He did of course work for Vespasian's census in Two for the Lions, catching tax evading providers of aniamls and gladiators for the games. I am not so sure he qualifies as heroic, though.
The chinese are perhaps a better example.
In, for instance, Tales from the Water Margin there are several officials
and bureaucrats who are forced to join the rebels/bandits/heroes for trying
to behave honestly in a period when the regime is corrupt, including their
leader, The Timely Rain Song Jiang.
I cannot seem to recall any down-right tax collectors, though. But then,
taxation seems to have been one of the problems in late Song, and some of
the heroes are in fact smugglers.
Their heroics lie, of course, in the "kicking the crap out of their
enemies" (as Ttrotsky puts it) department, apart from being just in
governing the bandit camp, and of course in being polite.
Many of the imperial commanders sent out to catch the bandits end up joining them, since Song Jiang is so just and polite.
No true hero of Kralorela should have less than three masteries in Polite ;-)
Nick Brooke replies, on another thread:
>If you want to stage Caesar's crossing of the Rhine, just say it's Sea
>Season and the river is in flood... :-)
Now there is another sort of hero, the Lunar Engineer-General! Or perhaps this is an old idea, the Building Wall Battle has always sounded a bit like Julius Caesar vs. Gnaeus Pompey at Dyrrachium!
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