Death Ex Machina

by Gary Corby

  IT WAS POSSIBLE but not easy for a metic to become a citizen. Diotima’s stepfather is the example in the book, but he’s fictitious. It really happened eighty years later to a highly talented man named Pasion. He began his career as a slave, was freed to become a metic, made enormous amounts of money as a banker, and was declared a citizen.

  The only way for a man to win citizenship was by act of parliament. Since the quorum was six thousand people, that meant there had to be at least three thousand citizens who thought you were worthy to join them. This is why Romanos desperately needs to be seen by the entire city to have done something of the highest merit. Whence his devious scheme.

  THAT LAKON IS willing to go to his death rather than admit he’s not really a citizen of Athens might seem extreme, but in fact that’s how the people of Athens felt about it. In those days, to be a citizen of Athens was the highest honor to which any man could aspire. There are multiple instances of condemned men choosing to die in Athens rather than live in permanent exile outside the city. Not least among these is Socrates.

  THE SCYTHIAN GUARD was a for-real force of three hundred slaves whose job was to keep the peace in the streets of Athens. They were so named because the original force was made up of slaves bought from Scythia, a barbarian land to the north of Greece.

  It’s an odd fact that these slaves were allowed to beat up their owners. Misdemeanors that would get you fined these days were dealt with somewhat more directly in Athens. A drunk and disorderly citizen or a troublemaker could expect to be beaten on the spot by the Scythians, which would not only encourage the troublemaker not to do it again, but deliver a fairly clear, visible reminder to anyone passing by.

  The system worked. Ancient writers remarked that Athens had one of the lowest rates of street crime in the world.

  Nor did the Scythians themselves ever become a source of trouble. That’s a remarkable thing, when you consider that hundreds of years later their equivalent in Rome, the Praetorian Guard, was the source of much of Rome’s woes. It speaks well of the men who led the Scythians. Pythax is my invention, but there must certainly have been someone like him: a hard man who kept these guardian slaves in line, yet a man of impeccable morals who never sought to use the power of his position for himself. We don’t even know his name.

  The standard weapon of the Scythians was a short bow. They unstrung this when on patrol to use as a cudgel.

  The idea of using a long rope to herd unruly citizens is thoroughly well documented. Another of the jobs of the Scythians was to force the citizens to turn up to their own parliament. The ecclesia of Athens was the world’s first parliamentary democracy. Every citizen was automatically a member of the parliament, but on slow days not enough people turned up to vote, so the Scythian slaves would work their way through the agora using the ropes to force their owners to go to parliament to run the city.

  THE IDEA OF halting the calendar looks too ridiculous to be true, a kind of ancient Groundhog Day. In fact it really happened on at least one occasion. In 271BC, almost two centuries after this story, everyone was running late for the Great Dionysia. It was a choice between holding the world’s greatest arts festival with everyone under-rehearsed, or else delaying the opening. But this was a sacred festival that had to start on the right sacred date. The archons solved the problem by adding four extra days between the 9th and 10th of Elaphebolion. That year the calendar went … 8th, 9th, 9th, 9th, 9th, 9th, 10th. At which point the show was ready, and everyone must have breathed a sigh of relief.

  One can only imagine with what desperate pleas the city leaders must have urged the artists to get their act together, while they held the calendar in check. There are probably some modern editors in publishing who wish they could pull the same trick. Not that any modern author would be slow delivering his manuscript.

  SORRY ABOUT THE month being called Elaphebolion. I know it looks weird, but that’s the real name of the month in which the Great Dionysia was held. For the record, the months in the classical calendar were: Hekatombaion, Metageitnion, Boedromion, Pyanepsion, Maimakterion, Poseideon, Gamelion, Anthesterion, Elaphebolion, Munychion, Thargelion, and Skirophorion.

  No, I can’t remember them either. Every time I need a calendar date, I have to look them up all over again.

  THE DESCRIPTION NICO gives of an ancient Greek wine cup that shows a man throwing up is all too accurate. The cup exists and can be found on display at the magnificent Getty Villa in Los Angeles. In fact the Getty Villa has an entire case of classical Greek cups and bowls decorated with themes that you are most unlikely to come across on modern partyware.

  ALL RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES of even the slightest importance included a sacrifice. The goat that Theokritos sacrifices at the altar within the theater is a typical example. It was important to the Greeks that the animal seem to agree to the sacrifice. Hence when the goat is shown the knife and appears to nod its head, that’s very good news for the people present (though the goat might feel otherwise). Sacrificed meat was barbecued and eaten in almost every instance. It’s not much different to having a barbecue after a modern church service. The Greeks also used these events as a charity system to get some quality food to poor families.

  I’VE USED THE word ghost to describe the haunting of the theater—the Ghost of Thespis—but that’s because ghost is the closest modern word. The Greeks didn’t believe in ghosts as we know them. I’d bet there are more people in the western world today per capita who believe in ghosts than there were in classical Athens.

  The Greeks did, however, have a total belief in the psyche, which was the spiritual part of a person that survives death. We would call it a soul. Your psyche descends to Hades when you die, where it remains for eternity.

  The important thing to a Greek was to make sure the spirits of the dead made it into Hades, after which they weren’t coming back. This was largely arranged via the funeral ritual, including the famous placing of a coin under the tongue.

  If a burial hadn’t been performed properly, then it was possible for a psyche to hang around on earth where it would disturb the living. That’s their equivalent of our ghosts. Indeed this happens in several famous classical stories. But it was extremely rare because the Greeks had enormous respect for the dead, even of their enemies, and made sure everyone got a decent burial.

  The story of Thespis as a ghost haunting the theater in Athens is therefore obvious nonsense to Nico. Thespis received a proper burial. Therefore his psyche must be safely in Hades.

  You might be surprised to learn though that the Ghost of Thespis remains a theatrical superstition to this day. It’s well known that actors never refer to Macbeth by name, nor will they whistle in a theater. Another of these quaint theater superstitions is that the Ghost of Thespis remains on earth to haunt theaters everywhere, so that whenever something odd happens, the ghost did it. This weird idea must have had its origin somewhere, so I decided it was at the Great Dionysia of 458BC.

  THAT EURIPIDES’S MOTHER was a vegetable seller in the agora is the stuff of legend. The great genius of Athenian comedy, Aristophanes, used this little factoid in his plays to skewer Euripides mercilessly. Aristophanes clearly expected everyone in the audience to know all about Euripides’s mother, which probably means this formidable lady qualified for the title of Most Embarrassing Mother Ever.

  I should add that Aristophanes makes Euripides the butt of many of his most cruel jokes. One assumes the two men were either the best of friends or the worst of enemies.

  THE THEATER OF Dionysos that Nico describes is not the one you see when you visit Athens. The Theater was rebuilt in the fourth century, and I have no doubt it was refurbished many times in the Roman period. The Romans venerated Greek culture; they restored or added to many famous Greek sites, just as British, US and now EU funding has restored many Greek sites over the last couple of centuries.

  The theater you see today is what survives of the deluxe Roman version. In Nico’s time the seating was almost certainly wooden benche
s. All Greek amphitheaters were placed on the sides of steep slopes, suitably sculpted, so that everyone in the audience could see the action. The amphitheater model also provides superb acoustics as the sound bounces upward, a very important consideration in a world without PA systems. A good example of this is the ancient amphitheater at Ephesus, a vast construction that seats twenty-five thousand people. That amphitheater still exists and is in excellent condition. I have stood at the topmost row of seats at Ephesus and could hear with adequate clarity what was being spoken from the orchestra far below.

  The Athenian theater was not nearly so grand. It seated at most fifteen thousand people, and that would have been very crowded.

  The marble backing wall of later times was certainly a wooden wall when Nico and Diotima saw it. There’s a long history to that back stage wall.

  When Thespis, the world’s first known professional actor, went on tour, he traveled from city to city, taking with him a cart to carry all his stuff. Chief amongst the stuff on the cart was a big tent. The tent wasn’t the theater, it was the change room.

  Thespis played every role in his plays, while a chorus sang much of the action. Since Thespis was the only actor, he frequently had to duck into the tent to change masks and clothes, and emerge as a different character. The side of the tent thus formed the back wall of his stage.

  In classical Greek, the word for tent is skene. When they started to build permanent theaters, the Greeks retained the name skene for the wall at the back of the stage. They knew perfectly well they were calling a back wall a tent. It’s a testimony to the massive impact Thespis had that they copied the names for everything he did, even when the word no longer applied.

  It wasn’t until Thespis was long gone, and Aeschylus was the top man in theater, that anyone thought to paint the skene to match the action on stage. It was probably Aeschylus himself who thought of that.

  The idea of painting the skene was such a huge success that people began to associate the word skene not with the wall (which used to be a tent), but with the images painted on it. Thus was born scenery. Later on, directors started to change the scenery as the play progressed, thus creating visible scenes.

  That is why in modern theaters we see actors in plays broken into scenes, in front of scenery. It’s all because 2,600 years ago, Thespis decided to use a tent to make his quick changes.

  I WANT TO publicly thank the very excellent illustrator who has provided a cover for every book in Nico’s adventures, and long may he continue to do so.

  His name is Stefano Vitale. He lives in Venice with his wife and two children, while I am in Sydney, Australia, and the amazing editor, Juliet Grames, is in New York. This has been a truly international effort.

  It is no accident that the name of the painter who paints the skene in Death ex Machina is Stephanos of Vitale.

  THE PAINTING METHOD that Stephanos uses is called encaustic. It’s an ancient Greek word that means “in heat” and really did involve pigments embedded in beeswax. The other major painting method for murals was egg tempura, for which you had to work even faster. But encaustic painting came first, and it’s almost certain encaustic murals were the standard in Nico’s time.

  The most famous examples of encaustic painting are not Greek, but Egyptian. You might already know of the incredibly beautiful and poignant portrait paintings found on Egyptian mummies from the Hellenistic Period. The faces seem so fresh and realistic that you might think you’re looking at people who you saw only yesterday. Those amazing portraits are all encaustic.

  The formula Stephanos gives to make white pigment is accurate, and in fact it was the Greeks who first discovered how to make white. Their formula of lead, vinegar, and poo remained the standard almost into modern times.

  There must have been a world’s first scene painter. We don’t know his name, but we do know he must have been alive in the time of Nico and Diotima, because it was Aeschylus who first thought to decorate the back wall.

  PHRYGIA WAS, AND still is, a province of Anatolia.

  Anatolia is the name the Greeks gave to what we now call Turkey. In classical Greek it means “the place where the sun rises,” which is rather accurate if you happen to be west of it.

  SABAZIOS APPEARS TO have been the most hated god in Athens. This is quite remarkable, considering the Athenians were notably tolerant of other religions.

  The followers of Sabazios may have done something to earn such enmity, but if so, it’s lost in the mists of time. I decided to supply a reason with the beer versus wine riot.

  About a 130 years after the time of this story, one Athenian politician named Demosthenes decided to attack an opponent by claiming he had assisted his mother in the rites of Sabazios. The attack was clearly intended as slander, as if anyone who worships Sabazios is not fit to be a citizen. Demosthenes also implied without saying so that assisting one’s mother in the rites of Sabazios went somewhat beyond the normal bounds of filial duty. This is what Demosthenes had to say:

  “On attaining manhood you abetted your mother in her initiations and the other rituals, and read aloud from the cultic writings … You rubbed the fat-cheeked snakes and swung them above your head, crying Euoi saboi and hues attes, attes hues.”

  The comic playwright Aristophanes wrote a play, now lost, in which Sabazios and a bunch of other gods are thrown out of the city. Sabazios never was thrown out of Athens. There’s a surviving inscription written about 250 years after this story which lists fifty one devotees of Sabazios. It’s not many, but 36 of those are citizen names.

  Aristophanes uses the term “the sleep of Sabazios” a couple of times to refer to guards who’ve been drinking on the job and fallen asleep. By implication they were drinking beer. When in my story the Scythians fall asleep while guarding the theater, I stole that wholesale from a play written 2,400 years ago. There’s a good chance that beer back then was stronger than the wine. Greeks always drank wine watered down, three parts water to one of wine. Without experience of beer, they probably drank it neat.

  Things have obviously changed since classical times, because I’ve drunk enough modern Greek beer to know it’s excellent, but the classical Greeks absolutely loathed the stuff. Watered wine was their tipple of choice and nothing else would do.

  Phrygians on the other hand loved their beer. There are plenty of surviving archaeological beer artifacts from Phrygia, mostly pottery beer jars, but also, interestingly, some of the straws through which they drank. The idea of drinking beer through straws from a communal vat may seem odd, but that’s how they did it. This seems to have been the standard system across the Middle East for hundreds of years. There are surviving reliefs from Mesopotamia that show the same thing: partygoers dancing in a circle as they drink from a large vat of beer, with everyone holding their own drinking straws.

  The Greeks were aware of this odd party trick. There’s a fragment of a poem from the poet Archilochos that includes the line, “as a Thracian or a Phrygian sucks his barley beer through a tube …”

  IN EVERY BOOK I include a character list at the front, with my suggestions on how to say those odd-looking Greek names. How I choose the sounding is really quite simple. I look for a similar Greek word that’s already been turned into common English, and then I follow the same conventions. Let me give as an example Euterpe, who is Nico’s mother-in-law.

  At first glance Euterpe and Euripides look tricky to render into English. But in fact, they’re easy, because you’ve probably heard of a place called Europe. Europe is named for the Greek mythological character Europa. In the original, the EU would have been pronounced OY, as in oyster. Europa was probably pronounced OY-ROPE-AY. We moderns have turned it into YOU-RUP. So I follow the same line to render Euterpe as YOU-TERP-E.

  THIS HAS BEEN Nico and Diotima’s first assignment since their marriage. Their last two jobs have been domestic commissions.

  But international events have been continuing apace while our heroes tarried at home. There’s a war on far to the south,
and political intrigue that demands their attention.

  In the next book they are off overseas, to the land called Aegypt.

  GLOSSARY

  Aeschylus

  First of the three great tragic playwrights of the ancient world. The other two were Sophocles and Euripides. Aeschylus wrote the oldest known play to survive to this day, The Persians. For that reason he’s considered the founder of modern theater.

  Agora

  The marketplace. Every city and town in Athens has an agora.

  Amphitheater

  The meaning hasn’t changed in three thousand years.

  Archon

  A city official, elected for the term of a year. The three most senior archons appear in this story: the Eponymous Archon, the Polemarch, and the Basileus.

  Artemis Agroptera, Artemision

  Artemis is one of the major goddesses of the Greek pantheon. She’s usually pictured as a young lady with a bow and arrow and called The Huntress. That’s exactly what the Agroptera part means in ancient Greek. Artemis Agroptera is Artemis the Huntress.

  The Temple of Artemis Agroptera is the name of her temple in Athens. The Artemision is her temple in Ephesus, over on the Asian mainland. There, the goddess Artemis was worshipped not as a huntress, but as a mother goddess. Artemision simply means “place of Artemis.” The Artemision was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  Diotima has served (across two previous adventures) at both the Temple of Artemis Agroptera in Athens, and the Artemision in Ephesus. This gives her serious credentials as a priestess, as Nico remarks in the book.

  Attica

  The region controlled by Athens. The relative power of each city-state determined how much land it controlled. Attica was very large indeed, comprising what we’d call southeastern Greece. Many villages, towns, and minor cities existed within Attica, one of which was Rhamnus.