Death on Delos

by Gary Corby

  The Terrace of the Lions was built by the people of Naxos, in about 600 bc. The lion count is usually given as nine to twelve, or maybe sixteen. Nobody knows. I’ve gone with ten, because ancient Greeks loved to use multiples of ten, in much the same way we tend to work with twelves. The surviving lions are heavily eroded and were moved into the museum at Naxos, except for one, which was taken by the Venetians hundreds of years ago.

  Hyperborea will be known to you if you’re a Conan the Barbarian fan. What is less well known is that this fantasy land might have existed.

  Hyperborea in Greek means “beyond Boreas.” Boreas was the name of the cold north wind that blew across central Europe. So Hyperborea is a land far to the north, beyond the cold. Which is how it ended up being stolen for Conan.

  At first glance Hyperborea has about as much reality as Atlantis. There isn’t a shred of archaeological evidence for any such place.

  The difficulty is that, unlike Atlantis, a lot of very credible writers talk about Hyperborea as if it exists. Herodotus says that Hesiod wrote about the Hyperboreans. Unfortunately that piece of Hesiod has been lost, but Hesiod was Europe’s first non-fiction author. If Hesiod wrote about them, then he thought they existed, rightly or wrongly. There’s also an archaic poem that talks about Hyperboreans that probably wasn’t written by Homer but which is from the same sort of time period.

  Herodotus himself provides the best evidence. He says the Hyperboreans decided to send gifts to the sacred isle of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. You might be noticing a plot element here. Yes, I ripped it off Herodotus.

  The story is much as Meren gives it in the book. The gifts were carried by two young women, who were sent on the long journey with five male warriors to protect them. The young women died while on Delos. It’s not clear what killed them, but disease rather than violence is kind of assumed since the women were greatly honored. Herodotus states point blank that their tomb is on the left as you enter the temple of Artemis at Delos, and that teenage boys and girls sacrifice to them.

  Now this is a very precise detail! There might not be two Hyperborean women in that tomb, but the Greeks think there are. If you ever visit Delos, by the way, you’ll be able to go to exactly where the tomb was, because the ruins of the Artemis temple are well known. Just walk to the entrance and look left. Sadly there’s nothing there now, but you’ll also be standing on a spot where Herodotus himself certainly stood.

  Herodotus states that when the Hyperboreans realized that their emissaries might not return, they decided to continue to send gifts every year, but to pass them on from one people to the next. To protect their gifts, the Hyperboreans wrapped them in sheaves of wheat. Then they gave the gifts to their neighbors, with a request to hand them on to the next people to the south.

  The Hyperborean Gift thus turned into an international game of pass-the-parcel. The gift was handed along until it reached Delos. Multiple authors speculated about the paths the gift took, in an attempt to work out where exactly was this Hyperborea. The ancient people themselves were none too sure.

  Herodotus states that the Hyperborean Gift was still turning up on Delos right up to his present day. This is a detail impossible to ignore. Herodotus first “published” his work at the Olympics of 440 bc. There were obviously people from Delos present. If the gift was not turning up as described, they surely would have put up their hands and pointed out that he was wrong. It doesn’t absolutely prove that Hyperborea existed. But if not, then someone was playing a strange game (which might be the case).

  The two things you are certain to find on any Greek beach are sand and Swedish backpackers. The idea that some Scandinavians in classical times might have quietly migrated south is very unlikely, but not completely outrageous.

  Pericles’s scheme to bribe Geros is cynical, yet consistent with the real Pericles, who never let idealism get in the way of pragmatic politics. The modern image of Pericles as an idealistic statesman is a slight whitewash.

  There was an incident one year in which a Spartan army invaded Attica. The Spartans made it all the way to the walls of Athens.

  Things looked bad for the Athenians, but Pericles said he would fix it, all on his own. He went to meet the enemy commander, carrying with him a number of bags that clinked heavily. After they had finished talking, the Spartans turned around and went home.

  At the end of the year, the public accounts showed that there were ten talents missing from the Athenian state treasury. Sixty thousand drachmae! Men had been executed for smaller discrepancies than this. Pericles’s only explanation for the missing money was that the ten talents had been spent “for necessary purposes.”

  The city accountants looked at this enormous gap in the state funds, and then with straight faces signed it off. They knew perfectly well that Pericles had bribed the commanders of the Spartan army.

  The Spartans knew it too. When they heard what the Athenian account books said, they fined their own leaders a lot of money. More than ten talents, in fact.

  Everyone thought this was hilarious. For decades afterwards, any Athenian who spent money on illicit activities would explain to his friends that he had spent the money “for necessary purposes,” and then everyone would fall on the floor laughing. This joke even made it into one of the great comedies written by Aristophanes.

  This not only proves that Pericles was willing to bribe people using state funds when the good of Athens called for it, but it also set the going rate for a Spartan General at ten talents. Thus Nico is stunned when Geros demands three times that, thirty talents, and Pericles instantly agrees. Pericles can afford to be complacent because in return he will “liberate” four thousand talents.

  Anaxinos spills the beans on what he really thinks of Athens after he becomes drunk. Later Diotima mentions there’s a poem that says wine is a window into a man’s soul. She’s not thinking of in vino veritas. That’s a Latin phrase and won’t be written for probably a couple hundred years. She’s thinking of a poem by a great poet of the archaic age, a man named Alcaeus.

  Alcaeus was the second of the two great poets of his time. The first of course was the infinitely more famous Sappho, who was called the Tenth Muse by Plato. Incredibly, Alcaeus and Sappho not only lived at the same time, but it’s certain that they knew each other. Alcaeus writes of Sappho in a poem, describing her as if she were a goddess. For this reason many assume the two were lovers.

  Childbirth was incredibly dangerous in ancient Greece. It was incredibly dangerous everywhere in the world, until modern medicine gave doctors the tools to save a mother in trouble.

  The mortality rate of mothers was probably the same as what you’d find in Europe in the 1700s and early 1800s. This is known to vary between about 1 in 30 and 1 in 50, depending on locale. That being the case, Nico is right to be terrified for Diotima.

  Phaenarete, the mother of Socrates (and Nico), was a real person and is known to have been a midwife. Plato mentions this fact in one of his books about Socrates.

  A midwife in ancient Greece had practical knowledge, of course, but very little understanding of what was going on, and no knowledge of anatomy. The midwife was as likely to spend time praying to the goddess of childbirth as she was to assist the birth. Human dissection was absolute anathema to the Greeks. Nor was there any such thing as surgery. The C-section, named for the much later Julius Caesar, is not known to have been practiced in Greece.

  Classical Athens did have people whose job was to keep the accounts. Athenians took their accounting very seriously.

  There was a group of ten city officials, elected yearly, called the Hellenotamiae. They were the official city treasurers, their job was to manage the money vault buried beneath the Parthenon. The sums they handled were vast.

  The Athenians, being the untrusting souls they were, checked the accounts on a regular basis. On one occasion, the numbers didn’t add up. The ten treasurers were ins
tantly charged with embezzlement.

  We know about this because what happened next was mentioned in a subsequent court case for which the documents have survived:

  Then again, your Hellenotamiae were once accused of embezzlement . . . Anger swept reason aside, and they were all put to death save one. Later the true facts became known.

  This one, whose name is said to have been Sosias, though under sentence of death, had not yet been executed. Meanwhile it was shown how the money had disappeared. The Athenian people rescued him from the very hands of the Eleven, while the rest had died entirely innocent.

  The Eleven was the official Athenian body responsible for carrying out state executions. In other words, Sosias had been in the hands of his executioners when they retrieved him. The implication of the “it was shown how the money had disappeared” is that it was a mistake in the books.

  So the other nine treasurers died for an accounting error.

  Modern accountants might feel that the classical system for dealing with an error in the books is slightly harsh—making it to partner status would be something of a triumph—it was however a very effective way to make sure that the people counting the coins paid close attention.

  Thus Karnon takes it for granted that he’ll be executed for his skimming of the profits from the investment fund. Nico certainly saves his life when he gives him a ticket off the island.

  Historical sources tell us that there were two accountants assigned to the Delian League to manage the treasury. Both of them were from Athens, which was an acknowledgment that Athens was by far the biggest contributor to the League. I have converted this to one to keep the character list manageable.

  The electrum coin from Kyzikos is perfectly real. There are surviving examples. Electrum really is a mixture of gold and silver and there are a very small number of mines where it is naturally occurring.

  Karnon’s market manipulations would be hideously illegal in the modern world, but were perfectly legal in the ancient. There was no such thing as a market regulator back then. There were however very extensive import and export rules and duty payments. Since Karnon is in modern terms a one-man NGO, he can avoid even those costs.

  It is easy for him to set aside part of the profits made in these ventures into his own personal account, as long as the money he skims is profit made away from Delos, and taken before it reaches Delos. Karnon is correct that Athenians were masters of watching the entire value of a treasury and everything that goes in or out. But the idea of accounting the entire value chain of an enterprise is a concept for accountants in the far distant future (and remains an accounting challenge to this day).

  Catharsis to us means a cleansing of the spirit, but the original meaning in ancient Greek was a ritual cleansing, like consecrating a church. The first person to use catharsis in our modern sense was Aristotle, when he wrote about the great tragedies.

  The catharsis of Delos really did happen as Anaxinos describes. The story is told in The Histories by Herodotus. The graveyard really does seem to have contained graves—at least based on the description from Herodotus—which was unusual for the period because cremation was the norm.

  The rule about neither dying nor giving birth on Delos is absolutely for real.

  You’re probably wondering what the penalty was for dying, and so am I. Presumably things couldn’t get much worse for you anyway. Alas, we’ll never know.

  Despite the rule against death on Delos, there is a fair amount of death in this book. Geros’s killers know the rule as well as anyone, but they don’t hesitate to kill him because from their point of view it’s the lesser of the evils. Nico is ready to fight and even kill the guards, because it is simply necessary. Likewise Karnon at the end waits to be executed. If that had been carried out, the Athenians would have taken him offshore on a trireme to carry out the sentence. Of course there is also a serious battle that leaves hundreds dead.

  So the rule against dying on the island is broken, and in every case there’s a practical reason. The Greeks would not necessarily think this a disaster, as long as the necessary purification (catharsis!) is carried out afterwards.

  They’re not being irreligious when they do this, not even the murderers, in their own way. Instead they are practicing a certain amount of doublethink. It’s exactly the same doublethink that we use in the modern world. Take for example the governor of a US state who goes to church and ascribes to the ten commandments, including thou shalt not kill, and then goes to work the next day and signs a death warrant for a condemned prisoner. There are many such modern examples of daily life not quite matching religious ideals.

  Ancient people were as inconsistent as us. We know which rules we’ll break, and which we won’t. After reading a large number of ancient books, I think I have a pretty firm grip on where they’d break with doctrine, and where they’d strictly adhere. The defense of the island at the end of the book is very clearly a moment where the Greeks will ignore the rule against death in favor of self-defense.

  Door keys were in use in classical Greece. They worked exactly as Nico describes in the book. Most keys at the time were for temple doors. It is said that the Greeks also invented the keyhole, though I doubt it could ever be proven that they got it first. Classical Greek keys looked a lot like the crank to start a vintage car.

  You can forget about carrying keys in your pocket, though. There is at least one surviving key that is actually inscribed as such, and it is more than forty centimeters long. That’s about sixteen inches. If you’re interested, you can find that key in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was a key to a temple door and is dated to the 5th century bc, the same time as Nico and Diotima. Thus it’s not only reasonable but virtually certain that the treasury doors on Delos were opened with keys.

  Keys, however, were an unusual technology for most people. It was possible for a normal adult, who was neither a priest nor an accountant, to get through their lives without ever seeing a key. The paradigm that we are used to—that possessing a key gives you access to what it protects—would have been a bit dubious to your average classical Greek. It seems obvious that a guard can intelligently recognize who is valid and who is not, and thus outperforms these new-fangled keys. Indeed to this day, when we really want to protect something, we assign armed guards. Thus Nico and Diotima have trouble getting their heads around the idea that they have to think in terms of who owns or can steal a key.

  I couldn’t resist playing a joke on you, Dear Reader, when I named the slave Ekamandronemus. I’m well aware that some modern readers find the ancient names a bit of a challenge. I try to avoid the difficult ones, but I made an exception for poor old Ekam. Of course I must have classical names. I can hardly call all these nice ancient people Fred and Jane.

  I always use genuine names from the period, and I try to pick ones that are fairly intuitive to an English speaker. Fortunately there are classical names such as Moira and Damon to fall back on. There’s only a limited stock of those, so I use them sparingly.

  Historical characters of course get their true names, but with modern spelling. Hence for example Pericles. Philipos is of course the modern Philip.

  Nico is quite right that classical Greeks used a lot of nicknames. Thus even Nico is taken aback by a slave named Ekamandronemus.

  Geros’s bankers are the Antisthenes and Archestratus Savings & Loan Company. It looks like a completely made-up, random detail, but this was a real bank of the fifth century bc based in Athens. Banking was a very new invention at this time—no more than a few decades old—I use A&A in my stories whenever dodgy financiers are required. They first appear in The Pericles Commission.

  I may well be traducing completely honest men, but since Antisthenes and Archestratus died 2,400 years ago I’m probably safe from a slander claim.

  Paralos was a real ship of the time, and her duties were as the good Captain Semnos describes. Paralos and Salaminia wer
e sister ships. Nico and Diotima normally travel on Salaminia when they are being wafted to their various missions. Paralos was so respected that Pericles named his second son Paralos in honor of the ship.

  Though they were theoretically interchangeable, my vague impression from reading the sources is that Salaminia tended to get the diplomatic missions, and Paralos tended to take the religious jobs. I’ve formalized that in the stories.

  The real Paralos will go on to play a much darker part in Nico’s family history. Fifty-five years after the time of this story, Nico’s younger brother Socrates was sentenced to die in an infamous trial. But straight after the sentence was declared, it was realized that Paralos had left for Delos, on exactly the same mission as occurs in this book. It was a rule of classical Athens that no prisoner could be executed while Paralos was attending religious duties. Thus Socrates was put in chains and had to wait. The return of Paralos to Athens was the signal for Socrates to be executed.

  When Damon and Nico chase the guards by boat, I included a moment where the guards tack into the wind. That was quite deliberate, but it will raise the eyebrows of historians of sailing. Tacking requires a fore-and-aft rig.

  All major ships of the classical world had a square rigged sail. There were no exceptions, and you can’t tack with a square rig. Or at least, not very well.

  Yet it is possible that small sailing dinghies and fishing boats in the fifth century bc might have had a type of fore-and-aft rig known as a spritsail.

  The earliest known use of a spritsail comes from ancient Greece, in the second century bc. Boats clearly rigged as spritsail appear on vase illustrations. I take it as likely that if spritsails are common enough in the second century bc to be iconic, then early versions could be around with Nico and Diotima in the fifth century bc. I also would not be surprised if the Phoenicians invented the spritsail before the Greeks got to it, but that’s the merest speculation.