Some of Taylor Caldwell's trilogies were really tetrologies. For example, the trilogy I called previously Diatribes on Evil, could easily have included Bright Flows the River in addition to The Listener, No one hears but Him, Dialogues with the Devil, and even Answer as a Man. A quintology, I suppose. TC loved calling out evil, though my favorite in her zest for doing so was Time No Longer. Here the greatest evil lay in an inanimate object, a shrunken head.

Open Road never did the promotion they said they would, and I expected. Nevertheless, in continuing the theme of TC's relevance, I review the book from her works that historically encompasses events that we can profitably compare with today. That would be Pillar of Iron, which belongs in a trilogy that includes Great Lion of God and her most renown novel, Dear and Glorious Physician. Even here, with the Meditteranean at its center, and despite its being enamoured of what paganism had wrought, there is justification for including Glory and the Lighting on Pericles and Aspasia. This well-documented romance between two exceptional people was one to which antiquity took.

Speaking of tetralogies, Pillar of Iron is her most sustained effort, and her unique four part novel. Yet, evil drives this novel in the form of Catiline. TC's generation, worldwide, knew many details of Cicero, even to the extent of being able to quote phrases from both Cicero and Caesar.

While the Romans were in thrall of Theseus, Hercules and Alexander the Great, the group of Sulla, Caesar, Crassus, Pompey and the rest of the gang seem both bigger than, and closer to, our times. With the exception of one woman, the Greek mythologies had it all over the Roman with their awe of feminine power and mysticism, what with Helene of Troy, Athena (especially Athena; Minerva in Roman mythology) and Venus. The exception, with some confusions, was Cleopatra. Her grace and voice, bravery and intelligence was coupled with her brutality. But, then, Cleopatra would never have been the mold for a TC heroine. As close as she could have come would have been Aspasia.

Finally, there is one character dear to TC that appears throughout this novel: the Mob. TC hated the Mob, and here it/they appear mesmerized by Catiline, to the extent that the famous group above must humor this Catiline monster well nigh to the end of the novel. We certainly do hear the phrase The Mob today, don't we?

So, as an tempt to glean how TC saw the world through her trilogies, I list – basically mini-reviews – abstracts of the four parts of Pillar of iron. These appeared in the corresponding newsletters of the 2nd quarter of this year. The whole newsletter is the html file on which you can click at the end of each part. This is the style of the archives of the collections of newsletter for this TC-Descendants work.

04-02-20APillarOfIron: Ancient Rome vs 21st Century America: Taylor Caldwell's Cicero

• When Caesar and Cicero were young, the – still – Republic of Rome was beset by massive corruption. Elite opinion saw Senate office as for those with Senate ancestry. Yet, Cicero, became a Senator on the from his talents.
• Cicero's orations against Catiline – a man universally regarded as the epitome of evil – had a momentous backdrop. We don't know it in Part I, but TC drives the whole novel with the battle between Catiline and Cicero.
• Few have such voluminous writings known to us as did Cicero. He could have been called the King of Hyperbole. Their readers regard them as eloquent, rather than sincere expressions of the truth. Caesar himself, as prolific, remarked on how much Cicero had bared his soul in dictated, then unrevised, oratories.
• History records that Cicero hoped philosophy could substitute for religion. He got this from the wisdom of many of his time's Greek sages, especially Plato. Taylor Caldwell wades out to find a proto-Christian in Cicero.

04-02-20APillarOfIron.html .

04-28-20PillarOfIronII: Revisiting a dramatic retelling of Cicero's Life

• Here, in Part II of "Pillar ...", TC emphasizes two points: Cicero's excellent legal training under the famous legal scholar Scaivola, and his search for the Unknown God, a surrogate for a Messiah.
• TC has Cicero learn from his Jewish friend that "It is more likely we will not recognize him at all. he will be known by an act of faith only."
• The 2nd Part ends with a dramatic court room scene. Cicero has decided to defend a former captain under Sulla – Servius – from the Senate charge that Servius has authored a blasphemy against Sulla. This piece of actual history goes far toward showing Cicero's standing even with such a fearsome tyrant as Sulla.
• Servius still insists that Sulla is a merciless tyrant, and Sulla can only respond to wit: Blame me not, Servius, for the people willed it so. On them the curse and the imprecations, and not on me. I am but their creature.

04-28-20PillarOfIronII.html

05-26-20PillarofIronIII: Part III of "Pillar of Iron" and the signing of a contract to turn this novel into a movie

• Here, in TC's longest novel, is one brutal pinacle of western civilization: A culminating time of pagan architecture and superstitious minds, with ambitious men still competing with Alexander the Great, just prior to the appearance of Jesus.
• An historically famous Roman triumvirate, of Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompey and Licinius Crassus (called the richest Roman) plan to oversee the dismantling of the Roman Republic; yet there is Cicero's quest to understand how the end of the Republic and a hoped-for Messiah can possibly mesh.
• Of course it is TC. The greatest of the enemies is the rabble, the mob, the dregs of society that TC hates.
• Will and Ariel Durant also have this great list of personages, a version of a detailed oil painting. In TC's novel those paint tube labels should include magnificence and squaler, appropriate for scenes from Lord of the Rings.

05-26-20PillarofIronIII.html.

06-28-20PillarofIronIV: "Pillar of Iron": Not "War and Peace," but damn close

• In this 4th (final) part of the novel, I break down TCs themes and comment on them.
• Christianity, the Old and New Testaments, and the significance of Pagan Religion: Julius Caesar, a strong believer in Pagan Religion who still stands as a collasus.
• What helps to get a handle on this history? I list reasons that tourists today are still amazed everywhere they go in Europe and Africa at precisely what the Romans of the Emperial age wrought.
• I think TC would have been non-plussed at the abstract Open Road put below. As I suggest, contrary to the OR abstract, there were hundreds of years of brutality left under the Roman Regime, and a thousand years of Orthodox Christianity that is still with us in Eastern Europe. All of those struggles with how monotheism gives us all today a vision of the world that no Roman then had.
• Speaking of Substance: What still persists today: those who mindlessly diss people, calling them names, dismissing those they don't like. Empty abstract words, mostly from people with not keenly developed ability to abstract much, thrown at those they don't like. Why, when they can hardly articulate what is right in front of them?

06-28-20PillarofIronIV.html

To delve more deeply and personally into TC's behavior, insights, talents, contradictions and hypocrisies, requires – if we dare – wending our way through Peggy's view of TC. After all, who but someone upon whom TC both depended and abandoned, would have had the motivation to have pondered her complexity.

Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell
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