12 October 20XX+1
My Dear Lucilius:
I know, two letters in the same day – in this case, it is late in the evening. Pompeia Paulina has gone to bed and I left here with her notes and my own thoughts. Over everything hovers the thought that tomorrow, I must judge.
I wonder, Lucilius, if this is what every judge has felt over the course of time as they face down the fact that they will have to render a verdict. A sense of doom – in the old sense of the world, a heavy pressing fate – lies over me this evening. It seems to even bend the light from the lamp and fire, colouring everything with a weight beyond what is normally present.
It is clear – or at least clear to me – that the Cataline acted in what he perceived as self defense, I believe for that of his wife. It makes a certain kind of horrible sense: an older man, taking advantage of a need, now realizing he needs to take care of loose ends, knowing that in this small community with increasingly strapped resources that the killing of one or two people whom almost no-one would miss would be of little concern or note. And certainly at the end, his wife had done nothing to deny that she thought her husband had taken advantage of the situation.
And yet...And yet, Cataline clearly confessed to the killing. He made no denial of the fact. And a death is a death.
Was it justifiable? What is necessary? No-one seems to have seen the deed itself, only the results of it.
In other times, likely we would have had witnesses all about and video records on smart phones recording the whole thing. We have none of that now, just the attestations of man’s characters versus the attestations of man’s actions.
And a ring. And a dead body. And a story which, if true, is both vile and likely being played out in a dozen different ways in a hundred different places. Always, the powerful prey on the weak, and there is always someone to take advantage of a situation.
Why, Lucilius, do times like these always seem to bring out the basest in us?
Your Obedient Servant, Seneca
The harm is done. Now justice for the community is to restore whatever civil is left in a world of less and less options.
ReplyDeleteA period of community service in a task needful (what's really happening with the groups garbage, a disease situation growing daily) or better yet securing food supplies could be restorative in the stead of punitive.
Jail isn't going to work. Who's going to pay a guard and feed the guard and prisoner?
At least that's how I'd hope this played out in my area.