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Aleks Farrugia is the author of Ghall-Glorja tal-Patrija! and lectures at the University of Malta Aleks Farrugia 12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 11 JULY 2021 OPINION THAT a historian is concerned with the life of a 'great' man is no historical innovation. If an- ything, modern historians have shifted their gaze towards the 'lesser' men and women, people who for a long time were ne- glected and considered 'insig- nificant' to the bigger scheme of History (with emphasis on the big H). Take an example from our own history: we still speak of Gorg Borg Olivier "getting us independence" and of Mintoff as "the father of the nation" with little study, if any, of the people who actually supported them and made their achievements possible – say, the 51,000 La- bour 'suldati tal-azzar' ('soldiers of steel') which, had it not been for their support and activism, Mintoff would have been as much a lonely voice in the de- sert as Manwel Dimech was at the turn of the 20th century. The first problem that 'great' men pose to the historian is that greatness begets mythology or, to be more exact, 'mythistory' – that insidious blurring between fact and fiction, where it be- comes very difficult to sift from supposed facts, the granules of fiction that have become ac- cepted as facts even by certain authoritative sources. This has led to the most cyn- ic of philosophers of history to resign themselves to the im- possibility of establishing pure fact devoid of any fictional el- ements, and consequently the impossibility of truth which is not concurrently partially a lie. The second problem with 'great' men, intrinsically tied to the first, is that the mythol- ogy of greatness creates mon- uments from men. The human aspect, with its flaws and con- tradictions, becomes automati- cally subjected to that to which greatness is attributed. Human life, with all its randomness and complexities, becomes a sys- tematic life project, as if from birth the 'great' man was des- tined towards 'greatness' and whatever passed during his life was part of the bigger design towards achieving such great- ness. Sex and the intimate – to take an example – have a func- tion to this narrative only in so far as they serve the purpose of the myth-making process. Take the salacious details about the rocky relationship between Na- poleon and Josephine; such de- tails fill many pages in any Na- poleon biography, but what is the intent behind them if not to sustain the romantic narrative of masculinity of which Napo- leon has often been raised to be the epitome? Not the same can be said of great – let alone the lesser – women. Often conforming to that Christian view that women are either virgins or prostitutes, historians have been less shy to pry into the intimacies of wom- en. And they have not been kind either; especially to those who did not conform to that impossible model of being a vir- gin mother. Not even the likes of St Catherine of Siena (who is said to have made up her mind about her chastity at the tender age of six!) have been spared. Historians, even the most modern ones, did not hesitate to brand her as 'somewhat ug- ly' and her mystic visions, with their erotic undertones, have been subjected to all sorts of associations and speculations. Perhaps throughout history, many a historian felt that mas- culinity would be better served by seeing behind the few 'great' women of history a closeted harlot awaiting to be unleashed if only the occasion were to present itself. After so much myth-making, that a Mintoff biography that tries to discover the man behind the myth is bound to be contro- versial, is frankly no surprise. What is surprising is that what has raised most controversy has been what, in my opinion, has been Mark Montebello's least successful attempt at de-my- thologising Mintoff: his sex life. To my knowledge, there is little research – if any, that compares Mintoff's persona with that of Benito Mussolini (the towering 'great' man of Mintoff's youth, fawned upon not least by the British them- selves). Like Mussolini, Mintoff remains to this day a very divid- ing figure between those who hail him as the 'saviour' of his country, the 'architect' of the nation; and those who loathe him, hold him to be a 'bully' and a 'dictator'. Such epithets were attributed to both men. Both Mintoff and Mussolini before him were very aware of their public persona and actively en- gaged in its construction: the image of the strong man but al- so a man of the people, a man of action but also a great orator, the man with an overarching vision but also a multi-tasking practical man who could engi- neer solutions even to the mi- nutest of mundane issues (in- cluding the choice of trees to be planted on the waysides!). Above all, though, intrinsi- cally wrought with their public persona, both Mussolini and Mintoff projected a narrative of masculinity that had to be necessarily virile and earthy – a narrative of masculinity rooted in the southern European pop- ular imagination of what a man should look like and behave if he is to be a 'true' man. The conquest of women, their subjugation, if necessary even their humiliation and the use of brute force: all this was part of a widespread narrative of mas- culinity and part of the plight of women in many households. The man has to be the conquer- ing man, the alpha-male, the lion that sits licking its paws whilst the pack of lionesses serve him and grant him sex in The lives of great men