The Marathon Conspiracy

by Corby, Gary

  For the treasure to have survived more than 2,500 years, it must have been well hidden. Archaeologists generally assume that the spring was filled in at the time of the Persian invasion, because no dedicated items have been recovered from after that period, but it might equally be because the Greeks changed their practices at that time. In any case, I have the Sacred Spring open and functioning twenty years after the invasion.

  Oddly, even as I wrote this book, archaeologists working at the site made a new discovery that was reported in the news. They found buried treasure at an unexpected location, and the treasure dated to about the same period as my story. This left me biting my nails, wondering if they were about to find something that would destroy my plot, and I sat with fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to alter my story in real time as news came to hand. Luckily, nothing went wrong (yet … but new discoveries are one of the occupational risks of writing historical fiction).

  What the archaeologists found were more items like the ones Nico discovers at the bottom of the Sacred Spring. These new items had been buried north of the spring, in an out-of-the-way place. In fact, Nico and Ophelia must have walked over that spot when they led the bear into battle.

  It seems likely that the treasure had been buried to hide it from the incoming Persians. That it wasn’t recovered indicates that whoever buried it didn’t survive the sacking.

  ONE THING I definitely did not make up is that girls were required to sacrifice their toys.

  I once gave a talk at my daughters’ school about ancient Greece. I talked about hairstyles, how children dressed, about ancient schools and how children took part in the festivals and how girls went to the sanctuary at Brauron. Then I mentioned in passing that ancient Greek girls, before they married, were required to dedicate all their toys to the goddess Artemis.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was still fielding questions as the girls desperately looked for ways around this evil rule. They were shocked.

  It was instantly obvious to me that Diotima would have cheated the system.

  The dedication of the toys is obviously a coming-of-age ritual. A maiden puts away her childish things before she becomes a wife. More accurately, it worked like this: When a girl was born she was a kore, which means maiden. When she was betrothed she became a nymphe, and nymphe she remained until motherhood, when she became a gyne. This is obviously the source of our modern word nymph, but the meaning has changed somewhat. The closest modern equivalent for the ancient nymphe would be the highly respectable debutante.

  The dedication of the toys was part of the transformation. The girl went to the temple, no doubt with her family, where in a ceremony she placed her toys within the temple. Then she left without them, no longer a girl, but a young woman.

  There are a few surviving dedications that we can read today. The clearest I know of is this one:

  Timareta, the daughter of Timaretus,

  before her wedding,

  has dedicated to you, Artemis of the Lake,

  her tambourine and her pretty ball,

  and the net that kept up her hair,

  and her dolls too, and their dresses;

  a virgin’s gift, as is fit, to a virgin goddess.

  THESE DAYS WE think of becoming an adult as a gradual process, but to the Greeks it was an instantaneous event. The adults in this book refer to the girls at the sanctuary as children. Which they are! But at the end of their time at the sanctuary the girls perform their dedication, and from that instant they are marriageable adults.

  A proud father would commission a statue of his girl to commemorate the occasion. This was like the graduation photos that families take these days, only back in classical Athens they did them in solid marble. The great majority of statues of girls from the ancient world come from Brauron. The surviving statues are very beautiful and lifelike, so that we have an astonishingly good idea what the girl children of classical Athens looked like.

  This instant graduation system might seem tough on the girls, but oddly the boys had the exact opposite problem. Men didn’t obtain their legal majority until their fathers had passed away. It was possible for a sixty-year-old man to still need his father’s permission to do anything (and indeed this happened to the unfortunate son of the playwright Sophocles). This is why in the book Nico, despite having served in the army, must ask his father for permission to leave the city. He will have to continue this practice for as long as Sophroniscus lives.

  ——

  NICO AND DIOTIMA have a slight problem when they inspect the bones of Hippias: forensics won’t be invented for centuries to come, and there isn’t a thing they can learn from a pile of musty old bones. I’m afraid CSI: Athenai is not a concept. The Greeks held the bodies of the dead in very great respect; even to touch the dead was considered ritually polluting, and human dissection was absolute anathema to them, as it was to virtually every culture until quite recently.

  The Greeks believed that a person’s psyche continued after death. It was the psyche that descended to Hades. “Psyche” means breath—in this case the breath of life, in the sense of the soul—and, quite obviously, it is the source of our modern words psyche, psychology, psychiatry, etc. To release a psyche from its mortal remains required a proper burial and, famously, the coin under the tongue with which to pay Charon the ferryman to take you to the underworld. If the proper forms were not observed, the psyche was doomed to remain on earth. Nico and Diotima take it for granted that the psyche of Hippias is hanging around close by.

  DIVORCE LAW WORKED exactly as the book describes. A man needed only to declare his intention. A woman needed only speak to an archon, one of the elected officials.

  The wife was then required to leave the marital home. She would have to go and live with her closest male relative, who typically would be her father if he was still alive, or else a brother. But there was a kicker to this. Not only did the wife leave, but her dowry went with her. Every last drachma. Or if it was property, every last little bit of land. Athenian law was rock solid on this point.

  The Greek dowry system was like the ancient version of a trust fund in the lady’s name, to be administered by her husband for her benefit. In the normal course of a happy married life, it was all in the family, and when the wife died her dowry would be inherited by her sons. But in the event of divorce, the dowry did not belong to the husband. It was the woman’s retirement fund, supplied by her father. This meant that the larger the dowry, the less likely an unhappy marriage was to break down. There was more than one man dependent on his wife’s dowry property for most of his income.

  Though divorce was much easier—or at least simpler—back then than it is today, the divorce rate was far lower than in modern times. Also, there was no such thing as gossip rags back then (we’ve definitely gone downhill on that one). Consequently, there are only a handful of documented divorce cases. The cases however make it clear that women could divorce simply by seeing an archon.

  This rule led to the most bizarre divorce case in the city’s history.

  There was a general and politician by the name of Alcibiades, fifty years after the time of this story, whose wife Hipparete despaired of him because he constantly consorted with prostitutes. Unable to take it any more, she began the walk to see an archon to declare divorce. Her husband, Alcibiades, got wind of this. He turned up just as she was crossing the agora, picked her up bodily, and carried her home. She never tried again.

  Alcibiades’s actions were far from the norm—so much so that people were still talking about it hundreds of years after his outrageous behavior. This true story is the basis for my scene in which Aposila makes the same walk, also with a husband prepared to stop her. The difference is, Aposila has Nico and Diotima to protect her.

  APOSILA AND MALIXA, the mothers of Allike and Ophelia, strike up a friendship in the face of their common woes. Wives socialized by visiting one another’s homes, where no doubt they nibbled on snacks as they gossiped about their friends and complained about thei
r husbands. This was the ancient world’s equivalent of sitting around the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. The other very frequent activity was going to the agora together, no doubt with a few slaves to carry the purchases.

  There were no cafés or clubs, but there were the temples, and it’s known that some religious festivals were women-only affairs. The men were probably intensely curious about what their wives got up to during those. Likewise, there are surviving decorations that show women partaking in athletic games.

  It’s perfectly viable and easy for Aposila and Malixa to fib to their husbands about where they’re going when they consult Nico and Diotima. They need only say they’re going shopping, and their husbands grunt and ignore them.

  It’s likely that wives whose husbands were away on active service moved in with friends, if only for the company. They all had slaves to do the basic household chores. So when Aposila is about to divorce and stays with Malixa, Malixa’s husband probably doesn’t even notice.

  If Antobius had divined Aposila’s location and turned up demanding her back, Polonikos would have handed her over in an instant. But Antobius doesn’t know where his wife’s gone. His only chance to stop his wife from divorcing him is to ring the agora with watchers and wait for her to turn up.

  ANTOBIUS, THE FATHER of Allike, considered suing the sanctuary for damages after his daughter was killed.

  Classical Athens was highly litigious. The comic playwright Aristophanes makes lots of jokes about it. It was almost impossible for any citizen to get through life without suing or being sued several times. Far from being a modern curse, vexatious litigation is as old as civilization.

  IT SUITED MY story to make this the first year in which Pericles stood for election. Pericles was well and truly established as the foremost man in Athens by 460 BC, which was the year before. Historical sources usually give 458 as his first elected year, but it makes sense to me that he would have run for an official position as soon as possible.

  These days we tend to think of Pericles as a wise statesman in a flowing white robe. The truth is, his day job was running the army. Pericles went on to win twenty-nine elections, all of which were free and fair. I believe that remains the world record for any leader of a democratic nation.

  WHEN GLAUCON WORKS through his list of record tablets, he calls out some strange-looking names for the days. The Athenian calendar had lunar months. Every month began with the new moon and ended on the last day of the cycle. An Athenian need merely look up at the night sky to know what day of the month it was.

  As you surely know, the moon waxes and wanes. The Athenians named the days of the month to match. The first day of each month was called Noumenia, which means “new moon.” After Noumenia, the next day was called 2nd Waxing, then 3rd Waxing, and so on to 10th Waxing. Then the system changes to 11th, 12th, 13th … 19th, and then Earlier 10th. The earlier is very important, because the following day was later 10th. Yes, they had two 10ths in a row: earlier and later. After Later 10th it counted down: 9th Waning, 8th Waning, down to 2nd Waning, and ending with Hena kai nea, meaning “old and new.”

  The definition of “day” was a bit odd. For the Greeks, the old day ended and the new one began at dusk. This makes perfect sense for people working to a lunar calendar. But it creates a terminology problem for me. Nicolaos could say at midday, “I’ll meet you early tomorrow,” and mean that night, leaving you, the reader, totally confused. I solved this problem by completely ignoring it. I stuck to modern convention.

  THE VAST MAJORITY of Greek priestesses were married and did their priestessing on a part-time basis. People tend to think of ancient priestesses as being like the Vestal Virgins, but the Vestals were purely Roman and had no Greek counterpart whatsoever.

  There was no requirement for either chastity or virginity among the Greeks, except probably in a few special cases. One special case would surely be the Pythoness who uttered prophecy at Delphi. I assume another would be the Priestess of the Sacred Games.

  Thus there’s nothing shocking or sacrilegious in the relationship between Zeke and Thea. It also means Diotima loses none of her priestessly character now that she’s a married woman.

  Where I have traduced Zeke’s character is in making him a deserter from the Persian army. There were many real cases of Greeks going over to the Persian side, but I don’t know of a single instance where a Persian officer deserted to the Greeks. The Persians were men of remarkable integrity. Of course, Zeke did it for love, and his family assumes that he perished at Marathon, so his good name remains secure.

  BEARS DEFINITELY USED to live in southern Greece, but as Nico points out they were hunted to extinction. There were still wild bears in northern Greece. One of the royal tombs in Macedonia shows a hunt scene in which a bear is part of the action.

  The Greeks never practiced bear baiting, but they did have cockfights. They seem to have been popular among lower-class men. The great General Themistocles was once invited to a fight, and he was so horrified by what he saw that he tried to have the practice banned. He failed miserably.

  THE MARATHON CONSPIRACY is the fourth book in the series, and the first book in which characters from previous adventures appear in cameos. You may have noticed during the wedding that Nico mentions two people who otherwise play no part in the story: Asia and Timodemus. These two were important to Nico and Diotima in the second and third books respectively (The Ionia Sanction and Sacred Games). Asia and Timo are both Athenians, and it would be strange indeed if they didn’t turn up for the wedding of their friends.

  The Athenian marriage ceremony was much as I give it, with a lot of detail removed because otherwise the book would never end. There were a lot of rituals involved, and the party could go on for days.

  Confetti is a very ancient tradition. It’s known that classical wedding guests threw it. The veil was also definitely worn. A white dress for the bride is much more recent. The silk for Diotima’s bridal gown was acquired on a previous adventure. Silk had reached Persia by this date but no further. When she appears at the door, Diotima becomes the first woman in Europe ever to wear a silk dress.

  The epithalamium was a song written especially for a newly married couple. It was a standard part of every marriage ceremony, though it would have been a rare marriage song that was co-authored by Pindar and Aeschylus. When you’re an historical novelist you can get away with these things. Believe it or not, epithalamium remains a valid word in English to this day.

  THE PLAY THAT Aeschylus is writing during the story, for which Nico so helpfully offers plot ideas, is known today as The Oresteia Trilogy. Aeschylus will go on to win first prize with it at the next major contest. It will be one of the last things he writes. It’s said that he was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head.

  Aeschylus wrote his own epitaph:

  Here lies Aeschylus the Athenian, son of Euphorion,

  who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela.

  Of his fighting powers the grove of Marathon can speak,

  and the long-haired Persian knows it well.

  Today we honor Aeschylus as the founder of modern drama, the genius inventor of tragedy, but in the epitaph that he wrote for himself, he spoke only of his ability to slaughter Persians. It never occurred to him to mention that he’d written a few plays.

  THE BATTLE OF Marathon changed the course of history. It’s probably the most famous battle ever. Despite which, modern historians can’t even agree on which direction the opposing lines faced, let alone details like whether the Persian cavalry took the field.

  I’m convinced that the version Aeschylus gives is the most likely approximation of the truth. But a lot of people have written a lot of books about Marathon, and if you want to learn more about this vastly important battle, I recommend reading Herodotus and one of the modern texts for comparison.

  The story of the signal that flashed to the enemy from behind the Athenian lines can be found in Herodotus. The identity of the traitors caused a lot of
wild speculation back then, and continues to do so to this day. The problem of light reflecting off a curved shield, which Socrates points out in the book, was in fact pointed out by a modern historian.

  In describing the battle, Herodotus said this of the Athenians:

  If they bow down before the Medes, it is clear from past experience what they will suffer when handed over to Hippias; but if this city prevails, it can become the first among all Greek cities.

  THE STORY OF Harmodius, Aristogeiton, and Leana is as Callias gives it in the book. I find it interesting that the first people in history to give their lives for democratic freedom were two gay men and a woman.

  The original statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton were taken by the Persians when they sacked Athens. The Athenians made replacements when they retook their city. It’s the second version that Nico sees in the agora. Alexander the Great returned the originals to Athens after he conquered Persia, and the two pairs stood together for centuries. The Romans made copies of the second pair. Some of these copies survive—probably the best copy is at the museum in Naples—which means we have a fair idea of what Harmodius and Aristogeiton looked like. As Nico reports, they stand close together, pressing forward but turned so that they’re almost back to back, and in each hand they wield a sword.