by Gary Corby
* * *
Witch women like Mina were alive and well in Classical Greece. A Greek witch was called a pharmakis, from which we have the modern pharmacist and pharmacology. The familiar name tells you what their basic job was. The Classical Greek witch dealt in herbs, medicines, and poison. The odds are very good that a sick person might go see the local witch woman rather than an expensive doctor.
The poison which Mina sells to Nico is hydrogen cyanide. The method she describes to extract cyanide from peach kernels actually works. Don’t try this at home, kids, you’re likely to poison yourselves. There’s no record of the Greeks using cyanide, but the ancient Hittites used it as one of their many cruel methods of execution, and the Hittites once ruled the land of Ionia. It’s reasonable for Mina to know how to make it. I wondered whether it was a good idea to give a working formula in the book, then realized anyone these days with the help of easily accessible advice on the Internet could make much worse, using only the bottles stored under the kitchen sink. If someone did use peach kernel cyanide these days then the peach DNA in the poison would be spotted at once and the police would have little trouble searching out the distilling equipment.
* * *
Not much is known about the children of Themistocles after his death, although we do know his descendants were honored in Magnesia for generations to come.
Cleophantus went on to become a well-known gentleman in Athens, although he was looked down on with contempt by the philosophers. About eighty years after the events of this story, Plato in his book Meno causes Socrates to say, “Cleophantus, the famous horseman … he could stand upright on horseback and shoot javelins from there and do many other remarkable things.… But have you ever heard anyone, young or old, say that Cleophantus, the son of Themistocles, was clever or wise?”
Romantics will be pleased to hear that Nicomache got her man. History records that one of the first acts of the sons of Themistocles after his death was to betroth her to Phrasicles of Athens. Phrasicles arrived promptly in Magnesia to claim his bride.
Asia, the little rock who held back a great wave, was taken to Athens to be raised by Nicomache and her new husband. From there Asia disappears into the mists of history, and is never heard from again.
A NOTE ON NAMES
The Greeks had only a single name each, which we would think of as a first name. Greek names were usually two everyday words stuck together to form a meaning. A lot of the trick to saying them is to spot the word boundary, then say and think of them as two words.
Let me use as an example someone you’ve heard of: Cleopatra.
Cleopatra may have been Queen of Egypt, but her name was very typically Greek. If you can cope with Cleopatra, you can cope with any Greek name. Cleopatra is CLEO + PATRA. Cleo means glory, and patra means of the father. Glory of the father. The ending in –a makes it a feminine name.
With that in mind, here are a few of the major characters with interesting names:
Nicolaos is NICO + LAOS. Nico is a variant of Nike, which means victory. Laos is of the people. Victory of the people. Nicolaos is a common name in Greece to this day, and is quite obviously the origin of the western Nicholas. There was a St. Nicolaos who is better known as Santa Claus. The Claus part comes from the –colaos of Nicolaos. Nico is our modern Nick.
Diotima is DIOS + TIMA. The Greek Dios is the Latin Deus, which if you’ve ever heard a Latin prayer in church you will know means God. Tima means honored. Diotima is honored by God. A suitable name for any priestess.
Boy names end in –os, –us, –es, –is, or –on. Girl names end in –a, –ia, or –ache. You can switch the sex of any name by switching the ending.
Archeptolis looks tough but is amazingly simple. Archeptolis is almost the same as architect, a very common English word. Say architect. Now take off the tect and add on a tolis. Done!
The pt in Greek always sounds like a plain old English t. Every modern child knows the flying reptile called a pterodactyl. It’s the same thing.
The Greek ch can always be said like an English k (as in architect). But if you want to go for slightly more authenticity, try saying it like the ch in Scottish or German, which is to say like a k while choking on a fish bone.
Themistocles is THEMISTOS + CLEO. Themistos is law. The final s is removed to join the word to Cleo, which we already know means glory. The o of cleo is removed to make way for the male –es ending. Themistocles is glory of the law.
The –cles ending was very common, because glory was something every male aspired to. Parents naturally wanted their children to have positive, happy sounding names, and so frequently picked from the same small pool of image-reinforcing words. That’s also why so many Greek names begin Aristo-. Aristos means best. Hence the English word aristocrat.
For the graduation exercise, let’s look at Mnesiptolema. I confess I wouldn’t have used this one except that Mnesiptolema was a real historical person, like about half of my characters. The word boundary is MNESI + PTOLEMA. Mn makes a plain old English N sound, like the English word mnemonic. Indeed Mnesi and Mnem both come from memory. Ptolemaios means warlike or aggressive. So Mnesiptolema is memory of war. Say her name as Nessie + Tolema. Her friends call her Nessie.
ALSO BY GARY CORBY
The Pericles Commission
THE IONIA SANCTION. Copyright © 2011 by Gary Corby. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corby, Gary.
The Ionia sanction / Gary Corby. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-59901-0
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Athens (Greece)—Fiction. 4. Greece—History—Athenian supremacy, 479-431 B.C.—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.4.C665I57 2011
823’.92—dc23
2011026221
First Edition: November 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-7915-3
