by Gary Corby
I had better not. Or Lakon the Actor would be exposed as a fraud to his admiring fans. I hadn’t voiced the threat, but I didn’t need to with Lakon.
LAKON’S HOUSE LAY not far from Diotima’s. It was only natural that I should stop by, to see how the Phrygians were getting on.
The house was in pristine perfect condition. The Hand of Sabazios was returned to its place in the courtyard. The beer vat out back had disappeared.
The Phrygians treated me like an honored guest. They installed me on a fine couch—I decided not to ask where it had come from—and they brought me wine and food of the highest quality. Petros sat beside me and we talked as we ate.
I said to Petros, “After that performance you’ll be able to win more roles.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to fit it into my schedule,” he said. “We have more work than we can cope with.”
“You do?” I said, confused.
“After the funeral of Romanos we attracted much attention,” said Petros. “We put on a show that was tasteful and elegant, much better than the usual hysterics that our customers demand. We showed Athens how a funeral should be done. Next day, we had a couple of men at our door—your door, rather, Diotima’s house—”
“I understand.”
“It seems people liked what they saw. They wanted advice on how to stage funerals for their own relatives. Of course, we charged them for our expertise.”
“Of course.”
“We’re very good at burying people. Every day we have more customers lined up outside your house. They want us to manage the funerals of their parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters.”
Which meant Diotima’s house was being filled every day with people in a state of ritual pollution. The neighbors were going to love me for this.
“We’ve upgraded from being mere professional mourners,” Petros went on. “We think of it as burial consultancy. People come to us for all their funerary needs. We arrange the jars for the ashes—I’ve done a deal with some potters in Ceramicus—we can get some excellent alabaster. We supply the mourners and build the pyre and sweep up the mess afterward. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the show.”
“I’ll keep your services in mind. Are your rates affordable?”
“Oh, we’d bury you for free!”
“You’re very kind.”
“I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done for us,” Petros said. “If it hadn’t been for you, we might already be on our way back to Phrygia. I can’t help but feel, now that we’re making money, that we should be paying you rent. Would the going rate suit you?”
“I accept,” I said at once.
There’s a bright side to everything.
AUTHOR NOTE
GREETINGS TO YOU, cherished reader. Here I’ll talk about the real history behind the story. If you haven’t finished the book yet, this would be a good time to turn back to the front, because this section is full of spoilers.
If you have finished the story, welcome!
THE GREAT DIONYSIA was the premier arts festival of the ancient world. Every great play which has come down to us from ancient times was first shown at a Dionysia.
The three masters of tragedy were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They belonged to successive generations, and they were very different playwrights. If they were alive today, Aeschylus would be writing military adventure and techno-thrillers, Sophocles would be writing courtroom dramas and family sagas, and Euripides would be writing mainstream literary.
I had to set this story in 458BC because it was my only chance to get all three men into the same book. It’s the final year for Aeschylus, Sophocles is in his prime, and Euripides is three years away from his first outing.
Aeschylus retired to Sicily, where he was promptly killed in unusual circumstances. History tells us that a passing eagle, seeking to crack open a turtle it had captured, mistook the famous writer’s bald head for a rock, and let go. Aeschylus was struck down by the plummeting turtle. Aeschylus was not only the world’s first playwright whose works survive, but he also set the standard for tragic author deaths.
Nico mentions in passing the one event that we know for sure did happen at the Great Dionysia of 458BC. Aeschylus’s contribution was the famous Oresteia trilogy. The chorus was made up of Furies, and they really did rush on stage with live snakes writhing in their hair. Young boys fainted of fright and a pregnant woman immediately went into labor.
This anecdote proves, in passing, that women and children attended the theater, and that the great plays of the ancient world were watched by all the family.
THE STYLIZED MASKS of Comedy and Tragedy that we see on modern theater playbills are wrong. There is a surviving vase illustration that shows an actor holding a mask. It’s called the Pronomos Vase and is held at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Though there are other vases that depict actors, this vase is one of the oldest, dating to perhaps 400BC, and has greater wealth of detail than any other. The Pronomos Vase is close to being the entire textbook on early acting.
The real Athenian actor mask was more realistic than we imagine, with hair and paint for a lifelike expression. The masks probably were rigid with a fixed face. The mask for comedy had a comic expression, and the masks for tragedy looked serious and grave. The mouth must have been open. The eyeholes were good enough to see forward but with very limited peripheral vision.
The entire staging of Sisyphus in this story is my invention. It’s known for sure that Sophocles wrote a play by this name, but the play is lost. We don’t even know in what year it was placed.
WE KNOW THAT the official cult statue of Dionysos was placed on stage to watch every play. The ancient Greeks believed that the Gods could inhabit the statues created for them.
This is why it is such a big deal that Romanos was murdered in the way that he was. The crime has been committed in the presence of the God. It would be hard to conceive anything more likely to bring down a curse on the city.
THESPIS WAS THE world’s first actor. We’ve been calling actors thespians ever since.
Before Thespis, tragedy was a choral performance where the chorus sang the action, and that was it. After Thespis, an actor acted out the story while the chorus sang the action. With only one actor on stage, masks were necessary to denote the different characters.
In the next generation, Aeschylus added a second actor. Dialogue became possible.
In the generation after that, Sophocles added a third actor.
By the time of the Great Dionysia of 458BC, tragedy is a story told between three actors, with a chorus singing to open the play and in between scenes.
THIS ISN’T THE place for literary criticism, but I want to mention briefly the Athenian concept of what made a play a tragedy. It was, simply, the story of a great man who makes a mistake and suffers the consequences. In so doing there’s supposed to be some form of catharsis (a very Greek word).
If you’re interested in this subject, I encourage you to read Poetics, by none other than Aristotle. Aristotle is often translated as saying that tragedy is the tale of a great man with a fatal flaw. But that isn’t what he says, strictly speaking. The tragic hero simply makes a big mistake.
In the same context, it’s worth mentioning the famous saying, “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
In its usual wording as above, it comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But he was rephrasing a saying that goes back more than 2,500 years. The earliest use is the play Antigone, by Sophocles. I’ve stolen this translation from the Perseus version:
For with wisdom did someone once reveal the maxim, now famous,
that evil at one time or another seems good,
to him whose mind a god leads to ruin.
Sophocles then adds:
But for the briefest moment such a man fares free of destruction.
Which is a variant of, “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!”
THE CLASSICAL TRAGEDIANS
riffed on common myths that everyone already knew, very similar to how jazz musicians play standards that they then alter to their own taste. What kept the audience enthralled was how the writer varied the plot and the characters.
That meant if you were sitting in the Theater of Dionysos in 458BC, then the audience about you already knew how the story ended.
THE GOD MACHINE on which Romanos dies was very real. It was used as Sophocles explains in the story. No tragedy was complete without the god machine delivering a deity into the thick of the action.
We usually think of the Greeks as being a non-mechanical people, but it would have been impossible for Athens to maintain the world’s largest fleet without a thorough practical knowledge of machinery. Greek machines were wooden, which is why none survive.
The very word machine is Greek. In their language it is mekhane.
What they didn’t know were the laws of mechanics. The rule of the lever and the physics behind the pulley were discovered by Archimedes, two hundred years after the time of this story. The machines in Nico’s time were designed with a complete lack of theoretical knowledge but a great deal of practical know-how.
The healing machine used by Doctor Melpon is only partly a figment of my imagination. Most of it was real. Forty years after this story, Hippocrates wrote a treatise called On Joints, in which he described a machine much like Melpon’s, for the purpose of fixing hips and spines. It’s known as the Hippocratic Bench, and it was every bit as horrible an experience as Phellis goes through in this book.
For this reason some people credit Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, as also being the inventor of that well-known instrument of torture: the rack.
DEUS EX MACHINA means literally “God from the machine,” and it’s a curiously Latin term for what is very much a Greek concept. Deus ex machina means any abrupt, arbitrary action that closes down a story too quickly.
There was a problem with the way the classical playwrights used their divine characters. The Gods tended to appear suddenly right at the end, and close down the story before it could reach a climax. It’s like the writers included too much plot and when time ran out simply chopped the story off using divine intervention.
Euripides was a serial offender when it came to deus ex machina.
Ion is a good example of his perfidy. In that story an orphan called Ion seeks his true identity. The plot becomes a trifle convoluted. There’s a false prophecy which totally confuses everyone. Ion meets his mother, all unknown to them both. She tries to kill him a couple of times (these things happen). He takes a shot at her too. Then Athena turns up for the first time in the story, and in a single speech reconciles everyone and explains away the early false prophecy with a very dodgy throwaway line. Mother and son for some reason think it’s cool that they’re related, despite recent homicidal attacks, and everyone lives happily ever after. No natural resolution.
Many years ago my wife, Helen, and I saw Ion played by the excellent Royal Shakespearean Company. Even knowing what was coming, it was still a huge letdown when Athena stopped the play dead.
That experience was the inspiration for the climax of this book. You may have noticed that Athena appears right at the end, to accuse Theokritos and prove his crime. It is in fact a deus ex machina.
For Athena’s speech at the end I shamelessly ripped off Euripides. In fact I ripped off Ion. Then I modified the dialogue for Nico’s circumstances. I’m fairly sure Euripides would not be the forgiving sort, so it’s lucky he’s not around to sue me.
WHETHER THERE WERE professional actors in the sense we know them is a moot question. Certainly there were a hundred years later, because a rather interesting man named Thessalus is recorded as having been both a professional actor who won at the Great Dionysia, and also an agent who worked for Alexander the Great. The combination of spying and acting has a venerable history.
By the time of this story, professional bards had been traveling from town to town for centuries. I take it for granted that actors would have done the same from the moment Thespis invented the idea.
Because actors worked behind masks, very few of them are known to us. The writers were the stars of the show. Hollywood, please take note.
Unfortunately the world of Nico and Diotima isn’t quite ready for Euterpe’s acting skills. Acting was an all-male affair, as it was in mediaeval times, through the Renaissance, and throughout the life of William Shakespeare, whose female roles were played by boys and men, exactly as was done in the Theater of Dionysos. The first serious actresses would not appear on stage until almost 2,200 years after the time of this story.
PROFESSIONAL MOURNING WAS a for-real occupation of the classical world. It might seem odd to outsource your grieving, but it was because extravagant displays were a status symbol.
This rapidly turned into something akin to an arms race, in which the women of competing families upped the ante with every funeral.
The displays reached such levels that something had to be done. The world’s first democratic constitution, written by Solon the Wise, includes an entire section limiting what was permitted during funerals. Women were specifically banned from extravagant displays, and the dead were permitted only three changes of clothing to go with them into the underworld.
Outside working hours, professional mourners must have been instantly recognizable by their shorn, ragged hair. Almost nothing is known about the men and women who mourned for a living. I take it for granted that it was a low status job. As Petros says, it was also a job that called for a great deal of histrionic talent. Possibly then it was something that out-of-work actors did.
WHEN NICO BRINGS in Captain Kordax and the crew of Salaminia to stage his spectacular climax, he is anticipating by two thousand years the system used by Shakespeare and his fellows. In Elizabethan England, the stage crews were mostly sailors! If you want to move around heavy stuff with only ropes and pulleys to do it, then it makes sense to hire the experts; that means the men who sail wooden ships.
Salaminia and her sister ship Paralos were the glory of the Athenian Navy. They were reserved for only the most sensitive diplomatic missions and for religious duties, such as shipping dedications and offerings to the sacred isle of Delos. Salaminia’s fittings really were made of gold. Both ships were forbidden to take part in naval actions unless circumstances absolutely required it. Which is hardly surprising since it would be kind of embarrassing to watch all that gold sink.
Captain Kordax is my invention, but of course there must have been a captain of Salaminia. Whoever he was, it’s very likely that the captain of Salaminia really was the fastest man on earth. It’s also likely that he kept his record well into mediaeval times, when the Viking longships would have given him a run for his money. (In passing, a longship versus trireme race would be one awesome spectacle.)
Salaminia first appears in Nico’s earlier adventure, The Ionia Sanction.
MY FICTITIOUS CHARACTER Lakon appears to have invented identity theft. In fact, he’s late to the party.
The first recorded identity theft that I know of occurred about sixty-five years before this story. When King Cambyses of Persia died, his younger brother Smerdis stepped forward to claim the throne. This came as a surprise because everyone thought Smerdis was long dead.
Which indeed he was. This Smerdis was an imposter. He ruled for a few months before the scheme went horribly wrong, with consequences you can imagine.
Mystery writers spend a lot of time thinking up interesting new ways to commit crimes. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Lakon’s identity theft from the grave was close to foolproof. Athenian record keeping was appalling. If anything, the Polemarch’s chaotic paper warehouse is being generous.
It’s known that a decade or two after this story, the Athenians cleansed their lists of anyone who was faking citizenship. So they must have known that they had some imposters among them.
But I very much suspect that anyone using Lakon’s scheme would have gotten
away with it.
THANATOS GETS SLIGHTLY bad press in this book, but it’s not my fault. Thanatos was the god of gentle death. His brother was Hypnos, god of sleep. Their sisters were the Keres, evil spirits who supported death by violence and pestilence. You might think Zeus would send the Keres to collect irritating mortals, but it’s always Thanatos who gets the job.
The story about Thanatos being tricked into chaining himself really is part of the legend of Sisyphus, which I’m afraid makes the god of death look like a total idiot.
THE PREJUDICE AGAINST metics appears to have been generally held. Metics couldn’t own real estate, couldn’t vote, and were second class citizens in the eyes of the law. But in day-to-day life there was little or no discrimination. Metics in Athens were well situated compared to immigrants in many countries across many locales and times.
There is a documented case where a citizen of Athens wanted to prosecute the men who had murdered his aged nanny. The nanny was a metic and the known killers were citizens. The man was advised by the archons not to pursue the case, because there was no hope of success before a jury, and it would damage his reputation if he even tried. The man was clearly very honorable—to start with, he was looking after his old nanny—but when the city’s senior judges told him there was no hope, he had to give up. This case is the inspiration for the difficulty Nico encounters in getting justice for Romanos.
Conversely, metics could do very well for themselves financially. Almost by definition, they were people prepared to go to great lengths to improve their lot in life.
It became something of a trope for wealthy metics to marry their daughters to the sons of citizens. The metic family guaranteed their descendants would be citizens of Athens; the citizen family saw a massive dowry arrive with the daughter, who came from a good and successful family.
Nico and Diotima’s marriage is just such a match. He’s a citizen. She was born a metic.