New World, New History

I was never one to agree with those who consider history a bane to their academia, but I have realized why they find it so boring. Just as how people prefer to talk about themselves more than talk about others, the root is their empathy. Empathy may have a different definition to some, but I prefer it to mean ‘The ability to translate words into personal emotions.’ To be truly bored while reading a personal recalling of a great battle, like Cannae, with much bloodshed and one-hundred thousand Roman bodies lying literally in piles after the slaughter, requires the inability to feel the emotions of the writer. I have always had fantastic empathy for those who suffer, but this is cultivated by those who have great empathy themselves, and give the effect of almost making a plea on behalf of the one whom they are writing about. This feeling of being spoken to by the author, and of almost being there with the author, watching the same event take place, leaves me in a trance which makes me also want to record it that someone else may experience the feeling.

My only problem lied in the fact that I had no great history to recount, and especially no man to want to listen to what I could write upon. Who am I, compared to other greater men? I stood confused and empty, yearning for something to record that my name might be remembered in tandem with something as great as, perhaps, Rome. This drive to become something so great as perhaps the great Livy who recorded the early history of Rome and the Carthaginian Wars. Maybe like Plutarch, who integrated philosophy into, and compared the intellect and psychology of, great Roman and Greek men of ancient times. These men, who were graced with the ability to have a sense of lacking in the field of History, have drawn me into this gilded home of orators and authors throughout time. One thing had yet to occur to me, however, until recently. Plutarch lived years after Livy. To Plutarch, Livy lived in “ancient times.” This is another fallacy of history. The view that time through history is a two-dimensional plane of existence which almost is fictional, and that no truly ‘human’ person existed in such a strange place. Truth is, though, that Livy wrote of things which were two-hundred to three-hundred years prior to his own life.

This is what I realized. The truth that a historian does not only know things of his own time, but of things even up to, possibly, three-thousand years before his own time! This, and that with culture differences which even ten years’ time can cause, the excitement is equivalent with learning of an alien world. This feeling of peering into a different world would make any writer want to share the experience and excitement of what they saw.

As I have said already, my problem, which wrought such personal distress and longing, sprout directly from the lacking of something to record – to have something to share with someone willing to read it. This place which I’ve been thrown into, so strange and quickly-paced, has only gone to make me jovial with the prospect of having something finally novel to write about. A prospect which, always taken by a better writer, I have been given by my recent arrival in this place and lack of competition.

My location, though formally known by its inhabitants as “Equestria”, is referred to by the greater men of the colony as the “New World” due to the circumstances leading up to our arrival. In keeping with the method of writing that Plutarch used, I shall be attempting correlations from the past to the future, Terrarian refugee and Native Equestrian, Earthly history and what has been already recorded of this New World – I shall call this place Nova Roma, or New Rome.

Once I had maintained a friendly relationship with Celestia, she eventually got out of me my ability to give excellent speeches, and insisted fervently (to the point of guilting me) that I take advantage of my situation in this strange and under-studied New World, to write my speeches down. I’m reliant upon a misuse of her request/demand to write “something”, that I might write a History rather than an autobiography. While it is my great honor and joy to be the historian who records such incredible events, I understand that many will consider my work a bore – and I don’t attempt to disagree!

I simply hope that the reader can enjoy this work which I have made, and before I begin my History, I wish to quote the words of one of the best and most frequent writers of all time. A man in whose work I take, quite literally, solace. As St. Augustine said at the end of his one-thousand ninety-one page “City of God” (which by no means do I wish to even come close to matching in sheer volume of work), “And now, as I think, I have discharged my debt, with the completion, by God’s help, of this huge work. It may be too much for some, too little for others. Of both groups I ask forgiveness. But of those for whom it is enough I make this request: That they do not thank me, but join with me in rendering thanks to God. Amen. Amen.”