he defined the second as "die practice of .concealing the identity when revealing it might be harmful ' Pleased at his response Leto then stated that he had written several histories under a pseudonym including those of Noah Arkwright, and even \rkwnght s biography What capital the Letoites could have made of this1 Their candidate states that he wrote histones (not plays, to be sure, but the next best thing) under a pseudonym, and m one of the Harban plays we find a quotation that closely parallels a passage in Leto s Journals However, the support provided by the quotation is illusory Students oi Atreidean literature have long known that Harq al Harba used sources, most of which have survived In the case of the play Carthage, al-Harba followed Tovat Gwinsted's The Chronicles of the Conquerors legends of pre Butlerian times collected in 9222, and translated on Arrakis in 10295 The relevant passage from the Chronicles reads as follows "In this he had a better teacher, Assur nasir apli, cruelest of the cruel, v*ho slew his father to take possession of the throne'' Here is all the information, down to the epithet that al-Harba needed for the passage in question And it was beyond the powers even of Leto D to ghost-write a book a thousand years before he was born Finally, consider the definition of ketman that Leto praised ' concealing the identity when revealing it might be harmful ' Harmful to whom1* What power could conceivably have harmed Leto that he might wish to have kept his authorship of some plays unknown1* The Spacing Guild, the Great Houses, the Ixians, the Bene Gessent, the Tleilaxu, all tried to 'harm" him, and all tailed Yet in no instance is it recorded that they were angry because they had discovered that he had covertly written stage dramas This theo ry is simply silly But there is another solution, one that has no more substantiating evidence than Knl-wan's, but no less either Harq al Harba was something new something unexpected in the reign of Leto We know that as the emperor continued his rule, he clutched the power to surprise ever more jealously to himself It sometimes seems that his reign was dedicated to reducing humanity on ev ery planet to a uniform grayness Would he AMPOLIROS not then have supported, perhaps even fathered the notion that he was Harq al-Harba? We find in Kiilwan's book no evidence, compel Img or otherwise, for believing that Leto II was Harq al-Harba, but it has aroused suspicions about the identity of A J Kulwan In sum, the al-Harba Question is a question only in the minds of those clouded by snobbery, delusion, hero-worship, and ignorance of Atreidean literary history No professional Harban scholar has ever lent it credence, and for good reason there is more evidence that Harq al-Harba wrote the plays attributed to him than for the works and existence of Virgil.