their hawsers as the crew casts off all remaining warps. Slowly the dark harbour cranes recede.

‘Engine stand-by please,’ the pilot says.

‘Stand-by,’ I reply, pushing the telegraph handle to stand-by. The engine room answers.

‘Langsam voraus.’

‘Langsam voraus.’ Slow ahead - I move the telegraph to the correct setting. Through the open door I hear the blasts of compressed air starting the main engine. I watch the rev counter over the centre bridge window obediently turn right to forty-five revolutions. We begin to crawl ahead.

A quarter of an hour later we are on the river, the tugs have cast off, it is high water and the ebb will start in a minute. It is eight o’clock and the Old Man glances at me. 

‘Number Four, you’d better go and turn in. You’ll be on at midnight together with the Second.’

I wish everyone a good watch and find my cabin. I never succeed in sleeping this early in the evening, but after an hour’s tossing and turning I drop off after all…

…the telephone rings, insistently and not to be ignored. Dazedly I clamber from my bunk, it is pitch dark. The phone rings again, I find the light switch.

‘Fourth Mate.’

It is the Old Man. ‘Number Four, it is quarter to twelve. Will you come up?’

‘Aye aye, Captain.’ I find the toilet, brush my teeth, dress quickly and go up. The door of the cabin is left open, as it always is at sea.

In the chartroom I let my eyes adjust to the darkness - there is just a red reading light above the chart table. The can of coffee is horrible to behold - it has been left on the warming plate for hours and now smells like liquid tar. Brrr. I open the door to the wheelhouse. It is pitch dark - the lights of the rev counter and the steering compass are dimmed. Vaguely I make out the shapes of the people on the bridge. It is freezing with the door to the bridge wing open, a cold draught swirling around my legs. The lookout outside on the bridge wing stamps his feet.

 

‘Merry Christmas, Number Four.’

‘Merry Christmas, Captain.’

‘We are abreast of Neuwerk. The pilot will disembark shortly. We have reduced speed already,’ the third mate says to me. He is ready to hand over the watch. ‘The pilot cutter waits ahead to starboard, the pilot ladder is lowered. Will you take him down in a moment? Ten more minutes.’

Fifteen minutes later we are stopped in the water after disembarking the Elbe pilot. The Weser pilot climbs aboard on the swaying ladder, I steady him as he steps across the rail. It is past midnight, Christmas is here.

‘Frohe Weihnachten, Steuermann.’

‘Frohe Weihnachten, Herr Lotse.’

The Captain invites him for coffee in his cabin, so the next hour the Second and I have the bridge to ourselves. We are moving again, turn to port into the direction of the Alte Weser approach buoy, and begin rolling mercilessly. Everything rattles and creaks, the chart slides off the chart table in the wheelhouse. It is icy cold, and far away at sea the radar shows a flurry of snow.

As I look to port to take a compass bearing on the Neuwerk lighthouse, suddenly the cloud cover in the southeast breaks. 

 

Like a miracle, low over the horizon a bright light penetrates the clouds: Sirius, the brightest star in the expanse. As if ordained from above, it remains visible for minutes, so bright that I see the reflection on the waves, a bright swathe of light. All that fails is angels singing.

The watch continues, the Second has arranged a tin of pea soup and a pan from the Chief Steward. The soup goes into the pan and we heat it up on the warming plate in the chartroom. Three mugs and spoons materialise from a drawer. Pedro, the Spanish lookout, comes in for a moment.

‘Feliz Navidad, Pedro.’

‘Feliz Navidad, Mr Mate.’

Together, Pedro, the Second and I, we eat the hot pea soup with slices of bacon on rye bread. Slowly we begin to thaw. We give way to a coaster coming down from the shipping lanes north of the islands, rolling in the swell like a pig. 

Half an hour later the Captain and the pilot come up. The Old Man sniffs the lingering scent of the pea soup. ‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘I’d love soup myself.’ 

Luckily there is a second tin of soup in the locker in the chartroom. I go down to fetch more mugs and spoons from the mess on the boat deck. Down there the rolling seems to be worse - the TV set is balancing on the edge of the dresser, so I lift it and put it on the deck to prevent worse. Back on the bridge I make soup for the Old Man and the pilot.

Alte Weser lighthouse

It is two in the morning as we pass the Alte Weser lighthouse on our way to Bremerhaven. The swell is reduced, in a few hours we’ll tie up - unusually in harbour on a feast day.

In Bremerhaven we find the cargo in the #5 tweendecks has come adrift after all.

-------

This is a story of seafaring half a century ago. But I hope it is familiar to those of you who are at sea right now. If you read this, whether at anchor or underway, I wish you a safe voyage and a Merry Christmas.

Intelligence, or the end of it?

My latest book HET BETWISTE LAND (in Dutch) is slowly approaching completion. The manuscript was edited and at the moment I’m only adding a few final details. The work of translating it into English has the added advantage of going over the Dutch text in detail - a final check, if you like. Translating into English comes to me easily, as I’m reasonably fluent in the language and familiar with common expressions. The translated book will be titled CONTESTED LAND, and I’m halfway into the manuscript. It goes slowly, but steadily - effectively I’m re-writing the book in another language.

Recently I discussed the translation with another author, who wondered whether I hadn’t better use an AI platform to do the job. That’s an interesting question - how does a human author and translator compare to artificial intelligence?

The mv Oostkerk, seen here at Dubai
beyond a traditional wooden vessel,
plays a part in CONTESTED LAND

Intelligence

Judging from the sheer number of definitions of intelligence, it is a concept difficult to define, such as being able to act pro-actively and think rationally. Or the ability to see similarities in two different entities, to recognise patterns and to acquire and apply knowledge. Then there is emotional intelligence: self-knowledge, optimism, empathy, social ability. And steadfastness or resilience, of which more later.

Being able to identify similarities and to think logically and consistently helps an author in shaping his story, investigating its background and turning it into a concrete end product. But equally important is emotional intelligence, which makes you think about the impact of the book upon the reader. To judge whether the reader will connect to it, or not.

CONTESTED LAND is a throwback to the conflict in the Middle East at an earlier stage during the 1970s, and was inspired by the horror I felt at the merciless extermination of the people of Gaza by the Israeli army. Regardless of the cause - the terror attack of Hamas in October 2023 - NOTHING warrants the excessive response by Israel and the almost 70,000 people killed, not counting the many injured in body and mind. 

The violent patterns of today already were present half a century ago - I remember the slaughter of the 1970s and 1980s all too well. But Israel takes things just one step further by letting AI-supported systems decide who to target without human interference, which contributes to the high death toll. If that is what the war of the future is like, it is the end of human intelligence. 

If war hadn’t been that to begin with.

Steadfastness and emotional intelligence

In CONTESTED LAND, ordinary people not unlike you and me play a part, trying to live through the poverty and the violence in a Palestinian camp during the Lebanese civil war. It wasn’t easy to penetrate into the culture of the Palestinian people, or that of the Palestinian diaspora. Even now, with the manuscript almost completed, I come across details that are worthwile.

Recently I attended a cultural event where young authors from Gaza presented a book of short stories entitled ‘We Are Not Numbers’. Their stories taught me something more that touches on my book, such as the steadfastness of Palestinian people, their resolve to stand up straight in the face of oppression. This is another form of emotional intelligence. Palestinians have a word for it: sumud, non-violent resistance. 

In an article on Sumud on Wikipedia I found what looked like a scale of resistance against oppression, and I see surprising parallels between sumud and the resistance against the German occupation of Holland during the war years. Many Dutch learned to survive and stand up straight, and in addition there was a fair amount of sabotage as a form of resistance. There were underground organisations gathering information, an underground press and organised help to those hiding from the Nazi occupiers. 

Resilience as a form of emotional intelligence is common to all peoples suffering under  oppression - it is present in the Maroons of Suriname as well, who resisted the brutal ‘plantocracy’ of the 1700s. 

Armed resistance takes things one step further. There was armed resistance in the Netherlands during WW2 - leading Nazis were shot. But the margin between legitimate armed resistance and terrorism is narrow, and as a consequence armed resistance is often (or deliberately) confused with terrorism. That is food for discussion - The Rights Forum recently published an interesting article, regrettably only in Dutch, about the legitimacy of armed resistance by the Palestinians, which shows exactly what is allowed under international law and what isn’t.

Back to intelligence

At the beginning of this article, I put the question how to compare a human author or translator to artificial intelligence. I will give you an example. Recently I asked someone to comment on a text I wrote. The reply was very clear and relevant, which made me ask the person in question whether she had experience of the subject. No, she replied - I made ChatGPT write the answer!

What does that say about revising text using AI? That the reply was useful doesn’t come into it: every comment that makes me think is relevant. But the only one that learned from the process is a digital glutton somewhere in the US, not the person who I had asked to comment.

Now suppose I’d use ChatGPT to translate my books into English. I wouldn’t control the result, unless I’d edit the generated text manually myself. But in addition, my text, my plot and my writing style, in short my entire copyright, would be stolen shamelessly by the translating platform. And finally, my knowledge of the English language would stop being fed by the exercise.

Perhaps I’m too critical, but if we allow AI to replace human intelligence in such tasks, eventually it must mean the end of intelligence: we’ll stop learning and only feed the monster.

Edited 19 November.

Book burnings

A recent email about their new books from a publisher I know personally was titled "Books with a Message." Books containing a social and possibly unwelcome message in a turbulent world.

The e-mail also said something about the significance of book bans. In the United States, scores of books and all kinds of cultural and historic content are now banned from public view due to the Trump administration's "anti-woke" censorship. Anything that clashes with the new ultra-conservative ideology is banned: climate change, black lives matter, immigrants, LGBTQ+. 

This is reaching ridiculous proportions: even the name of the aeroplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (Enola Gay) had to be erased from history because the word "gay" appears in it…

Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the Hiroshima bomb.
Source: Wikipedia

Entartete Kunst

I sincerely hope that we won’t go down that way, but I’m not optimistic. Such developments are reminiscent of a dark period in German history, when books by Jewish authors were publicly burned, and modern art was portrayed as Entartete Kunst - degenerate art for those who don't understand German. Just as the first victim of war is truth, the first victim of a totalitarian regime is freedom of speech and expression.

If you take it one step further and sell your soul to Artificial Intelligence (AI), where AI instead of a flesh-and-blood author writes books reflecting the mantras that best suit those in power, there is no returning to sanity. Some time ago I wrote about Big Brother, the dictator in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that dystopian world, books, the news, and even history are continuously being rewritten according to the prevailing policies of the day.

Not only freedom of expression is at risk, but so is what we are allowed to think. If necessary, the new political correctness will be violently enforced. The Nazi brownshirts who destroyed Jewish shops and books in 1938, the American army being prepped in 2025 to defeat the President's "enemy within", and in our little country, anti-immigrant gangs causing havoc at asylum centers waving Nazi flags. Keep going, guys.

Books with a message

Often, my thrillers also contain a message. They are about people who find themselves in dire straits and manage to escape the horrors they experienced. Fictional persons like Syrian doctor Leila Hammadi, who flees the Assad regime during the civil war and, after years of hardship, manages to build a new life in Greece. And the Russian girl Irina Makarova, a victim of woman trafficking who is confronted by a heartless Dutch government, yet manages to keep her head above water. And the young African woman Efua, who three centuries ago, during the days of the Dutch West India Company’s slave trade, takes Anansi's stories with her on the slave ship and seeks her freedom in the interior of Suriname.

Most of these stories have a seafaring background, because the sea is our last wilderness, and because I know the sea well, as a former seafarer and (still) a yachtsman. At sea, you're left to your own devices, which adds an extra element of suspense to the story. Some reviewers of my books grumble a bit about the maritime content, but I have no complaints from my readers. Each to his own, I’d say...

Finally, there's a common theme in every book: romance developing between two people, often from very different cultures, who come together against all odds and refuse to let go. After all, our blood is always red, no matter where we come from, and love is our strongest emotion. I sincerely hope that love will triumph over the hatred that tries to poison us all.

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