Steve wrote:
>
> Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 19:00:25 -0800
> From: "Zero Powers" <zero_powers@hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Udo, extropic monk
>
> From: "scerir" <scerir@libero.it>
>
> > Who then invented "extropy", really?
>
> >That would probably be Lucifer. In Genesis he tells Adam & Eve to eat some
> >fruit from the tree of knowledge so that they would be like God. That
> >sounds pretty well extropic to me.
>
> >- -Zero
>
> If we are allowing fictional characters (God, Adam, Lucifer &c.) then
> the earliest post-human might well be Gilgamesh, hero of the Babylonian
> mythos.
I just finished reading Steven Pressfield's "The Tides of War:
Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War", an historical novel about the
last great general of ancient Athens. Alcibiades seemed quite an
extropic individual, the tragedy being his quest for greatness (and
Athens own such quest) was hamstrung by the mercurial and jealous
vicissitudes of the Athenian demos, as well as his own tendency to favor
opportunism over principle.
I recommend it as a companion piece to Pressfield's earlier "Gates of
Fire" about the Spartans up to and at the Battle of Thermopylae,
reflecting Sparta and Athens, these two great, if in some ways mirror
image cities.
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