OLYMPIAD
AN HISTORICAL NOVEL
TOM HOLT
'Men die, cattle die; only the glory of heroes lives for ever'
VIKING PROVERB
'So they found Achilles taking his pleasure of a loud lyre, fair, of curious work, with a silver crossbar upon it; one he had taken from the spoils when he laid Eetion's city waste. Therein he was delighting his soul, and singing the glories of heroes'
ILIAD, BOOK IX
'Achilles replied, "Don't try to kid me about death, Odysseus; I'd rather be alive, and slave to some pauper, some landless man, making a piss-poor living, Than be king and Kaiser of all the glorious dead"'
ODYSSEY, BOOK XI
'History is hard to know, because of the hired bullshit'
THE GREAT SHARK HUNT, HUNTER S. THOMPSON
PROLOGUE:
ABOUT HISTORY
(OR WHY TODAY'S DATE IS A MATTER OF OPINION)
History as we know it began in 776BC, near the Greek city of Elis, when some men we know next to nothing about ran from one pile of stones to another.
Anywhere you look, you'll see the date: day, month and year. Our days of the week are named after Norse gods; the names of the months are Roman; the third part of the formula tells us how many years have passed since a man called Jesus Bar-Joseph was reckoned to have been born, at Bethlehem in the Roman province of Judaea. We know the date of his birth because the Romans were good at dates and figures; they carried out a regular census, and they used a system of chronology based on the date of the foundation of the city of Rome (753BC, by our reckoning). If asked how they knew when their city was founded, the Romans would have put it into the context of the Olympiads - the tradition of holding athletic competitions every four years at Olympia, near Elis, on which the Greeks based their chronology.
So, if we trace it through (like film of a relay race run through the projector backwards), we know what year it is because the Christian church kept records based on the records kept by the Romans, who in turn integrated their chronology into the Greek tradition, which assumed as an article of faith that on a certain day in July or August (the second or third full moon after the summer solstice) some men ran 192 metres between two piles of stones in the one and only event of the First Olympiad, and that this event was reckoned to be so important by the people of Elis that they remembered it, held another games four years later, and carried on doing so at four-year intervals until humanity was sufficiently grown-up to find more scientific ways of calculating its place in time.
All we know about those first games (and for 'know', read 'take on trust') is that a man called Coroebus won a foot-race. At that time, of course, the Olympics weren't called the Olympics, nor was the place where they were held called Olympia. Later, as the games became an established part of Greek life, other events were added, the site was adorned with great and wonderful buildings, all wars stopped while the games were on and people came from all over the Greek world to watch them, until the first Christian emperor of Rome banned them as being too pagan for his taste, some 1,148 years later. There were no written records in those days (writing probably started in Greece at some point between 750BC and 650BC; the Greeks believed that the art was learned from the Phoenicians, or invented by a man called Palamedes, or both, or neither). This wasn't the Ancient Greece we know, the era of philosophers, dramatists, artists and politicians; in the eighth century BC, Greece was still in the Dark Ages that followed the total collapse of the civilisation we call Mycenean (what they called it is anybody's guess), materially poor and decidedly primitive in comparison with the great kingdoms of Egypt and the Middle East with their complex systems of government and neatly written state archives which recorded in great detail their many centuries of history.
But the great kingdoms were conquered and either destroyed or subsumed; the archives lay buried until the nineteenth century, when antiquarians dug them up and worked out how to read them -and, incidentally, revived the Olympic Games. Their records failed as works of history, the process by which what happened in the past is recorded and passed on to the future. History had to rely on the memory of Goroebus running between two piles of stones.
(The word 'history', of course, means different things in different languages. In Greek, 'historia' meant a question. It was the Romans, uncharacteristically slapdash with the phrase book, who gave it the meaning we've inherited. In French, 'histoire' means a story; colloquially, a lie. The Germans, typically, have no truck with such Romance ambiguities; their word for history is 'Geschichte' - onomatopoeia, I've always assumed, derived from generations of scholars sneezing over dusty old manuscripts.)
A neat analogy for history would be the Olympic flame, kept perpetually alive and transmitted across the world and down the years by the Olympic torch, from that first kindling over 2,750 years ago right down to tomorrow. The analogy would be neater still if the games hadn't lapsed for fifteen centuries, and if the flame and the torch weren't a masterly touch of Victorian showmanship, only dating back to the first modern Olympiad in 1896.
We have no idea what made that first foot-race so devastatingly memorable. The Greeks had been playing games for a long time before 776BC, traditionally as part of the funeral ceremonies of important men - as well as running, they jumped, boxed, wrestled, threw things and raced chariots, and prowess in the games was almost as important to them as prowess in battle. Whether Coroebus' victory stuck in their minds because it was Coroebus who won (whoever he might have been) or because the race marked some other important event long since forgotten, or just because it was a really exciting race and everybody enjoyed it so much they decided to do it again, is something we'll never know.
Appropriately, nearly all of what follows is pure fiction, though some of it is probably true, parts of it are possibly true, and much of it could conceivably be true for all we know.
Scholars, who are sceptical people not given to accepting anything without hard evidence, will tell you that the first Olympic foot-race was won by Coroebus of Elis. Their authority for this statement is a guidebook written nine hundred years after the first Games by one Pausanias. Pausanias is a credible witness because his book has survived where countless others haven't; it's a criterion of reliability, though perhaps not the best. Ancient manuscripts survived in many different ways; some were copied out over and over again by professional scribes, later by monks, a new copy being made when the old one fell to bits, so that the earliest manuscript of an ancient text may date from the Middle Ages. Some texts are represented by several copies (invariably slightly different); some only survived because they were cut up and used to bind other books. Quite a few pages of original papyrus manuscript have been found, mostly in Egypt; they range from substantial chunks of the iliad to private letters and shopping lists. Very occasionally we find a list of dates, a genuine chronicle; but since every Greek state had a different calendar, with different names and lengths for the months and their own idea of when the year started and ended, even these aren't quite as rock solid as at first they seem to be. From these bits and pieces, together with a name scratched on the neck of a jar or the remains of an inscription on the base of a statue, generations of serious-minded men have built an artefact we call history. Very little of it would stand up as evidence in a court of law, where the burdens of proof are more stringent, and every ten years or so a new scrap of papyrus or scratched potsherd turns up that disproves the theories, scatters the pieces of the jigsaw and leaves them lying for the next generation of historians.
Pausanias never mentioned a King Leon, or two brothers called Cleander and Cratus, or their sister and uncle, or a Corinthian dynasty usurping power in Aegina; these are genuine fictions, reliably false. There is a certain amount of evidence,
drawn from literature and archaeology, for how people lived and thought in the eighth century BC: their material poverty, their way of regarding emotions as the effects of external forces acting on them, the shape of their houses and sword-blades, some idea of what they ate and what they wore on their feet. There is a considerable amount of literary evidence that we know is almost certainly not true, such as the story, widely believed in antiquity, that the Olympic Games were founded by Hercules.
The sad fact is, we have no proof that Coroebus ever existed, or that the first Olympiad was held in 776BC, or that it was ever held at all - only fragments of records of stories of memories, a slovenly, unintentional relay race run by men who didn't know where they were going and who were in no hurry to get there. On that depends our knowledge of history, and on history depends our knowledge and understanding of who we are and how we got that way.
If Coroebus hadn't existed, of course, it would have been necessary to invent him. So I have.
Tom Holt
(?) 6th February, 1999
CHAPTER ONE
'No, no, that's completely wrong,' said the guest, shaking his head. 'Give it here, let me show you again.' He pulled the wax-covered board out of his host's hand, smeared the marks away and took back the little pointed stick. 'Like this,' he said. 'There, you see? The first part - well, it's like an arrowhead, or a man's elbow. And the other part's just a straight line coming down, like this.' He drew the point of the stick smartly through the wax, cutting a furrow. 'Now, try again.
'All right,' his host replied tolerantly. 'But my heart tells me I'm not going to get the hang of this.'
The guest pulled a face. 'If you'd listen to me occasionally instead of your confounded heart, we might actually get somewhere. Come on. Have another go.'
The old man was, of course, holding the stick all wrong, but his guest had the common sense not to point this out, for fear of exhausting his fairly limited supply of patience and enthusiasm. In the event, it wasn't bad. At least, it was recognisable. If you knew what you were looking at. More or less.
'Excellent,' said the guest. 'You see, it's easy when you concentrate.'
The old man sat gazing at the waxed board and the scratches, while his family and household looked on in speechless wonder (except for one small boy in the shadows near the door, who repeated an earlier observation to his mother about the size of the foreigner's nose). 'And you're telling me,' the old man said after a while, 'that anybody in your country looking at that squiggle will know at once what it means?'
'Of course,' replied the guest. 'Well, not everybody. Most people. Most people of the better sort, anyhow.'
The old man shook his head. 'Remarkable,' he said, as if he'd just been shown a talking chicken. 'People can look at that scratch and know it means aaah.' He smiled. 'What does aaah mean?' he added.
His guest frowned. 'I explained all that,' he said. 'Each different letter - each design of scratch, if you like - means a different sound. Put them all together, and you sound out a word. For instance -He gripped the pointed stick between his thumb and first two fingers and quickly drew some more scratches. 'There,' he said. 'That's your name. Look: pe, aleph, lamedh, aleph again, mem, he, daleth-'
'What's that stuff you're chanting?' asked the host suspiciously. 'It's not magic, is it?'
'It's the names of the letters. I mean, the scratches.'
'They've got names?' The old man chuckled. 'You people really do pay attention to detail.'
The guest sighed. 'All right,' he said. 'Pee, ah, luh, ah, mu, eh, duh, eh, suh. Palamedes. Your name.'
The old man sat up. 'Those scratches mean my name?' he said. 'Really?'
'Really.'
'And if you took that bit of wood home with you and gave it to someone else, they'd look at it and know my name?'
The guest nodded. 'Any of my neighbours in Tyre could read that,' he said.
The old man sat back against the wall and blinked. 'Well,' he said, 'isn't that something? And if you kept that bit of wood safely, like in a box or on a shelf in the wall, it'd keep on saying my name even after I'm dead? For ever, even.'
The guest smiled. 'Well, maybe not for ever. To be honest with you, I don't know how long wax lasts before it goes bad and crumbles away. But suppose when that happens my son were to copy it on to a fresh tablet, and then his son after him, and his son after that - yes, it's possible your name could live for a very long time. Who knows, maybe for ever.'
'Without me ever having done anything to deserve it? Just because of a few scratches?'
'Of course.'
The old man scowled. 'You know,' he said, 'my heart reckons that's not right. I mean to say, suppose you're telling the truth. My name could still be remembered long after other people have been forgotten - better men than me, people who've done great things, heroes. Where'd be the sense in that?'
'I see your point,' the guest said politely. 'But we could write their names down too.'
'Yes, but then who'd be able to tell the difference? Between the real heroes, I mean, and the people whose names just happened to be scratched in wax? If that's possible, what'd be the point of being a great hero or a wise king or anything like that?' He shook his head disapprovingly. 'Sorry,' he said, 'but Wisdom isn't in that.'
'We've been doing it for hundreds of years in Phoenicia,' the guest said gently. 'And it doesn't seem to have done us any harm.'
The old man wasn't impressed. 'Maybe,' he said. 'But we see things different here. And besides,' he went on, 'how do you know?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'How do you know,' the old man said, 'that you've been using scratches for hundreds of years? Nobody can remember that far back.'
'Ah,' the guest said, smiling. 'But we have the writing to tell us. We call it -' He said some word in Phoenician that the old man didn't know. 'It means that every year we write down all the important things that happened that year, so that in years to come-'
'But how do you know they're telling the truth?'
It wasn't the first time the Phoenician had stayed at Palamedes' house; far from it. He'd made his first trip to Greece when his father was still alive, working the old route by way of Cyprus and Crete, and his father had introduced him to Palamedes' father over thirty years ago. He'd come back this way once every five years or so, but this was only the third time he'd bothered going as far north as Elis; usually he'd got everything he wanted by Calchis or Sparta. This year, though, he particularly wanted hides - good-quality untanned ox hides, to sell to the Sidonians, who sold them to the Assyrians, Lords of All Creation, to make into shields. Unfortunately, he wasn't the only trader with the same idea, which meant he'd had to go further to get what he wanted. And much further than Elis, he felt sure, there was no conceivable reason ever to go.
Elis had changed a bit since he'd first seen it, of course. For one thing, it was bigger - like it or not, there were more Greeks in the world now than there had been then, and the rate of increase showed no sign of slowing down. Why the gods were apparently stockpiling Greeks, he had no idea; presumably they had some use for them, now or in the future, but as usual they felt no obligation to share their plans with mortals.
As a result of the increase in numbers, Elis was starting to overflow its walls, like an overfilled jug; there were houses all round the outside of the old walls, the usual single-room, flat-roof Greek pattern with an open porch, though a few were two-storeyed, with brick walls carefully faced with meticulously cut stone. Inside the city proper, new buildings had sprung up where old ones had fallen or burned down, while others seemed to have oozed out of the cracks between the older structures, like sap from a cut tree. There was no trace of order or planning in the way the place was laid out; rather, it was as if some giant child had spilt a jarful of houses and run away without clearing up the mess. Only the big old places stood out of the general confusion, country houses stranded in a town, like high places turned into islands by floodwater; their arched, thatched roofs and rounded bac
k ends stood proud so that their eaves were level with their neighbours' rooftops. A few of them still had their own back orchards and kitchen gardens; there was some superstition about building on these, since they'd originally been set aside for the householders' ancestors as a part of the social contract, whereby the better sort fought in the front rank of the battle and in return got the best of everything. Those ways were getting a little tight under the arms and across the shoulders these days, as the numbers increased and land was starting to be something you owned (rather than the other way round); nevertheless, even a great man of the better sort would think twice before building a granary or a shit-house on his honour, let alone allowing ordinary people to live there.
Mostly, though, the old ways were still reckoned to be the best ways, usually because they were the best ways, and nobody had been able to come up with worthwhile improvements. People still lived in the city because they'd be safe there behind the walls, or at least under their shadow, and they still walked to their fields every morning and trudged back at night because they had no choice in the matter. Now and again a brave soul would build a place for himself out in the open, where he reckoned he could scrape a little hitherto-undisturbed dirt together and grow something in it, but that was usually an act of desperation, where by bad luck or folly a man had no land of his own; if the bandits or the bears didn't get him, the bad seasons soon chased him out, and his silly little house would slowly fall apart, a landmark and a warning to all right-thinking people. All Greeks were, of course, right thinking; in their own estimation, at least.
By and large, he liked Greeks - mainlanders, of course, as opposed to islanders, who tended to indulge in piracy when the harvests were poor, and sometimes when they weren't; Greeks were, in fact, almost his favourite savages. He liked their strange, rather long-winded language with its enormous words and sweetly balanced sentences (if ever they find something to say, he'd often thought, they've got a fine language to say it in). He liked their idiotic notions of hospitality, their absurd pride in the few trashy possessions they managed to acquire, their often bizarre way of expressing themselves. He liked their habit of attributing their own stray thoughts and observations to 'the god' - unspecified, because they were realistic enough to admit that they didn't know which god to attribute their moments of intuition and insight to, and cautious enough not to appear blasphemously disrespectful by saying 'some god or other' out loud. Best of all, in his opinion, was the way they seemed to believe that the feelings and emotions they experienced weren't part of them at all, but acts of intervention by unpredictable and irresponsible gods - who else but a Greek could yell at you and threaten you with a knife, and a moment later inform you with a disarming smile that Anger had stolen his heart for a moment there, but it was all right now, she'd gone? And there was that ludicrous habit they had of thinking aloud, in public, debating with their 'beloved heart', as if holding a rational conversation with their own internal organs. At first he'd assumed it was all a pantomime they put on for the benefit of gullible foreigners; but no, he'd watched them when they hadn't known he was there, and they did it for real. Crazy. But crazy in a good sort of way, at least on the mainland.
Olympiad Tom Holt Page 1
