Amber and Clay

by Laura Amy Schlitz

  THIS is the FOR-est pri-ME-val the MUR-mur-ing PINES and the HEM-LOCKS

  ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE TWO

  It’s an interesting rhythm, but very chanty in English. If you listen to someone reciting Homer in Greek, it’s sonorous rather than chanty. All the same, I wanted to use a little dactylic hexameter, even in faulty English. So there are lines of dactylic hexameter inserted here and there, especially in places where the reader’s view opens to a panorama, or the action quickens.

  I used elegiac couplets (dactylic hexameter followed by dactylic pentameter) for the transformation of Thratta into a dolphin. I also used elegiac couplets when Athena narrates part of Sokrates’s trial. Unlike Rhaskos and the gods, Melisto resisted being put into verse, and so her story is told in prose. She does, however, speak in hendecasyllables when she complains about being a ghost (eleven syllables to the line and a strict pattern of strong and weak beats. For some reason, the rhythm seemed appropriate for a ghost).

  HISTORY: REAL PEOPLE

  Amber and Clay is a historical novel: that is, a combination of story and history. Whenever I read a historical novel, I’m often curious about what is historic and what was made up.

  The smallest seed of Amber and Clay was planted when I read a brief play, or dialogue, called the Meno, which was written by Sokrates’s pupil Plato. The Meno features the characters Menon, Sokrates, and an enslaved boy, whom I named Rhaskos.

  Sokrates was a real person. Though he was one of the most famous thinkers who ever lived, he never wrote anything down. All the same, we know what he thought because three people who knew him well wrote about him. First and foremost was the philosopher and poet known as Plato. The Greek general Xenophon also wrote Socratic dialogues, and the playwright Aristophanes mocked Sokrates in his play The Clouds. (It is said that when Sokrates saw himself ridiculed on stage, he stood up in the audience and took a bow.) Though the three accounts of him differ, they fit together to show one man: a person who was endlessly curious, talkative, and eccentric. Sokrates had a playful mind, but he was deeply serious about his search for truth. I tried to make Sokrates’s imaginary dialogues with Rhaskos a showcase for his ideas.

  The enslaved boy in the Meno is never named. He may not have been a child at all, because in ancient Greece, enslaved men were called boy as long as they lived.

  On the other hand, he could have been a child. Sokrates was trying to prove a point about learning and memory, and he chose to question someone who had never been taught geometry. A child might have suited his dramatic purpose better than an adult. Whoever he was, he comes off well in the dialogue. He was honest about what he didn’t know and intelligent enough to solve the problem.

  Other real people in Amber and Clay are Alkibiades, Anytus, and Menon himself. (Sokrates’s friend Xenophon knew Menon well. He detested him.) Sokrates had a wife named Xanthippe and three sons, one of whom appears near the end of the book. I gave Plato a cameo appearance on page 266, but I used his real name, Aristokles. In the Menon household, Alexidemus and Thucydides (not the Greek historian) were real people. Galene, Tycho, Timaeus, Lykos, and all the enslaved household members except for Rhaskos are imaginary.

  The characters Melisto (and her entire household) and Phaistus (and his whole household) are made up. Simon the cobbler, however, was real, and archeologists have found the site of his shop.

  HISTORY: THE DEATH OF SOKRATES

  I worry that a reader of Amber and Clay may feel cheated and confused, because the death of Sokrates doesn’t seem to make sense. Why was he put to death? Though Sokrates was associated with the corrupt and charismatic Alkibiades, he was known for his virtuous life.

  The truth is that there was no single or clear reason why he should have been killed — nothing that makes sense to people of the twenty-first century. Historians are still arguing about whether there was a “real reason” why Sokrates was killed, and what that reason might have been.

  It is said that within a week of his death, the Athenians experienced remorse for executing Sokrates. They realized that they had killed a good and wise man and planned to erect a statue of him in the marketplace. The statue was never built.

  HISTORY: ON GREEK SLAVERY

  Ancient Greece was a slave society. There is a particular meaning to that phrase slave society; most ancient civilizations practiced slavery, and most ancient cities contained enslaved people. A slave society, however, is one where a large percentage of the population is enslaved, in which the economy relies on unpaid labor, and in which laws and social relationships are based on the belief that some men are masters and others are slaves.

  Today we use the term enslaved people rather than slaves, because it reminds us that the unlucky victims of a slave society were people. Being enslaved was something that happened to them. But the Greeks didn’t think of enslaved people that way. They believed slaves were “slavish” — lazy, dishonest, cowardly, and unable to control themselves. The very condition of being enslaved degraded them. As the poet Homer said, “Whatever day makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.”

  Ancient Greek slavery was never based on skin color. People were born into slavery (that is, their parents were enslaved), sold into slavery, or captured in war. It was against the law for an Athenian to enslave another Athenian, so most Athenian slaves were foreigners. Greek citizens often saw their slaves in terms of ethnic stereotypes. Thracians like Rhaskos and other people from the north were believed to be tough and hardy, but brutal and thickheaded. Persians and Syrians, born in a warmer climate, were considered skillful at handiwork, but timid and frail. The Greeks saw themselves as balanced between barbarian extremes: they were strong and intelligent and skillful and brave.

  Nobody knows how many enslaved people lived in Athens during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Most of my reference books estimate that at least one-third of the population was enslaved. These enslaved people did almost every kind of work there was to do. A company of Skythian slaves was armed with whips and instructed to keep order in the city. Enslaved people were bankers and teachers, farmers and craftsmen, cooks, wet nurses, entertainers, sex workers, and miners. The only thing that enslaved people did not do was run the government. Only male citizens could be part of the democracy. Slaves, like women and foreigners, had no vote.

  I would love to say that Sokrates criticized slavery and wished to abolish it. He didn’t. Neither did his contemporaries. Sokrates liked arguing philosophy so much that he spent time talking to enslaved people, and even to women. But for Sokrates, slavery, like war, was not so much an evil to be uprooted, but a fact of life.

  HISTORY: ON ANIMAL SACRIFICE

  The Greeks were a religious people: almost every day was the birthday of a god, and that meant there had to be a sacrifice. Before every performance of the theatre, and every meeting of the government, an animal was sacrificed.

  The animals that were killed were almost always domesticated animals, though stags were sometimes sacrificed to Artemis. Before the sacrifice, the victims were groomed, fed, petted, and distracted. It was considered unlucky for the animal to struggle or suffer, so they were killed as quickly as possible. When the death blow was given, the women present cried out in mourning.

  The blood from the animal was splashed on the altar, and the meat was divided among the people who had witnessed the sacrifice. Meat was precious in ancient Greece. Because it was shared as part of a religious ritual, the poor got a few mouthfuls, as well as the rich.

  HISTORY: ABOUT BRAURON AND THE LITTLE BEARS

  As Hermes tells the reader, there is almost nothing known about the little girls who “played the bear” at Brauron. The playwright Aristophanes wrote one line about them: one. There are three later manuscripts that tell us more about that single line; they give us the story of the slain bear and the angry goddess. The three manuscripts are similar, but the details vary.

  I visited Greece and traveled to Brauron when I researched th
is story. Brauron is hauntingly beautiful, and there’s a museum full of the artifacts that archaeologists have found there: statues of children, pottery, loom weights, and jewelry. Many tiny cups — the krateriskoi — have been unearthed, but only a small percentage of them have been photographed or catalogued. (As archaeologists remind us, we can’t jump to the conclusion that the pictures on the cups are snapshots of daily life at Brauron.)

  So Brauron is full of question marks. Nobody knows how many girls went to Brauron to serve as bears, or what they did, or how long they stayed. Nobody is sure how old the Little Bears were. On the cups I was able to see, they looked young, so I decided to agree with the majority of the scholars, who think the girls were five to ten years old. A few of the cups show girls running with torches, which granted me permission to set some of the scenes at night.

  There is no evidence, written or archaeological, that shows how the girls traveled from Athens to Brauron — a journey of twenty-four miles. As a storyteller, I had to work out the details. I thought the girls would need adults to show the way, something to eat, and donkeys to carry the food. I decided that the yellow robes mentioned by Aristophanes would be himations, large and warm enough to serve as blankets at night. I tried to think logically, as well as dramatically: How does Artemis behave in Greek myths? What kinds of behaviors might please her? How could girls “playing the bears” serve the city of Athens? What bear behaviors might they imitate?

  I am indebted to Thomas Scanlon, in his Eros and Greek Athletics, for pointing out the splayed fingers of the little girls running on the krateriskoi. Since the pots are so small, it took trouble to draw those tiny fingers: they must have been important. The splayed fingers suggested bear claws to Scanlon, and from this I decided that when the girls were running, they were impersonating bears. I am also indebted to Susan Guettel Cole’s Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space for pointing out that Brauron was the frontier of Athens, and that the rituals performed there might have been devised to guard the central city. Neither Ms. Cole nor Mr. Scanlon is to blame for the imaginative leaps I took after I encountered their ideas.

  A historical novel, like a daimon, is a kind of mule: half history, half story. Every author has to make up her mind how to handle the two halves. I tried to be as accurate as I could with the history — I did not, for example, create a Sokrates who wanted to abolish slavery. But when the facts are unknown, I felt quite comfortable using my imagination. In the case of Brauron, the facts are few, and the chapters are almost entirely my invention.

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  Copyright Acknowledgments

  p. 155 Studies in Girls’ Transitions: Aspects of the Arkteia and Age Representation in Attic Iconography by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. Copyright © Institut du Livre - Kardamitsa.

  p. 156 “154” from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson. Copyright © 2002 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  “4” from Sapphic Fragments from Poems of Sappho, translated by Julia Dubnoff. Used by permission of Julia Dubnoff. https://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html. Accessed June 26, 2020.

  “The Dance” by Sappho, from Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation, translated by Sherod Santos. Copyright © 2005 by Sherod Santos. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  I am also indebted to the Andante archaeological tour “Greece Uncovered” that I took back in October 2015. I met the archaeologists Aristotle Koskinas and Ioannis Georganas during that tour, and they were generous with their knowledge, answering every question.

  All page numbers refer to the print edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Laura Amy Schlitz

  Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Julia Iredale

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.