Zorba
We now move to ancient Greece, where we meet Zorba, who made one of the greatest contributions to the development of civilisation of any man of his times.
Zorba was a man of great vision, a thinker, a philosopher, a writer, and dance instructor.
When you’re as intellectual as Zorba you need to have intellectual friends to share thoughts with, to develop ideas, and to decide which dance steps are the best match for a particular tune. So, Zorba would correspond with friends of like mind, whom he called collectively ‘pen friends’, they would write to each other to stimulate their minds, asking questions, making observations, describing new dance steps, and so on. Of course, at that time, as there was no postal service, regular correspondence with his pen friends was quite difficult.
Zorba would write a letter to a friend who lived say fifty miles away, then jump on his horse and gallop over to his friend’s house to deliver the letter. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he would race back home, where he would sit by his post box, eagerly awaiting a reply.
Zorba had a brother, Plastikoktopous, a name that really grabs you isn't it, Plastikoktopous bred pigeons, for food, they were quite a delicacy in Greece, or white wine sauce, or pie, or flattened with a club and fried.
Zorba, being a great observer of things natural, noticed that the birds would fly about quite freely but always return home.
"Hmm," he would mumble to himself, "How do they know which house to fly to?"
Zorba sometimes failed to see the obvious, in this case, other
than scavenging, that the only place the pigeons could find food was at Plastikoktopous's place. He decided to study the birds more closely from a nearby hiding place.
Suddenly the obvious jumped up and bit him, or rather one of the pigeons did. He had a pimple on the end of his nose that looked just like grain, an inbound pigeon saw it sticking out of Zorba's hiding place and tried to eat it.
"Ah ha," cried Zorba, "they come back to eat! Hmm, I wonder if......?"
Soon he started to train the pigeons by taking half a dozen birds up to Mount Olympus and letting them fly home, where they would be rewarded with their favorite feed.
Then he took some to his closest friend, thirty miles away; they came back home too.
Before too long he had trained dozens of birds, they would fly from Zorba’s house to a friend’s house where they would be fed, then they would fly back to Zorba’s. He had several birds for each of his friends, and if a message was from one pen friend to another, Zorba would take the message from the incoming bird and send it on to the recipient.
Zorba and his friends could send messages to each other at any time of day or night, without leaving home, it was marvelous.
Zorba realised almost straight away that there was huge commercial potential for the service, and soon he had built a network of pigeon lofts throughout the land. At each loft a servant would be at hand to swap messages from bird to bird, and to feed them. Customers could take a letter to their nearest pigeon loft where the servant would send it to the nearest loft to
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