Inquiries about Ancient Greece

Under this title, I am presenting the following writings of mine, originally published in The Review, the midweek supplement of Dawn in the early 2000s and written from a perspective which I now see as "the Valley of Wonderment":

1. Helen of Troy
2. Herodotus
3. Socrates
4. Aristotle
5. Alexander the Great
6. Cleopatra

As explained elsewhere, I refer to the twenty years from 1987 to 2006 in the history of Pakistan as "the Valley of Wonderment" because Sheikh Fariduddin Attar has described the valley in The Conference of the Birds as a place where the Unity previously written on the souls is gone. Travelers do not know whether they are dead or alive, awake or asleep, and all they can tell is that they are in love but do not know with whom. There cannot be a more apt description for this phase of our collective life, and I guess it resonated in my writings too.