Thursday, March 24, 2016

Weird dream...

I'm stuck with the fragments of this dream from the other morning. It was...strange. It was like a movie version of a novel, and the novel entirely took the form of letters between two brothers in the mid- to late-Third Century BC.

The brothers were Carthaginian, sons of an extremely successful merchant and each was manning a trading outpost for the family business. One was on the western coast of Africa, somewhere just south of the Sahara and northwest of the bight of Benin...maybe the current location of Freetown in Sierra Leone? The other brother was running the family's godown in western Britain, maybe Wales or the north coast of Cornwall?

Anyway, these men grew up in a cosmopolitan setting, they'd been to Athens and Tyre as kids with their dad, seen the shiny new model city of Alexandria, their family was among the movers and shakers of their society. Now their homeland...their civilization...was being dashed from its pinnacle by the expanding Roman republic, and they're watching this happen at one remove, out at the edges of the known world, getting messages about not-quite-current affairs via merchant ship and passing letters on to each other via the family trading routes.

There's a book in here somewhere.
.