LETO II, as enigma. Leto would have taken extreme pleasure in the idea of futurfe generations attempting to write ency clopedia articles concerning him Certainly he held such waters m contempt during his lifetime, boasting to many that he had burned alive many a historian upon pyres made of their own works No historian could dare to claim equal knowledge of the past with Leto, for, after all, Leto was directly responsible for over 3,500 years of the past Moreover, given his claim that he had withm him the memories of every single one of his ancestors, one could reasonably suggest that the words Leto and history are one and the same Leto's contempt for history and historians supplies a clue to the nature of this ultimately unknowable man and god Leto in The Stolen Journals wrote of history You cannot understand history unless you understand its Sowings, its currents a&d the ways leaders move within such forces A leader tnes to perpetuate the conditions which demand tus leadership Thus, the leader requires the outsider I caution you to examine my career with care 1 3m both leader and outsider Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the Church which was the State That was my function as leader and I bad many historical models to use as pattern For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the aits of my tune The arts arc barbaric UK favorite poetry1' The Epic The popular dramatic ideal? Heroism Dances? Wildly abandoned From Moneo's viewpoint, he -is correct ia describing this as dangerous It stimulates the imagination It makes people feel the lock of that which I have taken from them What did I take from them'' The right to participate in history Leto damned the one thing that he believed was essential to the freedom of his subjects He usurped timr right to create their own past by living m a free present The worlds ran strictly according to the whims of the God Emperor and he made clear to all thinking creatures that to h\e apart from him was unthinkable Leto was God and, as God, all was created in his image With such a view of the universe, he would not allow anyone to interpret the past or even to describe it Only Leto knew the one and only path, the Golden Path, and his sole owner ship of the path demanded that he possess all the maps as well The p"u>t, or beginning of the Golden Path, had to remain in his hands because it was a key to what he intended for the future Thus, Leto's attitude toward historians was a mixture of ironic jest and tyrannic policy On the one hand, Leto knew that those who worshiped the past could understand so little of it that they were laughable in what they took for truth On the other, he had no wish that anyone, even by accident, appear to so interpret the past that the key to the future be even briefly touched by another As the above quotation indicates, his answer