Likening the Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader to Diocletian, who also withdrew to Split to grow cabbages, is farfetched, to say the least (“The Dilemmas of Diocletian,” July 11, 2009). As you say, Croatia is awash with gossip about Sanader’s sudden and still unexplained withdrawal from politics entire. Some worry about blackmail, others about the European Union’s mismanagement of Croatia’s silly border dispute with Slovenia, and quite a number about the shambles that is the country’s economy at this fraught juncture. Under Sanader, Croatia’s foreign debt doubled to forty-billion dollars in just six years, and it is far from clear what the consequences of such indebtedness will be. But there is a brand of gossip you fail to even mention: widespread corruption, organized crime reaching all the way to the national government, conflict of interests at every government level, money laundering on a momentous scale, and the like. The prime minister could not but have been deeply involved in much of this murky business. Whence the most serious possibility of blackmail from one of several mafias competing for primacy in government affairs. While Diocletian is remembered as the first Roman emperor who voluntarily abdicated his position in 305 because of illness after many a success in his twenty-one-year imperial career, Sanader has little or nothing to boast about. Some Diocletian, indeed.