by Gene Wolfe
Secrets of the Greeks
(1990)
Since I’m told there are real classicists present, I ought to kick this off by admitting I’m not one, and asking their help. You see, I’ve been wanting to write a Classic Greek phrase book for travelers, and I’d like to work with somebody who actually knows Greek. The idea is to give the ordinary business traveler and tourist the phrases he’ll require the next time he goes to ancient Attica. With our phrase book—as I envision it—and a few minutes’ practice, anybody can speak fluent Classic Greek. Can you say:
‘η α ’Aτλαντκo πo.
Hay presbaya Atlantikou poo? Let’s try it all together now. “Hay presbaya Atlantikou poo?” That was very good!
Where is the U.S. embassy? Hay presbaya Atlantikou poo? A phrase that you may well require on your first trip to ancient Athens.
Now let’s try another one.
Megorgay Achilleus ti.
This time I want to hear everybody. Megorgay Achilleus ti.
Fine, but next time remember that ti is enclitic, okay? Megorgay Achilleus ti. Why is Achilles so cross?
Now let’s do one more before we move on to something else.
‘η µτηρ σo δ ’Aχλλεσ.
Hay maytayer soi kai day kai Achilleus.
Don’t be shy. Lemme hear ya! Hay maytayer soi kai day kai Achilleus.
Wonderful! Your mother is, too, Achilles! You never know when you may require this phrase, and of course other names can be substituted.
After this demonstration of my mastery of the language—and, indeed, the entire period—it may come as a shock to you to learn that by training I’m a mechanical engineer. Some of you, I understand, design beautiful ceilings. And some of you paint those ceilings, just like Charlton Heston. I represent the guys who route the air-conditioning ducts right below those ceilings.
I got into all this because Pocket Books almost literally went crazy. Ten years ago, Pocket had by far the best science-fiction and fantasy publishing program in the world. David G. Hartwell, who was in charge of the program, was also my editor, and Pocket was publishing a tetralogy for me: The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch. These four books, which make up what is called The Book of the New Sun, are laid in a decadent society in Earth’s far future; and I had modeled this society on the Byzantine Empire. That had given me an excuse to read a few good books, from which I stole several interesting ideas that I put into my own. The hero of my own books is one Severian, who begins life as a half-starved torturer’s apprentice and ends up becoming Autarch—that is to say, by becoming Emperor. He’s the narrator—which may be a big part of the reason why he’s the hero—and at the end of the fourth and last volume, The Citadel of the Autarch, he’s about to go up into space to save Urth. To jump ahead a trifle, he’s going to have to leave this universe of ours and go to the universe next door to get a white hole to put at the core of Urth’s sun.
It worries him a little. So he sits down the night before he’s going to catch his flight and writes his life history, how he went from ragged apprentice torturer to Autarch. And on the last page he says, “Well, that’s how it’s done. Now here I go.”
I had an argument with David Hartwell over this last bit. David felt that I should add one more paragraph saying, Okay, Severian went to the universe next door and borrowed the white hole and fixed the sun and everybody lived happily every after. I, on the other hand—men … de, as they say in Greek—felt that a paragraph wasn’t going to be enough. David and I yelled at each other for a while, but eventually came to an agreement. David would publish The Citadel of the Autarch exactly as I had written it, provided that I would write another book in which Severian recounted his trip to the universe next door.
Fine, we were all set. I titled this fifth book-to-be The Urth of the New Sun and started in.
The first draft was about half finished when Pocket Books surprised the book business by announcing that it was no longer interested in science fiction or fantasy, and (with the single lucrative exception of Star Trek books) would not publish either again. I’m simplifying here—there was a whole bizarre episode involving the Scott Meredith Literary Agency; but the upshot was that Pocket dealt itself out of the science fiction and fantasy game. John Douglas, David’s right-hand man, went to Avon to head its science fiction and fantasy program. David himself became the head of William Morrow’s program and a consulting editor at Tor, and carried me to Tor with him. Parenthetically, I should say here that three new companies—Tor, Baen Books, and Bluejay—were essentially created from the ruins of the Pocket program. Bluejay went out of business several years ago, but Tor and Baen are both thriving, as well as I can judge.
While I was writing the books I’ve already talked about, I had also written one called Free Live Free, about an old man who invites four strangers to live in his house rent-free. It turns out that the old man is a renegade time-traveler from the early Second World War era, and that an enormous wooden airplane built by Howard Hughes is still circling Earth. Et cetera.
At any rate, David, in his new job as a consulting editor for Tor, gave me a two-book contract—the two books being Free Live Free and The Urth of the New Sun. Pocket having announced firmly that it had no further interest in science fiction, there seemed to be no reason I shouldn’t sell The Urth of the New Sun to Tor. David mentioned the contract to various friends in the publishing industry.
And soon Tor and my agent got letters from Pocket. These letters pointed out that Pocket had an option on The Urth of the New Sun, and threatened suit if that option was disregarded. We protested that Urth was science fiction, which Pocket no longer published. Pocket said it would judge that for itself, when the book was finished.
David rescued me by crossing out the words “The Urth of the New Sun” on my Tor contract and writing in “an untitled novel.” Tor could have taken me to court, of course, if its president, Tom Doherty, had chosen to be nasty.
I needed a new idea, and fast; and I may well have come up with the least workable one in the history of hackwork. I had been reading about Byzantium and thought that I knew a good deal about the ancient world. And I had just come across an article in Science News about a type of brain injury that destroys long-term memory while leaving short-term memory intact. That same day I laid aside The Urth of the New Sun and began a new novel about a mercenary in Xerxes’ army who has lost his long-term memory because of a head wound received in the Battle of Plataea. By the time I started Chapter Three, I had discovered that I did not know a good deal about the ancient world—that I was, for a novelist who proposed to write about it, appallingly ignorant of the ancient world.
I’ve titled this little talk “Secrets of the Greeks,” and of course there are a great many things we do not know and would like to know: the formula for Greek Fire; the real arrangement of rowers in a trireme (and never mind that thing you saw in Archaeology); and the nature of the poison the Greeks called “bull’s blood”—I think I’ve figured that one out, by the way, although I can’t prove it.
Most of all, the wellsprings of the Greeks’ unparalleled achievements. I believe the current fashion among scholars is to say that the Greeks “really” got their civilization from the Egyptians and Phoenicians, much of it by way of Crete. And the Greeks undoubtedly borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, as they told us themselves, which is itself a most significant point—the Greeks invented history, which takes its very name from the title of a Greek book.
But consider. The Egyptians had little that various other ancient civilizations did not have: big buildings and monarchy (its name is Greek, of course: “one-rule”). Writing, taxation, bureaucracy, and a caste system. The Phoenicians may well have been the greatest seamen that the world has ever known—but the Greeks did not get that from them; the Greeks never equaled or even approached the Phoenicians’ maritime achievements.
But science—by which I mean organized, questing kn
owledge—is Greek. Mathematics, literature, and politics, as we know those things, are all Greek, too. So is philosophy.
Drama arose from the rites of Dionysus. Plays written in Greece two thousand years ago are still being performed today; I challenge you to find a play written one thousand years ago of which that can be said.
Our military science begins with the army and campaigns of Alexander the Great, and though we call Alexander a Macedonian, he called himself a Greek, and got his grounding in strategy and tactics at the dinner table of Epiminondas of Thebes.
The Egyptians played a game remarkably like baseball, and everybody wrestled and ran footraces; but the “modes” concept of sports comes to us from the Greeks. We still celebrate their Olympic Games, in fact, and I’ll get back to those games in just a minute.
It would be impertinent for me to try to talk to this audience about Greek art and architecture. So I’ll limit myself to the story about the tourist who wanted to know why the Greeks built their churches like banks.
But all this impressive stuff I’ve been rattling off to you is pretty much what I knew already when I began writing the novel I eventually titled Soldier of the Mist. What I did not know, and soon discovered that I had to find out, was virtually everything else. What did an ancient Greek eat for breakfast? What was a poor man’s dinner like? How did he refer to the times of day—did he talk about the positions of the sun, or the length of a shadow, or what? What was a rich man’s dinner party like? Why do the horses in Greek art almost always have their mouths open? (I got the answer to that one, by the way, as soon as I saw some ancient Greek bits.)
What pictures would a rich man in Athens hang on the walls of his house? Come to think of it, what was that house like? Where were the kitchen and the bedrooms, and what were the beds like? Did he go in for picture windows? Why were the priests of Apollo at Delphi forbidden to wear sandals? And why are the women on Greek vases white and the men black?
Eventually I got answers to most of those questions and put them in my books, but I learned a good many other things along the way. The first and by far the most bitter lesson was that no book would tell me the things nobody knows. If no one knows, for example, exactly what historic events took place in 476 B.C., you cannot find a book that will say that. If no one knows the details of a particular public ceremony, no one will tell you that they’re lost, either.
Nor will most authors of histories say how they learned the facts they present—which ancient writers they’ve borrowed from, for example, though there are a few honorable exceptions.
Pretty early on, I realized I was going to have to learn at least a smattering of Greek, at which point—and this is the truth, so help me—a teacher of Greek moved in across the street. One of the things I eventually found out is that there are no fewer than four systems for pronouncing Classic Greek. In the hope that you may be interested, they are: the Greek system, in which ancient Greek is pronounced as though it were modern Greek; the Erasmian system, which is taught in most European universities outside of Greece; the English system, which Greek is pronounced rather as though it were Latin—when we say names like Socrates and Sophocles, we generally use the English system; and last but not least, the ancient system, which means saying ancient Greek words the way an ancient Athenian would have said them. Please notice that I said an Athenian—Spartans talked like Bostonians, and in fact like Kennedys, while Thebans—including Pindar, who became one of my leading characters—sounded like they came from Long-gIland.
I myself waver between the English system and the ancient, with frequent interludes of just plain wrong.
So, I regret to say, are the experts—let me give you a few examples. I have a large, costly, and quite recent book titled The Phoenicians. One of its plates shows a gold ring, and the caption reads: “Ring with male bearded head and headdress from Tharros, 7th—6th century B.C.” [italics added] But if you look at the picture, you will see that the ring does not show a male head, bearded or clean-shaven. In fact, it doesn’t show a head at all. What it shows is a helmet whose visor depicts a bearded face. I might add that to my admittedly untrained eye this helmet looks Greek, not Punic.
Now it may be that the caption I quoted was not written by the expert who wrote the section on Phoenician jewelry; it may have been written by some overworked editor at the publisher’s office. But if it was, it clearly should not have been. And if it wasn’t, our expert never really saw the photo before him.
Nor is that all. I could show you a picture purporting to show a cross section of a Greek trireme, in which the thalamites are sitting with their bare feet in the bilges. How long do you think a sailor would remain fit for duty if he were forced to soak his feet in raw sewage for several hours every day?
I could also show you a map of the naval dispositions at Salamis that proves the Greeks had no chance of winning. In reality, of course, the Greeks won; not being an utter idiot, Themistocles did not have his ships out in the strait like that to meet the Persian fleet head-on.
And I even have a book that tells me the Olympic Games were held at the foot of Mount Olympus. They were actually held at Olympia in Elis; and confusing the two is rather like getting Portland, Maine, mixed up with Portland, Oregon.
All of which goes to prove that the secrets of the Greeks aren’t the only things we don’t know about them. Too often, we don’t know things that are in fact quite well known—things that are obvious to anyone who looks and thinks and things that the Greeks themselves have told us plainly.
But what about the great secret, the one we really want to know? What made the ancient Greeks think better, not only than any other people of their time, but better than any other people of any time? I don’t pretend to know the whole answer, but I think I’ve found two parts of it, and I’d like to tell you about them.
The first was a sort of byproduct of the fact that Attica was a wine-growing region. Egypt, right across the sea—take a look at the map when you get home—was a very large, very rich, and very thirsty country. That meant that the Athenians had to make a great many attractive containers in which to ship wine to Egypt—attractive because they had to sell when they got there, and nobody in ancient times threw away a jar that wasn’t broken. Jars were too costly and too handy for that. Not being subject to the madness of modern government, the Greeks kept their best jars for themselves, and strove to make them better and better.
Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of Silence and Slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more lovely than our rhyme.
All those millions of jars, shipload after shipload of jars full of wine, supplied endless employment for artists, since each jar had to be painted individually and by hand. To paint well, one must do what the expert who captioned that ring did not do. One must look, and look carefully—paint what you see, and not what you think you ought to be seeing. Thus Greek science, which was inductive rather than experimental.
Furthermore, because Greek wine went from Athens to Egypt, Egyptian goods were cheap all over Greece, and particularly at Athens, the principal wine-exporting port. And Egyptian goods meant above all papyrus, the writing material of ancient times. In those times, of course, to write was to publish. One wrote a book or a poem, which was passed from hand to hand among those who could read. And if somebody liked it enough, he copied it down. To write well, one must actually think, and not just set down unsupported opinions and prejudices. Thus Greek literature and much Greek thought.
And finally—I’m just about finished, I promise you—there was Greek simplicity, and the typical Greek’s day. It has been wisely said that the cost of living keeps going up because we can’t live without what our parents could. The average Greek, and even great and rich Greeks like Themistocles and Aristides, lived very simply indeed by our standards. That in turn gave them the Greek day. An ancient Greek rose at the first light, spit, and went straight to work. His w
ork, I should add, seldom required a commute of more than a few streets or a field or two. He did his work in the morning, and at noon he was through. He ate his first meal of the day then. It was also his main meal. And then he went down to the marketplace to hear the news of the city, and talk about politics and everything else all afternoon.
Greece was, in short, so full of geniuses because it had no solitary geniuses. Each idea and every action had to withstand the probing questions of interested bystanders who could bring writers and philosophers, artists and architects, generals and statesmen to book. It made those people very careful, and it forced them to think. I recommend it to you, just as from time to time I recommend it to myself.
Now here’s your chance to practice. If you have questions about anything I’ve said, I’d like to hear them and I’ll try to answer them, though anything concerning the subjunctive mood will be turned over to one of the real experts in the audience.
From a Letter to Larry McCaffery
DATED OCTOBER 1, 1987
As for Cyberpunk, I’m interested in it, but I’m not sure I’ve got much of value to say about it. Or to put it another way, some of your questions seem to me to be rather too simple and straightforward to maintain academe’s reputation for fog and overworking.
What is your view of the fiction it has produced?
Like the fiction produced by other movements, it is sometimes excellent, sometimes poor, mostly in between. When good, it affords us a unique viewpoint that is exclusively modern, and in that lies its principal difference from the fiction of most other schools. I don’t believe it’s a compliment to say that something is relevent only to the present; but I confess that the narrowing of focus makes some details stand out more sharply.