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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING
SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

After Ancient
Biography
Modern Types and Classical Archetypes

Robert Fraser
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Series Editors
Clare Brant
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK

Max Saunders
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK
This series features books that address key concepts and subjects, with an
emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but acces-
sible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on con-
necting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series
aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and
students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and
forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks
with potent materials.
The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect the academic,
public and global reach of life writing, and to continue its democratic tra-
dition. The series seeks contributions that address contexts beyond tradi-
tional territories – for instance, in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It also
aims to publish volumes addressing topics of general interest (such as
food, drink, sport, gardening) with which life writing scholarship can
engage in lively and original ways, as well as to further the political engage-
ment of life writing especially in relation to human rights, migration,
trauma and repression, sadly also persistently topical themes. The series
looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood
and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that
deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject, and
which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance
of life writing.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15200
 Robert Fraser

After Ancient
Biography
Modern Types and Classical Archetypes
Robert Fraser
Department of English and Creative Writing
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

ISBN 978-3-030-35168-7    ISBN 978-3-030-35169-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4

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To Brigid Allen
 Preface

Biography Ancient and Modern: The Shock

of the Old

In the concluding sentence of an incisive essay “on the interpretation of

late antique biography”, published in 2006, the Plato scholar John Dillon
remarks that, in addressing subjects as these, “we are involved in asking
what the real purpose and justification of biography is even now”. His
point is well taken. It is hard to contemplate an individual work of biogra-
phy or the work of an individual biographer, ancient or modern, without
broaching far-reaching questions about form, intention and what we now
call “genre”. The Greeks had no term for biography as such, and when
Plutarch, at the commencement of his thrilling Life of Alexander, wishes
to tell us what he is about, he says simply “I am not writing history but
lives”. His plural noun is bioi, and in deploying it Plutarch is conveying a
strong conviction concerning what he is doing and what he is not doing.
The statement implies a theory of classification, but it also implies a sense
of momentum and direction. Having made it, he gets on with the task
in hand.
Biography may indeed be a genre, but biographers worth their salt do
not proceed generically or not only generically. If, from the point of view
of the scholar, biography is indeed a distinctive form, from the point of
view of the biographer it is decidedly an activity, and the ways of tackling
it are almost infinite.
The readership for which this book is intended consists primarily of life-­
writers: that is of practitioners of life-writing such as myself and of students

vii
viii PREFACE

and scholars of life-writing. Bearing this fact in mind, I have not assumed
a mastery on their part of any of the ancient tongues nor indeed any prior
acquaintance with the various authors from antiquity whom I selectively
discuss. This is not a history of biography in the ancient world; it is a book
about craft and the reverberations of craft. More specifically, it is about the
opportunities provided by ancient biography for writers and readers of
later periods, including the modern era. Its central point, in the broadest
of terms, is that ancient biography supplies narrative patterns for later
writers. Those among my readers who are classically versed will have to
forgive me if in its middle chapters I trawl across what may seem to them
familiar ground: it will not always be familiar to many among my intended
audience. That said, it is very clear that the reception of ancient biography
among professional classicists represents one essential strand in the after-
life of these texts, and to it I have therefore devoted one long chapter
(Chap. 2). The upshot of its argument is that, taking the long view, clas-
sicists and modernist have found themselves addressing the common and
fundamental questions implicit in all life-writing, from a vantage point
created by a shared cultural climate. For those who wish to delve further I
have supplied bibliographies and suggestions for further reading at the
end of every chapter, including a list of relevant classical authorities.
In a long and thoughtful essay on the teaching of biography collected
in his book The Long Pursuit, the self-styled “Romantic biographer”
Richard Holmes introduces a suggestive and useful term. “Comparative
biography” is what he calls it, and by it he implies two different processes.
The first is a comparison between sequential biographies of the same per-
son: a phenomenon that in a late chapter he applies to life studies of the
poet John Keats, the subject of quite a few. The second is a comparison
between ways of biographical writing prevalent in different ages (say, the
neo-classical and the Romantic periods).
The present work aims to be a contribution to the second of these exer-
cises. Life-writing is now a capacious and growing subject endowed with
many sub-specialisms and styles of approach, many voices and many ears.
Increasingly there has been a move to see across these divisions and draw
meaningful comparisons, including those between different “schools” or
periods of biography. One advantage of concentrating on life-writing from
times far prior to our own is that it opens the subject up along two com-
plementary trajectories. That is, it opens up ancient biography by demon-
strating just how far its problems, dilemmas and opportunities mirror
those which later biographers have faced, and it opens up modern
 PREFACE ix

biography by exposing it to something one can only call “the shock of the
old”. In this book the periods covered are sufficiently far apart as superfi-
cially almost to have lost sight of one another. The first stretches from the
fifth century BCE to the second century CE and covers Graeco-Roman
biography, the Christian gospels and early lives of the saints; the second
covers the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth (and to a lesser extent
twenty-first) centuries. The range is deliberate, since I am endeavouring to
think outside the box.
Throughout I have adopted the dual perspectives of an academic critic
and an active author of lives: someone who wishes to conduct an argu-
ment, but also someone who wishes to tell a story. With an eye to a dra-
matic opening, the biographer in me has chosen for his narrative curtain
raiser a gory assassination in Paris in 1791 so as to demonstrate how one
particular passage in a classical author was able to incite political murder
fifteen centuries after it was written. Then I lead through a documented
discussion of issues raised by ancient life-writing for students of the classics
to a sequence of chapters in which I introduce non-classicist readers to
Plutarch, Suetonius, Procopius, the Christian evangelists and early writers
of saints’ lives. The purpose of these chapters is to inform the non-­classicists
among my readers who these writers were, when and where they lived,
what they wrote, to what extent they can be thought of as biographers and
what is the critical consensus concerning them. Having provided this nec-
essary and varied background (which I need to do in some detail, for my
reader’s sake), I then turn to the impact of ancient life-writing on nine-
teenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century biography and, in the conclu-
sion, on modern fiction and film. This structure is not entirely conventional,
but it is deliberate.
The historical scope involved in this exercise is a mite ambitious but it
is necessary and, I hope, salutary. During the modern period (i.e., at least
since the end of the First World War and the elegant coup de foudre of
Lytton Strachey) we have somehow got used to a misleading and fore-
shortened view of the history of biography. A revealing expression of it
may be found in Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Art of Biography” from her
posthumously published collection The Death of A Moth (1942).
“Biography”, Woolf claimed, “compared with the arts of poetry and fic-
tion, is a young art. Interest in ourselves and in other people’s lives is a late
development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in
England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private
x PREFACE

people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography full grown and
hugely prolific.”
Wonderful author and critic though Woolf was, her very incisiveness
could at times mislead her. Woolf’s generation—which was also the gen-
eration of Strachey—was convinced that it had discovered biography anew,
an illusion similar to the one which causes generation after generation to
believe that it has discovered sex. Her essay was left unrevised at her death;
had she lived she might have toned down her generalisations about one of
the oldest of literary arts. Curiosity about the twists and turns of individual
nature is older than the Parthenon. It is the contention of the present
book, moreover, that the history of biographical writing has been
extended, continuous and self-referential. There exists a long-standing
biographical tradition, though it is not customary to call it by that name.
Biographers have for centuries learned from each other, echoed or else
reacted against one another: exercised and received what in the consider-
ation of other literary genres is commonly known as “influence”.
Whichever way they approach their task, all biographers possess a com-
mon starting line. There exists a shared biographical question, or perhaps
set of questions. How exactly does one relate the story of a given life—
especially another’s life—with justice, candour, freshness and flair? In what
order should a life be told? On whose evidence should one draw? Is “oral”
evidence as reliable as written? For whom is one undertaking this task, and
to what end? Should recorded lives serve as examples, either encouraging
or cautionary, to others? To what extent, to render the life described more
vivid or meaningful in the telling, is one entitled to tinker with the facts?
What are facts in any case? What is truth, and what is falsehood? Should
biography reflect all shades of society and opinion, all classes, professions,
both (or now all) genders, all religious or political creeds, all types of
behaviour? Should one aim to instruct, to amuse or to provoke? These are
dilemmas that faced Plutarch and Suetonius in their time as surely as they
faced Woolf in hers, and Holmes in his. The challenges involved in biog-
raphy are perennial, and the answers, if not fixed and finite, are at least
recognisably recurrent. If biography from diverse periods can profitably be
compared, it is at least partly because its practitioners are all doing the
same kind of thing, and facing the same array of problems.
Though there are common challenges, there are and have been various
solutions. In my survey of the ancient field I go so far as to suggest a four-­
fold paradigm: biography as representation (in Chap. 3); biography as
censure (in Chap. 4); biography as persuasion (in Chap. 5) and biography
 PREFACE xi

as inner drama (in Chap. 6). I have chosen these four archetypes not only
because they seem to me to exhaust the schools of ancient biography
addressed but because they recur in later biography, sometimes in combi-
nation. Nowadays we seemingly live in an age of censure: as my account of
nineteenth-century biography in Chap. 7 shows, it has not always
been thus.
The discussion of these problems has, it appears to me, very often been
held back by unavailing short cuts. Questions of definition, of course, are
inevitable. A recurrent bugbear, however, has been that those who con-
cern themselves with these issues have too often started out with a ready-­
made rule of thumb, sometimes culled from a dictionary, which they have
then attempted to apply lock stock and barrel to the particular biography
or group of biographies in which they are interested. What they seem to
be looking for is a set of rules which they can then apply to the text or texts
in hand to see whether or not they comply. Yet, as Hermione Lee has
emphatically demonstrated, while a number of rules are customarily
adduced, the principal and overriding rule is that, in very many of the
most interesting biographies—ancient or modern—all or most of these are
broken. A far more constructive approach is to adjust the rules to the
plenitude of examples available and to expand our definitions to suit them.
Better to take a close look at the way in which classical or modern biogra-
phies, whether of men or women, soldiers, monarchs, saints or sinners,
crooks and/or politicians, or of Jesus Christ, recount these lives, and to
adjust our notions of biography accordingly.
Age answers to age. Throughout ancient biography moments occur
that take us aback with the appearance of what we might call modernity.
One such occurs towards the end of an eight-volume life of Apollonius of
Tyana, a neo-Pythagorean sage of the first century AD, written in the fol-
lowing century by Lucius Flavius Philostratus, one of the most versatile
authors of the Hellenistic world. Apollonius is revisiting Rome several
years after an earlier episode in which he niftily escaped the clutches of the
emperor Nero. This time his opponent is the new emperor Domitian, an
unscrupulous bully with a reputation for persecuting Christians amongst
others. Domitian wants Apollonius out of the way, so arraigns him before
the court on a trumped-up charge of wizardry. On the morning of the
trial, Philostratus invites us to eavesdrop on the tetchy Emperor as he
rustles through his papers in preparation for what he hopes will be a defini-
tive and damning case:
xii PREFACE

Let us now repair to the law court to listen to the sage pleading his cause,
for it is already sunrise and the door is open to receive the celebrities. And
the companions of the Emperor say that they have taken no food that day
because, I imagine, he was so absorbed in examining the documents of the
case. For they say that he was holding in his hand a roll of writing of some
sort, sometimes reading it with anger, and sometimes more calmly. And we
must needs figure him as one who was angry with the law for having invented
such as thing as courts of justice.

Here is a sort of verisimilitude, a graphic fly-on-the-wall vividness we

might associate with the cinema or with courtroom dramas on television
or Netflix (“Cut to the courtroom; subdued hum of voices; judge evi-
dently agitated and distressed”). The apparent familiarity of the scene of
course tells us more about ourselves—our hunger for life in the raw, our
resentment of authority, our appetite for legal conflict—than it does about
Philostratus. Nonetheless, the seeming recognition of a flicker from every-
day life demonstrates one of the many ways in which the biographical
writings of the ancients appeal to us. Our response is part of the story.
The passage quoted here is quite unlike anything else in the Life of
Apollonius of Tyana. The use of the present tense, the invitation to the
reader to pry into a semi-enclosed world of official procedure and then the
turbulent mind of one of the chief actors mark it out as a departure from
the chronological and dialectic modes in which the remainder of the nar-
rative is couched. Philostratus is trying out a new trick.
Biography involves a lot of preparatory sweat and toil, straining after
elusive facts, but the end result is always an art form. Being art, it is experi-
mental. All biographers, whether ancient or modern, take risks, involve
themselves in acts of daring, but so do we when reading them. Biography
is not a closed form nor does it succumb easily to definitions. This open-
ness is something we associate with our more adventurous contempo-
raries, but it is equally a feature of antiquity. This is another reason why it
is profitable to consider ancient and modern biography side by side.

Charlbury, UK Robert Fraser

Good Friday, 2020
 Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to a number of former teachers whose interests lay

across ancient and modern literature and who encouraged me early on to
think about connections between the two. Prominent among these were
Anthony Nuttall, a scholar equally at home with the Graeco-Roman clas-
sics, Shakespeare and twentieth-century writing, and David Daiches who
wrote about the modern novel amongst many other things but who long
ago had done his doctoral work at Balliol on the Bible, bringing to its
study a rich knowledge of Hebrew, Latin and Greek. “A clerk ther was of
Oxenford also”: Stephen Medcalf who features in my memory as the clos-
est the mid-twentieth century could supply to a medieval friar. A few for-
mer colleagues from Cambridge and elsewhere gave me the benefit of
their wisdom and learning. I have in mind Professor Adrian Poole who has
published on connections between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy and
the late Jeremy Maule, whose curious knowledge spanned the seventeenth
century and Medieval Latin. More recently Dr Jeremy Paterson, archae-
ologist and ancient historian, and Georgios Terezakis, cicerone and church
cantor, served as guides to Plutarch’s stomping grounds of Chaeronea and
Delphi. My appreciation of biography as a calling and form was greatly
enhanced by conversations with Jenny Uglow, Robert Crawford, Michael
Holroyd and Zachary Leader. I should like to thank Palgrave Macmillan’s
anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, Clare Brand and Max
Saunders, editors of the Life-Writing Series, for their understanding and
imagination and the firm’s in-house editors, especially Lina Aboujieb and
Rebecca Hinsley, for their patience and forbearance. I hereby salute my
son Benjo Fraser and Ms Maria and Ms Sophia Thanasi for showing me

xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

what the Greek classics may mean to a younger generation, and to the
Thanasi family in general for their hospitality in Albania and Athens.
The staff of the London Library, the British Library and the Bodleian
Library were unfailingly courteous and helpful. The finishing touches
were put to this book during the coronavirus emergency of 2020, when all
of these facilities had to close their doors. Under these trying circum-
stances I was much obliged to the London Library for posting volumes
out to me. I also learned to appreciate the excellent services of AbeBooks,
the resources of which appeared to be inexhaustible. I owe an immense
debt, both emotional and stylistic, to the book’s dedicatee, biographer as
it happens of Pausanias’s most fetching twentieth-century translator. All of
these people and institutions have helped me along the way. Any faults
that remain are my responsibility alone.
 Contents

1 Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age

of Revolution  1

2 Ancient Biographers and Modern Classicists:

“What Is Truth?” 37

3 Biography as Representation: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives 73

4 Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius 99

5 Biography as Persuasion: The Christian Gospels129

6 Biography as Inner Drama: Athanasius’s Life of Antony163

7 Heroic Biography: Carlyle & Co189

8 Caustic Biography: Strachey & Co.221

9 Conclusion: “Beauty Is Terror”255

Index265

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography

in an Age of Revolution

Who does not know David’s painting of Marat in the bath? Done from the
life—or rather from the death—it depicts the prolific author, one-time
physician (MD, St Andrews) and now revolutionary journalist and self-­
styled “friend of the people” just a few hours after his assassination by the
twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Corday in July 1793. Marat is lying on his
side, a towel around his head, a quill in his dangling right hand. (Marat’s
works included a Treatise on Light, An Essay on Slavery, and a helpful
work on the treatment of gonorrhoea.) Before him is an improvised desk,
a cloth-covered board on which he wrote while steeping himself in a
medicinal salve of his own concoction. As a qualified and somewhat opin-
ionated doctor he had decided that the skin complaint contracted in the
sewers of Paris while hiding from his political opponents necessitated these
ablutions for much of the day. In his left hand he holds a letter of intro-
duction that Corday had brought under the pretext of exposing the ene-
mies of the government. His face is so serene that he might be sleeping.
There is more than a touch of the Christ from Michelangelo’s Pietà about
him. His skin is smooth and white: no sign of the ravages of skin disease
there. The light source is high up to his left and, again, it seems a sort of
celestial beam. Here is a fit object for veneration as much as for lament: a
martyr to the French Revolution then a mere four years old. A revolution-
ary icon, no less.
What are the messages implicit in this image? Since, depend on it,
Jacques-Louis David, an associate of Robespierre and a vocal member of

© The Author(s) 2020 1

R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_1
2 R. FRASER

the Jacobin Club, intended his work to be didactic, and thus—despite

earlier misgivings about this eccentric intellectual entertained by the
Jacobin leadership—was it immediately received. That Marat died unjustly,
certainly. That he was a thinker, a scholar, a hero probably, a martyr cer-
tainly, maybe even a secular saint. But it is the sculptural, clean-limned,
neo-classical style of the picture that commands attention just as surely as
its subject. Nineteen years earlier, David, then a student at the Académie
royale, had won the academy’s coveted Prix de Rome with a depiction of
a scene from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius: “Eristratus Discovering the
Causes of Antiochus’ Disease”. (Antiochus was in love with his mother-in-­
law, who had already borne him a child.) It had been David’s fourth
attempt, having failed a third time the previous year with an equally lurid
scene from Suetonius’s “Life of the Emperor Nero”: the suicide of the
philosopher Seneca (also featuring a bath, but this time a foot-bath). The
authorities at the Académie, naturally, chose the subject prescribed each
year. Since 1775, when Louis XV1 had appointed Charles-Claude Flahaut
de la Billaderie, Comte d’Angeviller as the new director with the instruc-
tion to found a new school of historical painting, preference had been
given to classical themes.1 In David’s case, this had often involved hunting
for suitable sources in ancient biography. His eventual victory would far
from exhaust his preoccupation the classics. After spending four years in
Rome, he had painted a succession of episodes from Graeco-Roman litera-
ture. “The Oath of the Horatii” of 1784 drew on a scene from Livy; “The
Dedication of the Eagles” copied images that the young David had
observed on Trajan’s Column in the Forum. “The Death of Socrates” in
1787 derived its story from Plato, while in 1789, the year of the outbreak
of the Revolution, “The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons”
had extended a dramatic episode from the life of a founder of the Roman
republic who features both in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and in Plutarch’s
“Life of Poplicola”. In 1730 Voltaire had written a play about this particu-
lar Brutus, Lucius Junius Brutus, a remote ancestor of the more famous
Marcus Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar. When revived in 1790, it gave
rise to a fanatical wave of Republican enthusiasm and even a hairdo, la
coiffure Brutus, copied from the curly crop sported by the actor who had
played one of the fated sons. When in June 1820 an aspiring young painter
asked the mature David how to choose a subject for a new canvas, the

1
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knoft,
1989), 171.
 1 PARIS IN PARALLEL: CLASSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION 3

veteran master replied in three words “Feuillez votre Plutarque”: “Browse

through your Plutarch”.2 Understandably so, since it had been the lives of
those designated, in Bishop Amyot’s sixteenth-century French translation
of Plutarch, “hommes illustres Grecs et Romains” which had provided the
most dependable source for his paintings.3 Which brings us back again to
Marat and his young murderess Charlotte Corday.
Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont had been born in 1768 in the
village of Saint-Saturnin-des-Limoges in the commune of Écorches near
Caen in Normandy. Her people were decayed gentry, royalist in sympathy,
who had seen better days. The playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–1684),
as she was only too aware, was a remote ancestor. He had drawn several of
his plots from classical sources, frequently highlighting the dynamic role
of his women characters. His first tragedy to be staged, Medéé (1635), had
taken its story from Euripides, and it had stressed Medea’s plight and
decisiveness. The storyline of La Mort de Pompeé (1642) showcased the
would-be assassin Cornelia: it was derived from Plutarch, who had depicted
her as a geometer, philosopher and expert player on the lyre. The plot of
Oedipe, the Sun King’s favourite among his works, came from Sophocles.
One of his last plays Tite et Bérénice (1670) drew on the Lives of the Twelve
Caesars by Suetonius and vividly evoked the desolation of Berenice, the
Jewish queen, who was banished from Rome by the Emperor to placate
the xenophobia of the populace.4
So Corday had grown up beneath an ample shade of literature, much of
it ancient and biographical, which she was disposed to read in a proto-­
feminist light. She had extended this debt to the classics in early adoles-
cence. After her mother and elder sister died, her grief-stricken father had
sent her to the convent of L’Abbaye des Dames in Caen, in the library of
which she discovered works by Voltaire, Rousseau and Plutarch. Rousseau,
as she would have read in his Confessions, had enjoyed an enthusiasm for
Plutarch’s Lives as a young man.5 Since there is no evidence that she had
been taught Greek, Corday must have read them in the sixteenth-century
translation by Bishop Jacques Amyot, rendered from a manuscript in the
Vatican. It was an internationally famous version on which even the
2
Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), 182
and passim.
3
See footnote 19 below.
4
Pierre Corneille, Théâtre Complet texte prefacé et annoté par Pierre Lièvre; edition com-
plétée par Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
5
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), i, 47.
4 R. FRASER

Englishman Sir Thomas North had relied for his translation of 1579–1603.
(North knew no more Greek than did Shakespeare who, consequently,
had taken all of his Plutarch-derived plots from him.)
Corday had been twenty-one, and still at L’Abbaye des Dames, when
the Revolution erupted. Two years afterwards, she left the Convent and
lodged with her aunt and cousin in the centre of the town, where she
imbibed a local, and distinctively provincial, view of national politics. She
had never been to Paris, where the revolution was fast adopting a more
extreme course.6 The local newspaper covered the whirlpooling events:
the Tennis Court Oath, the calling of the Estates-General, the splitting of
the Third Estate into factions. Notably among the cliques was La
Montagne (The Mountain, thus named since they sat at a high bench)
including the vocal Jacobin Club which championed the cause of the
urban proletariat and insisted on the guillotining of the King. Against
them were ranged the Girondins, provincial based, who counselled less
desperate measures. Charlotte was strongly influenced by the Girondins,
who were very active in Caen. Her aunt’s house where she now lodged
overlooked l’intendance, their headquarters in town, and she had met
some of their ring-leaders, notably Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux. She was
just twenty-two when news arrived of the execution of the King and
Queen in the newly renamed Place de la Révolution, previously la Place
Louis XV, now and ironically La Place de la Concorde. Though Charlotte
had grown up in a royalist family, she now regarded herself as firmly repub-
lican. The Girondins offered a middle way, epitomised for her by the wife
of one of their leaders, Madame de Roland, born Manon Philipion7 whose
political education, like Corday’s, had owed much to Plutarch. At the age
of nine she had carried a copy of his works to Mass each Sunday, and later
wrote “It was at that moment that I date the impression of ideas that were
to make me a republican”.8 Both women were very conscious that the bal-
ance of power in the Convention in Paris was shifting in favour of Les
Montagnards. Robespierre was their ring-leader, Marat their mouthpiece:
his newspaper L’Ami du Peuple was easily to be acquired in the streets
of Caen.

6
Michel Corday, Charlotte Corday tr. E. F. Buckley (London: Thornton Butterworth,
1931), 103.
7
Chantal Thomas, “Les exemples de Charlotte Corday et de Madame Roland”, Po&Sie 49
(Bicentenaire de, 1789), 1989, 82–91.
8
Madame Roland, Lettres ed. Claude Perroud (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1802), 512.
 1 PARIS IN PARALLEL: CLASSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION 5

The climax to the story is related by Jean Epois in his L’Affaire Corday/
Marat: Prélude à la Terreur.9 In the second week of July 1793 Corday told
her widowed father that she was going to pay a visit to England. Instead,
on Tuesday 9th, her cousin saw her off on the Paris diligence. As she
entered the carriage she held a copy—presumably an octavo, one-volume
edition—of the Amyot Plutarch to allay the tedium of the two-day jour-
ney. At five o’ clock on the afternoon of the 11th she alighted in the capi-
tal. Then she and her Plutarch checked in at the Hôtel de Providence in
the Rue des Augustins, where she slept for fifteen solid hours. On Friday
morning she composed an Address to the French People, arguing that she
was acting in the interests of Res Publica, the Public Thing, la République.
She spent the rest of the day, in the words of Jules Michelet, “quietly read-
ing that Bible to personal fortitude, Plutarch’s Lives”.10 The following
morning she purchased a 5 inch kitchen knife from a shop near the Palais
Royal. She had intended to confront the Friend of the People at the
National Assembly. Instead, learning that his skin complaint nowadays
confined him to his home in the Cordeliers neighbourhood, she presented
herself at his house, only to be turned away by Marat’s sister-in-law,
Cathérine. That evening, having sent another note pleading her pure,
revolutionary intentions, she turned up again at the flat, whereupon Marat
called out that she should be admitted. She handed over to him a list of
Girondin contacts in Caen. Marat promised her that these people would
promptly be guillotined. Then she drew the knife from her dress and
struck him through the chest.
She knew what her punishment would be. The following day she wrote
to Barbaroux from the Abbaye prison, stating “Those who disapprove of
my actions will be pleased to see me at rest in the Elysian Fields with
Brutus and some few of the ancients”.11 Did she mean Brutus the founder
of the Roman republic or his notorious descendant, the assassin? Both
were Republic icons. In front of the tribunal she defended her actions, re-­
iterating her apologia from her Address, arguing that she had acted in the

9
Jean Epois, L’Affaire Corday-Marat: Prelude à la Terreur (Paris: FeniXX réédition
numérique, 1980), passim.
10
Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la Révolution (Paris: Editions Adolphe Delahays, 1854),
Chap. 8.
11
Letter headed “Charlotte Corday à Barbaroux. Aux prisons de l’Abbaye dans la ci-devant
chambre de Brissot, le second jour de la préparation de la paix, quoted in Couet-Gironville,
Charlotte Corday. Décapitée A Paris, Le 17 Juillet 1793 ou Mémoire Pour Servir à l’Histoire de
la Vie de Cette Femme Célèbre (Paris: chez le Citoyen Gilbert, 1796), 140.
6 R. FRASER

interests of the Republic, which she hoped to save from the extremes of
bitter men. She was Marcus Brutus, risen against an impish, pock-­
marked Caesar.
Corday was guillotined on July 17 and ever since has divided opinion.
When the tide turned against the Enlightenment during the nineteenth
century, the poet Lamartine dubbed her “l’ange de l’assassinat”, the angel
of assassination. She became a sort of counter-revolutionary Jeanne d’Arc.
In the post-modern twentieth century, her intervention was surrealistically
and gruesomely staged in Peter Weiss’s morbid Marat/Sade play in which
Danton’s murder was re-enacted by the inmates of a lunatic asylum under
the direction of The Marquis de Sade. Filmed under the direction of Peter
Brook, it was the perfect illustration of the principles of Theatre of Cruelty
as further explained in Brook’s book The Empty Space. The result however
told one more about the disturbed mind of central Europe in the post-war
period than about the French Revolution, the versatile and afflicted Marat,
the determined and clear-sighted Corday, or indeed the libertine and mas-
turbatory Marquis. The prevailing impression conveyed by Charlotte
Corday’s behaviour at the time remains one of resignation and calm delib-
eration. She was very conscious of what she was doing and fully prepared
to face the consequences. In the hours before the tumbril arrived to take
her to her place of execution, she caused her portrait to be painted, demure
and serious beneath her lace cap. Hers was an existential choice made with
neo-classical determination and grace (at least, as she perceived these qual-
ities). Her experience had prepared her for this sacrifice. But so, it should
be emphasised, had her reading of ancient lives.

The Last of the Romans

Revolutionary assassination was one public parallel to be derived from
reading of classical biography; a second was a political model of democracy
copied from the Romans, a third was paganism, a fourth was revolutionary
suicide. A fifth, eventually, was to be their seeming opposite:
counter-revolution.
Paganism was a side-effect of the de-Christianisation, and more specifi-
cally de-catholicisation, which the Revolution required in order to purge
itself of the remnants of royal and ecclesiastical control. Its prime progeni-
tor and hit-man was Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the twenty-eight-year-old
President of the Commune and a leading opponent of the Girondins, who
had changed his apostolic first name to Anaxagoras after the pre-Socratic
 1 PARIS IN PARALLEL: CLASSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION 7

philosopher whose views are set out in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles. Richard
Cobb has outlined the effects of the consequent secularisation, which
invariably took the form of a substitution of classical, mostly Roman, ste-
reotypes for traditional Catholic forms:

In May 1793 the Commune stopped the payment of clerical salaries and
publicly tried to prevent the public exercise of Catholicism. It closed the
churches in Paris and forced over 400 priests to abdicate. Chaumette
demanded that the former metropolitan church of Notre-Dame be re-­
consecrated to the cult of Reason. The Convention hastened to comply and
on 10 November a civic festival was held in the temple, its façade bearing the
words “To Philosophy”.12

One result of this alienation from—and obliteration of—every vestige of

l’ancien régime was the institution late in 1793 of the Republican Calendar.
It was devised by a committee of three headed by the mathematician
Charles-Gilbert Romme, who presented their findings to the Committee
of Public Instruction that September. With the help of the head gardener
from the Jardin des Plantes, the months were renamed along botanical
and meteorological lines, and each month was divided into three weeks of
ten days each. The traditional saints’ days gave way before commemora-
tions of great men of the past. December 25 became a feast for Newton.
This was the high tide of Jacobinism. By late 1794 the Jacobins were in
retreat. Marat’s body was disinterred from the Panthéon—where it had
replaced Mirabeau’s—dragged through the streets and chucked into a
common grave. On 29 Priarial of the sixth year of the Revolution (June
17, 1795, according to the old calendar), Romme and two comrade
Jacobins, Pierre-Amable Soubrany and Jean-Marie Goujon, were arraigned
on the orders of the Diréctoire. Condemned to the guillotine by a revolu-
tionary tribunal, the “last of the Montagnards” as they became known
elected instead to take their own lives on their way out of the courtroom.
With Victorian distaste, Thomas Carlyle later described the scene in The
French Revolution: A History: “Hearing the sentence, Goujon drew a
knife, struck it into his breast, passed it to his neighbour Romme; and fell
dead. Romme did the like; and another all-but did it: Roman dead rushing
on there, as in an electric chain, before your Bailiffs could intervene! The

12
Richard Cobb et al. The French Revolution: Voices from a momentous epoch 1789–1795
(London: Guild Publishing, 1988), 202.
8 R. FRASER

Guillotine had the rest.” “They”, concludes Carlyle, “were Ultimi

Romanorum”, the last of the Romans.13
Suicide had long been a talking point for the Enlightenment. There
were plenty of exempla in classical life-writing, especially in Plutarch’s
Lives. Marcus Brutus and Marcus Antonius, sworn enemies to one another,
had both fallen on their swords. The Church had anathemised the practice
so, partly for this reason, it had become fashionable action for intellectual
freethinkers to defend it. In 1777, in Edinburgh, that “Athens of the
North”, David Hume wrote an essay “Of Suicide” that remains in manu-
script since its publication was suppressed.14 His argument is simple, and
apparently derived from Christian, or more strictly Deistic, principles. All
occurrences are governed by divine law; suicide is an occurrence, and
therefore it too is divinely ordained. The cosmos is Lucretian and indiffer-
ent; it does not care. It follows that “the life of man is of no greater impor-
tance to the universe that that of an oyster”. It appears to have been a
matter of no account to Hume that the same argument might be used to
exonerate murder.
The philosopher Montesquieu, a few decades previously, had long
wrestled with this dilemma. In his Lettres persanes (1721) he had imagined
a flow of correspondence from two oriental visitors to the Paris of Louis
XV1. Writing to associates back in Isphahan, they report on the oddities
of western Christian society, among which is an entrenched prejudice
against self-destruction. In Letter 76, Usbek, who is writing to his friend
Ibben, inveighs against this prejudice, represented by him as a tyrannical
imposition on free will: “It appears to me today … that these statutes are
quite unfair. When weighed down with pain, misery or misunderstanding,
why do they stop me putting an end to my misfortunes and cruelly rob me
of a remedy that lies in my own hands.”15 As if to illustrate the point, the
work ends with the mass suicide, back in Isphahan, of most of the harem.
In his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence (1734) Montesquieu considers the frequency of suicide in
ancient Rome, drawing extensively on Plutarch, specifically the deaths of

13
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History [1837] (Oxford University Press,
1907), ii, 440. In Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, V. iii, the “last of the Romans” are Cassius and
Licinius, and the words in English are spoken by Marcus Brutus. In the singular, the Latin
phrase had been applied by Julius Caesar to Brutus himself.
14
David Hume, “Of Suicide”, National Library of Scotland Ms. 509.
15
Montesquieu, Oeuvres de Montesquieu avec Les Remarques des Divers Commentateurs et
Les Notes Inédites. Seul Edition Complète (Paris: D’Antoine Bavaux, 1825), 517.
 1 PARIS IN PARALLEL: CLASSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION 9

Brutus and Cato. “Several causes may be adduced for so general a custom
among the Romans as this of administering one’s own death”, he remarks,
“the progress of Stoicism which encouraged it; the institution of triumphs
and slavery, which made a number of great men reluctant to survive a
defeat; the advantage gained by those accused through disposing of their
own lives rather than submitting to an indictment that would sully their
reputation and cause their property to be seized; a subtle point of honour,
arguably more reasonable than that which prompts us to eviscerate a friend
for a mere gesture or word; lastly a grand pretext enabling each person to
complete the role he had played on the world’s stage, each man putting an
end to the part he played when and just as he chose”.16 In De l’esprit des
lois (1750), he remarks cryptically that, in contrast to the English, who
often seemed to top themselves irrationally, the Romans invariably pos-
sessed clear-sighted reasons why they thought it appropriate to take their
own lives.17
Suicide then was a socially conditioned act which changed its complex-
ion from one culture to another and between historical periods.
Montesquieu remains an outstanding early example of a cultural relativist.
By the 1790s, half a century later, when society and its laws were in a state
of dangerous flux, the way lay open for parallels with ancient Rome, on
which so much, aesthetically and politically, was now being modelled.
Brutus and Cato, it could be argued, had destroyed themselves in reaction
against the erosion of the Republic and the growing threat of despotism.
As in Paris the revolution grew more and more extreme, seemingly eating
its own children, eventually giving itself over to the control of a supremely
gifted tyrant, analogies with a Rome confronted with the menace of the
Caesars became increasingly uncomfortable and compelling. Romme’s
last recorded words, before he plunged in the knife, were “I die for the
Republic”.18

16
Montesquieu (1825), 419.
17
Montesquieu (1825), 370.
18
Jules Claretie, Les Derniers Montagnards: Histoire de l’Insurrection de Prairial An III
D’Après les Documents Originaux et Inédits (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1865). See also
Marc de Vissac, Un Conventionnel du Puy-de-Dôme: Romme le Montagnard (Clermond-
Ferrand: Dilhan-Vivès, 1883) and Gilbert Romme (1750–1795) et son temps Jean Ehrard and
Albert Sobeul eds. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966).
10 R. FRASER

Plutarch as a Textbook for Life

Taking one’s personal bearing from the writers of ancient lives was already
an established habit in France. In Biography and the Question of Literature
in France (2007), Ann Jefferson alludes to the “pragmatics” of biography,
the convention in accordance which early modern readers turned to
authors like Plutarch for models as to how to behave. These Greek and
Roman lives were held to be exemplary, fit objects for imitation. In sup-
port of this view Jefferson quotes Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Auxerre
(1513–1593), who had set out his purpose in rendering Plutarch into
French in the Preface to the first edition of his translation, published
between 1554 and 1560.19 Plutarch’s lives are worth perusing for a variety
of readers, Amyot had declared, but principally “because [examples] do
not only declare what it to be done but also worke a desire to do it, as well
in respect of a certain natural inclination which all men have to follow
examples, as also for the beautie of virtue, which is of such power, that
wheresoever she is seene, she maketh herself to be loved and liked”.20 Two
years later, much the same argument was voiced by Cruserius in his Latin
translation of 1561. As Jefferson insists, this repeated claim for the benefi-
cial potential of reading the ancient lives was in conformity with what
Plutarch himself had twice stated to be his objective: once in his life of
Pericles and once in the life of Aemilius. Both of whom, one might add,
are distinguished in his accounts by their almost total lack of personal
blemish.
So persuasive a view is this that it can blind the modern reader to just
how odd, over-determined and in some ways lopsided, a view of the whole
run of Plutarch’s Lives it actually represents. There are fifty lives in all, and
many of them are far from exemplary or blameless. These mini-­biographies
are not self-sufficient entities but paired—one Roman against one Greek.
What unites or divides the pairs is just as often the weakness or vices of the
individuals concerned as their strengths. Coriolanus and Alcibiades, for
example, are combined because, misled by public admiration, they each
betrayed their country. Demetrius and Anthony “were insolent in prosper-
ity, and abandoned themselves to luxurious enjoyments”. Phocion and

19
Plutarque de Charonée, Les vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains comparéés l’une à
l’autre translatées de Grec en François par Monsieur Jacques Amyot Abbé de Bellozane, Eveque
d”Auxerre etc. (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1554–1560.)
20
Anne Jefferson, Biography and The Question of Literature in France (Oxford University
Press), 32.
 1 PARIS IN PARALLEL: CLASSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION 11

Cato the Younger were self-willed, stubborn and humourless. Themistocles

and Camillus forfeited the trust of their fellow citizens, and both ended in
exile or disgrace. In other cases, the burden of the comparison lies in the
superiority of one partner over the other. Cato is boastful; Aristides is not.
Cato’s is profligate and ruins his descendants; Aristides is careful and hands
on his wealth. Nicias’s fortune was got by honest means, Crassius’s was
gained through usury. Demosthenes’s oratory was direct and unstudied,
“not smelling of the lamp”, while Cicero’s was deliberate and showy.
Dion’s rebellion against the tyrant Dionysus II was justified, while Brutus’s
disloyalty to Caesar was peevish: “It was not the same thing for the Sicilians
to be freed from Dionysus as for the Romans to be freed from Caesar”.
And so on and so forth.
From the reader’s point of view, the inventory of virtues and vices
involved in these parallels is frequently less striking than the continuity
between them. In practice, as with Alexander the Great and Caesar, the
failings of the individuals concerned often represent the flip-side of their
virtues. It is this consistency within disparity, the psychological laws under-
lying and governing the contradictions of character, that overall seems to
interest Plutarch most.
Once he had been translated from the rare Greek manuscripts, this is
certainly the impression made by Plutarch on his Renaissance readers. Of
no one was this truer than the author who, more than any other, popula-
rised Plutarch among the French. In 1580, a couple of decades after
Amyot’s influential translation, we find the philosophical writer Michel
Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) lauding its excellences in lavish
terms in his Essay “A demain les affaires”. Montaigne confesses his igno-
rance of Greek, but then praises the late Bishop and translator, not simply
for the purity and directness of his style (qualities which Montaigne is
anxious to emulate) but for opening his eyes to the wisdom to be found in
the Lives which he recommends to his own readers as “nostre bréviaire”:
“Ignorant people like us would have been lost if that book had not brought
us up out of the mire: thanks to it, we now dare to live and write—and the
ladies teach the dominies; it is our breviary”.
Montaigne cites Plutarch no less than five hundred times in the Essais;
if Sarah Bakewell is right indeed, The Moralia may even have suggested
the form the Essais took. He cites him on the ambivalence of weeping,21

21
“Comme nous pleurons et rions d’une même chose”, Essais, Book 1. Ch, xxxviii, citing
Plutarch’s “Life of Timoleon”.
12 R. FRASER

on Latin style22 and on the subjectivity of apprehension.23 He cites him on

the universal obligation of benevolence,24 on the detection of false flat-
tery25 and on overlooking the minor faults of the great.26 He cites him on
the necessity of self-discipline,27 on the benefit of experiencing opposite
extremes28 and on the obligation to honour the dead.29 He is most sensi-
tive to him when his observations are most paradoxical, most open to the
flow and counter-flow of life. Manifestly, Plutarch and Montaigne took to
one another: something polymathic, almost polymorphic, in the Greek
author’s temperament clearly appealed. Montaigne’s Plutarch is an author
less of precepts than of curiosities, odd insights and off-the-wall observa-
tions. In general, he is as interested in Plutarch the psychologist as in
Plutarch the moralist.
Take, for example, a theme of some relevance to Corday, Romme and
the “last of the Montagnards”, and also to the young Napoleon: stoicism.
I mean stoicism in the practical sense of the term—fortitude, or patience
under duress—rather than in its strictly philosophical sense, of which
Plutarch writes more specifically in the Moralia. Though Plutarch does
not always the word as such, he often brings the subject up, especially in
relation to a clutch of lives depicting eminent men of Sparta. In these
cases, Plutarch is writing many centuries after the deaths of those con-
cerned, whom he may in consequence have over-idealised.
It is to Plutarch, more than any other authority, that we owe our idea
of Spartan restraint. In Moralia he treats such fortitude as a virtue, as
when in De Ira he praises the emperor Nero for his self-control when
learning that an expensive octagonal tent he had ordered has been lost at
sea. (Seneca, his tutor, had advised him under such circumstances to

22
“In “Que Philosopher, c’est apprendre a mourir”, Essais, Book 1, Ch xx, citing The Life
of Cicero.
23
In “Que le gout des biens et des maux depend en bonne partie d’opinion que nous
en avons”, Essais, Book 1, ch. xiv” citing The Life of Brutus.
24
In “De la cruauté”, Essais, Book 11. Ch, xxxviii, citing Plutarch’s “Life of Timoleon”.
25
In “Apologie de Raimond Sebond”, Essais, Book ii, ch xii, citing “Quomodo adulator
ab amico. internoscator” (“How to distinguish flattery from friendship”) in Plutarch’s
Moralia.
26
From “De plus excellents hommes”, Essais, Book 11, ch. xxxvi, citing “The Life of
Alexander”.
27
In “De la vanité”, Essais, Bk 111, ch. ix, citing “The Life of Solon”.
28
In “De l’expérience”, Essais, Bk 111 ch. xiii, citing “The Life of Philemon”.
29
In “De l’expérience”, citing “The Life of Pompey” (and quoting Amyot’s translation),
and “The Life of Julius Caesar”.
 1 PARIS IN PARALLEL: CLASSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION 13

remain calm.) In the Lives, and especially the Spartan lives, by contrast,
self-control is more often treated as a form of human behaviour objec-
tively observed, irrespective of moral or didactic comment.
Montaigne mentions two examples of such forbearance in his essay
“Défence de Sénèque et de Plutarque”. Here Montaigne is protecting
Plutarch’s reputation against criticisms levelled a few years earlier by the
jurist Jean Bodin in Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. Bodin
had taken Plutarch to task for his credulity and lack of realism when por-
traying self-control in others. In the “Life of Lycurgus” Plutarch tells of a
Spartan lad who allowed a stolen fox cub he had hidden under his tunic to
eviscerate him rather than owning up to his theft. In the same life he men-
tions another Spartan boy serving as a thurifer at the altar of Diana who
refused to cry out when a cinder from the smouldering incense ran down
his sleeve and burned his whole forearm.
In reprising these anecdotes, it is clear that Montaigne is far more inter-
ested in the reflexes demonstrated by these young stalwarts than in the
morality of the tasks they are engaged in. One is a thief, the other a dili-
gent altar boy. In Montaigne’s eyes (and, I would argue in Plutarch’s too),
what is most interesting is that they are equally obstinate or brave, these
two mental states being akin. Montaigne expands on this point by adduc-
ing experiences within his personal knowledge. Some of these involve
people who have refused to abjure their religious or political convictions
under torture, as on the rack; others are instances of mere petulant cussed-
ness. In Gascony especially it appears, “I have known hundreds of
women … who would rather bite into red-hot iron than abandon an opin-
ion they had conceived in anger”. Bearing in mind the thoughts about the
necessity of controlling one’s rage expressed by his mentor Plutarch in De
Ira, it is doubtful that Montaigne regards the intransigence of these
women folk as being in any way exemplary, since ironically their anger is
the source of their self-control. They are motivated by pique, where those
in his earlier example are supported by faith. For Montaigne, however,
they illustrate the same psychological law: whether from pride, from deter-
mination or from cussedness, people under stress do not like to give up.
This is the multivalent humanist vision of Plutarch inherited by
Shakespeare, who draws on him in all three of his Roman plays and Timon
of Athens. The protagonists of each of these tense dramas are bitterly torn:
Caesar between duty and ambition, Brutus between loyalty and liberty,
Antony between discipline and desire, Cleopatra between Egypt and
Rome, Coriolanus between fealty and arrogance, Timon between
14 R. FRASER

munificence and spleen. Shakespeare conjures up his characters, he does

not judge them. For all their Plutarchian freighting, there is no absolute
right and no wrong in any of these plays.
Despite this, a political reading of these Shakespearean dramas is always
available for use, and critics and directors across the ages have not been
slow to take advantage, including in France. If James Shapiro is right,
Julius Caesar, first produced in 1599, served as a focus for the conflicting
responses to the Earl of Essex’s botched campaign in Ireland—where one
of its commanders was Sir Thomas North—and his insubordination
towards Queen Elizabeth (who had just finished Englishing Plutarch’s De
Curiositate).30 In 1735, drawing on Plutarch, Suetonius and Shakespeare,
Voltaire created a version of the story in which Marcus Brutus, aware that
he is Caesar’s son, struggles with filial affection before ridding the republic
of the peril posed by his dad. (In this version of events there is no comeup-
pance, and Brutus does not die.) In the 1960s, Julius Nyerere, President
of independent Tanzania, wrote a Swahili version of Shakespeare’s play
that converted it into an anti-colonial putsch. Between 1951 and 1953
Berthold Brecht re-worked Coriolanus as a play about the class struggle.
It is not difficult to turn Timon of Athens into an anti-capitalist fable.
The original plays outstrip any such loaded understanding. Their mes-
sage, insofar as they have one, has to do with the complex and irreducible
nature of human affairs. Of this there are few better examples than their
treatment of two themes of much concern to the French revolutionaries:
the action of suicide and the idea of nobility, for his presentation of both
of which the playwright is indebted to Plutarch. The most famous suicide
in all of Shakespeare is Marcus Brutus’s after the Battle of Philippi in Act
V, Scene V of Julius Caesar. The source here is Plutarch’s Life of Brutus,
which gives us two alternative versions of the same event. This is how in
1579 North had rendered them, translating from Amyot. Facing defeat at
the hands of the triumvirate, Brutus takes his old school mate Strato
aside. Then:

He came as neere to him as he coulde, and taking his sword by the hilts with
both his hands and falling downe up on the poynte of it, ran him selfe
through. Others say, that not he, but Strato (at his request) held the sword,

30
James Shapiro, 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber,
2005), 182–92.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of A voice from the
inner world
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Title: A voice from the inner world

Author: A. Hyatt Verrill

Illustrator: Frank R. Paul

Release date: December 11, 2023 [eBook #72379]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: E. P. Co., Inc, 1927

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A VOICE

FROM THE INNER WORLD ***
 The Voice from the Inner World
Second Honorable Mention in the $500 Prize Cover Contest
Awarded to A. Hyatt Verrill, New York City,
for “A Voice from the Inner World.”

... And it was evident that the others were equally afraid of me ... they
stood regarding me with an odd mixture of wonder and terror on their
 huge faces.

The Voice from the Inner World

by A. Hyatt Verrill
Author of “The Plague of the Living Dead,” “Through the Crater’s Rim,” etc.

The author of this story, well known to our readers, in submitting his prize
story, adopts a treatment entirely different from that of practically all the
rest of the winners. He has submitted a tale so characteristic and so
original that it holds your interest by sheer strength. That there should be a
cannibalistic race of females somewhere in our world is, after all, not
impossible nor improbable. There are still cannibals at large, at the present
writing, and probably will be for many generations to come. While the story
has its gruesome moments, it also contains good science and Mr. Verrill
certainly knows how to treat his subject and get the most from it. As a
“different” sort of story, we highly recommend it to your attention.

On the eighteenth of October, the New York papers reported the

appearance of a remarkable meteor which had been seen in mid-
Pacific, and the far more startling announcement that it was feared
that the amazing celestial visitor had struck and destroyed a
steamship.
“At eleven-fifteen last evening,” read the account in the Herald,
“the Panama-Hawaiian Line steamship Chiriqui reported by radio the
appearance of an immense meteor which suddenly appeared above
the horizon to the southeast, and which increased rapidly in size and
brilliance. Within ten minutes from the time the phenomenon was
first sighted, it appeared as a huge greenish sphere of dazzling
brilliance high in the sky, and heading, apparently, directly for the
Chiriqui. Almost at the same time as reported by the Chiriqui, several
other ships, among them the Miners and Merchants Line Vulcan,
and the Japanese liner Fujiama Maru also reported the meteorite,
although they were more than one thousand miles apart and
equidistant from the position of the Chiriqui.
“In the midst of a sentence describing the appearance of the
rapidly approaching meteor, the Chiriqui’s wireless message came to
an abrupt end, and all attempts to get into further communication
with her operator failed. The other vessels reported that a
scintillating flash, like an explosion, was followed by the meteor’s
disappearance, and it is feared that the immense aerolite may have
struck the Chiriqui, and utterly destroyed her with all on board. As no
S O S has been received, and as the ship’s radio broke off with the
words: ‘It is very close and the sea is as bright as day. Below the
immense mass of green fire are two smaller spheres of intense red.
It is so near we can hear it roaring like a terrific wind. It is headed—’
It is probable that the vessel, if struck, was instantly destroyed. It has
been suggested, however, that it is possible that the meteor or
meteors were accompanied by electrical phenomena which may
have put the Chiriqui’s wireless apparatus out of commission and
that the ship may be safe.”
Later editions of the press announced that no word had been
received from the Chiriqui, that other ships had reported the meteor,
and that two of these had radioed that the aerolite, instead of
exploding, had been seen to continue on its way and gradually
disappear beyond the horizon. These reports somewhat allayed the
fears that the Chiriqui had been struck by the meteor, and prominent
scientists expressed the opinion that the supposed explosion had
been merely an optical illusion caused by its passage through some
dense or cloudy layer of air. They also quoted numerous cases of
immense meteors having been seen by observers over immense
distances, and declared their belief that the aerolite had not reached
the earth, but had merely passed through the outer atmosphere.
When asked regarding the possibility of the meteor having affected
the ship’s wireless apparatus, experts stated that such might have
been the case, although, hitherto, severe electrical disturbances had
never been associated with the passage of meteors. Moreover, they
declared that even if the wireless had been injured, it could have
been repaired in a few hours, and that they could not explain the
continued silence of the Chiriqui. Word also came from Panama that
the naval commandant at Balboa had despatched a destroyer to
search for the Chiriqui, or any survivors of the catastrophe if the ship
had been destroyed.
 A few hours later, despatches were received from various points
in Central and South America, reporting the meteor of the previous
night. All of these agreed that the fiery mass had swept across the
heavens in a wide arc and had vanished in the east beyond the
summits of the Andes.
It was, therefore, fairly certain that the Chiriqui had not been
struck by the meteor, and in a few days the incident was completely
forgotten by the public at large.
But when, ten days later, the warship reported that no sign of the
missing ship could be found, and the officials of the Panama-
Hawaiian Line admitted that the Chiriqui was four days overdue,
interest was again aroused. Then came the startling news, featured
in screaming headlines, that the meteor or its twin had been again
reported by various ships in the Pacific, and that the
U. S. S. McCracken, which had been scouring the seas for traces of
the missing Chiriqui, had sent in a detailed report of the meteor’s
appearance, and that her wireless had gone “dead,” exactly as had
that of the Chiriqui.
And when, after every effort, no communication could be
established with the war vessel, and when two weeks had elapsed
without word from her, it was generally conceded that both ships had
been destroyed by the amazing celestial visitor. For a time the
double catastrophe filled the papers to the exclusion of nearly
everything else, and such everyday features as scandals and murder
trials were crowded to the back pages of the dailies to make room for
long articles on meteors and missing ships and interviews with
scientists. But as no more meteors appeared, and as no more ships
vanished, the subject gradually lost interest and was no longer news.
About three months after the first report of the green meteor
appeared (on January fifteenth, to be exact) I was in Peru, visiting
my daughter, when I received a communication of such an utterly
amazing character that it appeared incredible, and yet was so borne
out by facts and details that it had all the earmarks of truth. So
astounding was this communication that, despite the fact that it will
unquestionably be scoffed at by the public, I feel that it should be
given to the world. As soon as I had received the story I hurried with
it to the American Minister in Lima, and related all that I had heard.
He agreed with me that the authorities at Washington should be
acquainted with the matter at once, and together we devoted many
hours to coding the story which was cabled in the secret cipher of
the State Department. The officials, however, were inclined to regard
the matter as a hoax, and, as far as I am aware, no steps have yet
been taken to follow out the suggestions contained in the
communication which I received, and thus save humanity from a
terrible fate. Personally, I am convinced that the amazing tale which
came to me in such an astounding and unexpected manner is
absolutely true, incredible as it may seem, but whether fact or fiction,
my readers may decide for themselves.
My son-in-law was intensely interested in radio, and devoted all of
his spare time to devising and constructing receiving sets, and in his
home in the delightful residential suburb of Miraflores, were a
number of receiving sets of both conventional and original design.
Having been closely in touch with the subject for several years, I was
deeply interested in Frank’s experiments, and especially in a new
type of hook-up which had given most remarkable results in
selectivity and distance. Practically every broadcasting station in
America, and many in Europe, had been logged by the little set, and
on several occasions faint signals had been heard which, although
recognizable as English, evidently emanated from a most remote
station. These, oddly enough, had come in at the same hour each
night, and each time had continued for exactly the same length of
time.
We were discussing this, and trying to again pick up the
unintelligible and unidentified signals on that memorable January
evening, when, without warning, and as clearly as though sent from
the station at Buenos Ayres, came the most astounding
communication which ever greeted human ears, and which, almost
verbatim, was as follows:1
“LISTEN! For God’s sake, I implore all who may hear my words to
listen! And believe what I say no matter how unbelievable it may
seem, for the fate of thousands of human beings, the fate of the
human race may depend upon you who by chance may hear this
message from another world. My name is James Berry, my home is
Butte, Montana, my profession a mining engineer, and I am speaking
through the short wave transmitter of the steamship Chiriqui on
which I was a passenger when the terrible, the incredible events
occurred which I am about to relate. On the evening of October
sixteenth2 the Chiriqui was steaming across the Pacific in calm
weather when our attention was attracted by what appeared to be an
unusually brilliant meteor of a peculiar greenish color. It first
appeared above the horizon to the southeast, and very rapidly
increased in size and brilliancy. At the time I was particularly struck
by the fact that it left no trail of light or fire behind it, as is usual with
large meteorites, but so rapidly did it approach that I had little time to
wonder at this. Within a few moments from the time that it was first
seen, the immense sphere of green incandescence had grown to the
size of the moon, and the entire sea for miles about our ship was
illuminated by a sickly green light. It appeared to be headed directly
towards our ship, and, standing as I was on the bridge-deck near the
wheel-house, I heard the chief officer cry out: ‘My God, it will strike
us!’ By now the mass of fire had altered in appearance, and a short
distance below the central green mass could be seen two smaller
spheres of blinding red, like huge globes of molten metal. By now,
too, the noise made by the meteor was plainly audible, sounding like
the roar of surf or the sound of a tornado.
“Everyone aboard the ship was panic-stricken; women screamed,
men cursed and shouted, and the crew rushed to man the boats, as
everyone felt that the Chiriqui was doomed. What happened next I
can scarcely describe, so rapidly did the events occur. As the meteor
seemed about to hurl itself upon the ship, there was a blinding flash
of light, a terrific detonation, and I saw men and women falling to the
decks as if struck down by shell fire. The next instant the meteor
vanished completely, and intense blackness followed the blinding
glare. At the same moment, I was aware of a peculiar pungent,
suffocating odor which, perhaps owing to my long experience with
deadly gases in mining work, I at once recognized as some noxious
gas. Almost involuntarily, and dully realizing that by some miracle the
ship had escaped destruction, I dashed below and reached my cabin
almost overcome by the fumes which now penetrated every portion
of the ship. Among my possessions was a new type of gas-mask
which had been especially designed for mine work, and my idea was
to don this, for I felt sure that the meteor had exploded close to the
ship and had released vast quantities of poisonous gases which
might hang about for a long time.
“Although almost overcome by the choking fumes, I managed to
find and put on the apparatus, for one of its greatest advantages was
the rapidity and ease with which it could be adjusted, it having been
designed for emergency use. But before it was fairly in place over
my face, the electric light in my room went out and I was in complete
darkness. Also, the ship seemed strangely still, and as I groped my
way to the stateroom door it suddenly dawned upon me that the
engines had stopped, that there was no longer the whirr of dynamos
from the depths of the hull. Not a light glimmered in the passageway,
and twice, as I felt my way towards the social hall, I stumbled over
the sprawled bodies of men, while in the saloon itself I several times
stepped upon the soft and yielding flesh of passengers who lay
where they had been struck down by the poisonous gas. In all
probability, I thought, I was the sole survivor aboard the ship, unless
some of the firemen and engineers survived, and I wondered how I
would manage to escape, if the vessel should be sighted by some
other ship, or if it should be my gruesome task to search the Chiriqui
from stem to stern, drag the bodies of the dead to the deck and cast
them into the sea, and remain—perhaps for weeks—alone upon the
ship until rescued by some passing vessel. But as I reached the door
and stepped upon the deck all such thoughts were driven from my
brain as I blinked my eyes and stared about in dumfounded
amazement. I had stepped from Stygian darkness into dazzling light.
Blinded for the moment, I closed my eyes, and when I again opened
them I reeled to the rail with a cry of terror. Poised above the ship’s
masts, and so enormous that it appeared to shut out half the sky,
was the stupendous meteor like a gigantic globe of green fire, and
seemingly less than one hundred feet above me. Still nearer, and
hanging but a few yards above the bow and stern of the ship, were
the two smaller spheres of glowing red. Cowering against the rail,
expecting to be shrivelled into a charred cinder at any instant, I
gazed transfixed and paralyzed at the titanic masses of flaming light
above the ship.
 “Then reason came back to me. My only chance to escape was to
leap into the sea, and I half clambered upon the rail prepared to take
the plunge. A scream, like that of a madman, came from my lips.
Below me was no sign of the waves, but a limitless void, while,
immeasurably distant beneath the ship, I could dimly see the crinkled
surface of the sea. The Chiriqui was floating in space!
“It was impossible, absolutely preposterous, and I felt convinced
that I had gone mad, or that the small quantity of gas I had breathed
had affected my brain and had induced the nightmarish vision.
Perhaps, I thought, the meteors above the ship were also visionary,
and I again stared upward. Then, I knew that I was insane. The
spheres of green and red light were rushing upward as I could see
by the brilliant stars studding the sky, and the ship upon which I
stood was following in their wake! Weak, limp as a rag, I slumped to
the deck and lay staring at the great globes above me. But the
insanely impossible events which had crowded upon my
overwrought senses were as nothing to the amazing discovery I now
made.
“As my eyes became accustomed to the glare of the immense
green sphere, I saw that instead of being merely a ball of fire it had
definite form. About its middle extended a broad band from which
slender rods of light extended. Round or ovoid spots seemed placed
in definite order about it, and from the extremities of its axes lines or
cables, clearly outlined by the glare, extended downward to the red
spheres above the ship. By now, I was so firmly convinced that I was
irrational, that these new and absolutely stunning discoveries did not
excite or surprise me in the least, and as if in a particularly vivid
dream, I lay there gazing upward, and dully, half consciously
speculating on what it all meant. Gradually, too, it dawned upon me
that the huge sphere with its encircling band of duller light was
rotating. The circular markings, which I thought were marvelously
like the ports of a ship, were certainly moving from top to bottom of
the sphere, and I could distinctly hear a low, vibrant humming.
“The next second I jerked upright with a start and my scalp
tingled. Reason had suddenly returned to me. The thing was no
meteor, no celestial body, but some marvelous machine, some
devilish invention of man, some gigantic form of airship which—God
only knew why—had by some incredible means captured the
Chiriqui, had lifted the twenty thousand ton ship into the air and was
bearing her off with myself, the only survivor of all the ship’s
company, witnessing the miraculous happening! It was the most
insane thought that had yet entered my brain, but I knew now for a
certainty that I was perfectly sane, and, oddly enough, now that I
was convinced that the catastrophe which had overtaken the Chiriqui
was the devilish work of human beings, I was no longer frightened
and my former nightmarish terror of things unknown, gave place to
the most intense anger and an inexpressible hatred of the fiends
who, without warning or reason, had annihilated hundreds of men
and women by means of this new and irresistible engine of
destruction. But I was helpless. Alone upon the stolen and stricken
ship I could do nothing. By what tremendous force the spherical
airship was moving through space, by what unknown power it was
lifting the ship and carrying it,—slung like the gondola of a Zeppelin
beneath the sphere,—were matters beyond my comprehension.
Calmly, now that I felt assured that I was rational and was the victim
of my fellow men—fiendish as they might be,—I walked aft to where
one red sphere hung a few yards above the ship’s deck.

“There seemed no visible connection between it and the vessel, but I

noticed that everything movable upon the deck, the iron cable, the
wire ropes, the coiled steel lines of the after derrick, all extended
upward from the deck, as rigid as bars of metal, while crackling blue
sparks like electrical discharges scintillated from the ship’s metal
work below the red sphere. Evidently, I decided, the red mass was
actuated by some form of electrical energy or magnetism, and I gave
the area beneath it a wide berth. Retracing my way to the bow of the
ship, I found similar conditions there. As I walked towards the waist
of the ship again I mounted the steps to the bridge, hoping from that
height to get a better view of the monstrous machine holding the
Chiriqui captive. I knew that in the chart-house I would find powerful
glasses with which to study the machine. Upon the bridge the bodies
of the quartermaster, the first officer and an apprentice lay sprawled
grotesquely, and across the chart-house door lay the captain.
Reaching down I lifted him by the shoulders to move him to one side,
and to my amazement I discovered that he was not dead. His heart
beat, his pulse, though slow and faint, was plain, he was breathing
and his face, still ruddy, was that of a sleeping man rather than of a
corpse.
“A wild thought rushed through my brain, and hastily I rushed to
the other bodies. There was no doubt of it. All were alive and merely
unconscious. The gas had struck them down, but had not killed
them, and it came to me as a surprise, though I should long before
have realized it, that the fumes had been purposely discharged by
the beings who had captured the vessel. Possibly, I mentally
decided, they had made a mistake and had failed in their intention to
destroy the persons upon the ship, or again, was it not possible that
they had intentionally rendered the ship’s company unconscious,
and had not intended to destroy their lives? Forgetting my original
purpose in visiting the bridge, I worked feverishly to resuscitate the
captain, but all to no purpose. Many gases, I knew, would render a
man unconscious without actually injuring him, and I was also aware,
that when under the influence of some of these, the victims could not
be revived until the definite period of the gases’ effect had passed.
So, feeling certain that in due time the captain and the others would
come to of their own accord, I entered the chartroom and, securing
the skipper’s binoculars, I again stepped upon the bridge. As I could
not conveniently use the glasses with my gas-mask in place, and as
I felt sure there was no longer any danger from the fumes, I started
to remove the apparatus. But no sooner did a breath of the air enter
my mouth than I hastily readjusted the contrivance, for the gas which
had struck down everyone but myself was as strong as ever. Indeed,
the mere whiff of the fumes made my head reel and swim, and I was
forced to steady myself by grasping the bridge-rail until the dizzy
spell passed.
“Once more myself, I focussed the glasses as best I could upon
the whirling sphere above the ship. But I could make out little more
than by my naked eyes. The band about the center or equator of the
globular thing was, I could now see, divided into segments, each of
which bore a round, slightly convex, eye-like object from the centers
of which extended slender rods which vibrated with incalculable
speed. Indeed, the whole affair reminded me of the glass models of
protozoans which I had seen in the American Museum of Natural
History. These minute marine organisms I knew, moved with great
rapidity by means of vibrating, hair-like appendages or cilia, and I
wondered if the enormous spherical machine at which I was gazing,
might not move through space in a similar manner by means of
vibrating rods moving with such incredible speed that, slender as
they were, they produced enormous propulsive power. Also, I could
now see that the two extremities of the sphere, or as I may better
express it, the axes, were equipped with projecting bosses or shafts
to which the cables supporting the red spheres were attached. And
as I peered through the glasses at the thing, the huge green sphere,
which had been hitherto traveling on an even keel, or, in other words,
with the central band vertical, now shifted its position and one end
swung sharply upward, throwing the band about the centre at an
acute angle. Involuntarily I grasped the rail of the bridge expecting to
be thrown from my feet by the abrupt uptilting of the ship. But to my
utter amazement the Chiriqui remained on an even plane and I then
saw that as the sphere tilted, the cable at the uppermost axis ran
rapidly out so that the two red spheres, which evidently supported
the captive ship, remained, in their original relative horizontal
position. No sign of life was visible upon the machine above me, and
I surmised that whoever might be handling the thing was within the
sphere.
“Wondering how high we had risen above the sea, I stepped to
the starboard end of the bridge and glanced down, and an
involuntary exclamation escaped my lips. Far beneath the ship and
clearly visible through the captain’s glasses was land! I could
distinguish the white line marking surf breaking on a rocky shore,
and ahead I could make out the cloud-topped, serried summits of a
mighty range of mountains. Not until then did I realize the terrific
speed at which the machine and captive vessel were traveling. I had
been subconsciously aware that a gale had been blowing, but I had
not stopped to realize that this was no ordinary wind, but was the
rush of air caused by the rapidity of motion. But as I peered at the
mountains through the binoculars, and saw the distant surface of the
earth whizzing backward far beneath the Chiriqui’s keel, I knew that
we were hurtling onward with the speed of the fastest scout airplane.
 “Even as I gazed, the mountains seemed to rush towards me until,
in a few minutes after I had first seen them, they appeared almost
directly under the ship. Then the gigantic machine above me
suddenly altered its course, it veered sharply to one side and swept
along the range of summits far beneath. For some reason, just why I
cannot explain, I dashed to the binnacle and saw that we were
traveling to the south, and it flashed across my mind, that I had a dim
recollection of noticing, when I first realized the nature of the
machine which had been mistaken for a meteor, that by the stars, we
were moving eastward. In that case, my suddenly alert mind told me,
the land below must be some portion of America, and if so, judging
by the altitude of the mountains, that they must be the Andes. All of
this rushed through my brain instantly, and in the brief lapse of time
in which I sprang to the binnacle and back to my observation point at
the bridge-rail.
“Now, I saw, we were rapidly descending, and focussing my
glasses upon the mountains, I made out an immense conical peak in
the top of which was a gigantic black opening. Without doubt it was
the crater of some stupendous extinct volcano, and, with a shock, I
realized that the machine and the ship were headed directly for the
yawning opening in the crater. The next instant we were dropping
with lightning speed towards it, and so terrified and dumfounded had
I become that I could not move from where I stood. Even before I
could grasp the fact, the Chiriqui was enclosed by towering, rocky
walls, inky blackness surrounded me, there was an upward breath-
taking rush of air, a roar as of a thousand hurricanes. The Chiriqui
rocked and pitched beneath my feet, as if in a heavy sea; I clung
desperately to the bridge-rail for support and I felt sure that the ship
had been dropped into the abysmal crater, that the next instant the
vessel would crash into fragments as it struck bottom, or worse, that
it would sink into the molten incandescent lava which might fill the
depths of the volcano. For what seemed hours, the awful fall
continued, though like as not the terrible suspense lasted for only a
few minutes, and then, without warning, so abruptly that I lost my
balance and was flung to the bridge, the ship ceased falling, an
indescribable blue light succeeded the blackness, and unable to
believe my senses I found the ship floating motionless, still
suspended from the giant mechanism overhead, above a marvelous
landscape.

“On every hand, as far as I could see, stretched jagged rocks,

immense cliffs, stupendous crags and rugged knife-ridged hills of the
most dazzling reds, yellows and purples. Mile-deep canons cut the
forbidding plains, which here and there showed patches of dull
green, and in one spot I saw a stream of emerald-hued water
pouring in a foaming cataract into a fathomless rift in the rock. But I
gave little attention to these sights at the time. My gaze was riveted
upon a strange, weird city which capped the cliffs close to the
waterfall, and almost directly beneath the Chiriqui. Slowly we were
dropping towards it, and I could see that the buildings which at first
sight had appeared of immense height and tower-like form, were in
reality gigantic basaltic columns capped with superimposed edifices
of gleaming yellow.
“The next second the glasses dropped from my shaking,
nerveless hands. Gathered on an open space of greenish plain were
hundreds of human beings! But were they human? In form and
features, as nearly as I could judge at that distance, they were
human, but in color they were scarlet, and surmounting the head and
extending along the arms to the elbows on every individual was a
whitish, membraneous frill, which at first sight, reminded me of an
Indian’s war bonnet. The beings appeared to be of average height,
but as the Chiriqui’s keel touched solid ground and, keeling to one
side, she rested upon one of her bilges, I saw with a shock, that the
scarlet creatures were of gigantic size, fully thirty feet in height, and
that, without exception, all were females! All were stark naked; but
despite the frills upon their heads and shoulders, despite their
bizarre scarlet skins, despite their gigantic proportions, they were
unquestionably human beings, women without doubt, and of the
most perfect proportions, the most graceful forms and the most
regular and even handsome features. Beside the stranded ship, they
loomed as giants; but against the stupendous proportions of their
land and city, they appeared no larger than ordinary mortals. By now
they were streaming from their houses and even in the surprise and
excitement of that moment I noticed that the giant rocky columns
were perforated by windows and doors, and had obviously been
hollowed out to form dwellings. Meantime, too, the huge machine
which had captured the Chiriqui had descended and was lying at
rest, and no longer emitting its green light, upon a cradle erected
near the waterfall, and from openings in its central band several of
the scarlet, giant Amazons were emerging. How long, I wondered,
would I remain undiscovered? How long would it be before one of
the female giants spied me? And then, what would be my fate? Why
had they captured the ship? Where was I? What was this strange
land reached through a crater?
“All these thoughts rushed through my brain as I peered
cautiously down at the giant women who swarmed about the ship.
But I had not long to wait for an answer to my first mental question.
With a sudden spring, one of the women leaped to the Chiriqui’s
anchor, with a second bound she was on the fore deck, and close at
her heels came a score of others. Standing upon the deck with her
head fringed by its erect vibrating membrane level with the boat-
deck, she gazed about for an instant. Then, catching sight of the
form of a sailor sprawled upon the deck, she uttered a shrill, piercing
cry, leaped forward, and, before my unbelieving, horror-stricken
eyes, tore the still living, palpitating body to pieces and ravenously
devoured it.
“Unable to stir through the very repulsiveness of the scene,
realizing that my turn might be next, I gazed fascinated. But the giant
cannibal female was not to feast in peace. As her companions
reached the deck, they rushed upon her and fought viciously for a
portion of the reeking flesh. The struggle of these awful giants, as
smeared with human blood, scratching and clawing, uttering shrill
cries of rage, they rolled and fought on the deck, was indescribably
terrible and disgusting. But it came to an abrupt end. With a bound, a
giantess of giantesses, a powerfully-muscled female, appeared, and
like cowed beasts, the others drew aside, licking their chops, the
membranes on their heads rising and falling in excitement, like the
frills on an iguana lizard, and watching the newly-arrived giantess
with furtive eyes. Evidently she was the leader or chieftainess, and in
curt but strangely shrill and, of course, to me, utterly unintelligible
words, she gave orders to the others. Instantly, the horde of women
began swarming over the ship, searching every nook and corner,
and, wherever they discovered the inert bodies of the ship’s
company, dragged them on deck and piled them in heaps. Shaking
with abject terror, I crouched back of the bridge, and racked my
brains for thought of some safe spot in which to hide. But before I
could make up my mind, one of the terrifying, monstrous females
sprang upon the bridge and rushed towards me. With a maniacal
scream, I turned and fled. Then, before me, blocking my way, there
appeared another of the creatures. And then a most marvelous and
surprising thing happened. Instead of falling upon me as I expected
her to do, the giantess turned, and with a scream that equalled my
own, leaped over the rail and fled to the uttermost extremity of the
deck.
“I forgot my terror in my amazement. Why should this giant,
cannibal woman fear me? Why should she run from me when, a few
moments before, she had been fighting over a meal of an
unconscious sailor? And it was evident that the others were equally
afraid of me, for at her cry, and my appearance, all had rushed as far
from me as possible, and stood regarding me with an odd mixture of
wonder and terror on their huge faces. And then it occurred to me
that their fear was, perhaps, due to my gas-mask, to the apparatus
that transformed me from a human being to a weird-looking monster.
At any rate, I was evidently safe from molestation for the time being,
and thanking my lucky stars that I had on the mask, I descended
from the bridge, the giantesses retreating as I advanced. I entered
the captain’s cabin and locked the door.
“Here I breathed more freely, for even if the women overcame
their fear of me and attempted to capture me, the steel doors and
walls of the cabin would be impregnable defenses. Moreover, upon
the wall above the bunk, was a rifle, in a drawer of the dresser was a
loaded revolver, and a short search revealed a plentiful supply of
cartridges. Yes, if I were attacked, I could give a good account of
myself, and I determined, if worst came to the worst, that I would
blow out my brains rather than fall a victim to the female cannibal
horde.
“Dully, through the thick walls of the cabin, I could hear the sounds
of the women on the deck, but I had no desire to witness what was
going on, and seated upon the captain’s chair, I thought over the
events which had transpired during the past few hours and tried to
find a reasonable solution to the incredible happenings.
“That I was within the earth seemed certain, though utterly
fantastic, but who the giant women were, why they had captured the
Chiriqui or by what unknown, tremendous power their marvelous
airship was operated, were all utterly beyond my comprehension.
But I must hurry on and relate the more important matters, for my
time is limited and the important thing is to let the world know how
the human race may be saved from the terrible fate which has
befallen me and all those upon the Chiriqui, and upon the destroyer
McCracken, for that vessel, too, has fallen a victim to these horrible
cannibalistic giantesses here within the centre of the earth.

“Hunger and thirst drove me at last from my refuge in the captain’s

cabin, and armed with the loaded rifle and revolver, I cautiously
peered out and stepped upon the deck. Only one woman was in
sight, and instantly, at sight of me, she fled away. Not a body of the
hundreds of men and women aboard the ship was visible, and
feeling relieved that I was for a time safe, I stepped to the ship’s rail
and peered over. Scores of the women were carrying the inert forms
of the unconscious men and women towards the nearby city.
Stealthily I hurried below in search of food and drink. Fears assailed
me that the women had, in all probability, preceded me and carried
off everything edible. But I need not have worried about food. I was
yet to learn the horrible truth and the gruesome habits of these red
giantesses. The saloon, the corridors, the staterooms, everything,
had been searched, and every person upon the vessel removed. In
the pantry I found an abundance of food, and quickly satisfied my
hunger and thirst. I pondered on my next move. The skipper’s cabin
seemed my safest refuge. I placed a supply of provisions within it,
and locked myself in the little room again. For several days nothing
of great importance occurred. I say days, but there are no days in
this terrible place. There is no sun, no moon, no stars and no
darkness. The whole place is illuminated by a brilliant, greenish light
that issues from a distant mountain range, and which seems to be of
the same character as that which emanated from the spherical air